I misread the final comment as referring to Roger Sterling and it still makes perfect sense.

Getting after it!!!

a man is standing in front of a crowd with his arms outstretched and a sign that says fine behind him . ALT: a man is standing in front of a crowd with his arms outstretched and a sign that says fine behind him .

That Al Finney Scrooge tho.

I, I, uh, I thought, right, that, uh, I thought conservatives were against, you know, teen pregnancies.

Also, he's just mad that the pope can actually claim that God elected him.

I thought mixing sports and politics was bad. Baseball takes long enough as it is.

And article eleven is under review.

35,000 words since December.

I just want the bad attitude to be palpable.

Is this academic decorum?

I thought we just called that Grok.

KINBOTE, your AI companion that hallucinates and interpolates new content into an already unstable text form.

In my defense, I’m describing what Nabokov is getting after in one part of this novel. In his defense, this is very funny.

“It may be described as the difference between those who are paid to think and those who are paid to follow orders.” Is this decorum?

I wrote my first article on this novel in very early 2023. Things felt close to home then. But now, fuck this place.

Maintaining decorum while writing on Nabokov’s Bend Sinister in this moment is less than easy. It’s a great political novel about “dim brained police brutality.” The transformation of religious philosophy into state doctrine. State-abducted citizen children who die in prison.

Do you know how many people will convert to Catholicism if Bob excommunicates Vance?

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

Look I’m not saying it would be funny if in response to the Avignon papacy reference we were to discover that the Vatican had nukes. But I am saying that it wouldn’t not be funny.

I may finish a draft of book two before finishing the revisions to book one 🙃

Our local church had on Easter setup an entire table dedicated to separating all our trash into the appropriate receptacles. Great. As a microcosm, kind of. Even on a city-level, it does nothing. I’m sure the ladies felt great and empowered by it. But its perceived impact is based on nothing.

Existentially, sure, it’s helpful. On a global scale you’re doing nothing. But it’s valuable as a microcosm, so long as you know you’re doing microcosmic work. Coca-Cola, to name one of the biggest non-nation offenders, would need to cease to exist in order for even a dent to be made.

My partner worked in the international green recycling space for awhile and let me tell you that your local communities’ efforts to reduce waste through recycling are about as effective as trying to damage a Ferrari by not keying it.

Well. I mean, if we’re Kristeva then it is intertextuality, but, to paraphrase Chesterton: we don’t have to be Kristeva, thankfully.

Macbeth is a once in history trick in literature. Like the ending of “The Vane Sisters.” Doing it again, or resetting it in another context, isn’t intertextuality, it’s copy-paste.

If in “Something Very Bad is Going to Happen” the twist falls on her being a C-section baby, à la Macbeth, I will be very disappointed. I appreciate the effort, but do better.

a man wearing a suit and tie is making a funny face . ALT: a man wearing a suit and tie is making a funny face .

Legit these three things may be my platform. The best part is you know the Orange Man “goes to Costa Rica” sooner.

Okay but like these things are totally reasonable. Do you know how many MAGAs we would lose for mandatory minimum sentences for people who rake up two parking spots with one car?

How fun is it, you ask? 22,000 words fun.

So I have this really fun article forthcoming that explores exactly this point Lonergan makes, except the issue is how are we to make sense of belief and religion *in literature* given that also in literature there is no data on God (Lonergan) and there is no data also on religion (Smith).