Gone to Feed the Roses

 I suppose there are basically two attitudes to death (and really just about everything else)—both of which are true, so far as they go. William James called them the healthy-minded and the sick. (And he made no secret of his greater affinity for the sick-souled way of seeing the matter.)

The healthy-minded say: "I accept the universe." They say: "death is a part of life." They say: "What death? Does not death bring forth new life? Does not the corpse of one being provide food and nutriment for the sprigs and branches of new life?"

The New Absence

 "The first day after a death, the new absence / Is always the same," Philip Larkin wrote. Today, I woke up to a house without dad in it. The caregivers were all gone. His hospital bed in the living room had been stripped of its linen. They wheeled his body out last night, after I had a final chance to say goodbye. 

Dad's last hours were very peaceful. After a final round of morphine, he just lay there quietly and comfortably for a few hours. We sat in the living room with him, listening to him breathe. Then, between 8 and 9 o'clock, he just stopped. We sat there, poised, listening for another breath that did not come. 

The Tail of Antichrist

 Since many far-right influencers have recently gone from viewing Trump as God's anointed on Earth to the literal Antichrist (viz. Tucker's recent musings on the subject)—and meanwhile, Peter Thiel is purporting to lecture on the subject in Rome—I thought it might be a good time to read up on the vicissitudes of the early modern Antichrist, as told by Christopher Hill. 

And it turns out that Hill's book on the subject, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England, explains even more about the fate of Trump's MAGA movement than I thought. Indeed, the book offers a window into the sort of archetypical progression (or retrogression) that every revolutionary movement undergoes once it obtains power.

Dread Level

 My dad is dying slowly in the living room. He's on twenty-four hour hospice care, and I pass his bed of sickness every time I get up for a meal or to refill my coffee. There's nothing particularly to do but wet his lips and administer doses of morphine. 

Somehow, my brain has managed to normalize the situation. At some point, it sprang out of the gear of crisis mode, and I started to think about other things and pick up abandoned lines of thought. 

The Whole and Every Whit

 This week brought us news of another AI-related controversy in the literary world. Apparently a number of readers are speculating that this year's winner of a major short story prize was actually created by (or with significant help from) a chatbot. 

This seems to be part of the misery we all live with these days—and it wounds in both directions. 

For those of us who write our own stuff and aren't winning literary prizes for it—we are jealous at the thought that other people are getting ahead and winning laurels by cheating. 

A Vassal Republic

 It seems increasingly like our elite institutions are all pulling together to enable Trump's next act of aggression, imperialism, and robbery—this time, against the people of Cuba. 

For months now, the U.S. has maintained a crippling oil blockade that has sabotaged the island's economy, leading to rolling blackouts and almost certainly causing the preventable deaths of Cuban civilians by interfering with life-saving medical treatment. 

Peasant Theology

 In the first chapter of his classic book of cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton studies a handful of folk tales in their earlier renditions, in order to get a glimpse into peasant mentalités under the Old Regime. 

He takes from these stories the conclusion that peasant life in the seventeenth century was brutish and short—that the world for these men and women was unforgiving and remorseless, and so the tales serve primarily to warn against the dangers of naively trusting one's fellow people. The only virtues they applaud—in Darnton's telling—are those of low cunning; a sort of hostile pawkiness in the presence of one's neighbors. 

Their Own Affairs

 The Russian government—that great exemplar of "Christian" and "Western" values, according to our neo-fascist Putin admirers in this country—recently sentenced a woman to eighteen months in a labor camp. Her crime? Writing K-pop fan fiction with a gay theme. 

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., our own Putin-inspired fascists are sending out criminal subpoenas against trans health care providers. The march of regress carries on. 

Lower for Proof

 Back when the Trump administration dismantled USAID—including its global health programs—many people sensibly asked: what happens if there's another major disease outbreak in the Global South? Who will monitor and contain it in its early stages? 

Now, we appear to have our answer. Southern Africa is witnessing another major outbreak of Ebola. The World Health Organization has already declared it a global health emergency. And early reports indicate that the virus spread far past the point at which pre-existing monitoring agencies ought to have detected it. 

Lordling

 Yesterday, the New York Times published an analysis article that places a few recent items of Trump's behavior in telling juxtaposition. 

Let's see, he is obsessed with funding his ballroom construction project at the White House. He has used the privileges and powers of the White House to enrich himself and his family. He has publicly announced that he "doesn't think" about "Americans' financial situation" at a time of rising prices for basic commodities as a result of his war in the Middle East. 

