Josie and the Pussycats (2001): A Structural Analysis

 This month, the Criterion Channel streamed 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats movie—thereby granting me intellectual permission for the first time to watch a film that I would not have been caught dead near at the time it ran in theaters (I being an 11-year-old boy at the time). It is now one of the most popular films streaming on the Criterion site, and it’s easy to see why: not only is the movie entertaining, it also has all the fascination and populist appeal that comes from being a film (much like 1999’s cult classic Drop Dead Gorgeous) that the critics completely misunderstood at the time it appeared, and which only began to receive its due thanks to DVD purchases and its die-hard contingent of fans finding each other on the internet. 

When it ran in theaters the first time around, after all, the film was a box-office flop: its satirical message proving ill-tailored to the target audience of its marketing. It also suffered the fate of so many films that draw from beloved pop cultural material of the past. People, to the extent that they were aware of “Josie and the Pussycats” at all, knew them as stars of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, or as side characters from the Archie comics—two sources of entertainment we recall with affection from childhood, but which seem cringe-inducingly naïve and unselfconscious in retrospect, like most pop culture from that era. Critics therefore assumed the Josie movie would have the same tone. 

Ultimate Indignities

 Of all the unsettling stories to emerge from our generative AI moment, perhaps the creepiest is the fact that people are now trying to create avatars of their deceased friends and relatives, using the new technology. The idea is that the algorithms can train on a library of video, text, and audio recordings of a person's various words and deeds (a trove of data that each of us now generates in the course of a lifetime, if we are at all plugged into technology—or members of our family are), then it can use this information to generate a plausible simulacrum that moves and sounds "like" the person who is gone, but can also respond to new prompts and stimuli, giving the illusion that you are really speaking with a lost loved one.  

What spooks me about this idea is not so much the idea of a person—or a digital avatar of a person—communicating with us "from beyond the grave." Rather, I am bothered on behalf of the deceased. I don't want anybody prolonging my existence—or a simulacrum of it—without my consent. I do not in any way share this longing for digital immortality that many of our tech overlords and silicon valley bros seem to have; indeed, it seems to me a prospect fraught with an especially vertiginous sort of existential horror. Who wants to live forever as bits—a set of ones and zeroes? 

Symbolism

 Throughout my life, I have at great intervals experienced an odd sensation. A confluence of circumstances will suddenly remind me of something. I will feel that whatever just occurred has a great yet inexplicable meaning. It's tempting to describe this feeling as a type of déjà vu, if only to help me find the words to describe it, but it's not exactly as if I feel—in these moments—that I have experienced the same thing before. Rather, it's as if whatever just occurred reminded me of a particularly important idea. Yet, in contrast to the familiar and more common type of realization, the importance of the ideas disclosed in these moments remains wholly incommunicable. And, more noteworthy still, I invariably forget them a few minutes later, and can never retrieve them again (I cannot even now, in writing this, think of a single specific example of the phenomenon in question—it is part of its nature to elude recollection). 

I've been tempted at various times by the thought that I should carry a small notebook in my pocket everywhere I go, so that whenever these moments of mysterious recollections occur to me, I could jot down something about their content—to catch them in the wild, as it were. Yet, I can never bring myself to put this scheme into practice. What stops me from implementing it—apart from its obvious impracticality and inconvenience—is the fear that if I ever started jotting these sensations down when they occurred, somehow it would make the visitations stop. I am sure that if I wrote these sudden "ideas" on paper, they would appear as meaningless to me the next day (or even the next hour) as most dreams usually are a half-hour after waking. And worse, I'm convinced that it would somehow kill my capacity to receive these transmissions. Like the old stand-by canard of the charlatan medium—I worry that the spirits would go quiet if I ever tried to record their speech. 

The Secret History

 There is something in Trump's character that invites a certain two-facedness on the part of his allies. After all, he demands of his various camp followers and toadies that they display constant uncritical devotion. No matter how terrible his behavior, the slightest sign of opposition from his various lackeys can transform one in an instant from trusted minion to arch-nemesis. Even Bill Barr, who did his best for years to enable Trump's excesses, nevertheless ended up on Trump's enemies list, purely because he refused to invent bogus reasons to overturn the 2020 election results, or to say that there was evidence of widespread voter fraud when there wasn't any. 

This constant need to cringe and bow before Trump, no matter the moral toll he exacts, surely wears people down over time. Whatever dignity remains inside them therefore starts to kick against the humiliation. People try to salvage their inner self-respect by rebelling, if only inwardly and silently. Thus, many of the same people who have appeared in public to be Trump's closest political allies, have also expressed to friends in private that they utterly loathe the man. 

An Impossible Dilemma

 I do not envy the many judges, juries, and prosecutors around the country now tasked with addressing Trump's various misdeeds. For the real tragedy of Trump's bad behavior—his repeated efforts to destabilize American democracy—is that there is practically no way to address it that is not itself destabilizing to our political institutions. Give him an amnesty, for the sake of peace, and you have established a precedent of impunity for attempts to overturn a democratic election. Prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law, and you set the stage for a never-ending tit-for-tat that brings our political process to a new low of partisan viciousness. 

The decision last night from the Colorado Supreme Court is a case in point. I honestly don't know how the judges should have ruled; I only know that they had no good options. Ultimately, a majority of the panel concluded that Trump was in fact barred from seeking office again, under the 14th Amendment's prohibition on the reelection of people complicit in an insurrection. The three dissenting judges, however, raised a good point—Trump has not actually been convicted of abetting an insurrection. He was acquitted in the Senate (however ludicrous and partisan most of us found that vote), and the current prosecution of him for defrauding the people of the United States has not yet secured a conviction. 

Bright Young Things

 Trump has made headlines yet again in recent days for his increasingly unhinged comments. Even as he has maintained his seemingly irresistible climb in the polls, he has meanwhile captured attention not for any campaign promises or conventional politicking, but for another round of bombastically fascistic remarks—many of which have pushed the moral envelope even by his abysmal standards. In recent weeks and months he has: once again described immigrants as "poisoning the blood" of the United States; heaped more praise on authoritarian strongmen from Xi to Putin to Kim Jong Un; endorsed, Duterte-like, the extrajudicial killing of accused shoplifters; and promised to be a dictator on "day one" of his presidency (though supposedly not thereafter) and pointedly declined to rule out abusing his presidential powers to persecute his critics. 

What I want to focus on today, however, is not so much what Trump said, but whom he said it to; for I think it sheds light on a side of the Trump movement that often goes unexamined. To be sure, many of the recent comments were delivered in the usual round of campaign rallies in early-primary states, soft ball interviews with sycophantic right-wing pseudo-journalists, etc. This part of the Trump phenomenon everyone knows: it is often said that he appeals to rural, less-educated whites alarmed at the pace of social change. To see him making a pitch to voters in a rust belt state, therefore, or yammering away on a right-wing call-in show, fits the clichéd image of how he reaches his base. 

Bacon and the Bush Doctrine

 Francis Bacon's Essays are sometimes seen as a founding text for the ideology of the British Empire, and the reputation is warranted; but it is not limited to such. Really, this book could function as a how-to manual for any aspiring imperial power. 

Bacon's ethic in the Essays is fundamentally one of realpolitik. It is ironic in this regard (and perhaps telling, in a "methinks he protests too much" sort of way) that he disavows the works of Machiavelli, and characterizes the great Italian thinker as an infidel; for in truth, Bacon is writing very much in the same spirit. This makes the Essays a timeless classic of political thought, though not always a wholesome one. 

Establishments

 In one of his various self-flattering fulminations about the evils of European institutions and the glory of American ones, Mark Twain declares (in the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) that the crucial difference between the two is that the former have an established church, and the latter does not. In Twain's telling, that is to say, the greatest bulwark of American freedom is our lack of an institutionalized state-sponsored religion; and the worse tyranny of continental monarchies descends from the fact that they do have one. 

Thus, he prophesied, our liberty of thought and expression "would last" only "until [the country] had an Established Church." For, he adds elsewhere, "an Established Church is an established crime." He goes on to advocate for splitting up religion "into forty-three sects," on the theory that, in that way, "they can police each other," and no one religious body will ever become too powerful. 

Just for a Handful of Silver

 One of the most fascinating aspects of the Trump era is how it has managed to bring once-submerged aspects of people's characters (both suppressed villainy and unexpected heroism) to the fore. In ordinary times, after all, many of the significant moral differences between people—their real as opposed to merely hypothetical courage and integrity—remains hidden. This is because, in ordinary times, simply going along with the collective opinion of one's party, caste, or society exacts no special moral cost. One is imperfect, but only in a normal sort of way, and no more so than everyone else. 

