"When [Justin] McDaniel began teaching Existential Despair a decade ago, he came up with a set of ground rules...."

"Students would read only literature — no biographies or self-help books. He forbade them from taking notes so as not to distract from the act of reading.... He feels that great novels can be read as religious texts, too. Part of the point of most religious stories, he believes, is that other people have endured ordeal after ordeal — and somehow carried on. McDaniel gravitates toward books that deal with bleak subjects: torture, genocide, hopelessness, pain and sickness, guilt and shame.... As one student at the reading group... described him to me as the 'least human and the most human person I know,' meaning that his affect alternates between empathetic and robotic. He keeps a 'crying chair' in his office and allows students to sit in it and cry for 15 minutes at a time, no questions asked (he leaves the room). But now and then, he told me, some students 'needed a little smackdown.' During one reading session last spring, he lost his temper. The class was reading The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. About halfway through, a few students finished and started chatting. 'It was five or six people who could not stop their self-satisfaction, how clever and interesting they were. Finally, I had to unleash on them. I was actually cruel to them, but they deserved it.' He shouted 'Shut the fuck up!' over and over until the room fell silent...."

From "Gluttons for Punishment Justin McDaniel has developed a cult following for getting his students to read — as long as they follow his rules" (NY Magazine).

Not sure why Meade sent me this, but I really appreciated 2:53 - 2:56.

Video here, at Truth Social.

Meade: "is that when we see bill clinton?"

Me: "No."

Meade: "Riding up the escalator"

Me: "I gave you the time stamp"

ADDED: It turns out Meade couldn't see the time stamp. You need to have the video displayed where the time counts from the beginning. If your display shows the time remaining, my time stamp won't get you to what amused me. This was supposed to be a cute lightweight post but ended up wasting over a half hour of my time in a technical mess, mostly because of another problem, the way Truth Social code leaves a big blank space after any embedded video. Now, I'm at the point of screaming at the sky. After numerous attempts to tweak the embedded video, I just switched to a link. This is the last time I try to have any kind of "fun" with Truth Social video.

"Although Mr. Trump is not expected to be competitive in California, the rally showed that he could turn out a crowd."

"Throngs of people at Calhoun Ranch, where it was held, braved the desert sun and temperatures that hovered near 100 degrees.... It was Mr. Trump’s second foray into a blue state in two days. On Friday, he visited Aurora, Colo., where he made a series of nativist attacks and promoted falsehoods about crimes committed by migrants in a state where Ms. Harris is safely ahead in polls. And word surfaced this week that Mr. Trump was planning to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York City, on Oct. 27. That would be his third major campaign event in New York, a state that was once his home but is also solidly blue.... At his California rally, several speakers taunted Ms. Harris, who represented California in the Senate and served as its attorney general, for problems the state has faced. Mr. Trump called California a 'paradise lost.'"

Writes Neil Vigdor, in "Trump Hits Coachella, Campaigning Once Again in a Blue State/The former president took a detour from the battleground states to hold a rally in the California desert, where temperatures hovered near 100 degrees" (NYT).

Why is Trump rallying in blue states? Lots of experts are weighing in. The dominant mainstream view seems to be that Trump wants to use these places as a backdrop for arguing that Democrats govern badly. Also there's the idea of helping down ballot Republicans.

I think it makes him look as though he's confident that he will win, and maybe people like to vote for the winner or feel de-motivated to vote for someone who looks like the loser. That could help him in all of the states. I think that a lot of people pre-adjust to what they think is inevitable and that Trump may be looking ahead and thinking about smoothing the transition of power — mellowing the people who might otherwise be screaming at the sky.

Trump recently expressed concern for that iconic screaming woman:

How can we simultaneously believe in the resurrection of Joe Biden and in the legitimacy of depriving him of the nomination he won in the primaries?

I open the NYT this morning — it's 3 a.m. — and see this:

 

Biden isn't sleeping in the middle of the day on a beach in Delaware, he's working — if not around the clock, against the clock.

