"The esteemed Manhattan theater in which I spent several hours on a recent Saturday night might as well have been a dormitory."

"Up and down the rows and aisles, people could be seen in various states of drowsy repose. A woman in the row ahead of mine had her head thrust all the way back, as if she were paying the audience member behind her to shampoo her hair.... Is every theater piece really that dull to some percentage of the crowd, I wonder, or are we just coming to public events ever more sleep-deprived?.... Do people attending plays and musicals have a moral obligation to the performers to try to stay awake?..."

From "Why pay $100 and more for a theater ticket if you sleep during the performance?" (WaPo).

The bike mountains of China.

"I need to make them look perfect for their family."

"Rich Lee, a grinder with dreams of turning his pelvis into a cyborgian vibrator, is in the front row."

"After he and his wife divorced in 2015, she sued for custody of their children. Mr. Lee has magnets inside his ears which act as headphones; shortly after his divorce, he attempted to implant his shins with foam armor, which ended in swelling, burst stitches and removal. His children, he wrote in a GoFundMe raising money for legal fees, 'used to think I was an awesome dad with super powers, but now they have been told I am a self-mutilating parent with a problem and that they are victims for seeing the stitches in my legs.'"

From "Magnet Implants? Welcome to the World of Medical Punk/'It’s not good enough to talk,' says Jeffrey Tibbetts, a registered nurse whose home plays host to Grindfest, an annual meetup of biohackers. 'You should be taking action. That’s kind of our ethos'" in The New York Times (which chose not to allow commenting on this crazy nonsense).

Maybe I'm weird, but here's something you can do that might be fun.

Go to Goodreads and search for a book you really like, scroll down to "community reviews," and select the filter "1 star." You might get boring non-reviews, like "I hated this book so much that I can't even talk about why." I saw that on a book I loved. It doesn't matter which one.

But I was looking for reviews of the book I'm reading now — "Men Without Women" by Haruki Murakami — which I'm immensely enjoying, and I stumbled into the "1 star" filter. Someone who goes by "Jack" wrote:

This review didn't begin so negatively because I hate the author and the kind of person who's attracted to his style; on the contrary, I've read his entire oeuvre, more or less, and enjoyed a decent majority of his works. The criticisms of Murakami's style are well-known at this point: he has a bag of narrative or aesthetic tricks, and there isn't a single thing in one of his stories he hasn't repeated somewhere else....

He's a casual read, uncomplicated but mostly superficially pleasing, like the bland emotionless sexual encounters in 95% of everything he writes. There's only so many times one can read about a relatively handsome Japanese man, in his late-thirties or maybe middle-age, who likes jazz and cooking and being a milquetoast zombie at once content and uneasy with his vapid life, without thinking that maybe Murakami isn't writing about some aspect of the human condition, or the plight of men, or something like that: maybe he's just putting himself into every novel, adding a weird dream or two, a cat, some sort of mundane fantastical event that goes unexplained, and repeating until the publishers phone up and say it's time for him to make them more money.

I became interested in Murakami's writing as a teenager because I was a big manga and JRPG nerd, and wanted to continue obsessing over Japan while gaining some sort of literary foothold that put me above the unwashed nerdy masses. He was an easy read while channeling an ineffable sensibility, and he was big into Anglo-American culture so I could understand most of his references. I might reread The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle sometime down the line and discover that there's still a lot in Murakami's style I enjoy.

For the most part, I can only conclude I've outgrown him. He didn't change; I did. By that line of thinking, maybe I shouldn't be making a value judgment of his work, if I've just come to a change of taste, right? Well, no. His prose is clunky at best, profoundly meaningless at its most infuriating. This is still a pretty bad short story collection, but if you like it, you're in luck! You'll like everything Murakami's ever written right up until the moment you realise you hate him. 

Ha ha. That was well written, and I don't think it will hurt my enjoyment of Murakami's writing... until (I guess) the moment I realize I hate him.

Why am I reading that book? Is it because of the incels in the news or the men-without-women amongst the commenters of this blog? No. There were 2 things:

First, I read a Murakami book last September. As described in a post titled "A song about singing off key," I was clicking around aimlessly and happened onto "15 sights that make Tokyo so fascinating" (HuffPo), and #7 was the Murakami novel "Norwegian Wood" ("For millions of readers around the world who've never been to Japan, it's been a way for them to experience in some small way, Japan's capital of the past").

Second, a reader familiar with my "Gatsby project" emailed to say, "I’m reading Murakami’s 'What I talk about when I talk about running.' I came to one paragraph (see attached) which made me think of you and which you might enjoy."

