And that ain’t all. ‘15.3% of ultra-Orthodox men and 11.9% of women secularize by age 30.’ With that many getting the hell out, there may be hope for Israeli society.

… tragedy.

*********************

KIMBERLEA:

Tell me then, Don Junior. Where can I go now? Tell me! Shall I go back to Fox News? Or shall I go to some other poor

wretched posting overseas? To exile?  [Shakes her head bitterly.]. Oh, I can just imagine how well they

will receive me!

Because, you see, Donnie, the truth falls like this: because of you, I have become a most hated

woman! Hated by both my own folk in my own country and by the Athenians!

CHORUS: [To each other:]

Friend against friend! An anger most implacable!

KIMBERLEA:

Hateful, miserable man! And words defy my tongue to put together insult worthy enough of your father!

You dare fire me, Trump! You! You, a man most hated by all the

generations of mortals and immortals alike – and by me!

***********************

Let me tell you, Donnie, let me remind you, what I have done for you.

I journeyed to Galen of Pergamum for plastic surgery.

I wore a tight red dress and bellowed forth like the Brazen Bull

My love for your father.

You’ve broken all oaths, old and new, and you know it!

Oh Zeus!

Lots of people note the essential barbarism of the public execution thing; see George Will and others. Christopher Hitchens made much, as he prepared to watch an execution in that state, of Missouri’s slogan: Show Me. Show Me!

I was assailed by a powerful sensation of voyeuristic indecency. There was something camp and wrong and over-rehearsed about it—the result of an ill-considered attempt to impose primness and decorum on something obscene…  I feel permanently degraded and somewhat unmanned by the small part I played, as a complicit spectator, in the dank and dingy little ritual that was enacted in that prison cellar in Missouri. 

Me, I’m reminded of Shamima Begum’s explanation for having left England and joined ISIS: It was watching ISIS videos of prisoners being beheaded that really got her going.

This year’s Nobelist in literature parallels ancient and contemporary life and thought in her best poetry; but she also publishes lesser work, thin slices of consciousness which offer whimsicality and absurdism in an effort to bring to the table what, in her case, turn out to be warmed over bits about the futility of existence.

Because the ‘why bother haha’ theme has been served up with great flair and substance by precursor Nobelists like Samuel Beckett and Joseph Brodsky, contemporary poets who want to add to the fruitlessness compote really need to bring something new. But a poem like Clive Song, despite its sweet urban aroma, falls flat.

The short autobiographical piece narrates a shared breakfast at a NYC cafe. Carson’s friend Clive is there, and they are joined by her husband, Currier. The poem’s beginning, middle, and end reference “the limits of human wisdom,” limits that change not at all from ancient (“early”) times to today, and this thrice-sounded phrase in a brief poem rather ham-handedly tells us, rather than evokes, the poem’s theme.

Clive’s decades-long but pretty much go-nowhere work on behalf of human rights at Guantanamo makes him both an object of admiration and pity for the poet:

Clive smiles

and goes up the street

in his saggy-butt pants,

looking not much like a high-powered lawyer…

In a witless postmodern world, indefatigable justice warriors like Clive should be a source of wisdom, and Carson approaches him in this spirit; she designates Clive our time’s sacred grove of oaks, a holy ground of the beautiful and true.

Invited to inspire us with the persistence of righteousness against incredibly steep odds, however, Clive stresses instead the Kafkan nonsense of his quest. His preference for chatting about absurdist humor troupes (The Goons; Monty Python) tells us that he seems to have settled for milking our quandary for laughs rather than seriously discussing the situation with Carson.

The absurd futilty deepens when Currier suggests introducing square dancing to Pakistan

Because the square dance is a “greeting dance

and we need more greeting! 

Carson’s poem points to desperate places like Pakistan and Gitmo largely to shrug or giggle; but the world of suffering isn’t so easily undercut or exploited as this poem would like it to be. The poem borrows a kind of seriousness with these mentions, rather than trying in some way to be adequate to them. It’s as if Kurt Vonnegut decided that repeated invocations of “Dresden” and “so it goes” could do the work of Slaughterhouse–Five.

To be sure, poetry condenses moral complexity/extremity through implication, repetition, linguistic richness, paradox, irony, etc. … I’m not saying Carson has to rewrite Yeats’s The Second Coming. We do live in different times. But the horrors of the world seem to me to put more pressure on the poet than we see reflected here.

Our Grecian ambassador Kimberly

Extorts from the Magaworld limberly

Her scandals aren’t sex

She’s into AMEX

And soon she’ll be out of the swimberly

A businessman called Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has been elected the mayor of a remote district in the Peruvian Andes, according to local election data.

As we grab our popcorn, Graeme Wood prepares us for the movie.

A Pennsylvania school board president was sworn in holding a stack of banned books, rather than the Bible.

… this article. About frats, of course.

I was a Zeta decades ago: 1. The ‘charity’ ‘work was a joke, 2. Lots of alcohol poisoning, 3. Study groups …maybe, but the more effective groups were formed in the classes, 4. Leadership? I was VP of the House and I was on the ‘Panhellenic Council’ – waste of time (lots of pearl clutching but not much else)… Oh, and I was raped at Frat parties, got an STD, crushing hangovers, lots of ‘DUI-ing’…. Big 10 school, graduated Summa but by the time I went to Law School, a lifetime pattern of alcohol dependency had set in. Sober now, feel much better!

UD likes the zingy quirky energy of this comment – it’s a superquick, highly representative life summary, ain’t it?

— at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library this Saturday at 2:00. Here’s the poem.

Our original focus for Saturday was James Merrill’s “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” and I’ll talk about that too.

Plus they’re a nest of thieves.

And your problem is…?

Michelle Cottle, NYT.

******************

‘The fact that these young men engage[d] in this behavior, talked about it the way they did, treated it as some big fun game … The thing I’m trying to say is, these aren’t exceptional young men, right?

In a lot of ways, they’re just ordinary young men. And the fact that this didn’t seem to be remarkable to these ordinary young men is, I think, evidence of the actual state of American culture as it relates to the treatment and dignity of women, and as it relates to how serious[ly] we take sexual assault and sexual violence.’

Jamelle Bouie, NYT.

Suddenly, finally, everyone’s talking about fraternities. Good moment to revisit my post about a wonderful essay by Laura Kipnis.

So much of the Cornell 7 thing is bloody obvious. Schools with heavy drinking cultures stand a chance of approaching, attaining, or even exceeding Cornell-level orgiastics.

‘Many people are taken completely aback by some of the disturbing details of this case. As someone who lives in this space, I want to specifically underline something:  This story doesn’t happen without substance abuse. The case is an extreme outlier in terms of alleged severity; I’ve not encountered another case in my career involving ketamine, or with four or more alleged assailants over the course of multiple hours. (Though I must note: Despite the prominent use of the chilling phrase the “Cornell Seven,” the lawsuit accuses four of the defendants of having sex with Doe; one of kissing her; and two of snorting drugs off her body.) But the case is par for the course in the sense that everyone on both sides of the allegations was abusing substances, which is a factor in nearly every case I’ve worked on.’

Brainless drunk sports and frats schools will always have rape and plunder. Brainy drunk sports and frats schools will often have it too. Remember the University of Virginia’s lacrosse players, one of whom murdered his girlfriend, also a student there. The killer was a brainless drunk legacy admit.