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At one point, though, the movie almost lost me. Without spoiling plot points, I will only say that the story relies on the idea that a serious and practicing Christian might be so theologically threatened by the discovery of extraterrestrial life as to do violence to suppress that information. This isn’t a new trope in science fiction, or in popular discussion of Christianity generally. Off the top of my head, the most extreme instance is James Blish’s SF classic A Case of Conscience, in which a Catholic space traveler commits genocide to keep alien life a secret.2

The psychology of a character who would encounter what she believes is decisive disproof of her religion, to which she is devoted, and who then immediately acts to suppress that evidence, is particularly opaque to me. When such characters appear, they usually defend their actions roughly as follows: “we” “need” “religion”, so even if “religion” isn’t true, we have to go on pretending it is because the world will be destabilized without it. Every claim here seems ass-backwards to me. One, we don’t “need” religion so much as we necessarily produce it by being living beings who live among language and with meanings, and who act according to intentions. “Religion” is something that we more or less secrete. When people lose one god, they tend to switch to another one, or cobble a new one together, rather than turning en masse to nihilist terrorism. Two, I think most devout Christians are interested in Christianity (e.g.) because they at least suspect it’s true, and would rapidly lose interest in it if it were decisively shown not to be true. The reason this rarely happens is that religions involve making our best guesses about the aspects of the world and our situation in it that are often not accessible to Popperian falsification, not because Christians are indifferent to the idea that we might be doing the world’s biggest cosplay about nothing. If you show me Christ’s corpse (wave aside how you’d prove that it’s his) and I believe you that it’s Christ’s corpse, I’m not going to start killing people to keep the corpse a secret, like some albino Jesuit in a Dan Brown novel. I’m going to be too busy rethinking my life. And three, a lot of religious people would very much like to see the world destabilized in some directions; we long for an apocalyptic mass realization of the truths our religions teach. One day we’ll all follow Dharma, one day we’ll love the Tao as we should, one day Christ will stand revealed. I am trying, in my own life, to take Christ seriously enough that it deranges some of the arrangements around me, and I think it would be neat if that happened on a wider scale. The person who loves religion for the sake of the maintenance of social order is loving it from the outside, as Karl Rove is said to have done with Christianity.

In any case, the discovery of extraterrestrial life wouldn’t indicate anything about the truth or falsity of Christianity. The Bible isn’t a science textbook; if it doesn’t take time to tell us about what’s happening re: life and its meaning on exoplanets, that’s because it’s got other fish to fry. It’s telling a story about this world, over a long period of time, via various writers who are not ideologically or even religiously identical.

There are, of course, many Christians who don’t read it as though the latter point were true. There are many disputable questions within Christianity, and we’re used to the scenario in which more “liberal” (for lack of a better word) Christians take one side and “fundamentalists” take the other, because the latter strictly enforce every implication of the Biblical text except “sell all your stuff,” “arm women judges with tent pegs,” or “celibacy > heterosexual marriage.”3 That seems to be the case here, too, although the situation on the ground can be complex. My dad is such a committed fundamentalist that many of our longest, bitterest arguments can be traced right to that difference, and he wants to see the aliens almost as much as I do. Nobody remembers this anymore, but in 1996 or so, there was a brief moment when some NASA scientists thought they’d found evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars. Father and son were punching the air like a couple of Knicks fans.

Unfortunately, my dad’s openness to the possibility of alien life is an outlier position at this point. If you look at the big intellectual organs of fundamentalist Protestant creationism—the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham’s content empire—they broadly rejection of the idea, and often combine their rejection with a sneering contempt for the very enterprise of science. (The Discovery Institute is very bitchy about the cost of spacecraft, for example.) Other creationists have slightly more nuanced views, like Hugh Ross, who rejects alien life mostly on grounds that sound more or less scientific (a hostile cosmic environment, the Fermi paradox, etc.) but who thinks UAPs are real but interdimensional (basically Jacques Vallee’s position). I wonder whether this is a recent consensus: Billy Graham, for example, had no trouble with the idea of life on other planets.

