Mr Fox comes to a prestigious private school in New England and begins to prey on 12-year-old girls. His students are starved for male attention. They rarely meet male teachers. For many of them, having a relationship with their father is an impossible dream. It’s easy for a pedophile like Fox to mesmerize them into submission.

One of the stricken students is Eunice Pfenning. Her father, a loyal, loving, responsible man, was ejected from the family home by the bored, brooding wife. Eunice is unattractive, so even the pedophile doesn’t want her, and this devastates the besotted girl.

The most poignant scenes in the novel are those describing Martin Pfenning, the man who suddenly finds himself thrown out of his family and his home for which he always did and continues to bear solitary financial responsibility. Pfenning thought he did everything right. He worked hard, respected his wife, provided an excellent living for his family. But his wife got bored and threw him out, destroyed his relationship with their daughter, and at no point saw herself as the villain of the situation.

There are several such bored divorcees in the novel who provide victims to the pedophile Fox. There’s also a cast of lonely lefty spinsters who enable Fox’s abuse of children. None of this excuses Fox who is a disgusting bastard freak. But you can’t help wondering how we arrived at the current situation where impermanent means good and attachment means bad.

I don’t want to give out any spoilers but I’ll say that the agents of good in the novel are working class men united by love of God, the desire to protect the weak, and male solidarity. What was broken by stupid, prattling, self-involved women and the pedophile these women invariably adore, these men repair. Of course, the damage can never be fully erased but there’s hope that we can step away from the brink. Because that’s what some of the characters in the novel did.

I hope everybody now understands why I said that I can’t believe that Oates’ prattly, lefty, wokey X account was written by the same person who wrote this novel. There’s so much more there than what I can mention in this post. There’s mockery of school administrators who exclude white men from jobs, there’s ridicule aimed at the obligatory portrayal of interracial couples in ads, there’s mention of how liberal elite schools have become and how they train their students to be insufferable snowflakes. Suffice it to say that the character who is appalled by the idea that she might hire somebody who is not “a woman of color” is quite indifferent to the realization that she hired a pedophile who filmed students being abused and sold images online.

Well, there are two kinds of Jews, the Orthodox and the secular. The Orthodox are, indeed, very conservative but you don’t see them in public life because they are concentrated on their religious life and the community. They are like the Amish in that sense.

The secular Jews are ethnically and temperamentally Jewish but if they are religious at all it’s mostly just a nod to tradition. Those are, indeed, far left, almost without exception.

Ethnic Jews, and I mean specifically the Ashkenazim, we are very excitable, high IQ and intense. We are one level extra in everything. We achieve a lot not because we have a secret cabal and we help each other, that’s just nuts. But because nothing is ever enough. We want to create, stand out, always do something new. And always something new is by definition the Left.

Once progressivism becomes “the old”, we’ll start picking that apart, so the future is bright.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia released from jail and will return to Maryland home https://t.co/7HhYID1ajX

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 22, 2025

So there’s that. Dude is free to beat more women and children and traffic more people.

No wonder we no longer hear about deportations.

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.