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.

Thousands of militant hijabis all in black from head to toe and mad as hell cuz turns out some Iranian women aren’t militant hijabis all in black from head to toe — these chicks is real hard to control when they mass in the street and get whomped up about whores who don’t veil. They is spoiling for a fight, and, if the Islamic state doesn’t discourage them, will soon be shaving the heads and then beheading the heads of the hussies. So the president himself went on tv tother day to say okay okay if you don’t want to wrap your whole self in black I guess you don’t have to…

Concerned parents are speaking out after more than a dozen fights broke out during the Parker vs. Ramsay football game at Legion Field, an event meant to celebrate non-violence.

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Hey but no one fired a gun. In Birmingham Alabama, that counts as non-violence.

He is one tough son of a bitch; but what do you want? He’s a southern sheriff! Blythewood SC’s lawman, Leon Lott says, “It is legal for people to shoot guns on private property, but [I] draw the line when homes are being hit by bullets.” All over a nearby residential neighborhood, bullets shot by some dude and his friends at a homemade gun range are piercing walls and chairs and tables and NOT people yet, but hold on jest a bit and they’ll kill some kid playing outside.

It thinks letting parents wrap their ten year old daughters in veils and black sacks is a beautiful instance of religious freedom, and that keeping that behavior out of schools is ‘discriminatory and authoritarian.’ But of course covering up your child like that is utterly discriminatory and authoritarian, which is why country after country is banning child veiling in schools.

We all understand that you have to throw black coverings over girls at the youngest age possible so they begin right away to accustom themselves to being inferior and hidden relative to their brothers and fathers and male schoolmates. We get it. But we don’t have to like it, and we have laws. In Europe, we think women are equal to men.

… [The latest mass murderer] seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed…

Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.

If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves…

[Let me pause here and say yes. Lots of people are rummaging in this guy’s writings/statements for this hatred/that cause; but since the man was manifestly, classically, paradigmatically insane, this is a waste of time. His was a literally fractured psyche. One can learn things – most of them already known – about psychosis from him, but that’s kind of it.]

“The kind of person that we’re seeing today,” Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, told me, “is not promoting a cause.”

He added that they were propelled by a general, wide-ranging fury…

[W]hy [have] so many Americans … become so susceptible to the void?

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To the void, and to the rage that the sense of the void generates.

One can feel free-floating nihilism without the destructive rage.  Albert Camus, one random evening in Prague, suddenly felt overwhelmed by “the death of the soul.” James Agee, alone on a broiling Sunday in Alabama, felt

… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…

This is writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything. 

Don DeLillo, in Libra, imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling nihilistic one hot afternoon in Texas:

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.

But Oswald’s angry nihilism, like that of the jihadis and McVeigh, emerges into the light with a particular ideology that justifies slaughter, whereas the NVE is more insidious because ideologically he remains largely underground, unconnected to a group or group identity. He may be discoverable in this or that online violence cult, but basically unless the people closest to him – parents, friends, teachers – are sufficiently alarmed by his accumulation of weapons, or increasingly wild behavior, to report him to the police and/or try to get him committed, he’s free to mass slaughter.

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And this is UD’s thing: People have to report. And the report has to go somewhere. Why aren’t these manifestly, frighteningly, sick people on our radar? Part of it is indifferent, protective, deluded, or themselves crazy, parents. Some of these parents pay a very high price – their kid kills them before heading off to the local preschool; or, if they survive, some of them go to prison.

I ain’t claiming that in every case parents should have suspected something and acted on that suspicion; what I’m saying is this: It’s a new world in the US; hundreds of millions of high-powered guns are around, and anyone can get plenty of them. The pope calls this “a pandemic of arms.”

Which makes having even a mildly disturbed, mildly in trouble with the law, child/adolescent (look at what Sue Klebold, mother of a 17 year old mass murderer, has said about this) very worrisome, and at the very least our schools (where every day loaded guns are discovered in backpacks) should be ready to expel people who give evidence of being dangerous. It’s obscene that it’s still quite hard, in our public schools, to remove fledgling gunnies; in all respects — family, school — we have to toughen up.

