One wonders how anyone could vote for an evil clown and his clown posse. Then one has to wonder how anyone could vote for a party who champions transgendered males in women's sports. Dr. Oz, Pete the drunken rapist. Social Justice Math. Where does it end?
I have the answer. It doesn't.
It was reported to me yesterday that Stephen Colbert was a kind of smarmy asshole to the director of the CIA about the dangers of TikTok. Colbert didn't get it, I guess. The director said that the Chinese know everything about the people who use the app. They know where you go, what you buy, who you text with, etc. Colbert pondered why it mattered. Dumb.
The answer can be seen in the power of advertising. I watched eight hours of football on Sunday. No. . . I watched about six hours of commercials. And therein, I think, lay the answer. If people are willing to watch that dumbass shit and be persuaded to buy those products, they can be convinced of anything.
I didn't see the show, but if the reporting is accurate. . . Fuck Colbert.
Academia is much like everything else now. I finished reading "Stella Maris" last night. I'll get to that, maybe, in a moment. As soon as I finished, I Googled book reviews, then I went to Google Scholar and looked to see what had been written. The book reviewers were mostly trying to be clever or seemingly bright. The academics were performative giving feminist readings and wondering why everybody was white.
O.K. I made up the last part. That wasn't about "Stella Maris," but about the other McCarthy novels. There was a lot of identity politics going on. But that has been the coin of the realm, and if you want to make hay. . . .
Ain't no different than any other marketplace. I've been in the field. I've toured the country on the factory dime looking at other academic institutions. Oh, man. . . admin loves to tout anything new. They have to make a mark. They WILL do anything, spend money on writeable walls and rooms without walls (yes, they are contradictory) and everything else that is peripheral to education, substance be damned.
Now I'm simplifying and making generalized statements, so take them as you will. If you want to argue the point, I'll need to do some background reading to prepare myself. I'm silly, maybe, but I'm no fool. But here is some data. Kids today are far behind the kids who came before them in reading and math skills . Far behind kids who grew up without technology, moveable desks, talking walls, behind kids learned to diagram sentences and were not taught the "new math." Not an opinion. Just data.
And Trump will be the new president in a few days. . . again. And the Drunken Rapist Fox Media Guy will be confirmed to lead the military.
And, apparently, it was Gavin Newsom who set the L.A. fires ablaze. . . according to Fox.
Whatever. Go live in Russia or China. If you get my drift.
"Stella Maris." I don't know to whom I would recommend the book. What was that quote I have somewhere about "late work"? The novel is no "Blood Meridian," but what is? Melville's other works were no "Moby Dick." Now I can't say that Faulkner didn't write three great novels, but his late work was not that. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize after "The Old Man and the Sea" which I think is one of his worst novels. He couldn't finish the last things he was working on for years. And for all the proclamations about "The Last Tycoon," it was no "Great Gatsby." So, yea. . . I don't think "Stella Maris" will be part of "the canon," but it is intriguing. It's a million times better than the best Stephen King schlock ever written. Anyone who thinks King a good writer should stay a billion miles away from McCarthy. He's better than Bob Dylan. I'm only saying that to the Nobel committee. Where the fuck is McCarthy's Nobel? As Harold Bloom points out, only Pynchon is a contemporary rival. . . . I don't know. . . I'm not weighing in on that. I'm only trying to whittle down the reading public to who may like the novel. You've got to be up for something other than entertainment.
Here's one book critic, Beejay Silox (I shit you not) from The Guardian.
Women, I am repeatedly told, don’t like – don’t get – Cormac McCarthy. It’s the kind of patronising nonsense that gets levelled at us when we point out the converse: that McCarthy’s fiction doesn’t get – doesn’t like – women. When female characters do appear in his pages, they are cowards, victims and sexpots: sirenic doom-bringers, cheetah-owning dommes, simpering twits and bad mothers. It’s often possible to admire the Pulitzer prize winner despite his paper-thin girls (see also Roth, Updike, Mailer and all the other cocksure Americans). Not in this novel. Stella Maris is a transcript of Alicia’s therapy sessions. The book hangs on her voice, and that voice is preposterous.
Alicia is less a character than a receptacle, a dumping ground for eight decades of snarled (and snarling) ideas. As her conversations with Dr Cohen deepen, she slips into McCarthy’s own narrative voice, with all its rococo cadences and tell-tale tics (“olivedrab”, “moonminded”, “girljuice”). It’s a grotesque kind of irony that the author’s most risible creation is the closest thing he’s given us to an avatar.
I've always warned that McCarthy's literature is male, that it is about the harsh realities of being male in a dangerous world. That was true. He attempts something else in this novel. I don't know Beejay's work, but it is surely up there with a finger snap and a head twirl. . . girl! Full of pithy puns and trite social awareness one offs.
The novel went, finally, where I had suspected it should go and where I would have had it go. If it hadn't, I would not have liked the novel nearly as much. But I won't give it away even though most book reviewers do. I'm glad I hadn't read the reviews before the novel for just that reason.
Now I have to read "The Passenger," the book narrated Alicia's brother. And I look forward to it.
Life here at mother's isn't all bad. I really have nothing to do when I am not cooking, fetching, and cleaning than read. I don't need to hate myself for not making good photographs (of nothing) right now. All I have to do is be a go-between for my mother and her home care people, the doctors, the insurances, and anything else that comes up. My mind is a blank but for the books I am consuming. I'm halfway through the New Yorker essay collection and have started Patti Smith's "Just Kids." My mind feels richer already. And my mother has an Alexa device in the kitchen, so I tell it to play station WUCF while I'm cooking or cleaning, and the music makes me happy and I dance. My mother gets a kick out of my dancing. Ili and I used to dance when we cooked, crazy shit, and we'd laugh often to the point of tears, but I haven't really danced while I cook since, so there is that joy. And my mother REALLY appreciates the meals I am making as do I. I am no chef, but I am a damn good cook. I am able to get away to the gym each day for an hour or so, after which I visit my house which is has taken the appearance of an old dream. So, yea. . . it is not all misery. "Catch as catch can" living. . . if you know the phrase.
Let's dance!
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