Category Archives: writing

A Few words about Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel was a Jewish writer from Odessa, born in 1894, not terribly far from where my mother’s people come from.  My grandparents were five or six years younger than him.   A kind of prodigy who wrote fluently in French as well as in Russian, and a great admirer of Guy de Maupassant, he was told by Maxim Gorky, to whom he submitted his precocious work, that he had talent but nothing to say yet.  Gorky told him to go live and come back when he had something to write about.   

Babel joined a group of Bolshevik Cossacks who rode into my grandparents’ neighborhood of the Ukraine during the second bloody phase of the Russian Revolution. These Red Cossacks battled the White Cossacks for control of the Ukraine and Poland.  Their savage, idealistic battle for human freedom won the hearts and minds of teenagers like my grandmother.  

Babel’s stories of this bloody campaign, and his life as a bookish urban Jew riding with rough horseman who lived by a brutal code, collected as Red Cavalry, are incomparable.   He wrote in an extremely compressed way, telling these merciless, human stories with an amazing, sometimes terrifying economy.   His characters spoke a dialect I immediately recognized, though I didn’t know from where.  It was my grandparents’ language, I realized years after they died.  (see this, if you would like more details)

He became a hero in the Soviet Union after the publication of the Red Cavalry collection — though the brutally honest stories also contained the seeds of his undoing.  Lenin died, Stalin seized power, Trotsky fled.   With Stalin, a paranoid mass murdering maniac in charge, the dream of the Revolution to spread equality and liberate the workers of the world from their oppression melted into a peculiarly Russian form of totalitarianism.

Under Stalin  Socialist Realism, a style flattering to the State, was required.  Babel continued to write but published little, tried not to say anything that might get himself killed, had chances to flee, didn’t get out of the Soviet Union in time.   Was eventually arrested by Stalin, held in an infamous hellhole, given a quick trial in a tiny room with no windows, and no witnesses.  He was expected to sign a confession that he was a spy, a Trotskyist terrorist and a traitor to the revolution.  

He asked to be allowed to finish his work. That was apparently the last thing he said.  He was taken out and shot in a courtyard a few months before Hitler ‘s armies invaded the Soviet Union.   He was one of millions quietly done in by the smiling maniac with the big mustache who many knew as Uncle Joe, America’s ferocious, indispensable ally in the war against Hitler.  

A reviewer of his works offers these bits of grim, colorful detail:

Babel was shot by firing squad in the Lubyanka, in 1940. His immense popularity in Russia did not save him; and besides, it had been most unwise of him to conduct a long-standing affair with the wife of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov.

There was supposed to have been a trunk of Babel’s writings, hidden by his friends, a trove of his writings that were never published.   It’s not clear if any of these pages were ever found.   I know the trunk went the way of my mother’s blue, leather-bound poetry notebook I recall seeing as a child.  A fucking tragedy every way you turn it.

I wrote the following as a footnote to the previous post.  It seemed a waste to leave it as a footnote about a writer I love, an inspirational writer you may never have heard of, so here you go, those of you who may be unfamiliar with this genius’s work.

I am a great admirer of Isaac Babel’s writing.  I put Babel’s writing in a class with Sam Cooke’s singing, Django’s guitar playing, Meryl Streep’s acting.  I read Babel in English, of course, I know and love the 1955 translation (long out of print) by Walter Morison.    

I was once  told by a Russian poet that Isaac Babel’s Russian is “untranslatable”.   I have always loved the Walter Morison translations, which this Russian poet told me captured Babel’s Russian surprisingly well.   When I see other translations I am often struck by their clumsiness, the way they are nothing like the Babel I love.  

Here is an excellent discussion, leavened by wryness, of the challenges of translating Babel’s Russian into English.   I tip my cap to this writer, well done!   

Here is the first article on the challenge of translating Babel I found, which struck me as great at the time.   I thought it contained a section of Morison’s masterful rendering of Babel’s Guy de Maupassant  (though the notes in the book I love apparently attributed the translation to Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski).   It appears the author of the article linked above thought he was up to the challenge of improving this flowing translation.   I say no, but, alas, am too lazy to rewrite the whole piece.  To cut straight to the immortal passages in the beautiful translation I first read, skip to the last paragraphs of this post.  Scroll to the double space above “Here, sorry about that.”

Here is Babel’s wonderful, laconic description of translating, of writing.   This is possibly the best short description ever written about what we do when wrestling our thoughts into the best possible language  (it comes after the other translator’s introduction of the story for context) (emphasis mine):

Babel himself was a translator from French and Yiddish. One of his best-known stories, “Guy de Maupassant,” is ostensibly about translation. Its narrator, a fictional Babel, has been hired by Raisa Berndersky, a rich Jewish Petersburg society wife, to help her with her attempts at translating Maupassant:

In her translation there was no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing phrases with their drawn-out breath of passion. Mrs. Bendersky’s writing was tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian back in the day. I took the manuscript home with me…and spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation (*). The work was not as bad as it sounds. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You need to turn it once, but not twice. In the morning, I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raïsa wasn’t lying when she told me of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless, her hands clasped as I read it to her: these satin hands melted to the floor, her forehead went pale, and the lace between her bound breasts strained and trembled. “How did you do that?” So then I started talking about style, about an army of words, an army in which all manner of weapons come into play. No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right. She listened, her head bowed, her painted lips parted. A black light glowed in her lacquered hair, smoothly pressed and parted. Her legs, with their strong tender calves, were bathed in stockings and splayed wide on the carpet.

No, wait just a minute.  This is not Morison’s translation, (or Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski’s) you treacherous fellow you.  I get it now, you think you have improved on the “Morison” translation, made it more faithful to Babel’s writing, to the actual Russian words he chose.  You haven’t, and I know this even though I don’t know a word of Russian.  It is in the flow, the music of the language, the rhythm.  Morison, the year before I was born, translated the phrase you style “hacking a path through somebody else’s translation” as “hacking my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose” as far as I recall, I don’t have the tattered out-of-print paperback with me here at the farm.  But compare those two phrases.  Why would Babel have written the dry first phrase when the second is so full of flavor? 

