“All my life I’d lived out of step and synch with the larger world, forever tottering on borders and fault lines.”
My Daughter, My Hero
One lesson from the coronavirus is that we need leaders who prevent crises more than we need managers who scramble to handle them
Wall Street Journal op-ed: Covid-19 was a Leadership Test. It Came Back Negative., by Sam Walker (author, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams (2018))
Carmine Abate–THE HOMECOMING PARTY
“[Imagine] that an unscrupulous man, a born whoremonger, points a pistol at your head and says to you: ‘Leave, or I’ll pull the trigger!’ What would you do?….Of course you leave, the way I left and so many young men from this town left.”
Per Petterson–I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME
“Fragile images of departure, the village back then.
I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed.”—Mao Tse-Tung
My parents often remind my brothers and me that they won’t have any money for us to inherit, but I think they’ve already passed on to us the wealth of their memories allowing us to grasp the beauty of a flowering wisteria, the delicacy of a word, the power of wonder. Even more, they’ve given us feet for walking to our dreams, to infinity. Which may be enough baggage to continue our journey on our own.
“Looking back on your twenties, what would you most want to say to those of us who are going through our twenties now,” a student asks the professor.
“I hope you all have someone who always makes you want to say, Let’s remember this day forever…[and] I hope you will never hesitate to say, I’ll be right there,” the professor responds.
“All the children of young [Czechoslovaks] in the 1970s were going to have to solve our parents’ pasts, like detectives, and what we would find out was going to seem like a mystery novel we wished we’d never bought. But I also realized…that [if I told] my father’s story as a mystery…[it] would betray his intentions and his struggles…[and] merely confirm the existence of a genre…All of his efforts [had challenged] those very social conventions and their pale reflection in literature.”
“Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and, sometimes, in the novelist’s gift for clairvoyance… It simply comes with the profession: the imaginative leaps this requires, the need to fix your mind on points of detail – to the point of obsession, in fact – so as not to lose the thread and give in to natural laziness – all this tension, this cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to ‘flashes of intuition concerning events past and future,’ as the Larousse dictionary puts it, under the heading of ‘clairvoyance.’ ”
– Patrick Modiano was known among his colleagues as ‘the man who could see around corners,’ as well as a walking encyclopaedia when it came to clairvoyance
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do for them is to present them with copies of [Strunk and White’s] The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” ― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker
“The gun’s not loaded. I don’t even have bullets…Go see for yourself. It’s in the night table under my copy of Strunk and White.” Audrey, in Dorothy Parker Drank Here
How slightly we know ourselves until something happens…How blurred the edges are: what we can do, what in the end we can’t. What nags, what doesn’t.
“Literature, I tell aspiring writers, is a mug’s game. The author of Moby Dick died in his seventies utterly forgotten…Not one newspaper obituary noted his passing. Some thirty years after he died…the academic field of American literature was swamped by a tsunami of second thoughts about Melville…[who now is] right up there with Aristotle, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Tolstoy in the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World, #48 out of 54….A mug’s game, I say, a crapshoot, the stakes one’s heart’s blood.”
“I am haunted by the idea of returning. Not a day goes by without the country calling to me. A secret sound, a scent on the breeze, a gesture, sometimes silence is enough to stir my childhood memories. ‘You won’t find anything there, apart from ghosts and a pile of ruins,’ Ana keeps telling me… I listen and I believe her….So I put it out of my mind. I decide, once and for all, that I’m never going back. it down all at once,” he would say, “and you’ll see your vigor return and tackle whatever confronts you.
Elsewhere she notes how little Greene valued contentment “…pleasure could not be an assumption and was not a goal; whereas suffering was a constant, and almost a code of honour. Suffering was the attestable key to imaginative existence.”Is suffering where writers really belong, what they need to experience in order to write fiction? If we can believe Hazzard, it was for Greene. However, I doubt it is necessary for most writers but perhaps it is why many of them become alcoholics.
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Lang explores the reasons why some authors were destroyed by excessive drinking. She writes: [Eugene] O’Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American writers nearly all have problems with alcohol because there’s a great deal of tension involved in writing, you know that. And it’s all right up to a certain age, and then you begin to need a little nervous support that you get from drinking.
