Young Arrogants

"A strange old piece, ye say!" interposed the maltster in a querulous voice. "At the same time ye be no old man worth naming--no old man at all. Yer teeth bain't half gone yet, and what's a old man if so be his teeth bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis a poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore--a boast weak as water." 

--Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy 

Well there you have it. Such is my feeling about every young know-it-all who presumes to tell me what's what about American life and politics, old age having rendered me unable to think clearly, I suppose. Fie! Away with ye, and a plague upon your house! Lol. One is never too old to understand. One can only be too young to understand.

Two Kinds of Magnificence

 The maltster's lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish his powers as a mill: he had been without them for so many years that toothlessness was felt less to be a defect than hard gums an acquisition.

--Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

Well, I get that. The lack of teeth--or such as mine once were--is not so much a matter of regret than relief. Oh sure, there is the bother of having to apply Polident several times a day, if you care to eat several times a day, but this seems more than a fair exchange for having to brush several times a day, or floss (thankfully not even an option with dentures), or submit to the dentist's drill, or suffer through a root canal procedure. 

And speaking of root canals, I have during the past couple of months suffered through the literary version of the procedure known as The Brothers Karamazov. 

I know this is blasphemy, folks, for which many would see me roasted in eternal fire kindled by the thousand pages of this interminable novel. But there you have it. It is a boring, ceaselessly talky, endlessly tedious monstrosity--not so much novel as philosophical treatise. 

Freud called it The most magnificent novel ever written. Sounds like a blurb on a book cover. Oh wait, it is the blurb on the book cover. Well, you can have it, Siggy. 

I'm glad, or rather relieved to have finished it, so that I too can now say Ah, magnificent, but all in all, I'd rather have hard gums. 

So, I have moved on now to Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. I'm about a hundred pages in and fully in love with this novel, astounded by the artfulness on every page, the careful juxtaposition of the character of nature and the nature of character, the odd cadence of the language that demands strict attention and often sends one backward in order to fully digest what one has just read. I can't believe I am discovering this novel for the first time, but I am aware at the same time that maybe I would not have been able to genuinely discover it before now. It is a book whose time has come. That's how I think of it anyway.

An Epistle from Home

I'm not mad at you. 

Do you need help? 

These are phrases commonly used by domestic terrorists. Or so our government would like us to believe. I'm not mad at you. Do you need help? 

My stepson is mixed, Caucasian / Indonesian. He was born in America, came here to Indonesia with his mother and me when he was about 10, and then some years later returned to the US to finish out high school and enter college. He lives there in Arizona, works at a bank, lives with his father, who is also mixed Caucasian and Indonesian. 

He sent me a message today on Instant Messenger. Said he misses me. Talked about some old memories from his childhood, times and events that I myself have no recollection of. It's funny the things that little children store away in the memory. Things of little matter that somehow do matter.

I said that I hoped that all is okay with him back there in the States.

Not to worry you, he wrote, but you already know that things are less than stellar. What's worse, between you and me, is that my dad is on team red. I always knew he was the way he is, but he is actively rooting for ICE now. 

A lot of my friends are Mexican and I'm worried for them, but he can't get it through his head that my friends might be in danger because of their race.

He simply lacks empathy. 

I'm worried too. I'm worried for my son. In a strange way, it seems like he has never quite understood that he is not white. Yes, his entire reference is America, he dresses like a young American, he thinks like a young American, his culture is fully America, not Indonesia. But he is not white. He could just as well be targeted as his Mexican friends. Yes, he is an American citizen, but so are his friends most likely, or at least legal residents. But we have seen that this does not matter to ICE.

If one of his friends were in trouble, and he came to their aid, what might he say to the assailants? I'm not mad at you? 

What might he ask his friend, other than Do you need help? 

And what might be the penalty for those simple words?

This is the reason you are my favorite parent, he concluded in his note today. 

And he, regardless of parentage, regardless of race, regardless of anything under the sun, is my beloved son. 

Look what they've done. 

Look what they've done. 

Look What They Done to My Country

Look what they done to my song, ma 

Look what they done to my song 

    --Melanie, 1970

"What have you done!", the woman shrieked as she ran across the icy Minneapolis street. "What the fuck have you done!" 

The SUV had already stopped moving, crunching up against a parked car. One bullet had crashed through the front windshield, two others were fired through the open driver side window at point blank range. 

By the time the the horrified woman reached the car, the ICE agent was already walking away, ignoring her screams. On the videos captured, his face appears to show no appreciation of having just taken a human life. 

It's just another day. 

Except for this woman's 6-year-old child. Except for her family members and friends. 

She was well-loved, the background stories tell us. She was unusually kind. She was involved in the community.

