Anton Chekhov has a wonderful short story about a woman called Olga Semyonovna who keeps attaching herself to men and adopting their interests, way of speaking and worldview as her own. Here’s the link to an English translation. The story’s title is clumsily translated as “The Darling” but I’d translate it as “Fluff.” Olga is warm and fuzzy towards her men but also insignificant and never fully adult. She is an imprint of whichever pair of pants appears on her horizon. Such women exist, and we all know at least one. Such men exist, too, and that’s just as sad.

In any case, this brilliantly observed character helped me figure out which of Joyce Maynard’s books are worth reading. She is very much like Chekhov’s Olga, adopting the beliefs of the man to whom she happens to be attached. At the age of 60, she married “an extremely progressive” (in her own words) man and then married him. It’s kind of funny because Maynard originally became famous because she published a long article at age 18 that was quaintly conservative for somebody so young. At that time, of course, Maynard was under the influence of her father. Then, she met JD Salinger and started aping his love of homeopathy and raw eating.

After falling in love with the far-left Jim, Maynard embraced progressivism. This means one can rely on everything she wrote before 2011 (the year she met Jim) as being very good. I read her 2013 novel After Her ages ago, and I don’t remember much but my records show that I detested it with an uncommon passion. Under the Influence from 2016 is excellent but it predates the TDS stage that exacerbated Maynard’s leftism.

I’m very glad to be able to provide this service to the community. By the way, have I inspired anybody to start reading Maynard yet? She is very good. I’m loving her books. Salinger was right when he prophesied that she’d never become a real writer and he was spot on as to why. Still, even though Maynard’s books aren’t art, they are very enjoyable.

For those who will watch tomorrow’s show, I promise I didn’t dress in green because I knew I’d be asked about Greenland. It’s a coincidence.

Also, I’ll probably be invited to a different show to talk about literature on a regular basis. Need to get reading!

Zuckerberg not only recognized yesterday that there is censorship on Facebook and that this censorship has been detrimental, he has now vowed to remove it.

The responsibility for this positive development lies in equal measure with FB’s loss of popularity and the Trump election.

Facebook censorship was still there this morning. For instance, you still can’t share the NYPost article about the rapid enrichment of the BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors-Khan. Let’s see how fast Zuckerberg manages to get rid of FB’s notoriously rabid censors.

Speaking on the subject of the horrific fires raging in California, the Mayor of LA informs city residents that they can find help at URL:

“Right now, if you need help, emergency information, resources, and shelter is available.

All of this can be found at URL.

Los Angeles, together is how we will get through this.”

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1877180303648702552?t=LrnJFy54KiOdPiXPagix1Q&s=19

Firefighting was defunded in LA. The leadership was DEI-ed. As a result, the Mayor is telling people to go to URL, and that’s all because they didn’t tell her to go to hell while they still had a chance.

It’s quite fitting that people should be told that help and shelter can only be found in the virtual reality, and even there an exact URL is a secret.

Joyce Maynard’s autobiography At Home in the World is like a thriller. You hang on every word, waiting for the author to get some insight into her own life. A chance to say “and then I finally understood, learned, figured out, grew up, realized” is why the genre of autobiography exists. If you start recounting the events of your life, it must be because you found a common thread that binds them, learned a lesson, discovered something worth sharing.

Maynard discovered nothing and clearly never even suspected that anything could be discovered. Her conclusion about her life is that she has spent it among unreasonable people of whom she has been a victim. Even the laziest of readers can’t avoid noticing, for example, that Maynard is one of those women who sees men solely as a conduit to getting babies, and that men tend to react negatively to being instrumentalized in that manner. Maynard, however, heroically ignores the insight that not only stares her in the face but howls like an unfed coyote. Not for her is the task of analyzing or wondering. She seems aware that the persona of “a prim know-it-all” (as she puts it) was hers at the very beginning of her writing career. That it accompanied her well into her middle age doesn’t seem to occur to her.

The autobiography is exceptionally well-written. It’s engrossing to the point where I breezed through it in a day and a half. Maynard did not have an easy life. She was sexually molested for years by her own mother. She tells about this honestly and explicitly in the book, yet never wonders whether this experience might have had any impact on, for example, her severe sexual problems in adulthood. Or her anorexia. Or her unhealthy relationship with her own daughter.

