400+ Pages of Dominick Dunne

Reading 400+ pages of Dominick Dunne is a bit like drinking a pitcher of gravy. It felt good on the way down. Now I am sitting here clutching my stomach and feeling queasy.

I came to the great Vanity Fair crime reporter/gossip king Dominick Dunne through reading his younger brother, John Gregory Dunne, whose book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen -- a work of droll and meticulously crafted prose about Dunne's role in creating an utterly mediocre Hollywood movie -- reawakened dormant longings in me to become a harried and tormented hack screenwriter someday (never one of my top five career fantasies, even, but always there in the background, ever since my teenage obsession with the legends of the early days of the Simpsons writers' room. Or maybe since Barton Fink).

"Useful Idiots"

Checking a coalition listserv the other week, a message came through from the head of a small left-wing group that primarily collects testimonies of human rights abuses in U.S. prisons. He had been angered by a recent article in Lawfare that he claimed unfairly stigmatized a radio segment to which his group contributes. As he portrayed it, with an attempt at acid sarcasm, the Lawfare writers seemed to think any criticism of the U.S. prison system was playing into Putin's agenda. He apparently saw himself and his group as the victims of a kind of neo-McCarthyism; a witch hunt committed by U.S. security hawks looking for Russians under the bed.

One crucial detail he forgot to mention: the segment ("Criminal Injustice") airs on Sputnik Radio. Which, in case you couldn't guess, is a subsidiary of Russian state-owned media. 

Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine (1988): A Review

Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine is the sort of book that captures one's heart long before one has read it -- even before one has seen it. All it takes is to read the first line of a summary of its contents somewhere. It's a novel that takes place almost entirely in the time it takes to travel from the bottom to the top of an escalator. 

Wonderful! Brilliant! I wanted to read this book however long ago I found out about its existence, based solely on the strength of this paraphrase, in the same way I still know I will enjoy Oblomov, when I get around to it some day (it's a novel where the main character never (or at least, not for a very long time) gets out of bed -- sign me up!).

The Wilt Chamberlain Argument in 2019

I was listening to Vox's The Weeds podcast this week -- as has become a commuting ritual for me this year -- and they brought up Robert Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain argument for libertarianism in the context of contemporary debates about taxation. (They also mentioned similar lines of thinking advanced by Greg Mankiw in more recent times.)

The argument was familiar to me in paraphrase (you know how it goes: people want to go see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball; he has a special and rare skill that people will pay good money to watch him perform; should he not, therefore, keep all of this money that is paid to him for this skill?; is it not in fact iniquitous and morally abhorrent for the state to take some of it away in the form of taxes or in the name of distributive justice? Etc.), but I had not given it more than a moment's thought in the last few years.

I kind of hate The West Wing

A podcast I was listening to this morning ended -- as so many conversations do these days -- with the millenial-ish presenters all talking about how much they miss The West Wing, and how much they love The West Wing, and how painful it is to watch The West Wing, because it is so beautiful and crystalline an image of what responsible, functional government might once have been, and maybe even what it was, when the Clintons were in power.

But let's not go nuts.

Errata and Marginalia 005: Dorfman and Mattelart

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: OR Books, 2018).

OR Books brought out a new edition last year of the Marxist pop culture criticism classic by famous playwright and author Ariel Dorfman (best known for Death and the Maiden) and Belgian Marxist critic Armand Mattelart, and I knew I had to get a copy (apparently the first to appear in English since the extremely limited print run of the English translation in the '70s that survived Disney's notorious copyright lawyers).

It is, perhaps, a book more delightful in premise than in execution. And perhaps Marxist cultural critics are not a group known for their felicitous literary style. And perhaps this book -- though written by a famous author when young -- does not entirely fulfill one's hopes that it will break the mold.

A Sonnet

May I, dear friend, express sincere despair
At reading Reihan’s well-intentioned words
They start off so compassionate and fair
Condemning cruelty that from Trump disturbs.
He says he gets the reasons for their flight;
Why some leave home – but more than that, he’s found
Circuitous, a way to put it right
We wait, breath held, for oracles profound.
It turns out that the path was plain to see:
In, half-baked, Paul Romer’s hell-fired brain
A neoliberal lawless sub-country
Where sweat-shops surely shall abolish pain!
  So doth all like unasked-for meddling end
  Quoth Claude McKay: ‘God save us from our friends!’

When they go low...

I was talking politics with my brother-in-law the other day, as we do, and he shared with me his strategic analysis of the 2020 election. "Donald Trump is not invincible," he said. "He's like one of those bosses in a video game where you have to shoot off the armor until the weak spot opens up, then you just hit that over and over again. Like in Star Fox." I giggled tremendously. I knew exactly the analogy he had in mind. The core has appeared, I said in a surfer drawl, stand by to attack!

He then proposed an example of what he has in mind. If Trump has a fundamental weakness, it is that he actually does have a dread of humiliation. Anger, fear, condemnation seem to feed his sense of power -- power as it is always understood by people who are essentially weak in character. But actually being slighted, snubbed, mocked... there's a reason Chaplin perceived that parody can be as effective a tool against dictators, if not more so, than vilification.