"Write another version with the focus on the Trump character, fictionalized. He's old, too old for the burdens of the presidency, and weary of the usual politicians, and sad..."

"... to have his last campaign over, and he latches on to the Musk character, who is complicated and highly energetic and realizes he can override the preferences of those who voted for Trump and reenergize and redirect the man into something that will be absolutely brilliant for the country and the world."

I wrote, prompting A.I., in the midst of a conversation that began with a reading of the NYT article "How Elon Musk Has Planted Himself Almost Literally at Trump’s Doorstep/For much of the period since Election Day, the billionaire has been staying at a $2,000-a-night cottage at Mar-a-Lago, giving him easy access to the president-elect."

I'm expending my last free access link of the month — of the year! — on that so you can begin where "we" — A.I. and I — began. My original prompt was: "Does Elon Musk avoid buying a house for himself and if so, why?"

"Cozy, whimsical novels — often featuring magical cats — that have long been popular in Japan and Korea are taking off globally."

I'm reading "In Tumultuous Times, Readers Turn to 'Healing Fiction'... Fans say they offer comfort during a chaotic time" (NYT).

[Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s series, “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,”] — set in a magical cafe in Tokyo where customers can travel back in time while their coffee cools — centers on ordinary people struggling with loss and regret who wish they could change the past....

Recent releases of cozy Japanese novels include Mai Mochizuki’s “The Full Moon Coffee Shop,” set in a magical coffee shop run by talking cats.... [There's also] “The Travelling Cat Chronicles,”.... “The Goodbye Cat,” and... “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” [and] “We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat”....

Cats are such a staple in healing fiction that Kawaguchi’s publishers in the United States and Britain added a fluffy brown cat to the covers of “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” even though, in a break from tradition, cats are not central to his novels....

No mention of Trump (or Vance) in this article, published yesterday, but it's featured at the top of the home page like this... 

... so it's pretty obvious that the NYT is offering this Japanese fantasy material as self-care for its readers suffering from the Democratic Party's blistering defeat. The election that's come to such a bad ending for them featured cats — Trump said "They're eating the cats" and Vance had said "childless cat ladies." So maybe cat offers some charming help for the suffering Trump haters, some balance for that awful squirrel that controlled the American election from the afterlife (as depicted charmingly in a cool fantasy novel to be counted among my unwritten books).

And, yes, I see the headlines on the left-hand side of the page. They're really important, but I'm not blogging in order of importance.

ADDED: I love the framing of Donald Trump inside the coils of barbed wire. It's all that's left of the dream of imprisoning him.

"It is a violent spectacle, blood-spattered, brutish and brawny."

"A fighter from California named Kevin Holland and a fighter from Poland named Michal Oleksiejczuk beat each other to a pulp inches from Mr. Trump’s face. The former president watched with interest as the American got the Pole onto the ground, secured his right arm and appeared to yank it out of its socket. ([Dana White, the chief executive of the U.F.C.] described it as an 'absolutely beautiful' moment in his post-match commentary: 'The arm clearly, at the very least, dislocated and possibly snapped,' he said.) Victorious, Holland emerged from the octagonal ring, walked over to Mr. Trump, bent down and shook hands, leaned in to hear the former president tell him something and clapped his left hand on Mr. Trump’s right shoulder...."

From "After Verdict, Trump Revels in Embrace of His Most Avid Base: Male Fans/The former president’s appearance at a U.F.C. fight in Newark on Saturday night showcased his hypermasculine appeal, and his defiance" (NYT).

This is just a little article about Trump going to the UFC fight right after the 34-felonies conviction. I had to look elsewhere for more on the broader topic of Trump's "hypermasculine appeal." A sprinkling of what my search turned up:

"Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself."

"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."

That's item #13 on "MONICA LEWINSKY: 25 'RANDOMS' ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL CLINTON CALAMITY/My name became public 25 years ago this week. What have I observed and learned in the quarter century since? Oh, plenty" (Vanity Fair).

Okay, let me try to write 25 "Randoms" on the text printed above:

"I was so angry and just irritated at seeing man after man — you know, typically, male politicians — grandstanding about abortion."

