Previous - 111. Miscegenation
Trump
I have a confession to make. Since G.W. Bush, I've tried to avoid hearing Presidents speak and, to the extent possible, avoid reading about their antics. From everything I've run into about Obama, he was exemplary (though still just more of the same when it comes to trade and all that trade implies -- this relates to my hatred of David Ricardo) and yet I still mostly avoided listening to his speeches. I've really done an excellent job of avoiding listening to Trump.I mention this because it seems that I may have over estimated his usefulness in my anti-Ricardo scheme. This morning I woke-up to a conversation on the local CBS radio news station about how reporters were learning to be very careful about calling Trump a liar as the growing consensus -- in just his first week in office -- is that he is actually delusional. Just as Bill Clinton taught us all how to parse statements about sexual relationships, Trump is helping us to understand that it isn't "lying" if you actually believe the "alternative fact." We may already be to the Annette-Bening-nude-in-the-hallway scene of The Grifters -- the instant where the audience suddenly comprehends she's bat-shit crazy.
Since I never watched his TV shows or his campaign speeches or the debates, I had assumed that he was at least a high-functioning whack-job. I will still take Pence over Ted Cruz, but he is not going to give me the only thing I was hoping to get out of this debacle.
Absalom
I never pay much attention to descriptions of settings, rooms and scenery and the like, (well, rarely) but this passage at the beginning of the final chapter is so brilliant. Again we have the contrast between winter Cambridge and summer Jefferson. Shreve and Quentin are in their cold beds -- Shreve even opens the window onto the snowy, icy night. And then we get this,p362 [Quentin] ... He could taste the dust. Even now with the chill pure weight of the snow-breathed New England air on his face, [Martha Grimes would love that] he could taste and feel the dust of the breathless (rather, furnace-breathed) Mississippi September night. He could even smell the old woman in the buggy beside him, smell the fusty camphor-reeking shawl and even the airless black cotton umbrella... He could smell the horse; he could hear the dry plaint of the light wheels in the weightless permeant dust and he seemed to feel the dust itself move sluggish and dry across the sweating flesh just as he seemed to hear the single profound suspiration of the parched earth's agony rising toward the imponderable and aloof stars....
p365 ... he led the mare from the road and tied one rein about a sapling in the weed-choked ditch...
I'm sorry, but horses in books and films are so much more accommodating than the horses I've known. If I had tied up my horse like that I would have been walking back to town cursing.
Something that suddenly struck me reading again this final chapter, which contains a good deal of dialog, I've never "heard" a Southern accent while reading this. When I read Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart, I could hear the accent. Maybe this is because I've not been around Southern accents recently. Maybe Mississippi (and in the early 20th century) had different accents. I don't know.
So Charles Bon is the one associated with the biblical Absalom? I'm afraid I don't know my Bible well enough to quite follow that. It would seem Henry would work just as well.
And that brings to a close my reading of Absalom, Absalom!
John Green
John Green is a popular young novelist I have not read, but he's one of my favorite YouTube personalities. I've watched hours of videos by both John and his brother Hank. But what struck me again tonight is how great his novel titles are. According to Wiki, he's written four novels (plus two projects "with" another author, that I know nothing about). All four titles are excellent: Looking For Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and The Fault in Our Stars.Each of these titles, if I noticed them in a shop, would make me pick up the book to at least find out what it's about. I collect book titles myself -- though I have no plans to write books to go with them. My favorites (not counting the ones a friend of mine has suggested) are: I immediately regret this..., A Question Yet Open to Some Controversy, The Three Musketeers (biography of Constant, Byron, and Goethe), The Streetlights of My Life, Paper Bullets of the Brain (from Much Ado About Nothing), and A Failure to Thrive.
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