The young marrieds in Tove Ditlevsen’s YOUTH: “Maybe he imagined a wife he could talk to about something other than love and the evening meal. Maybe he imagined they could do something else in the evening than sit on each other’s laps. I think, at any rate, that it must be just terribly boring.”
“Death is not a gentle falling asleep as I once believed. It’s brutal, hideous, and foul-smelling . . . I look forward to having the rotten, suffocating stench seep out of the apartment” — the death of an aged aunt in the cramped apartment brings a moment of stunning candor in Tove Ditlevsen’s YOUTH
Excellent. (I’m on my way to becoming a George Eliot completist).
Great news!
Some places are in your destiny and in some places you are happy.
—Nancy Lemann, The Fiery Pantheon
“Some people in the Epstein files are monstrously gross. Some are moderately gross. Some are situationally, aspirationally, or cosmetically gross.” Josh Tyrangiel sifted through nearly 3.5 million pages to determine a taxonomy for those named in the files. theatln.tc/TYNK1H3C
“Whenever I think about the future, I run up against a wall everywhere, and that’s why I want to prolong my childhood so badly. I can’t see any way out of it. . . . The future is a monstrous, powerful colossus that will soon fall on me and crush me.” Tove Ditlevsen, CHILDHOOD
“Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own. . . . On the sly, you observe the adults whose childhood lies inside them, torn and full of holes like a moth-eaten rug no one thinks about any more or has any use for.” Tove Ditlevsen, CHILDHOOD
“For there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of existence.” George Eliot, FELIX HOLT
“It was as if a long-expected letter, with a black seal, had come at last.” Reading the final chapters of George Eliot’s FELIX HOLT, in which long-guarded secrets explode into view.
“Temper and selfish insensibility will defeat excellent gifts — will make a sensible person shout when shouting is out of place, and will make a polished man rude when his polish might be of eminent use to him.” George Eliot, FELIX HOLT
“I remember most things a little too well. You had better say at once what is your object in recalling them.”
With her discarded husband merry in his dotage, the steely Mrs Transome wrestles in FELIX HOLT with past crimes and their perilous legacies.
The physiology of aristocratic regard in FELIX HOLT: “Mrs. Transome hardly noticed Mr. Lyon, not from studied haughtiness, but from sheer mental inability to consider him — as a person ignorant of natural history is unable to consider a freshwater polyp otherwise than as a sort of animated weed.”
“I prefer going shares with the unlucky,” declares George Eliot’s uncompromising FELIX HOLT. “I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labor and common burden of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and scramble for money and position.”
Difficult choice. “Orlando” goes so wonderfully, and wittily, back in time. But “A Voyage” disorientingly explores the extremes of biology and identity.
“It is a lucky eel that escapes skinning. The best happiness I shall ever know will be to escape the worst misery” — the regal Mrs. Transome, whose diligent plots come to naught, in George Eliot’s FELIX HOLT
“Here was a secret; and secrets were often a source of profit of that agreeable kind which involved little labor.” The “somewhat shattered man of pleasure” Maurice Christian (née Scaddon) in Eliot’s FELIX HOLT seeks to retrieve his fortunes by exploiting the secrets of others.
The scheming ‘Courier’ Maurice Christian in Eliot’s FELIX HOLT: “Having early exhausted the more impulsive delights of life, he had become a sober calculator . . . for a man who had long ago run through his own money, servitude in a great family was the best kind of retirement.”
I’m pretty locked-in. Her characters are very well-rounded, especially the women; full of complications and contradictions. Felix Holt himself has been largely off-stage and looming — midway through, I’m not yet sure what the plot holds in store for him!
“Her life was a heap of fragments, and so were her thoughts; some great energy was needed to bind them together.” The sybaritic Esther Lyon, whose modest means are out of sync with her refined desires, in George Eliot’s FELIX HOLT
“For years there had been a deep silence about the past between them; on her side, because she remembered; on his side because he more and more forgot.” In Eliot’s FELIX HOLT, a sharp grievance submerged in surface amity.
