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.
Think of Jon Fosse as more like Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor than the literary precursors in my headline (Fosse, when asked about influences, cites these two, Beckett and Pinter): His work, across all literary genres, is a longing for an end to the self and an equal longing for its replacement by God.
“To write what I myself have experienced doesn’t interest me at all. I write more to get rid of myself than to express myself,” he tells one interviewer. “Writing is all about transformation. I listen to a universe that is different from mine, and writing is a way to escape into this universe. That’s the great thing about it. I want to get away from myself, not to express myself,” he tells another.
An almost-fatal alcoholic (he doesn’t drink anymore), a depressive, Fosse understands with painful clarity the unbearable lightness/heaviness of human being, and he also understands that the process of aesthetic creation suspends the hated self (just as alcohol does). “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” wrote T S Eliot; “it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Remember the title of Catholic novelist Graham Greene’s memoirs: Ways of Escape. Remember that the one book left behind on his bedside table after Anthony Bourdain’s suicide was Ways of Escape — in which Greene writes: “Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”
Not sayin it’s fair, but if you don’t happen to be an artistic genius, you might indeed have to deal with your self-hatred (UD thinks the capacity to hate oneself is one of humanity’s more endearing traits) via drink or drugs… I mean, you also remember the Randy Newman song, right?
You know how it is with me baby
You know, I just can’t stand myself
It takes a whole lot of medicine
For me to pretend that I’m somebody else
And a whole WHOLE lot of medicine for me to pretend that I’m nobody else…
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Worse, for many creative geniuses, it’s not either/or: You drink AND you write The Great Gatsby… or you drink and write a novel that had a huge impact on Fosse: The Sound and the Fury… So think of Jon Fosse as a particularly desperate escape artist, unwilling to inhabit permanently the tormenting nothingness of being and the occasional suspension of nothingness via writing/alcohol, and really longing to move to a higher plane. “[E]veryone has a deep longing inside them,” he writes; “we always always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we’re longing for God, because the human being is a continuous prayer, a person is a prayer through his or her longing…”
Consider Fosse’s poem, “Night Psalm.”
There is an earth that opens wide
its night of black abyss
and soul and body will it hide
until there’s none to miss
There is a night that meets with you
receives you nice and soft
and lets you rest with honour due
hand, foot and soul aloft
For God he is in all on earth
in teeming night above
your soul is His, you are His worth
you shine His heaven’s love
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So in the first stanza it all comes down, as Tracy Nelson reminds us, to Mother Earth; just under your bright life black death awaits your capture, Midnight Skater…
But! (Stanza Two) There’s a softer night all around us that doesn’t simply gobble us up; it is gentle and wafts you to an honored place, and if you follow God you will find it. For, as Fosse says in his final stanza, God is here with us on earth. He is everywhere, above and below; and you must learn, if you are not to fall forgotten into the abyss, that you belong to him and he awaits your acceptance of his gift of eternal life. Remember Simone Weil’s favorite poem, the poem which propelled her into the Catholic faith:
LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’
‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.
**************************************
You must accept this divine gift of eternal life; if you do not, you will fall into the abyss.
And no, there’s no bitter Blakeian irony behind the simple language of Fosse’s last stanza. The lines honestly state the convictions of a Catholic convert.
As with Flannery O’Connor, most of Fosse’s writing locates itself in the agonizing daily void which is life prior to faith; but in this poem he sets forth the way out of ways of escape.
They’ve been hammering away at the research misconduct at some of the president’s neuroscience labs, and he has been as high-handed and obnoxious with the little buggers as you’d imagine. But the school journalists were right on the money. They persisted, and they brought the dude down. The school’s investigation found “repeated instances of manipulation of research data and/or subpar scientific practices from different people and in labs run by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different institutions.”
[Stanford’s] investigation [of Marc Tessier-Lavigne] took eight months, with one member stepping off after The Daily revealed that he maintained an $18 million investment in a biotech company Tessier-Lavigne cofounded. Reporting by The Daily this week shows that some witnesses to an alleged incident of fraud during Tessier-Lavigne’s time at the biotechnology company Genentech refused to cooperate because investigators would not guarantee them anonymity, even though they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.
Of course some sleuthing would turn up a financial conflict of interest on the committee: that’s SOOOO Stanford. And as to the skeeziness on protecting the identity of sources — why wouldn’t the committee guarantee anonymity, given the Genentech people’s legal vulnerability?
Much of the writing and reporting for the Daily has come from the genetically overdetermined Theo Baker.
This page has links to Baker’s reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.
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A comment in response to an article in the NYT:
In three successive labs headed by this man, data was manipulated (ie, fraudulent). The connecting link is Lavigne, who apparently rewarded post-docs who produced findings that advanced his career, and penalized those who couldn’t do so. The obvious conclusion is that he consistently cut corners and closed his eyes to what his behavior led underlings to do. And when the misconduct began to surface, he simply refused to issue the necessary corrections. He is not a victim or some innocent party here. His research was shabby and he has now got what he deserves: loss of his primary job and his reputation.