Please please please love our airport.

Is Singapore trying too hard?

"There is a whole literary subgenre now that trades in this sort of deferred pleasure – books with subtitles like 'My year of reading' or 'Unpacking my library' or..."

"... 'One hundred books I read in the bathtub during my sabbatical in the south of France.' When you read about someone working their way through their intended-to-impress reading list, it helps you to imagine that you too are capable of accomplishing such a feat. Often, these books involve either a man reading the Greek and Roman classics or a woman tackling the thick Victorian novels – canons both familiar and fusty enough to keep me from losing my mind with envy. Not so in the case of Sharp. Dear God, what a sexy reading list Michelle Dean has put together. Never have I seen so clearly that my dream version of myself – the person I always assumed I would grow up to be – is a drily witty, slightly abrasive woman in a black turtleneck whose end table is stacked high with yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt."

From "Smart for our own good" by Kristen Roupenian. You remember Kristen Roupenian, she of "Cat Person."* The book under review is "Sharp: The women who made an art of having an opinion."

Roupenian's "dream version" of herself — what she pictured as she was growing up — had a particular mode of conversation ("drily witty, slightly abrasive"), a specified item of clothing ("a black turtleneck"), and a visualizable pile of books ("yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt").

So what was your dream version of yourself? Even if you weren't, in your real youth, thinking in terms of a particular mode of conversation, a specified item or items of clothing and a visualizable pile of books, please play my little game. It's like Clue — Colonel Mustard in The Conservatory with the lead pipe.

Also, chez Meadhouse, we just had a long conversation about this:

Perhaps the finest moment in Sharp... is Dorothy Parker’s parodic takedown of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Rosalind rested her nineteen year-old elbows on her nineteen-year-old knees. All that you could see of her, above the polished sides of the nineteen-year-old bathtub, was her bobbed, curly hair and her disturbing gray eyes. A cigarette drooped lazily from the spoiled curves of her nineteen-year-old mouth.

Yes, Parker anticipated the recent, scathing Twitter thread “Describe yourself like a male author would” by almost a hundred years.

That's a great Twitter game. Maybe you won't play my "Dream Version" game because "Describe yourself like a male author would"** is too deliciously tempting. But my game is easier. Can't go wrong. How well do you think Dorothy Parker did at her parody? I thought the repetition of "nineteen year-old" was hilarious, but the really puzzling part is the point of view: "All that you could see of her" has a "you" standing somewhere, eyeing and judging the young woman, and "your" view was obscured by the side of the bathtub so that you could only see as far down her face as her eyes, and then in the next sentence, "you" could see her mouth. Is that Dorothy's lapse or is she skewering a foible of F. Scott's?

And here's Nora Ephron's parody of Ayn Rand:

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face painted, his hair the colour of a bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean planes, Howard Roark laughed.

Hey: Describe yourself like a female author would. Another game.

Roupenian knocks "Sharp" as "essentially, of a series of positive reviews of well-respected writers":

[I]f everyone in your audience already agrees with what you’re saying in your essay, then writing it is a waste of time. In the case of Sharp, readers would have been pleasurably surprised to encounter the name of a writer whose inclusion felt even a little bit risky, even disagreeable: the aforementioned Ayn Rand, say, or Camille Paglia, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Roupenian uses words like "well-respected," "risky," and "agrees"/"disagreeable" to stand in for any mention of politics or ideology. Was that active sanitation or really the way Roupenian thinks (that is, like an artist***? The latter, I hope.

In this sense, Sharp is a book that hasn’t learnt the lesson it tries to impart. It is disconcerting to read a book that focuses on so many women who pushed intellectual boundaries, yet which stays so squarely within the confines of conventional wisdom when it comes to the writers it chooses to assess.

____________________

* Looking for a link about "Cat Person," I found, from last May, "Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person, is dating a woman." We got so excited about the story of a woman going through with having sex with a man when she didn't really want it. Roupenian said it was "strange to suddenly be the spokesperson for terrible straight sex."