The last couple weeks I'd been fretting about whether we even had a President at the moment and fantasizing about asking Kamala Harris how she could justify refraining from using the 25th Amendment to fill the vacuum. If it was proper to engage in the bold strategy to displace him as her party's candidate, why is it acceptable to stand by and do nothing when you are the one with the power to oust him from the presidency? 

Maybe it's because of questions like mine that the NYT concocted the headline "Biden Works Against the Clock as Violence Escalates in the Middle East" and installed it at the top of the front page alongside that somber photo of the elderly man's serious, determined face. I read the subheadline and wonder if any newsworthy story even occurred: "President Biden is beginning to acknowledge that he is simply running out of time to help forge a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas, his aides say. And the risk of a wider war has never looked greater." That's a well-known, persistent condition. 

"What [E. Jean] Carroll did not do that day in the lingerie department dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, where she says Mr. Trump pinned her against a wall..."

"... pulled down her tights and shoved his fingers and then his penis into her vagina, is scream. 'I’m not a screamer,' she testified in civil court last week, when asked by an attorney for Mr. Trump why she hadn’t cried out. 'I was too much in a panic to scream. I was fighting.'... Not screaming was the cause, in 2017, for a sexual assault case being tossed out in Italy. It was a backdrop to a widely publicized 2018 criminal rape trial involving two well-known rugby players in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who were acquitted. And while experts in trauma and sexual assault, such as the psychologist James Hopper, have repeatedly shown that not screaming or crying out — freezing, essentially — is a common brain response to danger, the screaming myth endures."

Writes Jessica Bennett in "Why Didn’t She Scream? And Other Questions Not to Ask a Rape Accuser" (NYT).

The reason to scream is for help. At Bergdorf's, there were, presumably, people within earshot who would have burst in and interrupted whatever was going on. Help was available. From the failure to summon help, you could infer that Carroll believed it was a situation best handled privately. She chose to do her own fighting, she testified, but she also says she was in a panic, perhaps unable to come up with the strategy of summoning help.

"‘Scream groups’ are forming across the world, where women gather in parks and public places to release their frustrations."

So says Samantha Lock (in The Guardian). 

“Women want to scream,” [a 54-year old female Australian said]. “There are plenty of spaces for men to yell [but] we don’t often get to raise our voices [and] when we do we’re met with disapproval.”...

"You were really shouting at him.... Your shouting, though, was really loud.... You want to get more information from him, not... telling him what he needs to do. You kind of sounded like you were telling him what to do.... You don’t want to do that."

Said Bob Woodward's wife — Elsa Walsh, also a reporter — after she heard him talking on the phone to then-President Trump.

Quoted in "The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger" (WaPo).

Woodward's response was "Okay. But we’re in a different world now, sweetie."

You can hear Bob Woodward yelling at Trump at the link. WaPo and Woodward are making a big thing out of sharing the tapes. Shades of Nixon, perhaps, or so they hope. But Trump wasn't speaking to his insiders in secret. He was doing an interview with Bob Woodward. Yet Woodward and WaPo present this disclosure of the "tapes" as if they are stretching the limits of their professional methods in order to warn the public about... what they've been warning the public about throughout the Trump era:

"One man brought in his own box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a carton of milk and some Entenmann’s mini crumb cakes before passing out face down on a table."

"Afterward, he rolled spliffs as nearby, paying customers tried to enjoy their lattes and Frappuccinos. A mentally disturbed man in a black trench coat talked to himself and screamed obscenities at the communal mirror near the bathrooms for 30 minutes. 'There’s a guy over by the bathrooms making people really uncomfortable,' one customer told an employee behind the counter."

From "'Woke' NYC Starbucks now a haven for junkies, drunks and homeless" (NY Post).

"I’m an African-American man, so I speak plainly. It was a Black theater. You yelled at the screen, and folks would talk."

"A major component of Black existence is forced comportment in white spaces. There is a comfort derived from taking off the disguise, if just for a few minutes in the cinema." 

Said Cyrus McQueen, a stand-up comedian, quoted in "The ‘Shouting Back’ Theater Abruptly Closes, and Brooklyn Mourns/A rowdy movie house suddenly goes dark, inspiring an outpouring of dismay and reminiscences" (NYT).

