Wait, what? Another assassination attempt on Trump?
Is the shooter another young man with no online presence, does anybody know?
Word Illness
Remember how I kept saying that there’s no such thing as “mental illness”? Because the second you accept that there is, this begins to happen:
You can’t “screen for mental conditions.” You can’t diagnose them. There is no blood work you can run. No X-rays. No CT scans. It’s all words.
This is a terrible government overreach that will do untold harm. But try explaining it to normies. Or don’t because it’s a total waste of time. Many kids will be medicated needlessly. Others will be excluded from public education. All of this will happen because they’ll choose some words on some stupid questionnaire that has zero meaning.
This is worse than COVID, people. It’s an absolute disaster.
Protect your kids. Don’t let these “screenings” anywhere near them.
The Great American Novel List: American Regions, Part 2
The second and the third novels on my list of the Great American novels of the regions have to do with New England / Midwest and Appalachia. And, yes, they are long. But bear with me. I promise there will be very short novels on the list, too.
Also, as promised, these are not going to be modernist novels. These are naturalism, which is a variety of reallist literature, in the first case, and postmodern social realism in the second. They are easy to read but they require a significant time investment.
Without further ado, I present to you the novel that I have read maybe 15 times in spite of it being so incredibly long, and it is:
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.
I couldn’t begin to imagine when I first read it as a teenager in the USSR that the differences between New England and the Midwest that the novel explores would become so central to my own life.
The novel is shockingly relevant to our reality today. A Midwestern boy from a religious family of a very conservative preacher abandons his traditional upbringing and tries to join the ranks of the coastal New England elite. Tension between sexual immorality and social striving is the main theme of the book. In Dreiser’s times, as in ours, voracious self indulgence was the enemy of success.
Beyond these extremely interesting and important themes, the novel portrays the daily life of the early 20th century America in so much delicious detail that this alone makes it worth reading.
The third novel on the American Regions list is
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.
I wrote about it fairly recently here, and I won’t repeat myself.
What the three novels have in common is that they all depict striving, determined, fascinating men. This doesn’t mean that these male characters are successful in their striving. Their quests can end in terrible failure. But what is interesting – and very American – is that the cause of their failures is always within themselves.
The next installments in this series will include the great American novels of academia, the great sci-fi and fantasy novels, the great American romance, and others.
The Great American Novel List: American Regions, Part 1
I received an excellent suggestion from one of our readers to make a list of worthwhile American novels. I’m going to group my recommendations according to the reasons for why I recommend them. Of course, the overarching reason is that I absolutely adore all of these books. There are some undisputable classics of American literature that I personally did not fall in love with. I will not recommend them but not because you shouldn’t be reading them There is nothing I can say about them that would be worthwhile, so what’s the point of me talking about them? The best book recommendations come from love, not obligation.
The first group of my recommendations is going to contain the great regional novels. It doesn’t mean, of course, that they’re only relevant for the specific regions where they’re set. But the different regions of America are so fascinating that they have given rise to novels that depict the specifics of the regional culture. The very first novel on my list is:
William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
It is, in my opinion, the greatest American novel of the 20th century. I use the word “American” here in the broadest sense. Many courses on Latin American literature start with Absalom, Absalom! because this novel is the foundation of the Latin American literature written since then. You can’t really understand anything written between Mississippi and the South Pole without knowing and understanding Faulkner.
Faulkner is the writer of the American South not only as a geographic place but as a way of being, as a manner of life. It’s devastating and beautiful, and once you really get it, you will never be able to leave it completely.
I warn you, though, that Faulkner is a high modernist author. He was a genius, far ahead of his times. He invented much of what today’s literature is. Absalom, Absalom! is not a realist novel. You can’t be a passive consumer of this type of art. You will have to participate actively in its creation. Modernity requires an enormous amount of agency from every human being. Modernist art doesn’t allow you to be a passive consumer because passive consumers get eaten alive in the modern world. Reading modernist literature helps you develop the kind of subjectivity that makes life in the modern world more comfortable for you. Faulkner’s novel disturbs you, confuses you, and makes you work hard to understand it. But it trains you up to be comfortable in modernity.
Please don’t worry, though. The next two novels on the regional list are going to be pure realism.
Movie Turned Reality
“Wouldn’t you know it?” my new secretary said pensively as she studied my outfit du jour. “My favorite movie of all time is The Devil Wears Prada.”
Good Leader
In reality, you don’t need tricks and strategies to be a good leader. Neither do you need leadership workshops. What you do need is to have a certain type of personality. If you are in possession of the three following qualities, you will make a good leader:
- You need to be interested in people and genuinely like them.