We all know that the 15 year old in Washington state who killed his family with a gun to which the father gave him access didn’t just wake up one night and do this; but because by many accounts the household had little do with the outside world, no one beyond the immediate family could judge how nihilistic/enraged he was. This isn’t an argument for an intrusive, freedom-constraining state, but it is an argument for far greater social/familial awareness/responsiveness around the now-toxic mix of adolescence, mental disorder, and guns.

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All of this is necessary because of a much larger nihilism: In this nation, we assign no particular meaning or value to death by gun. It’s something that triggers a thoughts and prayers tweet. It doesn’t even have meaning when children are pulped. We just continue working to make it easier for everyone to get and carry guns. “Everyone dies. That’s life,” says an Oklahoma state senator in response to a question about his state’s astounding gun suicide rate.

That’s very strange, that he says that, but we can’t afford to waste time analyzing it. As we speak, the next insane teenager with a high capacity arsenal prepares.

It’s very much local news, but see how parents got together and petitioned and packed meeting rooms at this Arlington Washington high school and succeeded in throwing out a pistol packing menace? “The gun had a bullet in the chamber, the safety off and an additional full magazine of bullets.” Insane public school rules make exile very difficult to achieve, but under humongous pressure school administrators got this person’s parents to agree to move him online or something.

Meanwhile, after a junior high school student brought a loaded gun to a Springfield Mo. school, one of the parents there said something rather quotable.

“A student shouldn’t be scared to go to school. Really, they shouldn’t. It’s supposed to be fun. Not death.”

We should soon expect to see this new motto on school buildings all over the US: FUN. NOT DEATH.

And she’s lawyering up.

Here’s a possible reason why.

Of course the madman (read his manifesto) had lots and lots of guns; and this being the States he probably got most of them himself, legally. But what if his mother provided some of them? Is this going to turn out to be a version of Adam Lanza or Kip Kinkel, homicidal madmen whose parents (one or both of them) believed that giving their psychotic, gun-obsessed children guns would be therapeutic?

Surely the latest shooter’s mother is aware that parents of mass murdering people are going to prison for providing some of their weaponry; and it may be that, you know, she’d rather not go to prison.

A writer for the local paper covering the Donna Adelson trial (the Adelsons seem to have worked together in some fashion to rid themselves of Dan Markel) is determined to raise this trashy tale all the way up to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Repeatedly in his article, he compares the farkakte Adelsons to the Macbeths or something … But for starters you need to start out high and be brought low to have a tragedy, which is why although Bernie Madoff’s end in prison was awful, we do not say it was tragic cuz he started out every bit as scummy as he ended. I don’t think anyone said of Bernie’s demise O what a fall was there.

This is why when seeking literary analogues for America’s last all-engrossing blood-soaked family (the Murdaughs) we landed not on Shakespeare, but on William Faulkner, troubadour of trash.

The Adelson story is not The Tragedie of Charlie, Orthodontist of Boca. Yet “It was another day of Shakespearean Tragedy in Courtroom 3G in the State of Florida v. Donna Adelson… The facts and witnesses in this case have many twists and turns that are consistent with a well-written tragedy, Unfortunately, this is not fiction and the case is the result of a brutal and heinous murder.  [SOS is not even going to bother with the illiteracy of the article.] In true Shakespearean fashion, Donna’s children could be the reason that she may spend the rest of her life in prison.”

Since Donna is closer to Linda Richman than King Lear, SOS is thinking Shakespearean analogies are non-starters.

Original play, 1895: ‘I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.’

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2025: [Ibn Demps’ lawyer told the court that he shot a fellow card player in the stomach at point-range due to] “some sort of misunderstanding.”

‘Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them.’

Only America.

Only America.

Only America.

Only America.

Only America.

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In every country, people get into arguments, suffer from mental health issues and have extreme views — all common explanations for shootings. But in America, these people can much more easily pick up a firearm and shoot someone. When a country makes something easy to do, people are more likely to do it.

Children! During Catholic mass! Sounds as though the shooter killed a lot of them. This sort of thing the bullet-addled American press will notice.

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Addition to the engraving on the building:

THIS IS THE HOUSE OF GOD AND THE GATE OF HEAVEN AND THE HELLSCAPE OF GUNS

[photo tim evans reuters]

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“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.”

