エピソード

  • Badolescence

    Badolescence
    2025/04/03
    Late at night last week in another country, my family and I talked with a Canadian couple about what America has come to. We agreed that what’s happening is bad, and I listed the good things that come to mind when I think of Canada: the Kids in the Hall, Alice Munro, Sidney Crosby, Leonard Cohen. “Where would we be without Leonard Cohen?” I said—though, to be honest, without Leonard Cohen I wouldn’t be different. Probably not at all. I like his songs, but I don’t know them well, not like I know the work of, say, Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, and the other Kids in the Hall. If you could take everyone who is currently dismantling what passes for our federal government, and force them to watch one movie, read one book, listen to one album, spend an hour with one painting, or engage with an artifact from another artistic medium, in the hope that it might fix them somehow, and pull their souls back from the brink of hell—which is where they are currently going, and trying desperately to pull us all with them—then what would that book, movie, album, painting, poem, or whatever, be?I, for one, would make them watch this 1982 film of a Randy Newman show that features appearances by Ry Cooder and Linda Ronstadt.The government dismantlers would have to watch the whole thing. The only way it works is if you watch the whole thing.Would it work? Would it solve the problem of them? No, not most of them. I know that. Maybe the better question is this: when this is all over—and it will be over, someday, after more people die, and we all suffer a while longer, maybe a lot longer—how do we fix those who are responsible for all that is currently going down? Let’s imagine they can be fixed. Let’s project a future in which there are consequences for those who do what are truly the worst things. What does rehabilitation look like, for the lunatic who wants all our kids to get measles, so that only the strongest of them survive? If they put me in charge of trying to fix our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, I would force him into detox for six months and subject him to mandatory viewings of that Randy Newman show and the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Seconds, in which an unhappy man is given another chance at his adulthood, and can pursue his dream of being an artist, rather than a guy behind a desk at a bank. Mere days into his new life, he finds that despite how he now looks like Rock Hudson and can paint all day long and have all the passionate sex he wants, he is still miserable. The cabinet member in my care would have to read “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” more than one time. He would have to read Song of Solomon and do chores.I would probably not, in the name of solving his poisoned soul and mind, show that broken man the hottest new TV show on Netflix, the British show that's called Adolescence. I don’t think it would help get the job done.If you don't know, Adolescence is a scripted show about a young teenage boy who murders a young teenage girl. The show spends its four episodes contemplating what led him to do that. It points fingers at the culture at large, the rhetoric that adolescent boys are exposed to via Instagram and elsewhere. Andrew Tate’s name comes up at least one time. Andrew Tate, if you don’t know, is an ugly man who brags online about treating women horribly in real life. I doubt he can be fixed.Adolescence is, if nothing else, an interesting TV show. I don’t regret watching it. There is no denying the feats that it performs, with every hour-long episode consisting of one continuous shot. In the first installment, we start with a couple of detectives in a car, discussing apples, and follow them to the suspect’s house, where a SWAT team, or something like it, battering-rams the door and holds the family at gunpoint. They take the kid to the police station and interrogate him. As they go from place to place, via car, there are no cuts in the action. It’s really something. The creators of the show must have had to choreograph everything the actors did with great meticulousness, especially on that first episode, with its police station full of people who walk through the frame in one direction or another. If even one of those blokes made a wrong move, like at minute forty-seven, they would have had to start all the way back again at the beginning. The fourth episode shows us the family of the adolescent boy, who is away in prison, a year after he committed the murder. They are getting by and still trying to wrap their heads around what happened. In some of the final minutes, the mother and father do their best to determine where they went wrong, how they brought up a kid who would commit murder at age thirteen, and what elements of the outside world must have guided his hand as he stabbed his victim many times. When that last episode ended, I felt a little bit like I had just watched an extended and technically impressive version of the anti-drug public ...