Now I see many small brutalities, inflicted no doubt, and without a sense of irony (especially considering the story itself, the passage about the subtle art of translation!) in the interest of making the translation more accurate, more tediously correct, if I may borrow your phrase for Raisa  Bendersky’s stilted, painstaking, tuneless translation.   I know that translation is a fine art, a very difficult art, no doubt, a kind of intoxicating dance (when working with something like Babel’s uniquely delicious prose).  But sometimes you simply need to leave a fine translation alone.

“How did you do that?” with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible, turn of the warm lever, is inferior, and far less immediate, than Morison’s/Rosenthal’s & Soski’s breathless “How did you do it?”.

And fuck, the last line of the story, which made my young spine tingle and filled me with a longing to some day write a line like that, has been changed too!  And not for the better, it ends the transcendent story rather flatly.  It is rendered:

My heart felt tight.  I was brushed by a premonition of the truth.

Nothing like the icy fingers grasping his heart as he has a premonition .. wait, I have found the original line, on-line:

My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.

Another great line, butchered also, damn it, made clumsy and clunky, along with the bit about needing to turn the lever once, not twice.  The proof, if it was needed, that some phrases don’t need the lever turned at all.  You took this:

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

and believe you’ve improved it, with only one turn of the lever, to this:  

No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right.

Dunce!

Goddamn it, you fucker.  Might be more accurate as a strict translation from the Russian, maybe the Russian word for “cold” is in there, “pierce” may be closer to the Russian than its close synonym “stab”, but for god’s sake, read the two lines in English.

 

Here, sorry about that.  I mentioned I don’t have my moth-eaten copy of Babel with me.  Read this, from the original translation, I found it in an old email I sent a friend in 2014. Observe the way it flows, without a word wasted:

I took the manuscript with me, and in Kazantsev’s attic, among my sleeping friends, spent the night cutting my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose.  It was not such dull work as it might seem.  A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist.  The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

Next morning I took back the corrected manuscript.  Raisa wasn’t lying when she told me that Maupassant was her sole passion.  She sat motionless, her hands clasped, as I read it to her. Her satin hands drooped to the floor, her forehead paled, and the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved.

“How did you do it?”

I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play.  No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.   She listened with her head down and her painted lips half open.  In her hair, pressed smooth, divided by a parting and looking like patent leather, shone a dark gleam.  Her legs in tight-fitting stockings, with their strong, soft calves, were planted wide apart on the carpet.

The maid, glancing to the side with her petrified wanton eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray. 

Listening to an Audio Book

An audiobook of an excellent writer’s work, read by an expressive, intelligent reader is a wonderful thing.   The audiobook of Eichmann in Jerusalem, read by the great Wanda McCaddon, is a fantastic aural read.  I’d say Wanda’s reading is like a great translation of the original  [1].  It is certainly “value added” and I’m sure Hannah Arendt would agree. 

Listening to an audiobook requires a certain concentration, which can be improved with practice.  Listening carefully is not something most people ever practice, we’re in a hurry, yo, get to the fucking point, did you hear… oh, sorry, were you still not getting to the point?  I heard… wait, I thought you were done, were going to say the same thing you always say, are we still talking about that? —  etc.

Wanda McCaddon read a line by Hannah Arendt that caused me to make a note to find the quote in Chapter IX of Eichmann in Jerusalem.  It seemed to explain a lot.   Why did the other countries of the world not help the Jews during the mass murder that went on for several years?   Most of them did little or nothing to help (outside of Denmark) and looking back after most of one’s family has been murdered, like an Armenian after the slaughter by the Turks, it’s natural to feel betrayed, ask ‘what the fuck?’  

Arendt writes (and it turns out to be merely a passing parenthetical), leaving aside the prevalent (though not Nazi level) anti-Semitism in Europe:

(As though those tightly organized European nation-states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes– penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country!)

How much light does this short observation shed on the worldwide refugee crisis the world is in the middle of today?

The United States refuels Saudi bombers in the air over Yemen so that our monarchist radical Islamic fundamentalist allies can continue bombing the towns and cities below.  The Saudi planes and the bombs are made in the USA.  We participate directly in creating the humanitarian crisis that has caused untold numbers of Yemeni civilians to flee their war-torn, cholera plagued country.   When they flee the war that we are daily helping Saudi Arabia wage we make a new law: NO YEMENIS!!!  None, no reason needs to be given, the great Oz has spoken.

The Koch brother’s boy, current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, releases an official State Department boast on International Refugee Day about how America has always been the world’s greatest supporter of those fleeing war and oppression.  He mentions a dollar amount we’ve given, the rough equivalent of a dime, or maybe three cents, and says no other country has done more since the end of World War Two.

A few days later a highly partisan 5-4 Supreme Court vote comes down, along strict party lines, upholding President Turd’s Muslim Ban, er…”travel ban”.  Under no circumstances (unless perhaps they are rich and doing business with one of the president’s businesses) will anyone from Yemen or several other Muslim countries be allowed to come to the United States.

USA!   USA!!!!!

 

[1]   I am a great admirer of Isaac Babel’s writing.  I put Babel’s writing in a class with Sam Cooke’s singing, Django’s guitar playing, Meryl Streep’s acting.  I read Babel in English, of course, I know and love the 1955 translation (long out of print) by Walter Morison.    

I was once  told by a Russian poet that Isaac Babel’s Russian is “untranslatable”.   I have always loved the Walter Morison translations, which this Russian poet told me captured Babel’s Russian surprisingly well.   When I see other translations I am often struck by their clumsiness, the way they are nothing like the Babel I love.  

Here is an excellent discussion, leavened by wryness, of the challenges of translating Babel’s Russian into English.   I tip my cap to this writer, well done!   