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“We are dealing with gunshot wound injuries from a high-velocity weapon.” Good to know that people are working hard as we speak to make and sell much higher velocity weapons. They’re particularly explosive on the bodies of young children. At Uvalde, there was very little left of some of the children. Pulverized.

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“The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children, it’s absolutely incomprehensible.”   Oh fuck you police chief. You’re the police chief. This is the sort of thing that happens in this country, so comprehend. Grasp mentally. Understand. Minneapolis doesn’t pay you to flutter your little handkerchief and say you don’t get it. If you don’t get it, get another job. Stop using words every bit as empty as thoughts and prayers. State that you are angry that violent psychopaths have access to military grade weapons in America, and that everyone should be angry. Say something that means something.

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Minneapolis has seen a string of violence in the past 24 hours. The shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church was the fourth in the city since Tuesday, and the second near a school. In total, the attacks have left at least five people dead and 25 injured, according to the police.

Duh. Can’t catch my breath.

First off, it’s got a good title, one that sardonically covers the theme of the piece: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PRINCE ANDREW.

Next, note how the writer’s basic point – that this new book has killed, not merely covered, the prince – establishes itself with morbid, hilarious, language, and sustains the morbidity. Will Lloyd doesn’t jump from death metaphors to other figurative stuff; he keeps it going, avoids having it get boring, and gives the piece depth and shapeliness. First paragraph:

Prince Andrew must be dead already. Biographies about breathing men have an inconclusive, interim quality. There are years to be lived: decisions to be made; books to be written; marriages to end; wars to be fought. The biographer whose subject is still with us apologetically and necessarily punts real judgements about them into the future. But in Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of The House of York, there is none of this sense of suspension, only the sound of the biographer’s axe falling, again and again, on the ragged bodies of Andrew Mountbatten–Windsor and Sarah Ferguson.

You know, not just the point that the book’s not a hit piece but an execution, but vivid and funny over the top (“axe” and “ragged” are very good) death knells. Second paragraph:

The first subheading in the book, clinically regarding Andrew when he is barely out of the crib, is called “Baby Grumpling”; the second, surveying his years at Heatherdown Prep School, is called “A Tiresome Little Shit”. According to Lownie, Andrew was a bad baby, who became a bad boy, who became a very bad man. We knew Andrew, following revelations about his relationship with the late child-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein and his now imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, was disgraced. Lownie shows us that the Duke’s predicament is even more funereal, a living death. 

Laughed out loud on tiresome little shit. Funereal, a living death, keeps us on the not a toff but a stiff track.

The book

reads as a nihilistic satire of Royal biography itself. The typical Windsorist book that parades birth, boarding, marriage, military service, foreign excursions, second marriage and so on, often written in threatless prose amidst an atmosphere of flummery, is not Lownie’s style. Less a biographer than a mortician, he has delivered a 456-page obituary for the Duke and Duchess of York. 

Nihilistic, Windsorist, threatless – these are fun, less familiar words… the phrase amidst an atmosphere of flummery has a pseudo fancy schmancy something to it which in itself reads as a nihilistic satire of royal pretensions. And then again the death thing. Look at that last sentence. It’s beautiful.

And then: The biographer’s three works on three royals represent a clutch of barrel bombs dropped on the Crown. “Clutch” is terrific; but notice he’s also produced some nice alliteration: clutch and Crown, barrel and bombs, with dropped and bombs assonantal.

“Fergie” as they call her, was a redtop hounded by the Redtops. Fun. Meghan Markle fled to Montecito. More fun. This is lively, playful, writing. The Ferguson family home, the balefully named “Dummer Down” … Who knew? And more fun alliteration!

There’s sly stuff, such as the tiny killing clause in the middle of this sentence: The Prince was lionised by the press that would later become, besides himself, the major antagonist of his life.  There are wonderful similes: Lownie moves like a basking shark through newspaper archives.

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To be sure, royalty has long been the ultimate satire target — all the more reason why doing it well deserves recognition.

It’s adjacent to an RV park and a golf course, and the bullets whizzed by the golfers and pierced the RVs and people got upset by this. So I enlarged my berm, and I paid for the RV damage.