The more intelligent the woman, the more likely to be mired in delusion. Precisely because the woman cannot imagine that she is mired in delusion. . . It’s as if a kind of amnesia seeps inexorably into the woman’s brain, so strong is her opposition to knowing the truth.

Joyce Carol Oates, Fox

Do you mean right now or the whole thing?

Right now is actually better than ever. Which is not a high bar to cross but I’ll take it. For example, back in April when I had my surgery, she said, “Enough about me. Right now what matters is that your surgery goes well.” This was very unusual. Never happened before. I always thought it was likelier I’d praise Putin for his deep humanity than that my mother would pronounce such words.

Then in May, my sister, my mother and I had dinner at a restaurant. And we ate. And talked. There was no weeping and gnashing of teeth. No drama or recriminations. It was strangely normal. And at the end my mother actually paid. My sister was very disconcerted.

“It’s OK, she’s trying to be motherly, so just let her,” I explained.

“Huh,” said my sister.

It’s unusual at my age to experience a motherly mother for the first time. I never had a mother like Klara has a mother. Like when you are five and you scrape your knee and she comforts you, and hugs you, and puts on a bandaid. I never had that.

Kara said recently, “Mommy, I know I’m grown but I still love it when you sit next to me when I fall asleep at night. It makes me feel safe. It’s like feelings of peace and comfort emanate from you, and it helps me to fall asleep.”

I never wanted my mother to sit next to me as I fell asleep. I wanted the exact opposite. Peace and comfort was not what she emanated.

So yes, good, good developments. Wonders truly never cease.

I swear, I thought this was parody https://t.co/m0T8P2yKrP

— vittorio (@IterIntellectus) August 22, 2025

People are laughing but this actually explains a lot. If you sit under a tree, waiting for time to happen, you’ll unavoidably end up needing the people who don’t waste time and make the future happen to come in to feed you and bring you medications.

I had a worker from Kenya last year who’d show up two hours late to a job assignment and explain that her culture understands time differently. Strangely, she still expected us, with our “strange” understanding of time, to pay her for not spending hers doing the assigned work.

The entirety of human culture is the elevation of non-material aspects of being over the material ones. The capacity to experience these non-material factors more acutely than the material ones is what makes us human. Culture brings transcendence because we can transcend the materiality of existence. Culture happens when we add any other factors to the maintenance of bare life. A porcelain plate is not needed to maintain bare life. Neither are a painting or a book.

The capacity to enjoy the non-material aspects of life is, to a large extent, inborn. It is a function of a high IQ. It responds well to early exposure. It can be developed. Every time you create beauty for its own sake, you affirm the primacy of the non-material aspects over bare life. If you set the table beautifully, put a vase of flowers on the table, and arrange the place settings, you delay the ingestion of the food until the environment is organized and not chaotic. In this way, you affirm your mastery over the animal part of your nature. You affirm that you are human and have control over your instincts. Culture is a system of limitations that are willingly sought and imposed by the higher order of your self on the raging maw of desire that is the animal self.

Culture is always excessive. It’s by definition unnecessary to bare life. We don’t relieve ourselves in the streets. Instead, we have created toilets and we maintain them clean and pretty. Seeing a dirty toilet depresses us because it reminds us that bare life is there. It can escape from the civilizational constraints that we put on it.

I refuse to believe that anyone seriously thinks simplification is “woke.” Have you people seen that loud and incongruent “progress” pride flag? Don’t you always talk about “woke Karens” or whatever having purple hair? Please stick to a narrative! https://t.co/oCZhvn0GEt

— Corie Whalen (@CorieWhalen) August 22, 2025

What’s confusing? All three listed things are about erasing tradition. That’s what they have in common. Woke means far-left. And far-left has been singing a variation on the Internationale since 1870s:

Let’s make a clean slate of the past,
Enslaved mass, arise, arise!
The world’s foundation will change,
We are nothing, now let’s be all!

Change everything! Make the world a better place! Down with the old! In with the new!

That’s what it’s about. Destroying everything familiar, inherited, known, and traditional.

In her new novel Fox, Joyce Carol Oates does to Nabokov’s Lolita the same thing that Nabokov does in Lolita. For the uninitiated, both novels are about a charming, cultured pedophile who preys on middle-school girls. If that’s all you see in these books, joke’s on you because the highly literate will know that these novels are word games. If you are in on the game, you can spaz out for hours over every paragraph. In order to derive the full amount of pleasure from Oates’ sly winkles to Nabokov, you need to know his text extremely well. Names of characters, names of places, literary allusions. None of it’s in your face because if you have to explain, you really shouldn’t bother.

There are so many layers, hints, suggestions that you can plunge deeper and deeper. But beyond all this, Fox is also a novel of ideas. Nabokov’s Lolita is not. It is a novel of and about language but it does not address polemical subjects or contribute to culture wars because it was written before all that. I will talk about this in a future post.

A yearly income of $100,000 a year is not what it was 10 years ago. The purchasing power dropped significantly. But it’s still not a bad income at all.

For people with this income, college education is free at my school. It’s free in the sense that students pay zero dollars. But it’s not free to us because we have to hire, turn on the lights, connect the Internet, provide textbooks. So who pays? It’s not the students, it’s not the state. Who pays?

The university pays. Our budget cuts, austerity, a hiring freeze are the result. We simply can’t cover all the expenses with the tuition paid by a very small percentage of students and whatever pittance the state gives us.

Also, being amidst all this constantly and then hearing people bleat about how expensive college education has become in comparison with the good old times is very annoying. How much cheaper than free do you want it to be? Do you want us to pay students for attending? Well, we already do that. We pay millions every year in scholarships and awards. That amount grew from a couple thousand to $300,000 for just my department since 2011.

I’m still reading Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel Fox, and I’ll never get over her being 87 and having a brain that can produce something this brilliantly thought out, exquisitely structured, and passionately delivered. I urgently need to know the details of her lifestyle and diet because can you imagine? She found a way never to be old.

Yes, yes, it’s probably genetic. But still.

Also, it’s funny because I thought she was a crap author after coming across her social media posts. Now I understand that she hired some stupid woke child to manage her accounts. But before, I’d chance upon them and wonder how somebody who wrote so badly could have become a recognized author. Forget ideology, the posts were atrociously written.

In her novel, Oates demonstrates not only a phenomenal command of the English language, stunning erudition and a capacity to write simultaneously for the highly literate and modestly educated readers, but also a sensibility that is not even conservative but right-wing.

If I’d known her age, I would have figured out that she wasn’t writing her own social media posts. But I somehow placed her as much younger than she is and took the posts seriously.

Almost missed an extraordinary readerly experience as a result.

This is not true and a cope. The difference between expensive and cheap shoes isn’t branding but the level of comfort, durability, and lack of pain.

I’m really not vain about brands. My entire wardrobe is from “Cato’s”, and I love it. But money absolutely does buy convenience, comfort, and reliability. Those $200 and $2,000 shoes are not like the $20 pair. They are so not like them that probably a different word should be found for these different categories because the objects they name are so distant from each other.

It is so so SO much easier to teach today than 10-15 years ago. Zoomers are on another level from Millennials.

Sorry, Millennials, I don’t think you all suck. Not at all. But cumulatively, it was… not easy.

While Millennials were woke, Zoomers are awake.