As for the Catholics and the Orthodox, the older siblings of Protestantism who never let us forget it for a second, they don’t have a settled position. The adherents of these traditions whose hermeneutic is mostly driven by fear all sound the creationists: if there are aliens, they’re probably not really aliens but deeeeemons. Lots of other Catholics and Orthodox4 are fine with aliens; they want to sit them down, have a theological discussion, and maybe invite them to church, if necessary.

Spielberg, later in Disclosure Day, actually does justice to this nuance. The scared Christian character is talked off the ledge by a nun. (Both of them cite scriptural pretexts that, on my reading, don’t exist, but we’re used to Spielberg saying crazy things about what’s in the Bible by now.) So even Hollywood sort of realizes this trope is overblown, and yet, if you read up on it, you find that it plays as big a role in r/Atheism-level debates about what “religious people” think as it does in the screeds of the creationists. What’s happening, I think, is that fearful people within the religion are joining hands with the least informed people outside of it to say, together, “This is the real teaching of your religion.” But we should be used to that, too: it’s how mainline Protestantism, liberal Catholicism, and open-minded Orthodoxy are always framed in mainstream journalism. Real religion is irrationally fearful and hostile to everything it can’t name, say the Father Feraponts of the world, and the smug secularist says, Yes, I agree.

In this project, however, the adult James and the youthful James collaborate somewhat. He was always an image-conscious, publicity-shy fellow. Scholar Carol Holly has written an entire study of Henry's shame. She quotes, as many others have, the 1864 letter to his friend T.S. Perry in which he asks Perry to receive his acceptance and rejection notices, saying, "I cannot again stand the pressure of avowed authorship (for the present.)." She also quotes his 1865 attack on Walt Whitman, in which he declares that "art requires ... a suppression of one's self." (He got over his dislike of Whitman: Many decades later, he would spend entire evenings declaiming the poet’s works with Edith Wharton.) Holly traces this self-effacing quality in Henry both to Henry Sr.'s weird, weird theories about the self — we'll get into those later — and to the masculine assertiveness of his brothers. The contrast between Henry and William on this topic can be expressed, I think, by the way they reacted, after sister Alice's death in 1892, to reading her journal. They both knew that here was the work of a brilliant writer. William enthused about the possibility of publishing it, while Henry wanted to wait, and to black out some names (when Henry spilled tea, Alice caught it). The difference can also be expressed by the fact that Henry once titled a book of short stories Embarrassments, whereas, well, here is what happens when you search that word in the current standard William bio:

Scholars of both Jameses have had to scramble to find all their juvenilia, but in William's case, it's because he was a restless and erratic late bloomer, and then a workaholic, so there just wasn’t that much juvenilia that remained or was interesting in an obvious way. In Henry's case, it's because if he didn't want you to see it, you weren't seeing it. Sometimes, especially early on, he walked away from things even in the process of publishing them. Henry has two great biographers, besides himself. One of them, Leon Edel, had to establish the anonymous "A Tragedy of Error" (February 1864) as his first published story. The other, Sheldon Novick — whose two volumes remained necessary, even after Edel's five, in part because even Edel couldn't help maintaining the (not-exactly-hard-to-guess-in-retrospect) secret of Henry's erotic love for men — did us the favor of turning up "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon" in the January 6, 1863, issue of the Boston Daily Traveler. It appears, for the first time attributed to James, as an appendix in Novick's Henry James: The Young Master. I've typed it out from there.

In future weeks, we'll hopefully start to move a little faster: I'm taking a long time on James influences and James youth both because I've got a lot to read and because there's a lot to say about everything I do read. Henry's early works are not much to write home about, and William doesn't get properly started until 1867, so I hope to rush through the remainder of the 1860s from here, so we can get to the good stuff. I'll also talk about where the family is at this point, what they've already lived through. 

Fanchon the Cricket, by the way, is a play based on George Sand's 1849 novel La Petite Fadette. It was Mitchell's showcase role for decades (think Mary Martin as Peter Pan); on googling Mitchell, I found that she took the thing on the road to my own city, Ann Arbor, as late as 1887. The play later became a vehicle for the famous Pickford siblings, the only film in which they all appeared together. 

