Admittedly, it’s easy to make stories like this funny. So this reporter gets no points for difficulty. Still – she does a fine job. Enjoy your inside look at UD‘s next-town-over neighbors.

… PROROGUE! What a great word. Describes the current American government beautifully, but I think its meaning here is different.

You’ll never find so sharp and beautiful an evisceration of a book in UD‘s local paper, the Post. You’ll never find anything approaching it.

I’ve already talked about the stellar NYT music critic, Anthony Tommasini; next comes one of their book reviewers, who writes an informed, literate, playful take-down of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel. This is really good critical writing. Let’s see how she does it, with a few excerpts.

The novels are imaginative as ever, but they are also increasingly wobbly, bloated and mannered. He is a writer in free fall. What happened?

This will be her main point throughout: Rushdie retains his fantastic capacity to imagine, but has lost, over years of generating many novels, the structural and empirical grounding that made Midnight’s Children magic realism. Here’s her best paragraph:

That famous style has congealed in recent years; the flamboyance that once felt so free now seems strenuous and grating. “If he had a fault, it was that of ostentation, of seeking to be not only himself but a performance of himself,” Rushdie writes of a character in his novel “The Enchantress of Florence,” which could read like stinging self-critique. The later books — “Shalimar the Clown,” “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” “The Golden House” — are all tics, technique and hammy narration that try to toupee over patchy stories, exhausted themes, types passing as characters. For a writer so frequently praised for ingenuity, Rushdie actually follows a formula of sorts. You could make yourself a bingo card: Classic Novel or Myth used as Scaffolding, Femme Fatale, Story within the Story (recounted by a Garrulous Narrator), Topical Concerns, Defense of Hybridity.

Toupee, right? The image captures the desperate, theatrical (“hammy”), fakery of someone who has aged out of – if you will – a full head.

Rushdie’s narrative impulses are centrifugal; they lie in tossing in celebrity cameos and literary allusions, in sending new plots into orbit in the hope they might lend glitter and ballast to a work sorely in need of both, sorely in need of tethering to the world, the concerted thinking and feeling of realism, not magic.

Glitter and ballast: A poetic pair with their flowing Ls and matching syllables and stresses and double letters. (See also: diamonds and rust.) In a very short review, Sehgal demonstrates deep knowledge of Rushdie’s work and of contemporary literature; she explains with uncompromising logic why his latest novel fails; and she writes enticing prose rich with metaphor.

… seven years.‘

Yeshiva University says: I hear you!

[W]hat began as a populist movement to bring inexpensive, Indian-made morphine to the ill has given rise to a pain management industry that promises countless new customers to American pharmaceutical companies facing a government crackdown and mounting lawsuits back home.

There is no room in this country, not one inch, for these gruesome practices. Nothing—not a witless respect for the cultural traditions of others, not a craven impulse to avoid looking intolerant—nothing should stop us from protecting every single American girl from being abused in this manner. Nothing should stop us from unequivocally prohibiting this kind of savagery, least of all the absurd insinuation that to do so would be somehow racist or ethnocentric. We do not reject FGM because it is practiced primarily by dark-skinned people, or because it is often erroneously presented as an Islamic commandment. We reject FGM because it is barbarism.

We have planted every flag we have in the name of civilization, and it is time to plant one now. America is the inheritor of that long tradition that slowly, over centuries, produced John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Abigail Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. Want to fight the patriarchy? Look no further than Somalia, where women are disbarred from making every major decision, including that most delicate and tender decision of how to manage one’s own fledgling sexuality. The Somalis take that right from 98 percent of their girls when they cut them open and rip away parts of their vagina. But this is America. These are our girls. And we don’t do that here.

Please Mister Malzman


Wait, oh yes wait a minute Mister Malzman
Wait, wait Malzman

Mister Malzman look and see
What that professor has said about me
I been waiting a long long time
For your reply to this email of mine

There must be some word today
From a provost so far away…
Please Mister Malzman, look and see
If you can hit him with a penalty

I been standing here waiting Mister Malzman
So patiently
For just a card or just a letter
Saying you will make it right for me


There must be some turpitude
Inside a person so very rude
Dear Mister Malzman, make me feel better
Please revoke my enemy’s tenure

You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
Abolish his tenure, the sooner the better
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute

Airport security people in Canada tell a girl to remove her hijab for a moment, and the girl makes a HUMONGOUS fuss and her father threatens to sue over this horror etc. Meanwhile, in the real world, more and more Iranian women are being imprisoned for lengthy periods of time in some of that country’s most dangerous prisons because of their courageous militancy against the compulsory hijab and myriad other theocratic repressions.

Assuming you have any interest at all in the business of women – girls – veiling themselves or being made to veil, UD suggests you’ll spend your time more wisely attending to the women of Iran.

… getting $572 million judgments wherever he goes.

… finds with ease the .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol her parents told her to use in case of an intruder. (The household has ten more weapons locked in a safe, but this one is in a bedroom, loaded.) She kills herself while her mother checks her email in an adjacent room.

Her mother says “she won’t live with guns in her home again.”

Remember 21 year old Tyler Hilinski. His college roommates had an AR-15 all ready for him.

UD is developing a sideline in spider web photography. She took this earlier shot in her woods; and this afternoon she snapped an enormous web along the side of her house.

This blog periodically notes echt-DeLillo deaths in this country, deaths that often involve that icon of affluent leisure, the golf ball. Read the opening pages of Players, or note the many pages of White Noise and other novels of his that mark the untimely death of someone while at play, or the mix of fatal violence and golf.