** For a description of the origin of this meme, read "‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages/The challenge is a fierce indictment of what happens when you try to write a character you don’t respect or understand."

A male author is insisting that he is living proof that it's possible for a male author to write an authentic female protagonist.

Here's a quote from his first page. pic.twitter.com/f6d5bN2EHq

— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) March 30, 2018

*** I always quote Oscar Wilde for this proposition: "Views are held by those who are not artists." It gives loft to my own aversion to politics.

Sacha Baron Cohen show ended its season without ever using his encounter with Sarah Palin.

The Daily Beast reports:

Despite Showtime’s attempts to tamp down expectations, it seemed inevitable that Baron Cohen would save Palin’s sit-down interview with Dr. Billy Wayne Ruddick, PhD for the seventh and final episode this Sunday. But it was nowhere to be found, perhaps for legal reasons or simply because the comedian just didn’t think it was good enough.

Instead the finale had O.J. Simpson. See if you think was worth doing:

Watch O.J. Simpson high-five @SachaBaronCohen after he makes a joke about murdering his girlfriend on the #WhoIsAmerica finale https://t.co/DfnzmTBKq4 pic.twitter.com/cEoZM2k5C5

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) August 27, 2018

IN THE COMMENTS: Darrell gives Cohen the joke he deserves: "It would have been funny if OJ stabbed HIM seventeen times."

"Congressional Republicans are getting ready for hell. Axios has obtained a spreadsheet that's circulated through Republican circles on and off Capitol Hill..."

"... including at least one leadership office — that meticulously previews the investigations Democrats will likely launch if they flip the House."

It sounds worse as a generality than if you read the itemization:

• President Trump’s tax returns
• Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution's emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization
• Trump's dealings with Russia, including the president's preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
• The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels
• James Comey's firing
• Trump's firing of U.S. attorneys
• Trump's proposed transgender ban for the military
• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's business dealings
• White House staff's personal email use
• Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks
• Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago
• Jared Kushner's ethics law compliance
• Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors
• The travel ban
• Family separation policy
• Hurricane response in Puerto Rico
• Election security and hacking attempts
• White House security clearances

"But [Neil] Simon, who died Sunday at 91, didn’t know he was standing directly over a fault in American culture, one that even as he hit his stride started gapping and would eventually pull him down."

"Until then, he reliably provided the pleasure of exaggerated self-recognition, reflecting life but with palpable structure and better punch lines. In the theater, the shared assumptions between the playwright and his very homogeneous late-century audience — largely white and urban, often Jewish or at least Jewish-adjacent — had the redoubling effect necessary to raucous comedy.... In the late ’60s and early ’70s, as independent films were diversifying their outlook and shaking off the formulas of Hollywood storytelling, Broadway boulevard comedies like 'Last of the Red Hot Lovers' and 'California Suite' — tales of the befuddled nouveau riche in a new world — began to look mass-produced and middlebrow.... Sometimes, in the way that can happen when writers momentarily grab the tail of the zeitgeist, the laughs were even prescient.... [The plays] may be unjust to the harridans, simps and playthings he stocks them with but they tell a real story of male collapse that was relevant to the culture at the time they were first produced, and might still hold up better than the later, more 'serious' works. I think I understood that back in high school when, putting on my father’s clothes [to play a minor role in 'The Odd Couple'], I saw how poorly they fit. These kinds of men were already under siege, as everyone in 'The Odd Couple' sensed without saying so. Which somehow made the laughs even bigger."

From "Neil Simon Drew Big Laughs, Then Came a Cultural Shift" by Jesse Green (NYT).

How can the NYT publish headlines as miswritten as this?

I clipped this just now from the front page of the the NYT website:



What is the talking about? Sex with Dad in the Taurus?

Get a copy editor or give us a trigger warning.

