“It is amazing how many of [Trumpists’] hopes and dreams did center on Hunter Biden’s addiction, Hunter Biden’s sex life, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and interesting for a political party that has based so much on ‘nothing matters’ to discover to their disappointment that nothing matters,” said Charlie Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind.

“Haven’t they sort of established a small universe where nothing matters? You can pay off a porn star and it doesn’t make a difference. Did they really think that somehow Hunter Biden was going to make a difference?”

Burqa bans, like marijuana, can be gateway drugs; they can lead to more dangerous bans. And while UD agrees that little girls are obviously unable to give consent to the hijab, the more important principle here is one of restraint and religious liberty. For UD, the burqa/hijab difference has to do with a fundamentally uncivil refusal to be visible in the public realm, vs. a visible face, a willingness to be identified as part of a free and equal society. Female-identity-crushing burqas are eccentric to any authentically egalitarian setting, whereas hijabs allow wearers to remain within the democratic orbit.

Late night weighs in on the forthcoming Mike Pence memoir.

“I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about religion, his hopes and dreams, and then maybe a chapter about how his boss tried to murder him.”

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I’m thinking he’s going to have a hard time competing with Hunter Biden.

True, and true.

Was his doctor (who he shot to death along with most of the doctor’s family) treating him for mental disorders related to the concussions? Was he obviously mentally ill? If so, how did he get the gun? Do they sell guns to mentally ill people in South Carolina?

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There are (according to one source) 21 guns for every individual in South Carolina. Adams had his pick.

His proud alma mater, South Carolina State, hasn’t yet taken down his hero page.

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‘I can say he’s a good kid,’ [Adams’ father said]. ‘I think the football messed him up.’ Football and an entire state sagging under the weight of its weaponry. Football and weaponry and mental illness and I’ll bet Adams was transmitting for some time to a number of people that he was messed up. Nothing like 21 guns per person for the deeply paranoid. Even if people tried keeping him away from guns, in South Carolina that would have been impossible.

I wonder if he issued threats. All of this will come out, and we’ll all read about it, because in a country where heavily armed uninteresting madmen kill dozens of people every week, this killing titillates: a rich prominent doctor; a high body count including children; an NFL football player. South Carolina: Ground zero for Strange brew, see what’s inside of you: Guns, god, football.

And what drugs – prescription, non-prescription – was the shooter on? All of this will come out.

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And as to the shock the local police chief is expressing – “This doesn’t happen here.” – weawy? Depends on what you mean by “here,” don’t it? Here as in the teeny tiny town where it happened, or here as in all over South Carolina, one of the ten most dangerous states in the country.

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His sister confirms that he had been for some time “aggressively” unbalanced. Yet another instance of the truth Nathan Heller not long ago uttered: Going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.

She left the benighted ultra-orthodox community … divorced her benighted ultra-orthodox husband… but her weird divorce agreement left the husband in charge of their son’s education!

The shonda-for-the-Jews ultraorthodox yeshiva system, wherein they gather millions of American tax dollars to refuse their students classes in math, English, and science, now gets to take Beatrice’s kid, chew him up, and spit him out as one more witless weenie.

Beatrice sees that now. She’s upset. New York State, which has an education mandate the ultra-orthodox ignore, doesn’t give a shit. She has nowhere to turn.

Her options? She can go back to divorce court and try her luck. More realistically, she needs to home school the unfortunate. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

This post continues the theme in this one, where a propagandist is quoted glorying in the fact that (as she tells it) many young women today don’t read our greatest modern fiction writers because they’re sexist pigs. UD doesn’t think we should pause too long in that woman’s world; on the other hand, it’s good to remind ourselves about art vs. propaganda — a distinction you’d think would be insanely easy to grasp, but maybe not.

Here’s Paul Theroux, reviewing his life as he turns eighty.

In my youth, Henry Miller’s novels “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn” were banned; so were D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” and Edmund Wilson’s “Memoirs of Hecate County.” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was a problem at the time of its publication, in 1885, and, by the way, it is still a problem. Because some books were viewed as vicious or vulgar, writers were suspect, potential corrupters, and consequently they were, to my mind, figures of transformative power… I was at a lunch, as an invited guest, a few years ago in a university setting when I mentioned that “Heart of Darkness” was a favorite book of mine. A young Nigerian student across the table, an aspiring writer, howled, “I hate this book!” The teachers equivocated in discomfort, but one of them spoke up on behalf of the student, agreeing that it was a flawed book and that Conrad’s ethics were questionable. Another teacher there told me that she was teaching “Moby-Dick” as a travel book. I found myself staring wildly at my plate of quiche…

You either care about transformative subversion in the name of human truths… you either care about beautiful, packed-with-life prose … or you don’t. Don’t rely on your literature professor to get you there; as Theroux notes, you might get a propagandist. And anyway, you’re supposed to have cottoned to the scandal of great fiction a good many years before you get to college.

Many of the palm trees, their fat roots undercut, have fallen into the sea, and the beach is now crowded, and stonier, in places bleak and gravelly—the visible effects of time passing and a reminder that I am doomed, too.

