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.

Public Figures with the Word “Courtney” in Their Names and Why They Are or Were Deep State Plants

• John Courtney Murray, theologian: Allegedly a Cold Warrior, in fact subordinated the Church to DEEP STATE THREE-LETTER-AGENCY WOKE COMMUNISM by doing (((religious liberty))) at Vatican II.

• Courtney Love, musician: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Hole is the Pontifical Gregorian University of kinderwhore grunge bands. Killed the revolutionary leaders Kurt Cobain and Kristen Pfaff and damaged US-Japan relations by creating the artistically questionable 2000s manga Princess Ai. But at least a lot of her actual music is very very good, which brings us to:

• Lou Courtney, musician: I have never really vibed with his particular kind of soul music, and he wrote for Chubby Checker, an obvious soft-power exercise if there ever was one.

• Courtney Eaton, actress: Was in Mad Max: Fury Road, which is feminazi propaganda against real American manhood. Stop the feminization of America!

• Kourtney Kardashian, Kardashian: Why does she spell it with a K? To make it seem like it’s a name in a language where /k/ is always spelled that way, OBVIOUSLY. This is a hyperforeignism to throw off suspicion. She’s a fed.

• Courtney Young, former President of the American Library Association: Was President of the American Library Association.

• Charles Courtney Curran, painter: No Impressionist could ever be a real MAGA patriot.

• Leonard Courtney, 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith: Victorian Liberal who supported Parliamentary reform and opposed the Empire. Need I say more?

Things That God Created to Train the Faithful: A Partial List

I write this from a more or less okay hotel lobby computer in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, dashed off in a slapdash fashion. It is my second Dune-inspired not-quite-essay, after the wildly successful (in some, extremely narrow, circles, which I suppose robs the expression “wildly successful” of most or all of its force) “Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?” The original saying, attributed by noted pro-life femcel Irulan Corrino to (who else?) Muad’dib, is, of course, “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.”

To Irulan’s immortalization of her husband’s observation, I add:

God created prestige TV, and its attendant practices around both viewing culture and narrative mode, to train the faithful. (Not to tip my hand about my current fandom participation overmuch, but…)

God created Florida to train the faithful.

God created Trustco Bank to train the faithful.

God created old-school anime fandom to train the faithful.

God created small talk to train the faithful.

God created dating to train the faithful.

God created Don DeLillo/Murakami Haruki-type swill about depoliticized consumerist realism, and the idea that this is “good” literature, to train the faithful.

God created hangnails to train the faithful.

God created car culture to train the faithful.

God created unseasonably warm weather to train the faithful.

God created sleep apnea to train the faithful.

God created the Republic of Ireland’s political system to train the faithful.

God created the funhouse-mirror version of the overgrown-high-school-mean-girl mindset, where you assume everyone else is an overgrown high school mean girl if they ever disagree with you on anything, to train the faithful.

God created some, but not all, of the Interstate Highway System to train the faithful.

God created both the phrase “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and its logical complement to train the faithful—but, since He also created the phrase “both sides do it” to train the faithful, it’s best not to stress this overmuch.

God created people who loudly complain about cold weather, and treat their preferences regarding this as objective fact with which everyone agrees, to train the faithful.

God created margarine to train the faithful.

An Autoflorilegium

The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. 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 Taylor Swift

As a Taylor Swift fan who cordially dislikes gridiron football (I think this combination of tastes is what in right-wing grievance lingo is called “cultural Marxism”), I hope the “synergy” in which she is for some reason to do with the NFL now loses its luster as soon as possible.

I haven’t been to any of the Eras Tour shows (I don't exactly make “Taylor Swift tickets” money as a museum archivist, and even if I did, I overstimulate easily), but I’ve seen a fair number of fan bootleg clips from them and it’s really an astounding spectacle. We’re talking a setlist that rivals your typical Springsteen concert, pyrotechnics that could seriously injure Swift if she gets sloppy with her choreography, lighting effects and stage design that seem precision-engineered to remind one at every moment that she is an overgrown theater kid with an unlimited budget and at least one unmedicated mood disorder—why be to do with football as well?

