630.
Me: Pearl, I have a bone to pick with you—
Pearl: You have some bones to pick with me? Then . . . come and pick some bones.
Me: . . .
632.
I’ve been derelict with the blog. And for that, I’m sorry. I’ve been busy with work, family, writing. Hard to find a free moment. The political realities keep changing, too, in a head-spinning, head-scratching couple of weeks. And my headaches have resurfaced. And I’ve devoted all of my free time to my next manuscript, tentatively titled God’s Angry Men. It’s a dual biography with a healthy dash of memoir, involving a prominent religious figure and a serial killer. Aren’t you tantalized?
633.
Here’s the first line: This is the story of two men, but it’s really the story of America.
634.
I’ve been a reading fool: Beautiful World, Where Are You?, Rites of Spring, The Blunderer, The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, All the Marvels, and the collected poetry of Fernando Pessoa.
635.
Pessoa is a 20th Century, modernist Portuguese writer with an enormous body of work. He wrote under multiple pseudonyms, and published a fascinating anti-novel, The Book of Disquiet, that is often favorably compared to Ulysses and A Man without Qualities. It’s a meandering, unsettling, often brilliant piece of writing.
636.
Here’s the novel’s first line: “I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason that their elders had it—without knowing why.”
637.
His poetry is fascinating, in part because he writes differently when writing under different guises. And not just his style. The tone and subject matter vary wildly. One of his avatars writes short, atheistic poems about the earth. Another writes long poems peppered with Greek mythological allusions. A third writes about the sea, longing, yearning, travel. He even gives false interviews from his fake personas. He contains multitudes.
638.
All the Marvels is author Douglas Wolk’s quixotic attempt to make sense of the Marvel Universe, by reading every comic they published between 1961 and 2017. I love it, and plan to write about it later. Here’s the first line: “The twenty-seven thousand or so superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are the longest, continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and counting.”
639.
(Grant Morrison, in Supergods, put it another way, saying that both Marvel and DC contain universes of such staggering and ever-expanding detail—thousands of creators pouring energy into them—that at some point both universes will become self-aware. I love stuff like this.)
640.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock is a beguiling biography, offering twelve different reads of Hitchcock the man, and Hitchcock the artist. It’s intriguing and often fun.
641.
(My favorite Hitchcock films: Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, The 39 Steps, Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window. I despise Marnie, and challenge any of its defenders to a debate, have a soft spot for Rope, and find Frenzy to be a genuinely disturbing movie.)
642.
The Blunderer is a crime novel by Patricia Highsmith, and it’s just excellent. I read an excerpt from her diaries and remembered how strong a writer she is. It follows a man who despises his wife, and through a series of bizarre turns, ends up suspected of murder. He’s innocent, but because of his decisions, no one believes him. The streak of fatalism—essential to noir—saturates every page. It belongs up there with The Postman Always Rings Twice and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Scabrous and delightful.
643.
Rites of Spring is a history of the cultural upheavals before and during World War I. It dovetails with two other books of its kind, Thunder at Twilight and The Vertigo Years. I love cultural history like this, especially when an author can make the era come alive. There’s something inherently haunting in the era, those crucial years right before the war to end all wars.
644.
And, finally, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, the third Sally Rooney novel, and her most complex work. Rooney emerged a few years ago as one of the major millennial talents, and here she follows two men and two women as they struggle with work, romance, and self-regard. That makes it sound like a soap opera or something, but Rooney is such a taut and economical writer of fiction the story doesn’t really matter. There’s a scene, early on, where one of the characters writes to another about buying junk food in a gas station, and how the items there are a repository of all the world’s cruelty, that each item possesses enormous acts of violence against people and the environment. The book festoons with insights like this.
645.
Bernadette: Give me some food, you bitch.
Beth: Why did you just call me a bitch?
Bernadette: Because it’s funny.
(Bernadette is 2.)
646.
To politics: The infrastructure bill is a historic achievement. We needed it, we wanted it, and we got it. This is how governance is supposed to work. It’s the second piece of major legislation out of the Biden White House. Trump, by way of example, didn’t pass any. The economy is humming along. We’re out of Afghanistan. We’ve recommitted to world affairs. Millions of people who were living below the poverty line have moved out of it. This is all to the good.
647.
And yet, we have inflation and anxiety. Rising crime. A punishing ennui. It’s the 1970s all over again. A sense of stasis and stagnation pervades every accomplishment. We can’t quite get past Covid, which has ceased to be a metaphor or a political football or a raging pandemic. It has seeped into our lives like toxins into drinking water. It’s become boring, which scares the shit out of me. 750,000 dead Americans, and counting, and we’re all bored of it.
648.
And here we have the Rittenhouse trial, yet another event cloaked in ideological mist. The right call him a hero. The left call him a murderer. He is neither. He is a kid who broke the law—more on this in a minute—and should go to prison for it. The weirdest thing about the case is that almost none of the facts are disputed. It’s all how we interpret them. And it all hinges on a single, if complex, question: how culpable is he for bringing a weapon to Kenosha?
649.
Here’s my take: I see a teenager carrying a weapon he is too young to own into a dangerous situation. It wasn’t his town. He didn’t live there. His family and friends weren’t in danger. He inserted himself when he shouldn’t have. And once there, he shot three people. He was acting as a vigilante, and that isn’t how our country or the law is supposed to work. I absolutely believe he thought his life was in danger. I also absolutely believe this doesn’t let him off the hook completely. (And, obviously, if he were a person of color, this whole thing would have unfolded very differently. A black man carrying an automatic weapon into the melee, then shooting three white men? Come on.)
650.
To that point. The trial of the three men who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery, a black man jogging through a mostly white residential area, is also going on. The trials are wildly different. Where the Rittenhouse case seems simple but is actually complex, the Arbery case is cut and dried. Here, two racist assholes killed an innocent man while a third filmed the goddamn thing. But the overlap of the two cases is strange, unsettling. And they both speak to the continuing culture war, the enormous divide, the exhausting echo chambers. And the very real possibility, that Arbery’s murderers will be acquitted and Rittenhouse will walk is grotesque and terrifying.
651.
Me: I never really understood why everyone calls The Little Mermaid sexist. Ariel’s the main character, and she drives the plot.
Beth: Are you serious? She gives up everything, and even changes her species to be with a guy she barely knows.
Me: Huh. I . . . see that, now.
651.
I listen to The Proposition soundtrack on the way to work, Curtis Mayfield on the way home. It works. So does Dave Brubeck. I always play jazz this time of year, David “Fathead” Newman and Horace Silver’s Song for My Father. It’s as much of our family’s musical life as Christmas tunes in December. It’s a time of year when I escape into music. With the falling leaves and the smell of fires, the frigid mornings and the even colder nights—I love it.
652.
Beth asks me to put some food on the backporch.
Me: You want me to put it outside?
Beth: That’s one of the dumbest fucking things I’ve ever heard. I obviously didn’t mean outside.
Me: That was . . . unkind.
Beth: Oh, sorry. That was . . . a really smart idea?
Me: . . .
simoneandthesilversurfer 