The thing about Trump, though, and other would-be gangsters and tyrants, is that they make a point of exacting special moral tributes from anyone who goes along with them. They make sure that, if you are going to join their team, you must do so at the cost of violating your moral self. It is a crude mechanism for maintaining group loyalty that is well known to the leaders of criminal organizations. You make sure people have really debased and compromised themselves in order to join your clique; that way, they can never turn on you, because they have shed their ties to the mainstream moral community. 

The Wonder

 Whenever I find myself wondering all over again why people so readily embrace fascism, as soon as it is served up to them, I only have to reflect for a moment before I recall that the major religions—at least in their most literal and least intellectualized forms—mostly still preach a species of cosmic fascism. 

The God of the orthodox theologies is a kind of secret policeman, who spends his days in his heavenly kingdom sniffing out hints of heresy or dissent. Those who have the temerity to question his diktats and ukases, he banishes to an eternity in his fiery gulag beneath the crust. He is a dictator, but infinitely more vindictive than any earthly one, because his sentences are for all time, and irrevocable, whereas a merely planetary autocrat can kill only the body, not the soul. The God of Orthodoxy is a super-Stalin, an ultra-Chiang Kai-shek; worse than these mortal butchers because he burns people into ash not once, but eternally. 

First the Heartland, Then the World

 With Senate Republicans voting down the Ukraine aid package last week, supposedly because they were outraged that it did not include unrelated and brutally cold-hearted provisions eviscerating the U.S. asylum system, we are drawing ever closer to a nightmare scenario in which MAGA politicians effectively throw the victory in Eastern Europe to Putin. And since Trump is already hinting he might pull the U.S. out of NATO, or otherwise refuse to honor our treaty commitments to our European allies under this instrument, then it seems we are likewise ever closer to enabling Vladimir Putin to simply march across Europe, in an effort to establish a world-spanning union of the far-right fascist republics. A UFFR to replace the USSR whose passing Putin mourns.

I have to confess that this was not the scenario I spent most of the last year-and-a-half preparing for. Back when Putin first invaded, I did warn that "America First" isolationist types would effectively take the Russian autocrat's side. At that point in history, though, it was much less clear that the MAGA contingent would still ultimately be so ascendant in the Republican Party. I was more worried, at that point, that the typical belligerence of U.S. foreign policy might hurl so many weapons into the conflict that it prolonged the fighting beyond the point at which a negotiated peace was possible. 

"Fire and Strength"

 The discourse around the Israel-Palestine conflict has become so utterly toxic in this country that it feels far more dangerous now than it did just a few months ago to speak the simplest of truths about it: just to remind people publicly, for instance, that there are human beings and families on both sides of the conflict who are just trying to survive, all of whom have a legitimate right to stay in their present homes without facing persecution and displacement. 

On the one side, we've seen the revival of a particularly virulent extremist branch of the revolutionary Left, which is endorsing Hamas's violence. This is a segment of the Left that had been dormant for several decades, and which many of us might have thought would never emerge again. For all the complaints about the alleged self-righteousness and knee-jerk radicalism of the progressive left during the period now known as the "Great Awokening," after all, few members of social justice movements during that era ever explicitly endorsed violence and terrorism as a means to their favored ends. That all changed, however, precisely in response to one of the worst acts of terrorism committed in modern history. After October 7, the Baader-Meinhof version of the extreme left was suddenly rearing its head again. Apparently, they beheld what Hamas committed on that day, and thought it was good.

The Long List

 Well, last night's GOP primary debate was another chilling display of the galloping extremism that has engulfed the Republican Party, and once again the news media seems to have missed the main storyline of what actually happened on stage. Much of the attention went to Christie and Haley, who did indeed deliver the best performances by the rules of traditional politics. But clearly, once again, the real protagonist on stage was Vivek Ramaswamy. I say this not because Ramaswamy has a prayer of winning the nomination—he does not; nor is he even trying (he is clearly auditioning instead for the role of Trump lapdog). But he is the one who best represents the views of the absent Trump, as well as the direction in which the overall MAGA movement is plainly headed. 

Two of the most significant moments of the debate both proceeded from Ramaswamy's mouth. Neither has received the attention it is due. The first came when Ramaswamy sought to reverse the GOP's longstanding support of Israel. Many observers seem not to have picked up on this at all. Ramaswamy chooses his words carefully enough on this topic, it would appear, that the significance of it has largely escaped notice. He talks about David Ben-Gurion and says that his position is that of the "true" supporter of Israel, because he is trying to encourage Israeli "self-reliance," so people don't bat an eye. But what he is actually saying is that the U.S. needs to withdraw all financial support of Israel. This is sure to win him the support of disaffected alt-left types online, or even worse segments of opinion (more on that below), but it has little to do with traditional Republican politics. 

The Bends

 A friend called me up yesterday afternoon to tell me he was working on his letter of resignation from work. I warned him to watch out for "the bends." "The Mercedes-Benz?" he asked. "No," I repeated, "the bends." I explained that minutes before he called, I had just finished reading Charles Bukowski's 1971 novel, Post Office, and that this book ends, appropriately enough, with its author submitting a letter of resignation to the post office. It is here Bukowski introduces the concept of "the bends."

"The bends" are what Bukowski calls the blues that follow the withdrawal of any employment, no matter how hated. Even as he loathed the U.S. postal service, after all, and describes his twelve years there as a purgatory, Bukowski (thinly disguised as Henry Chinaski in the novel) nevertheless slips into a depressive funk as soon as he leaves. He compares this feeling to the bends, because it is as if he had just emerged from the deep ocean, and his body has trouble adjusting to the change in pressure.  

The Absolute Fake

 I have done my share of handwringing over the past year about the potential threat of AI deepfakes to our political environment—and even to our ability to rely on a sense of shared reality. In a recent post I cited a Wall Street Journal article with the alarming headline "Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore." Last spring, I quoted Walter Lippmann's prescient warnings about the crisis for democracy that could arise in a world where we no longer distinguish truth from falsehood. The basic concern behind all these posts is simple: generative AI has made falsified images appear more realistic than ever before. Soon, we will be unable to detect any difference between the real ones and the fakes. And without a shared epistemic baseline, how will we be able to negotiate any of our political disagreements without resort to violence? 

A recent New Yorker article by Daniel Immerwahr, however, makes a cogent case that these fears are overblown. AI deepfakes are indeed concerning and often harmful, Immerwahr concedes—but not primarily because they have actually proved effective in misleading people. These images have been used to harass, sexually humiliate, and reinforce people's already-blinkered opinions; but they have not actually spawned the kind of epistemic crisis that I and so many other observers have feared, even as they have become increasingly lifelike and sophisticated. The reason, Immerwahr argues, is that convincing fakes are not actually a new phenomenon. It has been possible to sow disinformation across various mass media for centuries. The way in which most of us have always tried to disaggregate which of these claims are true and which are false is not actually by "seeing it with our own eyes," but by checking what we consider to be reliable sources—a process Immerwahr dubs "social verification."

Was It For This?

 The news that filled the headlines from Dublin yesterday was depressing for more than the obvious reasons. Of course, one never wants to open the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and see front-page images of right-wing extremists torching cars and rioting in the streets in an orgy of xenophobic violence. One doesn't want to see that happening in any country. But there's something about it occurring in Ireland—a country I have long idealized—that cut me especially close to home. 

Why did I have this distinctly strong reaction? After all, the Dublin riots were hardly the only or the worst manifestation of racist sentiment targeting migrants in the democratic West (I mean, just look around us here, in this country). But there's something especially disappointing about it in this case. 

Expectations

 There has been much consternation recently over the apparent disconnect between how the U.S. economy is actually doing and how Americans perceive it. On the one hand, we have low unemployment, rising wages, cooling inflation, and strong GDP growth that has defied warnings of recession. On the other, we have widespread economic discontent, according to polls and surveys assessing how Americans feel about the situation. And since people tend to blame the incumbent president for the current state of the economy, this spells trouble for Biden in the 2024 election—and therefore potentially the future of American democracy. 

As the AP article linked above and other commentators observe, the explanation for this discrepancy appears to still be inflation. Economists will say: but inflation is cooling! And it is. But inflation is measured year-over-year, and people have longer memories than that. They know that current inflation rates are measured against last year as a baseline, and that was in turn a terrible year for inflation. What they really remember is how relatively cheap things were two or three years ago, and they want to go back to that. And I certainly can't blame them. 

"The Worst of Them Many States"

I was talking to some new acquaintances at a family gathering in Minnesota this weekend, and I mentioned I live in Iowa. "Oh," they asked, "Whereabouts in Iowa?" "Iowa City," I replied. "Ah," they said; "well if you have to live in Iowa, that's the place to be." 

I have to admit, I didn't know what they meant. I like my recently-adopted town, but I always thought of it as a small outpost, not a center of civilization. Its "downtown" is made up of about two intersections, after all, and if it weren't for the university, it often feels there would be no one living there at all. 