DRAMATIC
Miss Maggie Mitchell—This charming comedienne opened at the Howard, last night, in her highly successful character of Fanchon, the Cricket, and enchanted the splendid audience which witnessed the performance, by one of the most bewitching and natural of impersonations. Miss Mitchell does not study for courtly attitude, indeed her slight form is too fragile for that, but she makes the heart and body labor in concordant action; she does not express the throbbings and tremors of emotion, by the recognized rules of declamatory eloquence, but by the guiding impulses of the heart. She leaps upon the stage like the child of nature skipping over the green fields of waning spring, and her face looks flushed with the health of fresh breezes which course over the green mantled fields. She seems to lose sight of the stifled auditory, and plays the most fantastic romps upon the mimic field, relieving herself of the joyous pleasures brimming over the cup which holds the burthen of her artless happiness. 

Her whole acting emanates apparently from impulse, and an intuitive perception of the actual sentiment of her character. The wild and reckless scenes of childhood she delivers with the most delicious vivacity and effect, while the tenderest chords of pathos are exhibited in that untutored sorrow which we might anticipate in a roving child whose life has been encompassed by enjoyments without the pale of society. And the exquisite abandon which she throws into every scene and incident of the play is among the most characteristic and entertaining features of her acting. Mr. Marshall has placed this play upon the stage supported by a company of no ordinary ability, and the scenery is, to say the least, exceedingly beautiful and picturesque, conveying a correct and appropriate idea of the chasms, mountains and weirdlike prospects of the German forests, and besides greatly enhancing its dramatic effect. 

Fanchon has been almost interminably before the most appreciative of New York audiences, with unqualified success; and every Western city has testified to its merits in the most unequivocal manner, and pronounced their favor by the most flattering receptions. The play will therefore be presented upon every night of this week. 

Nevertheless, because while I was doing this job I talked about it a lot (for example here), and because my old publication bios all mention the Review (it claimed a lot of my energy and belonged in a bio), I occasionally get letters from people in prison asking about how they can get their work published, or from kind friends of people in prison asking how they can help an imprisoned writer publish their work. Here is everything I currently can say in response to these questions. I will try to remember to update this post as resources and details change. (This post will not easily be available to people in prison, but it gives me something I can print out and throw in the mail when I do get these queries.)

1. I’m a prisoner in Michigan and I wrote poetry/fiction/essays. Or, I’m a friend of a prisoner in Michigan and I’d like to help them publish their poetry/fiction/essays. How can I get published in the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing? So glad you asked. From this link:

   The Review accepts submissions of poetry, fiction, plays, and short essays from people currently incarcerated in Michigan. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year and should be accompanied with a note that includes any pen names the author wishes to use, their Michigan Department of Corrections or Federal Bureau of Prisons ID number, and their current address. Send submissions to:

   Attn: John Buckley
   Prison Creative Arts Project
   1801 East Quad
   701 E. University
   Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1245

   If your stuff isn’t lost in the mail, you will eventually get a response either from John or one of his volunteers, or from one of the students in my fall English 221 class. It will either be an acceptance or a non-form rejection letter written by somebody who actually read your stuff and has thought carefully about how you might improve your work.

2. I live in Ann Arbor/I don’t live in Ann Arbor and I’d like to help edit the journal. I believe John does both in-person and remote meetings. Shoot me an email and I’ll put you in touch.

3. I’m a prisoner and I wrote a book. Can you read/give me advice on/publish my novel or other book-length work? Can you ghostwrite my book? No. We often get these sorts of requests, but editing a person’s book for them is a whole job. Asking someone to do this for free is like asking a stranger to paint your house for free.

   
   However! A group that may be able to help you with this is:

   Prisons Foundation
   2512 Virginia Avenue NW
   #58043
   Washington, DC 20037
   Email: dennissmail-prisonsfoundation.org@yahoo.com

   
   Disclaimer: I don’t know these people. Their website says that they help “prisoners publish their books on Amazon.com.” They give “information and advice” for free, and they offer “paid services for editing, typing, designing covers, and uploading manuscripts.”

4. Is it worth trying to self-publish my book? It just depends on what you want from the experience. Self-publishing successfully is hard in some of the same ways that getting published by a company is hard, and also in some different ways. It tends to work OK for people who have built a following already by some other means, or by people who have a book that fills a very particular preexisting niche (The Guide to Collectible Fishbowl Ornaments). Otherwise the book tends to just sit there selling a few copies every month or year. But that’s the outcome for plenty of people who go through “traditional” publishing, too, so maybe it’s not a bad idea. I would not pay a lot of money to self-publish a book.

