Is the niqab/burqa, as this New York Times reporter writes, the sort of thing you will wear (and make your female children wear: “A small girl of perhaps 7 or 8 was sitting atop a pile of humanitarian food aid boxes, clad in the black abaya and jilbab of a grown woman, but in miniature…” ) if you are a rigid, strict, fundamentalist, literalist Muslim? Actually, Mehdi Hasan makes a compelling argument that ISIS isn’t Islamic at all, but rather a cultic perversion of the faith. Plenty of others have observed that ISIS people tend to know shit about Islam and present instead as nihilists who like violence. ‘“I’m struggling to reconcile the two things, wanting to look at them as displaced people and human,” said Dareen Khalifa, an International Crisis Group analyst who has visited [a women’s detention] camp; but some of the women are “very ideological, and the atmosphere is very ripe for all sorts of indoctrination…”‘ It’s maybe the best thing about us, qua humans, that we struggle like hell to see fanatics, who unapologetically enslave, rape, and behead, as fellow humans, as sufferers, as (trying our very hardest here) confused and fragile victims…

UD remembers, thirty years ago, sweeping her eyes over images of bloated bodies on a hill in Guyana and feeling (along with a sense of witnessing inassimilable grotesquerie) almost unbearable pity for the suicidal stupidity of the Jonestown fanatics.

But ISIS is homicidal, mass homicidal, which makes the business of pitying (looking at them as displaced people and human) very much more difficult. Even those who haven’t literally killed, let’s say, but only enslaved… It’s like – well, here’s another memory. UD remembers trying hard to feel something human toward Hedda Nussbaum, who watched two children being tortured (one to death) by her partner and did nothing, and who at his trial claimed to have been afraid and herself brutalized, etc. Highly educated, an editor at Random House, a successful Manhattanite, Nussbaum asked us to believe this…

UD finds more worthwhile, in these and associated matters, to pose Ron Padgett’s question: What makes us so mean? Padgett writes a long, amusing poem, inconclusively pondering this. But having read lots of interviews with/memoirs by ISIS and other degenerates, UD is at least willing to conclude this: Sadism – watching it, taking part in it, even being the object of it – is for many people terribly, terribly, exciting.

Once a year I’m lyin’ here
Stuck in a firing line
Momma’s pissed herself with fear
And the kids begin to whine
I see the cops I’m all worn out
All I can do is pray
I paid ten bucks
To park my truck and watch the bullets spray

    If you ask me why I go
   I would answer I don’t know
  Maybe we’ll stop going there
  Next year oh god forbid
   They’ll maybe kill my kid
   That hot, cheesy, way sleazy
   My Minnesota State Fair

‘Coastal HS football roundup: Williamson wins game marred by gunfire’

Yeah, who won? And how many shot?

Ten.

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Violence-porn-viewing here. The true south: Guns, Football, and (children screaming out to) God.

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If you have any doubt that ending a high school or college football or basketball game with gunfire has become a ritual in parts of this country, like a cigarette after sex, put the words football and shooting in my search engine.

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UPDATE: And in Texas:

POLICE ACTIVITY ROUNDUP: TRAFFIC STOP MARRED BY GUNFIRE

… that UD has a thousand news sites from which to choose a link for you. As usual, though, she’s drawn to Deadspin, whose commenters are a sight to behold.

Much of Deadspin‘s Tyler Skaggs thread involves writers comparing notes on the opioids Skaggs took; in particular, they try manfully (UD figures they’re almost all guys) to describe what it’s like to take oxys.

I had liquid oxy after throat surgery and I felt like a rainbow over a lake filled with titties.

Large numbers of students boycotted a lecturer at Trinity College who declared that mutilating the genitals of little girls can be, you know, more than fine under the right circumstances. He was denounced by every doctor in Ireland, and by the head of the Muslim community there. A professor of medicine at the school said he’d quit if Trinity didn’t infibulate Mr Calm Down Little Girl It Ain’t So Bad.

Well the dude was an adjunct and easily removed, but of course he’s suing now for back pay or whatever. Apparently he wants to be made intact again.

Time was ’round here in Nevada you’d see a AK-whatever and 2,000 or so rounds of ammo in a parked car at a university and walk on by. People have a right to defend themselves! Guns are no big deal! It’s the west ’round here! Et cetera.

Well now everybody’s scared cuz of what’s his name that guy that killed all those people in Las Vegas and some snowflake went and reported the stuff in the car to the police and now they’ve arrested some poor guy just trying to go to class.

And he forgot! When he saw the cops around his car he explained that he just forgot about the gun and ammo being there.

So now you’ve punished a guy just trying to go to class. Nevada needs campus carry.

I mean, the latest anxious freshman eighteen year old preparing to mass kill if he failed to get into a frat made a point of leaving gun-unfriendly Boston (where he went to a real expensive private school) and coming to Highpoint University in North Carolina because, he explained to the authorities, it’s easier to get guns in that state. Acquaintances from the private school recall his obsession with guns and mass killing; he clearly made a logical decision to move to a place where – unlike Massachusetts – that would be easy. Crazed reject loner mass killers like the guy down the street at the University of North Carolina Charlotte last April just seem drawn to North Carolina, whose state motto appears on this shirt…

Yeah.

Today’s crazed eighteen year old family-slaughterer is a real religious dude. And God is good! Only gave him a rifle. If he’d had a better weapon, he could have killed the whole neighborhood.

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.