Here is the first article on the challenge of translating Babel I found, which struck me as great at the time.   I thought it contained a section of Morison’s masterful rendering of Babel’s Guy de Maupassant  (though the notes in the book I love apparently attributed the translation to Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski)   It appears the author of the article linked above thought he was up to the challenge of improving this flowing translation.   I say no, but, alas, am too lazy to rewrite the whole piece.  To cut straight to the immortal passages in the beautiful translation I first read, skip to the last paragraphs of this post.  Scroll to the double space above “Here, sorry about that.”

Isaac Babel deserves his own post (and now, a few hours later, he has it), but here is Babel’s wonderful, laconic description of translating, of writing.   This is possibly the best short description ever written about what we do when wrestling our thoughts into the best possible language  (it comes after the other translator’s introduction of the story for context) (emphasis mine):   

Babel himself was a translator from French and Yiddish. One of his best-known stories, “Guy de Maupassant,” is ostensibly about translation. Its narrator, a fictional Babel, has been hired by Raisa Berndersky, a rich Jewish Petersburg society wife, to help her with her attempts at translating Maupassant:

In her translation there was no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing phrases with their drawn-out breath of passion. Mrs. Bendersky’s writing was tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian back in the day. I took the manuscript home with me…and spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation (*). The work was not as bad as it sounds. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You need to turn it once, but not twice. In the morning, I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raïsa wasn’t lying when she told me of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless, her hands clasped as I read it to her: these satin hands melted to the floor, her forehead went pale, and the lace between her bound breasts strained and trembled. “How did you do that?” So then I started talking about style, about an army of words, an army in which all manner of weapons come into play. No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right. She listened, her head bowed, her painted lips parted. A black light glowed in her lacquered hair, smoothly pressed and parted. Her legs, with their strong tender calves, were bathed in stockings and splayed wide on the carpet.

No, wait just a minute.  This is not Morison’s translation, (or Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski’s) you treacherous fellow you.  I get it now, you think you have improved on the “Morison” translation, made it more faithful to Babel’s writing, to the actual Russian words he chose.  You haven’t, and I know this even though I don’t know a word of Russian.  It is in the flow, the music of the language, the rhythm.  Morison, the year before I was born, translated the phrase you style “hacking a path through somebody else’s translation” as “hacking my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose” as far as I recall, I don’t have the tattered out-of-print paperback with me here at the farm.  But compare those two phrases.  Why would Babel have written the dry first phrase when the second is so full of flavor? 

Now I see many small brutalities, inflicted no doubt, and without a sense of irony (especially considering the story itself, the passage about the subtle art of translation!) in the interest of making the translation more accurate, more tediously correct, if I may borrow your phrase for Raisa  Bendersky’s stilted, painstaking, tuneless translation.   I know that translation is a fine art, a very difficult art, no doubt, a kind of intoxicating dance (when working with something like Babel’s uniquely delicious prose).  But sometimes you simply need to leave a fine translation alone.

“How did you do that?” with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible, turn of the warm lever, is inferior, and far less immediate, than Morison’s/Rosenthal’s & Soski’s breathless “How did you do it?”.

And fuck, the last line of the story, which made my young spine tingle and filled me with a longing to some day write a line like that, has been changed too!  And not for the better, it ends the transcendent story rather flatly.  It is rendered:

My heart felt tight.  I was brushed by a premonition of the truth.

Nothing like the icy fingers grasping his heart as he has a premonition .. wait, I have found the original line, on-line:

My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.

Another great line, butchered also, damn it, made clumsy and clunky, along with the bit about needing to turn the lever once, not twice.  The proof, if it was needed, that some phrases don’t need the lever turned at all.  You took this:

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

and believe you’ve improved it, with only one turn of the lever, to this:  

No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right.

Dunce!

Goddamn it, you fucker.  Might be more accurate as a strict translation from the Russian, maybe the Russian word for “cold” is in there, “pierce” may be closer to the Russian than its close synonym “stab”, but for god’s sake, read the two lines in English.

 

Here, sorry about that.  I mentioned I don’t have my moth-eaten copy of Babel with me.  Read this, from the original translation, I found it in an old email I sent a friend in 2014. Observe the way it flows, without a word wasted:

I took the manuscript with me, and in Kazantsev’s attic, among my sleeping friends, spent the night cutting my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose.  It was not such dull work as it might seem.  A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist.  The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

Next morning I took back the corrected manuscript.  Raisa wasn’t lying when she told me that Maupassant was her sole passion.  She sat motionless, her hands clasped, as I read it to her. Her satin hands drooped to the floor, her forehead paled, and the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved.

“How did you do it?”

I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play.  No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.   She listened with her head down and her painted lips half open.  In her hair, pressed smooth, divided by a parting and looking like patent leather, shone a dark gleam.  Her legs in tight-fitting stockings, with their strong, soft calves, were planted wide apart on the carpet.

The maid, glancing to the side with her petrified wanton eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray. 

Personal vs. political

I am sitting alone, having my daily silent conversation, ostensibly with a reader, (with you, dear reader!) though one can pretty easily see that I do not write for a great number of readers. [1]   It doesn’t matter if you write for one person, as in a letter, or to every sentient reader on the earth (as many of us strive to write for) the process is the same.   It is a personal process and also a political process.

No less an authority on the subject than Adolf Hitler wrote, early in his life, that art is a bridge from the artist’s heart to the heart of another.  He later applied this same principle to the art of political propaganda.   Too bad the little shit was rejected from art school, his hissy temper tantrums at art critics and gallery owners without taste would have served the world much better than the ones he threw on the world stage, but that is another matter.   No idea why I am thinking about fucking Hitler right now. [2]  

I guess, to say, the exercise is essentially that —  building a bridge from the self to others outside of the self.   Writing clearly is the goal; making it easy for the reader to follow our guided tour through our thoughts, ideas and feelings.   These are three different things, thoughts: what goes through our minds as we ponder, ideas: conclusions we come to about the things we ponder, and feelings: our emotions as this is happening.   All three of these are important, essential really.  When we write we explain what we are thinking and feeling to ourselves, in the process of setting it out clearly to the imaginary reader.  