Here's the article, "Talking Sex With Dad (in the Ford Taurus)/You know that scene in 'Lady Bird' when Saoirse Ronan throws herself out of a moving vehicle to avoid talking to her mother for another second? That was me, at 14, in the car with my father." Here's the nub of it:

Today I’m one of those queers who can find a narrative about sexuality in anything. But my father’s warning that sex was “not as important as the sitcoms would have us believe” has often reminded me that sex in America is as much marketing as it is a means of pleasure or self-expression.

I begrudgingly thank my father for these excruciating exchanges we shared in the 1990s. Today, when some men seem to confuse physical abuse with consensual role play, when teenagers are consuming pornography at a younger age, and when abstinence-only sex education is getting a renewed push, I look back and realize what a blessing it was to have a father who made me want to crawl out of my own skin every now and then. (Also, I spent pretty much my entire 20s embarrassing him back.)

Picnic Point, this morning in the mist.

About 15 minutes later, with a little more sun and from a somewhat more distant vantage point, it crispened up to this.



Anyway, this is a "café" post, so talk about anything you want. Don't limit yourself to the topic of the clarity of the view of Picnic Point from various locations on the Lake Mendota trail.

"It matters that the alleged perpetrator is a woman and the alleged victim is a man. It matters, too, that he is young and handsome..."

"... and she is older: her apparently desperate neediness is part of what makes the case documents such cringeworthy reading. It matters that he identifies as gay and she as a lesbian, because it makes us question how important the sexual really is in sexual harassment. It matters that the investigation was conducted by a private university under conditions of confidentiality, and that the accuser is now suing that university... It also matters a great deal that the latest fallen star is an academic and a feminist.... Perhaps justice can be found neither in closed investigations nor in open court but in a different sort of public forum. If the ultimate objective of #MeToo is a fundamental change in power relationships—if it is indeed a revolution and not merely a series of attempts at retribution—then it may call for confrontations and discussions in the mode of truth-and-reconciliation commissions that societies undergoing change have organized. Perhaps victims should face their abusers and tell their stories not only to and through the media but to one another."

From "An N.Y.U. Sexual-Harassment Case Has Spurred a Necessary Conversation About #MeToo" by Masha Gessen (in The New Yorker), about the NYT literary scholar and philosopher Avital Ronell.

I was particularly interested in this quote about Ronell's method of teaching, which "circulated on Facebook." The author wrote anonymously, reportedly out of fear of retaliation:

We don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’ and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration, body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all about manipulation and psychic violence. . . . AR pulls students and young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to talk to her at night, etc. . . . All I am saying is: the AR-case is not about a single case of sexual harassment, it’s about systematic manipulation, bullying, intimidation, pitting students against each other, creating rivalry between them. . . . I agree the concept of “Avital Ronell” is a great one: I too would love to be friends with a smart, hilarious, queer, Jewish, feminist, anarchist theorist!

"Could you taste the homophobia in every bite?"

That's the top-rated comment at "I tried one of Chick-fil-A’s new meal kits, and I have good news and bad news" (Washington Post).

The food was deemed "delicious" and "surprisingly good." The only "bad news" in the article had to do with the amount of sodium and fat, as recorded on the label and as detected by the author's body, which felt "puffy" and required "chugging water" all afternoon. Nothing in the article itself about Chick-fil-A's gay problem.

But the comments... they go on and on: "We don't serve our kids hate chicken." "This is where my subscription dollars are going? To support a horribly anti-gay company for the sake of a review of a meal kit? I'm appalled." "Doesn't sound like a value meal at that price. And if you have to chug a liter of water afterwards just to get the salt flushed out of your system, not very smart eating. And then there's the phony Jesus thing. These people's religion is mostly from the belly button on down."

By the way — I looked it up — drinking a lot of water doesn't work to "flush out" the excess salt you may have eaten.

Impression, Mendota.

A view of Picnic Point from the boathouse, this morning just after sunrise. It was not a foggy day, but the mist rising from the lake obscured the line between water and sky.

"An illegal fishing boat has run aground and been found abandoned in crocodile-infested waters in northern Queensland, Australia."