Extremist Ragout

 I get the nauseous feeling that we are living in a moment of proliferating totalitarian ideas, spreading like wildfire on social media. Obviously, the use of these online platforms to seed extremist ideas is nothing new. But what is creeping me out right now, even beyond the usual baseline concern about rising political extremism that hums as perpetual background noise in our present reality, is the appearance of these ideas in the feeds of tremendously powerful and influential people; plus the eerie cross-pollination that we seem to be witnessing in the promotion of these ideas between the extreme left and the extreme right. That part is new.

Yesterday was an especially bad day for anyone worried about the rise of antisemitism and other forms of extremism online. First, we had the news about Elon Musk's latest comments. If there was any lingering shred of plausible deniability he might have invoked as to his views, prior to these posts, he eliminated it that day. He is now actively endorsing antisemitic conspiracy theories and purveying them to his followers. And the way he talks about them, specifically, shows that this was no one-time gaffe. This was not a case of merely liking the wrong tweet. It's clear that Musk is deeply embedded in the worldview of white nationalists and the web of the ultra-right. He is conversant in their terminology and appears to have embraced their core propositions. 

Two Poems

I.

There was one book he

Still hadn’t read

Ubu Roi

John Berryman said.

I wonder why?

It’s not that long

But so he says

In his Dream Songs.

Perhaps the French

Serves to disguise

The fact the play

Is pocket-sized.

I Don't Get It

 Maybe it's time for me to admit that I really just don't know or understand what's happening in the mind of the great American public. The past few weeks have brought a raft of data showing that the people of this nation, at least in the most relevant swing states that will determine the outcome of the next election, are thinking very differently about the 2024 race than I am. 

From what I can see, at my vantage point, this looming election is an existential choice that will decide the fate of American democracy. On one side, we have a basically normal candidate—flawed in some ways, admirable in others—who, whatever else he may do, is at least not likely to overturn our democratic institutions and become a dictator. On the other side, we have a would-be strongman, currently under multiple federal and state indictments for trying to subvert the last election, who has made no secret of the fact that his goal in a second term will be to persecute his enemies, eviscerate the independence of the Justice Department and transform it into a political weapon of the presidency, rip apart communities by expelling millions of undocumented immigrants, and empty the federal government of all but his most craven lackeys. 

Postmodern Dictatorship

 You'd never guess it from listening to his admirers and pro bono propagandists on the MAGA Right and the Greenwald Left, but Putin most likely killed 300 of his own citizens once upon a time, in order to tighten his grip on power. Remember the 1999 apartment bombings? The episode is decades-old at this point, but it perhaps still sheds some relevant light on the psychology of the man who invaded Ukraine. People who are still intent on finding a sympathetic explanation for Putin's actions, or who—on IR "realist" grounds—can only believe that states act for fundamentally rational reasons—should take heed of this incident. Maybe the take that Putin is just a power-hungry creep deserves more of a hearing?

As detailed in Masha Gessen's account and those of other journalists, a number of eerie circumstances around the 1999 apartment bombings suggest that Putin's friends in the Russian state played a role in the attack. For one thing, there were the FSB agents surprised in the apparent act of planting more bombs (later dismissed by the FSB itself as a training exercise). Then, there was the fact that one politician announced and began condemning the attack in the Duma—before it had actually occurred. Then there's the fact that a defector who escaped to Britain and wrote a book accusing Putin of involvement in the plot to blow up the apartment buildings was assassinated in 2006—most likely on Putin's orders. 

1985

 In his slightly tongue-in-cheek prophecy of the decade to come, 1985, Anthony Burgess (writing in 1978) accused George Orwell of getting the future wrong. "1984 is not going to be like that at all," he writes. He therefore offers his own bleakly comic view, in contrast, of what the future actually holds. Instead of a rapid descent into outright dictatorship organized around a cult of personality, Burgess appears to predict a gradual slide into pettifogging bureaucracy and self-righteous unionism. Instead of the 1980s being envisioned as a boot stamping on a human face forever, Burgess pictures it as a sort of endless wait at a DMV counter. And indeed, it must be said: his future is a fair extrapolation from some of the social trends most visible in Britain in the 1970s: rising inflation, depreciating currency, daily strikes and walk-outs in every major industry. 

The irony of the book, though, is that even as Burgess accuses Orwell of being mistaken in his prophecy, he appears to have been just as bad at guessing future trends. For the real 1985 would come to resemble Burgess's dystopia as little as it would Orwell's. Far from the trade unions acquiring ever greater power, they were crushed in Britain and the United States by a ruthless right-wing reaction. Elsewhere, Burgess conjures the phrase "right to work" as an expression of heroic individualism in a world dominated by closed shops, grievance politics, obligatory strikes, and ruinous wage-hikes—and he was right that the phrase would actually enter our politics; but it would not do so as a cry of protest against the hegemonic worldview, but as a cynical (Orwellian, really) slogan for a political movement that sought to bury the union movement even further, after it had already been mostly defeated. 

A Parcel of Rogues

 The news media seems largely to have met last night's GOP primary debate with a shrug. The consensus is that it was a dull affair that shed little new light on most of the candidates. I largely agree with that assessment, but with one glaring exception. And to me, it is such an important exception that I almost wonder if we were even watching the same debate. For even if the candidates largely echoed each other on most of the issues up for discussion, they divided in very significant ways over foreign policy. There were basically two sides on stage: there were the ordinary old-fashioned sort of excessively-hawkish-but-at-least-pro-democracy-and-pro-American Republicans, like Nikki Haley; and then there was the terrifying emissary from the party's Putinist future, the flabbergastingly unprincipled Vivek Ramaswamy. 

The news media did not even begin to do justice to the magnitude of the weirdness and eeriness of the views Ramaswamy was spouting on the stage. Here's the New York Times's sanguine recap of the Ukraine segment of the debate, for instance: after describing Nikki Haley's positions, they then summarize: "Most of the other candidates gave versions of the same responses." Well, yes, I suppose this is true in a numerical sense. The majority of the other candidates sounded similar to Haley. But one of them—Mr. Ramaswamy—presented such a frighteningly dissonant alternative that I would have thought it would surely be newsworthy. He went beyond repeating his now-familiar opposition to further U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and began actually parroting Kremlin talking points about the Ukrainian government and the country's eastern provinces. 

Self-Defense vs. Revenge

 In Robert Southey's dramatic poem about the medieval English Peasant's Revolt, Wat Tyler, he imagines the radical priest John Ball (he of the immortal phrase "when Adam delved and Eve span/who was then a gentleman?") as a kind of proto-Tolstoyan pacifist. In this regard, Southey was probably far more influenced by contemporary radical writers than he was by any historical sources about Ball. After all, Southey composed the work when he was only twenty years old and still a radical. According to Wikipedia, he is believed to have originally drafted it in 1794. This is the same year that William Godwin published Caleb Williams—and there are several passages in which one can detect the overt influence of that work. 

This is most readily apparent in Southey's themes of pacifism and non-resistance. Sounding much like Godwin's great novel of social protest and anarcho-pacifism, Southey's version of Ball harps frequently on the notion that the retributive justice of the court system is really just a glorified form of revenge. He asks at one point whether his listeners cannot "See in the sable garment of the law/Revenge conceal'd." This is pure Godwin. Then there is Southey's reference to the "blood-purpled robes of royalty," in which we seem to hear an echo of Godwin's phrase about "the gore-dripping robes of authority."  

Leaving the Planet

 A couple weeks ago, the New York Times ran a piece asserting that NASA engineers now believe we may be able to live on the moon by the year 2040. I, like most people, think this sounds awesome. I'm not against it. Still, the techno-utopian grandiosity of the proposal strikes me, and it seems to crystallize in a way the fundamental ambivalence of our current relationship with technology. We live in an era of unbounded excitement and optimism about the future potential of novel technologies, of a kind we have not experienced for at least several decades; yet at the same time we are perhaps more uneasy and perturbed by the direction and rapidity of this change than we have been in at least as long a time. 

I thought it was strangely apt, for instance, that Oppenheimer was the blockbuster hit of the summer. Obviously, it tapped into the zeitgeist—yet it was such a grand undertaking that Christopher Nolan must have been planning it years before he could have known how well it would suit our moment. One therefore has the sense that he was building better than he knew. And I don't just mean that we are experiencing an episode of renewed anxiety and concern about nuclear weapons—conflicts involving nuclear-armed powers in Ukraine and now in the Middle East obviously have a lot to do with this. But also, we are at a moment when the promethean powers of scientists in general are facing renewed skepticism. 

