Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 776
May 18, 2016
Donald Trump is a phony and a liar: The press doesn’t get to call him “authentic” ever again
Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer)
For a candidate who’s often touted in the press as an authentic straight shooter, Donald Trump did a lot last week to puncture that reputation. From insisting that his promise of a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” was really “only a suggestion,” to flip-flopping on whether voters had a right to see his tax returns, Trump seemed to cast aside promises on a daily basis.
But the strangest turn came with the revelation that years ago Trump often called up reporters claiming to be a company spokesman named “John Miller” or “John Barron,” and then said endlessly flattering things about his boss. (“He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.”)
“This was so farcical, that he pretended to be his own publicist,” said Sue Carswell, a former People reporter who once interviewed “John Miller” about Trump’s love life.
Yet despite those image pile-ups last week, there’s little indication that the press is backing off its “authentic” mantle for Trump, let alone rising up to denounce him as a would-be charlatan.
Days after the “John Miller” laugher, along with Trump walking away from previous campaign pledges, The Hillactually credited the Republican for trying to change lanes; for successfully “selling himself as a truth-telling firebrand” during the primary season, and now being “willing to refine that image.” The fact that Trump’s “refining his brand” simply represents another savvy move on his part.
And that raises a key question: Is there anything Trump can do that will ever move the press off its preferred mark about how the 2016 campaign between himself and Hillary Clinton features Mr. Authentic vs. Mrs. Inauthentic?
It’s rather remarkable that the political media have been chattering, yet again, about Clinton being inauthentic while news of Trump’s invented alter ego simultaneously swirled. And there seems to be little media realization that maybe he’s the phony one.
There’s no question that in politics, “authentic” doubles as a media compliment. It’s reserved for a candidate who’s completely sure of him or herself and can effortlessly connect with voters who pick up on the confidence and genuineness. By contrast, “inauthentic” represents a grave campaign failure. It’s used to put down pols who are surrounded by yes men and women and who are too timid to reveal themselves, and to express their core values.
For generations the Beltway press has kept an eagle-eye watch on inauthentic candidates who attempted image updates during the election season; for any candidates acting phony. (In 2000, Al Gore was pummeled in the press for supposedly being guilty of that transgression.)
For decades the press, often echoing conservatives, has depicted Clinton as something of calculating fraud. Even today, as she amasses more votes than any other candidate in the primary season, she’s portrayed as out of touch and having trouble “connecting” with voters. Clinton doesn’t inspire, we’re told over and over, while more than 12 million Americans have lined up and voted for her this year. (And if she’s so “inauthentic,” so “scripted” and “poll-tested,” how did Clinton tally roughly 18 million votes during the 2008 primary, and win her 2000 senate campaign in a landslide?)
Still, that talking point has become a media cornerstone for this campaign. Remember when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Hillary Clinton, “Does it hurt you when people say you are too lawyerly, you parse your words, you are not authentic, you’re not connecting?”
Back in February, Ron Fournier in The Atlantic stressed “Clinton continues to struggle to convince many Democratic voters of her authenticity.” After Clinton then went out and essentially won the Democratic primary, how did Fournier respond? He recently scolded Clinton’s campaign for not being as “honest and authentic” as the Trump campaign.
And this from the Washington Post last week about Clinton’s supposed personality defects:
“She often comes across as inauthentic or lacking a basic core of beliefs.”
“When she is out on the campaign trail, the word that most often comes to mind for Clinton is ‘clunky.’ Or ‘formulaic.’ ‘Guarded.’”
“If connecting is the coin of the realm in politics, Clinton doesn’t have much money in her pocket.”
“The Clinton that voters meet tends to be someone who comes across as overly cautious and too political — afraid to say what she thinks about anything for fear of alienating this or that constituency.”
In sharp contrast, much of the political press has spent months touting Trump’s supposed authenticity and praising his allegedly candid campaigning style. (Just like Chris Christie!)
Last month, Trump’s senior aide Paul Manafort practically bragged about how the Republican front-runner was going to unveil a makeover, and that the Trump people saw during the primary season was just “projecting an image.” At the time, many D.C. commentators applauded the move, stressing how savvy it was for Trump to shed one image and try on another for the general election campaign.
At this point it’s harder to tell which media urge is stronger, the desire to keep promoting Trump as a straight shooter, or the yearning to paint Clinton as a phony.