This is not apropos of the above (except in the ways that it is), but I have, as I’ve said, been spoiling to tell people off about this:

Substantively, strong-to-dispositive arguments can and should be made that Taylor Swift’s actual ouevre is a lot less monomaniacally obsessed with buttressing heteronormativity than her public image tends to suggest. This shows up in her choices of hypotexts, in her aesthetic and intellectual relationships with other artists, and in specific songs like (off the top of my head) “Wonderland,” “Seven,” and “Ivy.” This doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift the human person is gay or bisexual, but it’s at least a little bit likelier to mean that than it is to mean that Taylor Swift the cultural product (an ungainly generation-absorbing chimera better understood by drinking heavily while watching Millennium Actress than by experiencing or researching anything in the mind-independent physical world) is “queer.” She isn’t, and people aren’t really saying that she is. These are three separate Taylor Swifts. No one worth listening to is arguing that the one who’s to do with gridiron football now for some reason is gay.

What’s demoralizing about every time Gaylor (both in the narrow sense of speculation about Taylor Swift not being straight and in the broad sense of the LGBT side of Taylor Swift’s fandom) makes mainstream news is the hostility to which LGBT Swifties, especially lesbian Swifties, are subjected. It can get shockingly overt, to the point of making one wonder how much other homophobia is just barely repressed in our society rather than having actually been overcome, but it also shows up in coded forms. Foremost among these is the idea that Gaylor speculah (to use an old anime fandom word) is somehow more egregious and insulting than other kinds of invasive speculah about Taylor Swift’s affective life, an idea that only makes any sense at all if you do on some level think that saying that someone is gay or bisexual is derogatory. The bemusement with which LGBT people who like more-firmly-queer art and do not like Taylor Swift tend to react is a bit more understandable, but still depressing to see because of the no-true-Scotsman element and the apparent lack of awareness that millions of people like Taylor Swift and also like Jen Cloher and Rina Sawayama and Boygenius and Killing Eve and so on.

In conclusion, Gaylor is a land of contrasts.

On Sports

Speaking of football, but not of Taylor Swift, the legalization of sports gambling has made mainstream sports TV, ESPN and the like, damn near unwatchable for anyone who isn’t a gambler, and I know people with otherwise vigorously libertarian views on gambling and other (of what used to be called) “vice” issues who think it was a mistake from a sheer quality-of-life standpoint.

It seems like such a shame to see sports in terms of bets about outcomes anyway, and this fuels my aesthetic dislike for sabermetrics as well; obviously it “matters” who “wins,” but in other countries, Tunisia for instance, I have seen large celebrations of local soccer teams that did not even win, just because they played a good game—and I myself liked both the Red Sox and the Orioles better when they won less.

On the 2023 Writer’s Guild of America Strike

Not only does a television writers' strike not cause much harm, out-and-out automating cultural production does. Too, if human writers really can't produce anything better than whatever ChatGPT’s great-grandscion program spews out for Avengers Wars 69, then we’re already halfway down the road from Rossetti’s “Amor Mundi.”

The only current scripted American TV show that I’m actively following is Yellowjackets, which genuinely could not be written, at all, without human consideration. If subsequent seasons suck because of this then I’ll be upset, but not nearly as upset as I’ll be if the strike fails and in ten years nobody has anything to watch that’s better-written than a fin de millénaire car commercial.

Moreover there have by definition to be some things that aren’t automated in order for human society to not just be that one wojak comic of someone hooked into a Harry Potter-themed VR headset while on a morphine drip.

On the Remake of the Film Mean Girls and Its Discontents

For Regina George being on TikTok now, she doesn't default to saying “fucking kys” nearly as much as is realistic for a high school bully born in ~2006. I'm not sure I'd say this ruins the tone—Mean Girls isn't exactly Heathers or Jawbreaker to begin with—but the tone is noticeably different, especially given instances of outright bowdlerization when in the original they call people sluts or dykes. There’s also a failure to accurately reflect the huge differences between bullying twenty years ago and bullying today, even though everyone is on social media (i.e., again, Regina should always be telling people to kill themselves, probably from behind seven burner accounts). We're left with unnecessarily softened forms of bullying behaviors that were mostly extirpated from American schools over a decade ago, all being filmed for TikTok for some reason. Some of the songs are really fun, and there are interesting and considered acting choices being made, particularly by the women playing Regina and Janis. The woman playing Cady is a bit more questionable, but that's interesting in itself since it means that she comes off as genuinely offputting and difficult to understand from the perspective of the characters who have been socialized normally.

On Various Movies That I Watched in June 2019, Written at That Time and Largely Unedited

Tolkien (2019)

This is a paint-by-numbers biopic that at more than a few points actively bored me and that felt way longer than it actually was; I would not see it again, at least not in its entirety. It fudges the facts in ways that sometimes make its subject look worse rather than better than he actually was and its treatment of his religious background is perfunctory at best. However, it’s not completely fatuous, not compared to actively audience-insulting biopics like The Babe Ruth Story or that Lifetime movie about J.K. Rowling; it does dramatize some of the key moments of Tolkien’s early life pretty well, its lead actors (Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien and Lily Collins as his eventual wife Edith) more or less know what they’re doing, and the production designs are pretty. A few early scenes with Tolkien’s mother Mabel, who is often overlooked when people discuss his early influences, were especially welcome to me; I particularly liked one where she puts on a magic lantern show for him and his brother.