The Second Collapse

It was a day of massive protests around the country, with people in major cities and university towns across the United States gathering to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and waving Palestinian flags. Maybe many of them have their hearts in the right place. Maybe they mean by all this only to condemn indiscriminate IDF airstrikes in Gaza that seem to needlessly and disproportionately harm civilians. Or maybe they only mean to protest the ongoing occupation of the West Bank, and the exclusion of the Palestinian people who live there from any meaningful say in the government that controls most aspects of their lives. These are things that do indeed deserve to be protested.

But, whatever their true motives, by simply waving their "Free Palestine" and "From the Rivers to the Sea" signs, so soon after the October 7 massacre of 1,400 Israeli civilians, and without providing any additional context, many invite an inference of bad faith. They sound—whether intentionally or otherwise—like they are calling for the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Israeli Jews. And if this is not in fact what many of them will say they mean, if pressed to clarify—they seldom act proactively to disavow such a meaning. They seem to feel no moral obligation to distance themselves from any such calls for ethnic cleansing, treating the risk of this happening as so remote a danger as to be negligible. 

The Quintessential Experimental Novel

 Is it possible to go beyond what B.S. Johnson already accomplished in his second novel, 1964's Albert Angelo? Or does the story of the novel as literary form end there? Clocking in at only 180 pages (in the New Directions edition), the book is nonetheless the perfect distillation of every major experimental technique developed in twentieth century fiction, plus a new one thrown in for good measure. It may be the quintessential avant-garde novel that can never be transcended. 

How did he do it? What were his sources? Johnson cites Beckett as an influence, featuring a quote from The Unnamable as an epigraph. But the influence of Joyce is just as discernible, if not more so. Johnson borrows from Ulysses the device of shifting between forms, genres, and registers with each chapter—one section in prose, another drama, another verse, another stream-of-consciousness. But the book doesn't just stop with Joyce. It is also compounded of equal parts Donleavy, postmodern metafiction, and pure sui generis Johnson. 

The More Things Change

 In Bernard Malamud's classic novel The Fixer—a searing indictment of antisemitism told from the perspective of a Jewish man living in the autocratic Russian empire around 1905 who is falsely accused of ritual murder for political reasons—this persecuted protagonist in one scene meets in secret with a Russian official, who reveals himself to be an unexpected ally. Despite working for the czarist state, it turns out that this official is a closet liberal: attempting within the confines of the autocratic system to make what incremental progress he can toward greater legality and justice. 

This official admits, after recounting the recent resurgence of antisemitic persecution and political repression in this czar's government, that these events call into question his belief in human progress. He asks the fixer if he is familiar with the expression "the more things change, the more they stay the same," and says it applies amply to the Russia of 1905. On the one hand, he like many other members of the liberal intelligentsia had believed up till then that the country was on an inevitable path toward greater modernization. On the other, he was living to witness the resurgence of some of the darkest forms of reaction in his own time—the return of the medieval superstition of blood libel, for instance; the threat of murderous pogroms. 

"Opportunity"

 A few years ago, when a spate of horrific killings of Asian Americans was in the news, a friend of mine who's Chinese American wrote down a few of his thoughts—trying to answer the fundamental question that follows every senseless atrocity: why? One of the words on his list was a simple one: "opportunity." I was struck by this phrasing and asked him to explain. He said that Asian Americans were attacked perhaps simply because they were there; because it was easy; because they were visible; because they were vulnerable. It was as if there was a kind of simmering rage, resentment, and latent capacity for cruelty inherent everywhere in human life. Then, when it gathered itself into expression, it was most often directed against those who stuck out; the ones in the most exposed position. They were the ones people had the "opportunity" to strike. 

I've been thinking back to his comment this week as our country faces another wave of bias-motivated attacks against racial and religious minorities—this time crystalizing around groups who have been conflated and lumped together, in some segments of the public mind, with events in the Middle East. There was the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian-American child, Wadea Al-Fayoume, in Illinois on October 14. There was the rash of online death threats and calls for mass murder targeting Jewish students at Cornell University—and many similar antisemitic incidents breaking out around the country. 

Israel... Gaza... Gaza... Israel...

 If I seem at times to be lurching back and forth 

with every change in the news

It's because I am

It's because

there is no shortage of horrors.

MAGA Goes Full-Lindbergh

 As a friend has reminded me several times in recent weeks, it was always only a matter of time before the MAGA movement decided to follow the course of its own festering antisemitism to its logical conclusion—namely, demanding an end to traditional US support for Israel. “Give it five years,” this friend told me, “and MAGA will have done a complete about-face on this issue.” It now appears he was right about everything except the timing. MAGA is already making the pivot he anticipated, except it’s happening now; not five years from now. 

The mainstream media may not have noticed it; in part because it is confined to those online corners of the evolving MAGA-sphere that most people try to ignore, in the hopes it will exhaust itself and go away. If you had only been paying attention to Trump himself, after all, you would not have concluded that any major policy realignment was afoot. Apart from a few characteristically bizarre and controversial quips (about Hezbollah being “smart,” e.g.), Trump has mostly hewed to the conventional Republican line of attacking Democrats from the right on this issue. 

The Badness of King George

 A couple days ago, Politico ran a tremendously witty piece about the unexpected reappearance of George W. Bush; and the events the article describes are indeed striking. Most of us have gone years without thinking of the former president; and when we have at all, it is inevitably with nostalgia and affection. Yes, I confess this—even as someone who utterly loathed and railed against Bush II when he was in office—even as someone who knows full well and thoroughly condemns all the ways in which the former president was most likely a war criminal (the torture program, extraordinary rendition, CIA black sites, Guantanamo, and on). 

In spite of all this, alas, political memory is appallingly short (even if the life of Bush's forever prison in Cuba and other worst legacies is not). We are left, after a passage of years, with vibes rather than facts. And the lingering aura around Bush is one of decency—especially compared to the Republican party of today. The result has been an inescapable drift among millennials toward viewing the former president with affection—even among those of us who went to high school in the Bush years and developed our first sense of political identity around hating him. 

Homage to John Heartfield

 After John Heartfield, "Madrid 1936: No Pasaran! Pasaremos!"

"Dead Bodies and Ruined Houses"

 At the beginning of her virtuoso essay about war and patriarchy, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf describes a series of photographs she receives each week "from the Spanish government"—urging support for the Republican cause in the Civil War. The pictures showed the effects of fascist violence—particularly of the bombardment of civilians. Woolf describes images of charred corpses, including those of children. She offers these photos as self-sufficient proof of the "beastliness" of war, the waste of war—which she summarizes as the Wilfred Owen view of war—arguing that the mere sight of these images makes the case for pacifism and disarmament virtually self-evident. 

In her 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag cites this passage in order to argue that Woolf was perhaps oversimplifying. After all, Sontag notes, the uselessness and brutality of fighting and of the use of force in general is not the only possible conclusion one could take from the photos. Quite to the contrary, many were moved to take up arms precisely because of seeing photos like that. The pictures didn't teach them that the use of force was always unjustified. They showed them what happened when fascist violence was left unchecked, and underscored the reasons for resisting it—by arms if necessary. 

Poison Tree

 At about the middle of the day I checked my email to find a series of messages from a friend. These missives at first expressed anger with me. Then, interpreting my lack of response as a reproach, the messages started arguing back and forth with one another. They vacillated as to whether or not they were truly mad, how mad they were if so, and whether or not I should treat the whole thing as a joke. 

When I saw them, I suffered the quasi-physical reaction that usually occurs in me when I detect conflict—specifically, when I realize someone is angry with me. I can only describe it as a kind of tearing sensation in the gut (I once wrote about it in a poem, available here—the one that starts "When it happened it..."), which then congeals into a kind of throbbing emotional lump in my stomach. 

Improving People

 In my first months of law school, I welcomed the encouragement and advice of others. I assumed I would be first in my class, so I found nothing to resent in people asking me how my grades were looking. I felt entitled to dream big about my future legal career, so I had nothing against people quizzing me about how prestigious my 1L summer internship was going to be. 

Then, as law school continued, and my record proved to be persistently less than perfect, I started to panic. "Uh oh," I thought. "I'm letting everybody down." It became an intolerable snub to hear someone say, "I assume you're going to be top of your class"—because I knew I wasn't. When friends said, "You're going to become a judge someday, right?" I had to cringe and admit it was unlikely. 

Free Fire Zones

 The wake of mass atrocities and terrorist violence is the very hardest time to call for restraint in response. It was hard vis a vis U.S. actions after 9/11, and it is hard to demand of Israel today. But such moments are also the most important possible time to issue such a call; for it is in precisely such times that restraint is otherwise least likely to be observed—and when fundamental human rights violations that would not ordinarily be countenanced may be committed with impunity. 

There is no doubt in my mind, to be sure, that Israel is now waging a just military operation in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, by its actions, made itself a legitimate military target, and Israel has the right if not duty to intervene to topple them—just as any other state would be justified in removing a political entity from power in a neighboring territory that had engaged in massive unprovoked aggression against its civilian population (and nota bene that all attacks on civilians are by definition "unprovoked"). 