May 17, 2016
Bernie loses his Bluegrass State battle: Hillary Clinton narrowly takes tight Kentucky Democratic primary
(Credit: AP/Susan Walsh/Jason DeCrow/Photo montage by Salon)
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton was able to stop Bernie Sanders from winning his 20th state with a narrow victory in Kentucky Tuesday.
The Kentucky primary was closed, meaning only registered Democrats could vote. Clinton had previously won 10-out-of-10 closed Democratic primaries, and despite a serious challenge from Sanders, the former first lady whose husband was the last Democrat to win the state in a general election was able to maintain her own perfect record with registered Democrats.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton leads Sanders by less than one percentage point, according to NBC News:
BREAKING: Hillary Clinton is the apparent winner of the KY Dem primary. More: https://t.co/ZVSBr6DR42 #Decision2016 pic.twitter.com/2MX0IaKL6m
— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) May 18, 2016
From The New York Times:
Clinton has now won five out of six contests that were decided by five percentage points or less (Sanders pulled off an upset in Michigan).
Clinton appears to have taken all of the state’s major population centers, even winning some counties with large factions of traditional Sanders voters, like near the University of Louisville where African-American voters make up around 20 percent of the Democratic base. Sanders – a vocal anti-coal candidate – appeared to obliterate Clinton across coal country throughout the state, an area where Clinton saw reverse margins of victories over Barack Obama in 2008. Republicans, of course, pummeled Clinton for her recent debate admission that her energy plan aimed to end the coal industry.
Today’s Democratic primaries in Kentucky, which has 61 delegates up for grabs, and in Oregon, which offers 74, served as Clinton’s last chance to defeat Sanders before their big California showdown in June. After losing primary battles to Sanders in Indiana and West Virginia this month, the Clinton campaign has attempted to pivot to the general election since shortly before Donald Trump clinched the Republican race, but in recent days decided to aggressively contest the Bluegrass State. Clinton appeared at five campaign events throughout the state in the past 48 hours and spent heavily on advertising, according to MSNBC.
The mail-in Democratic primary in Oregon on Tuesday was also a closed Democratic race. There has been little polling in Oregon, but some of the latest polling from March indicated that Clinton holds a narrow lead — although pollster Nate Silver gives Sanders a 15 percentage point edge over Clinton.
No matter tonight’s results, Clinton marches on towards the Democratic presidential nomination as even the slightest of losses in Kentucky and largest of wins in Oregon would likely do little make much of a dent in Clinton’s lead of 280 elected delegates, because of the proportional allocation system.
bell hooks vs. Beyoncé: What this feminist scholarly critique gets wrong about “Lemonade” and liberation
Beyoncé in "Lemonade"
Often, when I’m vocal about the degradation and oppression of women – specifically black women – I am labeled a feminist by supporters and opponents alike. Women most often refer to me as feminist to confer honor. Men most often weaponize the term, using it to connate unwarranted bitterness and dismiss arguments. When either does so, I respond plainly, “I am not a feminist.”
It is not that I take offense at the term. I grant it neither disgust nor worship. In reality, feminism has no firm nor universal mission. It seems the title is bestowed or stripped based on some complex and contradictory matrix with an ever-changing formula for determining who qualifies and how that qualification must be upheld. Practical feminism is more popularity contest than movement for equality and liberation, more infighting than unity. It is a trendy term, and an elitist one. I want no part.
Few examples are more illustrative of the divisive state of feminism than the controversy that surrounds Beyoncé’s worthiness of her ascribed and avowed status as a feminist. To borrow a line from Beyoncé herself: Feminists, self-proclaimed or crowned, keep her “name rolling off the tongue,” or rather, the keyboard. Her every public offering is critiqued for any signs of accord with or betrayal of feminist ideals, as determined by the critic. Every album, every wardrobe selection, every performance is hotly debated to polarizing results. She is at once iconic and problematic.
