I’m reviewing the last twenty four hours of discourse and making some kind of face, but I don’t know what kind because apparently I don’t know what a frown is.
Is this a frown?
Is this a frown?
Is Florence Pugh a Muppet?
Much to think about. Quick: what are you doing with your face right now? I thought so. But turn that pout inside-out because BookForum just published Justin Taylor’s fantastic review of Cormac McCarthy’s new pair of novels, “Stella Maris” and “The Passenger,” as well as Cormac McCarthy’s whole career in general, hinging on the question: “Is Cormac McCarthy our most minor major novelist or is he our most major minor novelist?”
The truth is that The Passenger only fails to satisfy when it vamps as a thriller. That’s a promise that just won’t ever be made good. When the novel follows its Lynchian instincts—setting a long scene on a deserted oil rig off the coast of Pensacola, for instance, or allowing Bobby to encounter the Kid (or to dream that he did) on a stormy beach—then its power and pleasures are considerable. It is a novel of set pieces and soliloquies, images and ideas, at its best when refusing to be anything other than its moody, freaky self. Above all, it is a book of evocative surfaces, like a John Ashbery poem, where things we take at first to be windows turn out to be mirrors, and the radical alterity glimpsed in dark glass turns out to be ourselves.
WHAT IS THE RELATION of the unconscious to the conscious mind? How is it that we live with this unknowable at the very heart of the known, this biological operating system that apparently comprehends language but refuses to use it, and what should we do with these otherworldly transmissions that reach us like alien broadcasts from our own deep inner space? These are questions worth asking. The Passenger requires a reader who is patient, a proactive collaborator in the production of meaning, and willing to meet McCarthy where he is. Such a reader will be richly satisfied. As to whether anyone else will be, I truly don’t know.
Every line of this review is flawlessly correct. My only addition would be that the math-and-physics-gossip parts of ”The Passenger” are also great and I wish he’d written a whole book of that.
Will Smith told Trevor Noah: “I Took My Hard and Made It Hard for Other People.“ I’m making another face but I don’t know what this one’s called either.
The Pink Sauce (previously) is back, no longer pink, still gross. New foot (previously) washed up, no longer pink, still gross.
In Hell Gate, Molly Osberg explained what to do if you encounter a person crying in public:
In extreme cases, when it’s possible someone is experiencing such a wave of preventable agitation or grief you feel moved to alleviate it in some way there is only one course of action: You ask that person, briefly and politely, if they’re good.
“You good?” That’s all you’re allowed to say, by law. Get it right.
Olivia Craighead: “Caffeine-free Diet Coke is what helicopter parents give their children when they think Sprite is too sugary and LaCroix is too spicy.”
In The New Republic Graham Gallagher wrote a pretty comprehensive survey of how weird the top-level Republicans are getting these days.
American voters see the political parties as equally extreme in policy, ignoring evidence that Republicans have moved right much faster than Democrats have moved left. However, a party fixated on genital sunning, seed oils, Catholic integralism, European aristocracy, and occultism can alienate voters not because of its positions but because of how it presents them—and itself.
And leading the vanguard of weird Republicans is Kanye West, who yesterday flounced from the softest imaginable feather bed for his current openly Nazi worldview, an interview with far-right laundry boy Tim Pool, when Pool very nearly seemed to almost suggest that he wasn’t sure everything bad that happens to Kanye is a conspiracy by The Jews.
Heartbreaking. The smirking boy-Himmler in the blue sweatshirt is Kanye’s “campaign manager” Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has a lot of personal lore and backstory but all you really need to know is he’s the guy who said “fellas, is it gay to have sex with a woman?”
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has sold tunnels to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum it put them on the map.
An aide to Mr. Hogan toured a parking-lot test site at the company’s then-headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport, getting a look at a tunnel-boring machine the company purchased secondhand. Boring named it Godot, the title character in Samuel Beckett’s play about a man who never shows up…
All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot.
Today in Crypto:
Good Toot Discovered:
Today’s Song: 100 gecs, “Doritos & Fritos” (check them out in the Spyplane today!)