“Until you are a woman, we will only think of your mother; when you are about to be married and leave me we will speak of her; but, without a great command laid upon me, I cannot pierce my heart by speaking of that which was and is not.” A widowed, still grieving father in Eliot’s FELIX HOLT
Reading George Eliot’s FELIX HOLT, encountered the jocular rural term “tithe pig,” referencing the tenth piglet in a litter, raised somewhat reluctantly as a contribution toward the upkeep of the local minister and his family.
Trump is seeking to pay for his new $1.5 trillion military budget by cutting the following: $510 million - Grants for farmers and agricultural research $82 million - Loans for rural small businesses (Fully eliminated) $61 million - Support for farmers and food markets (Fully eliminated) $240 million - School meals and food education for children abroad (Fully eliminated) $659 million - Community building grants $47 million - Support for minority-owned businesses (Fully eliminated) $449 million - Economic development grants for communities $1.6 billion - Weather forecasting, fisheries, and coastal protection (NOAA) $993 million - Scientific research and technology standards
$150 million - Support for American exports and trade $2.2 billion - Broadband and internet access programs $8.5 billion - Funding for public schools $1.5 billion - Vocational training and adult education (Fully eliminated) $2.7 billion - College access and higher education support $15.2 billion - Roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects $1.1 billion - Home energy efficiency and clean energy programs (Fully eliminated) $1.1 billion - Scientific research funding $386 million - Environmental cleanup programs $150 million - Cutting-edge clean energy research $4 billion - Help paying home heating and cooling bills for low-income families (Fully eliminated) $768 million - Refugee resettlement assistance $819 million - Care and shelter for migrant children $775 million - Local anti-poverty programs (Fully eliminated)
$5 billion - Public health programs, mental health services, and disease prevention $5 billion - Medical research (NIH) $129 million - Healthcare quality and safety research $356 million - Emergency preparedness and disaster response $1.3 billion - FEMA community disaster preparedness grants $707 million - Cybersecurity protection for critical infrastructure $52 million - Airport and transportation security $40 million - Protection against chemical and biological weapons threats $53 million - Funding for homeland security operations $3.3 billion - Community development block grants for local neighborhoods (Fully eliminated) $1.3 billion - Affordable housing construction grants (Fully eliminated) $393 million - Programs to reduce homelessness $529 million - Housing assistance for people living with HIV/AIDS (Fully eliminated)
$489 million - Housing and services for Native American communities $50 million - Grants to help communities build more housing (Fully eliminated) $60 million - Enforcement of fair housing and anti-discrimination laws $58 million - Homebuyer and renter counseling services (Fully eliminated) $45 million - Renewable energy development programs (Fully eliminated) $1.7 billion - Grants for local law enforcement and public safety $20 million - Civil rights mediation and legal access programs (Fully eliminated) $1.6 billion - Job training for at-risk youth (Fully eliminated) $395 million - Jobs program for low-income seniors (Fully eliminated) $234 million - Worker safety and labor protection programs $101 million - Enforcement of equal pay and workplace anti-discrimination laws
It’s a death cult.
“The Song of Other Things” is a poem
made from disambiguation statements posted at the beginning of Wikipedia articles -> thebaffler.com/poems/excerp... @marjeec.bsky.social shared this with me and it really shows she gets me. Always up for contemporary Borgesian vibes.
This is a great essay on academic publishing... I shared it with my colleagues at Minnesota and encouraged everyone to read it.
“History has a stutter
It says w..w..w..watch out!”
Sympathy for the Mekons (1987)
A WIRED investigation has identified multiple members of the paramilitary units behind some of the most egregious immigration enforcement actions of the last year. from @awinston.bsky.social and @regret.bsky.social
I’m also a little gobsmacked; it is the book just before “Middlemarch.” I’ve had a set of Eliot waiting for me to finish other reading projects (Hardy, Scott, Zola) and am beginning to suspect it is going to be like finding a chest of gold bars in the cellar.
“It was not so well for a lawyer to be overhonest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.” George Eliot, FELIX HOLT