Here's the paragraph:

One other project I’m involved in now is translating Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and things are going well. I’ve finished the first draft and am revising the second. I’m taking my time, going over each line carefully, and as I do so the translation gets smoother and I’m better able to render Fitzgerald’s prose into more natural Japanese. It’s a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp— so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly— the realities of life. How was this possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is.

I can't imagine translating Gatsby, because the sentences are so weird. Do you translate literally to preserve the weirdness, or do you make it sound natural and idiomatic so people won't say you don't know how to translate, or can you find similar ways to be weird that fit the translated-to language?

And if you're thinking of fighting my opinion that the Gatsby sentences are weird, please click on the "Gatsby project" link above. Each post is about exactly one sentence — such as "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

When I heard about the Murakami translation of "Gatsby," my heart leapt but only for a half-second. I can't read Japanese! I almost studied Japanese long ago, and nothing prevents me from studying it or anything else even now. But it made me want to read Murakami again, and "Men Without Women" seemed to be the most recent fiction. I started in on that. After reading 5 of the 8 stories, I put the nonfiction "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" in my Kindle too. Don't want to overload on fiction. And the 5th story was really great.

By the way — "Men Without Women" is also the title of a story collection by Ernest Hemingway. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is a story collection by Raymond Carver. And, obviously, "Norwegian Wood" is a Beatles song.

From the 5th story:

“Mr. Kino, you’re not the type who would willingly do something wrong. I know that very well. But there are times in this world when it’s not enough just not to do the wrong thing. Some people use that blank space as a kind of loophole. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

"If I said that phrase back then, quite some time ago, it was in a way to counter the Spielbergs and that lot who said a story had to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and so, as a joke, I said: 'not in that order.'"

Said Jean-Luc Godard, confronted with his old statement that films should not follow a conventional narrative arc, quoted in "Godard injects anarchic spirit at Cannes with small screen cameo." The 87-year-old filmmaker appeared via Facetime to promote his new movie "The Image Book," which is a collection of "clips from other films, stills, news footage and even Islamic State online videos, with a soundtrack often at odds with the images."

"I do not want to sit and make a nest and be comfortable, and I did feel so comfortable that I stopped being involved as a person and an artist and that is not something I want."

"I don't want to have comfort, I don't want to have a family, I don't want to have a flat — so I destroyed in a way everything I had in order to be able to build. It is almost like a delete button and you just want to start fresh."

So said Sergei Polunin, in 2012, when he was 22 and had suddenly quit the Royal Ballet, where he was the youngest dancer ever to have been made a principal.

I'm reading that today because it was presented as related by BBC News where I'd gone to read "Booed tenor quits La Scala's Aida/Top tenor Roberto Alagna has stunned opera-goers at La Scala in Milan by storming off stage in the middle of a performance after he was booed."

That's an article from 2006, which I was reading as a consequence of this search of my own blog archive:

I was looking at that because Meade had texted me a little video that made me think "La Scala" had some personal significance to us that I ought to have remembered — not that everything I should remember is collected in the blog archive.

How is Roberto Alagna doing these days?  The following year he performed in Aida at the Metropolitan Opera and got a standing ovation. I guess he's recovered from the hurt feelings he got being booed. I like the "Early years" section of his Wikipedia article:

Alagna was born outside the city of Paris in 1963 to a family of Sicilian immigrants. As a teenager, the young Alagna began busking and singing pop in Parisian cabarets, mostly for tips. Influenced primarily by the films of Mario Lanza and learning from recordings of many historic tenors, he then switched to opera, but remained largely self-taught....

That makes me think of the movie "Heavenly Creatures." Have you ever seen that Peter Jackson movie, where the girls (one of whom is played by Kate Winslet) go absolutely mad for Mario Lanza?



And what has become of Sergei Polunin? Well, at the end of the article quoted above, he says that ballet was his "childhood goal," and he achieved it at age 19, "And then I said 'what's next?' and I set myself a different goal at 19 to become an actor. I started watching movies more carefully, watching actors - the way they act, the way the movie is filmed, just as a hobby in a way, but also something to progress to maybe in the future." And here he is talking about his role in the 2017 film "Murder on the Orient Express":



"... into the tongue, into the mouse..."

At Mosey's Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

And think about using the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"'A plant on top of a brick and some plywood furniture,' Alegre said, jokingly, of the dominant Apartamento style..."