Kurt Vonnegut always wrote imagining his sister, who was a great reader, his ideal reader, reading the page.  If the joke would make her laugh, it was worth keeping in.  If the image would make her eyes grow moist, her nostrils flare slightly, the image stayed.   If she would roll her eyes, or not buy it, or find it pretentious or ridiculous, out it went.   His writing appealed to millions, appeals to this day, but he wrote every word, to hear him tell it, imagining his sister as his only reader.  Good enough, I’d say.  We write, on one level or another, to that imagined sensibility, the sensitive reader we’d love to be reading our words.

My mother was a great reader and I can often picture her reading a sentence or paragraph I’ve just written.   She had a great grasp of language, and a love of it, and a poetic imagination.   She didn’t mind something being just a little cartoonish, if it served to make the thing more clear, the feeling and colors more vivid, the conclusion that much more emphatic.

The dialogue we have when we are alone… I don’t think I could put a price on it.  In the previous post Hannah Arendt is quoted as believing:

The passion of being was in thinking. And that comes from that two-in-one dialogue in one’s head.  And for her, that was the beginning of moral life, that dialogue.  

Can I get a “hell yeah!”?   The world is vexing, often perplexing, the only quiet we often get, and the best chance to get any real perspective (if we are persistent and lucky, and disposed toward this exercise)  is sitting by ourselves, thinking through this kind of quiet inner dialogue.   All around us busy people are complaining:   “I don’t have time to think!”  “I don’t know whether to shit or wind my watch!”   “Who has the time?!!!!”  “It’s all too much!”    “I can’t watch the news, it fills me with dread and hatred!!!”

I am a man with the luxury of time, and I spend some of it each day doing this, having a silent chat with someone I’ve never met as I run everything by myself.

How do I make the time?   Admittedly I save a lot of time every day by doing virtually no cleaning.  I clean my kitchen sink regularly, and keep all decomposable food garbage in the freezer until I take it out, I clean my bathroom occasionally.   Outside of that, and a hump to the laundromat with a heavy bag every couple of weeks, I live in a chaos that would be embarrassing if photographed.  

I could see the horrified jurors:  “Look, ladies and gentlemen, if you have the stomach for it, at these photographs of the defendant’s living room…”   The prosecutor could rest his case after showing the shots of the jammed shelves, the overflowing tabletops, the collapsing piles of boxes, the carpet of papers covering everything, the tangled chaos on the floor, the cracked walls, ceilings and broken tile floors.   A jury of my actual peers would be a slovenly twelve indeed, but that is not the point.  I’m not competing for a spread in Better Homes and Gardens.

I also have the great luck not to be a covetous person, which saves time too.  A friend who plays guitar OK and has a couple of beautiful, expensive guitars– I say, God bless him!  Truly.  I’m not the envious type.  I don’t waste time or emotion measuring what I have against the acquisitions of other people.  I’m content to own what I need, to preserve the things I love– favorite pens, knives, musical instruments, to use things up, to wear the same shirt for a decade or more.   One of my favorite shirts is one my mother always liked, I wore it to visit her at the hospice the last day she had her eyes open.  It was the last shirt she saw me in, and she smiled to see it.   A colorful affair it is, purchased at Costco once upon a time.  My mother died eight years ago.  I wear the shirt now for special occasions, rarely mentioning the shirt’s connection to my mother’s death, how she smiled to see it one last time.

There is the personal, the things that matter most to us, the things we find most fascinating, compelling, irresistible.  These things vary greatly from one of us to the next.  The realm of the personal, though, is something we all share.  We all take certain things personally and we can all relate to exactly why that is.   If you can illuminate your personal passions three dimensionally enough you might draw somebody through that doorway, into a world they never appreciated before.  It’s like the old adage (and a wise one, too) that you take the professor, not the course.  You can sign up for the most interesting sounding course in the catalogue, only to find the juice and life sucked out of it by a cadaverous professor.  The flip-side is that you can take a course that appears less than marginally interesting in the course description that turns out to be fantastic, because the professor is brilliant and draws you into her love of the subject.

The personal, we are often reminded, is political, as the political is personal.  Take the average partisan voter, they take their politics very personally and their political views flow from the experiences of their personal lives.   If liberal they get exercised by the idea of racism, the state’s overbearing interference with a human right (abortion comes first to mind), the grotesquely uneven distribution of wealth and opportunity, the destruction of the natural earth by greedy corporations mining the last scraps of the world’s resources and poisoning everything.   If conservative they are pissed off at “political correctness”, the idea that every lazy poor person feels entitled to free food, free medical care, a low-cost place to stay, a cell phone, fancy sneakers, sickened at government interference with human rights– like the right not to be killed as a fetus for the convenience of an immoral pregnant woman– job killing regulations to save some endangered bird or rodent, on down the line.   These issues are litmus test left-right issues.  Abortion.   Poverty.   Catastrophic Climate Disruption.   Regulations.  Income inequality.

Also, all deeply personal issues.   This is where the rubber meets the road, as they say in that big cliche mill in the sky.   The successful politician makes a personal connection, as, say what you will about him, the current president has undoubtedly made among his supporters.   He speaks plainly to them, speaks the way they do, doesn’t worry if a bad word slips out, everyone uses a bad word sometimes.   Fuck those sons of bitches, you know what I’m saying?  Am I right?  Seriously, (a huge huzzah of approval) fuck those fucking losers.  We’re going to bomb the shit out of those motherfuckers!  You know what I’m saying?     His audience roars, they know exactly what he’s saying.  