5. Do I have to go to college to be a good writer? Absolutely not. It helps—it means you can encounter a lot of skills and ideas very fast. But lots of great writers didn’t go to college, or didn’t study literature in college, and lots of people who’ve been to college become lousy novelists. Formal education is one path. Formal education also really helps with getting published, which is a whole different issue. If you don’t go to college you need to read as hard as or harder than most of the people who did, and there are books that can help you do that. Some of them are the same as the good writing books (see below): Delany’s About Writing, for example. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer is at least OK. Others include Mimesis by Eric Auerbach, or The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter, which is often a good starting place because a lot of people are already reading the Bible. Occasionally you can find a really good book devoted to just one particular author; a recent one is Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison. These books are all hard in places but they’re a lot easier than trying to get good at writing without getting good at reading.

6. What do I have to do to get good at writing? Read a lot; read critically (not in the sense that you are sitting there angrily criticizing everything you read, but in the sense that you’re asking a lot of questions: why did the writer use this word rather than another one? Why is it structured the way it is, in the order it is? If I liked it, what are the things the writer did that I liked, and why did I like them?). Write and show it to people. Find people who like the kind of work you’re doing and bug them politely. That’s the path. Every good writer is following that path, whether or not they’re rich and famous. That includes lots of the people who write or have written for the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing.

7. How can I make money (or more money) writing? I get this question a lot and, every time, I feel a stab of pure empathy for the person asking it, because it’s one I ask myself regularly. The short answer in my case is “If I knew, I would quit my teaching job and just write all the time!” There isn’t a lot of money in the writing game—or there is, but it’s not distributed very widely. (A handful of writers who have big publishing behind them tend to monopolize most of it!) In my experience, people who write are just fascinated by the process, and they stick to it because they like it. As that happens, other opportunities, some of them paying, slowly roll in. But it takes forever, so you have to like writing itself and pursue that and hope it goes somewhere, rather than saying, “Ah, I shall become a poet and get rich that way.”

8. Can you recommend some books on writing? Yes. For just getting started, I love Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. There are a lot of copies of that one floating around. I also like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist and Stephen King’s On Writing. For harder, technical stuff, Samuel Delany’s About Writing is a masterpiece. Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin is very good. A Poet’s Handbook and Rules of the Dance by Mary Oliver are pretty good. PCAP has done its best to encourage organizations that collect books for Michigan prison libraries to grab up any copies of these books that they can, so look for them in the library. If by good luck you get your hands on a copy of George Saintsbury’s History of English Prose Rhythm, guard it with your life.

9. Where else can I publish my work? Two answers to this question.

   If you’re a fairly experienced reader and writer, with a strong sense of what you like to read and what you like to write, and you really don’t want to be pigeonholed as a “prison writer”, you should send your work to a journal/magazine that publishes the kind of work you like and see what happens. You should start with journals/magazines that have a lot of prestige and that you can’t imagine getting published in, and then work down from there. (I don’t do this, because I’m too silly to take my own advice. But it’s good advice.) If you’re a poet, aim for Poetry and work down. If you’re a science fiction writer, aim for Fantasy and Science Fiction or Analog or Clarkesworld and work down.

   That’s the first answer. The second answer is for those of you who write mostly for self-expression, or to describe/psychologically “process” your life experiences. Here are some options:

   1. The American Prison Writing Archive wants nonfiction writing about people’s first-hand experiences with prison. If you write to them at
      American Prison Writing Archive
      ℅ Hamilton College
      198 College Hill Road
      Clinton NY 133323-1218
      … they will send you a brief explanation of their project and their paperwork.