David Foster Wallace began his widely discussed and recently published (This is Water) commencement address at Kenyon College in May 2005 with a parable. In the parable two young fish happen to meet an older fish that says to them “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on a bit until one says to the other “What the hell’s the water?”
Wallace writes: “The point of the story is that the most important, obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”
To the graduating students he says that the really significant education they have received isn’t “about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” Later he added this means:“…being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
He says that in his experience the most dangerous consequence of an academic education is the tendency to “over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right of front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” It’s the water parable again.
Much of the talk is a warning to the students about what adult life is really like. “Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.”
This is Water This is River
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Report: Thousands Of Urns Shipped To Wuhan, Where The Virus Is Supposedly Under Control“There were twenty of us in my barracks…twenty boys. And only two came back. One who went mad, and myself. But that doesn’t mean we survived [the war]. I don’t think I did survive it. I may not be buried in a French field but I linger there. My spirit does, anyway…There’s a difference between breathing and being alive.”—Tristan Sadler
I read so many scathing — forgive me long and thorough and scathing — reviews of this one that I figured something had to be up. And indeed there is. However unpleasant and disturbing this movie may be, it is excellent along all major dimensions of cinematic quality, including drama, script, characterization, performances, cinematography, color, music, and more, not to mention embedded cinematic references. But here is the catch: it is the most anti-Leftist movie I have seen, ever. It quite explicitly portrays the egalitarian instinct as a kind of barbaric violent atavism, and it is pointedly critical of Antifa and related movements, showing them as representing a literal end of civilization. Only the wealthy are genteel and urbane and proper. On crime and law and order, it is right-wing in a 1970s “Death Wish” sort of way, though anti-gun too.
~ Tyler Cowen’s views
Kevin D Williamson doesn’t hesitate to put the boot in:
With apologies to Margaret Atwood and a thousand other dystopian novelists, we do not have to theorize about what an American police state would look like, because we know what it looks like: the airport, that familiar totalitarian environment where Americans are disarmed, stripped of their privacy, divested of their freedom of speech, herded around like livestock, and bullied by bovine agents of “security” in a theatrical process that has an 85 percent failure rate because it isn’t designed as a security-screening protocol at all but as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable morons.
Now, when I hear the words “otherwise unemployable morons,” I think of Robert Francis O’Rourke and his sad little presidential campaign, which suffered a little setback on Tuesday night when the gentleman who advertises himself as “Beto” tried out some tough-guy shtick on Pete Buttigieg, who is, whatever else you can say about him, a veteran of the Afghanistan campaign, one who rightly pointed out that he doesn’t have to prove his “courage” to the idiot son of a well-connected El Paso political family who has done almost nothing with his life other than show himself a reasonably effective fundraiser in the family business.
O’Rourke is a cretin, and an ambitious cretin at that. And what are his ambitions? Turning America into the airport.
Yes, South Park grovels:
Some background here:
After the “Band in China” episode mocked Hollywood for shaping its content to please the Chinese government, Beijing has responded by deleting all clips, episodes and discussions of the Comedy Central show.South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone probably saw this coming, and to their credit, simply didn’t care.
From the point of view of the Chinese government there are far too many people now paying quite close attention to them, whom they do not control. The people presiding over Communist despotisms are always touted as strategic geniuses, but I sense a change in the world. Or then again, it could just be that I attended an excellent talk about Hong Kong last night, and will be attendinganother talk about Hong Kong on Wednesday, at the ASI. That link may not last, so I note here that a lady called Denise Ho will be speaking.
That second link is to a report in the Guardian, which it makes a nice change for us here to be agreeing with, assuming most of us do. The Chinese government is now making enemies all across the political spectrum. They will surely “win” this battle in Hong Kong, one way or another. But are they now stuck in a Cold War that they might end up losing? Could well be. As the above non-apology from these South Park guys illustrates, to say nothing of events in Hong Kong, things are not now going entirely to their script.
Also, now that masks are no longer allowed in Hong Kong, how about a new hair-do?