"Refusal of Aid Between Nations"

It's almost hard to recall anymore, given the mountain of horrific global events that have piled up since then, but it's been only a week and a half since a handful of far-right Republicans nearly shut down the federal government—remember that? And it was all primarily because they refused to provide additional aid to Ukraine in its defense against Putin's aggression. When their leadership did the right thing—albeit at the last moment—and agreed to fund the government for a few more weeks, they voted him out of office for it (just for a measly CR!)—and this, despite the fact that the continuing resolution he negotiated didn't even include the Ukraine aid they fought against so strenuously. 

It's hard to understand what their categorical objection to Ukraine aid could possibly be about, other than an ideological affinity for Putin and a support for his aggression. After all, do they oppose extra spending in general? Why, then, in the immense galaxy of the federal budget, are these the only earmarked funds they seemed to care about? Do they have a principled objection to militarism? Or at least a consistent ideological commitment to isolationism or foreign policy "restraint" of some kind? Um, excuse me, these are the same people openly advocating a war with Mexico. The only thing that's left as a possible explanation is that they endorse Putin's actions, or at least don't give a damn about the fate of Ukraine. 

Doomscrolling

 At some point a few years ago, my relationship to the news profoundly changed. What had once been a last-resort maneuver to stave off boredom—checking the headlines—became an engrossing activity that demanded its own significant allocation of time and mental effort. Instead of being a sleep-aid (reading a few articles before bed) it became an obstacle to rest. Opening up a news website meant girding oneself for fear, and what usually greeted one upon peeking inside was indeed a lightning stroke of white-hot terror. And even if this began during the pandemic, it has long outlasted its worst phases. 

The dynamic is often blamed on social media, of course—with its infinite supply of new content that allows one to obsess over a story or event, without ever reaching the bottom of an article or exhausting the supply of instantaneous reactions. But this can't be the whole story. After all, I have found that my new emotional relationship to news has outlasted even my personal boycott of Musk-owned websites and indifference to most other social media platforms. I'm still "doomscrolling," that is to say—even if it's only through the live blog updates on the New York Times home page. 

The Beetle Leg

 Well that was an experience! John Hawkes's experimental 1951 novel The Beetle Leg is short enough to be read in a morning, but I found it required the afternoon to then go back over it thoroughly enough to make sense of it. After all—Hawkes, according to an oft-quoted remark, sought to eliminate the usual encumbrances of character and plot from prose fiction. This makes the book considerably harder to read; but none the less emotionally powerful and ultimately rewarding for that. One might fear, after all, that an absence of traditional novelistic touches would render the book dull—but such proves hardly to be the case. 

For one thing, Hawkes's prose is not as truly bereft of recognizable narrative landmarks and human elements as the quote might lead one to expect (Beckett's The Unnamable, say, goes much further in this direction toward utter literary "flatness" and minimalism). And it is precisely the fact that these familiar elements seem present in the novel, even as they just elude one's grasp, that makes the novel so entrancing. Hawkes's prose gets into you like fish hooks (which play an unforgettable role in one of the novel's most disturbing hallucinatory scenes). It stays at just the outer limits of accessible meaning, and therefore becomes profoundly tantalizing. 

Probabilities

Walter Faber is a man for our time. I am referring to the protagonist of Swiss author Max Frisch's poignant and haunting 1957 novel Homo Faber, which I read this week. In his antihero Faber, Frisch has given us the archetype of the total technologist: a man who believes that humanity is a mere transitory stage of evolution, destined to be replaced by machines; a man who regards feelings such as "hopes and fears" as a byproduct of humankind's cognitive limitations—specifically, of our inability to accurately weigh the probability and improbability of various events—and one that ought to be transcended.

For people reading the novel in 1957 or the decades since, Faber's extreme technological anti-humanism might have struck them as a caricature. But picking up the novel now, in 2023, at the crest of the wave of techno-utopianism and transhumanist speculation touched off by the dawn of generative AI roughly a year ago, Faber just seems like an early emissary of an ideology that has become increasingly prevalent, particularly in Silicon Valley. Today, even more than in Faber's time, there is frank talk of the possibility of machine algorithms replacing most human creative and cognitive functions. 

Accidental Indictment of an Anarchist

 In the days after the Trump indictment in Georgia came down, most of us on the left were celebrating: accountability has come! Justice is on the way! But even then, a few crusty civil libertarians could be heard muttering: "be careful what you wish for." After all—the left-liberal contrarian take went—as much as we might like this one indictment, the legal authority used to secure it is nevertheless dangerously sweeping and over-broad: I am referring to Georgia's sui generis RICO statute. 

Then, as if to underline the point, just a few short weeks later the Georgia RICO law was back in the headlines: this time being used to indict more than 60 left-wing activists involved in the "Stop Cop City" protest movement. The event and its timing could not have more vividly illustrated the crusty civil libertarians' warning: this is not a good legal authority, because it allows the criminal actions of a few individuals to become the basis for indicting an entire political movement and ideology. 

Butterflies

I'm so excited for the new season of Supreme Court oral arguments to start

All day long I'm looking forward to my walk home so I can hit play on Pulsifer v US

So many hours of bingeable content coming our way

The first episode just dropped today

All my favorite characters are back

Their contracts were renewed for the next season

And all the major plot lines are coming to a head

Will they or won't they destroy the administrative state?

Will they or won't they eliminate any constitutional basis for the Federal Reserve system and plunge us into a global depression? 

Find out

This term on

SCOTUS TV!

Harrying Mexico

 In each of the last two Republican primary debates, the same bizarre line has cropped up (usually emanating from DeSantis, but echoed by others of the candidates who are trying to occupy or at least flirt with the MAGA/"nationalist" lane of the party). Usually one of the candidates will be asked about Ukraine, and whether the United States should continue supporting the country's defense. The candidate first will hem and haw (if they are one of the aforementioned MAGA/nationalist lane types), because they don't want to utterly antagonize and alienate the party's more traditional hawkish wing, but they also don't want to lose the votes of the party's neo-fascist Putin-loving contingent that is sometimes over-generously described as "isolationist." 

After unburdening themselves of whatever vague and noncommittal response the Ukraine question first elicited, the candidate then executes the pivot to what they really want to talk about. "The real problem," they say, "isn't the invasion happening at Ukraine's border; it's the invasion happening at our border!" or: "Instead of spending money to defend Ukraine's border; we should be spending money to defend our border!" Then comes the litany about Mexican drug cartels, asylum-seekers, and undocumented immigration, with the candidate usually winding up by declaring their intent to invade Mexico on "day one" after they take office. 

Death Drive

  Thanatos is in the driver's seat of today's GOP. I don't know how else to describe the careening suicidalism of the party's most recent activities. Even as the planet bakes and no politician can deny even in front of a hard-right audience (at least not without getting booed) that global warming is real—even then, the party's candidates at their second debate earlier this week spent the evening outbidding each other for who would pledge to burn fossil fuels the most if elected. (One of the few jabs Haley landed on DeSantis, for instance, was to accuse him of cancelling a few drilling and burning operations in his home state.) 

Likewise with the party's ongoing infatuation and death-embrace with Trump. Here is self-destructive behavior at its most incomprehensible. The man lost the previous election, tried to stage a coup, and has spent the years since penning increasingly vindictive and unhinged micro-edicts, in which he calls for the death of his enemies and declares his intent to eliminate the independence of large swathes of government should he be re-elected to office. And yet it seems all-but-inevitable at this point that GOP voters will crown him yet again as their nominee for president. 

"Subterfuge of Economy"

 The aforementioned Omnibus Project podcast did an episode this time last year on the so-called "Boots Theory"—a piece of observational economics attributed to Terry Pratchett. The essence of the theory is that the purchasing of cheap goods is actually more expensive in the long run, due to the shorter shelf-life of the inexpensive goods and the constant need for replacements. Thus, the theory goes—this (along with things like the higher interest payments charged to lower-income borrowers with poor credit ratings) is yet another way in which it is actually more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich. Poverty costs more, that is to say, because it forbids the larger up-front payment that is necessary to afford higher-quality and longer-lasting goods that do not need such frequent replacement. 

The articulation of this theory led to a hunt for literary precursors, according to the podcast, with people finding antecedents of the boots theory is such sources as the works of twentieth century working-class socialist novelist Robert Tressell. No one so far, however—to the best of my knowledge—has previously identified a different forbear of the boots theory that occurs in literature, which I uncovered in my recreational reading this week: the Pooka's theory of cheap factory-made clothes, as it appears in Flann O'Brien's experimental novel (often characterized as a work of metafiction and proto-postmodernism) At Swim-Two-Birds. Since I have not elsewhere seen the passage discussed in connection with boots theory, I offer an account of it here for purposes of our collective enlightenment. 