   2. Prison Legal News publishes a lot of work by prisoners, though this too is more nonfiction/journalism. Write to them at
      Prison Legal News
      PO Box 1151
      Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460

   3. Late in my time at the Review we started getting a lot of informational essays that read like class term papers. I’m guessing that this has something to do with the Calvin Prison Initiative and other efforts to bring college-level writing instruction to people in prison. (I’m a huge fan of these efforts, and very proud that some of my own beloved undergrad mentors and professors have been involved in the Calvin Prison Inititiave.) The MI Review of PCW typically doesn’t tend to publish these sorts of pieces unless they’re unusually stylistically interesting or eloquent (see next question). A publication that does seek this work is the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. You can reach out to them at
      Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
      ℅ Justin Piché
      Assistant Professor
      Department of Criminology
      University of Ottawa
      Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
      K1N 6N5

   4. The Marshall Project also publishes journalism by prisoners. One writer who I know and respect a lot had a bad experience there (they changed his title and some of his content without his permission), so bear that in mind. Still, they’re out there. So is PEN America, which a lot of you know about; they give out an annual Prison Writing Award.

   5. The back pages of The Angolite, America’s finest prisoner-run magazine (if only by default), publish short poems and reflections from all over the country.

      The Angolite, Louisiana State Penitentiary c/o Cashiers Office

      Angola, LA 70712
      A fuller directory of resources for prisoners, of all kind, is maintained here: https://www.prisonactivist.org/resources

10. I’d like to be a prison journalist. God bless you and good luck. Until this country and its prisons are run by civilized and decent people, you will have to make your own idiosyncratic way through a thousand weird, constantly changing obstacles. To get some idea how you might make it happen, the best resource right now is John J. Lennon’s The Tragedy of True Crime. There’s an appendix where he describes in detail all the ways he’s gotten around the lack of a computer, lack of a place to store his notes, lack of access to sources for stories, lack of a normal email address, mail censorship that prevents him from being able to correct galleys in the normal way, and so on. He cultivated a vast network of people in the free world who were willing to help him. You’ll have to ask a lot of people, and you’ll have to get used to being told “No” and not holding it against them (everybody I know who is even adjacent to the prison-arts world is run off their feet and has to say “No” all the time). It will help if you make the ask as specific as you can: “Can I get you to look over these five pages and hang on to them for me” rather than “Can you help me.”

11. I have the feeling that my writing isn’t as literary as what these publications want. But I’m not sure what that means. Is it that the writing isn’t fancy enough? Do I not use enough big words? Metaphors? What is it that “literary” people are looking for? A good definition of “literary” is: work that a person could read and enjoy reading without feeling a strong preexisting interest in either the author or the topic, because of something about the way the work is written. (That definition doesn’t cover the entirety of what we call “literature,” but no definition really does; this one does it well enough to go on with!) It might be that the language is fancy and ornate, though actually this is one of the easiest things to screw up. It might be, on the other hand, that the language is simple and straightforward, or even curt and abrupt, or elliptical—surrounded by a lot of obvious unsaid. But in any case there’s something individual, unusual, about the way the words sound in combination—you feel like no one else would say the thing this person is saying the exact way they’re saying it. It evokes a particular human voice and personality.

12. Doesn’t any language used by anyone “evoke a particular human voice and personality”? That’s what you’d think, and that’s the interesting thing!: Most of the language we use doesn’t do that. Most of the language we use day-to-day is a series of cliches that could be said by anybody. It sounds human but it doesn’t sound like any particular human. Think of the language that gets used in official prison directives: it’s the same weird legal terms arranged in somewhat different order, over and over again. We do the same thing when we have a casual verbal interaction with someone we don’t know well. They say “Hello” or “Hi” or “Hey” or “Sup” and we say the same thing plus “How’s it going” or “How you feeling” or “How’s you’re day going” and they say “OK, how about you” or “I’m blessed, how about you” or “I’m maintaining with the Good Lord’s help, how about you” or “Can't complain, nobody listens” and so on. That’s fine; that’s how these things are supposed to work. But they’re not how literature is supposed to work.

13. What are some writing prompts you like?

    1. In the 1970s a guy named Georges Perec wrote a novel called Life: A User’s Manual. If you had eight pages to give someone a user’s manual for being alive, what would you say?

    2. Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the greatest living writers in the English language, in my opinion. One thing she likes to do is take famous names from history and give them to people who are living in unglamorous circumstances. For example, her great play Top Dog/Underdog is about two brothers named Lincoln and Booth. Lincoln is a working-class Black man who dresses up as Abraham Lincoln (he has to wear whiteface makeup) so tourists can pay him to take pictures with them. Booth ekes out a living playing card games. Over the course of the play, though, they find themselves weirdly falling into the roles that their famous names impose on them—Booth must assassinate Lincoln. Take two or three of your favorite names from history, and apply them to regular people who are just doing stuff. How do the names seem to change their behavior? How do names influence us?

