One of the biggest defamation suits ever filed. Special suits for special people.
One of the biggest defamation suits ever filed. Special suits for special people.
If you’re like me, the letter Q is powerfully associated with the word/world “queer” – Duke University Press even had for many years a Series Q, which brought “a theoretical and interdisciplinary lens to gay and lesbian studies, approaching questions of sexuality from a queer angle.” (One of the Series Q books, Unbecoming, had a humongous impact on UD.)
Now that Nancy Pelosi has cleverly QAnoned Kevin McCarthy by referring to him as “McCarthy (Q-CA),” the letter Q transposes into something very… other.
Edith Pretty says this to the hilariously uppity archeologist, who disdains self-taught Basil Brown, in the film The Dig — and I gotta tell you, this film was MADE for UD. She has watched it three times already, and it’s clear she’s not done with it. A fictionalized account of the staggering Sutton Hoo discovery, it’s got everything UD: archeology, architecture, reading, philosophy, music, British accents (UD loves British accents), moody landscapes, true dark skies (Brown brings his telescope to Pretty’s rural firmament)… And UD ain’t alone! A just-released film she figured would attract an audience of a few dozen already ranks third on Netflix.
UD’s preferences here are exactly those of UD‘s mother – the trowel doesn’t fall far from the tree. A student of Wilhelmina Jashemski’s at the University of Maryland, UD‘s mother accompanied Jashemski on several digs at Pompeii … And UD‘s mother dragged wee UD herself, one hot summer, through all that site’s ins and outs (her mother’s association with Jashemski meant we got access to off-limits human casts and villas), which was wonderful but exhausting.
All those moment-of-death human bodies, all that vast charred living landscape – it was a morbid treat, in the way powerful unburied ruinous settings tend to be; and The Dig is exactly the sort of extended memento mori one would like, with Pretty’s impending death – and the possible death of Europe itself in the impending war – haunting the narrative. “What’s left of us?” “We die. We rot.” The film’s characters, gazing into the faint outline of a submerged sixth-century ship in the Sussex dirt, fall into this grubby nihilism all the time in the film; but they are always lifted out by friends and lovers, who voice a soulful faith in the human story of which we are imperishably a part.
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But snobbery, now. What got me going on that?
Easy. The letter Christopher Hitchens’ widow and agent just sent to his friends and associates commanding them not to cooperate with a biography of him that’s in the works. So at odds, rhetorically, with Hitchens’ own relaxed and democratic voice, the letter was jarring to UD, a huge Hitchens fan.
We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton. In solidarity…
I found the “in solidarity” particularly jarring, drawing as it does on a political tradition dear to Hitchens – that of the social justice left, as in his oft-expressed solidarity with democratic forces like the Kurds. It seems cheap of these authors to assume that mantle when the rest of the note locates them clearly in the trivial and off-putting realm (“dismayed,” “one,” “self-appointed”) of the literary mandarin.
They make no effort, for instance, to explain what in the manuscript is likely to be coarse and reductive; they simply high-handedly invoke these terms and let it go at that. Coarse is particularly problematic, since anyone who has read gobs of Hitchens and watched virtually all of the Hitch YouTubes knows he had no problem with coarseness – he exhibited it often, and made its relative absence in women one of the main bases of their inability (most of them) to be funny. Was it coarse for Hitch and Martin Amis to go trolling whores in New York City? I guess so. I mean, Hitch thought it was. Is his biographer supposed to overlook it, or somehow snob it up?
As David Nasaw writes:
Blue-Hitchens and [Steve] Wasserman are well within their rights to refuse to cooperate with this particular biographer, but by reaching out, as they have done, to so wide a universe of individuals who might have something to say on the subject, they are engaging in a sort of preemptive censorship, intended to frighten away not just this one writer but any others who might not, for one reason or another, pass muster with them.
If the National Rifle Association weren’t so busy infighting and stealing from itself and all, it would be in a position to take note of the story out of the Scranton suburbs, where a maddening, incessant noise problem was solved by a gun.
Neighbors in adjoining houses – a single man in one house, a married couple in another – had been screaming across their lawns at one another for some time – insults, obscenities – until the ill will among them really escalated during a recent big snowstorm.
“The Goys were shoveling the snow from their parking spots, shoveling the snow across the road, and throwing the snow onto Spaides’ property,” [neighbors] said in their statement.
… Spaide asked the couple to stop, sparking a heated exchange of words. James Goy apparently threw a tool at Spaide that he had been using to clear snow from his car…. When James Goy approached Spaide with a raised fist, Spaide reportedly retreated into his house and fetched a gun…
[D]espite seeing Spaide with a gun, James and Lisa Goy continued shouting names at him from the middle of the street.
Spaide allegedly opened fire on the couple, shooting both of them multiple times. Officials said Spaide then went back into his house and retrieved another firearm, which he reportedly used to shoot them again.
Wow. He must have really been angry. Popped them multiple times, then went inside and got another gun and did it all over again.
Then he killed himself, natch.
