25 ఏప్రిల్, 2021
Some snippets of comments — emailed in and added to various posts over the last few days.
These are snippets, not necessarily comprehensible without clicking through. I'm just showing you where to go to read comments!
3. "Welcome to the real world Joe, or whoever your ventriloquist is."
6. "Who would have thought that I could have gotten written up in New Scientist for it though?"
10. "Mike sends this apt bit from George Carlin...."
11. "I am struck by the complaint 'They allowed him to win awards' by one of the plaintiffs."
15. "But you can't say any of this in public anymore. If you do, you are a privileged jerk...."
16. "It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces.... And their civil wars."
"With no daily obligations and no children around, the challenge was 'to profit from the present moment without ever thinking about what will happen in one hour, in two hours'...."
"In partnership with laboratories in France and Switzerland, scientists monitored the 15 team members’ sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioural reactions via sensors. One sensor was a tiny thermometer inside a capsule that participants swallowed like a pill. It measured body temperature and transmitted data to a computer until it was expelled naturally. The team members followed their biological clocks to know when to wake up, go to sleep and eat. They counted their days not in hours but in sleep cycles. 'It’s really interesting to observe how this group synchronises themselves,' [project director Christian] Clot said earlier in a recording from inside the cave.... Two-thirds of the participants expressed a desire to remain underground a little longer to finish group projects started during their stay.... "
FROM THE EMAIL: ALP writes:
I found this very interesting - the fact that so many wanted to stay in the cave. Like you, I don't do "real travel" - the kind that involves airports and exotic places. Prefer ordinary days as well. My ideal vacation is one in which I have a stretch of days where I do not have to look at the clock. I am constantly worried about time passing when I'm on the job; such is life in Big Law. Just listening to traveling types describe their plans, designed with near military precision to fit it all in, is annoying. Of course the Cave People want to stay in the cave - we are so linked to the passing of time it is such a nice change to be divorced from it. I totally get it.
You're reminding me how much I hated working "billable hours." It's something I only did for a couple years after law school, but I've never forgotten how much I appreciated moving into a job where my time wasn't connected to the money. The money flowed in over there, and nothing about the way I did my work made me feel that time equals money. I know some people prefer to feel the connection between work and money. It can be quite motivating! But I love the disconnect.
AND: SGT Ted emails:
The experiment of the cave dwellers is interesting but seems like contrived science to me, by removing normal activity that is required for survival, like finding food, raising the next generation and living in a natural diurnal environment. Maybe as an application towards living in outer space it has some merit. But they could just as easily have done that with a sealed building instead of underground caves.
"'I didn’t come here to be insulted,' she murmured at one point, and Roth burst out laughing. 'But of course you did, he said. We all did.'"
"'That’s what I want carved on my gravestone. Philip Roth. He came here to be insulted.'"
From "Excerpt: Novelist Philip Roth’s Unsettled Marriage to Claire Bloom 'God, I’m fond of adultery,' Roth liked to say. 'Aren’t you?'" by Blake Bailey (Vulture).
That's from an excerpt from the Philip Roth biography we've been talking about, the one the publisher has been withholding because of allegations about the biographer. I've been reading about this book — have read several articles — and blogged it more than once. This morning, my readings brought me around to the subject of Claire Bloom, and I got to the point of blogging the quote above before I realized what I was reading was the writing of the accused man, the biographer — Blake Bailey. Strange!
Claire Bloom and Philip Roth sound like an awful pair. I don't know if I want to read about them. I considered buying Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving a Doll's House," but it's not available on Kindle. I'll keep her at a distance, as the star of one of my all-time favorite movies, "Limelight."
As for Philip Roth, it seems better to encounter him through his novels, and in fact, I'm reading one of his novels, "The Human Stain." When I blogged about the biography yesterday, I ran into a quote from that book, and it was fine enough to send me to Amazon to download the text and the audio.
Here, I highlighted one quote so far. It's all one sentence:
My point is that by moving here I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience—or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.
Sure, you can diagram it. I'll start: point | is....
ADDED: The OED defines "caterwaul" as "The cry of the cat at rutting time. Also transferred. Any similar sound." It could be modernized into "catwail," but it's an old word, first seen in English in this sentence: "If the cattes skyn be slyk and gay, forth she wil, er eny day be dawet, To schewe hir skyn, and goon a caterwrawet." That's Chaucer. Circa 1386.