    3. Write a love poem. Do not mention love, hearts, passion, or anything sexual. Do not talk about how beautiful the beloved person is. Try to make the reader feel love without mentioning love.

    4. Write a review of a piece of art—a painting, a novel, a record or mixtape, a TV cartoon for kids, whatever—that doesn’t exist, but you wish it did.
       

The weird thing about the Graham Platner discourse is not that many liberals and leftists wonder where his real loyalties lie. Under the circumstances, that’s a normal reaction. It’s also not that people are arguing that il faut que vote blue no matter who, because that’s a cogent position (indeed I’d argue it’s so cogent that people come up with all sorts of ingenious but futile arguments against it precisely because its cogency is the deathly cogency of “you have two options that suck”). What’s weird is who is making which argument.

I have accepted the logic of “vote blue no matter who” in every general election since 2004. I voted for John Kerry, who wasn’t that bad, and then for Barack Obama, Senator, who seemed great, and then for Barack Obama, President, who had maintained for four years the murderous War on Terror with its huge yearly harvest of the unnecessarily dead. Then, in the 2016 general, I voted for Hillary Clinton, Senator, a supporter of the Iraq War and, as Obama’s Secretary of State, incredibly violent US imperialist. Then I voted for Joe Biden, who I had hated for years because of his support for War on Drug policies and his soft imperialism, and who, according to the discourse rules then in operation within my social circle, was someone who should be presumed a rapist, since nobody (that I can remember) ever really refuted Tara Reade’s accusations beyond playing the old Monica Lewinsky “nutty/slutty” hits. He won and went on to be the least bad president of my lifetime, i.e., still a disaster. We go back to waiting for the Democrat Reagan that wasn’t promised. (Maybe it’ll be Hunter?) In 2024 I voted for Kamala Harris, who—if we just don’t hold the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza against her at all, on the principle that the Vice Presidency isn’t a real job—is still a career prosecutor who made her reputation by being “tough” on e.g. parents of truant children. Kamala is the only person on this list who doesn’t have a body count (meaning dead bodies, not people you’ve slept with) way higher than that of the former mercenary Platner. It’s precisely because I don’t have a separate category of “political sins” vs. “sin sins” that I think all of these people, possibly barring Harris, are worse than he is as of now. They’ve killed more people. Again, for now.

Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to build what will—don’t fool yourself—become, if built, huge death camps, in as many suburbs as possible, while maintaining a lethal and ruinous war in Iran, plus continued support for the genocidal Netanyahu regime, plus they’re trying to starve out the Cubans so we can finally win the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kamala would have done at most one of those things. The vote-blue-no-matter-who argument continues to be as cogent as ever; the don’t-vote-it-only-encourages-them argument continues to be a piece of wishful thinking, a way out of a choice between bad options that consists of closing your eyes and pretending real hard and insisting that this action manifests agency or principles rather than denial. It didn’t when people on the broad left refrained from voting for Kamala because of Gaza, and it won’t if Mainers on the broad left refrain from voting Platner because he’s scary. So it’s weird to see people who still curse the non-voters in, e.g., Dearborn talking as though Platner’s creepiness makes voting for him impossible. If you voted for Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, voting for this guy doesn’t represent an abdication of your previously high standards.

If I lived in Maine, I’d vote for Andrea LaFlamme, and then, if Platner wins the primary, I would vote for him in the general. It is, again, because I don’t have a separate “political sins” vs. “sin sins” category that I think Susan Collins is an even riskier choice than this man. He might be a Nazi fetishist; she definitely is a Republican, a party that has for ten years openly mainstreamed Naziism and whose next standard-bearer, once Trump dies, will almost certainly be Nick Fuentes.

