A Website of the Radical Imagination
An open letter
I know fame.
I’ve experienced fame.
And I now know the price of fame.
All without being famous.
Larry David, I want my life back.
I notice the illusion starts with the sideways glance, followed by a series of yes/no/can’t/could/not sure/but hey that leads to the soft opening: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Larry David?” Ever? My new friend, you are the third person today.
(an homage to/adaptation of/improvisation upon Lydia Davis’s “Old Men Around Town”)
The customer who had been coming to Espresso Bongo the longest had been a magician. He had white hair and blue eyes which were alert and bright. He arrived when the café opened and sat at a corner table opposite the rest room and told people if it was occupied and, if they had never known or had but had forgotten the lock’s combination, he clicked the remote he palmed and opened it. If a small child arrived, he bowed, introduced himself to its parent and, with their permission, pulled a quarter from the child’s ear.
Each rainy season, he left for San Miguel de Allende. This spring he did not return. He has an ex-wife and adult son but no one at the café knew how to reach them. His usual seat has been taken by a 95-year-old, former Pilates instructor, who can still raise one foot above her head while standing on the other foot but can not keep from offering books she has brought from home to people who declined them the previous day or, sometimes, the previous hour.
Walking north along Whitehall in the direction of Trafalgar Square, I felt an odd stirring as we passed the memorials to Britain’s bygone military heroes. I didn’t really know who most of the statues represented, many of them seemed to be related to the Great Wars of the twentieth century, but it didn’t matter. Or maybe it did – the First and Second World Wars seem to loom over this country in a way that is much more present, much more remembered, than in America.
Your editor meant to post this Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari earlier this season but it’s still on time. Click here (and it might make sense to start around 4:50). Harari’s protest against Israel’s Roman turn remains urgent. As does his injunction to get representative voices from his country’s millions of Palestinian-Israeli citizens into mainstream discourse. (I don’t believe journalists have picked up on his prompts yet. Please let me know if I missed something on that front.) B.D.
1. JFK to be renamed Trump International. By the time this takes effect, other airports will have been similarly renamed, along with their associated IATA codes. As this may create an elevated risk of baggage transport errors, carry-ons are recommended.
Franz Kafka, a spiritual guide in these trying times, thought that there might be “a certain truth in a chorus (or choir)” of voices. For this choir, I propose vox populi and will draw counsel from readers of Anne Applebaum and listeners to Anne Applebaum who have written their reactions into the Web. After Applebaum spoke in London on “‘Putinism’: The Ideology,” one listener commented, quite simply, “Brilliant mind! Very articulate!” On another occasion, an admirer wrote, “Always, always great to hear Anne Applebaum speak. So deeply informed, humane and articulate.” I cite these voices because they speak to my own. True, another listener to her London talk complained about her very articulateness, since “being articulate like Ribbentrop or Beria (sic) is not a highly prized point of honor” (this is also what vox populi gets you); but readers of her latest book, Autocracy, Inc. aren’t likely to mind the clarity and force of her every word.
Patricia Williams’ The Miracle of the Black Leg, ends aptly (and elegantly) with a survey of the familial photo archive she recently deposited in a Harvard university library. She muses about “archiving as a social process” in her book’s final paragraph:
I yearn to have future beings see me and my wonderful forefathers and -mothers. We were all here! I wish them to live in social imagination more fully than many of them were able to while on the planet. And so I need to explain, I am constantly explaining. I am always looking for the right words, the right accent, the perfect analogy, the smoothest homology, the felt connection, the link that sparks a mental orgasm of humanizing recognition.
Williams squeezes out sparks in her chapter on her family and throughout The Miracle of the Black Leg. Try this extended excerpt from a passage on NOLA in a chapter titled, “The Dispossessed.” I think you’ll experience a kind of drawn-out “mental orgasm.” You may also cheer for Ms. Williams as she bites a hand that’s fed her.
A slightly adapted/compacted version of this Brit’s Substack commentary.
July 24
In our heart of hearts we all know what will decide this election. It won’t be debates or speeches or experience or fitness to serve. Saving external catastrophe it’ll be whether a critical part of the US electorate can really imagine — even almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century — a woman being president. If they manage that hurdle, Harris ought to win. But if they can’t and find enough excuses for not liking her, then she may well lose.
