Cenotaph

Carved out of a block of styrofoam after French Enlightenment architect Étienne-Louis Boullée's thrilling visionary design for a funerary monument to Sir Isaac Newton. It was supposed to be bigger than the pyramids. It would have put Epcot to shame. Tragically, it was never built. But a miniature carved out of styrofoam is a bit more doable. So I did it. Had we but world enough and time, I think this would be marketable as a pencil sharpener, with the writing implement entering the small portal. Or, dreaming big like Boullée, I think this would be an awesome plan for a doghouse.

UDS

So, back in 2016, I wrote a post of which I was intensely proud. Its subject was the range of distinct emotions and physical sensations that I know by inward knowledge I have experienced, but for which there didn't seem to be any word at present in our language. At the time, here is one I described:

Whenever I am alone with someone and they become consumed, of necessity, with some task involving intense concentration -- doodling or writing, say, or showing me something on a map, or finishing the drafting of an email (I first remember experiencing this feeling while watching my kindergarten teacher check something in her calendar, for example) -- I have a tingling sensation of pleasure somewhere in my abdomen. It's not like any other sensation of pleasure one obtains from any other satisfaction, however. It is a ghost's pleasure -- a thrill of temporary non-existence. I can sort of hover there, peering over the other person's shoulder, with one foot inside my being and the other outside of it. Then they close the laptop or the sketch book or calendar, turn to me, and the feeling evaporates.

After I explained all of this recently to my friend Seanan, he suggested that maybe there was a German word for it, since they are so good at coming up with compound words that lack precise English equivalents. Failing in our efforts to find one, he made one up: Über-die-Schulter (over-the-shoulder). And we'd better go with that, since we have no other. 

Have any of you ever experienced it, that is, a touch of the old Über-die-Schulter? "Ah, I had such a case of Über-die-Schulter at that meeting today." I could see it catching on.

Let us call it UDS for short.

Feedback

In the last few weeks, the term "cancel culture" suddenly entered our public lexicon. I suspect for many of us it was a recent New York Times op-ed that crystalized the notion -- here, as in so many other cases, NYT proving a solid barometer for telling when an idea has departed the digital cutting-edge and entered the frumpy mainstream -- thus becoming accessible to the likes of me. In any case, I found it to be a solid piece of work. Taking as its example a number of YA novels that have been yanked from the publishing queue in recent months because of negative reaction on social media to advance copies, it makes several points about our present cultural moment that needed saying.

Titus Andronicus

Most "great" famous authors really are great when you finally get around to reading them. And this is always a dismaying realization, since it defeats one's attempts to excuse the fact of not yet having read them by passing it off as a product of superior discernment.

For my young self, the trouble in this regard was always that I could never bring myself to touch Shakespeare. Of course, I read some of it in school, and saw some of it in plays I was taken to - that is to say, I absorbed the unavoidable quota in our society. But I never of my own volition made a concerted attempt upon the bard. The fact that the insidious educational Establishment wanted me to recognize Shakespeare's genius made me hate him on principle.

Venezuela, a postscript

Earlier this month, I wrote a short post about the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela. I was trying my best to play my usual aspirational role of a post-war Camus, planted between the Scylla and Charybdis of right- and left-wing tyrannies and delivering a firm and impassioned ni to both. Neither Franco nor Stalin! Neither victims nor executioners!

As applied to the present catastrophe unfolding in Venezuela, the Camus principle led me to try to communicate that both the Maduro government and the U.S. strategy of trying to topple him through sanctions -- and replace him with a man who has never been elected to the presidency -- are morally abhorrent.

Mending fences

In my limited backyard, a small portion of a white fence abuts in one area a next-door neighbor's property. It is a flimsy thing to start with -- made of some kind of plastic -- and when I keep my windows open on a windy night I often hear it creaking eerily outside my bedroom. Therefore, I wasn't entirely surprised -- actually, I didn't even notice -- when on a particularly blustery evening a few months back, a whole section of the fence popped out of its bracket, leaving a top corner of a section of the fence to flap occasionally against the column that otherwise sustained it.

This is, in fact, very much the kind of thing that I would never have noticed or fixed at all. Years might have gone by without my caring. I realize now that I was hearing it flapping at night all that time, but as I have mentioned, there was so much spooky creaking and rustling going on already, that my brain was willing to just add it to the mix.

The American Scheme

A coworker and I were trading podcast recommendations the other day, and as usually happens in these sorts of conversations, mine all seemed to me stale and obvious and old-hat, whereas she dropped a single name that has since then already changed my whole understanding of life and the world and American society. It was The Dream -- the podcast about Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). I'd never heard of it before, but I have now spent more than a few prolonged evenings binging its eleven episodes. Having reached the end, it now seems to me that MLMs explain everything about our national character and the political age in which we live.

But what exactly are MLMs? It turns out they include those great all-American corporations you've vaguely heard about from the distant past, but which are apparently still major players in our economy, including Amway and Mary Kay. It turns out they -- Amway specifically -- are the source of the DeVos family fortune that has bankrolled Republican politics in this country for the last half-century; that has staffed the Chamber of Commerce; that put my family's home town of Grand Rapids, MI on the map; and that catapulted our current Secretary of Education into a cabinet-level position. They are the companies that have won accolades and swelling praise from the likes of Donald Trump (no surprise there), George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon...

Eliot, Allusions by and to

Perhaps you are like me, and you have a general interest in literature, and therefore in your younger days you made a few valiant efforts to scale the tallest peaks of High Modernism, T.S. Eliot's poems among them, and when you did so you came away with a few memorable quotations and passages, and a great deal of other stuff that was wholly impenetrable and useless to you. And perhaps, if you are even more like me, you now find yourself approaching thirty, and are increasingly filled with a superstitious feeling that there are certain things that you just want to be able to say you did while you were still in your twenties, and you unexpectedly had a snow day from work today, and you are encouraged by seeing from the book on your shelf that the "Complete Poems" in Eliot's case are really not so great in number, even if they are dense in mystification, and so you decide to make another attempt upon that mountain that defeated you in the past, and you open the book and read.

Strategy, in the Face of Novelty

I am utterly sure that Democrats have done more to create the myth of the Republican master strategist than members of their own party ever could, or would want to. Since the 1990s, hand-wringing liberals have cried up the awesome power of the Frank Luntzes, the Lee Atwaters, the Roger Stones of the world-- burnishing their images more no doubt in the eyes of prospective clients than anything their promotional materials could achieve. "Look, Republicans are so evil!" this line of liberal argument runs. "They have these Machiavellian geniuses." And then the usual corollary, added with a twinkle: "Couldn't we get one of those for ourselves?"

We are like distressed villagers calling in the services of the Magnificent Seven. We need an outlaw gunslinger of our own, but fighting on the side of good rather than evil. Or, less sympathetically, perhaps we are like Denethor, contemplating the prospect of laying hold of the One Ring: the Democratic version of Lee Atwater could be "hidden deep in the vaults, never to be used, unless at the utmost END of need." You could trust us with one!

Venezuela

On a news digest I receive at work that features any and every story each week involving the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, I noticed a headline a few days ago that made me wince. Not with the usual feeling of righteous dismay, I add. But with something more akin to shame.

The source in this case was in no way reputable, but far from this lessening my embarrassment, it sharpened it. There's something particularly nausea-inducing about being criticized in a way that you half-way recognize as true by someone otherwise distinctly lacking in the moral upper-hand. You have a right to be awful, you think. You have a right to attack me, hate me, malign me. I'd expect that. But you surely don't have a right to be right, while doing so.