So on the one hand, all that. On the other hand, I am seeing, in addition to defenses of Platner that make me wonder whether some of these writers kiss their mothers with that mouth—the fact that he might’ve put his hands on an ex is proof that he has a groin! It means he’s not an HR lady!—a degree of deference to him as a radical that people no longer even give AOC. We know virtually nothing about how he’ll vote or govern, we know just enough to almost feel safe assuming he’ll vote in the interests of continued human life on this planet more often than Susan Collins would (which is both reason enough to vote for him and not saying much), and a lot of his initial support came not from some string of hilarious-but-inappropriate Chapo appearances but from being talked up by the centrist Pod Save America guys. And yet people are talking about him like he’s Bernie Sanders. Get real. The absolutely shockingly good, eat-my-every-critical-word, so-sorry-I-ever-doubted-you-sir scenario if he wins is that he turns out to be not Bernie Sanders but the guy that Hillary 2016 deadenders have spent the last decade pretending Bernie Sanders is, a sexist jerk who does good things for poor people sometimes. That’s if we’re very lucky.

Haven’t really said anything about The Tattoo. When I first heard about the tattoo, that was actually the easiest thing for me to wave away. When it comes to Nazi iconography, I only know the two or three greatest hits. I don’t know Songs 5 or 6 on the best-of album, let alone the album tracks. I think that this is a perfectly defensible sort of relationship to have to Nazi iconography. I only know what a Totenkampf is because of the Platner controversy, just as I only know what a Sonnenrad is because of Nate Hochman and Ron DeSantis (thanks, assholes). I found it genuinely totally convincing that a guy would get a tattoo with his platoon that features cool-looking skulls, and not know, till somewhere in the recent past, when we have all been forced to broaden our knowledge of the Nazi iconography canon, that those skulls had been arranged Nazily. Turns out I was wrong, though! He apparently knew the whole time, maybe thought it was funny?

So yeah, good luck to Andrea LaFlamme, I guess?

The world is an…

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Here are some of the sentences that I hear in my head when I see this picture of myself, in my new glasses:

1. “Oh, ‘Mr. Christman’ is my father‘s name. And ‘consulting’? That was my father’s job”

2. “I’m sure you have hired lots of consultants, Stefan. But how many times have you worked with an Excellence Coordinator?”

3. “Remember how Subway had ‘sandwich artists’? Here at Christman Realty, we call ourselves Production Designers. We do mis-en-scene for your life.”

4. “I think of the therapist as a kind of performance artist. We’re doing existential improv. And [squeezes your shoulder way too hard] I’ve got your back, buddy.”

5. “I call ‘em ‘y’allergies’ bc I only get them in the South. Haha, no offense. It’s beautiful here”

6. “I know what it says on the office door, but Fr. Jake here will tell you I’m really the volunteer *discoordinator*”

7. “I hear you, son, I hear you. I really do. You don’t want an ordinary college experience. But who ever said business is ordinary?”

8. “Welcome to our men’s ministry, The Burden Bearers. We’ll start with some kettlebell work”

9. “I’m just saying, is four really too young to consider psychedelics?”

10. “For our first date I thought I’d take you hang gliding. J/k! But seriously, bring knee and wrist pads”

11. “When Geoff Johns first contacted me about reimagining Red Tornado for the twenty first century, I thought, What a fucktastic cumdinger of an opportunity. But when I found out I’d be teaming with generational talents Matt Fraction and Grimes as part of a multi tiered approach to bringing this Bronze Age character to the Bitcoin Age of comics—well, my mind wasn’t just blown—it was Tornado’d!”

12. “Welcome to the chaplain’s office. Why don’t you tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in. I bet I don’t believe in him either”

13. “My lenses are progressive and so… are my politics”

"The* marquise** went*** out**** at***** five****** o'clock*******

*isn't 'the' a bizarre word, so imperia…

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(Previously, on this subject. See also BDM and John.)

The literary world was rocked this week when Jamir Nazir, the author of the prize-winning, probably AI-generated short story “Serpent in the Grove” (which, unlike Nazir himself, hardly rises to the level of fiction), emerged from silence to defend his creation. To The Observer’s …

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—Marilynne Robinson, Writings of the 1980s, Essays of the 1990-2004, The Gilead Quartet, Writings of the 2000s-2010s.

I think you could do Housekeeping, Mother Country, and the smattering of book reviews and shorter pieces she wrote during the ‘80s in one volume, then do all the essays from the period when she wasn’t publishing fiction in one book, then…

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They say the grove still hums at noon.