"Authorities have found 11 people and think more are hiding in mangroves near Daintree, north of Cairns... About 40 people are thought to have been on board, reports say.... 'We don't know whether these are illegal refugees or we don't know if these are fishermen who were maybe fishing illegally and have ended up in Australian waters and the boat's gone bad and they've got trapped,' [said Queensland state MP Michael Healy]... If the boat was carrying asylum seekers, it would be the first successful landing by such a vessel in Australia for years.... Even if found to be genuine refugees, they are already blocked from being resettled in Australia. They can either return home, be resettled on Manus or Nauru, or go to a third country...."

BBC reports.

On the subject of Nauru, here's a report in The Guardian from a couple days ago, "'Begging to die': succession of critically ill children moved off Nauru/Girl refusing food and water the latest out of dozens of children referred for transfer by medical staff."

A girl suffering “resignation syndrome” and who is refusing all food and water has been ordered off Nauru by an Australian court, as a succession of critically ill children are brought from the island.

At least three children have left the island since Thursday, and reports from island sources say at least three more children, as young as 12, are “on FFR” – food and fluid refusal....

“Before she got sick, she was the best-performing student,” a source familiar with the girl and her condition told the Guardian. “She had a dream to be a doctor in Australia and to help others. Now, she is on food-and-fluid refusal and begging to die as death is better than Nauru.”

The girl told her Australian advocate: “I can’t live in this island anymore. I hate everything and everyone around me. I hate to go outside. We left our country to have a good and better life, but we faced the worst life ever, the life which forced us to end it.”

"Cafes, clubs and bars are proliferating. There are shopping malls with cinemas showing the latest releases, including a glitzy glass enormity..."

"... with a Dubai-style helicopter pad on the roof. There are restaurants on the river and plays at the theater and comedy nights at the coffeehouses. On Fridays, poets recite their works and artists show off their paintings in the Ottoman-era gardens surrounding Mutanabbi Street, named for a 10th-century Iraqi poet who lived when Baghdad was at the epicenter of the civilized world.... [T]here’s a widespread consensus that at no time in the past 40 years, since Saddam Hussein acquired absolute power and led Iraq into a series of ruinous wars, has Baghdad been as free and as fun as it is now. 'Every Iraqi has reached the conclusion that it is important to have as much fun as you can before you die,' said Alaa Kahtan, a theater director who had come to Coffee and Books, one of Baghdad’s hip new cafes that attracts a mostly literary crowd."

From "Baghdad gets its groove back/Violence is receding and Iraq’s capital is partying again" (WaPo). I love the photographs.

"Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is required by law to fill vacancies in the state's U.S. Senate delegation...."

"The governor has only said he will not appoint himself. But does Ducey want a temporary caretaker to hold the office only until the 2020 election? Or someone he hopes would seek re-election?..."

AZ Central looks at the 8 names that "have been floated," beginning with Cindy McCain and including former Senator Jon Kyl, both of whom fall in the "temporary caretaker" category. 2020 is a long time for a temporary caretaker to serve, I would think.

"More than 30 people have been honored by lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, a gesture reserved for the country’s 'most eminent citizens,' since the practice began in 1852..."

"... after the death of Henry Clay, the former House speaker and senator from Kentucky. Mr. McCain would be the 13th former senator to be granted the honor, according to the Architect of the Capitol."

From "John McCain to Lie in State at Capitols in Washington and Arizona" (NYT).

Here's the list of 30 that begins with Henry Clay.

The death of John McCain changes the national discourse, the national mood, just as we are enduring intense political passions (which I have called a "national nervous breakdown"). I hope the change is for the better, but so many people, on both sides, are deeply committed to maintaining an atmosphere of hysteria, despair, outrage, and anxiety.

Do you remember how the death of Ronald Reagan affected the course of politics in 2004? From the eulogy (delivered in an election year by the candidate for reelection):

See, our 40th President wore his title lightly, and it fit like a white Stetson. In the end, through his belief in our country and his love for our country, he became an enduring symbol of our country. We think of his steady stride, that tilt of the head and snap of the salute, the big-screen smile, and the glint in his Irish eyes when a story came to mind.