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    26 分
  • Stories Are Made out of Eggs

    Stories Are Made out of Eggs
    2025/03/12
    Incrediwife and I had the sort of conversation folks like us are having now. We discussed what new breakfasts we can eat, to replace the ones we usually have, which are made using several eggs. We are not egg fiends, but we consume them most mornings, often with kale or bell peppers scrambled in there. I love cuisine.Now, thanks to the ghouls who are running our country, many of whom have never shopped at a supermarket, because they have always been so rich they have had others do everything for them, a dozen eggs in Kansas City cost $7.50. We have to moderate our egg consumption so we don’t lose too much money.Ours, I realize, is not yet an extraordinary hardship. We have tofu in our refrigerator at all times. A tofu scramble is always an option. We like oatmeal. I have a vegan brunch cookbook. Incrediwife, our kids, and I are prepared for this moment.I don’t know, though, what the next moment will be like. Will more people take the turn we have, and start making tofu scrambles instead of cooking eggs? If so, that could make tofu scarce. What will the next shortage be? And what’s going to happen if thousands more retirees stop getting the Social Security checks that have kept them from going hungry and unhoused? That’s a much bigger problem than my household not having eggs. I thought about getting a chicken coop and putting chickens in it. Chickens lay eggs. We could feed the chickens whatever we want, and take their eggs from them despite their protestations. We don’t have much of a backyard, but we have no neighbors in back of our house. There are only the woods out there. We could handle chickens. They make nice sounds.I looked up chicken coops online, and my first thought, when I saw this one on Chewy.com, went something like, No way. I cannot imagine confining chickens to such a limited space for their entire lives, strictly so I can continue stuffing my face with their eggs. They would have no room to move around! They would not feel joy. It’s without a doubt one of the most absurd thoughts I have had recently. Because, you know, chickens would be lucky to live in a small coop in my backyard. It would be about a hundred thousand times better than the places most of them live. You know? So, yes, eggs cost too much, and I expect things to get a lot worse. Things can always get worse. And they will.But sometimes, when I enter a room, and one of our cats is there, I say hello to him. You’re allowed to say hello without expecting a response. I don’t expect a response from the cats.And starting a paragraph with a conjunction is a great way to abruptly change the subject in your newsletter. But I am so tired of watching scenes in TV shows where one character tells another about their shared history. They retell a scene from their past, and the scene they retell is one they were both present for, which both of them remember. It happens on A Thousand Blows. It happens on Yellowjackets, and probably every TV show. Even the good ones do this thing that drives me up the wall. I wanted to provide an example of this in action, but when I tried googling it, not expecting much, or knowing how to describe what I’m going on about in a succinct google search, I found a website that’s meant to help people whose televisions have recently begun to address them specifically. Like, the programs aren’t for a broad audience of people anymore, the TV shows are instead directed at this one person. Their TVs are trying to tell them something important through the TV shows. It is apparently a symptom of mental illness, to become convinced that the TV is doing that. I know why people on television tell each other about things from the past that both of them remember with clarity and don’t need to have explained to them. They are speaking to one another for the sake of the viewers. They are telling each other things they both already know so that whoever is listening will learn about them. It’s a way for the writers to demonstrate for whoever is watching who these characters are, where they came from, and how and how well they know one another. It is a symptom of what some people like to call “character development.” And it is not only unnecessary, it’s a boring thing to sit through. It’s a way to check a certain kind of box, a way to help those who write in teams, the way TV writers do, feel like they are doing their jobs. If you’re writing a story and it’s going well, you don’t have to go out of your way to develop characters. That’s what’s supposed to happen in the course of telling your story. We learn who the characters are through their actions and from how they speak. If you feel like you need to stop and have a character explain to the audience who they are, that’s a sign that of one of three things: * You are William Shakespeare, it’s the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the rules are different because it’s the past and you’re writing for the stage.* You’re ...