He is a star because he speaks a language his audience takes very personally.   His opponent in the last election, whatever else we might say about her,  did not have the same gift, was not as able to make that personal connection, even as she was arguably more personable, certainly less abrasive, than our current attacker-in-chief.   Partisans will argue over which one was the bigger liar.  We must not forget, the last election was a close contest between the most hated and second most hated political personalities in America.

I have long believed, and do even now, that if people of good faith and good will sit down to solve the local version of world problems, there is much even political opposites would agree on.  The argument against this is the way “winning” politics is conducted in our intensely commercial society.   It was discovered at some point that negative campaigning wins elections, if you can get people to believe your opponent is a pedophile, for example– you have a huge advantage with the voters.  

Newt Gingrich and his friends made a science out of “wedge issues”, hammering on the emotional issues that divide us into opposing camps.   The Democratic party’s response was to try to make their tent big enough for everybody, by carefully not offending anyone.   Which in itself is kind of offensive to many, particularly if you adopt the worst ideas of your opponents in the name of “compromise” while engaging in the standard servile courtship of super-wealthy human and corporate donors.  

The Democrats’ inclusive approach was disparagingly branded “identity politics” as though the politics of the conservative is not also based on identity, and carved into the other side of the same stone.   On and on.  Blue hat, red hat.   Blue asshole, red asshole.  Brands, mere brands in a culture raised on brand loyalty, steeped in the consciousness of brands, understanding quality only through brand names.

What is my brand?   Not having a brand.   (see footnote 1)

“Not much of a goddamned brand.   Excellent brand for a loser, though, I have to give you that.”

The tone of the conversation in my head is calm, as honest as I can make it, with a bias toward trying to be fair.   If we are fair when we analyze a problem, the odds are better we’ll come to reasonable ideas about how to solve it, or at least make it better.   The alternative is an eternal contest between sullen, immovable two year-olds.

The trouble with voting for a brand, being a partisan, is that very often no thought at all goes into taking rigid positions that are always presented as either/or.   Spokesmen for our self-identified brand will tell us what side to take on any given issue, assuring us that there are only two sides to any issue, an imbecilic position few bother to question.   Good people don’t kill fetuses vs. good people don’t force fourteen year-old rape victims to carry the rapist’s baby for nine months and give birth to it.   There are arguments on both sides, I suppose, and a world of nuance between these two absolute views but the ones that begin “God said”… well, enough said, I think.  

I say believe in God as deeply as you like, and may the good, merciful things you do multiply as your faith deepens.   Personally, I have no problem with the righteous of any religion, until they come with swords, because God told them… you know.

Meantime, the conversation continues, as all good conversations should.

 

[1]  When I get a “like” I generally try to return the favor and like something on the liker’s site.  I read something I like and click like, and am often number 399 liking that post.   A big post for likes, in my case, is four or five.

I shit you not, I got a couple of likes on this very post today, went to the blahgs, read something I liked and clicked “like”.  Czech it out, eerie, crazy:

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[2] Not a day goes by… I had a great experience recently, a nervous, chatty guy I was waiting for a medical procedure with (by pure chance, never met him before), as we went up in the elevator, asking me what my ancestry was.   I assumed he was asking if I was Jewish, so I told him where my people came from.  “You’re a Jew?   Jesus Christ,” he said, which I repeated with a big smile.  I love that kind of shit.  Only tangentially related to not a day going by without some thought of Hitler, this guy certainly didn’t strike me as an anti-Semite, but… Jesus Christ!   That was great.

A Relatively Poor Day

How we are feeling at any given moment is relative, to our own feelings at other times and to the way anyone else feels in a given moment on a given day.  I wouldn’t trade a moment of my life for even the happiest one of anybody else’s, but that’s just me.  That said, I passed a sad, low energy day today.   It was not only stumbling on the fezbook page of my old friend’s widow (she was the suggested friend of a friend I’d gone to read something by), seeing the beaming face of my dead friend in a couple of photos I’d never seen, and the one where, flanked by his daughters, his head is an alarmingly white ball with his familiar face on it.  I didn’t immediately think of the image of our old mutual friend, after a visit with him not long before the end, stopping in on neighbors who were having dinner, and bursting into uncontrollable sobs.  That image hit me just now, though it must have been lurking since I saw those happy moments in the life of my old, dead friend.  

I’d woken two hours too early again today, no idea what’s up with that shit.  This time I emerged from a dream where I was two-timing two pretty, delightful young women who were both, in the manner of such dreams, quite crazy about me.  Complicating matters was that they lived in apartments directly next door to each other, so that I locked the door of one and unlocked the door of the other after the first one went to work and the other was about to arrive home.  The obvious question of how anyone could possibly be clever enough, duplicitous enough, enough of a psychopath (not to put too fine a point on it), to carry on this deception was a considerable one.   One, the newer of the two lovers (I was leaning toward choosing this girl, if things didn’t blow up completely before I could do so), was a singer, and I had a gig at a restaurant accompanying her on guitar, for decent pay, as I recall.   The other was very cool too, and I’d known her longer, and we were very compatible and laughed a lot together.   The sex with both of them was great.  Neither had any idea of the existence of the other, as I went from one to the other over the course of an increasingly disquieting dream.  In the end, I was awake, alone, on mysteriously short sleep.

Not long afterwards I was looking at the smiling face of my dead friend who’d died of  a rare cancer, a deadly soft tissue sarcoma,   The same one that killed Hugo Chavez, he told me after Chavez died.  He told me that shortly before he himself died.   I had a call from another old friend, a prostate cancer survivor, who is seeing his oncologist Wednesday about another unrelated cancer, some kind of soft tissue sarcoma. Fucking hell.   He was calling me for advice, his sisters are closing in trying to get the rest of the money their mother left them.  I told him to just give them their shares and tell them to shut the fuck up now.   His daughter, a survivor of sexual assault at age ten from her mom’s new boyfriend (a guy my friend has somehow managed not to murder)  is having nightmares.  The latest one involves her dad dying before she gets back from sleep-away camp.  In spite of it all, we had a few laughs, he promised to keep me posted on what he learns after his visit to the oncologist.