FROM THE EMAIL: Nancy sends this, from a NYT article on Leaving a Dollhouse:
''He's tense; she's tense,'' Gore Vidal said from his home in Ravello, Italy. ''Each is neurotic. They were together 17 years; it couldn't have been all that bad.'' Like most of the couple's friends, Mr. Vidal is trying to distance himself from the memoir. ''It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces,'' he said. ''And their civil wars.''
Very funny and true!
"So, Walter Mondale shows up in heaven the other day, and I’m all eager to talk to him because I’m kind of a political junkie — see Richard III — but before I can say anything..."
"... he’s like, 'So?' And I’m like, 'So, what?' And then he goes, 'So, did you really write them?' And I’m like, 'Write what?' And he goes, 'Your plays.' And I’m like, 'What is this, some kind of Grant’s Tomb trick question? Of course I wrote my plays. Who did you think wrote them? Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford?' I say that as a joke because Edward de Vere is a moron — I once asked him to borrow a codpiece, and he gave me an actual piece of cod. But then Mondale is all, 'Yes, I actually heard Edward de Vere did write them.' Mondale then fills me in on this whole crazy theory that I didn’t write my own plays. You guys weren’t going to tell me this? How has nobody ever mentioned this to me? I look over, and Christopher Marlowe is giving Mondale that 'stop talking' throat slash gesture thingy, but it’s too late...."
From "SHAKESPEARE FINDS OUT ABOUT THE 'SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP QUESTION' FROM WALTER MONDALE" by Stephen Ruddy (McSweeney's).
(To comment, email me here.)
"For people whose only home is a vehicle, the knock is a visceral, even existential, threat. How do you avoid it?"
"You hide in plain sight. Make yourself invisible. Internalize the idea that you’re unwelcome. Stay hypervigilant to avoid trouble. Apart from telling you to clear out, the police can harass you with fines and tickets or get your home-on-wheels towed away to an impound lot.... In the film ['Nomadland'], Fern, played by Frances McDormand, is startled by a knock that interrupts a quiet meal. She looks up with a start and swears. A face hovers at the window, and a fist pounds once, twice, three times on the door. Then comes a gruff voice. 'No overnight parking! You can’t sleep here.'
Watching the character’s panic at the sudden sound of a fist hitting her van gave me anxious flashbacks. Then it made me sad. Then I felt angry, because that scene was just too accurate, and I wished it didn’t reflect the reality of how people treat one another.... Bob Wells, 65, has a popular video, 'Avoiding the Knock,' and has been lecturing on the topic for ages.... In a better world, people wouldn’t have to go to such lengths to stay out of sight.... Some towns have created areas where vehicle dwellers can sleep undisturbed."
From "What ‘Nomadland’ Exposes About Fear in America/People who live in homes-on-wheels should not have to be in constant fear of 'the knock'" by Jessica Bruder (NYT).
Bruder is the author of the book the movie is based on. And here's the Bob Wells video. (Wells is in the movie.)
By the way, Meade and I saw the movie. It was the first time we'd been out to the movies in over a year. I was disappointed in the experience. The image on the screen looked dim and dull. I would have preferred to watch it on TV (but not enough to subscribe to Hulu, which is what you need to do).
I would have walked out if I had been alone. Meade, however, loved the movie. He said it was the best movie he'd seen since he saw "How the West Was Won" when he was a kid — and that movie was in Cinerama (true 3-lens Cinerama). "Nomadland" was my most extreme example of seeing a movie with someone whose opinion of it was the opposite of mine. I said, "I hated it."
FROM THE EMAIL: Kate writes:
It's not a home. It's a car. In the effort to not shame the homeless, this author isn't helping. Be honest. It has no bathroom or kitchen. It's a car. You want to help? Get serious. Build public parking lots with bathrooms. I've lived very rough, and these kind of euphemisms are silly. Shelter, the basic human need, includes a designated place to pee and cook. Any motor vehicle that provides these services is a camper. (I haven't seen Nomadland yet. When it streams on a service I use, I'll gladly watch it.)
The vehicles shown in the movie have something like a kitchen and bathroom. That is, the toilet is a plastic bucket, and there's some device for heating food. Mostly the vehicles are old and quite ordinary vans.
As for the word "home," there's a very important line in the movie. Asked if she's "homeless," the main character says: "I'm not homeless. I'm just houseless." A similar examination of language occurs when she's asked, "Are you married?" She says, "I am, but my husband died." The issue is, what really matters? What is a home? What is a marriage? People with less may have more.
AND: Mary emails:
"Why had the polyamorous community rephrased the rush of falling in love as 'new relationship energy' (NRE for short)?"