Said Gabrielle Blair, quoted in "Gabrielle Blair Would Like a Word With Men/After 16 years of making a name for herself as a blogger and home decor expert, Design Mom has written her manifesto — about reproductive health" by Kase Wickman (NYT).

The NYT article seems to be a reaction to the fact that a book Blair created out of a 64-post-long Twitter thread has debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’s paperback nonfiction best-seller list.

Here's the Twitter thread, and here's the book: “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion.” 

Now, my readers may be saying tough luck for Althouse. She could have written a book called "Don't Be a Splooge Stooge," but Blair got to the best-seller list first. Of all my unwritten books, that's the one I'm least sad about not devoting a year of my life to.

"[T]he 'Lebensborn' program — meaning wellspring or fountain of life... created in 1935... provided luxurious accommodations for unwed, pregnant women."

"Part of the program’s attraction was that unwed pregnant girls could give birth in secret. In 1939, about 58 percent of the mothers-to-be who applied to the program were unwed... by 1940, that number had swelled to 70 percent. Often, the homes were converted estates decorated by Himmler himself, using the highest quality loot confiscated from Jewish homes after their owners had been killed or sent to camps. Girls who were already pregnant or willing to be impregnated by SS officers had to prove their Aryan lineage going back three generations and pass inspections that included measuring the size of their heads and the length of their teeth. Once accepted, they were pampered by nurses and staff who served them delicacies at mealtimes and provided a recreational diet rich in Nazi propaganda...."

From "A new novel tells the story of Nazi birthing farms" by Kathleen Parker (WaP).

The new novel is "Cradles of the Reich" by Jennifer Coburn.

Here's the article in the Holocaust Encyclopedia about the Lebensborn program.

I found that as I was looking for photographs showing how a place "decorated by Himmler" would look. Here's a propaganda photograph with a caption that translated into "Everything for the healthy child":

 

 

From the Holocaust Encyclopedia article:

"I'll madly live the poems I shall never write."

It's too complicated to explain how I arrived here, but I encountered this cool poem by Aldous Huxley:

Complaint of a Poet Manqué

We judge by appearance merely:

If I can't think strangely, I can at least look queerly.

So I grew the hair so long on my head

That my mother wouldn't know me,

Till a woman in a night-club said,

As I was passing by,

"Hullo, here comes Salome ..."

I looked in the dirty gilt-edged glass,

And, oh Salome; there I was—

Positively jewelled, half a vampire,

With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily

Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire

Over the brink of the crag of sense,

Looking down from perilous eminence 

Into a gulf of windy night.

And there's straw in my tempestuous hair,

And I'm not a poet: but never despair!

I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.

"Doing his best Mussolini imitation, he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability. He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw..."

"... just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.... I have asthma, so I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody – not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest."

Mary Trump has a new book, quoted in "Trump was ‘in pain and afraid’ during post-Covid display of bravado, niece’s book says/Mary Trump’s new book The Reckoning, seen by the Guardian, describes a national trauma worsened by her uncle" (The Guardian).

What is the value of Mary Trump's writing? The writing style isn't horrible, but she didn't have access to him. She was just watching him on television like the rest of us, right? Purporting to know the workings of his mind makes her less credible than those of us who would add phrases like "I think" to assertions like "he was afraid" or who would change that "was" to "looked." 

There are other efforts to bolster her authority. In that brief passage, I note "just as my grandmother did" and "I have asthma." Let's examine those 2 notions. 

1. "just as my grandmother did" — This must be a reference to Mary's grandmother who was the mother of Donald Trump. Mary has observed her grandmother and perhaps knows a style of holding her mouth and can say that Donald Trump's mouth has the same look. She implies that there are family mouth positions and other members of the family know what they mean. So Mary has special expertise at watching Donald Trump on television.

2. "I have asthma" — Mary claims a sort of medical expertise: "I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe." Really? You're aware of "what it looks like"? No, you're not looking at yourself when you are having an asthma attack. You are acutely aware of what it feels like, not what it looks like. Unless you do your asthma attacks in front of a mirror.

