At the Lotus Café...

... unfold.

"He continued to write novels even after declaring the form a 19th-century relic, no longer able to capture the complexities of the contemporary world...."

"Mr. Naipaul’s writing about Africa drew criticism from many who were unsettled by his portraits of Africans.... He was also criticized for his unflattering portrayals of women.... He visited Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia in the late 1970s, when they were witnessing a rise in political power and Islamic fundamentalism. His first travelogue, 'Among the Believers,' was published in 1981. A sequel, 'Beyond Belief,' followed in 1998. He started his inquiry, he later explained, by asking simple questions: To what extent had 'people who lock themselves away in belief shut themselves away from the active, busy world?' 'To what extent without knowing it' were they 'parasitic on that world'? And why did they have 'no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them?' The books are grounded in Mr. Naipaul’s belief that Islamic societies lead to tyranny, which he essentially attributed to a flaw in Islam, that it 'offered no political or practical solution.' 'It offered only the faith,' he wrote. These books were harshly criticized...."

From "V.S. Naipaul, Who Explored Colonialism Through Unsparing Books, Dies at 85" (NYT).

"To put it bluntly, the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair."

Said the official Chinese newspaper People’s Daily, quoted in "Burying ‘One Child’ Limits, China Pushes Women to Have More Babies" (NYT).

It is a startling reversal for the party, which only a short time ago imposed punishing fines on most couples who had more than one child and compelled hundreds of millions of Chinese women to have abortions or undergo sterilization operations.

The new campaign has raised fear that China may go from one invasive extreme to another in getting women to have more children. Some provinces are already tightening access to abortion or making it more difficult to get divorced....

“Women cannot decide what happens to their own ovaries,” one user complained on Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, after Jiangxi detailed the abortion guidelines in July.

"Eleanor Roosevelt lived across the hall in the 1940s when we first moved in."

"My mom, Jane Bishir, was a Midwestern girl who’d come to New York to make it as a writer and became the closest of friends with Vivian Vance long before she was on 'I Love Lucy.' She was my godmother. My godfather was the best babysitter on God’s green earth, Garth Williams, the illustrator for all these wonderful books. He would be doodling, and there was one evening where he showed me three or four spiders: 'Which spider do you like?' He and E.B. White were going around the bend to avoid the Disneyfication of 'Charlotte’s Web,' and he wanted to try it out on a kid. My dad was a classical harmonica player and good friends with Burl Ives, who asked him if we could let this songwriter from Oklahoma stay at our house for a while. So I’m in bed, and in the next room I hear Woody Guthrie singing and playing, and in my total infancy I thought, 'He’s not as good as Dad.'..."

Said John Sebastian, quoted in "How ‘Summer in the City’ Became the Soundtrack for Every City Summer/The dog days of 1966 were filled with riots, protests and a nation on edge. Not to mention a brutal heat wave. But in Greenwich Village, something new was happening" (NYT).

Harvard statistician developed an algorithm to determine the likelihood that a song was written by John Lennon or Paul McCartney...

... and pretty much resolves the longstanding controversy over who wrote the music to "In My Life." There's no controversy about the lyrics — only about the music. This Science Friday podcast goes through some of the characteristics of Lennon music and McCartney music, and it's mainly that John was more conventional and ordinary and Paul was creative (for example, jumping whole octaves in songs like "Love Me Do" and "Eleanor Rigby"). But the statistician, Mark Glickman, is not given enough time to tell us about the detail of the music in "In My Life," so I don't know why his algorithm gave that song to John (with a 98.2% likelihood). Isn't there a big jump from one note to the next in the final "in MY-EYE-EYE-EYE life"?

Yeah, that's called viewpoint neutrality.

"Facebook censors artist's work criticising male-dominated society because it features naked breasts" (The Art Newspaper)(photograph with naked breasts at the link).

The Icelandic artist Borghildur Indridadóttir is blaming Facebook for having taken over her account after she had posted pictures featuring bare female breasts. "Facebook told me the pictures were against their community standards and did not only take those away from my timeline, but also deleted my friends and likes," she says.