At the age of 18, Maynard started a relationship of sorts with JD Salinger and quit college to cohabit with the writer. Their relationship was never fully sexual and quite unsatisfactory in most every way, yet Maynard was stunned when Salinger decided to end it. As a person incapable of any degree of insight, she then spent the next quarter of a century trying to figure out why the relationship had ended. There’s a scene in the book where 25 years after the breakup, Maynard barges into the house where a 78-year-old Salinger lives with his wife. She ignores the wife and starts interrogating the elderly author about their long-ago dalliance. Salinger is horrified (and who wouldn’t be if a paramour from a quarter century earlier materialized in their living room and started making a scene?), and again, Maynard doesn’t have the slightest suspicion that her own actions might be causing Salinger’s negative reaction to her appearance.

At some point, Maynard gets in trouble with the law, but once again, there’s no realization that her assumed childishness is not endearing in a middle-aged woman and that the police is absolutely right to pursue the matter.

It’s hard for me to understand how a person can be as interested as Maynard in the minutiae of her life – what she cooked for specific occasions, what she wore, who she pouted at at any given moment – but remain so stonily indifferent to her own motivations. She has the self-awareness of a house pet, and observing a human being who is completely devoid of the need to understand herself is a large part of the book’s attraction.

This is the most enjoyable autobiography I have read in years. There’s not a boring sentence in it, and I’m very grateful to the author for the entertainment this book provided.

Just so you understand how much we appreciate snow, now that we’ve finally had a serious snowfall, I took a day off work yesterday to take Klara out to play in the snow. N is taking a day off today for the same purpose.

I looked up the climate in Greenland, and it’s encouragingly chilly. Are there any places of higher education there just in case it does decide to join the union?

Remember, we are the bad people for being horrified by these stories:

It’s really cute how that ludicrous “103 years” was snuck into the story to obscure how minimal the actual sentences were.

Hussain raped girls for over a decade, with the youngest being only 11 years old. He’s back in the community now.

I have my entire X feed filled to the brim with the obsessively repeated “But why would Elon Musk care about what’s happening in Britain?” Strangely, the same Europeans who just don’t get it thought it was perfectly fine for them to organize BLM events over George Floyd.

There are several trans-identifying men who are serving sentences at the Washington Correctional Center for Women for murdering or raping women.

One of them is Douglas Perry, a serial killer who murdered Yolanda Sapp (26), Nicki Lowe (34), and Kathleen Brisbois (38). He disposed of their naked bodies by dumping them near the Spokane River. He insinuated that he had killed additional 6 women, bringing his suspected victim count to 9. Today, Perry is serving his sentence in a women’s jail.

Another trans-identifying man housed at the Washington Correctional Center for Women is Hobbie Bingham. He was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl. In jail, he sexually assaulted a developmentally disabled female inmate.

Yet another male prisoner at this correctional facility is Nathan Goninan, convicted for strangling a 17-year-old girl. In jail – the same female jail as the other male criminals I discuss here – he raped several women. The jail authorities tried to transfer him to a men’s prison but the ACLU defended his right to stay in women’s jail on human rights grounds.

Christopher Williams, a convicted child rapist, is serving a prison term at the same female correctional facility. He subjected a female cellmate to a campaign of sexual harassment and then raped her.

There are currently 11 trans-identifying men serving their sentences at the Washington Correctional Center for Women. Nine of them are there for violent and sexual crimes against women and children.

An additional 150 men are petitioning to be transferred to the Washington Correctional Center for Women.

Turns out JD Salinger was a health food nut and a practicing homeopath. His understanding of healthy eating was very touchingly American.

He was adamantly opposed to eating anything but nuts, seeds, raw vegetables, and raw milk. Rarely, he’d consent to cheese. Nothing processed, nothing with sugar, and nothing cooked at over 150°F. No coffee. No beverages at all except water. And, incomprehensibly, no tomatoes, not even the raw variety.

The only exception to these rules were popcorn, bagels, and smoked salmon. It would not occur to anybody but an American, and a Jewish American at that, to list these as indispensable and healthier than tomatoes.

This isn’t some incel toiling in obscurity. It’s a guy who’s been given everything you can aspire to on the institutional level:

I guess it’s not equally illegal for everybody in the UK to mention population replacement.