ADDED: I could write a book about Mary's book, in which I use Mary's approach to observational expertise against her. I would go through the book paragraph by paragraph and find every turn of phrase that I can characterize as evidence of the traits that she finds in Donald Trump and I would repetitively bolster my points by reminding the reader that Mary and Donald belong to the same family, so we can presume these are family traits. Whatever she says about him I can observe in her, and the only evidence I will need is her own book.

"John Lennon died at age 40, 40 years ago today. I did this blog post 12 years ago, linking to both of my parents' memories..."

"... of being in the same city where he died on December 8, 1980. Both of their posts mention that they named me John when I was born 99 days later. Now I'm almost 40 and I'm living on the Upper West Side, not far from where it happened on West 72nd Street. I've walked by there many times, always thinking about it, never quite believing it really happened here." 

Writes my son John (on his blog). Here's his old post, written in 2008, which links to his father's post, written in 2005, and to my post, also written in 2005. 

I wrote: 

On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn't even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can't remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article.... 

How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!

Looking back at that reaction, I realize I was influenced by the shame I'd felt in 1977 when I showed my feelings about the death of Elvis Presley. Did I ever blog about that? It's something I've thought about lately, as I've reflected on my life. It turns out I blogged about that in 2005 — August 2005:

"Publishers Fret Over Obama’s ‘Failure to Perform’/Michelle finished her book. Why is Obama having trouble living up to his part of their lucrative contract?"

Headline at American Spectator.

Contracts that come with a reported $65 million advance, such as the one signed by Barack and Michelle Obama in February 2017 with Penguin Random House (PRH), will inevitably include [a "failure to perform" clause].... At the time the Obama deal was made in early 2017, insiders were telling Publishers Weekly that books by both Michelle and Barack would be released in fall 2018. Michelle’s book, Becoming, was released by PRH’s Crown division on schedule in November 2018 and has exceeded expectations. Barack’s book will be released at least two years behind schedule with no publication date in sight....

Proposed book title: "From Caring to Karen: A Woman's Journey."

I thought of the title. It's writing prompt for you. What's the story?

"Fire and Fury" author Michael Wolff says he's working on "nothing" — he's "embracing" "obsolescence."

... although this piece itself (in the UK Spectator) is something:

[I]t is hard not to be fatalistic if you are a journalist. Every magazine I have ever worked for, and I have worked for them all, is dead or will die shortly. For another thing, Donald Trump is the one consuming subject, sucking all views and opinions into his void, and on this issue I have nothing left to say. Still, even with the collapse of so many journalistic enterprises, many of my former colleagues still go on at great and constant unpaid length on social media or, scrambling for a pay-per-appearance contract, as desperately willing pundits on cable television. Why? People are afraid, it seems, to say nothing. I’m looking forward to trying.

You know what I say: Better than nothing is a high standard. It's good that (if?) Wolff realizes that the endless barrage of ranting against Trump is worse than nothing. But he can't get everyone else to stop doing it, and one man's silence can't be heard when everyone else is talking. He clearly knows that, which is why he is talking. Talking about how other people need to have the courage to shut up.

Alas, I have a four-year-old. So there will have to be some form of exchanging words for dollars in order to provide for the next 20 years of her education. But really I am not sure how, if I were doing gainful work, I would be able to perform all the duties necessary for applying to kindergarten. I have older children, all of whom have been successfully educated, but our daughter is my wife’s first and she has cast a wide net among Uptown, Downtown, public, private, traditional and progressive schools....

Wolff is 66 years old and publicly whining about his current wife's spending habits and the difficulty he's having making a living in his field that has gone to hell. Retire! You're 66! But somehow, you have a 4 year old, and you're on the hook for the next 20 years — that is, until you are 86.

[My son is] a stand-up comedian... A surprising number of my contemporaries have children who are stand-up comics. Could this have something to do with the disappearance of a certain kind of journalism?...

Could it have something to do with seeing your own father as some kind of joke?

ADDED: I have the feeling that Wolff really does have a writing project, and it's the story of his adventures in fatherhood, with a 4-year-old daughter and a standup comedian son. He's struggling with his own mortal decline and the decline of his profession. It's unlikely that he's honest or talented enough to write a book I'd care about reading, but if a great writer would steal this idea and write a novel titled "All My Friends' Sons Are Stand-up Comedians," I'd love to read it.

