On its fiftieth anniversary, everyone’s talking about Joni Mitchell’s album, Blue. (Go here.) UD, who listened obsessively to the thing throughout her unhappy freshman year at Goucher College, hasn’t much to add – beyond random unhappy personal things – to all the superannuated hippie nostalgia out there.

As in – her roommate that year, Marian Dillon, was lively, beautiful and came from a wealthy, private school background (UD, remarkably clueless for someone from Bethesda, didn’t know what a private school was until Marian explained it to her). Marian hadn’t brought her horse to college, but Courtney down the hall had (can’t remember her last name, but she was closely related to Philip Roth and looked a lot like him), and UD should have been tipped off from the campus stables and horses and Courtney’s horse scrapbooks that Goucher really wasn’t a good UD fit… But I digress. The sad personal thing is that UD idly searched Marian’s name a few months ago and she died at 52.

That year was also sad because David Kosofsky and I were tumultuously on and off; he’d show up from College Park, we’d thrash around trying to make sense of our hopeless relationship, and then he’d drive back to school. Laurie Fleischman, his true love, was somehow (too long ago to remember) in the background of all of this. And that’s two other sad personal things: Both Laurie and David also died young. “WHAT LIVES ARE IN STORE FOR 2 SUCH AS US!” she wrote him from the Bronx High School of Science. Bizarrely, I ended up with her love letters/sketches/pressed flowers to David.

In one of them, she nastily alluded to wee UD as (yes) “Joni Mitchell.” (David had attended performances I’d given, in high school and synagogue, of Joni Mitchell songs.) For Laurie, Joni Mitchell was short for Not Charlie Parker, Not Hip, Not Jazz, Not… Blues. Joni Mitchell was short for Sylvia Plath – a suburban pipsqueak with the pseudoblues.

UD wonders if, over the years of Mitchell’s artistic development, Laurie felt more generous toward her.

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So picture ol’ UD, years later, tears welling up as she reads Laurie’s letters to David and thinks on the bitter reversal of all that beautiful passionate arrogant youth.

I guess the Blue song for this is The Last Time I Saw Richard.

A New York Times writer found this pun so nice, she used it twice.

Insanely invasive and on its way to seven feet tall, this … thing is all over UD‘s garden.

Note that it has begun to put out small daisy-like flowers.

UPDATE: Aska Gardener informs me it’s a weed, and a nasty one. They can’t precisely identify it, but they are familiar with it, and it must be destroyed. So this morning, with the ground still wet from storms, UD lifted, roots and all, every stalk of mystery weed she could find. ANOTHER UPDATE: I think it’s an evil variety of goldenrod.

Well, this Israeli didn’t grow up in a theocracy, so he finds the ways of theocracies unnerving.

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With its latest fragile, semi-rational, government, maybe Israel will suspend its theocratic ways and police its ultraorthodox hoodlums, but don’t hold your breath. Don’t expect the state to get in the way of mobs of men hurling hot coffee at women trying to pray, calling them whores, and ripping up their prayer books. That’s just the way they roll in a Zionist country running scared from violent anti-Zionists.

Don’t try to understand. And don’t hold your breath.

Unbelievable.

Wyoming, UD comes to think, is our most peculiar state. In 2013, it was our fifth richest. It’s bilious with billionaires, but also boasts plenty of brick and mortar industry.

It’s got guns up the wazoo: “Wyoming has, by far, the highest number of guns per [shot off] capita. Of Wyoming’s 581,075 people, there are 132,806 registered guns.”

Shot off? What’s UD mean?

Waaal, you know… all them guns….

In 2020, 181 Wyomingites killed themselves. That’s a rate of 31 deaths per 100,000 residents, up from 29.4 in 2019, the highest suicide rate in the nation. The state’s suicide rate has remained high for years…

Round these parts, people say Let a smile be your umbrella. In Wyoming, they say Let a Colt be your bolt.

Or, as they say at the NRA: Guns don’t kill people; people with guns kill themselves.

And here’s another peculiar Wyoming statistic: It’s almost smack-dab at the bottom of states with the lowest covid vaccination rates. Only some of our poorest states (Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi) rank lower than wealthy Wyoming. (“Wyoming is currently ranked 4^th in the United States for its economic outlook.”) Ain’t dat something? I mean, when you put it all together: A gorgeous, well-off state with everything to live for, whose most noteworthy output is suicidal gun-hoarders who don’t give a shit about their health or yours. Paging Cormac McCarthy.

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And hey maybe UD finds all of this arresting because maybe she’s looking at the future. Where America’s cutting-edge, paranoid, venture capitalists go, there go I. There go all of us. To quote the title of that funny book about grammar: Eats, shoots, and leaves.

Andrew Sullivan has done the talking for me on the subject. Read it all. To the last paragraph.

To expose propaganda is to defend liberal education, and to defend liberal culture. I’m thinking that like a lot of big shiny new things our big shiny new-obsessed country embraces, this latest one’s not long for this world. But we can certainly hasten its demise by fighting it at every turn.