So– thank God he had a gun! I mean, guns! The neighbors had had it up to here with the shrieks and obscenities. Now, if you visit that street on the outskirts of Scranton, things are back to normal.
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Spaide’s second gun was an AR-15 – cuz nothing finishes off the neighbors – already maybe dead from his pistol? – like an AR-15. People who argue that civilians don’t need AR-15s have clearly never been there, in the thick of snow-removal battle, against unarmed neighbors.
John Kerry deserves all the contempt and ridicule he’s getting for taking a private plane to Iceland to receive an environmental award.
Tone-deaf as ever, he made things much worse by explaining that “people like me” need to fly private planes.
Could my fellow Democrats, just as Biden’s getting started, have stepped in a deeper pile of shit? What a gift to the other side.
But I laughed even harder when Newt Gingrich, who not long ago carried a debt of $500,000 at Tiffany’s, tweeted about his and the missus and their folksy economical ways compared to “Prince” Kerry.
And know what? He defended himself on the Tiffany’s thing by saying he was a private citizen who had done well financially and could spend his money as he liked– exactly what owners of private jets say all the time.
Newt needs to decide whether capitalism, and the personal luxuries it allows, is okay, or whether he’s suddenly a fire-breathing commie.
Trump’s favorite playmates banned in Canada! But (whew!) he can still play with them here.
You know the old joke.
Trumpolatrous Newsmax keeps putting one-feather-short-of-a-bolster Mike Lindell on its screen; then it complains when this notorious dirty picture depicts obscene conspiracy theories about the presidential election.
Complains? His interviewer stormed off the set! Interviewees leave in a huff all the time; but interviewers? “Can we get out of here please?” the interviewer begged his producer as Lindell pant-pant-panted about ballot fraud; but he was stuck in dirty picture hell. So he hauled ass!
People are calling this segment bizarre, surreal. Yet to UD‘s eyes it’s just … It’s like a Romper Room that goes off the rails. It’s like those YouTubes that show two infants burbling at each other with a kind of initial wary friendliness and then getting more and more somehow meaninglessly belligerent, and then one starts bawling and her mother lifts her up out of her high chair, which leaves the other infant big-eyed, at a total loss.
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Und why is Trumpolatrous Newsmax, of all places, shutting down stolen election rants?
Onaccounta Dominion Voting Systems is preparing its billion dollar defamation suit against it, and Newsmax is pissing its Pull-Ups.
They asked me what I knew
Of Marjorie and Jews
I of course replied
When a fascist lies
… in the last congressional election… Actually, quite a lot of you did. It was a close contest. Instead, you let Brian Fitzgerald squeak in. Hope you’re having fun.
The Capitol-Trasher cult; the ultraorthodox cult; the integralist Catholic cult. Their leaders: Marjorie Taylor Greene; primitive authoritarian rabbis; Pater Edmund Waldstein. These groups are violent; they don’t recognize laws and institutions; they are irrational; they are primitive.
Everyone is so surprised that it turns out a significant minority of the Cap-Trash cult didn’t even vote in a presidential election whose result caused them to try to overthrow the government of the United States. They didn’t vote for Trump.
Why are you surprised? Cultists don’t vote. Or if they vote, it’s in robotic blocks, obeying commands from the cult leader.
Get with the program and perceive their world long enough to defend yourself.
They are trying to kill you and kill your world, and you totally need to defend yourself against them.
They’re not cute. Okay? Waldstein thinks burning non-cultists at the stake is a good idea. Greene wants to put a bullet through the head of Nancy Pelosi. Israeli haredim teach fifteen year old boys to burn down city buses and attack police. Why do you cling to the idea that because these people present themselves as god-fearing they deserve your respect?
Read Don DeLillo’s Mao II, his novel about cults, if you’d like to pause and understand the deep reasons people join cults. Or don’t bother learning the deep reasons. The imperative is to fight them with all you’ve got. With all we’ve got.
I’m sorry. Not a pretty way to put it.
But the new administration looks likely – in the special case of DJT – to revoke the usual ex-presidential prerogative to receive intelligence briefings.
Need we count the ways this treacherous man represents a threat to the nation, with or without privileged information? I’d give stuff like this to his best buddy Marjorie Taylor Greene before I’d give it to him.
Fuckface’s legal team resigns.
Or maybe this is the female genital mutilator’s best friend’s moment to shine!
One of thousands of bogus holocaust survivor stories, Mischa Defonseca’s (a made-up name to go with her made-up story) got covered on University Diaries a few years back because the bogus story was so immediately, so obviously, bullshit (parentless, she was raised by wolves; at the age of seven she stabbed a Nazi to death) and yet she got very far with it indeed. Made a lot of money off of it. Oprah came calling.
Which seemed odd to UD at the time, but of course now in l’age du Trump … I mean, UD has come to understand that millions of people will believe anything…
Though to be entirely honest some teeny mewling desperately rational part of her still resists this knowledge…
Anyway, there’s a new Sundance film all about this lovely person; and if your idea of a good time is a couple of hours in her world, go for it.
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UD’s own brush with holocaust-liar fame: She was a student of Paul de Man’s when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.