"Cups are used for quenching thirst across a wide range of cultures and social classes, and different styles of cups may be used for different liquids or in different situations."

"Cups of different styles may be used for different types of liquids or other foodstuffs (e.g. teacups and measuring cups), in different situations (e.g. at water stations or in ceremonies and rituals), or for decoration.... Cups are an obvious improvement on using cupped hands or feet to hold liquids. They have almost certainly been used since before recorded history, and have been found at archaeological sites throughout the world. Prehistoric cups were sometimes fashioned from shells and hollowed out stones.... There is an evidence that the Roman Empire may have spread the use of cups throughout Europe, with notable examples including silver cups in Wales and a color-changing glass cup in ancient Thrace...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia entry "Cup."

I was contemplating cups as I was out running this morning, mainly because a familiar song lyric with the word "cup" came up again on my November-sunrise-running playlist, and I often get hung up on the idea in that song and in 2 other songs I've liked for a long time. Maybe it was the endorphins, but I got to imagining writing an entire book about cups and could see all the chapter headings. Back home at my desk, following my standard sitting-at-a-desk approach to exploring a sprawling concept, I looked up the word on Wikipedia.

I love the line "Cups are an obvious improvement on using cupped hands or feet to hold liquids." That slight deviation from Wikipedia flatness — "obvious" — amuses me. And then there are the 2 words that are so weird I didn't even see them on first read: "or feet."

What's the color-changing glass cup from Thrace? — you may wonder. It's the Lycurgus Cup — "a 4th-century Roman glass cage cup made of a dichroic glass, which shows a different colour depending on whether or not light is passing through it: red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front":

 

That's King Lycurgus who tries to kill Ambrosia after Ambrosia turned into a vine that twined itself around the king. The king eventually dies (in this myth) and Dionysus laughs at him.

Yes — I am answering unheard questions — my unwritten book includes the communion cup and the  cups in tarot cards. Yes, I have thought of bra cups and the World Cup and other trophies.

The song on my playlist was "Full Measure" by the Lovin' Spoonful, which begins: "The full measure of your giving/You don't yet understand/A cupful of living/That you hold in your hand." The other 2 "cup" songs are "Across the Universe" ("Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe") and "Danny's Song" ("Love the girl who holds the world in a paper cup/Drink it up...").

If you're like me, you're wondering whether the Lovin' Spoonful cup was — like the "Across the Universe" cup and the "Danny's Song" cup — a paper cup.

Notice that all 3 songs visualize the cup as containing grand and exalted space — life, the universe, the world. Thus, this post gets my #1 all-time favorite tag, "big and small." And I'm making a new tag now — "cups" — and will add it retroactively, so wait an hour and click it, if you enjoy the random delights of the archive. While you're waiting, why not have a drink? Use a cup. It's obviously better than cupping your hands or your feet.

My drug-infused idea of the plot for a book.

Okay, so here's the idea I had while absorbing nitrous oxide and waiting for the novocaine to kick in just before my dentist extracted my upper left wisdom tooth. The topic of discussion was whether some people wanted to take their tooth with them, and I heard that some people want it because there's a gold crown. They want their gold. What, do they take it to some dealer for cash? It was mentioned that the tooth has the person's DNA. So I was picturing some gold dealer's shop with a store of gold-capped teeth, discovered 100 years in the future, when cloning human beings is a viable enterprise. They make new humans with the DNA of the people who wanted their extracted tooth and the cash value of whatever gold goes into a tooth crown. The thing is: This is a set of people made from the DNA of people who would take the old tooth because of the gold and go to a dealer to turn that gold into cash. A disparate group, but with one very specific thing in common. What sort of people emerge from that DNA? My drug-infused guess: Very annoying people.

ADDED: Meade suggested the title, "Children of the Tooth."

ALSO: I was afraid to get the tooth pulled, and I'd just gone through 2 cataract surgery experiences without feeling any fear at all. You might think a person would be much more sensitive about laser destruction of an internal part of the eye and a cut into the eye to insert a new part, but I talked about this with the dentist, and I think the answer is that we are very tuned in to feelings in the mouth. We have the daily pleasures of eating and drinking. I didn't talk about this with the dentist, but why is kissing so important? Our mouth has a heightened sense of touch. Our eyes are extremely important sense organs, but the sense is sight, and we don't use them for the sense of touch. We mostly don't want to feel anything in our eyes. We care about any irritants, even tiny irritants, but the ideal condition of the eye is to feel nothing.