"... though it has nonetheless encouraged a generation of homeowners (or, just as likely, renters) to rethink what makes a good home and, perhaps by extension, a good life.... 'We built this house in a way that you almost don’t need any furniture,' he said. Apartamento, it seems, has given him an appreciation of emptiness.... The cork dining table... was covered with remnants of a long lunch that Alegre had hosted the previous Sunday afternoon. A wine key was still on the table. The contents of a wooden bowl formed an accidental still life: onion, shriveled lemons, coaster, light bulb. 'That’s the thing with a second home,' Alegre said. 'It doesn’t have to be nice all the time.'"

From "Inside an Artfully Imperfect Home in the Catalonian Countryside" (NYT).

Here's a link to the Apartamento site.

It's funny for me to read this today, because yesterday, I spent the whole day attacking clutter in this house. The only way "accidental still lifes" of the "onion, shriveled lemons, coaster, light bulb" kind are going to feel charming — to me, anyway — is if you do periodically clear everything out. Food clutter is a special problem. What if there is a bug on that onion and shriveled lemons still life? Not so still anymore.

I've never thought until just now about whether the category still life excludes images that contain moving life, such as insects. Having thought of the issue, I assumed insects on a pile of fruit would not cause us to refrain from calling it a still life.

Researching the question, I encountered Balthasar van der Ast (1593/94 – 7 March 1657)...

... a Dutch Golden Age painter who specialized in still lifes of flowers and fruit, as well as painting a number of remarkable shell still lifes... His still lifes often contain insects and lizards.... His lifetime of works was once summarized by an Amsterdam doctor who said, "In flowers, shells and lizards, beautiful."

"Sen. John McCain is 2,200 miles from Washington and hasn’t been on Capitol Hill in five months, but he showed this week that he remains a potent force in national politics and a polarizing figure within the Republican Party."

"From his home in Sedona, Ariz., where he is receiving treatment for an aggressive and typically fatal type of brain cancer, McCain has challenged and praised the Trump administration’s actions on national security — his voice limited to news releases and Twitter. But his declaration Wednesday in opposition to Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee for CIA director, has uniquely roiled the political scene. The denunciation has prompted reactions from fellow senators and a former vice president, as well as intemperate remarks from some Republicans aligned with Trump, including a White House aide. It has revived the fierce debate over torture and its effectiveness in extracting information in the years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — from a man who speaks from experience. McCain was held for 5½ years in a North Vietnamese prison, often deprived of sleep, food and medical care, after a jet he piloted was shot down over Hanoi...."

So begins "Speaking out on torture and a Trump nominee, ailing McCain roils Washington" (WaPo).

Also at WaPo: "John McCain is the single greatest political leader of our time" (by Dana Milbank). Excerpt:

McCain is still with us, and this is no obituary. But as Trump loyalists besmirch this good man, I thought I would put in writing what I have often thought over the years: John McCain is the single greatest political leader of our time. He is, in a way, not of our time, for his creed — country before self — is unfamiliar to many who serve in office and utterly foreign to the man in charge.

Only once during the nearly quarter of a century I’ve been covering politics did I think I could work for a politician, and that politician was McCain. I first got to know him in early 1999, when there were just a few of us driving around New Hampshire with him in an SUV, before the “Straight Talk Express” rolled. Had he beaten George W. Bush (he surely would have defeated Al Gore), and had he been president on Sept. 11, 2001, I know he would have done great things with the national unity Bush ultimately squandered....

Too literal?

"Keepin' Out of Mischief Now" is the song Elvis Costello says he'd like played at his funeral.

"When writing is our way of being in the world, it continuously asserts itself over the countless other aspects of life: love, study, a job."

"It insists even when there’s no paper and pen or anything, because we’re worshippers of the written word and our minds dictate sentences even in the absence of tools with which to set them down. Writing, in short, is always there, urgent, and distances even the people we love, even our children who ask us to play."

Writes Elena Ferrante in "If you feel the urge to write, there’s no good reason to put it off" (The Guardian.

At the Cattle Dog Café...

... I hope you're paying attention.

"Cave Found in Kenya in Which People Lived for 78,000 Years/Unique discoveries in tropical forest cave show gradual development of weapons and other skills, negating the theory of sudden spurts of innovation."

Haaretz reports.

Panga ya Saidi is actually a network of caves about a kilometer long in limestone hills: the main chamber is about 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) co-author Prof. Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute tells Haaretz. It was used from the Middle Stone Age to this day, though people don’t live in it any more: now they use it for burials and rituals, he says. In any case, it was big enough to have supported hundreds of people....

At Panga ya Saidi, tools go back to the earliest occupation 78,000 years ago. But the occupants’ technology changed markedly 67,000 years ago, with smaller, finer implements appearing, reflecting changes in hunting practices and skills.