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    20 分
  • You Have Got To Be Squidding Me

    You Have Got To Be Squidding Me
    2025/02/25
    I have continued to use Little Red Book a.k.a. Xiaohongshu a.k.a. Rednote. It’s the Chinese version of TikTok that got popular in the USA when it seemed like TikTok was going to shut down. I never liked TikTok, but I enjoy Rednote, because I can’t understand what anyone is saying and I can’t determine how nauseatingly bad all of the jokes are. I am pleased to report that a comment I left on a video on Rednote has gotten more than 200 likes. The number is climbing all of the time. Soon they’re going to call me Mr. Worldwide because of my universally celebrated fame, all because of the comment I left on this one video.This is the story of how I left the comment on the video. I was watching footage of a man breaking up logs of wood, using a kind of whirling drill thing. It looks like the drill bit that’s on the front of the vehicle Shredder uses to travel from underground to the surface in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Sometimes he would bring Krang with him.On the video, in English, I commented, “please put my head on this.” Now, every time I open the app, I find that a dozen people have liked that comment. Sometimes it’s more than that. It’s an extremely popular comment. But I don’t really want anyone to split my head open with an electric thing, I was pretending.I have also found a man who does livestreams at night, which is daytime here in the USA, of cats and dogs he has taken in. Someone posted in English during a livestream that he rescued them, that they’re all strays. They gather in this outdoor space, and there’s always a pot of something simmering in the foreground, while further back he slices raw meat and fish and feeds them to the cats and dogs. He wears nose plugs. It must smell like a nightmare, all the dirty animals and dead flesh pulsating in the hot Chinese night.I want to travel to China and meet this man. I want to help him feed the dogs and cats. But it’s possible I should stay at home instead and write something about the leafy greens that are in the simmering pot. I wonder what sort of inner life I can extrapolate for those vegetables. Who are their parents? What did they want for their own lives, before they ended up in that pot?Using Rednote reminds me of what it used to be like to use the Internet. I heard Chris Hayes, of all people, talking on a podcast about how in the early Internet days going online could sometimes feel like the moments after you check into a hotel in a new city, when you hit the street to go and get a cup of coffee and see what kind of people you see, whereas now using the Internet always seems to feel more like getting stuck in traffic. And I wouldn’t necessarily put it the same way—going online for me has never quite matched the excitement of being in a new place like that. But using an app that’s based in another country, which has very few American users, does remind me of what the Internet was supposed to be, before it turned into what it is. I wrote an essay that was published on Friday at The Culture We Deserve. You can read it now. It’s about the novel Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown, which was the subject of my master’s thesis, which I wrote twenty years ago. You know what I can’t believe? I can’t believe the nurse at my doctor’s office laughed at me when I said I wanted to be the healthiest person she’s ever seen. I said I wanted to feel like a man who has something to live for. I told her someone in this world had to lay it all on the line, and that it might as well be me. She laughed for at least the third time that visit. I said nothing could happen anymore unless something took place that was real, that you could feel with your hands. She laughed even harder. The nurse did laugh in real life, though, when I said I aspire to be someone who smokes cannabis all day long and floats through his life without a care in the world. I confessed that I have too much work to do, to be like that. My kids would be against it, I’d probably feel nauseous a lot, and I just wouldn’t act like myself. Also I need to drive places, and I don’t want to do that under the influence. No one would be happy with me if I were like that, but still I kind of wish I could be that kind of person, who’s like the physical embodiment of calm and feeling good. The nurse walked out of the room laughing and said something to the doctor, I think that she thought I was funny. I couldn’t really hear her. She may have recommended that the doctor inject me with Lethal Injection Fluid and get this mess over with once and for all. Although I am rarely calm, and if I am the physical embodiment of anything it’s the sound of Jell-O being fired out of a machinegun, at least I am not a coffeehouse that’s owned by a church. The Kansas City subreddit had a thread going the other day about coffeehouses in the city’s northland, where I live, being owned by churches and Christian groups. One of them advertises that they ...