I actually had a fantastically good experience with this tooth extraction. I want to say it was fun... even the sound effects, which might have been nauseatingly gruesome without the nitrous oxide. The tearing sound was... ludicrous!

3 years ago, Trump announced that he was running for President, and, oh, how the media mocked him.

He was manifestly a joke. He could never become President. The question was only how much chaos and hilarity he could inject into the process before the serious candidates had the stage to themselves.

Via "FLASHBACK: Three Years Ago Today – Donald Announced His Historic Run for President — WATCH HOW MEDIA MOCKED HIM" (Gateway Pundit, June 16th), via Drudge.

My attitude was just about exactly what you see in that video except that I believed in ignoring him (because, don't encourage him). My post noting the occasion was just a collection 5 anagrams of the name I would not say, and the only tag was "nothing," which I used in the sense of muttering an obscenity.

But over the 3 years, my attitude has changed. I'm thinking of mining my archive to write a book with the title "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Donald Trump." Seriously, that's my title. I'll self-publish on Kindle Direct if I can make that happen. Consider encouraging me. Or not.

"The full-beat face has become the ubiquitous face of the Internet, a strange mirror of Kim Kardashian’s visage but also somehow just like Internet influencer Huda Kattan’s and Kylie Jenner’s, too."

"Instagram is awash in full-beat glory.... Save for variations in skin color and precise shade of shimmering eye shadow, the women all look uncannily the same. It’s the 'Instagram look'... 'When you take a picture, you lose the dimension on your face. The light will wash it away.' Over time, savvy ’Grammers realized that with a small mountain of makeup...  you could replace the shadows and the light... [You need] 'an elongated eye, lashes, contouring, bronzing, highlighting, and sculpting'... A theatrical set of drawn-on brows. And finally... a matte lip so overdrawn that it can look like an allergic reaction.... [T]he goal is to give yourself features you don’t actually possess: brighter, bigger eyes, a narrower, daintier nose, eyes so fringed in false lashes that they look as if they can’t possibly bear the weight. 'We’re a walking painting'..."

From "Brows, contour, lips, lashes: How the ‘full-beat face’ took over the Internet" (WaPo).

These things go in cycles. I can't believe that young people won't come to associate heavy makeup with the older generation and to rediscover the special attraction of looking natural while you have the gift of youth. As for older women, I can't believe they don't see themselves as garish and clownlike in heavy makeup. Yet if people don't live in the real world but only in photographs and video, then maybe stage makeup is where we will end up. In that case, the argument shouldn't be give up the horridly heavy makeup but: Return to living in the natural world.

I have a vague hope that the new generation will acquire an aversion to photography.

Or... here's an idea for one of my unwritten books. It's science fiction: It turns out actually to be true — as some seemingly ill-informed people have long believed — that photography steals a person's soul. These poor people who have been doing those ever more exaggerated "full-beat" faces in fact lost their souls a while back, perhaps somewhere around the 1,000th selfie.

"Fittingly for a piece of entertainment that means well but misfires at every turn, the film's star, Matt Damon, has been embroiled in his own series of blunders..."

"... on the Downsizing publicity tour, stemming from his comments about Hollywood's sexual assault crisis.* Damon probably wishes he could just shrink himself to nothing and disappear forever inside the film's 'Leisure Land,' a pint-sized monument to the suburban male ego."

From the NPR review of "Downsizing."

I wanted to like that movie because:

1. The director is Alexander Payne, who made "Election," which is one of the best movies about politics (and high school).

2. I myself have contemplated the idea of getting small as an environmentalist solution. I didn't think about a radical medical procedure or reducing people to bug size (which is what happens in the movie), but I did think — for fictional purposes — of a government imposing a scheme of eugenics that bred human beings to the smallest natural, healthy size. I was picturing strong taxing and spending incentives along with extreme social pressure to be very small. This gets my tag "unwritten books." In my story, the government isn't fascistic about imposing this scheme. It catches on because people believe in it. It would be like the way so many women now hope to produce children who are as tall as possible. Flip that. Women would be oohing over how short each other's children are, and relatives who haven't seen the kid for a while would exclaim, My, how you haven't grown.

