Another Autoflorilegium
The foregoing is a collection of my further thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, and mostly from recent months. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.
On the Relationship between Religion and Politics
In grad school I watched the Scorsese adaptation of Silence. It was in a seminar on East Asian Christianity so we got some very good discussion out of it. My parents watched the movie on their own as well. Between the three of us, my parents and I came up with what my professor thought were two very good, very important observations: First, the persecutors seem just as strangely obsessed, from a modern liberal standpoint, with the martyrs’ religion as do the martyrs themselves; secondly, why does this sort of killing and dying for religious beliefs come across as more irrational than killing or dying for political or philosophical beliefs? It is not immediately obvious why it should, yet it does.
It is, in fact, possible, I think, that the order here has been entirely reversed. The habit now is of viewing a political worldview—leftism, rightism, the “MAGA movement,” “common-good constitutionalism,” Posado-Catholicism, neo-Ikkō-ikki Pure Land communism—as a static mass, a single object. A set of beliefs is bundled together and given over as handsel to an adherent. Religion and morals, now downstream from politics, become individuated epiphenomena, to be filled and animated, or deadened, by the waters of the person’s oceanic political conviction. Yet from the beginning it was not so.
On Identifying the Least Unbearable Social Media Platform
Tumblr is the only usable one, mostly because the bulk of its unbelievably toxic early-to-mid-2010s user base bolted for Twitter about five years ago, but also because its algorithm doesn’t work and all its updates are done by frivolous twits; yes, these are selling points, or at least they ought to be. More generally, though, social media is bad for society and everyone should be able to acknowledge this in the same way that, for example, the Victorians knew that constant exposure to lead and arsenic was unhealthy, only they didn’t know exactly why or have viable alternatives yet. Don’t be fooled by the idea that banning TikTok will fix it, either, although it won’t hurt; teenagers getting zonked out on Osama bin Laden apologia and slickly repackaged Holocaust revisionism is socially and politically and culturally disastrous, and boomers getting their personalities so thoroughly replaced with hateful parafascist conspiracy slop that they believe it over their own loved ones is socially and politically and culturally disastrous as well. God have mercy upon us. Butlerian Jihad now!
On Soda, Tonic, or What You Will
I was very surprised by how ingrained the culture of free refills of non-water beverages is when I visited a friend in Indiana last year. I was especially confused that one wouldn’t just order the smallest size of something if the actual amount of it one gets is arbitrary no matter what. It’s indeed very stereotypically Middle American, despite certain affluent coastal liberals’ characteristically nasty and bigoted way of saying so.
On the Incumbent Governor of the Great State of New York
Kathy Hochul doesn’t really make sense if you're looking at her through the usual ideological-spectrum and blue-tribe-red-tribe lenses, but she makes perfect sense through the lens of being a creature of the New York Democratic machine, where it’s still the Clinton-Gingrich era and everybody with real ideological or moral commitments, of any kind, is a dumb Columbia sophomore who doesn’t know what’s good for them. In the House in the early 2010s this expressed itself as a mostly productive, collaborative, “bipartisan”-for-the-time voting record; in Albany in the mid-2020s it expresses itself as out-of-touch heavy-handedness and open alignment with property developers and people who think rural Upstate school districts somehow have too much money.
I think a successful 2026 primary challenge is a possibility. James has about the same approvals as Hochul but much lower disapprovals, and could probably raise a lot of money through various #Resistance channels, especially if it’s another Trump midterm…
On LED Headlights
Let’s discuss. I’m sure we can all come up with a naïve argument that these things shouldn’t be street-legal; I know multiple people who no longer feel safe driving at night because of how blinding they are if you’re not in the car or truck or whatever that has them. So what gives? Is there some specific legal or regulatory reason why they have to be allowed, or is it just that nobody’s bothered to put through a rule against them because they tend to be popular with car buyers in our antisocial and fuck-you-I’ve-got-mine-oriented age?
On Evangelicalism in Latin America
Latin American Evangelicalism has very much been ratfucked into existence there by various Republican-led State Departments but, also, I have heard that it appeals because of its dissimilarity to Catholicism. I have heard, that is, that it’s able to present itself as less corrupt and hypocritical and less politically overconcerned. All of which is demonstrably untrue, but Evangelicalism has a certain Teflon quality to it when it comes to those particular charges, because it’s so decentralized—nowhere for the buck to stop—and because we as a civilization cannot have nice things. It should go without saying that I see the growth of this kind of Christianity as a serious, direct, and quite personal cultural and sectional threat as well, which affects my ability to think about it with any sympathy.
On the Collapse of the So-Called Liberal World Order
I do not like the way the current state of the world has caused me to think and feel. I will not say “made me” or “forced me,” but “caused me to” I think is true. I unironically say things like “heiwaboke,” I treat it as a red flag rather than a green one when someone says that they are into “peace activism,” and when I rewatched “The City on the Edge of Forever” recently I was not initially sure I would be able to see Edith Keeler with any charity. I hate all of these things about my current self, and I hate feeling like this. We live in a cruel and coarse time.
I do need to wonder if people who were perhaps similar to me in the 1930s and 1940s felt the same—the bulk of the Catholic Worker movement, for example, who temporarily broke from it, or at least from its leadership, over Dorothy Day’s no-nuance opposition to getting involved in World War II even after Pearl Harbor. There are circumstantial reasons to look at her later writing and conclude that she perhaps realized afterwards that this had been a serious mistake, but it is a serious blot on her copybook. I wonder how disillusioned people like me felt.
I do not like to feel disillusioned. One’s illusions are a precious thing, but one only realizes that after one realizes that they are illusions, and one only realizes that they are illusions after one no longer has them. There needs to be some route to gratitude for what one still has; I know that for some people there is one, but I suppose I spend so much time dreaming the kinds of dreams that I wish to dream.