The To-Be-Forgotten

 We all recall when ABC killed the polling aggregator and political analysis site FiveThirtyEight last year—in a move they described as a business decision at the time, but which seemed eerily to coincide with the general trend of the "Great Accomodation" during the early months of the Trump administration. 

Now, having already died once, the website appears set to undergo what Thomas Hardy called the "second death"—that of "oblivion." Even after it stopped generating new content, after all, FiveThirtyEight lingered on as a searchable archive. People could at least link back to old articles. Now, that too appears to be gone. 

Weakness of Will

 A friend of mine a few months back was taking me on a FaceTime tour of his room. He showed me all the library books piled up on a shelf that he had not returned in years.

"If you add up all those late fees," I said, "it must be in the thousands of dollars!"

My friend explained that San Francisco had abolished overdue penalties at libraries. 

Plank of Standard Pinkness

 The Guardian published a new list of the 100 greatest novels of all time this week. 

What immediately strikes one about the entries is how familiar they all are. How predictable the list is. How much it consists of all the obvious works still in print that you can find in any "classics" row at a standard bookstore. 

That Summit

 Back during Trump's first term, a Republican friend of mine would often say: "Look, I'm not defending Trump, but..." and there would follow in the rest of that sentence a litany of things that sounded a great deal like defenses of Trump. 

One of the items my friend would always adduce was: "Well, at least Trump got serious about China." 

Ganz Tot

 A lot of my recent posts on this blog have been frenzied efforts to impose some sort of meaning and narrative coherence on my dad's ordeal of dying from brain cancer. 

Along the way, he has had lucid moments when he told me he loves me and is proud of me, and that he trusts our family will be okay when he's gone. 

Morphine

 I'm afraid I spoke too soon the other day when I wrote that Dad's version of cancer fortunately comes without much pain, and that therefore we would probably never have to touch the morphine supply in the refrigerator. 

Yesterday, he started rubbing his scalp more frequently in the spot where the tumor is located. We asked if it hurt, and while—in his current mental state—he does not reply to any question with something so simple as a "yes," that appeared to be the gist of his response. 

Antisemitism

 Well, the day we all feared has come. The Democratic Party officially has its equivalent to a Marjorie Taylor Greene—as in, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist with a host of loony beliefs. I am referring to Maureen Galindo, who was unfortunately suddenly all over the news yesterday as a contender in the Democratic primaries for a congressional seat in Texas. 

She truly sounds like MTG from the worst point of the latter's QAnon period—except that Galindo is if anything even more overtly antisemitic than MTG ever was. She has reportedly railed against what she calls "the Jews who own Hollywood." She has implied that Jewish people constitute the "Church of Satan" and the "synagogue of Satan." And so on. 

Compromises

 The recent hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship has been dominating the news all week—and doubtless it is prompting many Americans to question whether it was really such a wise choice for us to dismantle our world-class public health system and appoint in its place a bunch of ideological hacks who appear not to even believe in the germ theory of disease. 

In particular—an opinion piece in the New York Times notes yesterday—Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana may be regretting his choice to vote in favor of Kennedy's nomination—seeing that public health was, for a time, the one issue most dear to him.

Sleep and Death

 My dad is in the terminal stages of brain cancer, and as the disease has progressively attacked his mind, he has inevitably gotten more confused and disoriented over time. 

Having cruelly robbed him piece by piece of his eyesight, his mobility, his work, and his short-term memory, the cancer is taking dad closer each day to what Hugh MacDiarmid called the "dread level of nothing but life itself." 

The Pranks of Brute Force

 Trump is pretty definitively losing his Iran war by this point. We're now over a month into the supposed ceasefire between the two parties, and the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed to commercial shipping. Iran retains the ability to frighten ships and insurance companies off with just a few random strikes; which means they retain enormous leverage in the ongoing negotiations with the United States. 

And Trump, I'm sorry to say, has no moral standing to complain about this. I don't say it's good for any government—let alone a brutally repressive theocratic one—to deliberately shut down a major economic artery of the globe. But Trump was the one who first announced the principle of the right of the stronger. And according to that rule—if you suddenly find yourself the weaker party, you have no moral claim against one's opponent. 

Shark and Dogfish

 The Trump administration carried out yet another set of extrajudicial killings on the high seas this weekend—bringing the total number of civilians it has murdered in these boat strikes to at least 192. 

Every one of these attacks has been an atrocity and a war crime. But this weekend's added a cruel twist: it left "one survivor at large in the eastern Pacific," as the New York Times put it. 

Millions

 Trump's sweeping termination of U.S. foreign aid programs last year has largely fallen off of most of our news feeds—leaving a lot of conservative influencers to declare that it was all no big deal; a nothingburger. 

