Like, some sort of interesting, like, sort of, like, things that, like, really, I sort of came up with, like, today, sort of, like, really
Like, some sort of interesting, like, sort of, like, things that, like, really, I sort of came up with, like, today, sort of, like, really
It's the weekend, at last...
Like, some sort of interesting, like, sort of, like, things that, like, really, I sort of came up with, like, today, sort of, like, really
[Gravity is one of my big unacceptables. Why does it have to hurt so much to fall down? I would greatly prefer floating ever so lightly upward as delicate strings play a dreamy melody when I trip, thank you. I was never consulted when the gravity decision was made and that feels tremendously unfair. Let’s organize and put a stop to this traumatizing injustice!]
One of my favorite current sources of unintentional humor, NPR, provided another comedy jewel the other day.
It was an interview with Maia Kobabe, the author of a book (a comic book, in fact, which seems a particularly popular genre among the exceedingly Woke), Gender Queer: A Memoir, that has apparently been getting some critical attention from some groups not entirely ideologically on-board with current Woke protocols.
Here’s the first statement we get there from Kobabe (I’m going to politely refuse to use pronouns here, as Kobabe, I just learned, uses “modified Spivak pronouns,” whatever that means, and as a general rule I prefer to stay out of that sly, mischievous little game—note well how carefully NPR also avoids any pronouns in the write-up, probably in quaking fear of being branded fascists or worse by Kobabe if they make the slightest trauma-producing misstep on this cosmically important matter):
"I wrote it sort of towards an audience who I knew, like, loved me and supported me and knew me and was very sympathetic to me," Kobabe told NPR. "And I think that let me write without any, really, fear."
Typically, people who talk like this are either 15 and/or they are people you consider to be paragons of clear and deep thought at your own great peril. The evidence in the interview shows that this person is about as confused and obsessed with the trauma of what most of us know as “being alive” as you can be while somehow just remaining capable of making it to the phone for your NPR interview about how confused and filled with anxiety about traumas past, present, and future you are.
A little further on, we get this painfully inarticulate set of observations about Kobabe’s struggles with e.g., normal periodic doctor visits for someone of Kobabe’s biological sex:
“I was like, I just feel like there's some stuff going on with me about gender. I can't decide if I'm a girl who feels kind of like a boy or like a gay man trapped in a girl's body or if I'm, like, a boy but in a very feminine way, or, like, am I a lesbian? It was just very confusing. And I just kept feeling like I was trying on, like, clothes that didn't fit…But, yeah, the pap smear exam scenes — there are two of them in the book — they were hard to write. Those were kind of the only scenes that when I sat down at my desk to draw them, I was like, I don't want to have to live in this memory again for the amount of time it's going to take me to draw these pages. This is an unpleasant experience, to be reliving this. I mean, half of it's kind of like psychological. I don't enjoy being reminded about this part of my body.”
You know what? I, like, totally don’t enjoy being reminded of the fact that I might at some point get various cancers that can kill me, and yet somehow this doesn’t provoke any sense of unbearable moral suffering on my part when doctors examine the parts of my body (some of which are internal and require uncomfortable probing) in which those cancers develop in order to ensure my good health. That Kobabe feels this way about something that has only the goal of protecting Kobabe’s health is not evidence of something objectively wrong with the world, or with medical science, as Kobabe seems to believe. The problem is elsewhere.
Even if there were no moral grounds on which to question books like this one being made available to young children (and, having looked at the images that seemed concerning to Kobabe’s public critics, I believe there are such grounds), there would certainly be intellectual grounds for keeping it away from impressionable minds. I find it difficult to imagine how an educator who takes that calling seriously could want a child to see this person as an exemplar of the literary and communicative arts worth emulating.
One of the things Wokeism promotes, often directly, but always at least implicitly, is a catastrophic decline in the quality of intellectual and creative work.