_____________________

* Matt Damon is in big trouble not for sexually harassing somebody, even allegedly, but for stating a pedestrian truth in a somewhat clumsy way. He didn't go out of his way to make a statement on the subject. It came up in interviews , when he was asked if he'd work with other actors who were targets of allegations of sexual abuse:

“That always went into my thinking. I mean, I wouldn’t want to work with somebody who—life’s too short for that.” he said [to Business Insider]. "But the question of if somebody had allegations against them, you know, it would be a case-by-case basis. You go, "What’s the story here?"'

He said that the “rotten apples” accounted for only about 1 percent of the industry and there are plenty of good men. “We're in this watershed moment, and it's great, but I think one thing that's not being talked about is there are a whole s**tload of guys - the preponderance of men I've worked with - who don't do this kind of thing and whose lives aren't going to be affected.”

He also said to ABC: “We’re going to have to figure — you know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?”

"I was unable to process what was happening: My dad and I were pretending to be lovers in a play while Kevin Spacey was trying to seduce me..."

"... and all the while in real life I was a hapless, straight virgin who just wanted to become a famous actor."

Said Harry Dreyfuss, the son of Richard Dreyfuss, about something that happened in 2008, quoted in The Daily Mail.

ADDED: What was this play in which Harry was cast as his father's lover? It was "Complicit," by Joe Sutton, and directed by Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic in London. Here's the Guardian's 2-star review (from 2009):

[The] hero, Ben Kritzer, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who, in the wake of 9/11, had written a powerful opinion piece advocating the use of torture in "the war on terror". Given hard evidence of America's brutal military tactics and disregard for international law, he has since undergone a change of heart and, thanks to a state department source, has published incriminating documents.

The key question is whether he will protect his source and risk prison, or, as his wife and lawyer fervently hope, save his own skin.... What we get is a three-way tussle over tactics between Ben, his wife, and his lawyer, interspersed with TV footage of an Andrew Marr interview. It is rather like being kept waiting outside the Colosseum while the Christians are being thrown to the lions...

Spacey's production is oddly cast. Richard Dreyfuss as Ben never seems on top of the material, and is given to prowling around the Vic's new in-the-round stage barking at people rather than conversing with them. He also seems five times as old as Elizabeth McGovern, who is sadly wasted as his wife. 

There's no mention of Harry Dreyfuss and what his character had to do with anything.

I'd like to write a play about an sexually predatory director who inserts roles for teenagers in plays that have nothing to do with teenagers. He lures famous old actors to take starring roles in productions they cannot really handle, and the old actor goes on — abysmally — because the offer included a role for his precious teenage son, who was eager to begin an acting career.

AND: I glossed over this set up for the quote I featured:

Harry writes that the three of them were in Spacey's London apartment, and that he and Spacey, now 58, sat together on a couch. Richard, now 70, was intensely rehearsing his lines and did not notice when, per the allegation, Spacey put his hand on Harry's thigh. Harry was helping his father rehearse by portraying his character's wife.

So teenage Harry was in Kevin Spacey's apartment, sitting on the couch with him and his father, and the way he got into this odd position — the position that gave Spacey a chance to grope him (with his father right there on the couch) — was that Harry was supposed to be reading the lines of the female character in the play. What a creepy set-up!

In his account, Harry describes how he got up to move to the other side of the couch, only for Spacey to follow him. He writes that he again moved to the other side of the couch and put his hands on his thighs. At which point, he alleges Spacey returned and slid his hand through the crevice between Harry's arm and leg. 'Over the course of about 20 seconds, centimeter by centimeter, Kevin crawled his hand from my thigh over toward my crotch,' Harry writes. 'Looking into his eyes, I gave the most meager shake of my head that I could manage.'

He describes how he did not want to alert his father because Spacey was his father's boss at the time. He also writes that he was worried about harming his own career. Eventually, Spacey removed the hand, it is alleged. Harry says is not sure how long the hand remained on his crotch.