OK! I can imagine a writer landing on this after reasonable reflection. As a way to tell us that we’re about to enter a particular and special place, a place about which the community keeps for itself certain stories that a folklorist would covet and a historian spurn, it’s a little obvious, but first sentences are hard. Off the top of my head I can think of two opening passages from great novelists that do similar things somewhat better. In David Rhodes’s Rock Island Line (1975), he specifies the “they” somewhat—“The old folks”—and this change, minor as it seems, both contextualizes everything that follows (it’s a place where there are old people, and where the word “folks” is used unironically; probably a small town or village, then, or else a very specific neighborhood in a city) and reassures us that we’re in the hands of a writer who has bothered to spell out to himself what he’s talking about. On the other hand, “124 was spiteful,” the opening sentence of Beloved (1987). Morrison goes further than Rhodes. She is so specific that we’re disoriented, as when we look at an ultra-close photograph and struggle for a moment to identify what we’re looking at. It’s not “the house” or even “That house” and we also aren’t going to glance at the they who knew it was spiteful, we’re going to begin the novel within their frame and we’re going to end it there too and in between we’re going to go so much closer it’s as stifling as the intimacy between Sethe, Beloved, and Denver.

But still. Toni Morrison is a recognized giant of American literature. David Rhodes (RIP) is an unrecognized giant. You drive through the Driftless region of the Midwest and there he is, and you’re like, Why isn’t this in the guides? This guy’s gigantic. My point is, we can’t all be them. So, appraised of our grove, with its noontime hum, we read on. It’s too early to quit.

Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine,

If we weren’t already thinking about Beloved (which continues “Full of a baby’s venom”), we are now. The assonance of “bees’ neat industry” is nice but … is their industry neat? I ask myself this and file the problem away; the fact is, I am not a beekeeper. Perhaps people who spend enough time around bees find it convincing. I don’t. “Clean rasp of cutlass on vine” sounds OK except that I don’t know why the idea is even being introduced here—we’ve already established that the grove hums, and the bee part further clarified what kind of hum it isn’t, so the next thing, logically, should be another hum we may be thinking of that is not the grove’s hum. “Clean rasp” isn’t a hum at all. It’s not in the galaxy or universe of hums. It’s so jarring that now, instead of thinking of Beloved, I’m thinking of LLMs, with their characteristic “not this but that” move. But then I bat that thought away: surely a contest-winning story that appears in Granta isn’t going to be mediocre in that way?

but a belly sound – as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.

That’s not a hum. I can’t imagine what “swallows a shout and holds it there” means, so the author (I’m still assuming there’s an author) specifies that it’s a belly sound. But if so, it’s an abrupt belly sound—both shouts and belly noises being in general abrupt. I am now thinking “Student writing.” I’m still not thinking LLM because I have, apparently, too much faith in institutions.

People who pass keep to the track and do not look into the bush where the stone rings lie.

We have by now a pileup of strongly metaphorical and imagistic language that is not adding up to a single picture at all. A grove is going to be planted close-together enough that there isn’t a ton of room for “stone rings,” unless they’re very small, which “stone,” as a descriptor, doesn’t logically but certainly connotationally rules out. A stone may fit in your pocket but a stone [noun here] is big and heavy: stone circles, stone walls, stone steps, etc. A small group of groves could have stone rings in between the groves, and if that’s what the writer means, they’ll find a more elegant way than that of saying so, but this writer isn’t trying at all, and as a reader, I’m losing faith that there’s a distinct meaning of any sort in the writer’s head.

Ask the oldest in the village and you’ll hear some version of: ‘It had a well there once, and a woman. The grove ain’t forget.’

Water and femininity. To cover up for the failure of the opening lines to create a strong image or sense of presence, our writer goes lunging for the Heavily Symbolic like a virgin in the backseat of a car digging around in his girlfriend’s panties for that thing he read about on the internet. It’s so clumsy that I’m now—before the first paragraph has even finished—reading out of anger and a sort of “how-bad-will-this-get” curiosity, and not out of any sympathetic readerly hope that this writer will take me somewhere interesting, or even an empathetic writerly hope that the story will show flashes of talent so that I can root for this person who is, like me, attempting the impossible.

It is only in the second paragraph that I start to believe there is no such person:

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Henry, Sr., born…

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