Theroux gazes at the Hawaiian beach where he’s writing and… and for goodness sake — don’t just read the words! He’s a stylist, okay, like all great writers! Propagandists don’t give a shit about style, but as a thoughtful human being who cares about art, you should. You should notice the poetry of this sentence, the many hard alliterative Ts (trees, fat, roots, undercut, stonier, time) balanced by the calm ah softness of palm and fallen — and how poets love words like palm and fallen because their brevity and their long ah-A is so lyrical placid and wise… UD thinks the most beautiful English word is: All. Listen to her beloved Purcell do a riff on all. Art is everything; don’t piss your life away failing to take on board as much of reality as you possibly can.

First Hoda goes all ISIS, and now her sister Arwa is arrested trying to do the exact same thing!

After [Arwa] Muthana was arrested, she waived her Miranda rights and stated during an interview that she was willing to fight and kill Americans if it was for Allah. 

What is it with the Muthana family? At this point I think we need to have a chat with the parents, no? As Lady Bracknell said: “To lose one daughter to ISIS, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like you brought them up that way.”

And Philip Roth’s biographer responds to his interviewer’s quotation from Gornick in exactly the right way:

I think that says more about Vivian Gornick’s social circle than it does about women collectively.

I mean. Jesus. Let’s keep ’em away from Henry Miller, James Joyce, Hemingway, and Don DeLillo too. Wouldn’t want to expose them to great fiction!

And let’s hope Hadley Freeman’s social circle is a lot larger than Gornick’s.

[E]njoying a novel is not dependent on approving of the deliberately flawed characters, or its similarly imperfect author. There are many things that make a book good – elegant writing, emotional truth, narrative voice – besides its morality.

And of course there are plenty of great novels – Lolita, Notes from Underground, Journey to the End of the Night – whose immorality intrigues us.

Andrew Sullivan, writing about the persistence of his Catholic faith.

And – citing dire statistics for American churchgoing – Amanda Marcotte writes:

The early Aughts saw the rise of megachurches with flashily dressed ministers who appeared more interested in money and sermonizing about people’s sex lives than modeling values of charity and humility…

Trump was a thrice-married chronic adulterer who routinely exposed how ignorant he was of religion, and who reportedly — and let’s face it, obviously — made fun of religious leaders behind their backs. But religious right leaders didn’t care. They continually pumped Trump up like he was the second coming, showily praying over him and extorting their followers to have faith in a man who literally could not have better conformed to the prophecies of the Antichrist. It was comically over the top, how extensively Christian right leaders exposed themselves as motivated by power, not faith. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Gallup’s numbers show numbers of religiously affiliated Americans taking a nosedive during the Trump years, dropping from 55% of Americans belonging to a church to 47%…

And many [potential churchgoers] are going to look at hypocritical, power-hungry ministers praying over an obvious grifter like Trump and be too turned off to even consider getting involved.

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Plus Trumpique que le Trump Matt Gaetz is also doing his bit to keep the hypocrisy banner flying.

Answer: Definitely getting there.

And they pop up in the strangest places. Hunter Biden – assuming he wrote his memoir; and it looks as though he did – turns out to be a good writer. One sentence from his book has been quoted rather a lot, and if we look at it closely, we can see why.

“Our relationship began as a mutually desperate grasping for the love we had both lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy.”

He’s talking about his affair with his brother’s widow.

Why is this a very good sentence? Well, concision would be part one. See how his complex sentence manages to cover a lot of time, a before as well as an after, without going on and on, or needing to break into multiple shorter sentences? That one little comma after “lost” does all the work, balancing the reader on an edge of expectation (comma? what next?), and then fulfilling in a very satisfying way that expectation. Note that the sentence is both straightforwardly chronological (this happened; then that happened) and emotionally, philosophically, chronological (we were naive; now we are sadder but wiser). The sentence delicately captures a complex, uber-proustian irony: those who go desperately grasping after lost love will only learn all the more painfully just how lost that love is. Biden throws in alliteration, too, to lend the sentence rhythm: love/lost; dissolution/deepened. And a lesser writer might not have known to end the sentence on its strongest word: tragedy.

In its dissolution, the tragedy only deepened is less interesting – indeed, it’s inching toward the maudlin. And that’s the last point SOS will make about this sort of content: it’s rife with maudlin-danger. Note how Biden avoids that throughout, offering a simple, direct, stoical, controlled, dignified tone.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The last line of Gatsby captures the beat of Biden’s sentence, its terrible and true two-step.

UD’s father in law spent four years in Corbu’s atelier just after WW2 – and I mean just after, as in he pretty much traveled directly from Murnau POW camp (where he spent the whole war, having been captured by the Germans early in the conflict) to the Paris studio. UD worked with Jerzy, who wrote the original manuscript in English, on his written English (English was his third or fourth language) in the main essay, which you can find here. (You can find a mistake-free version of the essay in this book.)

One of my happiest memories is sitting on the porch overlooking a pond at Wojciech Fangor’s house one summer, going back and forth with Jerzy, paragraph by paragraph. He had a big broad excitable style with major use of dashes, dot-dot-dots, and exclamation marks; he took all of my editing suggestions in good humor.

Here’s Jerzy’s acknowledgement of our work together.

And here’s his just-released writing about Corbu, translated into Polish:

Nahum Barnea, a commentator for the country’s top-selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote on Wednesday that the rise of Religious Zionism “isn’t just a blow to morale, it’s an ideological catastrophe.”

He said Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party was now “a hostage in the hands of an anti-democratic, racist, homophobic, terrorism-sponsoring group of people.”