Even if you haven’t read the novel, you’ve learned a lot about it, and DeLillo’s world view, just from reading this blog, which after all has a whole category devoted to DeLillo. The Noah Baumbach production opens August 31 at the Venice Film Festival.
A Bronx-born son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo is an entirely urban animal, yet he knowledgeably sets his novel in a small midwestern “village” (I’ll explain the quotation marks in a moment); a writer who has never had children, he sensitively places at the heart of the book the character and fate of many children in a blended family (their parents are much-divorced). As with many of my posts on the postmodern way of death, the novel first establishes the enviably, pleasantly, eventlessly “immune” life of affluent Americans, and then throws a lethal environmental catastrophe (“the airborne toxic event”) right in their faces. And lungs.
So DeLillo locates the Gladney family (glad; bland) in the cute village of Blacksmith, with its preserved nineteenth century main street and vernacular library and town hall and churches…
From its sweet pre-industrial name to its charming brick storefronts, Blacksmith could convince you you really are living a pre-modern life, before advanced technology, massive shopping malls, and endless ubiquitous streaming media; but, as White Noise makes hilariously clear, it’s all a simulacrum, a Truman-show facade behind which lies, like it or not, the late twentieth century.
When the disaster hits, Gladney’s first response is total denial:
“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornadoes. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”
The filmmakers chose Wellington, Ohio for their Blacksmith – a heartland town whose preserved main street has won national awards.
The cast?
Adam Driver is a bit more young and ethnic than Gladney as described (put rumpled clothes and nerdy glasses on Mitt Romney and you’d get closer to the mark), but he’s definitely got the open-mouthed incomprehension/disbelief the plot demands. I’ll write more about the film as critical response to it, and then of course the film itself, begins to appear.
No kidding. We wuz robbed Trump has transexualized into Ada Doom, the batty granny in Cold Comfort Farm, who obsessively says: I saw something nasty in the woodshed.I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I saw something nasty in the election returns.
This blog therefore now officially drops the moniker we have long given Trump, inspired by what Nicolae Ceaușescu insisted he be called — The Genius of the Carpathians — and adopts a new one: Ada Doom.
Government lawyers also intend to ask the judge to remove Christine Jorgensen, Kemal Atatürk, Carly Simon, Eric Satie, and Damien Thorn from the list of people Trump is suing.
… that this nation’s first case of polio in many years originated in an ultraorthodox Jewish sect. The Times of Israel summarizes:
Young man who recently got married is suffering from paralysis; was not vaccinated; is a resident of Rockland County, which has a history of low vaccine compliance
The story is getting wide coverage. What it represents is the shame of a nation. A modern, enlightened country like the US should see no polio at all, since any outbreak is the result of absolutely basic disregard of personal and civic health norms.
Imagine: A highly contagious disease like that lurking, and a community’s indifference to basic science and the well-being of its children allows people to go unvaccinated. It’s of a piece with these same communities refusing to educate their children to national standards, breaking tax laws, and breaking non-discrimination laws. Not to mention refusing vaccines for other easily avoided scourges.
The new polio case comes amid fierce backlash against vaccination in some Orthodox communities fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic and following a measles outbreak in Rockland County in 2018 and 2019 that was centered in the area’s Haredi Orthodox population.
[This] community was also a nexus of a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019, with hundreds of cases in the county and in Brooklyn, which is also home to many Orthodox residents. Rockland County’s rate of polio vaccination for small children is significantly lower than the rate for other counties outside of New York City, according to state data.
These communities, which voted at a higher percentage for Trump than any other community in America, and which sent busloads of community members to, er, various January 6 events in Washington (the insurrection was one of the very few places on earth where you could watch ultraorthodox Jews and neo-Nazis cavorting together), will fight national authorities tooth and nail if any government agency actually tries to make them behave. We have already witnessed, in the streets of New York, how shockingly violent they can be.
Indeed these are the Trumpian shock troops, communities of people who recognize that Trump’s violent nihilism is their own. If government has any defensive purpose at all, it is to respond to the threat profoundly non-compliant sects like this one represent.
Klobuchar wonders how the violence at the Capitol would have been handled if we’d had a president “who didn’t flaunt the laws of the United States.”
As Vocabulary.com notes, “Flaunt is to show off, but flout is to ignore the rules.”
She’s forgiven because it’s way easy to confuse these two very similar words; and also because she’d make a damn good presidential candidate and I don’t want to discourage her.
He’s a runner and he’ll run away soon there’ll be no Josh courage ain’t been born that can make him stay Hawley get away while you can
He’s a runner and he’ll run away with police escort courage ain’t been born that can make him stay come his Proud Boys mob come the coup he’s a runner
There’ll come the runnin’ He’ll know he’s got to don’t ask him not to or why Oh why oh why did you run off and leave Oath Keepers cryin’ now they’re in jail and you’re not
In the U.S., the urgent desire to stop mass shootings — and gun violence in general — is met with almost total refusal in conservative state legislatures to pass laws or restrictions that make careless gun ownership a crime. “I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that’s very encouraging,” says Allison Anderman, director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center. Meanwhile, 4.6 million children live in homes where loaded firearms are unlocked; a 2021 survey showed that 70 percent of parents believe they have sufficiently secured their weapons, while a third of their adolescent kids say they can find them within five minutes. In 2020, 4,368 kids died of gunshot wounds in America, making it the leading cause of childhood death. A third of these were suicides.
“The room erupted in laughter,” said a reporter in the January 6 hearings room tonight. She was describing the hilarious juxtaposition of Missouri’s Josh Hawley first pumping his macho fist and riling up the crowd of insurrectionists; and then immediately after, with the Capitol overrun, racing like a wittle wabbit to get away from the people he’d made violent.
… Via the Los Angeles Times review of Bad City, a book about disgusting events at pretty much always-disgusting University of Southern California. My coverage of these particular grotesqueries can be found here. Put University Southern California in my search engine for years of scandal and corruption.
[T]wo major scandals at USC involv[ed] two doctors employed by the university: the medical school dean, Carmen Puliafito, and a gynecologist who worked at USC‘s student health center. Both doctors took advantage of young women to satisfy their prurient desires. Eventually, the book becomes a pointed critique of USC’s culture of secrecy and its shameful efforts to protect its public image. The university’s supporting role in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal serves as a kind of coda to a dark tale of privilege, amorality and coverups...
In one especially outrageous scene, [Dean] Puliafito brings a pair of addicts into his office at the Keck School of Medicine, where they don the doctor’s USC lab coat and an inflatable Trojan hat after smoking heroin...
Todd’s Indiana’s Attorney General, and I bet he thinks Dr. Caitlin Bernard’s real purty too, but that don’t seem to be keeping her from suing him for defamation. Why?
Well, since Ohio is a feudal fiefdom, where a pregnant ten year old rape victim can’t get an abortion, the child had to go to Indiana, where Bernard performed the procedure and in so doing got Todd so riled up he spewed all kinds of lies about her on national media and now she needs round the clock security.
Turns out broadcasting life-destroying lies about people is defamation, and Bernard will almost certainly successfully sue Rokita on these grounds.
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What a comedown for Todd Rokita. Once that ten year old hemorrhaged to death trying to give birth in Ohio, he’d for sure have been given Ohio’s Distinguished Service Medal. Now all he has to look forward to is a whopping legal settlement.
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Contribute to Dr. Bernard’s legal/security fund here.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