The theater closed last Sunday, taking regulars by surprise.... Dean Fleischer-Camp, a filmmaker, said that his favorite movie experience ever involved people “screaming, laughing, singing” and “throwing popcorn” during a 6 p.m. screening of “Drag Me to Hell.” Lincoln Restler, the newly elected councilman whose district includes Downtown Brooklyn, shared a picture of a moving van parked outside. “For the shouting-back-at-action-movie experience,” he wrote, “there was no place better!”

What's the last thing you woke up from a dream yelling?

For me — and this happened last night — it was: "There's a reason there's a rule against jumping on the furniture."

I even said it twice. It was, apparently, an important revelation in the world of a dream of which I have no memory.

"You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’re just seeing, a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure, pure demagoguery."

"A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power." 

Said Mitch McConnell, quoted in "McConnell rips Biden’s voting rights speech as ‘profoundly unpresidential’" (NY Post). 

I didn't watch Biden's speech — I can read the transcript — but I did overhear it, and I said out loud, What is he yelling about? Why is he scolding us? He's using a ridiculous "tough guy" voice. 

You can criticize me for not attending to the substance, but he wasn't trying to use substance. He was using emotive sound effects. It was like a Trump rally — but no. A Trump rally would have humor and fun. 

And I don't think Trump ever relied on the argument that you're a racist if you don't agree with him. The anti-Trump rejoinder: Trump never called his opponents racists, because his between-the-lines message was always come all you racists and follow me. 

"Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is unhappy that a group of progressive activists followed her into a bathroom over the weekend."

"Leaving aside that Sinema doesn’t get to set the terms of how her constituents hold her accountable, you know who would have likely applauded those activists’ tactics? A young Kyrsten Sinema, the one who didn’t mind calling out Democrats who are more interested in obtaining power than in using it to advance their values.... "

From "Kyrsten Sinema's bathroom protest was a long time coming/The Kyrsten Sinema of 2003 would have been among the activists protesting her at Arizona State University" by Hayes Brown (MSNBC).

There's a big difference between "calling out" politicians and hounding them physically until they retreat into the dead-end space of a bathroom stall. That's a nightmare, and anyone who's proud of doing that to her ought never to claim to understand the problem of violence against women. Not that it's acceptable to treat a man like that. But getting trapped in a small, interior space by people who are yelling at you and coming at you is a woman's nightmare.

Low-level disorder.

Recent yelling in Kalispell:

Someone wanted Kalispell Police Department to check on a man’s welfare after they saw him throwing his arms around, waving his shirt, and yelling. Officers checked on the man who was "just being his normal self."...

A man reportedly jumped out from between two recycling containers, scaring a woman and her son.... 

A bearded man with scruffy dark hair was standing in a duck pond, yelling and throwing rocks.... 

About five people were yelling at each other....

"According to John Steel, Bob Dylan told him that when he first heard the Animals' version [of 'The House of the Rising Sun'] on his car radio, he stopped to listen, 'jumped out of his car' and 'banged on the bonnet' (the hood of the car), inspiring him to go electric.…"

From "The Animals' guitarist, Hilton Valentine, has died" (at my son John's blog, quoting Wikipedia). 

First, goodbye to Hilton Valentine. 

Second. I don't know about that Bob Dylan story. Who, on hearing something on the car radio, gets out of the car to bang on the "bonnet"? I'm assuming Steel was paraphrasing and will not get into the silliness of Dylan saying "bonnet." And I won't question that there really is somebody named John Steel who told this story, even though "John Steel" sounds like the #1 fictional name of all time. Look for it in romance novels and action movies. 

Ah, I see, John Steel was the drummer for The Animals. I can believe that Dylan told Steel that story, but not that Dylan really did pull over the car just to jump out of it to bang on the hood. I mean, in movies when things like that happen, the character pulls over the car and bangs on the steering wheel. In real life, I think you tend to keep driving, maybe gesticulate. With one hand waving free. 