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    31 分
  • The Hand That Grips Us Gets Stronger

    The Hand That Grips Us Gets Stronger
    2025/02/04
    Don’t ever let anyone tell you that when you read a book there is no way you will see yourself reflected in the words on the page. Because that definitely happened to me this morning.I was reading the novel The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, and I got to the part where the narrator describes his father, saying, I knew that my father…was some sort of luckless failure before I knew what ‘failure’ meant, before I knew anything about money, status, power, fame or any of those coveted prizes whose myriad forms have led me throughout my life that dervish dance which is now, I trust, over. And of course when I say that my dear father was a failure I mean it only in the grossest worldly sense. He was an intelligent good man, pure in heart.I can’t remember the last time I identified with a paragraph so completely. Let this be all the evidence we need that books are good. Despite how most of the people in government couldn’t make their way through even an accessible but slow-paced novel like The Sea, the Sea from start to finish to save their lives—and I mean just reading one, not writing one—books like it have a lot to offer. Sometimes the author describes a loser in a way that evokes a kind of frisson, a kind of shiver of recognition that’s exactly what you need to get your heart started on a cold Tuesday morning. Do I really think I’m a loser? Not on a cosmic scale. Not when it comes to, like, eternity. Anyway, it took a few days for it to sink in, that the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute at the president's inauguration. He did it twice, in case you missed it, somehow, once to the crowd and once to the flag behind him. He did it again later, apparently, and now he’s telling Germans to put the Holocaust behind them, and dismantling the federal government.I started to write this last week. At first, all I mentioned here at the start were the Nazi salutes. Every day there’s more stuff I should mention. Like how the richest man in the world has enlisted the help of college boys to destroy the Department of Stuff That Helps People Out. They want to abolish the Department of Education next. I have kids who go to school. I went to schools, once, myself. Is it time to buy a gun? I don't want to have a gun. But the president and his friends, who have more money than the rest of us have air to breathe, want people to get hurt. I might well be someone he wants to hurt. I might be the kind of guy whose life he’ll get around to destroying once he’s done some more ethnic cleansing and ended all taxation for anyone who owns their own boat. I know that American history is soaked with the blood of mostly helpless people. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but the arc of American history will bend you until you break. It will take a long time, it will hurt, and as soon as they’re done with you they’ll start on your children.It’s hard to come to terms with your own helplessness. Arming yourself doesn’t make you any less helpless. I am, at the moment I write this sentence, at the luxury high school, which is not for the rich but is still a luxury. The same twenty or so students have been walking past the classroom where I am substitute teaching. They move in the same direction every time I see them. They have passed this room at least a half-dozen times. There some of them are again. I don't know what is going on.I was listening recently to the podcast The Culture We Deserve. They were discussing the film The Brutalist.I haven't seen The Brutalist. I doubt I ever will. It sound boring, and it's three hours long. I don't have that kind of time on my hands. I haven’t done anything for a consecutive three hours in the last twelve years except work. I would say I have also slept for three consecutive hours in that period of time, but I’m honestly not sure I have.There go the students again. Why is this happening?It wasn't until I heard podcasters discuss The Brutalist that I learned its protagonist's name is Laszlo Toth.I googled that name, and it turns out it belongs to the man who vandalized Michaelangelo's Pietà in 1972. I think he hit it with a hammer. I heard, once, that the founder of the City Museum in St. Louis was present for that event. I heard he helped stop the man from destroying the statue, and died later under strange circumstances.Lazlo Toth is also the name of Don Novello's letter-writing alter ego. Don Novello is a comedy writer, who wrote for SNL, and made appearances on the show and elsewhere as Father Guido Sarducci. As Lazlo Toth, he wrote letters to presidents, corporations, and celebrities. He collected them in books, one of which I used to have.The letters were funny, in the dry way that letters can be.Is Laszlo Toth a common name? Is it the Mike Smith of another part of the world, somewhere? Like Hungary?Am I the only one left who remembers the letter-writing Lazlo Toth?And isn’t it strange, how everything seems to get heavier all the time? ...