After that turning point, the archaeologists observed a mix of technologies rather than sudden changes. That argues against a series of cognitive or cultural "revolutions" theorized by some archaeologists, they write....

"I think that Twitter is a useful reporting tool sometimes, but an utterly toxic swamp that nonetheless I engage in more than I probably should."

"Look, it’s still a great way to promote stories. It’s also a great reporting tool in the sense that I’ll tweet a piece of information, and someone will contact me, and they’ll have more information. In that way, it’s great. But it’s just a time suck. Look, a lot of us need an editor, right? I need an editor. I don’t have an editor on Twitter. I have an editor in the paper, and so I tend to be less precise in 140 characters and sometimes I leave people confused as to my meaning. And then I make the mistake of engaging and trying to explain it, which just leads you down a rabbit hole. Less time spent there is probably better."

Says NYT reporter Maggie Haberman in an interview at Slate.

There seems to be a lot of hating of Twitter. I was just reading that Andrew Sullivan piece, blogged in the previous post, and it had a stray line of Twitter hate that stuck with me:

[A decade ago,] The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites... and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing.

Twitter swallowed blogging.... yet blogging was better. Things have gotten uglier. I keep my distance from Twitter (and Facebook), but I think there's an idea that the interactivity is better on Twitter — so fast and intense. By comparison, blogs don't seem to happen. The very thing blogs did that was so exciting 10 years ago is what blogs just don't seem to do at all anymore. And yet people are powerfully unhappy with Twitter. Everything looks so ugly and cruel. And it's Trump's milieu. So painful for Sullivan, Haberman, et al.

Andrew Sullivan finds himself "instinctually siding with the independent artist" like Kanye West...

"... perhaps because I’ve had to fight for my own individuality apart from my own various identities, most of my life," writes Andrew Sullivan in  "Kanye West and the Question of Freedom."

It wasn’t easy being the first openly gay editor of anything in Washington when I was in my 20s. But it was harder still to be someone not defined entirely by my group, to be a dissident within it, a pariah to many, even an oxymoron, because of my politics or my faith....

I’m not whining about this experience, just explaining why I tend to side reflexively with the individual when he is told he isn’t legit by the group. In that intimidating atmosphere, I’m with the dissenter, the loner, and the outlier. I’m with the undocumented, the dude who has had his group credentials taken away.

And so I bristle at Ta-Nehisi’s view that West cannot be a truly black musician and a Trump admirer, based on the logic that the gift of black music 'can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it …What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought — liberation from the dictates of that we.'

I bristle because, of course, Coates is not merely subjecting West to 'expectation and scrutiny' which should apply to anyone and to which no one should object; he is subjecting West to anathematization, to expulsion from the ranks. In fact, Coates reserves the worst adjective he can think of to describe West, the most othering and damning binary word he can muster: white.... Coates denounces West for seeking something called 'white freedom'....

I even feel something similar in a different way as a gay man in a straight world, where the general culture is not designed for me, and the architecture of a full civic life was once denied me. But that my own freedom was harder to achieve doesn’t make it any less precious, or sacrosanct. I’d argue it actually makes it more vivid, more real, than it might be for someone who never questioned it. And I am never going to concede it to 'straightness,' the way Coates does to 'whiteness.' As an individual, I seek my own freedom, period....

There is no gay freedom or straight freedom, no black freedom or white freedom; merely freedom, a common dream, a universalizing, individual experience. 'Liberation from the dictates of the we' is everyone’s birthright in America... A free artist owes nothing to anyone, especially his own tribe."

Sullivan focused on the same material in Coates's essay that I wrote about a few days ago: "I had to read it out loud to try to absorb the part where we can understand why West's idea of freedom is specifically white. It didn't work. Maybe because I'm white and that's making me think that complete freedom is every human being's birthright and that it would be racist to tell black people to adhere to a prescribed black form of freedom."

I'm interested in Sullivan's attention to the idea of the artist, even as he speaks of identifying with Kanye and "the independent artist." I don't think Sullivan regards himself as an artist, and I don't know about Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I suspect that Coates does see himself as an artist — as a literary genius of some sort. Certainly Coates hears himself spoken of that way, and his prose style — to my eye — reflects that self-image. Coates has made race his template, his brutally repetitive message. His artistic freedom has moved him to continually say that black people are not free. He's really not free to say anything else, is he? So he must say it about other artists, even as those other artists claim their freedom to say whatever they want too. Coates can only describe a prison. He can't put anyone else in it. He can only invite them to perceive the prison and themselves inside it.