But did Dylan get the idea to go electric from The Animals? The Animals are not even mentioned in Dylan's memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One." The Byrds are mentioned. The closest thing to "animals" in the book is:

Suddenly... my mind sprang back to... the time I’d seen the Leopard Girl.... The Leopard Girl. A carnie barker had explained about her, how her mother who was pregnant with her in North Carolina saw a leopard on a dark road at night and the animal had marked her unborn child. Then I saw the Leopard Girl and when I did, my emotions got weak. 

I wondered, now, whether all of us... had been inscribed and marked before birth, given a sticker, some secret sign. If that’s true, then none of us could change anything. We’re all running a wild race. We play the game the way it’s set up or we don’t play. If the secret sign thing is true, then it wouldn’t be fair to judge anybody….

"It’s like you get the most confident, strong personality people, a lot of them being women, and it’s like you’re layering all of them on top of each other and it becomes everyone trying to talk over each other."

"So it’s a lot of really enthusiastic yelling.... It was nice to have so many different, really strong opinions. We always joke that whenever we bring our friends over for the first time they’re going to get grilled. Like, if you don’t have your 10-year plan, like, fully ready and outlined in a spreadsheet for them, you’re not going to survive that meal." 

Said Ella Emhoff, quoted in "What’s It Like to Have Kamala Harris As ‘Momala’? We Asked Her Stepkids/A Zoom interview with Ella and Cole Emhoff" (NYT). 

I was interested in the question — asked by the NYT interviewer — "Your dad has never not worked, right? What do you think that’s going to be like for him?" 

The reader is forced to infer that Emhoff is quitting his work. There's no link or statement to that effect, and I didn't know it. He's only 56. He's been a lawyer. I see at his Wikipedia page that he took a leave of absence from his law firm when Harris was running for VP, and he permanently resigned when she became VP. So what will this be like for him? I'd say, he's old enough to retire, and not retiring would probably cause more trouble than any good his working could have done, even assuming that his legal work was for the good.

Here's his daughter's answer:

I hope he takes up, like, another hobby. I hope he starts knitting, like I do. I think it’ll be a good time for him to slow down and just, I don’t know, like appreciate life. And tap into a lot of the things that he couldn’t do because he was working so much or had these, like, time constraints. I hope that it opens up some of those creative outlets, but that’s obviously just me, the creative child.

Let him play the supportive role with grace and dignity, like the female first and second spouses have done. He's inventing the masculine version of a traditional role. I've seen some people say that the arrival of a man into this role ought to be an occasion for getting rid of it altogether — as if the role itself is sexist, and putting a man in it reveals that it was never a good at all. But I'd say that line of reasoning is sexist. 

BUT: Just clicking on footnotes at Emhoff's Wikipedia page, I see "Kamala Harris’s Husband Named to Faculty at Georgetown Law":  

Emhoff will be a Distinguished Visitor from Practice focusing on media and entertainment law, which he practiced for nearly three decades as a partner at DLA Piper. He will also serve as a distinguished fellow of the school’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy.

Dad needs a hobby. Ha ha. Being a law professor is a hobby. Or such a nothing pastime that you need to load in something like knitting to keep from being at loose ends. 

That NYT question — "Your dad has never not worked, right? What do you think that’s going to be like for him?" — contains the inference that to be a law professor is not to work!

"In a stunning moment, Judge Garaufis interrupted [the defense lawyer] in the middle of his speech, yelling, 'No!'"

"During a back-and-forth in which the two men shouted through face masks, Judge Garaufis spoke forcefully about how intent did not matter when a 45-year-old man sexually abuses a child. 'It’s an insult to the intelligence of anyone who listens,' the judge said."

From "Keith Raniere, Leader of Nxivm Sex Cult, Is Sentenced to 120 Years in Prison/In the courtroom, more than a dozen victims gave wrenching testimony about how he manipulated and sexually abused them" (NYT).

"Biden continually interrupts Ryan in a way I find incredibly annoying."

