Venting The Day Away

Done with this week's group therapy. Had a spiel on arousal management. Hell, the pain in my knee is enough to keep me from getting aroused if even Charlize Theron walked in here. Too many dead women in my life. I do not want to get attached to anyone nowadays. Then, too, I think I have had enough fun to last me a good long time. Sorry, had to vent.

I really do not have the energy to do anything. I went to the grocery at 4 pm, that took an hour and a bit more out of my life.

The last hour I have gone through some of my emails, but I am just tired of looking at this computer screen. Yet, it is too early to call it a day.

It is that kind of a day. I will procrastinate on doing any serious work until tomorrow. And the odd thing is that it is not the heat and humidity doing me in, but the stiff back.

I managed to read Michael Kimmage's The New York Intellectuals’ Battle of the Sexes from The New Republic. It reviews Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals. I have read a little of Mailer and Howe and Sontag, and two of McCarthy's books. Otherwise, New York intellectuals is a phrase that usually gets an eye roll from me. Perhaps, I should think differently:

The deepest, most enduring irony of Grinberg’s fascinating history is the irony of assimilation. The New York intellectuals were the children of outsiders and the children of a persecuted minority. All of them worked hard to succeed in America, and America could not resist them. They succeeded with a vengeance, growing into lives that had to have been unrecognizable, even unimaginable, to their parents and grandparents. Their assimilation turned them into Americans, while allowing them to instill Jewish traits in American culture. Grinberg writes that their struggles “illuminate modern American intellectual life more broadly.” If their contribution to modern American intellectual life appears to have faded, it may simply be because they did so much to shape it. 

Now for more items that have been gathering dust in Google Keep.

From Lincoln Michel, Playful novels:

Most novels, in my view, can benefit from some playfulness on the page. Shake things up, try something new, what’s to lose? But since I’ve covered that topic before, I thought I’d write about something more specific: novels that are entirely in unusual forms. Not just some passages, but the entire thing. Novels that have to smuggle in their characters, plots, and narratives inside shapes where we don’t expect them. These books exhibit one of the hardest qualities to pull off in literature: commitment to the bit.

Quite an interesting list. 

The Lost Abortion Plot is offered how little we either know about our history, or how much our history is manipulated by those who want us less free. I noticed when reading The USA Trilogy how often abortion made its appearance. There are those who do not like human nature, and they will bend and mutilate it to fit their preconceptions and drive us over their cliff.

And about how we will let the glory hounds of the political class drive us over a cliff: She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all.

Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. “The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes,” district attorney Matt Weintraub told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader’s reputation.

***

Towards the end of the police press conference, a reporter had raised his hand. Given our first instinct is to believe our eyes, how did the police conclude the videos were deepfakes, he asked, “versus saying: maybe this is teenagers lying, and the videos are real”?

“There’s what’s called metadata,” Weintraub replied. “We can look behind the curtain, as we were able to do in this case. We can’t do it in every case because some providers are halfway across the world. Some don’t cooperate. Others are just inundated with requests.”

***

But a little over a year later, when Spone finally appeared in court to face the charges against her, she was told the cyberharassment element of the case had been dropped. The police were no longer alleging that she had digitally manipulated anything. Someone had been crying deepfake. A story that generated thousands of headlines around the world was based on teenage lies, after all. When the truth finally came out, it was barely reported – but the videos and images were real.

 What We Can Learn From History (And What We Can't)

Travelling by Ann Powers review – a dazzling life of Joni Mitchell - from today's The Guardian. I do not know why I like Joni Mitchell. She is not my usual kind of female singer. That would be Tina Turner or Joan Jett or Aretha. But like her, I do. 

sch