Mailer Marginalia

 In his great history of the footnote as a literary form, Anthony Grafton argues that the essential innovation of the footnote was to introduce a structure of parallel narrative to historical writing. Once footnotes became the default method of citation in historical scholarship, that is, works of history now came equipped with not one, but two ongoing narratives: first, the author's primary chronological narrative, and second—the sly, often more ironical, discursive editorial narrative that accompanies it through the footnotes. 

The reader of a work of history thus has two voices going in their head at the same time, as they work their way through the book: the main historical narrative, plus the editorial commentary. 

Complex and Simple

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is—it cannot be said too often—historically complicated. Too complicated to lend itself easily to being boiled down into signs or slogans—which makes the proliferation of signs and slogans in this conflict especially frustrating. 

But some things about this conflict are actually remarkably simple: such as that no one, on either side, can justify the killing or persecution of civilians. And we shouldn't let people invoke the complexity of the historical circumstances to disguise this truth—to cloak the indefensible. 

The Siege of Chicago

 My one-time home city of Chicago has been swarming for months now with Trump-deployed federal troops (ICE, National Guard, FBI, you name it). All of this is known only to me by hearsay—I haven't been back to the City of the Big Shoulders for years at this point—at least not for any purpose more substantial than a flight through Midway. 

But the images are inescapable for anyone following the news. ICE agents in military gear rappelling down the sides of apartment buildings; kicking down doors; searching people's homes without a warrant; ransacking people's private belongings and hauling them outside to wait in zip-ties in the backs of black vans. These are the dystopian nightmares of our news feeds. 

Heresy Hunting

 This morning, I woke up thinking of "men as innocent as I am / Bent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars." (MacDiarmid.) Because right now—Tennessee is holding a man in jail literally for doing nothing more than what you or I might have done on a typical day—namely, criticizing the far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk on social media. 

The Intercept this weekend had the story. There is not much more to it than what I said above. The case does not have some further legal wrinkle that could explain how a state government can get away with violating the First Amendment rights of one of its citizens so flagrantly. A county sheriff in Tennessee really did just take it upon himself to arrest a man for posting negatively about Charlie Kirk online. And he has been in jail ever since. He remains there to this day. 

"Predistribution" and the Democrats

 The most recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast was interesting, in that it presented a number of ideas I would have whole-heartedly endorsed a couple years ago—and which I therefore wanted at first to leap to my feet to applaud; but which I find a bit hard to square with more recent political experience. 

Headlined "Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?"—the episode sounds at first like it's going to be another warmed-over version of the stock Bernie Bro critique of the Democratic establishment. But Klein's guest ultimately makes a more sophisticated point. 

Butchery

 This week certainly did not lack for more hideous news. The Trump administration yesterday reportedly moved an aircraft carrier into position in the Caribbean—yet another show of military force, threatening a potential action against Venezuela—as well as a sign that the administration means to double down even further on its current drone war in the region—which has now, as of this week, killed more than 40 people. 

Meanwhile, human bodies are reportedly washing ashore in Trinidad. No one is quite positive where they come from—but they have all been hideously mangled and burned and chewed up like something out of Gottfried Benn's "Morgue" poems. The most likely explanation is that these are victims of the Trump administration's extrajudicial killings by drone. 

Gentrified Democrats?

 The New York Times opinion page ran a piece yesterday charting what it describes as the "gentrification" of the Democratic Party. 

Over the last few generations—the piece observes—the two major political parties in the U.S. have essentially swapped positions—at least when it comes to their class valence. 

"Americans who lived in wealthier areas used to have mostly Republican representatives," the author notes. Today, the opposite is the case. 

Soviet Antisemitism

 Every one-time communist has some cherished floor—some moral bottom line—below which they thought their disillusionment could never sink. In Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook—her floor is antisemitism. No matter what else she discovered the Soviet regime might be capable of—she thought—at least they would never do that. 

Even as it became harder and harder to avoid the reports of purges, hangings, deportations, and gulags, then—she still managed to persuade herself that Stalin's government would at least never stoop to outright antisemitic persecution. It would retain that one moral distinction. "[W]e all had some illusions," she writes: "mine was that anti-Semitism was 'impossible'."

It Had to Go Somewhere

 Yesterday, Jonathan Blitzer published an article in the New Yorker trying to answer the question of why the Trump administration has become so infatuated with its campaign of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea. 