Ghost professors haunt community colleges, but they’re probably flitting around at four-year places with online courses too.

When you add covid to the myriad excuses online instructors already have to sorta drop out of the whole show up and teach thing, you get an Army of Ghosts phenom — which is to say, not the routine only-half-there, give-a-shittery some distance profs exhibit, but actual, significant, increasingly noted and discussed, disappearance. Not the lazy deceitful hand most of the work off to subcontracted anonymous drudges thing, but simple total cutting and running.

“They’re not teaching, you don’t see them, they don’t do Zoom, they don’t have office hours,” said Santa Monica College political science student Jonnae Serrano. “I’ve had office hours where it’s completely text — I’m texting my professor, and waiting for her to get back to me.” … [Students] complain of professors who’ve given them a list of YouTube videos, produced by someone else, and questions as the teaching for the entire semester. [One student] said a “ghost professor” in her history class kept his camera off the three times she attended his online office hours.“I just stopped doing it because it was just talking to a screen.” … [Another student offered the revolutionary thought that] “If you’re requiring your students to do work and be present in your class, you should be present as well.” …

“In the defense of some of these so-called ghost professors, many people, you know, don’t have the formal online training,” [one professor] said.

Yes, and the response to not having medical training is to make appointments to treat people, and to go ahead and collect payment, but not to show up. Because, you know, you don’t have the formal training.

In order of thrill:

1. DRAGONFLIES
2. HUMMINGBIRDS
3. SONG OF THE THRUSH
4. FIREFLIES

Totally off the thrillist:

1. DEER
2. MOSQUITOES
3. THE PROFUSE ANONYMOUS BROAD LEAFY WEED(?) THAT’S NOW SIX FEET HIGH ALL OVER THE GARDEN AND HAS TO BE HACKED BACK EVERY DAY
4. GRAPE VINES

UPDATE: And who knew how lucky I am to see hummingbirds, dragonflies, butterflies, bees, and fireflies all the time?

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I’ve been seeing this guy – a male whitetail skimmer – all day. (Tried to take a pic but it wouldn’t sit still, so this is from Wikipedia.)

Hana Schank’s essay about being in a car accident is first-rate.

Before the accident I went to yoga retreats and tried meditation. I said things like “I just need to unplug.” Apparently what I needed was to get hit by a truck. Perhaps I have discovered the secret to a peaceful mind, and it is traumatic brain injury.

Tea is WAY ancient wisdom, and UD has always been happy to drink it by the gallon. Mr UD, a coffee man, has, under UD‘s influence, begun to drink quite a lot of tea too. For UD, it’s almost always a good black fruit brew: Harney & Sons Mango; Mariage Freres Marco Polo…

… UD shared a Guinness with Mr UD at the dinner table (pad thai with shrimp from Noodles and Co., since you ask). Holding her little glass aloft, she said A toast to the greatest English-language writer the modern world has ever seen. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, I love you, and I will never stop reading you.

Mr UD went on a bit, during the meal (pad thai without the shrimp), about Habermas, and the rather different form of communication about which he’s obsessed. Joycean internal monologues are all well and good; the stories we endlessly tell ourselves about ourselves as we walk around all day are all well and good; but the understanding of rationality to include communicative rationality, and, on that foundation, the elaboration of a discourse ethics, is just as crucial…

All day, UD‘s been playing and singing songs that appear in Joyce’s work (she just performed Sweet Rosie O’Grady).

UD has read from Joyce at the Irish Embassy, at the Cosmos Club, and at lots of other venues around DC. But some years seem to call for something more quiet. One year she took two of her GW students to an Irish bar. Sipping Guinness, we took turns reading favorite passages from Ulysses.

James Joyce is Mr UD‘s ninth cousin, twice removed.

UD has watched with pleasure as Andrew Yang’s mayoral bid tanks. In a just political universe, you don’t brag that you’ll let cultists keep their children in ignorance, placing the burden of their support as lifetime unemployables on the New York taxpayer, without paying a heavy price. Good on you, NYC.

Couple this with events in Israel, and hey.

But hold onto your hat. Expect, in both cities, ultraorthodox riots. They’ll be really, really bad in Israel.

… as we ate breakfast while staring out the window at the hummingbirds who have found our crop of bee balm.

“Horrid terrorists. No.”

“Not Chechnya. Czechia.”

“Is that… the latest name for Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, etc.?”

“Yes.”

“Should I … ha-ha … czech it out?”

“Check out their Pirate Party. They might actually win the next election.”

“With a name like Pirate Party? Wow.”

So UD checked them out.

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All members of the Pirate Party look like extras on the set of Easy Rider. (There is a tradition of this.) Except for their leader, who looks like Bo Derek. They are very cool, very anti-corruption, very personal liberty. When the current government refused to thank Taiwan for donating anti-covid medical supplies (wouldn’t want to offend China), the Pirate Party put up an enormous THANK YOU TAIWAN image during an anti-corruption rally.

… on the morning after a big storm.