B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates

 Of all the "experimental" and "avant-garde" novelists of the twentieth century, B.S. Johnson's work has lasted in a way that others' simply has not. (Who rests in Robbe-Grillet's mean flattery now?) And I can't help the feeling that his books succeed for reasons largely if not wholly unrelated to their formalistic experiments and convention-breaking eccentricities. 

The things one most remembers from Albert Angelo, say, are the hideously realistic portrayals of life as a substitute teacher in working class England—not the pieces of paper cut out from the text. But then again, I have to ask myself—did I only pick up the book in the first place because of its formalistic experiments?

Sunk Costs

 Of the various Senate Republicans who have expressed skepticism in the past about the president's war-making powers, a curious number of them nevertheless voted against the resolution this week that would have constrained Trump's ability to continue his illegal bombing of Iran. 

The New York Times yesterday highlighted the case of Todd Young, the Senator from Indiana, who in the past had "warned of the dangers of a legislative branch that had ceded its war-making powers to the executive branch." Nevertheless, he helped vote down the war powers resolution. What gives? 

On His Blindness

 As readers of the blog know, my dad is recovering right now from a week-long stay at the hospital for septic shock. On top of that, he has a brain tumor in his right temporal lobe that has robbed him of vision on the left side. He also has severe hearing loss that long predated the cancer, but which has certainly not been improved by the tumor or the fact that he is currently down one hearing aid because of an accident in the ICU. 

As he put it to me at one point: "This would all be a lot easier if I could see or hear." 

American Football

 I have long said that the Trump administration's crudely chauvinistic rhetoric, about their various wars and extrajudicial killings, reminds me of nothing so much as the speaker in Harold Pinter's satirical 1991 poem about the Gulf War, "American Football." 

But at his latest press conference today, Hegseth made the comparison seem even more inevitable. 

Pinter's poem satirizes the sadism and cruelty of the American war juggernaut—and its apologists—by adopting the voice of a triumphant schoolyard bully: 

Into Hell, Into Prison

 My dad just finished a week-long stay in the hospital. It was one of the best facilities in the country. He was in a lovely new building with lots of natural lighting. By the end of his time there, he had a room to himself. A room with a view, at that. 

But "Even in this island richly blest [...] Earth is too harsh," as Edna St. Vincent Millay once put it. Even the best of possible hospitals is still a hospital. And thus, in spite of all its efforts, it still felt like a kind of prison or carceral institution. 

"War is Hell"

Pete Hegseth was asked yesterday about the four U.S. service members who had already lost their lives at that point due to Trump's illegal Iran bombing. (Now, it's up to six.) He blithely responded: "War is hell and always will be." 

War? What war? I thought we were just engaged in a "strike" or a "special operation" of some sort. If this is a war, then the U.S. Constitution is very clear who has the authority to make it: Congress, not the president. 

For God and Phallus?

 It goes without saying that there is no rational, legal, moral, or humanitarian justification for Trump's murderous war of aggression in Iran—which has so far taken the lives of four American service members and hundreds of Iranian civilians—many of them apparently elementary-age schoolchildren. 

If you search for a logical answer to the question: why are we are war with Iran?, you will find none. But if you search for explanations at the level of the nether-reaches of psychology—you will suddenly find a surfeit. From the standpoint of the libido and the Id, Trump's war suddenly seems over-determined.