There might be a reason why I think all movie actors are talentless hacks while almost all actors on Audible are acting geniuses.
It’s kind of easier to appreciate their craft if I don’t have to look at them.
Book Notes: Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister
Emily Wharton’s relatives are horrified by her plan to marry Ferdinand Lopez. He is not a British gentleman, and the Wharton family is convinced that the marriage will be a disaster. Emily disagrees because Ferdinand is living like (or, as we would say today, identifies as) a British gentleman, and that’s just as good. Or is it?
To her horror, Emily soon discovers that living like and identifying as are not the same as being. A British gentleman is a historically, culturally and temperamentally circumscribed entity. Try as he might, Ferdinand cannot keep the pretense of being “just like” one but unfortunately he and Emily are already married, and she cannot escape.
Unlike many 19th-century authors, Trollope was a master at creating profound, nuanced and memorable male characters. The European novel is replete with interesting female heroines, which is not surprising since, in the 18th and 19th centuries, novels were written primarily for female audiences. We all know the names of Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Fortunata and Jacinta, Eugénie Grandet, Jane Eyre, Clarissa, Pamela, and many others. Of course, there are also Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Mauprat but one of them is a shipwreck, two are children, and the fourth you probably never heard of.
Trollope buckles the trend and gives us a large cast of complicated, strong, sometimes nasty and often deeply admirable men. In The Prime Minister, we once again meet my favorite male character of all times, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium. Trollope was great at creating meaningful character names. You don’t need to think hard to understand the social and economic status of somebody called the Duke of Omnium who lives at Gatherum Castle.
In a previous post, I talked about Plantagenet Palliser when he was a young husband who goes to heroic lengths to save his marriage to a capricious, self-indulgent woman. In The Prime Minister, Palliser is now my age and holds the highest political office in the land. His wife is as emotionally incontinent and demanding as always and tries to meddle aggressively in the way the Prime Minister runs his government. He has to keep her lovingly at bay while preserving his sense of duty and dignity both in his marriage and his public career.
I cannot think of another author who wrote about male friendships, male mentorships, and male interests as much and as beautifully as Trollope. What it means to be a husband, a father, a brother, a colleague were the issues that he explored time and again in his beautiful, long novels. The world of Trollope’s books is long gone but what a fascinating world it was. I am not sure we have gained much by leaving it so completely behind.
Elk Meat for Lunch
Another adventure in diabetic eating is below:
N likes unusual meats, and this is ground elk. Ground meats are boring, so I add a lot of herbs and spices. There are also carrots, mushrooms, spinach and parsley.
And yes, I eat these large very hot peppers like dessert. N doesn’t like spicy food, so I do my hotness factor separately.
The Magic Number
The CNN is still clinging to the figure of 11 million. I thought we had graduated to the equally unrealistic number of 13 million but the CNN insists that there have been 11 million for the past quarter century.
Who Does the Allowing?
Klara said something that I really loved today.
She said, “Mommy, one of the things I love about you is that you don’t wait for anybody’s permission, you just do things.”
I remember when she was 4 and we’d come to the Gardens for a walk. There would be a huge boulder placed in the drive to prevent people from using this vast, beautiful space. It was April of 2020, so you know.
I’d get out of the car, roll away the boulder, and proceed to park in the “forbidden” parking lot.
“Mommy, are you sure this is allowed?” Klara would ask.
“Nobody can allow or not allow,” I’d say. “I’m a taxpayer. I pay for the Gardens to be maintained, so I will decide when to use them.”
She was too little to understand the concept back then but now she got it.
Victory over Gender
Kathleen Stock is celebrating the victory of reason over gender myth-making in the British courts:
Another big problem for transactivist campaigners was the restricted arsenal of argumentative weapons at their disposal. They couldn’t rely on reason or evidence as these concepts are commonly understood, because no good arguments for transubstantiation by means of lip gloss existed. This left only three options: intellectual misdirection, emotional blackmail, and aggressively shaming opponents into silence.
It’s right to celebrate but that it should have taken years and an extraordinary amount of effort to prove that men don’t belong in women’s jails and changing rooms is in itself quite sad.
Fish Kotlety
Since people like talking about diabetes, this was lunch:
These are fish kotlety hiding under the parsley. I love parsley and eat it by the bunch.