The pictures were part of her work Demoncrazy, which deals with how older men continue to dominate certain public and social spaces in Iceland. As part of the Reykjavik arts festival in June, Indridadóttir showed photographs of topless young women standing in front of painted portraits of older men...

More Demoncrazy — watch out for breasts — here.

Facebook should have a viewpoint neutral standard, not a ban with an exception for the right political ideas. And if posing your naked model in front of a picture of an old man was enough to get special treatment, then anyone could set up their photoshoot like that.

Omarosa doesn't know what's in her own book... or she does and she's pretending not to.

I do not want to spend much time on Omarosa's book. I'm just going to link to this NPR piece, "Omarosa Tells NPR She Heard Trump 'N-Word Tape,' Contradicting Her Own Tell-All Book" and quote this:

In her interview with NPR's Rachel Martin, Manigault Newman claims to have heard the tape and heard Trump using that slur on the tape.

But that's not what it says in her tell-all book, Unhinged, due out on Tuesday.

When asked by Martin about the discrepancy during the interview, Manigault Newman insisted Martin must not have read the book (she had) and pointed to a section at the very end of it. But in that section, Manigault Newman doesn't actually describe hearing the tape. She writes of calling one of her "sources" who had a lead on the "N-word tape."

"Unhinged" is such a common insult these days, but I heard some comedian say something like: "They said I was 'unhinged,' but I don't even have hinges." I'm just going to guess it was Kathy Griffin, because I can't find the joke on the internet and I recently sat through her 3-hour show. I liked that joke, and I'm tired of the insult "unhinged" (and all the other insults that rest on the premise of mental illness, a condition that warrants empathy (including my own longstanding tag "Trump derangement syndrome")).

I can also see that when the comedian Michelle Wolf was called "unhinged," she reacted with the joke, "Now is not the time to be hinged," but I like "I don't even have hinges" much better, because it takes you immediately to the concrete image — a person with hinges. This is what I picture:



That man — his name is Jeff Warner — is really good at operating that toy and I like his voice too. It reminds me of Jim Kweskin. The toy is called a "limberjack" or a "jig doll." I was a little worried that the term "jig doll" in a post involving Omarosa might strike some people as racist, especially since the song Warner is singing is "Buffalo Gals." But a "jig" is a dance, and these dolls — also called "limberjacks" — have been around for hundreds of years and don't seem connected to the racial slur that begins with those 3 letters and that can be shortened to those 3 letters. But here are some Pinterest images of jig dolls, and you'll see that some of them depict black people in a way that is easily interpreted as racist (like this one).

As for "Buffalo Gals"... are they supposed to be black women? I've never thought about this before. From Wikipedia:

"Buffalo Gals" is a traditional American song, written and published as "Lubly Fan" in 1844 by the blackface minstrel John Hodges, who performed as "Cool White." The song was widely popular throughout the United States. Because of its popularity, minstrels altered the lyrics to suit the local audience, so it might be performed as "New York Gals" in New York City or "Boston Gals" in Boston or "Alabama Girls" in Alabama (as in the version recorded by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins on a field recording trip in 1959). The best-known version is named after Buffalo, New York.

Hmm. So "Buffalo" is not a way to refer to black people. It's just Buffalo, New York. But it is an old blackface minstrel song! What a strange set of facts to encounter as I put some extra effort into steering away from anything arguably racist. And I don't want to be unfair to Jeff Warner, who just seems delightful to me. Here's the most famous version of the song:



"Buffalo Gals" is also what the slave character Jim is singing when we first encounter him in Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer":

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged. Jim came skipping out at the gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. Bringing water from the town pump had always been hateful work in Tom's eyes, before, but now it did not strike him so. He remembered that there was company at the pump. White, mulatto, and negro boys and girls were always there waiting their turns, resting, trading playthings, quarrelling, fighting, skylarking. And he remembered that although the pump was only a hundred and fifty yards off, Jim never got back with a bucket of water under an hour--and even then somebody generally had to go after him. Tom said:

"Say, Jim, I'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash some."

Jim shook his head and said: "Can't, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an' git dis water an' not stop foolin' roun' wid anybody. She say she spec' Mars Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an' so she tole me go 'long an' 'tend to my own business--she 'lowed SHE'D 'tend to de whitewashin'."

“Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That's the way she always talks. Gimme the bucket--I won't be gone only a a minute. SHE won't ever know."

“Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would."

I didn't have to censor the "N-word" in that passage. It does appear elsewhere in "Tom Sawyer," but not (as in "Huckleberry Finn") as part of Jim's name. But Mark Twain's use of the African American Vernacular English is on vivid display. The white author completely failed to follow the Roxane Gay directive to "know your lane" and stay in it.

And now, if you need a book to read, you can't be thinking of reading "Unhinged." That would be nuts. Don't you feel like reading "Tom Sawyer"? "Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden." That's great stuff. And I love running into words that it seems we've been forgetting to use, like "skylarking."

"Skylark" is also a song. Here, this is nice:



I think the "skylark" there is the bird. Not the prankish horseplay. And not the Buick...



Bonus: The French word for the "skylark" (the bird) is "alouette" — as in...



Je te plumerai la tête = I'll pluck the feathers out of your head.

And that's where I'm going with all this: I'll pluck all thoughts of Omarosa out of your head.

"Anders Carlson-Wee engaged in nothing we moderns need slur as 'blackface.'"

"To wit, while we must evaluate each case on its own basis, to the extent that any white person’s depiction of Black English of whatever quality or diligence elicits rolling eyes at best and social media witch hunts at worst, we have lost step not only with linguistic science, but also with what most would consider norms of how human groups co-occupy social spaces and learn from one another."

Writes John McWhorter in "There’s Nothing Wrong With Black English/Accepting it as an alternative form of the language, and not a degraded one, requires being open to artists employing it in their work, even if they didn't grow up speaking it" (The Atlantic).

Anders Carlson-Wee is the white poet whose poem The Nation obsequiously apologized for publishing. We talked about it here.

McWhorter pushes back the writer/professor/editor/commentator Roxane Gay (who, like McWhorter, is African American):

[Roxane Gay] directs white writers to “know your lane,” and not depict the dialect.... Of course, if a Carlson-Wee depicted Black English gracelessly in terms of the grammar, it’d be time to call foul. But he got it right....

Gay... wrote on Twitter: “The reality is that when most white writers use [African American Vernacular English] they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy.” Indeed. But it isn’t clear to me that Carlson-Wee is guilty of either of these flubs....

This may be some solace to Carlson-Wee, but — for all McWhorter's linguistic expertise — Gay's message is the one that will stick. What white writer would read all this and decide anything other than just to stay in your lane as Gay instructed? You might get McWhorter's elevated, educated approval, but you'll only get that — is that enough?! — if you avoid "flubs" — what are all the possible flubs?! — and even then, I sense there's something more:

[W]hen a Carlson-Wee briefly explores the pain of a black homeless person and shows her using precisely the speech variety she actually would, or an Oscar Hammerstein knows that working-class black people in a parachute factory [in Carmen Jones] would not talk like the characters in his previous hits Oklahoma! or Carousel, it’s time for educated America to get past the cringe of seeing Black English depicted on the page by someone who didn’t grow up speaking it.

It seems the writer will also have to pass an empathy test and successfully inspire the belief that he's exploring the pain or showering knowledge of working class black people. But good literature doesn't make it that clear. How do we know this writer is not making fun of black people or criticizing them in some way? Even when he's not, you may think he is. I read Carlson-Wee's poem and I don't think it unambiguously or simply "explores the pain." As I wrote a few days ago:

The voice is that of a black person, talking to other black people, explaining how to to collect money from the white people who pass by... The key insight is that you get money by causing white people to think about who they are and to be motivated to give you money because they were made to think that the person who gives you money is the person they want to be. So you succeed if you essentially cease to be and transform yourself into the image of whatever it is that jogs them into feeling they need to be the person who helps you. That key insight follows a how-to list of ways to be that inauthentic person who gets white people to give you money.

Is the main problem that the white poet had the nerve to appropriate a black voice or is it that he portrayed black people as pathetic and conniving? Or is it that he portrayed white people helping black people as a matter of white narcissism?

