The Visit

 Airport book kiosks would appear to be unpromising places to find literary reads these days. With each passing year they seem to carry fewer and fewer actual books; and those that remain are almost exclusively recent bestsellers. Which is perfectly fine in itself, no doubt, but does no good to an eccentric like me, who is perversely obsessed with picking over the intellectual ruins of the twentieth century and rarely reads a book published in the last two decades. 

There is one small newsstand in the Chicago-Midway airport, however, that always brings me luck. By all appearances, it is an unpromising as all the others. It, too, has been steadily denuded with the passage of the years of most of its stock of books. But the handful of shelves that remains always seems to carry at least one slim volume that beckons to me—a literary classic, say, that I had always meant to read but never gotten around to, and which is just the right short length for a plane ride. This weekend, that book for me was Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit. 

Living One's Dreams

 When she was in the 8th grade, my older sister used to make a habit of explaining her math homework to me each night while she worked through it. The practice served us both: she (who, perhaps unsurprisingly, grew up to become a teacher) has always found the best way to learn something was to teach it to another (years later, when she was in college, we again discovered that she would infinitely rather explain to me what her BA thesis was about than write it down before an empty room and send it off into the void). 

And I, for my part, delighted in the thought that despite being only ten at the time, I was nevertheless learning "advanced math." I marveled at the apparent complexity of the exotic algebraic contraptions we studied, such as the quadratic formula (a device I settled on for the rest of that year as a kind of personal coat of arms). I took to writing these formulae down each night on post-it notes as talismans. The string of letters and symbols, which I ill-comprehended, seemed to have a romantic aspect akin to the writing on the glass in the Princeton library windows in A Beautiful Mind. 

Two Poems

I. 

Lecouvreur

Dramatic muse of whom the poet sang 
To Paris where his burning words condemned 
The cruelty of a public that would scant
No praise of her whose talents they consumed
But when, a husk, her final ember died  
Would throw her from the cemetery gates!
What soundness or consistency is there
In doctrine that rejects what it adored
And judges guilty whom it once enjoyed?
Who knew the one who told her tale before
The gathered heirs of they who damned her soul
Would face the fate alike of the portrayed 
And live to justify the poet’s rage?
Thus time may change the masks but not the face
Injustice and hypocrisy remain;
And they who loudest sang the muse’s praise
Still prove the ones to cast her to the wolves. 

Regret

 I wrote on this blog recently that it was only in the last few months—well into my second semester of law school, that I allowed myself to indulge the possibility of regret about going to law school. Since I published that post, I have added a few variations on the feeling to my inner stew: regret not only at going to law school, but at going to this particular law school; at having moved so far; at having decided too precipitously and based on a mad rush which school I should attend just in order to be done with the decision, rather than giving it the deliberation and thought of long-term consequences it required. 

Up to now, these suspicions had all been firmly consigned to the ranks of the Forbidden Thoughts. I placed them under this taboo because the regrets could only be futile (it's too late now) and because having made my choice and invested so much already I wanted to convince myself it could only have been a wise decision (sunk costs fallacy). Even more fundamentally, there seemed to be nothing to be gained from asking what might have happened, since the answer is fundamentally unknowable. Any regrets could only rest on unfalsifiable counterfactuals that can provide no guidance. 

A Thin Line

 A friend of mine who's a social worker shared with me a statement from her boss that had made a particularly large impression on her at the time. This supervisor's advice to my friend and the other clinicians on her staff went as follows: "Always remember: the things our clients say about us are true." 

This paradoxical assertion was not meant to be taken literally. After all, my friend works with people suffering from conditions ranging from paranoid schizophrenia to borderline personality disorder. Many are beset by delusions that far exceed the bounds of consensus reality; and even those who aren't often engage in the psychological process of "splitting," whereby they portray their clinicians in exaggerated terms as either wholly good or wholly evil and treacherous. 

Off the ladder

 A friend of mine was recapping the other day a conversation he'd heard at second hand with a current Yale Law student. Someone asked this student if they thought graduating first in your class from Harvard Law School was a distinguished accomplishment. "No," the Yale student said; "because all the people at Harvard Law are just Yale's reject pile anyways."

Being told of this interchange, I felt a perverse twinge of pleasure deep within me, at the thought that the institution I had chosen for my own legal education was in such a different league altogether from both these schools that I had effectively exited the race. No one from Yale or Harvard would look down their nose at me, since I was so far below their line of sight. Indeed—for perverse reasons I still struggle to explain to myself—I hadn't even applied to either school, during my own law school admissions process. "I guess I just... opted out," I told my friend. 

Objective Correlatives

 Like many Americans, pretty much the only time I see new, popular, contemporary films these days—the latest family-friendly CGI gem, say, or the latest Oscar-winner, etc.—is over family vacations, when we're all looking for a way to pass the evening together. And since these occasions only come around so many times a year, they always have a remedial quality: we're trying to catch up with what some of us, or some of our friends, have already seen and raved about during the interval since our last meeting. 