This is a very Don DeLillo photograph.

*******************

If you doubt the cultural centrality of golf balls in America, read this front-page article in the New York Times, which ominously reports that errant golf balls breaking windows in retirement communities is “an increasingly prominent problem.”

********************

So a recent alleged murder at an expensive neighborhood in Atlanta seems to feature an attorney so incensed that someone threw a golf ball at his $60,000 Mercedes CLS 550 (no damage to the car was found, so it’s not clear anything was in fact thrown) that he took his massive car and ran down and killed a guy (a real estate investor) he thought threw it.

Scripted by DeLillo.

******************

UPDATE: A reader reminds me that DeLillo was far from the first. Many of us will recall this amazing little poem by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day 
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.

Mom had a moment; Mom had a gun. Her kids – two very promising people, the daughter a journalism student at Boston University – were dispatched with ease. Give Mom (who killed herself after killing her kids) a knife, or any other weapon, and these two strong life-loving young people might have been able to fight back, to overpower her, to defend themselves.

There’s nothing like a gun to give your psychotic impulsivity episode full scope.

Did no one at all have the slightest inkling this woman was… troubled? Excessively vengeful toward her ex? Was her medical supply company being investigated? Did she have a substance abuse problem? Why did this troubled woman have a gun at home? For safety in her ultra-safe gated community? Did it occur to anyone to think about the safety of her children?

Oh, and kudos to the mayor of Atlanta, who offers us this: The peace of God… surpasses all understanding. Really?

… with a basketball court inside. Whatever the Washington Post thinks, this is the opposite of a true Garrett Park house, its owners having destroyed lots of greenery (Garrett Park is an arboretum) in order to make a very large house even larger.

UD is anxious to dissociate her beloved town from this monstrosity.

The town has excellent basketball courts in a beautiful setting, but you wouldn’t want to play with the riffraff. Much better to take up all the privacy and most of the yard on your lot, and throw massive shade over neighboring houses, in order to build an indoor basketball court and who knows what other pointless fillings-up of pointless space inside your fourteenth addition.

The property has been on the market for eighty days, while Garrett Park houses usually sell in minutes. Here’s hoping its obscene asking price plus grotesque excess keep this house on the market forever. Karma sucks, don’t it.

****************

UPDATE: 193 days on the market.

… is already notorious for his … unsavory legal and writing career… and, most recently, for his full-throated defense of female genital mutilation. He spends much of his distinguished-retirement time denying having taken part in an underage sex slave ring — indeed denying having had sex with one or more of said underage sex slaves. And here’s an updated snapshot from a life well-lived:

In 2015, the ABC News team of Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with [alleged sex slave Virginia] Giuffre. In a sequence of events confirmed by the network, producers paid for Giuffre and her family to fly from Colorado, where they lived, to New York City and put them up at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Central Park South. Robach and her news crew interviewed Giuffre on tape for more than an hour about Epstein and his entourage.

“At the time, in 2015, Epstein was walking around a free man, comparing his criminal behavior to stealing a bagel,” Giuffre writes in an email to NPR. “I really wanted a spotlight shone on him and the others who acted with him and enabled his vile and shameless conduct against young girls and young women.”

“I viewed the ABC interview as a potential game-changer,” she writes. “Appearing on ABC with its wide viewership would have been the first time for me to speak out against the government for basically looking the other way and to describe the anger and betrayal victims felt.“

The story never aired. And Giuffre has said she was never directly told why.

ABC News would not detail its editorial choices.

One ABC News staffer with knowledge of events says the network received a call from one of Epstein’s top lawyers: Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. And Giuffre and her lawyers placed great significance on that call.

Dershowitz had been part of the powerhouse legal team that earlier kept Epstein from facing serious federal charges in Florida, which also included former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr and renowned Miami defense attorney Roy Black.

Dershowitz tells NPR he intervened after learning ABC was on the brink of broadcasting its interview with Giuffre. He says he believes he spoke with two producers and a lawyer within the same 24-hour period.

“I did not want to see [Giuffre’s] credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz says.

In a December 2014 court filing in another accuser’s lawsuit, Giuffre had alleged Dershowitz was among the prominent men Epstein had instructed her to have sex with when she was a teenager. In early 2015, Dershowitz had rejected her account out of hand in his own court filings. (The nature of his denials were such that Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation earlier this year. Dershowitz has asked the court to dismiss that lawsuit.)

I think we can all understand Dershowitz’s frantic desire to shut Giuffre up. He continues to try intimidation and lawsuits and all and he’s obviously had some success. Wonder for how much longer.

*****************

UPDATE: Mulling over Alan Dershowitz’s life, UD thinks he can continue to make a contribution to Harvard University by appearing… not as a guest lecturer, but as … a kind of exemplar… in Michael Sandel’s famous discussion of Kantian ethics. Students may gaze upon and ask questions of a human being who has, apparently all his life and quite consistently, used people as means rather than ends. If reports are to be believed, he has done this in a myriad of ways for sixty years to achieve the classic payoffs: money, sex, power.

Could Sandel coax him to speak honestly? I think yes. After all, he will die pretty soon (he’s eighty) and he’s basically gotten away with it, so you have to figure he’s proud. It can be done – a life of cruel self-seeking – and this is the moment, if there’s going to be a moment, when he takes a public victory lap.