"The Eerie Synchronicity, Sir!"

 I've mentioned before on this blog that perhaps no other media property in existence has given me as many experiences of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as the Ken Jennings/John Roderick–hosted podcast, The Omnibus Project. As you may recall, this is the psychological illusion that occurs when you learn about something for the first time in one context, and then suddenly start to notice it everywhere.

I suspect a large part of the psychological basis for this effect is that we tend to overestimate our own front-end knowledge, due to our naturally ego-centric bias as individuals. Thus, if we have only just learned about something for the first time, at what feels to us to be a late or recent date, then we tend to assume that the thing must have been astonishingly rare and obscure—otherwise, why would we not have already known about it long ago? (I'll never forget or live down, for instance, the time in high school I had just learned the phrase "jumping the shark," and hastened to condescendingly explain it to a friend, only to have him roar in outrage that he knew about "jumping the shark" years before I did). Then, if we subsequently see this thing in other contexts, instead of assuming it must simply be less obscure than we initially thought, we feel that something mysterious is afoot. 

"The Reign of Old Men"

 When Mitt Romney unexpectedly announced his forthcoming retirement from the Senate at the end of this term, he chose to use the occasion to warn that American government was at risk of becoming a gerontocracy. He said that he was stepping aside in part to make way for new (read: younger) leadership in politics, and in case this seemed too subtle a hint, he specifically urged both of the current frontrunners for the two major nominations for 2024 to bow out and let someone else try captaining their respective parties. He couldn't vote for Trump, he said; but Biden too—he urged—was too advanced in years to be an effective leader, and ought to quit while he was ahead. 

Romney's words fed into a deeper anxiety among many observers of our political scene that our leadership has gotten too aged, and that there don't seem to be enough plausible young or middle-aged people to take their place. The usual parallels drawn here are to Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Mitch McConnell—a nonagenarian and an octogenarian, respectively, who have recently had health scares in Congress but have so far declined to retire. 

Burmurdouscak

 Ernest Hemingway was a great big phony 

Who went to war expecting it to be absurd and found, or claimed to find, that indeed it was

Then wrote a book full of danger and near-escapes with death and explosions that everyone assumed was based on his own experience and that he must have had such close brushes himself even though it wasn't and he didn't

And unlike someone like say John Dos Passos who also went to war expecting to find it absurd and found it in fact to be absurd but who at least had the decency to regret going for that reason and wish he had just been a creator instead and foreswear ever after that fact to ever again march with the intolerable pack and sink himself down into the swamp of common indignity just to get more material for purposes of calligraphy 

Team Leyner

 Did Mark Leyner predict the future? His defiantly unique and uproariously funny 1992 novel, Et Tu, Babe, was received at the time of publication as an outrageously over-the-top send-up of celebrity narcissism, shot through with early-nineties cyberpunk aesthetics. Picking it up now, thirty years later, the book feels more like an eerily accurate evocation of the age we now live in. Leyner's ability to conjure our present world three decades in advance of actual history is apparent in instances ranging from the hyper-specific (the book features Justice Clarence Thomas in a brief cameo, defending himself from allegations of improper personal connections) to the more general: the book portrays an overall direction—a precipitous downward slide—of cultural and technological development that has since been fulfilled in our time. A few examples follow.

Leyner's technique is largely grounded in the art of the absurd juxtaposition. This prompts him to imagine such ludicrous future technologies in his novel as software that re-edits any film of one's choice so as to substitute Arnold Schwarzenegger for the lead actor, or—along similar lines—a computer program that will alter the text of Leyner's own books in order to make their contents uniquely relevant to each regional market in the U.S.—thereby maximizing the books' salability and profitability. And as preposterous as these pseudo-technologies must have sounded at the time, neither is completely beyond the reach of present-day generative AI. And neither seems especially far-fetched in an era when people are spawning deepfakes of politicians and Hollywood actors, and digital publications can rapidly generate personally-customized content instantaneously, using chatbots. 

Why My Ántonia is So Great

 My Ántonia is a book often assigned in school, and thereby often ruined. Teenagers pick up a book about nostalgia, about adult regret and longing for the land of lost content, and they realize they don't relate to any of this at all. How could they? They have none of the life experience yet that would make this resonate. So they find the book boring and therefore never pick it up again. And typically they end up concluding that literature as a whole is a recondite language inaccessible to them, or else a pretentious game in which pompous adults merely claim to find things interesting that are actually dull, and they are turned off reading for life. Thanks a lot, school!

But picking the book up for the first time in adulthood (or at least, for the first time with any serious intent of finishing it) one realizes at last what all the grownups were talking about. This is a truly beautiful book! This is one of the greatest books ever! Why? What is so great about it? Let me count the ways. 

Clytemnestriad

I, who only tried
To keep faith with my child,
By crimsoning the tile whereon her killer last respired,
After he declined
The red carpet treatment
Saying “No, no; No sell-out I, I’m
Too rugged,
A man of the people!”
Oh, I smiled, thinking the while,
Is that what they call
Bundling our daughter into the fire
You’re just a touch old-fashioned?

Something to Say

 I have continued my reading of John Barth's short fiction this week, moving on from Lost in the Funhouse to his next collection of interwoven novellas: the wonderfully inventive and occasionally quite moving Chimera, originally published in 1972. One could say that here Barth continues to explore his great theme of the angst the modern writer feels at having nothing to say. Chimera is in part, like its predecessor, a book about not having anything to write a book about. 

I should clarify that I in no way mean this pejoratively. Barth himself is entirely self-conscious about this fear; he himself—as I quoted last time—admits that one of his recurring obsessions is that of the specter of creative "impotency" (to which he draws the obvious sexual analogy in both the earlier collection and in Chimera). And he is committed to responding to this situation, not by retreating into silence and despair, but by forging something out of the very impasse in which he finds himself: he seeks, as he wrote in Lost in the Funhouse—echoing the themes of his earlier essay on the "Literature of Exhaustion"—"to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness [...] against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new." 

Cupid as Metaphysical Rebellion

 Just about the only time I ever gain insight into the present state of pop music is at the tail-end of long road trips. It is then, after the twelfth hour or so of driving, at the end of a long day on the road, when my brain has thoroughly melted and formed two running rivulets down the sides of my face, that I am finally forced to silence whatever audiobook I was enjoying and resort to the radio to keep me in a state of minimal consciousness. I then start seeking through the multiple layers of FM stations, dodging the Christian rock ones (instantly recognizable by their generic chords and  tell-tale vocabulary choices (if you hear the word “glory,” and it’s not followed immediately by “days,” run)), skipping over the hectoring talk radio, and trying to find some basic catchy beat to bounce to. 

In any given summer, there are usually only about two new songs on the radio that will achieve this purpose (a frequency that works great for me, since this is about the number of times per year I make a long road trip of this sort). And these are so easily distinguishable that merely by virtue of searching through stations enough times, catching only the first few seconds of most of the offerings, I am usually able to tell within a few rotations which they are. This summer, one standout was that Olivia Rodrigo vampire song, which was undeniably compelling and engrossing (though, as other critics pointed out, a bit too heavy-handed in its lyrical choices; a trace more subtlety might have helped). 

Ballad of a Presidential Candidate

(Homage to e.e. cummings, "Ballad of an Intellectual")

Listen, you voters great and small
To the ballad of a candidate presidentiall
(And if you don’t emuhllate what he's done
You’re missing out royal on lots of fun)
Seems like his problem wasn’t with smarts
Brains, nerves, etc.—he had all the parts
Nothing seemed missing, when he peered inside,

Errata and Marginalia 026: Barth

 John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York, NY, Anchor Books, a division of Random House: 1988), first published 1968. 

What does it mean to find a "typo" in an avowedly experimental work of fiction? How is one to sort out the deliberate eccentricities from the copy-editor's mistakes? Would it even make sense to speak of there being a misspelling in an edition of, say, Finnegans Wake? 

Identifying errata in Barth's celebrated and groundbreaking collection of postmodern metafiction, Lost in the Funhouse, presents some of these same difficulties. Still, even after making allowances for such idiosyncratic but accepted variants as "enounce," and even after acknowledging that there are more than a few instances in these stories where the author plainly intended to repeat phrases or pass off odd locutions, as some of his narrative experiments--even then, I find, there are a few places in the current print edition where the misspellings appear to serve no literary function, and which I feel confident in stating were mere errata. For the convenience of future editors, I list them below. 