For kotlety, I found two nice trays of catfish fillets at $5.99 a tray, which is very low for our landlocked area. I put them through the grinder with boiled carrots, garlic, and some leftover quinoa. Added an egg and baked them in pork rind crumbs.
Q&A about Soviets and Nazis
Because the left sets the narrative, that’s why. Nazism is a crime of the (far) right. USSR is a crime of (an equally far) left. Pretty much all of the world intellectuals of the twentieth century were in some way collaborating with the USSR or the regimes sponsored by it. Think of any name, and there’s a 90% chance that writer, thinker, academic, dancer, muralist, philosopher, etc was buying drinks with Soviet money.
Yes, there are exceptions but culture is built by networks. If you haven’t carefully and painstakingly woven a net, you won’t catch any butterflies. The international Left was nourished by the Soviet colossus for 70 years. It got so powerful that it could write the story of everything. And nobody had a platform to say otherwise and be heard.
But the best part? Once the USSR fell apart, the United States of America took over the financing of the international Left. The transition was very seamless, very smooth. And America has much more money. Many more leftists could be funded around the world. Many more projects could be filled to the brim with ready cash.
This is why leftism became much more aggressive AFTER the fall of the USSR. That’s why it reached the heights of lunacy that the Soviets couldn’t dream of. I mean, the worst that the Soviets could force scientists to parrot was that oak branches can sprout out of a birch tree. And even that required thousands of academics to be shot dead or jailed. The post-Soviet leftism, in the meantime, made scientists, Prime Ministers, and every cultural authority declare that women have penises. And without a single shot fired. Step aside, Comrades. The real power is in town.
P.S. To the sweet person who asked my opinion on crypto, thank you for the trust but I sincerely know nothing whatsoever on the subject. I have outsourced everything related to finance to my husband who is a whiz and somehow manages to materialize free business class tickets to Europe (aside from free UberEats meals, free Lyft rides, free Casa del Libro books, free toiletries, etc).
ADHD Revelations
The NYTimes released an article that finally recognizes the enormous disconnect between the science on ADHD and the daily practice of treating it with stimulants:
I’ve spent the last year speaking with some of the leading A.D.H.D. researchers in the United States and abroad, and many of them, like Swanson, express concern over what they see as a disconnect between the emerging scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. and the way the condition is being treated in clinics and doctors’ offices. Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London, described the situation in personal terms. “I’ve invested 35 years of my life trying to identify the causes of A.D.H.D., and somehow we seem to be farther away from our goal than we were when we started,” he told me. “We have a clinical definition of A.D.H.D. that is increasingly unanchored from what we’re finding in our science.”
One more quote from the article because it’s paywalled and I want to share at least the most crucial parts:
That ever-expanding mountain of pills rests on certain assumptions: that A.D.H.D. is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution; that it is caused by inherent deficits in children’s brains; and that the medications we give them repair those deficits. Scientists who study A.D.H.D. are now challenging each one of those assumptions — and uncovering new evidence for the role of a child’s environment in the progression of his symptoms.
And just one more:
Some scientists have begun to argue that the traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an unchanging, essential fact about you — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. According to Sonuga-Barke, the British researcher, the traditional notion that there is a natural category of “people with A.D.H.D.” that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.”
The facts on ADHD come out in the exact pattern as facts about COVID. People who contradict the propaganda narrative are screamed down, vilified, and accused of wanting to murder grandma. Then, after a while, everything such people said gets recognized as true but no amends are made and no recognition of mistakes made is offered.
There is a large number of absolutely deranged beliefs held by the American public on matters of health. One example is the belief that the extraordinary rates of obesity in the US are “genetic” and utterly unconnected to food quality and eating habits. Another one that I encountered only last week is that people eat sugary breakfast cereals after being diagnosed with diabetes because doctors tell them to eat a high-carb diet with this disease.
Other such beliefs I will not name because I honestly don’t need the drama that will inevitably ensue. All that the NYTimes article says I’ve known for a long time because it’s very easy to find. It’s as easy to find as “don’t eat sugar by the spoonful if you have diabetes” but people will still be shocked when these facts are revealed.
Michelin Food
I’m one of those people whose appetite is impossible to kill.
Yet this presentation of a dish at a Michelin restaurant achieved exactly this:
Who are the iron-stomached people who actually took sa bite of this hideous thing?
The vulgarity of it all is beyond words.
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