Photographed outside, in front
of one of UD‘s dragonfly pillows.

… Nebraska, which just loved him, and which still loves him. Like Johnny Manziel, Richie was lionized during his college years even though everyone could see he was all fucked up.

Jock schools can’t get enough of broad-shouldered psychotics cuz they make the best plays, and these schools are certainly not in the business of noticing that their hotly-recruited wrecks are sick in the head and in need of help.

And then it’s on to the pros for these shambling bohemoths, for more fun basket-case-voyeurism. We’ve even got Richie’s latest paranoid attack and collapse on tape.

… at the exhibit honoring his modernist designs.

*************
Photo: Joanna Soltan

Prolific, hilarious, shameless, truth-bearing.

Like his anti-hero, Mickey Sabbath, Roth had “the talent of a ruined man for recklessness, of a saboteur for subversion, even the talent of a lunatic — or a simulated lunatic — to overawe and horrify ordinary people.” Whether young and reckless like Ozzie Freedman, or old and reckless like Sabbath, Roth’s characters tend to age toward self-hatred at the settled spectacle of their all-too-human depravity, their daily hopeless struggle (no; they’ve given up the struggle) against sloth, filth, lust, despair, envy, violence…

Notice how, in the excerpt from Sabbath’s Theater, the name Dostoevsky recurs:

I had been reading O’Neill. I was reading Conrad. A guy on board had given me books. I was reading all that stuff and jerking myself off over it. Dostoyevsky — everybody going around with grudges and immense fury, rage like it was all put to music…

The unbearable lightness of being. Unmitigated rage at being. Writers put this to music. What was it I quoted in a post a few days ago? A writer’s comment on the suicide of musician Scott Hutchison:

Frightened Rabbit [Hutchison’s band] was virtuosic when it came to expressing the odd anxieties of an early, hungover morning, when a person wakes up and has to reckon with herself, again — the relentless ennui of being, and being, and being, and being.

The deeply hopeless lowness of the human can be played strictly for laughs – Portnoy’s Complaint, or Woody Allen’s “Notes from the Overfed” – but the best writers at their best (Kafka) throw in high and low for a real Alban Berg effect.

Roth located this modern leit-motif and settled there, teasing out variations on our vileness and our moment-by-moment reckoning with our vileness, a reckoning that grinds on without any Jesus to perceive and forgive and redeem.

Right now. Warsaw.

Mr UD: Far right.

On her way to her Uber, UD spied
a turtle in her pachysandra.

At Potomac Park, she bought tea
and coffee at this new Italian cafe,
stuffed her backpack with grapes,
Cheerios, toothpaste and dog treats
from Harris Teeter, walked briskly
around residential Potomac Park,
and then Ubered home.

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

UPDATE: UD‘s rather – uh –
informal garden turns out to be
a perfect spot for turtles.

Hungary goes down the tubes.

Daddy’s Guns. (Sing it.)

When people ask of me
What would you like to be,
Now that you’re not a kid any more?
I know just what to say,
I answer right away.
There’s just one thing
I’ve been wishing for.

I wanna take Daddy’s guns
I wanna take Daddy’s guns
That’s the most important thing to me.
Cuz when I get Daddy’s guns
When I get Daddy’s guns
I’ll blast the girls who aren’t nice to me.

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

Gunny, isn’t it?

Gunny. You’re a land that loves weapons
That’s a peculiar sign
Gunny. You give guns to your children.
Gunny, isn’t it?
Large, and gunny, and mine.

Bravo, Trudeau.

What a remarkable country UD lives in.

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

Also great for gramps!

Big sports programs are such a boon to universities.

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

Penn State: “Whew! We got off easy.”

Once again, students must instruct professors on the gross negligence of failing to restrict/outlaw laptop use in their classes. This Northwestern University student nicely rehearses the by-now almost universally accepted arguments against laptop use in the classroom; he goes on to note that plenty of professors still don’t give a shit.

Baby, baby, baby don’t sue me
Ooh, please don’t sue me for forty mill
I’ve got this red-faced shame-faced flustered feelin’ inside me
Ooh, deep inside me and it hurts so bad

Baby, baby, where did our love go?
Ooh, don’t you sue me
Don’t you sue me no more (baby, baby)
Ooh, baby

… (they’ve been out of touch for years) just won the Democratic US House primary in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Twenty-five years ago, we all traveled to the Greek island of Santorini and rented a house during the meltemi winds season. Sometimes the house rocked like a little boat in the labored, hours-long gusts.

That was strange: The beyond-brilliant sun, the faint caldera out to sea. And the bright blue water in the swimming pool turbulent, taking a beating from the air.

When things calmed down, we piled into the open top jeep Scott rented and drove the treacherous island roads to a black sand beach or an obscure diner or the chic shopping district.

We celebrated my birthday at a restaurant high high up on the white cliffs — the lot of us hypnotically suspended over a world of ocean.

Today I was on campus to have lunch
with a Canadian student getting ready
to start law school at Osgoode Hall;
to pick up a student’s final exam from
Disability Support Services; and to
check out a third student’s photography exhibit.

Here the photographer talks about her project:

An image from the show.

On my way back to the Foggy Bottom metro,
purple irises bloomed between buildings.