(Now that JD Vance has been selected, the full list can be revealed.)
The candidates (commentary by Donald Trump):
File under #Grabembythebigotry. [Copyright to John Haas.]
So, Donald “George Wallace” Trump enlightened us all on his racial views yesterday before a group of black journalists.
Pierre—a rando from comedy show Kill Tony’s lot of amateur comedians—opens his set with “I’ve been working out lately, and I realized I could rape everybody here… if I wanted too.'” An outlier/success in ep. 669’s series of audience call ups, Pierre spins racial stereotypes/myths about black people, taking cues from the show’s host Tony Hinchcliffe—who’ll run with jokes about his homosexual life (clever ones, not hateful slurs). Before Pierre’s entrance, it’s hard to watch as Tony pressures one guest, after a lame set—enough humiliation already!—to detail his violent criminal conviction. Ali Siddiq‘s feature and follow-up in another episode—head in hands as Tony does in a newbie whose stand-up is impaired by a speech impediment—embodies every (sane) KT viewer’s dilemma: should I really be watching, participating in this? Comedian Bill Burr amps up such doubts by explicitly refusing the show’s premise in one ep., calling out Tony for abusing newer/younger comedians. Yet KT’s formula, the cringe (and/or occasional burst of talent), is almost addicting—the show gets millions of YouTube views and hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners.
Riffing on Joyce Wadler
…..Arthur Bremmer, Squeaky Fromme,
…..Sara Jane Moore, John Hinckley, Jr.
…..Now this guy
…..Left them walking away.
…..(Well, not Wallace.)
Pet Shop Boys have always soundtracked our times, from the AIDs era (try “King’s Cross”) to Obamatime (“More than a Dream“). Earlier this season their prophetic “Bullet for Narcissus” was tuned to a Secret Service officer on guard as Trump ranted at a rally…
I listened to the Trump-Biden debate with some kind of horror on BART. I’m not a fan of Biden but still, the shock of hearing him stumble through the event overrode any political disagreements. I felt a deep concern and pity for Biden (and all of us). What was it that was happening here? I left when they started talking about golf. The friend who I was staying with that night got a text from another friend about the debate. It simply said “haha, we’re all going to die.”
What a woman knows, she tells slant.
Let men and the sun spill everything.
The moon, too, keeps secrets.
Birds broadcast their news all day.
Originally posted on Sunday July 14, 2024.
One of the primary lessons I have learned after many years on social media is that it never hurts to wait before commenting. Waiting is usually the right choice. The wise choice.
Example: Within minutes of yesterday’s shooting, one of my Facebook “friends,” deeply mired in the Trump cult, took to my page to rage about “the liberal wacko,” “the liberal moron,” who, provoked by the “violent” rhetoric from the left, tried to assassinate Trump.
Then we wait.
Then it turns out the young man is a Republican. Who gave $15 to a Democratic Get-Out-the-Vote group. With a Libertarian father. A Democratic mother. And an AR-15.
I was skeptical when I heard that God had miraculously saved Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania while permitting a local man to die, but after several Republican spiritual and political leaders confirmed it, I was forced to reconsider.
Green Border, which is showing until Thursday in NYC, is my idea of counterprogramming to the RNC. You won’t get out of the flic without tears, but it’s not for goodies only. While the movie leaves the implication that human beings may be “cured by altruism” (per Stanley Corngold’s First review), it also implies that such cures are not matters of opinion. What’s “good for body and soul” is “to risk your well-being in caring for others.”
One Brit critic had caveats and I’ll allow Green Border might not be a work of art that will work a century from now. Director Agnieszka Holland hasn’t come up with a genius metaphor for Fortress Europa. (There’s no cinematic equivalent to the hi-tech marijuana factory run by gangsters in the Dardennes’ immigration saga, Tori and Lokita.) But right here, right now — as I flash on the charmer Nur (a Syrian boy who drowns in a Polish swamp) — Holland’s humanism without borders is undeniable.
What follows is the soulful song that soundtracks a minute of joy in Green Border. A couple Polish teenagers nod their heads with three African refugees who rap along to Youssoupha’s testament…
The author posted this before the assassination attempt. It’s still on time…
Photo by Tracy Harris
I have been reporting on and writing about politics for 55 years, and I have never in all those years seen people so depressed about the state of our union, as they say.