One of Beyoncé’s most noted critics of late has been famed feminist scholar bell hooks. A legend in the world of feminism, hooks has devoted her career to writing, speaking and educating about the intersections of race, class and gender, focusing on how these intersecting identities influence oppression. As a black woman with expertise in gender studies and how the images of women, notably black women, influence our experiences, Dr. hooks is most certainly qualified to critique how the superstar’s art affects women. And the influence that comes with Beyoncé’s position as one of the most prolific entertainers of our time has the side effect, however unfair, of opening her up to public scrutiny. Yet while hooks’ discussions of the singer’s power and how she wields it are expected and perhaps even warranted, when shielded by reverence the feminist giant continues not only to analyze but target Beyoncé, with a passionate, often hypocritical contempt that reduces what should be thought-provoking evaluations to social media fodder and anecdotal evidence of women’s propensity for spite.
Dr. hooks’ brutal criticism of Beyoncé was first widely noted when she participated in a panel discussion in May 2014. Of Knowles, hooks first proclaimed, “…I don’t think you can separate her class power and the wealth, from people’s fascination with her. That here is a young, black woman who is so incredibly wealthy….” She further mused, “One could argue, even more than her body, it’s what that body stands for — the body of desire fulfilled, that is wealth, fame, celebrity, all the things that so many people in our culture are lusting for, wanting.” But the hardest blow came when hooks labeled Beyoncé’s influence on not only “anti-feminist,” but “assaulting” and “terrorist.”
With the full weight of her reputation protecting her, hooks designated this woman, this young black woman like the millions who’ve looked up to her and whom she has devoted her life to speaking for, a terrorist. The impact of such a respected feminist figure branding one of the most powerful women in the world with such a title cannot be overstated. Her words moved the discussion from how Beyoncé’s music and aesthetic impresses women and girls to useless vitriol which opens the door to patriarchy, misogyny and misogynoir disguised as liberation, as hooks decides that she has the right to build and tailor the box in which all expressions of womanhood and feminine artistry must reside, and that those whose autonomy refuses to contort to fit into that box are not only against the feminist mission but actively and maliciously engaged in efforts to destroy it.
Still, hooks’ most important critique of Beyoncé is found in an essay she released last week, nearly two years to the day she called the mogul a terrorist. In “Moving Beyond Pain,” hooks examines Beyoncé’s latest project, the stunning visual album “Lemonade.” Flexing her linguistic expertise, hooks delivers an at once typical and unique perspective on the acclaimed work.
Betraying to the title, Dr. hooks’ essay does not focus as much on moving beyond pain as it does on exposing “Lemonade” as not the love letter to black women that many of us have insisted it is but a skillful exploitation of our vulnerabilities, the result of ingenious conceptualization and flawless execution that “positively exploits images of black female bodies.” In her view, Beyoncé is merely regurgitating patriarchal ideas about the irrational emotion of women, and masquerading that as healing.
And from the first sentence, hooks makes it crystal clear that she’s figured out the end game, and it’s all about the money. A reference to women in her hometown setting up lemonade stands in the first paragraph sets the tone. This album is Beyoncé’s own lemonade stand, where she serves up the perfect glass, fused with the precise amount of sweet and sour, pain and pleasure, heartbreak and happy ending — and for a price, of course!
Viewers, and those viewers have been without question black women, “who like to suggest Lemonade was created solely or primarily for black female audiences are missing the point,” hooks confirms. “Commodities, irrespective of their subject matter, are made, produced, and marketed to entice any and all consumers. Beyoncé’s audience is the world and that world of business and money-making has no color.”
As one of those viewers who not only suggests that “Lemonade” was prepared and served for the black woman’s gaze, but demands it be respected as such, stubbornly clinging to ownership, even I cannot argue that the album is not primarily commodity. Even as I stand absolutely assured that “Lemonade” was crafted with black women in mind, I cannot deny that it was also crafted to be sold to black women. That fact, however, does not diminish its cultural significance to us.
Dr. hooks’ insistence that Lemonade is “all about the body, and the body as a commodity” does much more for invalidating black women and simplifying our complexities than Beyoncé’s so-called “anti-feminist” image ever could. Black women are enthralled, moved to tears, and motivated to unpack baggage and trauma, dead set on seeking support within the sisterhood because of “Lemonade.” It is contrary to any stretch of feminist ideology to then issue us an edict that we have been duped, reducing our connection, a legitimate feeling of transcendent sisterhood and reclamation of our own selves substantiated by shared lived experiences, to our inability to recognize and reject imperialist propaganda.