And with all these films lately, I seem to be having the same repetitive experience of let-down. Someone will highly recommend the film to me and explain its main theme. I will be instantly impressed. "That sounds amazing! So relevant! So on-point!" Then I will see the film, and it will feel strangely hollow. The resonant and appealing theme was there all right. But was there anything else? And if the theme was all there was to it, then what was the point of watching it, instead of just talking about it? 

AI Melancholia

 The past few days I've felt another wave of AI-related melancholia wash over me. Here I was thinking I had fully processed and already put aside my feelings on the subject. In one post after another the last few months, after all, I have catalogued my thoughts and reactions to the dawning of the AI age, doing my best to maintain perspective on the potential dangers of the new technology without taking at face value every extreme claim made on behalf of its purportedly revolutionary powers. 

No sooner had I put these thoughts behind me, however, than the makers of the current frontrunner of the AI race announce another, vastly more sophisticated version of the same tech; and I am back to reassessing all of my assumptions and evaluations all over again. The same fears return: is this the end of an era in human life?; was 2022 in some sense the last normal year we'll ever enjoy—and if so, should I have appreciated it more?; will I still be able to derive meaning from my life when many of the activities I value most might prove replaceable by machines? 

Always Next Time

 There is a recurrent irony in history whereby politicians and their parties often seem to end up fulfilling the exact opposite of what they came into office purporting to stand for: it was the hawkish Nixon who famously went to China, for instance; it was largely a series of center-right conservative governments in postwar Western Europe that created the modern welfare state; and so on. 

And if the effect can work in this beneficent direction—whereby right-wingers sometimes surprise us by gaining the credibility to enact policies that would be distrusted and resented in the hands of the left—it can also go the opposite way as well. It was a Democratic president who famously signed into law acts gutting welfare and expanding the death penalty, for instance (albeit ones first passed by a hard-right Congress).

Three Putin Stooges

Just over a year ago, after Putin began his invasion of Ukraine, I predicted on this blog that the isolationist and nativist faction of the GOP would soon lose the will for any ongoing support to the Ukrainian defense.  Particularly as the economic costs of sanctions started to mount, and people began to face real sacrifices in their daily lives for the sake of opposing Putin's expansionism, I wrote: "there will Trump and Tucker Carlson be, ready to declare: 'See! Putin's not your enemy. It's these Democrats! They're the ones trying to bleed you dry. What did Putin ever do to you? Who cares about Ukraine? Let Ukraine hang!'"

I then concluded: "And so the nation's other major party—the one that for years told us that they were the only party that truly had the guts to defend U.S. strategic interests and champion the cause of 'freedom' around the world—will be prepared to run the next election on a pledge to cozy up to Putin and let him trample over the rights of people in Ukraine and other neighboring countries."

A single second

 Back in my early twenties, when I still suffered from a paralyzing fear of flying each time I boarded a plane, I received some excellent advice: whenever the flight gets turbulent, just shut your eyes and count the bumps. I tried the exercise and soon added a twist of my own. Whenever the fasten-seat-belt sign lit up, I would close my eyes and concentrate on the next bump that went by. Then, after it had passed, I would try to score it on a scale of one to ten as to how intense it was. Curiously enough, this device worked. I soon stopped dreading turbulence on a flight, and found that I could weather any patch of "rough air" without losing control of my emotions. 

The trick works because it forces one to focus on the bumps that actually were, rather than the hypothetical bumps that may never be. Once one is concentrating on the individual bumps that actually happened, one realizes that each was entirely survivable. More than that, most of them were not actually that intense and scary. Score enough of them in your head, and you start to realize that one rarely gets above two or three on one's internal scale of terror. Why, then, was I so afraid before? It wasn't because of the actual bumps. It was because, once the bumps started, I began to imagine all the other, vastly more horrifying ones that might follow: leaps and plunges through thousands of feet of empty air. 

"The Peculiar Predominance of Luck"

 The implosion of Silicon Valley Bank—the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, as all the headlines have blared the last few days—is one of those astonishing events (a bank run? An old-fashioned financial panic? In 2023?) that already has acquired an aura of retrospective inevitability. After all, we knew that something was going to go haywire in the financial system this year. We just didn't know exactly what, or exactly when. All last year, we were dreading what seemed like an unavoidable recession. It kept being foretold; and yet it never actually came. All this calendar year so far, we have similarly been living under the Damoclean peril of the House GOP's refusal to raise the debt ceiling—we just don't know exactly when we will crash up against it. 

Some sort of looming financial catastrophe was plainly in the air, therefore, following the come-down from the pandemic-era bull market and the Fed's program of interest rate hikes. We just didn't know what it would be. Thus, we are truly experiencing a "black swan" event (named for a book by Nassim Taleb that I confess I have not yet read). The idea of the black swan—as I understand it—is that any given improbable thing may be unlikely in itself (by definition—so far we have merely a tautology). But given enough time and a large enough set of discrete events, improbable things will nevertheless happen. Thus, improbable events do in fact need to be factored into our expectations for the future. We need to be prepared for the seemingly unlikely catastrophe—such as a classic-style bank run occurring in 2023. 

Sacrilicious

An episode from Samuel Beckett's uproariously witty absurdist classic Molloy. It can only remind us (perhaps it inspired the latter?) of Homer Simpson addressing the waffle stuck to his ceiling. "Why do you mock me O Lord?"