It seems, from Blitzer's explanation, that the administration's interest in this bloodshed is, if anything, overdetermined. Blowing up boats full of civilians checks a lot of boxes for different members of Trump's team. 

Unknown to Glory

 More than a month after Charlie Kirk's assassination, people are still getting canceled for saying the wrong thing about his death—even on the other side of the Atlantic. The Associated Press reported yesterday that the head of the Oxford debating society was forced out this week for reportedly celebrating the killing in a group chat. 

Meanwhile, right-wing activists across the country are continuing their campaign to turn Kirk into a martyr and a patriotic symbol. In my home state of Florida, Republican state legislators have proposed using state funds to coerce public universities into renaming college roadways in Kirk's honor. One county has already reportedly rechristened a highway in his memory (at least on one sign). 

A Ruthless Few

 As Trump continues his campaign of retaliation against perceived dissidents—including members of his own former administration—it's interesting to watch the steady moral deterioration along the way in the kinds of people he can find to do his bidding. They just get worse and worse. 

Trump's first attorney general, after all—back in his first term—was Jeff Sessions—and we thought at the time that he was as bad as they could come. But even he had enough integrity to recuse himself from an investigation in which he had a conflict of interest—and Trump never forgave him for it. 

Joyce's Exiles

 The scatological themes of the previous post reminded me of something I wanted to say at some point about Joyce's early play, Exiles. 

I grant that the psychoanalytic reading is perhaps the lowest form of literary criticism. But some authors simply cry out for it. Joyce etched his psycho-biography into every page. Not only does Exiles feature the same episode involving Joyce's mother than haunted the mature artist, and his fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus—the one in which he refused to kneel by his mother's deathbed, because of his rebellion against the family religion—it also dwells in places on Joyce's other great Freudian obsessions: defecation and micturition. 

Merde

 Over the weekend—in response to nationwide protests against his rule—the president of the United States chose to post an AI-generated video on social media of himself spraying the American people with poop. 

We're so inured to this sort of thing by now it barely registered. I thought: "well that's perfectly typical of him" (In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, to borrow a line from the poet Isaac Rosenberg). AI slop from our hog president. And I moved on.

Dead Bodies

 Trump's campaign of serial murder in the Caribbean Sea has now left upwards of thirty bodies in the ocean. And his fight over social media this weekend with Colombian president Gustavo Petro seemed to underscore what we all already suspected at this point: many of the people Trump is killing in these extrajudicial executions are not drug traffickers at all—but just ordinary and completely innocent fishermen. 

Petro on Saturday accused the U.S. government of murdering one of his country's citizens in these strikes—and he was no "narco-terrorist." In September, the Colombian president claimed, a fisherman by the name of Alejandro Carranza was adrift in a small craft that had lost power. He had sent out a distress signal. Instead of obeying the universal law of the sea and of humanity by rendering him aid—the U.S. government blasted him from the skies. He had no ties to drug traffickers whatsoever. 

Nothing Whatever to Say

 Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson—the third novel in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy about Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman—is a book about a writer trying to escape the curse of writing. 

It's really not so unusual. Writing is not the sort of activity you enjoy. It's a compulsion, in which a small dose of reward chemicals that comes from having written is bookended by long periods of agony: first, there's the period in which you have an idea you want to express. It builds inside you until you can't tolerate the inward "pressure of clauses and sentences" (George Eliot) any longer. 

The Anger of the Gods

 So I guess Trump really is doing the whole authoritarian repression bit. 

Not only has he secured flagrantly baseless and politically-motivated indictments against two of his perceived political enemies in recent weeks—the Wall Street Journal also reports this morning that he is readying plans to turn the IRS into an arm of his repressive apparatus. 

Young Republicans

 Probably by now we've all seen the Politico story about the leaked group chat messages from the nation's Young Republicans—a sprawling network of Gen Z party activists that includes some staffers and other people in influential positions in the nationwide GOP. 

The reported messages are obviously racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, and everything else awful you can think of. The people who wrote these quips come across as simply dreadful—the worst you can imagine. (It's as if the made-up Stephen Glass story about CPAC from the '90s was reborn in living color.)

Other People

 Shelley once wrote (in his "Peter Bell the Third") that "Hell is a city much like London." (Bertolt Brecht replied that, with all respect, Hell must be even more like Los Angeles.)

It has also been said—most quotably of all—that Hell is other people. 

Martin Amis wrote a novel called Other People, set in the city of London. And its conclusion appears to be that Hell is not only a city like London, and other people, but also is life itself. 

