writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime
KurtThere is a very familiar shape in the picture of the stack of wood I shared last week, but I doubt that everyone can see it*. Kind of like how only the chosen ones can see the face of the Virgin Mary in their toast… but different.
*If you’re having a hard time seeing the shape, try closing your eyes and squinting real hard too see if that helps.
Until I read this:
Ethereum uses as much electricity as all of Libya, and the digital artist Memo Atken calculated that, due to the blockchain transactions involved in minting an NFT, the average NFT has a carbon footprint equal to over a month of the average EU citizen’s electricity usage.
*Yeah, I have no idea what an NFT is either – was just trying to be one of the cool kids.
A man who alleged in a lawsuit that he was fired from a hospital system because he is a white man has been awarded a $10 million verdict by a North Carolina jury, according to court documents.
Jury awards $10M to former exec who said he was fired because he is white male, NBC News, October 28, 2021
My guess is that many on the jury that awarded this poor, victimized dude $10,000,000.00 for his misfortune of being born white and male overlapped with the University of North Carolina board of trustees who denied tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The New York Times Magazine, for her blasphemously accurate reportage of the United States’ bleak history of slavery…
*And by North Carolina, I mean South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas… you get the picture.
One of these days I’ll get back to blogging for real again, especially since there’s so much nonsense to discuss these days. But I am at least getting close to knocking out another book. Going back to my wheelhouse this time with another literary fiction number similar in spirit, but not in story, to Inside the Skin. I’ll probably be sending out a request for beta readers to my newsletter soon so if you’re interested helping me out, get on that mailing list so you’ll be notified (and get a free copy of my short story collection to boot). Stay weird, ya weirdos.
And by hat-trick I mean the Rachel Nichols sh*t show at ESPN that features a disappointing trifecta of racism, sexism, and privacy rights issues.
Here’s a quote at the center of the controversy that comes from a phone conversation of Nichols that was inadvertently recorded to ESPN servers and then discovered and (illegally?) dispersed by a former/fired ESPN employee:
“I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball,” Nichols said in July 2020. “If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.”
A Disparaging Video Prompts Explosive Fallout Within ESPN, New York Times, July 4, 2021
Generally speaking, I’m not surprised that a white person (Rachel Nichols) would feel this way towards a Black person (Maria Taylor) regarding positioning and advancement in the workplace. However, I am surprised that a white person would openly (openly can certainly be debated here, hence the concerns about privacy rights) express such sentiments whose occupation (NBA courtside reporter) involves developing close relationships with the employees (NBA athletes) of an an industry (professional basketball) where Blacks make up nearly 75% of the workforce.
On second thought, I’m not actually surprised by that either.
No matter how much we, and by we I mostly mean progressive whites but just about anyone can be included I suppose, profess to be color blind and sex blind and gender blind and sexuality blind and on and on, it doesn’t take much to trigger us back to type, and by type I mean the socialization/indoctrination process that takes place during our formative years and instills deeply, indelibly some would say, within us our beliefs and values and prejudices and fears.
And the fear of losing one’s livelihood is a heck of a trigger.
Not saying it’s right, just saying that’s the way our world works as I see it.
Which is why there has been and there always will be, at least for the foreseeable future, a critical need for special interest groups, identity politics, and the understanding by all of the concept of intersectionality, a concept more and more of us are becoming familiar with as the ugly and misguided debate about Critical Race Theory drags on.
For an example of how intersectionality works, consider how racism, sexism, and homophobia affects the Black female lesbian, perhaps the most marginalized group in the country:
The most general statement of [the Combahee River Collective] politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE STATEMENT (1977), Blackpast.org
Look, I’ve only scratched the surface here so you really need to read the whole story to get a feel for all the unfortunate issues going on right now at ESPN. It really is quite tragic…
And, unfortunately, quite unsurprising.
Sorry to say but chances are you’re a racist…
One more than likely slave to a supremist ego and motivated by fear and seduced by a willful (and more than likely generational) ignorance.
However, if you condemn and attack Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project without any understanding of either and truly believe you’re not a racist, then please at least make an effort to explain to us (in your own words, not Fox News’) how that is possible.
Good luck with that.
In exploring the reasons why there is so much pushback and misinformation being disseminated regarding critical race theory (CRT) … let’s examine the psychology of humans. There is a theory called “psychological reactance,” which was first proposed by Jack W. Brehm in 1966. Brehm theorized that people are inherently resistant to certain persuasion, specifically when they feel that the persuasion is somehow posing a threat to their freedoms or their existence. People who are threatened usually feel uncomfortable, hostile, aggressive and angry.
Psychological reactance makes people disregard even the most glaring reality in order to protect their perception of themselves — their ego. They view an acceptance of this reality as a threat to their entire existence and do everything in their power to stifle that “perceived threat.”
Justin J. Grooms, The San Diego Union-Tribune, June 15, 2021
*and #BLM and the Take a Knee Movement and on and on and on…
BOOK | FICTION | LITERARY
THE GRADUATE by Charles Webb
RATING: ★ ★ ★ ★
When The Graduate, a book published in 1963 by recently deceased author Charles Webb, popped up as a Kindle Unlimited recommendation the other day, I thought to myself, why not? I mean, shouldn’t every fan of the movie version, a film which “is often ranked among the greatest, most quoted and talked about of all time,” feel obligated to read the source from which the film’s greatness was spawned?
The answer, of course, is yes.
So I read the book obligingly – it’s a fast read as the book weighs in at a slim 224 pages – and upon reflection, I didn’t realize it from the movie version, but The Graduate is essentially a continuation of The Catcher in the Rye. In other words, we essentially witness Holden Caulfield’s post-collegiate angst as channeled through Benjamin Braddock.
In the movie version Dustin Hoffman’s Braddock, as excellent and memorable as it is, comes across to me as more neurotic and whiney than angry and angsty as the character is portrayed in the novel. As I’m not a practicing psychologist, please don’t ask me to differentiate between the two as per the DSM-5 or whatever version the shrinks are now working off of.
However, as examples, when I, the layman psychologist that I am, think of neurotic-y (whiney) type actors in the vein of Hoffman’s Braddock, I easily think of Woody Allen (obviously), Owen Wilson, and Jesse Eisenberg.
However (once again), coming up with angsty type actors in the vein of Webb’s Braddock, that’s a little harder for me to pull off – Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattison both come to mind (probably can blame it on Twilight), and perhaps Zack Braff. Of course on the extreme end of the angsty scale we have Christian Bale, whose several angsty roles often seem to teeter on the precipice of sanity.
Anyway, that’s my impression of the novel. So I give it a four-star, not so much for its literary achievements (because, honestly, it’s not that well-written (Just about everything is described as perfectly this or that; and for some reason, just about every character seems to have a hearing problem as they keep having to ask What? after something is said to them. Quite annoying; however, we see a similar case of the What’s in The Catcher in the Rye as well, so… take that for what it’s worth.)). But for a book written by a twenty-four-year old that becomes the foundation for such an important movie, hey, I can afford to grade on a curve and give it an extra star.
Incidentally, it’s interesting to me that both J.D. Salinger and Charles Webb were so disillusioned with society that one became a famous grouchy recluse and the other donated his book proceeds to charity and lived a chosen life of poverty.
How ’bout that?