Blame It on the Muse

Uh oh. I'm in for it now. One post on the subject of the excretory function—in the course of a nearly-decade-long (and counting) blogging career—might have been pardoned and overlooked as a single aberration. But to follow it up now with a sequel on the same topic is asking for trouble. I am practically inviting the Freudians by this point to come prowling around asking questions about my upbringing. 

All I can say in my defense is that I am not the first writer to sense an analogy between the voiding of the bowels and the plopping of words onto the page. The famously scatological Martin Luther seemed to equate the release of his long-pent heretical views, after a period of self-repression, to the relief that comes with the evacuation of a retained stool. Jonathan Franzen in an interview somewhere compared the enviable prolixity and productivity of the mature John Updike to a toddler who has just dropped his first full turd unassisted and wishes to show it off to his parents. 

Supply and Demand

 Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's appearance before Congress this week forced our lawmakers to confront directly an odd feature of our economic system that most of them would rather politely ignore: namely, that the most important economic policy decision makers are not themselves, but rather an unelected board of technocrats charged with raising and lowering interest rates. Not only that: but this board is presently engaged in the task of actively trying to tamp down many features of the economy that the rest of us would ordinarily regard as unalloyed goods, and which purely democratic decision making would probably never knowingly sacrifice: a strong labor market, robust wage and jobs growth, etc. 

Now, as bizarre as the Fed system is, it would be infinitely worse not to have a central bank empowered to act independently (history has proved that well enough). And most members of Congress know this. Thus, most senators seem to have felt there was little to be gained from challenging the Fed directly during Powell's testimony. Still, there were a couple lawmakers who reportedly couldn't contain themselves. According to Politico, John Kennedy of Louisiana grilled Powell on whether he was intentionally trying to raise the unemployment rate. Elizabeth Warren, in the most heated exchange of all, asked Powell what he would say to the millions of people the Fed's rate hikes will knowingly drive out of work. 

The Bloated vs. the Hungry Tick

 A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were having a familiar and singularly unenlightening debate as to which of the two presumptive GOP frontrunners for the 2024 election—Trump or DeSantis—would be marginally worse than the other. Obviously, it's an absurd and unnecessary question. They're both awful, and we should work equally hard to ensure neither of them ever becomes president. No great truth to reveal there. 

Still, as an academic exercise, it's one that can't help but enthrall us. And in my own case, despite the steady accumulation of horrendous news out of Florida, I still held to the view that—dreadful as DeSantis may be—Trump is still slightly worse. Why? I argued: "we know that Trump tried to subvert democracy and undermine the results of a fair election. DeSantis hasn't done that yet. We shouldn't reward the guy we know is capable of a coup attempt. Better to give a chance to someone who hasn't tried it—even if it's only because he hasn't yet had the opportunity."

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

 In late 2018, deep in the slough and moral abyss of the Trump administration, I uttered on this blog a question from the heart: "Where is all the political art?" I felt that the nation was passing through such an ugly and unprecedented chapter that it demanded visual representation. More specifically: it needed someone who could summon on canvas the depth of rage and disgust I felt for the people then in power. 

Where was our Otto Dix to depict the carnivalesque depravity of the White House staff? Where was the Goya to depict with savage sarcasm the violence and injustice of the Trump presidency? Where was our Guernica for the war in Yemen, where U.S. and Saudi bombs are raining down on civilians from the skies? Where is our Francis Bacon to capture the mixture of horror and vulgarity and mediocrity all rolled into one that Trump himself represented? 

Impostures

 A friend of mine was telling me the other day about his stint in high school as the editor of the student newspaper. I asked him how he got that gig. "Did you apply for it?" He giggled at the naïve question. "No," he said. "People just weirdly appointed me to it." He went on to describe this as a frequent occurrence of his high school experience. He didn't really try to succeed or be put in charge of things. People just mysteriously worked to clear a path for him without his asking. 

Most people reading this far might conclude that this is merely a product of privilege. And while that no doubt explains some part of the phenomenon, it should be noted here that my friend is neither white nor straight—so he couldn't be described as privileged across all aspects of his identity, at least not in the present state of our society. There were plenty of straight white men around when we were in high school who could have been appointed in his place, if privilege were the only factor. But instead it was him. 

Coolness

 Corporate sponsors working on digital platforms have a new complaint: the strategy of bankrolling "influencers" to promote their products is starting to backfire. People have become cynical about influencers with paid promotions. They might tune into a YouTube channel looking for some original content, but they will quickly x-out of the window again at the first whiff of sponsored content. 

In this regard, corporations are just experiencing all over again what advertisers already went through in the 1990s, when they confronted a youth audience inured to claims of "coolness" and frankly jaded about any company's appeal to what's "hip" with the "young people." As chronicled in accounts of the time, such as Douglas Rushkoff's 2001 documentary for PBS Frontline, Merchants of Cool, marketers responded to this phenomenon with meta-textual recursions as a way to try to out-cynical the cynical youth (such as creating advertisements with paid celebrity promotions that themselves mocked the idea of paid celebrity promotions).