A physician on the scene tried to help, but was blocked by ICE agents. The victim was dead before she reached the hospital. She was probably dead before the second and third bullets burst through her skull. Spilling out of the glove compartment in the car were some of her daughter's beloved stuffed animals. The driver's side airbag was splattered red with blood. 

She was a domestic terrorist, we are told by the authorities, out to use her car as a deadly weapon. 

This 37-year-old woman with a glove compartment full of stuffed animals.

Look what they done to my song, ma. 

Look what they done to my song.

Well they tied it up in a plastic bag 

Turned it upside down, ma. 

Look what they done to my song.

I have seen the videos, and I have heard all the increasingly desperate, obvious lies. I have seen and heard the cold-hearted and stunning utter lack of remorse. She was the killer, we are told, not the man with the gun. 

And I am filled with rage. I am filled with a white hot hatred of those who are telling their evil tales, and of those who are offering their heartless, ignorant, careless comments on social media. Their irresponsible, disingenuous, cowardly excuses. It was her own fault. She had it coming. Good riddance.

I wish I could find a good book to live in 

Wish I could find a good book 

Well if I could find a real good book 

I'd never have to come out and look at 

What they done to my song

Look what they've done to my country.

She had a name, by the way. 

Renee Nicole Good

Murdered January 7, 2026

Love One Another

"I love mankind," he said,"but I marvel at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love human beings in particular, separately, that is, as individual persons. In my dreams," he said, "I would often arrive at fervent plans of devotion to mankind and might very possibly have gone to the cross for human beings, had that been suddenly required of me, and yet I am unable to spend two days in the same room with someone else, and this I know from experience. No sooner is that someone else close to me than his personality crushes my self-esteem and hampers my freedom. In the space of a day and a night I am capable of coming to hate even the best of human beings: one because he takes too long over dinner, another because he has a cold and is perpetually blowing his nose. I become the enemy of others," he said, "very nearly as soon as they come into contact with me. To compensate for this, however, it has always happened that the more I have hated human beings in particular, the more ardent has become my love for mankind in general.

--The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Here is a sentiment that Sartre expressed as well, and more succinctly at that, when he wrote simply that "Hell is other people" (L'enfer est les autres). This in turn has often been variously misquoted to read something like 'The only problem with heaven is other people'. But the point is the same. We nurture a cozy feeling of love toward mankind that is assailable only by mankind--not the fuzzy ideal, but the walking, talking, nose blowing critter itself. 

This brings to mind the scripture (John 4:20) which tells us that "If someone says,'I love God', and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he is not seen?

Well, you would be surprised, or more probably you would not be, for as anyone can see in social media posts and counterposts, the world is chock full of people who love God (supposedly) and at the same time maintain a nearly murderous disdain for their fellow human beings.

Ah well, just some things to think about, which have come to mind in my reading of the Brothers Karamazov, a very long, very dense, very talky novel indeed but one that has long been on my bucket list of things I really ought to read.

Happy New Year

Well Happy New Year, folks. I say this and despite being a lifelong New Years Scrooge. But I guess it's the thing to do. 

Despite the official ban on fireworks here in Bali, it is quite clear, at 8:00 p.m., that people intend to disregard this altogether. I have a good mind to call the local police, but I guess that wouldn't be very neighborly 😅 I suppose I should mind my own business (as if peace and quiet is not my business) and just watch something cheerful on TV, necessarily at loud volume. Something like The Walking Dead.

Best wishes for the year to come.

Flesh

What is crystal clear from the outset of David Szalay's novel Flesh is that Mr. Szalay has read a lot of Hemingway. What is equally clear is that he has utterly failed to understand how Hemingway Hemingway-ed. It's not a matter of short sentences. Szalay has that down. It's not a matter of terse dialogue, such as

Do you think so? 

Yeah. 

Really? 

Yeah. 

What? 

Yeah.

Sure.

Okay.

which, although unintentionally hilarious, does nothing to move the story along.

This is all tone and no intention. It is tone for the sake of tone, and it is silly. 

And it don't get much better from there, folks. 

Flesh is the story of an insensitive man of meager means who manages nonetheless to rise in the world by capturing the affection, for some ungiven reason, of a wealthy woman (or rather the wife of a wealthy man), and then fall again by his own clueless devices, whereafter, it is said, he lives alone. 

That's it? 

Yeah. 

Really? 

Sure. 

The most compelling question raised by this novel, in my mind anyway, is why it was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker prize. 

Brilliance on every page, the book cover blurb gushes. 

Well, I stuck with it, friends, to the dreary end. I kept waiting for the brilliance to show up. It never did. The author could have said the whole thing in a short short story and succeeded just as well at saying nothing at all.