Revisiting Trump as Sorcerer

 There's something about Trump's strange power to survive and gain strength from every apparent political disaster (the fact, for instance, that he still holds the frontrunner position in the GOP primary, even as he is now under multiple federal and state indictments) that invites comparisons to dark magic. In a recent review published in the New York Times, for instance, the writer quotes a passage from the new Stephen King novel, in which a character "thinks Donald Trump is a boor, but he’s also a sorcerer; with some abracadabra magic she doesn’t understand (but in her deepest heart envies) he has turned America’s podgy, apathetic middle class into revolutionaries." 

Nor is the implication that Trump is a kind of occult entity limited to his critics and political adversaries. Tucker Carlson, who has done more than anyone to introduce Trump's dark spells into millions of American homes, and to amplify the former president's odds of once again securing the GOP nomination, once characterized Trump in a leaked text message as a "demonic force." 

Glass Boxes

 Earlier this summer, I wrote a post on this blog about a wacky new internet conspiracy theory that purports to trace the decline of Western civilization to the growth of modernist architecture. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, the theory regards the appearance of big formalistic glass boxes on the avenues of major cities, during the twentieth century, as an aesthetic scar so ghastly that it could not possibly have been self-inflicted. No way people wanted these buildings, the theory goes. Therefore, they must have been planted there in order to cover up the evidence of the luxurious global superstate that preceded their existence, and which ought to have been our true birthright, if only they (who, exactly? architects?) had not conspired to deprive us of it. 

Now, there are a couple things that never made sense to me about this theory. The most significant of these is that I think modernist architecture actually looks cool. I never understood why it would need an explanation other than its manifest aesthetic qualities. People can complain all they want about the dullness and interchangeability of "glass boxes" in the abstract, but actually go online and look up photos of some of the masterworks of Louis Kahn or Philip Johnson, say, and tell me truly you don't think they are at least occasionally awe-inspiring. What would require a diabolical conspiracy, by contrast, would be an attempt to corrupt the cold purity of high modernism and cover it over with extraneous flutings and doo-dads. 

Disintegration of Values

 On a popular politics podcast rehashing the first GOP primary debate of the election season, one of the guest panelists recently opined that the entire occasion felt like stepping through the portals of a time machine and finding oneself on the other side of the first Trump election. To drive home the point, she noted that she had briefly during the debate posted to her social media pages a gif from "Back to the Future," with the dial of the DeLorean set to 2015. 

The reason the debate felt like such an atavistic throwback is surely due most of all to the absence of the race's current frontrunner. Trump's decision to sit out the event and lob fusillades from a side conversation with Tucker Carlson gave those of us watching on TV a window into a Trumpless version of the GOP--the party that would still survive today, if the vast majority of its voters weren't already in the bag for a candidate who represents so little of what it once stood for. Left to its own devices, sans Trump, we realized the party still sounds a lot like it used to. It was momentarily reassuring, if only from the standpoint of sheer nostalgia. 

Awaiting One's Daily Bread

 There is a moment in Italo Svevo's poignant early novel, As a Man Grows Older--one of two books the Triestene writer published during his period of obscurity as a young author, before he gave up literature in discouragement, only to be coaxed back decades later into setting pen to paper by an improbable and fateful friendship with James Joyce--when the novel's hapless and irresolute, yet touching and lovable protagonist Emilio (a forerunner in these qualities of Svevo's later and more famous literary creation Zeno Cosini) is suddenly reminded, by the sight of a group of laborers on a river, of his earlier socialist convictions. 

It occurs to him that these beliefs, his former political faith and the visionary dreams of human flourishing that they engendered, now seem very remote from him. It's not that he ever renounced them; they just seem distant from his present life. And at once this fact fills him with shame. "He was stricken with remorse for having betrayed his earlier ideals and aspirations," writes Svevo (De Zoete trans. throughout); "for the moment the whole of his present life seemed to him to be a kind of apostasy." 

GOP Tankies

Watching the GOP primary debate on live TV earlier this week, I found one of the more reassuring moments of the event to be simultaneously its most disturbing. This came when the moderators introduced the subject of U.S. support for Ukraine. One after another, the vast majority of the candidates on stage spoke in favor of maintaining U.S. military aid to Ukraine. This (setting aside nuanced disagreements on strategy for the moment) was the reassuring part: Despite our differences across party lines, most of us--it briefly seemed--can still agree on a few basic truths: Putin is a ruthless authoritarian; his invasion is bad; Ukraine is an ally, whose preservation as an independent state implicates the fate of the democratic West in general, and we owe them our support in their attempt to resist Russian aggression. 

The disturbing part was that, even though the majority of the candidates on stage voiced support for these consensus views, they do not actually represent the majority of the Republican party. The pro-Ukraine vote on stage may have amounted to about 87% of the candidates in the race-- but they collectively are polling in the single digits among likely GOP primary voters. The candidate who wasn't on stage-- the absent Trump-- is still attracting more support in the polls than all the others combined. And the only person present for the debate who disagreed with the rest on Ukraine is also the most representative of Trump's views on this subject--the lickspittle Vivek Ramaswamy, who spent his air time evidently trying to toady up to the absent former president in the hopes of an eventual cabinet post or even a VP spot on the ticket. 

Easter Eggs: Baker

As John Livingston Lowes proved better than anyone in The Road to Xanadu, there is exquisite intellectual pleasure—combining the satisfactions of scholarship, mystery, and the chase—to be found in tracking down exactly what an author was reading at the time they composed their works. And if anyone is likely to provide enough textual clues to complete the task, it is Nicholson Baker. Here's why:

Déjà vu

I spent much of the summer watching the looming GOP primaries with a kind of cynical detachment that now seems inexplicable to me. I of course can't imagine enduring another Trump presidency, but DeSantis seems nearly as awful, and his personal arrogance and sense of entitlement invite a feeling of schadenfreude, even when the obvious replacement, should he stumble and fall out of the gates, is the man who just tried to subvert American democracy. When one heard anecdotes out of DeSantis's self-applauding memoir about how superior he is in courage and awesomeness to all other mortals, it was hard to suppress an inner impulse to say, "Go get him Trump--take him down a peg!"-- even on the part of someone who knows full well--or thought they knew-- just how disastrous a Trump administration redivivus would be for the country. 

That all changed for me, though, on listening to the recent rounds of reporting on Trump's indictments. Of course, there was little in any of them to catch one wholly by surprise. But a few choice details made it all real to me again in a way that was fresh and living: Pence's testimony, for instance, that Trump had described him as "too honest" for his unwillingness to violate the Constitution; the fact that Trump insiders were openly discussing the Insurrection Act as something that might empower them to deploy the military to suppress opposition, in the event that their scheme to overturn the election provoked widespread unrest. In other words, it was borne in all over again to me-- something I should never have forgotten: this man tried to undo democracy! He tried to stage a coup and unlawfully retain power! He must never again be trusted anywhere close to the reins of authority!

If Only...

 One of the more baffling displays of culture wars run amok happening in my home town in Florida right now is the campaign that far-right officials have waged against the local hospital for its handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Their objection? That the hospital did not dose patients with experimental pseudo-treatments with no support from the FDA but an ardent following on the political right: things like the horse de-worming medication ivermectin and the anti-malarial drug once touted by Trump, hydroxychloroquine. No matter that a hospital needs to follow scientific advice on how to treat its patients or else risk liability. The facility and its staff were nevertheless put through the wringer merely for complying with FDA guidelines. 

In trying to understand how such an absurd controversy could even begin, my mother made a helpful observation: a lot of the local people leading the charge had lost loved ones to the pandemic. And, in a state of personal grief, it is easy to become obsessed with the haunting question of whether things could have gone differently: whether there was not some one thing that one could have done that would have prevented the catastrophe. Would my family member still be alive, people would ask themselves, if only the doctor had been willing to think outside the box--if only they had been willing to try one of these other less popular or mainstream treatments? 

What Would Randolph Do?

 The shambling figure of the early twentieth century critic, radical, and social prophet Randolph Bourne must forever be one of those ghosts that haunt the American left-liberal conscience in times of war; and now that we are nearly eighteen months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with no end in sight, it's worth taking stock of how the liberal intelligentsia has responded to the conflict. 

Bourne, recall, was one of the few writers of the progressive generation who consistently and unbendingly opposed U.S. involvement in the First World War, and he castigated his fellow intellectuals searingly for their willingness to dupe themselves into backing the President's position. All too many became convinced that the instrument of war could be used for ideal social ends. Bourne, in expressing skepticism toward this proposition, stands out with the benefit of hindsight as uniquely prescient among his contemporaries.

Truth Vaccine

 In his collection Mythologies, the French critic Roland Barthes describes at one point a technique in counter-intuitive advertising which he dubs "Operation Astra." The process works like this: first, spend some time criticizing your own product. Acknowledge and emphasize all of its most notorious flaws. Outdo your very critics in deprecating your wares. This old thing? Terrible. Look at it! It's tattered; moldy; it has holes. Who'd want it?

