Patrick O'Dowd.com - A Bastion of, Et Cetera

Mr. Trump’s coalition comprised not just staunchly conservative Republicans in the South and West. They were joined by millions of voters in the onetime heartlands of 20th-century liberal populism — the Upper and Lower Midwest — where white Americans without a college degree voted decisively to reject the more diverse, educated and cosmopolitan Democratic Party of the 21st century, making Republicans the country’s dominant political party at every level of government. But Mr. Trump also won over millions of voters who had once flocked to President Obama’s promise of hope and change, and who on Tuesday saw in Mr. Trump their best chance to dampen the most painful blows of globalization and trade, to fight special interests, and to be heard and protected. Twelve percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters approved of Mr. Obama, according to the exit polls.

Fitzgerald is less a natural and more a “made” writer than he allowed himself to seem. He had a first rush of fame with “This Side of Paradise,” a bad book buoyed up by its time, and a probing and uncertain rise into mature artistry with two good, troubled books, “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night.” Then, having fallen apart, he arrived at an articulate vision of what had gone wrong, and, with “The Crack-Up,” helped invent a genre: the addiction confession, which became a strong form of American writing in the second half of the twentieth century. “The Crack-Up” is hanging over the shoulder not just of the confessional poets but of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “A Fan’s Notes” and, for that matter, “Eat, Pray, Love.” He flourishes in fragments, in confessional bursts, in fable-minded stories, and in beautiful, isolated pages that pack in as much of the American scene as haiku do of the Japanese one.

In this, as in so many other parts of contemporary politics, members of the self-identified center are in some important sense unable to accept opposition. Through smarm, they have cut themselves off from the language of actual dispute. An entire political agenda—privatization of government services, aggressive policing, charter schooling, cuts in Social Security—has been packaged as apolitical, a reasonable consensus about necessity. Those who oppose the agenda are "interest groups," whose selfish greed makes them unable to see reason, or "ideologues." Those who promote it are disinterested and nonideological. There is no reason for the latter to even engage the former. In smarm is power. ... Smarm, on the other hand, is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says "Don't Be Evil," rather than making sure it does not do evil. ... The fear that keeps the smarmers tossing on their bullshit-stuffed mattresses on the beds of bullshit they would have us all sleep in—is this: We are exactly the same size as you are. Everybody is.

When I was in Australia last week, I dreamed about my old red bicycle that I hadn’t thought about in years. It was a clunky one-speed bike I’d bought off a senior sorority girl when I was a freshman. I went to college in California and the bike was my only form of transportation; I didn’t have a driver’s license and I didn’t really care. In my mind, the bike gave me a certain freedom that the slaves to the car didn’t have. Once, although everyone said I was crazy, I biked to San Francisco. And when on Friday nights my friends all piled into someone’s Honda to head to dinner in Palo Alto, I made my way there alone on my bike, gliding past the palm trees on Palm Drive that never got less exotic. The bike moved so much more slowly than everyone else’s wheels but to me it was my Batmobile: I controlled the motion and speed; I arrived and left on my own time; I set my own rhythms.

Valve Pulls an Android

Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason...

In America, now, oblivion, literary failure, obscurity, neglect — all the great moments of artistic tragedy and misunderstanding — still occur, but the natural conditions for the occurrence are in a curious state of camouflage, like those decorating ideas in which wood is painted to look like paper and paper to look like wood.

Honoré de Balzac is said to have consumed the equivalent of fifty cups of coffee a day at his peak. He did not drink coffee, though—he pulverized coffee beans into a fine dust and ingested the dry powder on an empty stomach. He described the approach as “horrible, rather brutal,” to be tried only by men of “excessive vigor.” He documented the effects of the process in his 1839 essay “Traité des Excitants Modernes” (“Treatise on Modern Stimulants”): “Sparks shoot all the way up to the brain” while “ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.”

I can’t decide: Is it brilliantly tasteless? Or just plain tasteless? A cheap stunt? A tour de force? The worst song I’ve ever heard? The best? What other musician makes you ask such questions?