Gender Queer is one example. I’ve written frequently about the amateur scholarly chops of some of the most celebrated Woke academic writers, e.g., Ibram X. Kendi and Michelle Alexander.
Here’s another depressing example from my recent France trip.
At the Orsay, this kitschy mediocrity by the same American painter, Kehinde Wiley, who gave us that bizarre rendering of Barack Obama in a suit sitting on a chair in the middle of a forest of vegetation (or is he in front of the ivy-covered outfield wall in Wrigley Field, preparing to shag fly balls?), was on display and occupying a vast amount of space in the central region of the museum.
It was certainly an effort by the museum to surf on (or at least avoid being swamped by) the global tidal wave of overwrought racial justice concern of the past several years. Its title is “Woman bitten by a serpent.” Apparently an effort to comment on or copy in appropriately Woke terms or otherwise oh so politically cleverly riff on a brilliant sculpture by Auguste Clésinger of the same title (also below) that sits in that same museum, not far from where this gaudy object that would not at all be out of place on the side of a subway car was displayed.
[The Wiley and two views of the Clésinger]
I remind you: This is in a museum full of Cézannes and Renoirs and Manets and Fantin-Latours and Pissarros.
How those responsible can imagine it will produce anything beyond head-scratching or carefully muffled laughter by serious museum-goers is beyond my comprehension.
Ernest Renan: “A school in which students made the rules would be a sad school.”
Maybe the best thing about the Internet, which almost (almost) makes up for all of its dreadful pathologies: Random treasures can be had at times, wholly unexpectedly and gloriously.
The other day I’m looking for a song with the phrase “Ol’ Hag” in the title (it’s about Merle Haggard), only realizing midway through that there was no chance I would find it online because it is an unpublished song of my father’s that I remembered from a cassette tape he gave me decades ago but that I had forgotten was his.
It’s as I’m scrolling through what Google gave me that I realize I’m not going to find what I was looking for. On one of the pages, a song appears: “Old Hag You Have Killed Me.” I’m intrigued by the title. (You wouldn’t be?) I click on the link.
It’s a jig (and the title of an album) by an Irish traditional music group, The Bothy Band, who recorded several wonderful LPs in the mid 1970s of which I was previously completely unaware.
I was entranced from the start of “Old Hag You Have Killed Me,” with the bewitchingly fluid melody on the clavinet, those delicious trills cascading down in such a lovely design, and I immediately searched and found all their albums on Pandora. I have been obsessively listening to them now for a few days straight, yesterday dancing around the kitchen like an oversized and awkward leprechaun while cooking chili, to the simultaneous horror and astonishment of my children.
And this one had me weeping from the opening melody and first lines. Yes, I’m an easy cry, but I think you might agree with me that it’s fairly high-octane mournfulness we’ve got here.
I have some Irish ancestry, so I am going to pretend that at least part of my reaction to this music is firmly anchored in the genes, just because it hit at such an emotional level from the first instant. It was not at all hard for me to imagine some of my people making that melancholy journey over the Atlantic, in hopeless pursuit of some beautiful girl they’d seen getting on the boat after leaving Coolmore, which is in County Donegal on the northwest coast.
Another day, I was reading, stretched out on the shore, and Zorba came and sat down opposite me, placed his santuri on his knees and began to play…Gradually his expression changed and a wild joy took possession of him. . . .Macedonian songs, Klepht songs, savage cries; the human throat became as it was in prehistoric times, when the cry was a great synthesis which bore within it all we call today by the names of poetry, music and thought. . . .The cry came from the depth of Zorba’s being and the whole thin crust of what we call civilization cracked and let out the immortal beast, the hairy god. . . .The sun went down, night came, the Great Bear danced round the immovable axis of the sky, the moon rose and gazed in horror at two tiny beasts who were singing on the sands and fearing no one.
—Nikos Kazantzakis, from Zorba the Greek
That painting is hideous. Something you would buy on the boardwalk in Venice Beach. Complete trash.