This gains you credibility in the eyes of a jaded and leery public, sick of being told what to do and buy. 

Stockmanns

 When, as a teenager, I first heard the plot of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People described, I recall thinking that it was a strange way to illustrate the Norwegian dramatist's thesis about the heroism of the isolated individual. If Dr. Stockmann had been driven from his hometown for being a socialist or the village atheist, say, it would have made more sense to me. But the idea that the townsfolk would resent so keenly a scientific conclusion about their water supply that seemed inarguable, and that it was manifestly in their own interests to heed, struck me as implausibly pessimistic. This is not the sort of thing that gets politicized, I thought. 

Of course, this was a naive attitude for me to hold even in the context of the times: the second George W. Bush administration. In reality, public health has always been controversial, and was so even then. There was no halcyon era in which it was held to be above politics. People with financial interests impacted by the findings of scientists have always resented them for it and sought to discredit their work. In this regard, Dr. Stockmann's fictional experience could be analogized to the controversies over mass tort liability in the twentieth century: legal disputes and fiery public debates over cigarette smoke, lead paint, and other public health menaces. 

Running with the Pack

 Every few years I experience a great wave of conformism. "What if it is not, after all, too late for me," I ask, "to be like everyone else?" Why, after all, should I have created all these rules and prohibitions for myself—no this, no that? Why must I devote my life to chimeras and dreams that can never love me back—justice, virtue, and other abstractions? Why can't I just get a job like other people have, make an ordinary sort of living, and find meaning in the usual places—family and so forth. As I once wrote in a poem on this blog: 

One wonders if it is not
After all so easy
To tuck in the shirt and find the mate
And birth the baby and bring up the child
And have the large family and build the large house
And make the large money and lay off the coffee

And quiet the large doubts and leave the large terrors

Missing Tapes

 Did it finally happen? Did Trump just reach peak Nixon? 

All throughout his presidential campaign and tenure, after all, Trump invited a sense of continuity with the former president. There seemed to be echoes of the Nixon-era "Chennault Affair" in the parallel foreign policy Trump's campaign team ran in the lead-up to the election. Trump himself was personally connected with historical figures from the Red Scare era like Roy Cohn. And the Donald even gathered to his banner some of the same self-described dirty tricksters, viz. Roger Stone, who made their bones doing electoral skulduggery for the Nixon campaign (and who, in Stone's case, bears a tattoo of the former president in case anyone forgot the connection). 

Protean Career Plans

 In my shambolic journey through young adulthood, I once joked that at one time or another I had managed to consider every possible career and life trajectory other than joining the military. Now, earlier this summer, I finally managed to cross that last missing item off the list. Despite opposing nearly everything the U.S. military has done in my politically-conscious lifespan, I strangely found myself a month or so ago checking out the procedure for officer enlistment in the U.S. Navy, and seriously thinking about doing it. 

What drove me to this unlikely consideration was primarily the same old motivation that has prompted people throughout history to take the King's shilling: the promise of job security. Specifically, it occurred to me that the military employs lawyers, and that they get benefits and tenure for about as long as they want to stay there. What appeals to many people about the military, after all, is that they seem to want you there (at least they give you that impression before you have mortgaged your freedom to them) and that they have resources to throw around. Plus, it offers to many young people a solution to the omnipresent existential dilemma that confronts us in the state of freedom. The military, whatever else it does, at least tells you what to do. And that's something!

The UFO Flap Comes for Congress

 Well, the never-ending UFO story is back, with high-profile members of Congress joining hands across party lines to give yet another imprimatur of respectability to the theory that extraterrestrial craft are visiting Earth. The latest flap was prompted by an alleged military intelligence "whistleblower" who came forward with the staggering claim that the U.S. government has recovered technology of "non-human origin" from UFO crash sites—and is keeping it a secret from the rest of us. 

If these claims sound preposterous on their face, Very Serious People are lining up to assure us they are in fact highly credible. After all, Congress is convening a hearing to discuss the allegations, and the likes of Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio have cosponsored legislation demanding answers from the executive branch on any secret UFO programs it may be operating, as well as on any "biological evidence" they may possess "of living or deceased non-human intelligence." Think Roswell and Alien Autopsy. 

Froth on a Daydream

 The arrival of a new bull market on Wall Street has myself and a lot of people waiting uneasily for the other shoe to drop. Why is it that the Fed keeps raising interest rates, economists keep warning about a potential downturn, and yet stocks keep rising and economic data keep coming in better than expected? The incongruity imparts a magical sheen to the markets, and whenever people start to engage in magical thinking about the economy, we can trust we are probably in the presence of a bubble. There is a "tulip mania" afoot, of the sort Donald Barthelme wrote it was ever a public duty to confront. 

Yet, to see the froth is not necessarily to resist bathing in it oneself, while it lasts. One still checks back on the stock ticker each day, hoping to see those numbers rise. I have even developed a superstition that if I can somehow manage to resist the urge to look at the results each day, until after markets close at 4 PM Eastern, and save up all that dopamine for one big rush at the end of trading hours, then this very restraint and forbearance on my part would somehow itself act to drive prices higher. 

Correcting People

 One of my ongoing debates with a friend, which I've described on this blog before, concerns our long-standing difference of opinion on the topic of the appropriateness of "feedback." He is of the view that, if you catch someone making a mistake or committing an error, you should instantly apprise them of it. After all, he argues, are you not doing them a favor in doing so—because you are saving them from the fate of having to walk around with a false belief? 

I, meanwhile, am of what I prefer to call the Ken Jennings school of thought on the issue—based on a quote the Jeopardy star once delivered on a podcast. The Jennings view is that it is rude—an undesirable and unattractive personal trait—to correct people or point out to them that they are wrong. Even if one thinks or knows that they are wrong, therefore, one should pretend not to notice the fact. 

"Perfection is Death"

 A couple months ago, I shared with a friend the key take-aways from a post I'd written on this blog, grappling with the topic of perfection. I was writing in the piece about how I was seized at times by the sudden fear that I had previously enjoyed a perfect life, but that I had pointlessly smashed my own idyll in order to move to a new city and start a new existence as a law student. 

My conclusion in the blog, ultimately, was that, first, I was prepared to bite the bullet on the possibility that my previous life had been perfect because, second, perfection is something that always invites its own destruction anyway. Perfection necessarily means stasis, after all—which means immobility—since, why should one ever change what is perfect? Yet, the essence of life is movement and change. To stop moving is to drop dead. Therefore, I concluded at last, I was right to smash my own perfection and to embark upon a new, imperfect life, even conceding the truth of that perfection, because "perfection is inimical to life." Perfection is death. It must be destroyed, or else the organism, which requires change and motion, dies where it stands. 

Flation

  This week brought another round of the perverse spectacle of Wall Street wringing their hands over the supposedly "bad news" that the economy keeps growing and the labor market keeps thriving, at least according to the latest data. Obviously, the hand-wringing is a rational response from their perspective to the downstream effects of this news on interest rates—the latest data means that the Fed will almost certainly keep making borrowing more expensive, in its July meeting, in order to slow down wage and price growth. 

But this just pushes the question back a step further: why does our central bank need to keep battling against the very growth and labor market strength that are benefiting American workers and increasing our national prosperity? Is there no possible response to inflation, other than to fight so hard against what should be a manifestly good thing? 

Resolutions

 At some point in the middle of 2021, some internet self-help wisdom managed to trickle down to me sufficient to convince me that what I really needed to do in order to solve all my life problems and conquer adulthood was to make my bed right after I woke up. I therefore started doing so punctiliously each morning. I swore to myself that each day, before I did anything else, I would make that bed; because, after all, if I can't do something as simply as make the bed, how can I expect to accomplish anything else? 

I made it about two days under this new regime, then collapsed into the worst spell of melancholic depression I'd suffered in years, read Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, quit my job and went to law school. 

Ideas Reborn

My three-year-old nephew met me at the door of his parents' house yesterday with an urgent message: "hurry! There are ghosts everywhere! We have to catch them!" I instantly fell in behind to join the ghost hunt, before I even had a chance to say hello to the adults in the house. My sister yesterday compared playing with toddlers to a round of improv comedy, and I see her point. As she put it, you have to take a "yes, and" approach. You will get nowhere if you reject the premise your scene partner has already established. You just have to accept it and them supply whatever additional elements come to mind. 

I therefore accepted entirely that we were on a ghost hunt. We charged around from room to room using an air puffer and a toy hammer respectively to eliminate or frighten away the spectral intruders (except for those few that were deemed to be "friendly"). At a certain point, my nephew gestured at me. "Oh no!" he cried, "there's a ghost on your head!" I doubled over and began clawing at my scalp. "Ah! Get it off! Get it off!" Then, in the spirit of improv comedy, I hazarded a next development: "Are they octopus ghosts that drop on people's heads?"