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

With this Studio Ghibli movie we have a “save the historic building” plotline wedded with surprising grace to what in other hands would probably have been a shockingly melodramatic emotional arc involving the female protagonist’s male love interest finding out his true parentage. It’s set in Japan in the early 1960s and when I watched it with my mother a lot of the material culture and even some of the songs felt familiar from her 1960s American childhood. These moments of recognition and nostalgia are common with Ghibli movies and I felt them too even though I was born in 1993. People say that Japan is a socially conservative country, and they’re right to say it, not because of “hot-button issues” but because much of the country looks basically as it does in this movie even now. The cute, fun-but-contemplative, jazzy soundtrack is a particular standout.

Suspiria (1977)

Midnight-movie stalwart Jessica Harper and her friend Stefania Casini go up against an evil coven at her posh European ballet school in this gore-soaked Italian horror classic directed by Anthony Bourdain’s father-in-law. A female friend of mine says that this movie looks the way a heavy period feels; its chief strength is its lurid cinematography, and Harper’s mega-ingenue balsa-wood acting style would go on to serve her well in the lesser-known Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Treatment. Harper is in her late twenties in this but looks maybe nineteen after wardrobe and makeup; her character is an interesting missing link between classic Gothic heroines like Mina Harker from Dracula and The Turn of the Screw’s nameless governess and more proactive but also more morally and (sometimes) sexually innocent “final girls” like the girl from Scream and Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Field of Dreams (1989)

It surprises me that there’s never been any kind of fad for this movie in Millennial social media circles. In so many ways it’s tailor-made for “Tumblr”-ish aesthetic tastes—it’s pervaded with American Gothic imagery with its unexplained disembodied voices and time-traveling baseball ghosts manifesting out of cornfields, Kevin Costner’s character is defined by proto-Chris Evans nonthreatening flannel-and-dad-jeans masculinity, it has an unsympathetic character being called a Nazi in public, it’s an unintentional eighties period piece in a way that people were all over two or three years ago, and on top of all this it’s a well-written and visually beautiful movie. It’s possible that the sports-driven premise and the fact that the movie is a Father’s Day staple and lots of people have awful relationships with their fathers put the social media scene off of it, but if so, I think that’s a shame.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is both a prequel and a sequel to the original Mamma Mia!, and that fact, which sounds at first like a gimmick, is in fact exactly what makes this otherwise insubstantial movie work and resonate at a surprisingly deep level. It would be ridiculous to say that this is a religious movie in the sense that The Song of Bernadette and Kundun are religious movies. What it is, however, is a movie that is at least occasionally able to look beyond its own boundaries to imagine an eternal world of total significance and utter joy. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a rigidly-enforced no-irony zone in which past, present, and future; sea, sand, sun, and sky; art and nature; “and we ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” are fused into a bright blue eternity whose beginning is in its end, through a riot of unselfconscious musical joy, in saecula saeculorum.

On the Battle of the Sexes

People who get set off by every little thing have always been with us. Thinking of it as a recent phenomenon specially linked to women or to feminism strikes me as confirmation bias.

On Bob Katter, Australian Politician

Every three months, a person is torn to pieces by a moose in Northern New England.

On Jim Jordan, US Congressman

A few ideas for unconventional Speaker candidates, given the GOP's demonstrated preference for abusive sports coaches:

Jerry Sandusky
Joe Paterno’s ghost
That Jim Foster guy from Northwestern’s baseball team
John Kreese from The Karate Kid
Ben Scott from Yellowjackets
Rex from Napoleon Dynamite
Eteri Tutberidze
Tonya Harding’s ex-husband
My high school gym teacher, from what I can remember

On Elena Ferrante

There’s apparently serious controversy among meridionalists about whether Ferrante is sufficiently critical of her namesake protagonist’s attitude at the end of L’amica geniale (the first book in the series that, in Italian, has the same title). As of this writing I have not finished the series and so I am keeping an open mind; I think how angry I am at Lenù right now is intentional on Ferrante’s part, but we’ll see how things evolve from here.

