Claire McGowan’s novel The Fall shows that the difference between art and commercial crap isn’t talent. It’s courage.

The novel begins strongly, with honest, devastating descriptions of helpless, self-infantilizing womanhood. The main characters are Charlotte, a banker’s fiancee with a chi-chi job in PR, and Keisha, a mixed-race mother of a 5-year-girl who loses custody because she lets her boyfriend brutalize the kid in front of her. Charlotte is rich, Keisha is poor but both are comically pouty and inept at the most basic things in life. Both lisp through their twenties in the persona of cute little girls and eagerly hand themselves over to men who (mis)manage their lives.

McGowan shows how easy it is to drum up outrage over imaginary “racism” to avoid looking at the real causes of both white and black dysfunction. She demolishes the girl-boss mythology and does the same for the “black girl magic” narrative.

And then she gets scared of what her talent revealed to her. The second half of The Fall constitutes McGowan’s frenzied effort to downplay or outright deny the unpleasant truths she narrated in the first. Her ditzy, helpless damsel characters suddenly transform into heroic overachievers who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The swoony PR diva Charlotte begins to work in homeless shelters for minimum wage to pay the bills. To make up for the transgression of noticing how frivolous cancel culture is, McGowan squeezes into the story a ridiculous bit of #MeTootery and uses it as a way of excusing Charlotte’s self-infantilization.

Things get so cliched that McGowan feels the need to endow each character with a romantic and financial happy ending. The abusive ogre Keisha snags a rich, handsome businessman who showers her with diamonds. We all know how much wealthy, successful men enjoy the company of rude, piss-poor women with non-existent hygiene habits. The princessy Charlotte willingly gives up designer handbags and £800 shoes and goes to law school while settling down with an unemployed chronic patient.

Let’s look at the contrast between McGowan’s The Fall and Emma Cline’s The Guest. Both writers are gifted and can speak to the most unpleasant truths that nobody else wants to notice. But Cline is unafraid of her own talent. She doesn’t panic in the middle of her novel and start piling up cliches to protect her readers from reality.

And then people say Freud didn’t know what he was talking about. This woman is a walking illustration for the chapter on hysteria as a consequence of sexual frustration.

Spend a little time on Far-Right social media and you can’t help but notice that a big chunk of it is now exhibiting and parroting the worst tendencies and ideas of the Old Hippie Left — nutrition and “health food” pseudoscience, dopey spiritualities, anti-CIA/FBI/cop/military paranoia, bizarro conspiracy theories, homeopathic nonsense, “back to nature” sentimentality, a rejection of science and The Establishment, and an impulse to isolate and purify themselves from the rest of society, and America from the rest of the world.

https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1766092662317129996?t=lU23sl7chJz0oH_Dj67NBw&s=19

True. And hippies, at least, invented their own crap. The far-right wokes are parroting the crap invented by the people they claim to despise. That’s very pathetic.

Back in 2000-2001 I briefly hung out with a far-left crowd. They were all rich, spoiled kids who ranted about the evil “establishment” because their futures were guaranteed to be comfortable by that very establishment. They were self-flatrering but never self-defeating.

Their imitators on today’s far right, on the other hand, are cutting themselves off from any hope of accumulating wealth by their conspiracy theories about “vaccinated cheese”, and all that.

You can’t have foreign policy without national borders. No borders means highly fluid, constantly shifting power groups with lots of unfinished business elsewhere. Long-term commitments become impossible because nobody knows which influence group will scream the loudest 15 minutes from now.

Once you can’t make any commitments beyond the next couple of weeks, nobody – including your own population – takes you seriously anymore. You start behaving in a schizoid manner, erasing today everything you did yesterday. (Afghanistan, Israel, Ukraine – examples abound).

We have a whole system of state institutions and international relations set up for a world of nation-states. We have nothing set up for fluid borderless blobs of dog-eat-dog groupings with no shared worldview, culture, or even language.

People keep asking, how do you write so much, publish so much, read so much? Where do you find the time?

People, have you noticed how much you talk? You really talk a lot. I’m sure you get a lot out of it but I don’t. I do other things instead. There’s no judgment here but you can’t have everything. I engage in very little sociability, so I have time for other stuff.

Normies are very talkative, and they keep repeating the same thing, it’s disturbing.

The difference between Biden and Trump on immigration is that Biden gave his base exactly what it wants while Trump didn’t. Biden’s base wants no borders, and it’s got no borders. Trump’s base wanted a wall and a dramatic reduction in immigration, and it’s got… no wall, no borders, and a dramatic increase in immigration.

This happened because Biden’s base is tenacious and active. It has been aggressively protesting the non-existent “Gaza genocide” for months, wrangling out all sorts of extraordinary concessions from terrified politicians. Trump’s base, in the meantime, is weak and passive. It accepts vague fairytales about “the Deep State” and “the swamp” and lets itself be duped again and again.

The actively evil always defeat the passively sweet. Yesterday, there was a large pro-Hamas protest that bullied Biden on his way to give the State of the Union address. On our side, we have an actual, real grievance – the murder of Laken Riley but all we got was the embarrassing MTG turn Laken into a joke with her clownish performance. As a result, the Hamas lovers squeezed a whole port out of Biden. And we wrangled out … words. Biden “said her name”, which we are supposed to see as some sort of a symbolic victory.

We don’t get any real victories, so we have to settle for symbolic ones.

I went on Twitter, and people are saying that in the State of the Union Biden spoke about Snickers bars, IVF, and building a port in Gaza. I’m choosing to believe that this is partisan coverage aimed at making him look demented.

I’m desperately looking for reasons to vote for Biden because I can’t stomach four more years of impotent “Law and order!” tweets while nobody but unhinged rioters is allowed to go outside. But a port in Gaza is just about to tip me over.

So? What happened during the State of the Union?

Come on, people, I’m on kid duty here all day, minding children while pacifying three grumpy grandmas at the same time. Can somebody return me to the world of adults by sharing their impressions of the event?

When I’m in Montreal, I’m mostly confined to an expensive pretty suburb but today we ventured downtown to entertain the kids. The very first thing we saw in the Old Port was a homeless, pantless addict, defecating in the middle of the street. My kid is not used to such sights, so I had to make a speech about drug addiction and homelessness.

There was nothing remotely similar in Montreal 15 years ago. This is a problem that has been manufactured since then. This was the most livable city in North America, and it’s being murdered in the same way as all North American cities are being murdered.

What’s great about being in a Canadian bookstore is that there are books by Canadian authors.

OK, one of them isn’t Canadian but still, two are better than nothing. I often get asked about Canadian literature, and I need to be able to give at least a couple of names.

I’ll post my impressions as I go along.