"Why would anyone endeavor to rebrand love into something like a start-up, complete with its own energized, abbreviated lingo? And how could Juhana encourage me to pursue other relationships? Did I truly inspire so little emotion he wouldn’t care if I dated someone else? 'I am willing to endure the discomfort,' he would reply, 'because you are worth it.' But why couldn’t he be willing to endure the discomfort of depriving himself of someone else? Why, I wanted to know, was one pain fundamentally more acceptable than the other?"
From "My Boyfriend Has Two Girlfriends. Should I Be His Third?/My mind could rationalize polyamory, but my heart rebelled" by Silva Kuusniemi (NYT).
Spoiler alert: She rejects him.
FROM THE EMAIL: Barbara writes;
When I was in college back in the '60s in Florida, a couple I knew decided that it was fine for the guy to have a girlfriend on the side, what with free love and all. It was so fine that the three of them moved into a three bedroom house together. After about a month of this, the first girlfriend put the second girlfriend's clothes in an old bathtub in the back yard and set them on fire. Then she--the first gf--jumped in her car and drove to Las Vegas, never to be seen again. That's a polyamorous story.
That makes me think of this old David Crosby song (originally from the 60s):
He says that song was "not the reason they threw me out of The Byrds": "They threw me out of The Byrds because I was an asshole."
24 ఏప్రిల్, 2021
"Caitlyn Jenner has accepted Joy Behar’s apology for misgendering the California gubernatorial hopeful, telling the daytime host she’s 'not about cancel culture.'"
"'Don’t sweat it, @JoyVBehar,' Jenner, 71, tweeted early Saturday morning. 'I’m not about cancel culture. I know where your heart is. California has bigger issues than pronouns.'... '[Behar] didn’t say it pointedly. She kept making the mistake. She corrected herself, and then accidentally did it again. She was not being malicious by any means,' an insider told Page Six while pointing out that Behar is an 'advocate' who 'has been honored by [LGBTQ+ rights group] GLAAD.'"
Good move by Jenner. Someone who wants to win the support of the masses can't lean into self-based fussiness. It's fine to recommend compassion about pronouns for young people who are struggling with their identity, but when you want to present yourself as ready to take on everyone else's problems and govern, you need to make people feel that you are well grounded and fully supported from within. You need to make other people comfortable — not worried that in talking about you they could say something wrong and have their lives ruined.
It's really a matter of etiquette, and a politician should not make people feel that they have to live up to some new, difficult standard of etiquette. Behar can't even do it when she's on TV and trying to make up for a slip she's already made.
(To comment, email me here.)
"If you’ve been to Mexico, you know that noise levels are often through the roof. Speaking of roofs, in many towns, 'watchdogs' are kept there..."
"... and they bark all the time — at nothing or at everything. And then there are the parties, for birthdays, quinceneras, religious and other holidays. Often these events include rented speakers as big as refrigerators set up in the street in front of their (and your) house. You might find your street blocked by a bounce house or funeral memorial for a day... or three. Strolling musicians are common and can be lovely, but sometimes you might prefer a quiet conversation at dinner or listening to waves at the beach instead of a 10-piece, horn-heavy band. In Mazatlán, open-air taxis, called pulmonias, have gigantic sound systems with speakers that blast music as they make their way through the neighborhoods...."
From "64-year-old retiree who left the U.S. for Mexico: 7 downsides of living in a beach town for $1,200 per month" (CNBC).
I quoted the material on the noise downside. There are 6 more downsides at the link. But the author, Janet Blaser, says she's got no regrets about her decision.
(To comment, email me here.)
"[W]hen an alleged rapist writes a book about a brilliant but problematic novelist, and when that book is lauded and celebrated up until..."
"... the moment two women say the author assaulted them — when all that happens, you wonder how the 900-page tome reads in hindsight."
Writes Monica Hesse (in WaPo). She bought the book after the publisher withdrew it. You can still download the Kindle version. [ADDED: You can even buy the hardcover book at that link. Amazon has its stock to ship. But the publisher, Norton, isn't shipping any more books, and it's not doing publicity.]
That takes some of the heat out of the argument that the book has been censored. I stand by my opinion — expressed here — that the book should be sold no matter what the author, Blake Bailey, may have done. The book is not doing any sort of active harm — where we might have a real debate about censorship. It's just the argument that the author is a bad person, and these are only allegations. I would support publishing the book even if Bailey had shot a man on 5th Avenue in broad daylight. Roth is an overwhelmingly important writer, and this was the biographer he authorized, which caused many people to give interviews to Bailey. It's unfair to the Roth to deprive him of the story of himself that he chose Bailey to tell, and it's unfair to keep that story from us.