- At the same time, you need to not care whether they like you back. High tolerance for conflict and disagreement is a must. Ideally, you would have the kind of personality where you’re not even capable of noticing that somebody dislikes you.
- Another crucial quality for a leader is forgetfulness. You should be incapable of bearing grudges. If you’re the kind of a person who dwells on who said what to whom last month, being in charge of a group of people is going to be very painful.
I’m not a great leader because I don’t have the first of the qualities on this list. I am an okay leader because I have the second and the third. I know people who have all three. My Associate Dean is the epitome of this type of personality, and my admiration for him is deep and sincere. I always admire people who have virtues of which I am not in possession.
New Leadership Style
College administrators go to all sorts of business seminars and workshops on ridiculous things like leadership and all that kind of garbage. Then they come back and put everything that they have learned into practice. The funniest thing is that they all do it simultaneously. It is as if the old software were wiped out and a completely new package suddenly got installed. To people who don’t know about the leadership seminars that they attend the sudden change in demeanor looks insane. One can easily learn all about the new leadership fads from the changes in their behavior.
For instance, the new fad is that they talk to faculty as if we were a bunch of extremely traumatized preschoolers. Since we are neither preschoolers nor traumatized but are, instead, a group of adult, very opinionated and dramatically coddled people, this makes a really bizarre impression. And since they all suddenly switched into this mode at the exact same time it all looks deeply unhinged.
We have one administrator who is a typical alpha male with an extremely short fuse. He’s a severe, hardcore dude and I always really respected him for that. Other people hated him for it but imagine everybody’s shock when all of a sudden he comes into a room and starts talking to us in a mealy-mouthed tones of a preschool teacher addressing toddlers. The man is clearly in great pain. This behavior does not jive with his personality.
“So… Stephen here did a really good job on the report. What do we say when somebody does a really good job? Let’s all say it together. Thank you, Stephen! Good job!”
Professors remain mute while Stephen looks at everybody in shocked silence.
The chancellor of the university gave his annual State of the University address the other day. I couldn’t go because I was teaching but my colleagues were crawling out of the room heaving with laughter. He also did the “Let’s all say it together! Good job!” thing. Can you imagine? Whoever came up with this leadership fad is probably taking the piss. This is a great way of making administrators look absolutely ridiculous and lose any remaining shred of their authority in the eyes of faculty. One couldn’t come up with anything more humiliating if one tried.
Professors are a jaded, cynical bunch. We don’t chant “good job, Stephen,” unless we’ve had a couple of drinks and are trying to be funny.
The previous leadership fad that has been abandoned in favor of this one was that you have to assume the persona of a mega important expert and treat others with condescension. The dramatic change from this persona to one of an overly emotional, fussy lady talking to toddlers looks schizoid. But they plough on because the expensive coaches they hire tell them that this is the “it” thing these days.
A Sign of Weakness
Never forbid anything if you aren’t willing to impose consequences for violating the prohibition. This is as true in parenting as it is in geopolitics. Saying “don’t do it” and then sitting impotently by while it gets done is the ultimate weak move.
Power Wins
A preacher showed up on campus a couple of weeks ago. He comes every spring and preaches in the quad about the ills of sexual immorality. We are a public university, and he has the First Amendment right to speak freely on public land. This is exactly the argument he was trying to make as the campus police dragged him away.
We have a large stone in the quad, and there is a tradition of students spray painting messages on it. It was fun to see what students would come up with every time. Then the administration introduced a new regulation that every message has to be pre-approved. You have to file paperwork and wait for your message to be studied and deemed appropriate. That kind of killed the whole long-standing tradition right there.
There are no rights without power.
Liberals and Leftists
I’m a conservative because both these approaches are the product of boundless individualism. They are about catering to the unhinged, impossible to satisfy “gimme, gimme, gimme” of a desiring maw of need that is a human who doesn’t recognize boundaries. Whether this desiring human demands power or rights is not that important.
The quoted poster is absolutely right in that both a liberal and a leftist appoint themselves to be the judges of Good and Bad. They bicker about what that is but the underlying principle that it’s up to them to figure it out remains intact. They can’t conceive of a limiting principle that lies outside of themselves and that they don’t immediately need to violate. They see themselves and their whims as the measure of everything. They are always owed. Whether they are owed power or rights or endless consideration for their feelings doesn’t matter.
In reality, this distinction between wanting power and wanting rights is unimportant. If rights are the most important thing, soon enough you’ll need a lot of power to wrangle more and more exotic rights out of others. We’ve all seen the creation of a disciplinary apparatus to ensure the right of some men to force people to call them women. We’ve all been forced to sit 6 feet apart so that some of us could exercise their right to feeling less anxious.
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