I'm rereading my live-blogging of the October 11, 2012 debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan. It's making me view Trump's debate behavior in a different way. I hated the way Biden treated the very polite, earnest Midwesterner Ryan. Excerpts (with timestamps omitted):

Biden is being rude, laughing and mouthing words.... Biden mutters an interruption. When Biden is given a turn, he calls what Ryan said "malarky."... Ryan is speaking earnestly... and Biden is chuckling toothily, his body shaking like Santa Claus.... When Ryan speaks, Biden is laughing clownishly again. It looks just awful... Biden is acting as though he cannot physically tolerate Ryan having a turn to speak!... Biden continually interrupts Ryan in a way I find incredibly annoying.... While Ryan is talking... Biden sighs long and loud... Biden interrupts. Ryan says: "Mr. Vice President, I know you're under a lot of duress to make up for lost ground, but I think everyone will be better served if we don't keep interrupting each other." I love the politeness of "if we don't keep" — we — when Biden has been an interruption machine and Ryan has barely interrupted and only occasionally has talked over to keep from losing his turn. The moderator, Martha Raddatz has done nothing at all to control Biden.... The stress level is rising. Biden is so angry. Why is he yelling? Ryan needs nerves of steel not to lose his cool. I'm impressed that Ryan, when he gets his turn, is able to speak in an even, natural voice. It's hard to concentrate on the policy itself, because the emotional static is so strong... That debate was so annoying! Some of the CNN commentators are talking about how Biden did what he came to do, to fire up the Democrats. "This was not for the independents," says Van Jones. Okay, well, but independents were watching, and Biden was horribly rude. He created this disturbing atmosphere of anxiety.

Debating Trump, Biden got a big serving of what he dished out 8 years ago. Ryan did a fantastic job of maintaining his cool, staying substantive, and going high when Biden went low. And then he lost the election. I'm sure Biden would have been willing to do what he did in 2012 and be completely rude and irritating as hell once again, but he's 8 years older, and, more importantly, Donald Trump is not Paul Ryan. Trump is Trump, and Trump saw the ultra-polished and polite Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan go down to defeat.

The Democratic convention was famously boring, but apparently the Republican convention is so damned exciting that...

... "coked" is trending on Twitter!

A taste of why...

“Passionate” = Coked out of his frigging gourd https://t.co/iyntSitHxE

— Hal Sparks (@HalSparks) August 25, 2020

Was @DonaldJTrumpJr ‘coked out of his mind’ during RNC speech? #RNC2020
https://t.co/U38EVrijei

— Raw Story (@RawStory) August 25, 2020

I’m not watching the #RNCConvention2020 but did see part of kimberly guilfoyle speech. All I gotta say is I worked in a chemical dependency office for years. That girl was coked out. pic.twitter.com/zwWPY0I5z8

— I’m The Mary⭐️ (@CMUnimpressed) August 25, 2020

This should mean more people will watch the speeches. I watched Guilfoyle in real time last night and thought it was wild how much she was yelling. But see for yourself:



And here's Don Jr. I've only watched a few seconds of this, and I will just observe that it appears that his makeup artist put a dot of a high-sparkle product under each eye, presumably with the notion that it would make his eyes "pop":



ADDED: "What's the Deal with Dots?"

"Simon told police that he was walking his dog with his girlfriend in the 3000 block of North Fox Street when he told the dog to poop."

"He then heard a voice from a ground-level apartment yelling at them and asking if they were going to train the dog or just yell at it, according to the probable cause statement. Simon said he tried to ignore the yelling but then saw the man point a gun at him."

From "Suspect in homicide near Coors Field opened fire because of dispute over dog poop, police say/Michael Close, 36, accused of firing on victims from his apartment while they were walking their dog" (Denver Post).

"No one should have to vote for any party based on their race or religion or background."

"I know that the comments have come on like I was taking the African American vote for granted … but nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve never done that, and I’ve earned it every time I’ve run. I was making the point that I have never taken a vote for granted."

Said Joe Biden, apologizing for what he now calls his "cavalier" statement, "If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black."

I recommend watching the entire 19-minute interview that got Joe Biden in trouble, but I admit that I haven't watched beyond 6:33, because I got tired of listening to Joe Biden yelling, especially the part — I'll focus you right on it — where he says "Dead! Dead! Dead!":