In the background today the Yankees came from behind to tie the game in Tampa, and then, on the first pitch in the bottom of the twelfth, boom! walk-off home run.  Yankees lose.   Judge O for 5.  I’d watched the last segments of a documentary on Netflix called The Staircase, which sets out what appears to have been a grave and vicious fifteen year miscarriage of justice, in twelve parts.   Well done, but the only doctor who would have ordered it for me today would have been Dr. Mengele, the notorious Nazi fuck.   To relax I went for a long walk and listened to a bit of Hannah Arendt’s insanely detailed The Origins of Totalitarianism, which I’d recommended to a friend as being on a par with Eichmann in Jerusalem,  but which I am having second thoughts about.

Returned from the stroll on aching knees, after several days doing the exercises the distracted young woman at the PT place showed me the other day, then didn’t bother to supervise as to form.   Which would have been impossible, since she was simultaneously working with two other patients with non-knee-related troubles, each behind a curtain of their own, but very close by.   My knees are killing me, as I wait for the ibuprofen– possibly deadly for my idiopathic kidney disease — to kick in.   Well, they are not really killing me, my knees, they’re more than usually sore.  I will live. That is the thing that is so easy to forget in this exciting world we all eventually must leave forever– for the time being, we will live. 

The miracle of it, and the tragedy, really.

Internet Service Provider Duopoly Millionaire Strikebreaker

I’ve got to write and post this quickly, my internet has been out all day so far, as it was most of yesterday, only winking back on a few minutes ago during a long call with Spectrum tech support. While on hold I learned, and passed on to Ron, the good-natured Spectrum rep, that Tom Rutledge, the great and important CEO of Spectrum’s parent company, a guy who made $98.5 million in 2016 when his outfit bought Time Warner Cable, is still refusing to negotiate with the technicians union, IBEW local No. 3, an outfit whose strike is in its second year.

Rutledge, in fairness to him and his principled refusal to negotiate with the lawfully constituted technicians’ union, is probably bitter at the vast drop in his income.  He made a mere $7,800,000 last year and his ungrateful technicians are bitching about giving up certain features of their health plan, retirement benefits and things like that.   It’s hard to blame Rutledge for being so intractable, unless you are the kind of person who is harsh to complete assholes.

Ron had no idea Spectrum technicians in New York were on strike, though he’d heard of vandalism in NYC.  I explained the difference between vandalism and acts of skilled sabotage by workers whose rights under the National Labor Relations Act seemed to be being violated.   I explained to him that in the old days workers who accepted bad pay to cross a picket line and break a strike were called bad names, including scabs, and that I was reluctant to let a strike breaking technician into my apartment to check a modem that doesn’t seem to be faulty, as it is currently working.  

Ron agreed the problem was not the modem, since it is getting a fine signal at the moment.   The problem could be in the “drop”, the box that splits off from the “node” for delivery into individual buildings.  The node serves 248 modems in my area, the drop might serve a dozen in my building.   There was no way for him to monitor activity on my “drop”, though only 10 of 248 modems on my node are currently offline.  If you are wondering why I don’t just switch to an ISP that is not so fucked up, I will tell you.

We have two ISPs in most of New York City, Spectrum (a branch of Charter, who bought the franchise from Time Warner Cable a few years back) and Verizon.  Both ISP giants provide substandard internet service, intermittent service, and, because the free competition we hear so much about only involves two giants in our free market, they are free to set whatever prices it pleases them to set for whatever service they see fit to provide.  I currently pay $50 a month for intermittent internet service from Spectrum, having grown tired of no service and repeated lies from Verizon.  Ron was somehow able to give me a double credit today for the hours last night into today that I had no service: a generous $3.33.

I have to contact the technicians’ union, IBEW local # 3 and get the latest on their strike against Spectrum, the internet provider with the handsomely compensated CEO, a chap who made over $100 million the last two years.  This wealthy titan will not negotiate with the union.  He does not believe in unions.  If he had his way, workers would not be paid at all. Think of how much more money he could make if all those wasted technician salaries, vacation days, health benefits, pension contributions were saved, clawed back, put into his tax-free investment portfolio!

I need to contact the IBEW and offer to help them publicize their strike.  They ran a great online ad a few months back, very compelling, but not a public word since.   Almost nobody knows about the status of the strike that strikebreaker CEO Tom Rutledge is doing his best to make go away.   I wonder how many are still on strike after more than a year, like Jewish children making a strong moral case to a Nazi. I want to support the union and I need the striking workers, if possible, to exempt my home from their sabotage of Spectrum’s never perfect, now never worse, service.

Spectrum told me yesterday that my modem is defective, that, for once, there is no outage in my area, on my node.   They will need to send scab technicians over to inspect it all, the modem, the interior connection, outside connectivity at the “drop”, issues relating to the entire node, etc. They gave me a generous $1.67 credit yesterday for a day without internet service (this outage must last, according to corporate policy, at least four consecutive hours to qualify for the refund). The modem I was assured yesterday must be broken, after hours of no service with no outages reported, is delivering a signal again now.   Ron assured me today it is very unlikely to be the modem.

Shades of the old runaround from Spectrum’s fellow duopolist ISP Verizon, who told me for months that there was a technical problem with my line and that they were working on it, that a technical team would contact me the following day. I was never contacted. The problem was not with my line, it was with the entire Verizon network, which was off-line for many months as they switched their network from copper wire to fiber. This required digging up streets, getting permits, burying fiberoptic cable, it took many months. A call to Verizon was the same bullshit, month after month. A complete lie.  The technical team will call you tomorrow, we have no idea why you have no service, now about that huge bill you keep refusing to pay…

If your only business is making profit, it would behoove you to lie if you might lose the bulk of your customers during the months they will have no service.  What self-respecting American business would admit something that would undoubtedly cause an exodus of customers?  Verizon billed me, month after month, for service I had not been receiving.  According to them, no refund was due until I paid in full.  They were demanding hundreds of dollars by the end.  Would it seem petty of me to call them Nazi motherfuckers?  Sure it would, they are just an American business trying to keep the lights on so that all Americans can enjoy a brighter day!