That is, I suspect that the hostility to Carlson-Wee came not because he tried to embody a suffering black person, but because he had that black person criticize the kind of good white person The Nation's readers like to think they are. Didn't pass the political test. And I see McWhorter as carrying forward a political test, though he paid almost no attention to it.

I'd like to think McWhorter would approve of the politics of the Carlson-Wee poem that means what I said it means. But even if the McWhorter seal of approval is all a white writer would need to have permission to depict a black style of speech, who would take the risk? And what writer would choose a project that entails the incessant inhibition of gunning for that approval?

Casual — and maybe charming — sarcasm from President Trump.

Democrats, please do not distance yourselves from Nancy Pelosi. She is a wonderful person whose ideas & policies may be bad, but who should definitely be given a 4th chance. She is trying very hard & has every right to take down the Democrat Party if she has veered too far left!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2018

"The judge in Paul Manafort's trial has called a recess without explanation."

"U.S. District Judge T. S. Ellis lll huddled with attorneys from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office and Manafort's defense lawyers, as well as court security officers, for more than 20 minutes before calling the recess. The judge then exited the courtroom toward the jury room...."

Yahoo News.

ADDED: As you can see at the same link, the trial resumed and there was no big deal. Too bad this boring post sat at the top of the blog all day! I hate when that happens. And before I went out for my 4-mile walk, I considered putting up this photograph:



But I decided it was too boring. How wrong I was! It is fascinating compared to the Manafort trial.

"We understand the purpose of education is not a career and a technical job, the purpose of an education is to teach young people how to think, which scares the hell out of Scott Walker."

Said Paul Soglin at the Democratic Party gubernatorial forum on Wednesday, quoted in "At Democratic forum Matt Flynn says Scott Walker will eat Tony Evers for lunch" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Here's the Isthmus report on the forum:

The mostly collegial conversation took a turn toward the end of the 90-minute forum, when Flynn took aim at Evers, criticizing him for supporting Walker’s most recent budget and calling him “Republican light.” Evers pushed back against the attack, calling Flynn’s characterization a “cheap shot” and pointing out that he praised the budget as “pro-kid” because Walker adopted 90 percent of the funding Evers had proposed. “I’ll never back off from that,” Evers said. “That is, frankly, an outrageous comment from somebody that I respect. We can win this race without this type of diatribe."

Flynn responded by suggesting that Evers couldn’t stand up to Walker. "If you ask an open question to a liar — to Scott Walker — he'll have you for lunch," Flynn said.

Tony Evers is the state school superintendent, and he's leading according to the latest Marquette poll. The primary is next Tuesday. It's a shame there are so many candidates. The forum was very hard to watch — technically amateurish to the point of absurdity. We watched and here's the comment I dashed off in my own comments section last night:

We watched the whole thing. Laughed a lot. At what??! They weren’t funny but we laughed anyway. Something about the mikes malfunctioning, Evers mumbling, that guy who seemed like Andy Kaufman wearing a yellow suit that turned green as the time wore on, Vinehout getting so gosh darn excited over everything and rocking back and forth, Flynn being so weirdly gruff, etc. It all seemed so rinky dink. At one point, a fedora floated by. No one took care of the technical side of this show. They were all seated, yet they stood up to talk and the camera had to tilt up and down woozily.

And you want to be my governor?

"A fedora floated by" literally refers to a man in a hat walking in front of the camera. Figuratively, it's a bit like an empty suit.

Floating Fedora from Natasha Kirke on Vimeo.

ADDED: Scott Walker won't eat Tony Evers for lunch because he's famous for eating the same thing for lunch every day, and it's not Tony Evers. See "This Governor Is Getting Mocked for Brown-Bagging Lunch Every Day" (Money):

Walker tweeted that for 26 long years in a row, he has eaten not one, but two ham-and-cheese sandwiches almost everyday for lunch. “Like millions of Americans, I bring my own lunch to work,” Walker wrote in the tweet.

Walker eating lunch is not a good metaphor for his opponents. It's long been part of his political rhetoric, and they're making me think of it.

Violent headline in The Washington Post: "Time for Mueller to bring out the big guns."

