Links for June 4th
The MAGA establishment, inflation and the fed, When Harry Met Sally, baseball players and cologne, Elif Batuman's (great!) Either/Or
Hope you’ve had a smooth week.
Links
This is a very astute short piece from Bill Kristol about the way political “establishments” form and the way one era shifts into another, specially around the idea of a fading Trump.
They’re fixing a very large and old church organ in New York, and it’s really interesting how complex a task that is, as it turns out.
If you, theoretically, did not understand what the Fed is trying to do with inflation vs. a recession, you might find this episode of Joe Weisenthal’s podcast really informative, as I did.
Here’s a great thread of someone watching When Harry Met Sally for the first time.
Here’s a highly entertaining story about baseball players:
“I’m a catcher so I sweat a lot,” Pérez said, pointing to all his gear. “So a little perfume helps. The umpires say, ‘Oh Salvy, you smell good.’ I say: ‘Thank you. Give me some strikes.’”
Light book commentary
There are few books written in the last… I don’t know… that I enjoyed as much as Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, which concerns the travails of a Harvard freshman in 1996, the titular idiot, the kind of narrator who refuses club drugs because, “if I messed up my brain, what else did I have?” The book fits squarely into my favorite genre “low-stakes existential crisis that’s funny” (other hits in that oeuvre: Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South, and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim). Anyway, it could have gone another 300 pages and I would have read it, and good news: The sequel — newly published Either/Or — picks up right where the first book* left off and goes on for 300 pages.
*Note: If this interests you at all, I would probably read The Idiot first.
What really makes these books work (imo): They operate in an ongoing episodic structure, and within most of them, at least one sentence twists in either an unexpected direction or loops back to sort of thematic completion. The writing is just so crisp and precise at times, where the smallest little comma and phrase just pops. So you get tossed off stuff like this:
I recognized this mania for referrals from people our parents’ age: the way they thought the most difficult problems could only be solved by special insider information that you had coaxed out of some guy with a name like Chuck.
Or in a longer example: In the last part of the book, narrator Selin visits Turkey and her grandmother’s house; the narrator’s divorced parents long ago immigrated to the United States, where they’re doctors but not especially wealthy. One member of the grandmother’s household help is treated warmly, like family. The other is treated like this:
My grandmother ordered Berrak around without saying please or thank you, like she was always already annoyed at her. Why was Berrak viewed with skepticism? It might have been because of her political views, which she shared with the doorman, who was a Marxist, and also religious — not privately, like my grandmother, but in a way that was critical of secularism and of the United States.
On the other hand, it could have been less about politics than about her tendency to say unpleasant things. Once, Berrak had spoken in my mother’s presence of ‘the kind of woman who has gotten to be fifty years old but doesn’t own any property.’
‘Isn’t it kind of funny that she’s a Marxist, but despises people who don’t…own property?’ I asked.
‘It’s very funny,’ my mother said, not laughing at all.
The structure of this is sort of interesting if you really look closely at it. Obviously, she knows that the reason for the disfavor here is that the woman is annoying and resentful of the family, but it’s sort of set up set-spike with the consideration of her politics, that then pulls through the politics to setup this punchline, where the not-really-needed modification “not laughing at all,” really puts someone’s peeved mother in view.
Anyway: This may or may not make you laugh here, but because the book is just relentlessly organized in this structure, once you get rolling reading it, if you are like me, you’ll be like actively laughing (and/or moved) at the extreme economy of words to impact. Either/Or, I enjoyed it!
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.