But we can get the Kindle version. And maybe we're more interested in it now. Monica Hesse got interested — interested in reading the book with "hindsight." I guess that means that all the time she's reading about Roth, she's thinking about how she's hearing the story of this "problematic" man as analyzed by another problematic man. Let's see what Hesse makes out of her assigned task of perceiving the problematic through an extra layer of problematizing:
You find yourself scrolling to a random page and reading a description of Roth’s first marriage: “Maggie’s sinuses were, of course, the least of their problems. Even at the best of times she couldn’t resist interrupting his work on the thinnest of pretexts (‘Could you go out and get half a pound of Parmesan cheese?’).” One could write a whole essay unpacking the premises propping up this sentence. Why is it unreasonable for Philip Roth to be asked to purchase an ingredient for the dinner he is presumably going to eat? Who purchased the rest of the groceries? One assumes it was Maggie. Was her day not “interrupted” when she shopped for and prepared the meal? What is the difference between a “thin pretext” and a valid request, other than whether the asker is Philip Roth or his shrewish, sinus-clogged wife?
Ha ha ha. That is rich. That's some really good feminist writing. Bailey is damned by his "thinnest of pretexts." He assumes Maggie just wanted to interrupt Roth, that there couldn't possibly be a legitimate reason for the person cooking dinner to ask the other person in the house to go out and buy a missing ingredient. Bailey seems to think that a person in a house with a Genius at Work must know not even to ask for help with mundane household matters.
Here — if you're going to Amazon to download the Kindle of the Roth bio (or anything else) — why not buy this sign to tack onto your study door and see how it works out with your stuffed-up spouse:
"This is a surreal depiction in which racism is concentrated everywhere. Everyone manifests racism, but then also a vulnerable human side."
"The characters' stories were nicely, complexly interwoven. I liked it — even when it skewed melodramatic. I liked that you were kept on your toes about which characters to love or hate, to respect or revile."
That's something I blogged in February 2006, after watching the movie "Crash," which had just been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
The movie went on to win that Oscar, a fact I'm contemplating this morning because I'm reading "The Oscars always get it wrong. Here are the real best pictures of the past 45 years" (Washington Post). Here's the entry for that year:
Nominees: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich
Best Picture winner: Crash
The actual best picture: Brokeback Mountain
Your tolerance for “Crash” may vary, but let’s face it: It won because it employed a dozen well-liked B-listers, and it was filmed in the neighborhoods where all the academy voters live. A sensitive and groundbreaking film whose catchphrase (“I wish I knew how to quit you”) still haunts, “Brokeback” was robbed.
That's not new writing. It's something WaPo published in 2016 and is now republishing along with new material to cover more recent movies. This republication had to be updated for full disclosure: "We published this fine quarrel in 2016, but they just keep on handing out Oscars to the wrong movies, so we have updated it for your further education."
The word "education" — though facetious — takes the position that opinion is stable and what they said 5 years ago about "Crash" is the same thing they'd say today.
23 ఏప్రిల్, 2021
"The sort of readers inclined to buy a 900-page book about [Philip] Roth, of all people, are not readers who are afraid to encounter questions about horrible male behavior. "
"[I]f you can make it through Roth’s novels eager to know more about the man who wrote them and drew so deeply on his own life to do so, surely, you’re prepared to encounter ugliness on the page and off it.... In halting printing and shipping of the Roth book, Norton may want to show that the company is willing to take a financial hit in order to demonstrate its values. But nobody, other than maybe Norton, gets anything out of such a decision. It would be far more productive for the company to publish the book, let the public decide its merits and commit to donating any profits — and maybe even a figure that matches Bailey’s advance — to charity instead. Why didn’t Norton trust the reading public to decide on the merits of the Bailey book for itself?"
From "Why stopping the distribution of the Philip Roth biography was a bad idea" by Alyssa Rosenberg (WaPo). The publisher, Norton, withdrew the book because of allegations that the author, Blake Bailey, "groomed" his middle school students and, after they became adults, pursued them for sex and that he raped a woman. Bailey denies all that.
Roth authorized this biography, which gave Bailey access to many people and to Roth's papers. It's an important book and it shouldn't be suppressed. I think the book should be released even if we saw Bailey murder somebody. The book doesn't further any harm to anyone. If Bailey committed crimes, he should be answerable in a criminal proceeding. If the actions are torts, he could be sued, and if he's made money, it will increase his ability to pay damages.
As Rosenberg speculates, it seems that Norton is attempting to structure the facts to cut off its own responsibility, but it's hard to see how there's liability for a publisher publishing a book written by a criminal/tortfeasor.
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