It's just an op-ed by a lawprof, and I haven't read it, but I see it's #1 on the "Most Read" list in the sidebar, so the headline worked as clickbait. Which makes me notice that the list should be headed "Most Clicked," because, as I said, I didn't read the op-ed, and I doubt if many of WaPo's readers (i.e. clickers) did. I mean I glanced at it again just to get an idea of when I decided, after clicking, that I didn't really want to read it after all, and I couldn't get past the first sentence...

Even as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III marches forward with his prosecution of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and as the case that President Trump engaged in criminal conduct grows stronger, the president and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani continue their tango about whether the president will deign to answer questions from Mueller’s team.

... and even then, I was just thinking idle thoughts like: marches forward, that sounds like something that might be done with big guns, but oh, what's this?, a tango. Mueller is marching and has guns, and Trump and Giuliani are tangoing. And they're purportedly tangoing "about" something. How do you tango about whether to answer questions?

It makes me think about the old aphorism "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." The point there is, obviously, you can't dance about architecture (so you can't write about music). It's a great line, because it's so trippy to think about dancing about architecture.

Dancing About Architecture from ZEITGUISED on Vimeo.

3 long sentences beginning with "When."

From "Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson/The Canadian psychology professor’s stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline—and deeply vulnerable," by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.

When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system.

When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

I was going to challenge you to diagram these sentences, but what I really want to ask you to do is to sing them to the tune of "Queen Jane Approximately." You know the Bob Dylan song I'm talking about?

When your mother sends back all your invitations/And your father to your sister he explains/That you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations...

Now when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you/And the smell of their roses does not remain/And all of your children start to resent you...

Now when all the clowns that you have commissioned/Have died in battle or in vain/And you’re sick of all this repetition...

When all of your advisers heave their plastic/At your feet to convince you of your pain/Trying to prove that your conclusions should be more drastic...

Now when all the bandits that you turned your other cheek to/All lay down their bandanas and complain/And you want somebody you don’t have to speak to...

Dylan follows all of his "when" clauses with "Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?" Flanagan's "when"s are followed by: 1. "something is dying," 2. "it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system," and 3. "the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end." Which do you like better, the Flanagan variety or the Dylan repetition? Dylan gets an extra plus or minus because one of the "when"s is about being "sick of all this repetition." I give a plus, myself, especially since where all the "when"s get us is to a desire to be with "somebody you don’t have to speak to." There's no repetition like no talking at all.

"It just happened that way. When I’m on a knee, most of the time I’m praying, and thank God for having Albert next to me."

"Being a part of this protest hasn’t been easy. I thought I was going to be by myself out there. Today I had an angel with me with Albert being out there. I’m grateful he sees what’s happening, and he wants to do something about it as well."

From "N.F.L. National Anthem Protests Resume With Players Kneeling and Raising Fists" (NYT). The quote is from Kenny Stills took a knee along with his Dolphins teammate Albert Wilson during the anthem before the preseason game last night. They were the only knee-takers this week, and there were also a couple players who raised a fist.

Did you notice it's time to pay attention to football again? It's early August. I notice that the Dolphin who raised a fist last night (Robert Quinn) is wearing a winter hat...



You don't need a hat in August in Florida, and — think about it — you don't need football.

The perfection of press vanity.

Getting ready to bring some #realnews to ⁦@colbertlateshow⁩ with ⁦@StephenAtHome⁩ #nottheenemy pic.twitter.com/a63TcxU92e

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 8, 2018

The Birds.

The 2018 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” pic.twitter.com/8EZvkUfbsO

— Madeline Eskind (@mdeskind) August 7, 2018

ADDED: "Fed-up locals are setting electric scooters on fire, smearing them with poop and burying them at sea" (L.A. Times).

These vandals are destroying or desecrating the vehicles in disturbingly imaginative ways, and celebrating their illegal deeds on social media — in full view of authorities and the public....

Lt. Michael Soliman, who supervises the LAPD Pacific Division’s Venice Beach detail, said he’s aware of some vandalism — his team has seen scooters left in a pile 10 feet high. But because people aren’t reporting such incidents, it’s not something officers are responding to, he said.

“If we have to prioritize the allocation of our time and resources, first and foremost we’re going to prioritize the preservation of life,” Soliman said. “Protection of property comes second.”

So it's open season.