Black women’s bodies in service to other black women, moving through trauma, love, hate, degradation and maturation accompanied by a corresponding soundtrack is not mere commodity. For centuries, black women’s bodies and the corresponding images were placed in service to white supremacy. Black breasts forcibly nourished dozens of babies, black and white, on plantations as enslaved black women were assigned to be wet nurses. Black women were forced to breed on plantations with mates not of their choosing to produce children who would be considered the property of their enslavers. Black women were raped by enslavers, and after the de jure emancipation of black bodies, black women continued to be community property, raped routinely as domestic and civil rights workers by men both black and white. So even if “Lemonade”’s employment of black women’s bodies to sell a product is, as hooks declares, “certainly not radical or revolutionary,” the concept of producing such images for the benefit of other black women is.
And while capitalistic exchange of these familiar symbols, for adoration, power, obsession and wealth, is most certainly profitable, Beyoncé using her body — the voice that flows from it, the thighs that shake, the eyes that glare — to elicit such responses is neither immoral nor undesirable.
Fundamentally, any body in capitalistic service has been commodified. Yes, Beyoncé sells ample hips and enticing cleavage. Yes, she sells an hour-glass figure and a beautiful face. But does not Dr. hooks sell the image of her body, too? Is she, with folded legs sitting at a computer typing her thoughts from arched fingers, not commodifying her body? Is her choice not to show as much leg or to cover her bosom not because she has commodified the idea that women should be modest in their presentation of their bodies? Is Dr. hooks being compensated finely for her physical presence—her body—on a panel, or at the podium of a classroom, somehow less representative of commodification than Beyoncé being well-compensated for her physical presence—her body—dancing and singing on stage or in front of a camera?
If the claim can be made that hooks somehow uses her body more honorably or more worthily than Beyoncé, though both are engaged in the same “business of capitalist money making” hooks called out at the beginning of her piece, then that brand of feminism is no more than the other side of the patriarchal coin.
We cannot move beyond the myriad of norms that comprise society’s restrictive definition of what womanhood is and what its acceptable utterances and displays look like by simply replacing them with new, yet just as restrictive, norms. Undoubtedly a woman’s value should not be reduced to the usefulness of her body in exciting and enticing the carnal senses. Neither, then, should a woman’s value be reduced by her ability to use her body to excite and entice carnal senses. And for as long as that ability has been exploited for financial and social capital gains by men, a woman not only controlling the output of these images but making gains from them herself represents the kind of resistance to and rejection of patriarchy that should define feminism.
That part of hooks’ criticism that addresses Beyoncé’s eroticized presentation of both herself and other black women is expected. No examination of the pop icon can be legitimate without at least a mention of the sexuality she exudes, steers and markets. But later in “Moving Beyond Pain,” hooks dissects more crucial themes in “Lemonade,” arguing that it is a “celebration of rage.” She defends this claim by highlighting the video for “Hold Up,” in which Beyoncé, in a Roberto Cavalli gown, “boldly struts through the street with baseball bat in hand, randomly smashing cars.” This, hooks tells us, “pure fantasy.”
Though this track and accompanying video are among my favorites on the album, I agree with hooks: “Hold Up”’s imagery is pure fantasy. Whose fantasy, though, is open to interpretation. An international superstar dressed in couture smashing the windows of classic cars as she skips and smiles is anything but reality. Yet, isn’t a woman looking perfect and smiling through her pain society’s ultimate fantasy? How many women have endured infidelity and abuse privately while still presenting beauty and confidence to the world? Tina Turner famously endured brutal physical abuse for years while smiling in interviews and giving her all on stage in her extravagant costumes. What hooks views as a smug “celebration of violence,” I view as the vacillation between who scorned women want to be and who we feel we have to be. It is an outward expression of rage pierced by an eternal obligation to suppress it and look happy. It is every woman who’s had to get up and still be pleasant and well-groomed in the office as she dies inside trying to deal with the hurt inflicted upon her by a cheating partner.
Most importantly, though, hooks reveals that “contrary to misguided notions of gender equality, women do not and will not seize power and create self-love and self-esteem through violent acts.” Absolutely. But that is not the argument “Lemonade” makes. Rage and its consequent expressions are the easiest to work through. To me, Beyoncé’s project does not encourage violence as a means to resolve hurt. Nor does it suggest that the destruction of property will repair the damage to the self-esteem caused by the ultimate betrayal. What it does is provide validation of those basic feelings, the immediate need to fuck up whatever tangible objects the cheater loves.
