Political things

I receive unsolicited emails from an agency called “Conservative Direct.” The latest one announces an online course on “totalitarian” novels, taught by the president of Hillsdale College.

Texts: 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, That Hideous Strength.

Conservatives and liberals may inhabit different echo chambers, but at least they read some of the same books.

(Extracting different lessons from them, of course.)

What else is “common ground?” Johnny Cash, I’ve been told.

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I thought this sociological piece on Elon Musk was insightful.

Too often, I see people denouncing Musk as a numbskull. He’s not that. I see other people praising his management style to high heaven. That’s wrong, too.

He succeeds at cutting costs when (a) he understands the industry (especially, its technology) and (b) he owns the stakes and assumes the risks for certain key decisions. But that doesn’t make him a good person for deciding how to cut costs across something so multiform, with so many “stakeholders,” as the U.S. government.

(He may or may not be evil, but that’s not what the piece is about.)

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What does the government do? I look forward to reading these essays.

Bathtime; speech patterns; Orwell, pt. 2

Sick kids today. Right now they’re feeling OK; they’ve been medicated and bathed. Samuel has been granted six more minutes in the tub. I don’t want him to drown, but I don’t want to sit by the tub all that time, either. I’m a busy guy.

Sing to me, I tell him.

(I want him to make noises while I’m out of the room.)

No.

Sing “The Greatest Adventure.”

No.

(Alas, Samuel is no bathtime Pavarotti.)

I keep suggesting songs for him, he keeps saying no, and then it’s time for him to get out of the tub. That’s one way to do it.

Now the boys are chowing down on sandwiches. They wouldn’t eat the chicken noodle soup I cooked earlier tonight.

I usually drain the water out of it, says Karin.

Indeed.

Uh, says Daniel.

He means Ziva. He’s picked up the habit of saying only final syllables (or, in some cases, vowel sounds). If I put him to bed, he’ll say er, meaning pacifier. Suppose he’s talking about planets. He’ll say Nus. I’ll have to use contextual clues to figure out whether he means Venus or Uranus. He knows how to say full words; he’s just awfully casual.

Samuel, on the other hand, distinguishes every word, every syllable, every audible letter, with the utmost care. No “Mairzy Doats” for him.

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More Orwell. I’ve reached his Spanish Civil War essays. Not having read Homage to Catalonia – or any survey of that war – I find myself pretty badly out of my depth as to what all the different parties were trying to achieve. But then, Orwell’s point seems to be that the conflict was largely misunderstood outside of Spain, and that the few who did understand it used it for their own ends, as propaganda.

Interestingly, as the volume’s content becomes more complex and abstract, Orwell’s tone gets angrier. Traveling to Spain and fighting with a haphazardly chosen militia must have been a whole other kettle of fish than going, soused, into the clink for a few hours with burglars and embezzlers.

My bracket, pt. 2; Beast; Orwell; the clink

Out go Nebraska and New Mexico, my underdogs. I’ve fallen from ~250,000th to ~400,000th place.

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I saw Beast (2017), set on Jersey in the English Channel. The leads are Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn. I was going to say, Flynn is one of the best young actors; but he’s forty-one; he’s been playing good and bad young men for almost two decades. In Beast, he’s a suspected serial killer. Is he guilty? And how is this possibility regarded by the turbulent woman (Buckley, even better than Flynn) who’s drawn to him “as a moth to the flame?”

Critics say this is a Badlands- or Bonnie-and-Clyde-type story. I think it’s more like Chabrol’s La cérémonie or, especially, Le boucher. Anyway, it’s an old story.

Much of Jersey seems manicured for tourists. But there are unkempt places. Buckley and Flynn climb cliffs, swim in the sea, roll in the dirt, tramp through forests, shoot rabbits.

Buckley wounds one. Flynn tells her to finish it off. It’s kinder, he says. As if kindness were the motive.

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I found a cheap copy of the large volume of Orwell’s essays and have been reading through them. He was a fine blogger from the get-go (“journalist,” I guess you’d call him). What essay are you reading, Samuel asked. “The Clink,” about how Orwell gets himself jailed for drunkenness, I said. Samuel built an enclosure with blocks and soon was playing that his action figures were in the clink.