“Epstein and Summers were so close, Summers went to Epstein for advice about an extramarital affair he was trying to have with a reluctant grad student, in between bouts of calling women stupid.”
I began thinking over this list of the six ingredients Professor Van Ghent felt it necessary for a novel to contain in order for it to provide “contiguity” – a nice euphemism for “relevance”- “with modern interests”: death, sex, hunger, war, guilt, God. When I cast around in my memory for a modern novel that would eminently qualify, the first that came to my mind was, for some reason, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, now so thoroughly forgotten, though it was only a little over twenty years ago that it was the great bestseller of the time and the great movie a little later. It had death; it had sadism; it had hunger – at least it contained great chunks of “social consciousness,” which I suppose is what is meant. It had sex – how thrilled we all were at the daring of the famous copulation scene on the Hawaiian beach! It had war – the attack on Pearl Harbor, no less. Indeed, it combined the last two ingredients in a short sentence of priceless felicity, to which Jane Austen could never have hoped to aspire: “Pearl Harbor made a queasiness in the testicles.”
From start to finish, “After the Hunt” sets its audience adrift on a sea of unmoored signifiers, flailing to keep up with all the arm-wavey gestures at “academia” and “bourgeois morality” and “ethics,” providing nothing beneath to hold it all together and indicate it knows what any of it means.
Some wonderful sentences in this review of a film centered on the Yale philosophy department.
Against all of this allegedly heady stuff, the score—by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—intentionally jars us from encroaching drowsiness with chortling woodwinds and shardlike piano chords that are the aural equivalent of jagged Plexiglass off-cuts. Remember, this isn’t just a movie; it’s art.
LOL.
And a paragraph for UD’s Morrissey-fan sister:
… [Chloe Sevigny] owns the movie’s single greatest moment: sitting with Alma at a college watering hole, she marvels that they’re playing a Morrissey song on the jukebox, given that he’s become persona non grata for his far-right political views. Alma corrects her: it’s not a Morrissey song that’s playing, but one by Morrissey’s band, the Smiths. (It’s “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”) Sevigny responds with a “same difference” shrug and goes back to her goblet of red wine. Not every encounter or exchange needs to entail a lesson in semantics, or the tyranny of cultural sensitivity, or the dominance of white males in academia and everywhere else. Sometimes a Morrissey song is just a Morrissey song. Even if it’s by the Smiths.
… Roger Craver has a nice take on it.
‘As for Trump, I find it difficult to hold him morally responsible for anything. He’s a creature of appetite and instinct who hunts and feeds in a dark sub-ethical realm. You don’t hold a shark morally responsible for mauling a swimmer. You just try to keep the shark at bay—which the American people failed to do.‘
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Dark sub-ethical realm is beautiful. It’s very very good writing. Maybe all the way to poetic.
‘After the aircraft came to a standstill, “we were upside down hanging like bats,” [a passenger] said.’
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Our own experience provides the basic material for our imag-
ination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try
to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables
one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s
mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the sur-
rounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound
signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by
one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not
very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave
as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I
am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those re-
sources are inadequate to the task.
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Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” suggests that there are limitations to the simile.
Fine writing about U Penn’s mistake in going after Amy Wax.
Those of us who are part of this increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan United States would once have seen the Waxes of the world as insurmountable obstacles to our success. But in today’s America, Ms. Wax’s resentment is more pathetic than powerful.
… [U]tterances of bigotry by a crank academic like Ms. Wax are [not] going to threaten me…
I’ve seen the tides of progress, even the old stomping ground of the Confederacy, and I’m confident that in the long run, the Waxes of the world will lose their fight against the diversification of America.
Electrostatic etc. Nice.
Resentment of elites is a powerful motive in democratic politics, and so is the feeling … that the economy was better under Trump. But that disregards the moral and psychological cesspool himself: a bully, a liar, a bigot, a sexual assaulter, a cheat; crude, cruel, disloyal, vengeful, dictatorial, and so selfish that he tried to shatter American democracy rather than accept defeat. His supporters have to ignore all of this, explain it away, or revel in displays of character that few of them would tolerate for a minute in their own children. Now they are trying to put him back in power. Beyond the reach of reason and even empathy, nearly half of my fellow citizens are unfathomable, including a few I personally like. The mystery of the good Trump voter troubled me.
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The essay is a sincere effort to understand Trump voters/enthusiasts.
The tragedy [of Kurtis Bay’s wife’s death in the hospital] fed his skepticism toward what he called the “managerial class”—the power elite in government bureaucracy, business, finance, and the media. The managerial class was necessary—the country couldn’t function without it—but it accumulated power by sowing conflict and chaos. Like the hospital’s doctors, members of the class weren’t individually vicious. “Yes, they are corrupt, but they’re more like AI,” Bay said. “It’s morphing all by itself. It’s incestuous—it breeds and breeds and breeds.” As for politicians, “I don’t think either political party gives a shit about the people”—a dictum I heard as often as the one about whiskey and water.
Bay saw Trump as the only president who tried to disrupt the managerial class and empower ordinary citizens. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would do it too, but voting for him would be throwing his vote away. If Trump loses this year, the managerial class will acquire more power and get into more wars, make the border more porous, hurt the economy by installing DEI algorithms in more corporations. “I’ll vote for Trump,” Bay said, “but that’s, like, the last thing I think about in terms of how I’m going to impact my neighbor, my friend, my society.” Everyone wanted clean air, clean water, opportunity for all to make money and raise a family. If the extremes would stop demonizing each other and fighting over trivia, then the country could come together and solve its immense problems—poverty, homelessness …
I listened, half-agreeing about the managerial class, still wondering how a man who dearly loved his multiracial family and cared about young people on the margins and called his late wife “the face of God on this Earth” could embrace Trump. So I asked. Bay replied that good people had done bad things on January 6 but not at Trump’s bidding, and he might have gone himself if the timing had been different; that he didn’t look to the president for moral guidance in raising children or running a business; that he’d easily take “grab her by the whatever” from a president who would end the border problem and stop funding wars.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Good writing!
There is … a workbook called I’m Dead, Now What? in which people set out their wishes to help relatives, friends and executors navigate funerals and finances after they’ve gone.