Galling, either way, that someone would make an active choice to ignore a real class conflict happening in real time in the same room as her in favor of listening to some guy bloviate about his trick of writing magazine articles about class conflict by regurgitating other articles and ISTAT papers. Plebs this, plebs that; Lila deserves better, especially since Lenù’s thoughts and feelings about Lila herself—we all have some idea what I mean by this; “dissolving margins”; “I had made a place for her in me”—are also so vague and self-evading, things she just won’t look straight at no matter how much mental drudgery she has to put into looking at other things instead.

Not that that is entirely her fault. Every time I think the teachers in L'amica geniale can’t get more classist, they come out with some horrifying shit like “Lila’s mental beauty all went to her tits and ass,” said directly to another teenage girl. It’s not even classism in the economic sense, since Lila is one of the wealthiest characters at this point, but that makes it all the more pernicious since, especially if you are the Smarted Gifted Kid Who’s Good at School, it’s more difficult to recognize it as classism rather than as a sound appraisal of the value of an education. It is to be mourned that Lenù eventually loses the ability to see through it.

I know that Ferrante is doing this for a reason and I know what that reason is, but every time Lenù’s narration refers derisively to the Neapolitan language as “dialect” my skin crawls. And that starts early on.

Other Topics Not Covered in This Autoflorilegium: the 1990s Children’s Book Series Animorphs; the 2006 Anime Simoun; the Locked Tomb Books; the Band Boygenius and Its Discontents; Most Matters Directly Involving Religion; Preservation; Touch-Aversion; the Egotism of the Summer People

Some Aphorisms

Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.

The problem with the open society is that you can’t get dirt on anybody.

If there’s one thing that I know boomers love, it’s free ziti.

Traditionalism is to tradition what a decapitated body is to a star athlete.

One should love God’s moral law in the way that one loves one’s most boring relative.

Just as the sun sets in the west, so the moral sets into the political.

In languages that have no gnomic aspect one cannot understand religion.

While I’m not sure whether or not I’m willing to fully subscribe to it, there is a robust public health and consumer safety argument for suplexing TikTok and similar algorithmed-to-hell-and-back short-form-video-oriented platforms into the fires of Orodruin whence they came, an argument that has nothing to do with what foreign dictatorships they do or don’t have servers in.

The Victorians were the last civilization to understand that human life is not actually very secure as a matter of course, which covers a multitude of their many other sins.

The modern tendency is to stress marriage’s exclusivity more than, and sometimes over against, its permanence. It is socially destabilizing and still morally imperfect, but not necessarily morally worse. What were once abuse victims’ (mostly women’s) problems become the community’s problems. Strong arguments can be made for that.

Moreover any situation that one is “allowed” to leave is going to look similar to this.

At least on the level of cultivating personal virtue, casual sex might actually be less immoral than plenty of what passes for normal heterosexual relationship behavior in the secular world. Casual sex is, whatever else can be said about it, at least a straightforward way of addressing a very common type of physical desire and frustration to which most (not all, but most) people can relate. With practices like hanging on in vague situationships with people one neither likes nor respects because of the perceived social censure that comes with singleness, or rebuilding one’s entire social circle from scratch every time one starts or ends a romantic relationship, other areas of life are implicated and it becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that an idol is being made of sexual practice itself, as long as that practice is dully heterosexual in character—and yet irreligious heterosexual people are at least as likely to behave this way as religious ones, to the point that I have known people who have left their childhood religions for the sectors of secular society that behave in this way! Received-wisdom heterosexual relationship behavior takes an axe to almost all the virtues, not despite but because of how socially normative it is.

The thing about Jesus the “moral philosopher” (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?) is that he’s really not unique and he’s certainly not uniquely admirable. The “historical Jesus” is a self-aggrandizing and occasionally even violent apocalypticist who swings back and forth between preaching what was actually within the mainstream of Pharisee moral theology at the time and demanding that people abandon their families and economic obligations to follow him around listening to more of this. The “Christ of faith” is the only Jesus Who’s still a convincing moral exemplar once you dispense with the presupposition that you have to like the guy.

Even the southwestern tip of Connecticut really is New England at heart—its deep history, landscape, and lieux de memoire are all pure New England. It has not so much sold its birthright as had that birthright bought out by rich people who have thrown up tacky mansions all along the shoreline and raise their children to root for New York sports teams. One need only visit an old burying ground in Greenwich or Darien to understand this.

