Stray thoughts/hiatus

Taking a weeklong break

Hi all,

Just a notice to say we’re off til next Tuesday, at which point we’ll surge back, cresting a wave of no doubt brilliant newsletters emerging from my mind like the goddess Athena rampant.

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In the interim, it’s more like the very pits of Hephaestus’s smithy in my cranium, so I’m taking a “rest cure” (baths for my agonies, binging the crap out of “Boardwalk Empire” for no especial virtuous reason) and will resume work in the content mines next week.

Stray thoughts, to tide you over:

— Tucker Carlson got outright fired, and whatever grim beast from the right-wing plasticine swamps replaces him on Fox is less likely to have a direct line from 4chan’s weirdest white supremacists to TV’s racist grandpa audience. This is a mix of pure schadenfreude—couldn’t’ve happened to a crueler and more sneering fancy-boy frozen-food heir—and a tiny gust of relief. Everything will keep swirling down the crapper, but maybe a drop or two got shunted back upward? Or something. At any rate the schadenfreude is unalloyed.

— Following up on David’s Culture Club post this week, I’ll just note that some of my favorite writing about mental illness is nigh unreadable because it reproduces the experience so well. A good example is David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Depressed Person,” which uses hyper-dense paragraphs and a great deal of footnote-on-footnote action to uncannily mimic the tedium and despair of clinical depression. It’s a tough read, but as close as you’ll get to emotional Tartarus without actually going through it. Similarly, Scott Stossel’s memoir My Age of Anxiety is a remarkable documentation of a panic-riddled life (he shits himself in front of JFK!) that reads with all the obsessive, herky-jerky lurching and terror-laden fillips of the anxious mind. I found it enlightening about my own condition, but the pain of reading it paralleled the pain of living with anxiety—kind of a hot-light-bouncing-off-a-mirror situation. A book that evades this conundrum while still feeling authentic to a lived experience of mental illness is Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, about the long history of melancholia/depression; it’s thoroughly researched and an absolute pleasure to read, damn the man! Recommended all over.

— The Supreme Court, a bunch of out of touch people granted unfathomable and unaccountable power, appears to be thoroughly corrupt. A Democratic establishment weighted down by its own lassitude (and perhaps, dare I say it, not eager to have their own tidy arrangements uncovered?) is demonstrating precisely zero concern about it. Vote blue I guess? Biden 2024? It’s not like the Supreme Court is popular; gin up an investigation! People love corrupt elites getting comeuppance or even the appearance thereof, it’s a rare enough treat. I understand criticizing the Democratic Party distresses some readers; I’d be happy to hear your thoughts about why this sort of flaccid/negligent behavior is acceptable.

And on that tart note… sayonara for now!

See you next week,

Talia