How could Richard Dreyfuss not have seen this? How could Harry have allowed Spacey to crawl his hand slowly and ultimately come to rest on his crotch and remain there? The answer seems to be: career. The abject submission is chilling. Harry was 18 and capable of consenting to sexual contact. (This happened in London, where the age of consent is and was 16.) How was Spacey to divine that Harry wasn't consenting?

"There's a certain kind of feminism that overlaps with misogyny."

"I would find it fascinating to read a post of yours that researches and presents that idea."

A Meadhouse conversation.

This is just a post referring to an unwritten post. I'll give this the tag "unwritten books," because even more than not writing books and not writing blog posts full of research and extended, persuasive arguments, I don't like making new tags.

That was the first time I ever wrote the word "genteel."

In the post about the NYT explaining Trump and wrestling: "[Trump's] tweeting of the wrestling-with-CNN video has caused the NYT to explain the context, which may be alien to its genteel readers."

I had to look up the spelling. You have to be careful not to write "gentile." "Genteel" actually looks wrong, like crudely phonetic spelling. Meade says it looks wrong "because it has an eel in it."

Ah, yes. "The Genteel Eel," that's the title of a children's book I want to write.

Here's the etymology of "genteel" from the (unlinkable) OED:

A re-adoption, at the end of the 16th cent., of French gentil , which had been previously adopted in the 13th cent., and had assumed the form gentle adj. and n. The re-adoption first appears in the form gentile, distinguished < gentile adj. and n. (= non-Jewish) by retaining the French pronunciation of the i and the stress on the last syllable. It is probable that it was originally fashionable to retain the French nasal sound in the first syllable; hence the vulgar pronunciation represented by the spelling ‘jonteel’, which occurs in comic literature of the early 19th cent. The fully anglicized spelling genteel came in at the end of the 17th cent.... Another attempt to render the French sound is jaunty n.

A few years before the middle of the 19th cent. the word was much ridiculed as being characteristic of those who are possessed with a dread of being taken for ‘common people’, or who attach exaggerated importance to supposed marks of social superiority. In seriously laudatory use it may now be said to be a vulgarism; in educated language it has always a sarcastic or at least playful colouring.

Wow. Did you know that gentle, gentile, genteel, and jaunty were all basically the same, all based on the French word gentil?

ADDED: How does the idea of not being Jewish get connected to those other words? The French word "gentil" comes from the Latin noun "gens," meaning nation. In Latin, the adjective, gentīlis, meant belonging to the same people or race. In French, the adjective, gentil, took on the meaning of belonging to a good family. The oldest meaning of the English word "gentle" was "Well-born, belonging to a family of position; originally used synonymously with noble." The word "gentile," meaning not Jewish, seems (as I read the OED) to be more directly connected to the Latin meaning, though I find that confusing, since many different peoples are not Jewish. I guess it makes sense if the word caught on in the plural form.

ALSO: I felt as though it was the first time I'd written the word "genteel," but a search of this blog's archive shows I'd written it twice before. (Not counting the times it appeared within quotes.)

The first time was in an October 2008 post in which I paraphrase what Dana Milbank is really saying about Sarah Palin: "Yes, dammit, why can't Palin simply resign herself to the fate of the campaign?... ... Palin responds with 'rage.' Anger is stage 1. Get with it, lady. You belong at stage 5, resignation, where the nice, genteel Mr. McCain is."

The second time was in November 2013, when Alec Baldwin got suspended from his MSNBC show after he got caught on camera calling a paparazzo a "cocksucking faggot." That presented a problem not because it's sexual, but because it's anti-gay. I said: "[S]hould he have a political talk show on MSNBC? That's for MSNBC to decide, and obviously they have. MSNBC has chosen to be more genteel and respectful toward the cultural elite. It doesn't seem to know how to foster vibrant discourse about politics, and the gambit of putting on the over-passionate Baldwin was always lame, even before he embarrassed them."

These days Baldwin is know for his impression of Donald Trump. We don't have any old video of Trump uttering anti-gay slurs, but, interestingly enough, we do have photographs of Alec Baldwin using wrestling moves on a media opponent.