Opinions, art, debate
Last year, Klara chose a pastel-colored backpack with fluffy teddy-bears hanging on it. This year, I suggested something similar and was greeted with, “I’m in third grade, Mom. This is for babies.”
To which I obviously replied, “Mommy to you, young lady, and we’ll revisit this on your 16th birthday.”
She chose an elegant black number with not a sparkle on it. It’s like they grow a mile every year.
It wasn’t just the opening that sucked bullets. Many things at these Olympics have gone wrong. Athletes are housed in miserable conditions that have prompted at least one of them to sleep in the park:
The cardboard beds have been a huge point of contention for the athletes in Paris, with many complaining they’re too hard and not conducive to a good night’s sleep. The beds are designed to be environmentally friendly and can be re-used after the Games, but the athletes hate them.
I hope the beds are reused to make the entire organizing committee sleep on them for a month.
One more thing about the book I just finished, then.
A great writer who creates literature differs from an OK author who provides entertainment in that she doesn’t try to soothe the readers’ anxieties by providing forced happy endings or explanations. An artist doesn’t speak to an audience. She’s in conversation with God, and audiences can listen in if they want.
Emma Cline’s The Guest is a wonderful example of a writer who is confident enough not to provide convenient explanations for why Alex is such a self-defeating layabout. Cline is not interested in how readers handle the anxiety they feel when faced with an eruption of chaos into daily life.
Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is talented but nowhere on the level of Emma Cline just yet. This is why she does provide an explanation for her characters’ dysfunction. To do that, she uses a real-life kidnapping of a rich Jewish businessman (with his consent) and turns a similar kidnapping into the root cause of her characters’ failure at life.
The kidnapping in question was that of Jack Teich in 1974. Brodesser-Ackner knows Teich and his family, and she recognizes in the Afterword that they did not experience anything remotely like the unraveling that her characters did. 1970s were a different era, and people simply didn’t know that it was OK to become a total wreck because your father was kidnapped before you were born.
The enormous difference between life and fiction in no way detracts from the quality of Brodesser-Ackner’s book. It’s a great novel, although definitely not everybody’s cup of tea.
The problem with reading an excellent book is that, after you finish, you are still infected with it, and your organism rejects any new book you want to introduce.
For several days, you stalk around, bookless and morose, sending everybody into flight with sad and hopeful pleas of “so one more thing about this book I just finished…”
“It’s OK, you’ll find a new book soon,” say long-suffering relatives and friends, squeezing your hand with fake compassion and absconding at a fast clip to prevent you from breaking into a yet another paean to the recently finished book.
“Anything yet?” they ask dejectedly if no new book has been found by day 3. “By the way, did I mention I’m going to be really busy until Thursday?”
Finally, you tumble into a new book, and everybody breathes easily for the time being.
The characters in Taffy Brodesser-Ackner’s Long Island Compromise aren’t struggling Japanese-Americans in Portland but very rich East Coast Jews. In spite of these differences, there is a Mika Suzuki-type character in the novel. Jenny Fletcher, a woman with a $3-million-a-year, every year, inherited income, is almost 40, single, jobless, childless, rudderless, and massively depressed because her life has no meaning.
The reason why Mika and Jenny fail to develop lives of their own is identical. They are horrified by the humdrum existences of the regular people around them. For Jenny, even a passing thought that she could have ended up like her childhood friends, with families and careers, is humiliating. To live like everybody else? How degrading! No, both Mika and Jenny believe that they deserve something massively better and spend years upon years waiting for that life of glittering mega importance to find them.
Both women believe that glittering mega importance is conferred on a person by outside circumstances. Mika is certain that if she manages to see Hamilton on Broadway and be invited backstage to meet the cast, she will finally feel like she matters. Jenny Fletcher, on the other hand, has enough money to buy out every seat in the house at a Broadway musical but she knows none of it will help her feel important.
I was thinking about this today because we went to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the local community theater. I buy tickets for every performance of our local theater group, and it’s always great, although what can possibly beat a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber? But I was thinking that both Mika and Jenny would have been crushed by attending such an event. They would have felt diminished, even though neither achieved the height even of a molehill from which they could be diminished. And it’s just one but deadly mistake that brought them into their listless, depressed existence. They ended up like this because they never figured out that glittering importance comes from the inside. Outside circumstances don’t bathe you in light. Just the opposite, the light from the inside turns humdrum life events into a place of amazing adventure.