 

post-script:

The modern world, my friends, where every war must be fought by propagandists who specialize in branding, messaging and targeted marketing, sometimes brings us, just fucking bullshit.

Pull up the IBEW information on their long-running strike against Charter/Spectrum, and here you go:

check us out, brothers and sisters

You can read about the neo-liberal asshole NYS Governor’s battle with the mega-corporation, complete with mealy mouthed almost-threats and a hint at support for a striking union that is a key political support group.  We have to go to Crain’s, in May 2018, for any kind of update on this shit?

Crain’s article

Why I Write– George Orwell 1946

A beautifully written short essay that everyone who writes should read.  At one point Orwell lays out the four main reasons people write.   This one leaped out at me:

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Fancy that!

The essay, a quick and rewarding read, is here.

also HERE

 

 

Vocabulary word of the day: anodyne

I was, for many years, prone to writing any unfamiliar word I’d encounter on a bookmark (with the page number next to it) and immediately looking up its meaning in the dictionary.   Then I’d read the sentence armed with this new knowledge and understand exactly what the writer meant by using the previously obscure word. This excellent habit was instilled in me by some wonderful teachers.  I recall, in High School, taking the vocabulary sheets they distributed quite seriously.  Little else they endeavored to teach me in High School meant very much to me, but expanding the number of words I could use to express myself clearly always made sense.

Now, with Jeevsie here, constantly by our side on the ubiquitous internet we carry around with us in our pockets, it is very easy to instantly have any unfamiliar word defined for us.  So it was the other night, when, drawing some knives, relieved that my favorite pen was behaving properly after a few days of struggle with her, I suddenly, unaccountably, wrote the word ‘anodyne.’   

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After I wrote it (I recall now hearing it months ago from Noam Chomsky describing the ‘anodyne explanations’ we get for each of our most unjust practices) I immediately looked it up.  Which took about 1.2 seconds with our modern data retrieval capabilities.  What a handy little fucker of a word!

We prefer the anodyne to the difficult, without a doubt.  An anodyne explanation usually smooths us down, a difficult conversation often churns us up.  Take American slavery, for example.  One can say, with great conviction and moral certainty, that it was a grave national sin that has not been practiced here for 150 years.  Abolished forever a century and half ago, our Constitution amended to make it perpetually so.  Done and done.  Nice and anodyne, wouldn’t you say?

 I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like a little anodyne myself, once in a while.  And you know how hard it is for me to lie.

Who gets to tell the story?

The cliché that history is written by the victors, as a rule, is hard to dispute.  We have to be a little careful about oversimplifying the categories of winner and loser, though.   Take the history of the American Civil War.   A generation or two after it ended the daughters and granddaughters of the great families of the South, the wealthiest families, the “best” families, in the popular parlance, became very concerned with how history would remember their glorious families.    An influential school of historians arose, largely supported by these well-born gals, who told the story the way they preferred it: a glorious history of high principle and protection of an inferior race who became predictably savage when liberated from the protection of their former masters.    

It may also be said that this history, written in the late 19th – early 20th century when most of the Confederate monuments were being erected to the heroes of the violent rebellion against federal tyranny, gave a moral fig leaf to a new generation of American racial terrorists.   The history is only now being written of the long, bloody decades of lynching and intimidation that went along with this sanitized, glorified version of the antebellum south and the Civil War.   It became cool, and often politically smart, for glory-seeking white racists to become “knights” in the Ku Klux Klan, membership soared nationwide after World War One.  Nothing like a good old-fashioned beating, mutilation and death by torture to remind everybody of their places.  The lessons of this brutality, even as it was most often kept a local secret, were not lost on anyone.

Who gets to tell the story?  In American politics mass media pundits (even drug addled ones), with no background in anything but self-promotion, are more influential than our most well-read, well-spoken, deepest thinking scholars.  Put the scholar on one side, a defiant blowhard on the other side, and America gets to watch another egghead get put in his fucking place.   It is a kind of thought crime here, basing your thoughts on too many fucking facts.  Fuck you and the fucking facts you rode in on, asshole!  You think you’re better than me just because you’re smart, and devoted to knowledge, and actively seeking facts and something you claim is truth?  I got your truth right here…

 Who gets to tell the story, even in your family?  Put any spin on it you like, dismiss the version that makes you feel bad.   No need to ever feel bad, just write anything bad out of history.  See how simple it is?     Most people I know, like my highly intelligent, idealistic father, eventually give up after enough time banging their head against the imperatives of our frequently merciless world.

I wrote the book about my father.  Not yet a book, it is a collection of stories and conversations, evoking the times, conflicts and the complicated spirit of a gifted man who did not fully enjoy his gifts, who died full of regrets.  More regretful than angry, even at himself.  How’s that for a deathbed surprise, dad?   The lifetime of rage and denial yields to the reality that death is hours away, your thoughts became more and more focused on how you missed out on the most beautiful parts of the ride your gifts might have otherwise provided you.

 “Oh, give it up, Elie!” says the skeleton of my father.   “Better to go through the hundreds of pages you’ve already written, picking likely lottery winning passages, pasting them together into a scroll.   Your lifetime of rage and denial will end in your own terrible regrets, when death is closing in on you, that you never managed to sell your book, be interviewed by Terry Gross.  I hear your man Leonard Lopate got canned for some likely sexual impropriety or other, so you missed that boat.   Keep paddling, Elie, is all I’m saying.”  

Righty-oh, dad.   I remind myself, while I’m wondering about who gets to write the stories we all come to believe, that there are many ways to see a given thing, a given person.   Not to say that every point of view is equally valid, equally interesting, equally revealing.  Can we separate a devoted Nazi’s beliefs from his watercolors?  I mean, the guy may have been a supremely gifted watercolorist, a regular Winslow Homer, but he was a major fucking Nazi.  A Nazi, dude, those beautiful watercolors were painted by an officer in the SS.    Nazi watercolors, dude.   Ain’t dassum shit?