On Gender
If you, like me and like Courtney Love, want to be the girl with the most cake, what is stopping you? Where is the rub? What is your trouble? What part of that target are you unable to hit? We often hear of girls who do not have the most case, or of people who acquire the most cake without being or becoming girls.
On Wedding Culture
My mother has long felt, and raised me to feel as well, that weddings as commonly done in this country are monuments to the couple's excessive self-regard and impositions on everyone else involved—but other Americans tend not to agree with us on this.
On Various Fictional Women
Nobody knows Cordelia Flyte’s story like I do (in the sense that it’s important to understanding her and Brideshead Revisited as a whole that she is 1. a wonderful, wise, compassionate person but also 2. a fascist).
There should be more Tar-Míriel fanwork out there that’s emotionally and morally complex without using the Z draft or going we-all-know-what-early-2010s-fandom-figure-I’m-vaguing-about-here full King’s Men apologia.
There’s a pervasive mischaracterization of Lottie Matthews as an outgoing popular party girl that seems to be based exclusively on the fact that Courtney Eaton is really, really, really hot. The hints of pre-crash Lottie that we have in the actual show suggest that she was a weird, introverted, studious girl who disliked popularity drama and probably listened to Hole.
You know that headline that’s like “he’s gay, she’s a lesbian, and their thirty-three-year marriage will redefine how you think of love”? I never actually read the article that that was the headline for, and I suspect I would not necessarily like everything it had to say if I were to read it, but that is Makioka Yukiko, she of the Telephone Incident and the dancing-sushi bloodlust, and her eventual husband.
Lila dissolving-margins-brains herself into realizing, or assuming, that sending the dolls did not have the intended psychological effect, so she escalates to sending blunter and blunter Mysterious Parcels until finally for an eightieth birthday present Lenù just gets a flash drive with an MP3 of “Good Luck, Babe!” on it. It still doesn’t work.
As for Galadriel—it’s hard to know what’s left to say about Galadriel. What is there? She’s a great character. She’s a creep. Lothlórien is one of the most terrifying places in Middle-earth. Much of what I say about Tar-Míriel also applies to her, less because there’s any deficit of thinking and writing and art about Galadriel and more because she’s oddly inexhaustible for a character so well-understood (well-understood, that is, except by people who like the pig disgusting Amazon show).
On the Locked Tomb Books and the Carole Lombard Movie Nothing Sacred
Hazel Flagg walked so Cytherea the First could run.
On Anomie
On a day, I went to pick up an online order at Walmart. Simple, right? One would assume that it was simple because online orders and the picking-up thereof are how we’re supposed to do everything now, how we’re supposed to prefer it at any rate—it’s more “convenient,” a term, or rather a way of using a term, to which I will get back later.
Anyway, I had thought so, but there is A Process now, and it starts on An App and involves another person putting things into your car.
I did not know that, so what I did was I went to the store, I walked in, I got directed further and further away from my car by multiple greeters who could tell that I was in the store and on foot and thus should, perhaps, have explained the Process to me and explained that one is meant not to do it outside of a fucking internal combustion engine, then, when I finally got out to the loading bays, I saw signage indicating that I’d done the whole Process wrong.
So I shlepped back to my car—through, I should add, an unpleasantly warm, humid, drippy day—and, since I had budgeted “walk into a store and go to a customer service desk” time into my errands, not “wrestle with a fucking app and then wait for some sort of confirmation” time, I realized I had to go back again tonight and do the entire process over again on a separate trip. It really made me appreciate the previous week’s civilized, human-scaled, reasonable-expectations process of “run around to two libraries asking if either of them had kept a bookmark that I accidentally returned with my copy of an Elena Ferrante book, because I got the bookmark at a church in Italy that does not have an online presence and would not have been able to get another one until some time in 2025 or 2026.”
If I had known about this in advance, I would have just walked in and bought the speaker the old-fashioned way. But the speaker was bought and paid for and, presumably, would be brought out to the loading zone when I finally figured out The Process, so oh well.
In any case, I went to the library to do something else and then, while there, realized that I had a badly frayed section in my pants, in an area where with that kind of thing it matters whether or not you are wearing underwear—which I wasn’t. Fortunately I did not have to do anything after that before I could go home and change. If I had had to I think I would have committed vehicular manslaughter.
Attempt #2 to pick up the speaker worked, but was also aggravating as all hell. This is the world of everyone being confined to their cars all of the time because relentless anomie has been plugged to us all as “convenience”—and perhaps it is “convenient,” in a way, since people will simply believe anything that advertises itself as “convenient.” If something claims to be cheap and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims to be fast and it isn’t, you can tell; if it claims, however, to be convenient and it isn’t, there is a temptation to assume that, since “convenience” is so vague, maybe it is more “convenient” on some difficult-to-measure level that you’re just too much of a luddite to see. More often than not this level is the level on which anomie sets in and people become obsessively unhappy with and afraid of one another. At the store, one shops. One goes out to the shops and meets people in the shops. Growing up I did in fact dislike that process very much, but that was just one case among many of people who were unhappy kids in the 1990s and 2000s not realizing how good we, in fact, had it.
On the Egotism of the Summer People
Warm-weather people are the morning people of weather.
Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: The unconscionable treatment and constant betrayal of people who live in the Gaza Strip; New Caledonia; Great Britain; the apparently extraordinarily bad movie Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage; the very good movie Marathon Man and the virtues and vices of the schools of acting that it features; my health; other people’s health; Pope Francis’s use of the quasi-reclaimed offensive Italian slang term frociaggine; what makes a good and a bad socialist realist propaganda poster.