But Nick Kristof today in the New York Times does the math and brings the receipts. He marshals convincing evidence that the number of people—mostly children under five—who have died so far as a result of Trump's aid withdrawals is at least in the hundreds of thousands. 

I'm not using AI; AI is using me

 I read a very annoying article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday and now I'm wishing I hadn't. 

It was about the cottage industry of people online who claim to be able to spot when other writers are using AI. 

They have identified a number of tells, they say, which amount to a "house style" for AI. 

Substance, Not Person

 Yesterday's obituary for Ted Turner in the New York Times quoted a number of appalling anecdotes about his reactionary youth, which made me think this guy does not register as a worthy person. But it also included a single story of personal loss from Turner's biography that was profoundly humanizing. 

The article talks about the fact that Turner lost his younger sister to lupus and encephalitis when he was in his twenties. Obviously, with my dad's situation in the hospital, I'm emotionally keyed in to anything I read or see that touches on death—so it's perhaps not surprising that this got to me. Turner "described her death as the reason he lost his religious faith," according to the Times write-up. 

The Best of the Penguins

 "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing," Orwell wrote in the first sentence of his classic essay on the English novelist. 

And Orwell himself, it would seem, is considered by many to be worth stealing as well. 

By Ken Griffin, for instance. 

Thy Glorious Bison Herds

 Trump's penchant for slaughter and mass-death seems to be concentrated right now in his ongoing boat strikes in the Caribbean and his war in the Middle East. But recent events also prove that his desire to destroy is not limited to human kind—but extends as well to the animal kingdom.

He has also sought to circumvent endangered species protections for the Rice's whale in the Gulf of Mexico, in order to promote more oil and gas drilling, for instance. And now he is reportedly even trying to evict bison herds from federal land in the West—per a recent New York Times article. 

à l'éternité

 My dad has been having a lot of mental confusion lately due to his brain cancer. Yesterday it was particularly bad. But there was one fleeting and precious moment when the fog lifted a bit and he was suddenly completely lucid. 

We were walking over to a restaurant a block from our house. As my dad often does in his current condition, he would walk a few feet, then have an idea and pause to explain it to me. 

Firebug

 At least if prosecutors are to be believed (never a certain proposition), it looks increasingly likely that last year's apocalyptic Palisades Fire in Los Angeles was deliberately set. Indeed, prosecutors allege that a specific individual went out to commit arson as an act of deliberate revolutionary terrorism against the rich. 

He did it, they say, because he was obsessed with another suspected populist terrorist—Luigi Mangione—and saw the fire as a form of vengeance against the indifferent rich. "We’re basically being enslaved by them," he allegedly said; and "Reddit let's kill all the billionaires," was reportedly one of his Google searches. 

Two Cheers for Slopulism

 I snorted at those ultra-wealthy tech executives in Silicon Valley who developed a sudden interest in right-wing politics as soon as California's Democratic government started flirting with the idea of a "billionaire tax." 

I rolled my eyes at news that Ken Griffin is currently in the midst of a knives-out political fight with Mayor Mamdani of New York over his proposed "pied-à-terre" tax, which would send Griffin a bill for his $238 million penthouse. 

Gloomy Vanity

 Everyone knows that technological change sometimes displaces whole art forms. It is a commonplace of art history that the invention of photography totally reshaped the purpose of painting, because oils and pigments were suddenly no longer the most efficient way to accurately represent a visual scene. Painters thus went off to explore more subjective and emotional impressions that were not so grounded in the mere literal transcription of reality—hence movements like expressionism, impressionism, Symbolism, cubism, surrealism, etc. 

In his introductory essay in his collection of prose pieces, Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), B.S. Johnson points out that something similar happened to the novel after the development of film. He notes that Joyce was well aware of the potential of the cinema to be a more efficient medium for telling stories. And so, the novel had to figure out what it could do better than film—if its 19th century task of merely telling "what happens next" in a narrative had been eclipsed. 

The Last Act

 Amidst the mental confusion caused by his brain cancer, my dad had a moment earlier in the week of unusual clarity and lucidity. 

It was heartbreaking, because in the brief interval when the fog lifted, he seemed to have a glimpse of everything he had lost. "I feel like I'm losing capacity," he said. "I feel like I'm letting everyone down." 

Tired of Kings

 Earlier this week, the official U.S. White House account on X decided to mock the American people by posting a caption under a photo showing Trump and King Charles walking together: "Two Kings," it read. 

But if Trump is a king, he is a king of the sort Shelley described: "an old, mad, despised and dying king."