The best artist I ever knew, a few nights before she died, expressed this very clearly.  She had no truck with Nazis who were otherwise very artistic people.

Selections for Sheila

My second cousin once removed, Sheila, recently asked me to send her what I’ve written about my father.   Sheila was always treated to the best of this likable man, his irreverent wit, his intelligence on every subject of consequence, his charm, his idealism.   I told her I’d send her a link to the 1,200 pages I’ve written in my two and a third year wrestling match with this gigantic subject.    

Then I thought better of it, picturing her struggling helplessly in that dense jungle of unorganized prose, and began going through the unwieldy manuscript, making some selections, almost at random, to give her a picture of the whole project.  I saved a 53 page chunk as “Selections for Sheila”– served with the personal touch, don’t you know?

She wrote back to tell me she liked what she’s read so far, though much of it was painful to her.   She’d had only the most generalized idea of the darkness in his early life and no inkling of the dark side he often retreated to in the company of his wife and children, the overarching tragedy of his life.  

I’ll refer you back to that post a few days ago for my thoughts on writing, why, and how and what for.   Bukowski wrote a great poem about real writing that is hard to argue with.   It is not the praise of another reader that makes a piece of writing worth reading, it is the writing itself.  Writing with passion and care is its own reward, sickening as that also is to say in a world where so many empty, ill-considered words are churned out by people well-paid to churn the vomit out, often with the help of ghosts who do the real work of making popular, bankable idiots sound relatively intelligent.   That said, having a reader or two who gets what you’re trying to do, appreciates the work involved– priceless.  

After I sent it off I looked over the Selections for Sheila and immediately wondered where a few important stories were.   At one point the manuscript had a table of contents and an index, to help me locate things.   That was hundreds of pages ago, I couldn’t keep up with the administrative tasks associated with the writing– the pages piled up too fast.   OK, I am… how to say?… I don’t like certain kinds of hard work.   I can work for two hours or more taking rough edges off a few paragraphs, increasing the clarity of what I am saying, adding an illustration where it will help the reader see something I haven’t been able to make clear enough.   To some people this kind of work is unthinkable.  To me, most other kinds of work are unthinkable.  

I am not anti-social, I like people, for the most part, enjoy interacting with people (animals too, for that matter).  I am open to people, let me say that.  I spend most of my time alone.   No single thing is as important to me, or makes me feel more like myself, than the time I spend by myself, focused, concentrating on making something as clear, or elegant, smooth or rough, as I can make it.   Craft has become one of those quaint notions in our fractured tabloid culture, but hold a beautifully finished wooden spoon in your hand once in a while, run your fingers over it, and you will feel what I am talking about.

I’ve always loved that Chekhov story  “The Bet.”   Chekhov wrote it when he was 28 or 29, a young man already two thirds of the way through what would turn out to be a short life (he died at 44).  Read it yourself, (click here) if you haven’t, it’s quite short.   The bones of the story:  a wealthy banker bets an idealistic guy who claims to love life and the pursuit of knowledge above all else two million dollars that he can’t stay locked in a room for fifteen years without any human contact.  The idealist takes the bet, on the condition that he can have musical instruments, books and writing materials brought to him whenever he asks.   He suffers terribly at first, constantly playing the piano, then learns several classical languages, reads the classics in their original languages, he studies a wide range of subjects, including the collected wisdom of the world’s religions.

I’ll save you the spoiler alert, in case you haven’t read that story, but I have always related to that character Chekhov created.   The banker is just the crass way of the material world, the pondering reader is the soul of the human world.  It doesn’t embarrass me to make this simplistic statement.   I am already too far gone.  

I am now collecting pieces for Selections for Sheila Two.  Hopefully one day a literary agent will be moved by an unsolicited packet of pages culled from those selections.  The agent will skillfully introduce my pages to some corporate person I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.  I won’t have to piss on them– they’ll give me money instead.

Now, back to collecting pages for Selections for Sheila part two.

Note to the writers out there — and a good one from Charles Bukowski

Wouldn’t you know it, five seconds, maybe ten seconds, after I hit “publish” on the previous piece, peevish about the long delay getting back to me by someone who promised to read something I’d sent her, I get a notification beep in my pocket.  I swear to your false gods, it was a few blinks of an eye.  An email from her, with an excellent reason for the delay, and some intelligent comments on the piece.

I appreciate her email, even as I also realized, as soon as I’d read it, that it was just an opinion.  Like mine, like anyone’s who clicks a thumb up or a thumb down on any of the 100,000,000,000 daily posts on the internet or any of its social media tentacles and capillaries.  Hey, Gangnam Style got a billion views at one point, probably has two billion by now (3,140,146,265 views and counting, grazie, Jeevsie).  Does that make it the greatest youtube video of all-time?   

Who gives a fuck?  The audience you write for is your own cultivated taste, served to the most intelligent, subtle-minded reader you can imagine.  It’s easy to forget that, particularly when the winds are stagnant and you’re getting the toxic stink full snout.  A friend sent me this poem by the great Charles Bukowski, which reminds us all of this, and more.  Kind of says it all (I have emphasized the stanza my friend pointed out).  Bon appétit:

so you want to be a writer?

Charles Bukowski, 1920 – 1994

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

 

From sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.

 

source

Note to HarperCollins and the Estate of Charles Bukowski:  please forgive this Fair Use of your copyrighted Charles Bukowski poem (and thanks for keeping the old boy in print for us all).   

If you deem this zero profit use a copyright violation, please have your lawyers contact my literary agent’s attorneys at … what did I do with that damned business card?

Better yet, read some of the recent shit on this site and let me know what kind of contracts you’re offering bitter fucking writers these days.