Money

 Once or twice in my life, I've had a sudden influx of cash. I don't want to exaggerate—we're not talking about the lottery here. We're talking about the ordinary kinds of windfalls that can occur in an adult person's life: an insurance check after a car wreck, say. Or the sale of a home. But still—enough money that I felt like I should do something with it. 

Another one of these windfalls came my way the other day. And I found myself inwardly reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin. The one where he thinks about the money in his drawer at home, and how it always reproaches him for not spending it. Here I am—says money—ready to be put to use. I'm here to give you a good time. And yet, you just sit at home reading as always! From the way you live, you might as well not have me. Who would know the difference? 

The End, The Beginning

 In his novel Zuckerman Unbound—the second in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy—Philip Roth portrays a typically tragicomic episode in which the eponymous author (and Roth alter ego) Nathan Zuckerman tries to find words of comfort for his dying father. 

Zuckerman is regarded as something of a traitor by his family—for depicting them in crude satirical terms in his scandalous bestseller Carnovsky (the fictional counterpart to Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint). 

Love Among the Ruins

 I continue to be baffled by how seriously everyone is taking Trump's vaunted peace plan for Gaza. I get that we had unambiguously good news yesterday—as the Israeli hostages were freed and humanitarian aid started flowing again to Gaza. It's easy to be swept up in the good feelings from that. 

But I keep reading articles that then pivot to Trump's plans to rehabilitate the Palestinian authority and transition to a period of peaceful coexistence in the Strip—without seriously questioning his motives or underlying agenda. 

Bought and Sold for English Gold

 The relief and joy are certainly palpable today, as we watch the long-overdue ceasefire in Gaza finally being implemented. My heart too swells to hear about hostages being released after years of captivity and desperately-needed food and medical supplies finally being allowed to flow unhindered into the Strip. 

Everything that's happening today is undoubtedly good news, compared to all that has gone before, the last two years. 

And yet, I can't help but feel a bit queasy about what comes next. 

A God-damned Lie

 If I have to read one more think piece—à la Ross Douthat's latest—praising Trump as a peacemaker for his ceasefire deal in Gaza, I will scream. 

Where was this man of peace when Netanyahu was starving Gaza's civilian population all through the last spring and summer? 

Where was this man of peace when Trump was bombing 21 innocent people from the sky, in a series of targeted killings in the Caribbean Sea without charge or trial? 

A Living Hell

 In his last days in office, Joe Biden commuted the capital sentences of 37 people on death row. It was an admirable act of mercy (though one that regrettably stopped short of halting all scheduled federal executions). 

Trump of course hated this decision. But when the president commutes your sentence for a federal crime, that's pretty much a done deal. Even Trump's team of lawless goons haven't found a way around it yet. 

Ham Sandwich

 The New York Times published a piece earlier this week documenting the almost surgical precision with which the Trump administration has fired Black officials in senior positions and replaced them overwhelmingly with white men. 

Could this pattern of discriminatory hiring and promotion be a mere coincidence? I would find that more plausible if the Pentagon right now wasn't run by a man who belongs to a church whose pastor has stated in the past that Black people were better off under slavery. 

What Are You Saying, Dean?

 Saul Bellow's 1982 novel The Dean's December is a plodding, humorless, self-righteous, and self-serious slog of a book. It's also—I'm sorry to say—a racist book. Which is exactly the kind of criticism that one hesitates to make against a recognized literary classic, under threat of being accused of PC Stalinism. But I read this whole thing through with an open mind—indeed, actively wanting to like it—and I really do not think the charge in this case is misplaced. 

At the novel's outset, we think it is going to be about a crime—a murder of a student, specifically, committed under ambiguous circumstances. But like much else in the novel, this never really goes anywhere. There is no mystery to be solved, and we never learn anything more about the crime—which, perhaps, is the point. There is no meaning to it. It's just another day in the whirlwind of the "moronic inferno," as Bellow calls it. 

Argentina: Cui Bono?

 So, I'm not opposed to "bail-outs" on principle. I have no wish to punish the innocent Argentine public for the sins and mismanagement of its leaders. Nor is it absurd to want to forestall chaos in one corner of the global financial market in order to prevent contagion elsewhere. 

What I am opposed to, though, is using taxpayer dollars for the sole purpose of saving the bacon of a handful of rich investors who happen to have a personal connection to the Treasury Secretary. 