Small, tiny, utterly undeveloped, rudimentary personalities dream of surrounding themselves with pomp and circumstance to borrow a bit of somebody else’s importance. Large, interesting personalities feel as interesting at the grocery store as anywhere else.
On page 362 of 445 of Taffy Brodesser-Ackner’s new novel Long Island Compromise, the evils of patriarchy finally made their inevitable appearance. I’m shocked that the writer held out as long as that before unleashing her patriarchy obsession on us.
However, the book is still very much worth it. There’s a whole chapter on the travails of graduate union organizers at Yale, and it’s priceless. I was one of those organizers but not top braas, like Brodesser-Ackner’s characters, but the lowest-rung. The description of that union in the novel is spot-on. At some point, the union decides to go on a hunger strike for some leftist cause. Soon, however, the students realize that going hungry is no fun, so they decide to do it in 12-hour shifts. That turns out to be onerous, as well, so they switch to 6-hour shifts.
These characters are so real, I practically know them in person.
I haven’t banned anybody on this blog since a reader got a bit mental and started cyberstalking other readers in creepy ways. That was a couple of years ago. Currently, the box of banned commenters in the settings sits completely empty. Nobody is banned. I’m ready to do so if people start behaving in unhealthy ways but there are no active bans.
Normally, if I see that somebody is no longer a valuable conversation partner for me, I stop reading their comments. I understand, however, that they might provide interesting conversation to other commenters. I respect and encourage that. But nobody is entitled to my time and attention, and once I’m bored, I move on. Everybody else is free to do the same.
Also, I haven’t checked the Hotmail box for many months. I apologize but there’s too much email in my life. This is why I removed the address from the blog and put the Anonymous message box instead. I think it’s great for people because this way they are completely anonymous and don’t have to involve their email address in communication.
I truly despair:
I mean. Dude already turned Georgia from red to purple and is proceeding to push it further into deep blue.
And the other side just dropped a batch of Russian propagandists on US soil and is gaslighting us into thinking that Kamala “is strong on immigration” and supports “law and order.”
I’m going to go do my breathing exercises now because observing all this is making me livid.
Very easy to make, light and delicious.
Mix 3 eggs with 300 grams of sour cream. Add some salt and pepper. A teaspoon of baking powder. Mix in 1,5 tablespoon of flour. Let the batter rest for 20 minutes on the kitchen counter until little bubbles form on the surface.
In the meantime, fry up some mushrooms. People usually fry them up with onions but I obviously skip that part. Add any herbs and spices you like.
Pour half of the batter into a smallish baking dish. I put parchment paper on the bottom so that it doesn’t stick. Put the mushrooms on top. Cover with the rest of the batter. Bake at 375°F for 15 minutes. Then poke the crust with a fork a few times and bake for 15 mins more.
That’s it, you can take it out and enjoy. This batter works great for chicken pie, too.
That a mega lefty Asian-American writer Emiko Jean would write the most pro-life novel I have ever read (or imagined reading) is a surprising and encouraging sign of a cultural turn that is underway. In Mika in Real Life, a teenager’s decision to give birth to a child of rape is never explained, let alone justified. To the contrary, it’s presented as such a normal thing to do that no explanation is necessary. The entire novel exists around the idea that this was the only good thing the main character did in her life. All of the pro-life folks should shut up right now because they usually make their case in the clumsiest possible way. Instead, they need to buy mountains of copies of Mika and hand them out to late teens and young adults. I’m a lifelong abortion rights supporter, and I honestly say that the book’s message landed with me. It didn’t transform me into a different person but if I’d read it as a teenager, it probably would have.
Jean is very mainstream, best-selling, and, once again, so left-wing that AOC looks conservative by her side. But she’s not writing about lefty topics anymore because there’s no longer that much interest.
Then there’s the exceptionally lefty Jewish-American Taffy Brodesser-Ackner. This year she also effectuated a sharp right turn away from her formerly deeply woke interests.
Writers are barometers of reality. If they have even a crumb of talent, their text will wrestle control and run its own way. I have no idea what Jean and Brodesser-Ackner wanted to say in their novels. It’s utterly unimportant because we can never find out for certain. But they are showing that the weather has changed and we are moving in a different direction now.
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