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    35 分
  • Attack of the Tub Studs: How Guys Talk When They Get Hot

    Attack of the Tub Studs: How Guys Talk When They Get Hot
    2025/01/08
    I was in the hot tub at the YMCA. My wife was there with me. We wanted to relax and talk about our day—but a couple of studs had other ideas.One of them was 87 years old. I know his age because he’s in the hot tub every I’m at the YMCA. If a stud wants to live a long time he’s got to be hot. Someone told me, one time when I was there, that this guy was 87. Maybe now he’s 88. When we’re both there at the same time he stares at me constantly. It’s what a stud does, when he sees a lesser stud. He’s got to stare him down, put him in his place. Sometimes you’ve got to show a guy what’s what.This time, though, he started talking to my wife, who is also known as Incrediwife. He asked how many kids she has.While he was busy taking my woman away from me—and doing it effortlessly—another man turned to me and struck up a conversation. It was like a game of cat-and-mouse in there. And I was the mouse. This other man wasn’t 87, he was 45 or 40, and for probably ten minutes he explained his life plans to me in great detail. I didn’t ask about his plans for life. I asked him no questions at all. He explained that he works for immigration enforcement. He has over a decade of experience there, and soon he will attend law school. His ultimate goal is to be a federal judge, which is why the tattoos he has are not on his neck. You can’t have a judge with neck tattoos. Right? He will be a federal bankruptcy judge, and by the time he gets to that stage in his plans he will have been with immigration enforcement long enough to have earned a pension. He will also own two businesses. He has already started one of them. He’ll be able to retire, eventually, something like four times. Four times! But then, he’ll probably only retire three times, because why would would any sane person retire from the federal judiciary? Why not keep being a judge, when you’ve got a whole staff to do most of the work for you?A few days ago, I started writing about this hot tub double-stud man and wife experience, where I learned so much about that guy I’ll never see again and didn’t want to know anything about. But then I took a breath and thought, Okay, Rob. Calm down. Maybe you’re the one who’s the problem here. Maybe you’re too sensitive to how men talk to you. Maybe the way they seem to only ever want to deliver monologues about their plans and lives, rather than have conversations, is due to your failure to be a tub stud. Maybe you should man up. Have you considered that, dear Robert?I had not considered that. I was going to press delete on this whole freaking newsletter-in-progress, but then, a day later, my daughter wanted me to take her and her friend back to the scene of the crime—not to the hot tub, but to the pool that the hot tub is next to. And I knew when I agreed to take her there that I’d end up in that boiling tub. I knew what would happen once I was in it. It took no more than one minute in that hot tub for another old man to strike up a so-called conversation. This encounter actually went okay for a minute. The guy told me he used to come to the YMCA five times a week. But he had been coming in less often, recently, because he had to have a couple of surgeries. I was like, Here we go again.But then something unexpected happened. He asked me a question. He asked what I did for a living. I knew my answer wouldn’t satisfy this man. No one over the age of 50 is ever glad to find out about my life. I said some version of, “I used to have a career, but I gave it up and have been freelancing while Incrediwife is the breadwinner and I do freelance work and raise the kids—but then the kids don’t need all that much attention anymore, so I’d like to restart full-time work again in some capacity if the kids will let me”—which I’m not sure they will, you know? Because someone has to be the one to drive kids to swimming pools and then to lunch at fast food restaurants. Sometimes you have to do that at eleven a.m. on a Friday. The man endured my fifteen-second explanation, and I was starting to think maybe this was it. Maybe I had found a man who knows how to have a conversation, in which two people ask each other questions, in which there is mutual sharing and listening. No suck luck! After my quarter-minute filibuster, he spent ten minutes talking my ear off about his career. It took him all over the world! He was a missionary of some kind. There’s not a state in the union he hasn’t been to, and he’s lived all over the world.More recently, though, this man’s wife wrote a book. He gave her some criticism, when she asked for it, and that was a bad idea, because then he had to help her out by writing two chapters of the book. And he didn’t get any credit for all of his work. You know how it is. He said he completely changed the state of things for homeless people in Seattle, and added that they’ve let the situation get completely out of hand. They let guys pitch tents ...
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    33 分
  • The Insufferable Guy Writer: Who Is He? Why Is He Like That?

    The Insufferable Guy Writer: Who Is He? Why Is He Like That?