Our Tempestuous Day

 For at least two months now, the conspiracy theories have circulated on the Left that Trump is suffering from some hidden disease. Maybe he's experienced a stroke, causing part of his face to sag. Maybe—the rumor went at one point—he's already died and been replaced with an AI avatar. 

There's obviously no actual evidence to support these rumors. But I will say, the man does not look well. And Trump himself has repeatedly felt the need to address speculation as to his health. As recently as yesterday, he was harping on his good health to a group of journalists. 

Permanent Underclass?

 The New Yorker yesterday informs me that a growing number of online commentators and Silicon Valley tech influencers believe the age of AI automation is finally at hand. Pretty much regardless of our field, they say, we are all about to be replaced by machines, and consigned to a permanently unemployable "underclass," like so many Silesian weavers. 

This wave of automation will come in inverted order from how it unfolded in the early nineteenth century. Instead of displacing hand work—this wave is going to start with brain work. 

Censored Broadcast

 The Trump administration——————————————————————————————————————————————— idiots ————————

(Homage to Heinrich Heine)

To Be An Editor

 Well, Bari Weiss played this well. 

Like many before her, she figured out how to leverage an elite-centered persecution complex about "wokeness" into a grand paranoid narrative, upon which others delighted to project their own inflated sense of victimization. 

She managed to recast a highly idiosyncratic set of sharp-elbowed opinions—founded in prejudice and self-interest—as evidence of her high-minded intellectual independence. 

The Political Id of Martin Amis

 Martin Amis was undoubtedly a hero of my young adulthood and literary apprenticeship. But unlike the other heroes of that time in my life—Orwell, Koestler, Hazlitt, say—it wasn't because I sensed any deep kinship with Amis in his moral and political sensibilities. To the contrary, I often felt far removed from him in those domains. The main reason he became a paragon to me was simply that he is such outrageous good fun to read. 

I couldn't explain the science behind it, but for some reason every page of prose Amis ever wrote sends reward chemicals directly into my brain. Which is partly why I haven't read every one of those pages yet—I have to save something to tide me over in my old age. 

Masters of Provocation

 Ever since Trump started deploying federal troops to U.S. cities, I've been calling this Trump's "Peterloo." I quoted the lines from Shelley in response to the 1819 massacre—when British troops open fired on protesting workers: 

I met Murder on the way

He had a mask like Castlereagh 

With all the controversy over the masks that Trump's agents wear—to disguise their identities as they go around tackling and manhandling people in courthouses and places of business—I thought the lines (indeed, the very title) of Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" seemed eerily apt. 

Poor Petition

 Vice President J.D. Vance is very very sure that the—now 21, as of yesterday—people his administration has extrajudicially executed without charge or trial on the high seas in recent weeks are all "terrorists" and "criminals" who really really deserve it...

—except when he admits he isn't; and they might not be. I missed it at the time—but apparently, in the middle of last month, Vance "joked" before an audience of hundreds that the people the administration is murdering arbitrarily in the Caribbean might just be local fishermen. 

A Real Minority of One

 The Democrats' current shutdown strategy seems to me like a typically muddled product of committee thinking. What exactly is it supposed to achieve? 

By every conventional measure, it is bound to be a political failure. It will alienate many voters. The party making demands in shutdown negotiations almost never gets what they want, if history is any guide. By rejecting a clean continuing resolution—even for an admittedly worthy policy cause—Democrats will seem like the intransigent ones and will take the blame for the shutdown in the public eye. 

Plugson Redivivus

 Yesterday, Matt Yglesias published a piece on his Substack arguing that corporations ought to do good things rather than bad things. This may seem obvious—but it actually flies in the face of some conventional wisdom in the pro-market literature, which tends to see all economic activity as morally neutral. 

Indeed—for the true ideologues (Yglesias cites an article by Milton Friedman as an example)—profit-making transactions are good precisely to the extent that they make money. After all, if a company can realize a profit from a transaction in a free market, that means they have created something of value that people cannot obtain elsewhere. 

Kipling the Rebel and the Anti-Rebel

 Rudyard Kipling's first, heavily-autobiographical novel, The Light that Failed, does not stint on literary quotations. Throughout the text, there are allusions to or snatches of poetry lifted from Emerson, Andrew Marvell, the King James Bible, and the works of the 19th century Scottish poet James Thomson—among others.  

But the young Kipling—despite his evident urge to quote—somehow avoids making any allusion to the one piece of English poetry that one would most expect to find its way into a book on this subject: namely, John Milton's sonnet on his blindness ("When I consider how my light is spent").