The American right from Reagan onwards, arguably from Goldwater onwards, has had one important point of similarity with fascism wisely expounded: it is not so much any form of “conservatism” as a Revolutionary Right ideology, which seeks not to preserve an existing or even restore a former social structure but to create a new type of society entirely. This society keeps nothing of substance from the past and owes nothing to the past other than as a wellspring and storehouse for its aesthetic imaginary. In the recent vicissitudes of the American right under its Tea Party, alt-right, and MAGA guises, we see this in the promiscuous cribbing of aesthetic signposts that in the past pointed to very different and often mutually hostile sectors of American society, not all of them reactionary at the time: Southern Redeemers and Neo-Confederates, “Main Street” small businessmen in the Northeast and Midwest, anti-authoritarian frontiersmen, many-relationed immigrant Catholics and religious Jews, blue-collar tough guys whose fathers or even whose younger selves were the “Resistance libs” of the Reagan years. The resulting historiography, or fantasia on themes from American historiography, is starkly nationalistic, but eclectic enough to have a certain crossover appeal to people disillusioned by or unwelcome in previous American nationalist spasms.

In the end, all non-absolute moral theories are the friend-enemy distinction in drag.

Added November 19, 2023: When one is parched beyond belief in a bone-dry airplane cabin and the drinks cart is ever-so-slowly inching closer, closer, closer—this too is a manifestation of the unsatisfactoriness of things. I have heard that in previous days it was not like this—but, then, almost nobody could afford it back then.

A Prose Poem Every Word of Which Is True

It's the witching hour on a July night, or morning. You're lying naked in bed with some type of splinter in your foot because you and your roommate both had a terrible day and nobody swept the kitchen floor. You had a terrible day because you had to authorize three thousand dollars for a car fix that might not even work; the mechanic is having a hard time explaining why not in terms that you can understand. The three thousand dollars are mostly your parents’ money, which is to say, your late grandparents’ money. They were with an oil supermajor and are thus also partly responsible for the fact that it is a muggy night even for July, yet still the least muggy night in days and days—and people still deny something is amiss here, because anecdotal evidence counts when it's cold out but not when it's hot out. You try to say a prayer for your grandparents in purgatory but for some reason what comes out is “Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam hatov v’ha’meitiv,” which is true but not helpful in the moment. You feel fat, and a bout of the gender dysphoria is setting in. A singer you like a lot did a theme song for a movie you were going to see, but now you don't think you'll bother because it turns out the author of the book on which it is based is wanted in connection with a murder case in the Republic of Zambia and has been for some time. Eventually at some point that you might or might not live to see history will consummate its triumph over time and we will, as they say, all look back on this and laugh. Do you know where your soul is? I do, saith the Lord.

Affronts to English Usage

This list is to be thought of in the context of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book (枕草子Makura no sōshi). Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists (La vertigine della lista) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”) might also guide some readers to an understanding that this isn’t to be taken too literally, and yet, at the same time, is to be taken utterly seriously.

Affronts to English Usage

“Weary” for “wary”

“Based off of” for “based on”

“Per say” for “per se”

“Yay or nay” for “yea or nay”

“Ah natural” for “au naturel”

Influencer

Polycule

For You Page

“PFP” for “icon” or “avatar”

S3ggs, k!ll, unalive, et hoc genus omne (I am old enough to remember 1337, p0n0s, vag000, and h4xx0rz. Today’s equivalents cannot hold a candle.)

“Mass of the Ages”

Chief Knowledge Officer

Anti-choice, pro-abort, et hoc genus omne

Unprecedented, new normal, et hoc genus omne

Wokism, especially as a loanword in other languages

Racial reckoning

“A republic, not a democracy”

CRT

“Our boys in blue”

And, most egregiously of all, the fact that some random online writer, mostly self-published, thinks anybody else has reason to care about a list like this.

Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?

One is a visionary who thinks in the long term about the future of the humanity but often stakes out incendiary or extreme-seeming positions on here-and-now issues that some argue damage the credibility of the overall cause. The other is a climate activist. Can you tell who said what?

1.       Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

2.       We have to tell it like it is. Because if there are no positive things to tell, then what should we do, should we spread false hope? We can’t do that, we have to tell the truth.

3.       I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived.

4.       Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most.

5.       It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

6.       That is what we have to realize, that that is what we have to do right now. I’m not the one who’s saying these things. I’m not the one who we should be listening to. And I say that all the time.

7.       We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences.

8.       Only fools prefer the past!

9.       Almost everything is black and white.

10.     If everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame.

Answers: Leto, Thunberg, Leto, Leto, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg, Leto, Thunberg, Thunberg

2. and 6. come from a Financial Times interview and a Democracy Now interview, both from 2019. 7., 9., and 10. come from a book called No One is Too Small to Make a Difference. 1., 3., 4., 5., and 8. come from God-Emperor of Dune.