    2024/12/17
    One of the things I don’t like about that story that emerged recently, concerning Cormac McCarthy, is that it provides me with more evidence that I am not the right kind of guy—or, rather, that the kind of guy I have chosen to be doesn't suit me. Every guy who exists, you see, has to be a certain kind of guy. It is mandatory. If a guy somewhere doesn't fit readily into one of the available categories, and/or if he hasn't adjusted himself so that he fits into one of the preestablished roles the world has for guys, then a guy type will be assigned to him. It will be whichever one he most closely resembles, based on the traits he exhibits.The good news is that there are lots of types of guys a guy can be, or be considered to be. There are jocks, former jocks, incels, comic book guys, vinyl record guys, comatose guys, egomaniacs, Harvey Weinstein types, sensitive guys, pretend-sensitive guys, Guy Pearce, and many more. These guy roles can overlap; Harvey Weinstein, the original Harvey Weinstein type, appears to have occasionally been pretend-sensitive. For all I know, he was also a collector of vinyl records, and was therefore one of those guys as well.The bad news is, there is only one variety of guy writer: the insufferable guy writer. Every guy who invests in writing enough to be considered "a writer" is assigned the role of insufferable guy writer. It doesn't matter if he is not actually insufferable, or if he is like me and is quite insufferable but not as much as certain other people. If he is a guy and he writes, he will always be considered to be, to one extent or another, an insufferable guy writer.If you don’t believe me, it’s possible that I am wrong about this, and that this is stupid. If that’s the case, you’re not allowed to get mad at me, about this or anything else. But you may recall an account on a website that was once called “Twitter.” It was the “Guy in your MFA” Twitter account, and someone at The Rumpus wrote about it at some length in 2018. The Twitter account featured a stream of annoying statements that sounded like they would come from an insufferable guy writer in the context of an MFA program. The Rumpus article I’ve linked to attests to how accurate a depiction of the MFA guy the Twitter account was—and how the real-life MFA guys, the insufferable writer guys, while laughing at the Twitter account, and getting all of the jokes, still managed to be insufferable. If you’re a guy or anything like one, and you also write, there is no escaping the insufferable guy writer. He is what you will be considered to be, no matter what you do.Do I like that this is how it is? No. Am I complicit in it? Yes. I have been guilty in my life of thinking guy writers are insufferable when they’re possibly not. In fact, the reason it took so long for me to start taking writing seriously, to engage in it as an artmaking endeavor, rather than something I did for literature seminars, was that every guy writer I met for many years was a card-carrying insufferable guy writer. They checked every box: they were arrogant; they didn't listen; they thought the world of themselves; they behaved as if they had arrived at their destinations already and were sighing into their clove cigarettes as they waited for the rest of us to catch up. I didn't want to be like them, so I didn't do what they did. I refrained from writing until I could not take it anymore. The dam burst, the writing began, and here I am, carrying on with it, growing more insufferable by the sentence.I did, eventually, meet some good writer guys. I didn't think they were insufferable, and I came to believe I could make myself into a guy writer who was all right to be around. What I didn't realize was that it didn't matter if I knew some good guy writers, and tried to be one myself. I would always represent the insufferable guy writer archetype, because that is the only guy writer archetype there is. Every guy writer is an insufferable guy writer. All that you can do is modulate the degree to which other people think you are insufferable.Am I saying things are easier for women writers? No, I am not saying that. I think everything is hard for everyone, and although I have been using he/him pronouns for guy roles, I don’t think they’re gender-specific. Anyone can be a kind of guy, whether it’s a pretend-sensitive guy or a shy artist guy. It doesn’t matter who you are. I am also fairly certain that the second Beetlejuice movie was originally written to be a TV show. The way the story played out seemed awfully episodic to me. Every major character gets their own fifteen or twenty minutes, the way in a prestige TV show they would get their own episode. I liked the movie, but that dimension of it bothered me. I don’t like it when I think I can see through a movie and identify what it was like in an earlier draft.And I’ve been having unrelated fun with The Death Generator, which is the source of most of the images...