We think of a man advancing in years with the sweetness and sincerity of a Scout saying the Pledge. We think of that grave expression that sometimes came over his face, the seriousness of a man angered by injustice and frightened by nothing. We know, as he always said, that America's best days are ahead of us, but with Ronald Reagan's passing, some very fine days are behind us, and that is worth our tears....

A white Stetson hat... these days we have red MAGA hats.

Should Pope Francis resign?

I'm reading "Former Vatican official claims Pope Francis knew of abusive priest and calls for his resignation" (CBS News):

A former Vatican ambassador to Washington said Sunday that he told Pope Francis in 2013 about allegations of sexual abuse against [Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington D.C.] – and that Francis took no action. Now, the former official, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, is calling for Francis to step down....

Vigano writes that he told Francis about the allegations: "Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance."

Vigano writes the pope did not respond to the statement, and McCarrick continued in his role as a public figure for the church.

From Vigano's letter:

"Pope Francis has repeatedly asked for total transparency in the Church... He must honestly state when he first learned about the crimes committed by McCarrick, who abused his authority with seminarians and priests. In any case, the Pope learned about it from me on June 23, 2013 and continued to cover him....

"To restore the beauty of holiness to the face of the Bride of Christ — so tremendously disfigured by so many abominable crimes, if we truly want to free the Church from the fetid swamp into which she has fallen, we must have the courage to tear down the culture of secrecy and publicly confess the truths that we have kept hidden."

To restore the beauty of holiness to the face of the Bride of Christ...

Let me talk for a moment about the metaphor. The Church is visualized as a woman, a woman worthy of marrying Jesus Christ, but she's fallen into a swamp — a "fetid swamp" — and her face is now insufficiently beautiful. The priestly abuses are all, necessarily, the evils of men. But the identity of a woman is assumed for the purposes of, it seems, aspiring to beauty, holiness, cleanliness.

It's an old metaphor:

The ekklēsia is never explicitly called "the bride of Christ" in the New Testament. That is approached in Ephesians 5:22-33. A major analogy is that of the body. Just as husband and wife are to be "one flesh",[Eph. 5:31] this analogy for the writer describes the relationship of Christ and ekklēsia.[Eph. 5:32] Husbands were exhorted to love their wives "just as Christ loved the ekklēsia and gave himself for it.[Eph. 5:25]...

In writing to the Church of Corinth in 2 Corinthians 11... Paul referred to the Church in Corinth as being espoused to Christ. "For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ...".

"America’s criminal justice system routinely coerces defendants to cooperate and incentivizes them to lie to please prosecutors."

"But most victims aren’t presidential confidants accused of bank fraud. The vast majority of people who confront the choice between cooperation and a longer sentence are poor and uneducated... Pleading guilty and implicating a co-defendant can be the only practical choice when your lawyer lacks the time and resources to mount an effective defense.... Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, isn’t atypical just because he’s privileged. He’s also unusual because he knows Trump well. Most defendants face cooperators who are not chummy fraternity brothers or corporate boardroom buddies, but jailhouse snitches notorious for fabricating overheard 'confessions.' The American Civil Liberties Union recently sued the district attorney and sheriff in Orange County, Calif., saying they ran a network of professional jailhouse snitches, meticulously tracked by law enforcement but concealed from defense attorneys. Criminal defendants routinely find themselves accused by alleged co-conspirators they don’t even recognize..... Only a civic culture of healthy skepticism of prosecutors’ claims — a genuine appreciation for the concept of reasonable doubt — can change that. But we won’t learn that skepticism from Trump, who routinely proclaims that the law protects criminals too much and that police should stop being gentle with them. His concern reaches only as far as his own skin and his own confederates...."

From "Witnesses ‘flipping’ does corrupt justice. But not because they’re ‘rats'" by (WaPo) by Ken White, a criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor. Here's his podcast, “All the President’s Lawyers” (which I have not yet listened to).