“Violence does not create positive change.” I suppose that’s true if the focus stops at revenge, but “Lemonade”’s seeming endorsement of violence does not designate violence as a vehicle for change. “Lemonade” simply makes space for women who can only feel rage, understanding that rage is the suitcase of it all. The self-healing comes from the unpacking of the box sealed by rage. Violent rage is the tape we tear through to get to the fragile contents.
And what of that unpacking? Perhaps my greatest frustration with hooks’ article comes with her conclusion that “concluding this narrative of hurt and betrayal with caring images of family and home do not serve as adequate ways to reconcile and heal trauma.” This implies that there is only one desired resolution for women in this scenario, and that resolution is not forgiving the male partner’s transgressions with the ultimate goal of staying together. Yes, patriarchy dictates that women should always be prepared to save their family, ignoring or at least always forgiving their mate’s adultery, no matter how severe or frequent. This is positively a feature we should reject in the quest to break the chains of patriarchy. But there’s a difference in telling a woman that she should accept chronic unfaithfulness and a woman testifying — or at least appearing to do so, since despite popular assumption, there has been no affirmation that “Lemonade” is autobiographical — that her own personal resolution involved forgiving her partner and staying with him.
I am in absolute agreement with hooks that “no matter how hard women in relationships with patriarchal men work for change, forgive and reconcile, men must do the work of inner and outer transformation if emotional violence against black females is to end,” yet I do not believe that it is the job of Beyoncé to focus on this point. Nothing in “Lemonade” suggests to me that a woman working through her own anger, pain and feelings of inadequacy excuses the offending partner. It does not sell the absolution of blame for cheating. In fact, it names the man who cheated as the just object upon which the rage is directed. But “Lemonade” is less about displaying a refined man who makes amends for his transgressions than it is about a refined woman committed to demanding she be treated with the respect her value warrants. The “caring images of Jay-Z which conclude the narrative” are not the championing of a good man ultimately conquered and changed by love — they are the championing of a woman who will accept no less.
“Lemonade” is not “a measure of our capacity to endure pain” absent “a celebration of our moving beyond pain,” as hooks indicates. I too am beyond weary of the depiction of the strong black woman perpetually able to take hit after hit and tragedy after tragedy, and come out unscathed. “Lemonade” does not pretend that black women are some unbreakable force. Instead, it presents a broken Beyoncé — a rich, beautiful, revered pop superstar who despite the ostensible cloak of invincibility is torn apart by cheating. It presents a broken Lesley McSpadden, the incurable grief of losing her son worn in her eyes. It allows us to be human and vulnerable and defeated. The celebration is not in our endurance but the realization that we are human and have the freedom to go through tragedy and rebound. The celebration is the realization that black women, though devalued by the world, still see the value in each other. The celebration is in the resurrecting power of sisterhood and embrace of black femininity in spite of pain.
“Concurrently, in the world of art-making, a black female creator as powerfully placed as Beyoncé can both create images and present viewers with her own interpretation of what those images mean. However, her interpretation cannot stand as truth,” hooks boldly asserts. I’d argue that truth is relative. If, as hooks claims, Beyoncé’s “vision of feminism cannot be trusted,” because it “does not call for an end to patriarchal domination,” neither can I trust hooks’ vision of feminism, which does call for a patriarchal end to domination — but only by replacing it with an equally rigid domination, constructed and maintained by women who wax poetic about liberation.
Maybe this will inspire you to get your hands dirty: 6 steps to growing your own backyard pot plant
(Credit: Yarygin via Shutterstock)
It’s not that hard. They call it weed for a reason. And if you threw a bunch of pot seeds out in a field and did nothing else, you’d probably get a pot plant—scraggly, runty, thirsty, starved of nutrients, but a living plant. You might even get a few buds off it, if it happened to be a female plant.
But you can do much better than that with just a little bit of care, effort and common sense.
You know you want to, at least if you’re one of the 44.5 million adult Americans a new Harris Poll says would grow their own if it were legal. That’s nearly one out of five adults nurturing a would-be green thumb for the green stuff.
It’s not legal everywhere—in fact, not in most places—but that isn’t stopping a lot of people. If it’s illegal to grow pot where you live, that’s something to take very seriously. Growing even a single plant can be a felony in some states. Factor that into your calculations, budding gardeners. But for those people who live in grow-legal states and people who don’t but who are willing to take their chances, here’s a brief sketch of how to grow your own outdoor pot plant from a clone.