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    30 分
  • This Is the Hour of Lead

    This Is the Hour of Lead
    2024/11/08
    I am suspending these Hoedowns for the time being. They have been going pretty steadily, on one platform or another, for several years. It’s time for a break. I don't know how long it will last—maybe a month, maybe a year, or forever. But I am as stunned as a lot of people are, and I woke up Wednesday morning, having barely slept, needing to revise myself in significant ways. I have suspended my social media accounts, also maybe for a week but maybe forever. I can't write something that's wryly funny, or hysterically stupid, when I feel like god has buried his fist in my chest. Everyone with a paid subscription to the Hoedown: your support means more to me than I know how to say, and I am thankful for it. But you may not get your money's worth for a while, so by all means suspend or halt those contributions, and put your money toward something that gets results.I find I am all but allergic to anything having to do with the recent election. I don’t want to turn on the radio. I don’t want to hear those voices, and I don’t even mean the candidates’ voices, but rather the voices of smart radio people who talk with their noses as much as their mouths. They all matriculated at the Smarm Academy, and have fond memories of casual evenings spent on the Quad Bucolic, playing lazy games of soccer and comparing trust funds. But as much as I hate this recent election, and everything about it, I will tell you this thing. I substitute taught at the luxury high school on election day. I overheard students discussing the election. One girl, a ninth-grader, was telling a classmate that it didn't matter if Kamala Harris did "something sexual" to "get herself a job," she was still a better candidate than Trump. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I don’t know where people get their disinformation anymore. Hearing that was not the first inkling I got, that things would go badly on election night. But it was a big inkling, that things were not going to happen the way I hoped they would. Why are people so eager to tell the same horrid stories about every woman they find out exists? Why do the people who hear those stories apparently clamor to believe them? Why do people hate women so much? It is true that Harris should have distinguished herself more from Biden. It's incredible to me that she didn't. She shouldn't have campaigned with Liz Cheney, but I don't even know if it would have made a difference. People have lost their minds. They will believe anything. I have read some op-eds since election night, about how as citizens of this nation we shan't disengage. We cannot give in and lose hope, because we need all the strength we have to fight and resist what's coming. We have to be the neighborhood Winston Churchill, holding the line against the horde. I think I said similar things in 2016, but what does it even mean? Where is the fight they keep talking about? Is someone leading it? How does the fighting work, exactly? Should I drive around in my car, and hope I see the fight somewhere, so I can lend it my formidable strength? Are we getting together to fight whatever we’re fighting, or are we all doing it in our own ways, and hoping for the best? What are the long-term goals of this resistance? How will it lead to a better world than the one we have now, which I want to hide from for the rest of my life?My experience of political engagement has brought me twenty-five years of defeat, horror, and disappointment. The best parts have been when the disappointment is delayed a few months, after some moments of quasi-triumph, and everything goes back to getting worse. If anyone knows how to get new results that will make me stop looking up small cities in Guatemala I can try to persuade my family to move to, before things get really bad, let me know if I can help. Because even though Guatemala is in the same time zone we live in right now, there is no way my family would go with me there. Also, I’m sure there are bigger problems in Guatemala than the ones we have here, and I have too much stuff now to relocate like that. Where in Guatemala would I put all these books? I don't think the Democrats we have right now know how to get different results from the ones we’ve been getting throughout my lifetime. I’m not sure they even want them. Not like the rest of us do. And if they run another lawyer in four years who campaigns with Republicans and/or talks about how the Republicans are fundamentally good and we need them to be at their very best, so that we can be our best, I will burst into flames. I will turn into lava. Here I am, announcing the suspension of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand, and I can’t seem to stop typing. It’s a form of mental illness, I think, to imagine there is a point to this, to think that when you talk someone else really listens. It's not unlikely that a week or a month from now I'll be back to my old self again, spewing ...
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    9 分
  • Who's Afraid of NotebookLM's Capacity to Analyze Texts by Virginia Woolf and Other Authors?

    Who's Afraid of NotebookLM's Capacity to Analyze Texts by Virginia Woolf and Other Authors?
    2024/10/31
    I almost hit SEND on this thing before I realized it’s Halloween. Two Halloweens ago, the magazine hex published my 1,000-word short story “Spider.” It’s about a spider that follows a woman out of the dream she is having and into her life, making it more complicated. Read it now, or hear me read it at the start of the audio recording of this newsletter.I dreamed I lived in a neighborhood where residents of four households near my house were angry with me. Why four? I don’t know. I had gone to their lawns, dug rectangles out of their grass with a shovel, and replaced the grass with bronze plaques I had made. They featured some of my original writing. I don’t recall what the writing was, but everyone was upset. These people didn’t want bronze plaques, they wanted grass. I had to apologize to the homeowners, telling them I have these borderline-manic episodes where I feel so inspired, and so full of things I want to tell everyone, that I have to do something to get it all out. What I did this time was make bronze plaques and embed them in lawns. I had to atone for what I had done. I had to remove the plaques and spread grass seed on the rectangles I had dug. Much of the dream consisted of planning these corrective measures. I thought I should wake up in the middle of the night and undo what I had done under cover of darkness. That way, no one would see me out there working. I might not feel so ashamed. This dream was plainly inspired by two things. One is that not long ago some workers from Google Fiber went through our neighborhood, digging rectangular holes in the lawns of all of the people who live here. They didn’t tell anyone they were going to do it. The only communication we got from Google were signs sticking out of our lawns that read, “Thank you for your patience.” Patience with what? The little signs didn’t say. Later, someone came and spray-painted the parts of the lawns where they would dig. I didn’t know what the spray paint was for. A few days after that, the crews arrived and they started digging. It didn’t take them long. They dug the holes, they ran cable through the ground, I guess, and most of the holes they covered again, while others, like the one on the edge of my lawn, now has a box of some kind embedded inside.The other thing that I don’t doubt inspired the dream is that I once again have that cyclical misgiving—it may be a seasonal misgiving—that the creative work I do is an imposition on anyone it’s presented to. Writing something and making it available to other people is equivalent to tearing up someone’s property and shoving the thing I have made where the nice grass used to be. They didn’t ask for this thing to be there. Why is it there? Why haven’t I done something more useful with my time than this? Come on, man.D.A.R.E.I wanted to share something I saw in the news about a substitute teacher.This guy in Minnesota apparently subbed for an English class where he—in order to help the students understand literature, I guess?—reenacted the murder of George Floyd. In the reenactment, he was the murdering officer, and the role of George Floyd was played by a high school student.But that’s not all. He did a series of other things:“According to the school’s statement, the substitute also:* Twisted a student’s arm behind the student’s back and showed pressure points on the chin* Fake punched a student with his fist “really close” to the student’s face* Mimicked holding up a gun and pointing it at students* Repeatedly made racially-harmful comments and told sexist jokes* Spoke in disturbing detail about dead bodies he had seen and shared explicit details about two sexual assault cases he investigated* Stated cops would be the best criminals because they know how to get away with stuff, adding that he once received an “A” grade on a paper about how to get away with murder* Stated police brutality isn’t real”Apparently, he told the students he is a police officer. The story says that status of his has not been verified by the school district. One thing I find really frustrating about the story is that it isn’t funny. Maybe I would laugh, if I heard these details in the right context, but it would be the way I laugh out of surprise. It would be mirthless. Having been a substitute teacher on occasion for the last year or so, I know from on-the-ground experience that there is a great deal of potential humor in the concept of a substitute teacher entering a classroom, ignoring whatever lesson plans they’re given, and instead doing a bizarre series of things that make no sense. If done properly, this person could be like Mr. G, the high school teacher in the film Bottoms, played by NFL running back Marshawn Lynch:Alas, what happened at the school in Minnesota isn’t funny. If his classroom performance had been caught on video, I don’t doubt it would be horrifying. If we could hear the “jokes” he told the students...
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    29 分