You can, of course, grow from seeds, but that involves a couple of complications (germination, and later, sexing to get rid of unwanted male plants) we want to avoid in this simple introduction. And you can grow your plants indoors with electricity, but that too adds whole new levels of complications, so we’re going to stick with plants from clones, grown outdoors in the sunlight.
That means we are bound by the seasons. Planting time will soon be upon us. It’s time to take action now to ensure you enjoy the fruits of your own garden come fall. Here’s what you need to do.
1. Find a location. There are two prime considerations here: privacy and sunlight. If growing pot is illegal, you want privacy for obvious reasons. But even if it isn’t, you want privacy to protect yourself from prying eyes, whether those of disapproving busybodies or larcenous teen night-stalkers.
If you’re not isolated from neighbors, an eight-foot fence would be preferable. Within your space, be it backyard or isolated garden plot, you can also make your plant less obvious by planting amid other greenery, but keep in mind that your plant is going to grow and grow. Low shrubs that camouflage it early on aren’t going to hide it when it’s four, five, six feet tall.
You want a spot with as much sunlight as possible. Observe at different times of day to see where the shade goes, then try to avoid those spots.
2. Find a clone. Clones are nothing more than cuttings from a “mother” pot plant, so they are genetically identical to mom, and unlike seeds, guaranteed to be female, which is what you want. If you’re in a grow-legal state, just go down to the pot shop. If they carry clones, they will have a nice selection. They typically go for $10-15 each. If you’re not in pot-friendly territory, you will have to know somebody who knows somebody. They are out there, but it might take some detective work to find them.
You will be looking for a clone from a strain that fits your needs and desires. Do you want the stoniest weed? Look for high-THC strains. Do you want an “up” high? Look for sativas or sativa-dominant strains. Are you seeking narcotized couchlock bliss? Look for indicas or indica-dominant strains. Are you seeking medically active strains? Look for high-CBD strains.
3. Plant it. Okay, you’ve obtained your clone. They typically come in two- or three-inch cubes and should be around a foot tall with several sets of leaves on them. Your clone will need to be repotted before it outgrows its cube. You’re going to need some good potting soil (I mix in perlite for an airier soil mix) and an 8-inch pot. Put some small rocks in the bottom of the pot so water can drain more easily through the holes in the bottom. Fill it with potting soil, wet it down thoroughly, then scoop out enough to make a hole big enough for the base of the clone to fit in. Put the clone in, tamp soil down around it, and voila!
Keep your new clone shaded for the first few days. They need to adjust to being out in the bright sun after their cloistered indoor existence. That eight-inch pot is only good for a few weeks; after that, the roots will want more room to expand and suck up nutrients. You must then decide whether to replant it in a bigger pot or in the ground. Pots have the advantage of mobility—you can move them to stay out of the shade if necessary, or if your mother-in-law is coming over. Plus, you don’t have to dig a hole in the ground.
But pot size will limit how big your plant will get and how much it produces. A five-gallon pot might get you a few ounces, while a 25-gallon pot might get you a pound or more. The same principle applies to holes in the ground: The bigger the hole you make and fill with potting soil, the bigger the plant. A 2′ x 2′ x 2′ hole—about enough to empty a bag of potting soil—will grow you a respectable plant. Do a hole twice that size, and you can grow a 10- or 12-foot, multi-pound-yielding monster.
4. Feed it. Plants need nutrients to grow and thrive. It’s up to you to see that your plant is well fed, and that means applying organic—please!—fertilizer on a regular basis. To keep it simple: Early on, you want fertilizers that encourage leafy, vegetative growth; as flowers begin to form mid-summer, you want to switch to a fertilizer for blooming or flowering. Use liquid organic fertilizers. You can use a gallon milk jug for diluting them properly. Just follow the instructions and you should be good to go. Don’t give your plant more fertilizer than called for; that can burn it. Quit fertilizing about October 1, or three weeks or so before you plan to harvest.
5. Water it. It’s not that tough. If you have a plant in a pot, water it every day until water starts running out the holes in the bottom. Then wait a few minutes and repeat to ensure that the soil is thoroughly moist. If you have a plant in the ground in a two-foot hole, give it a gallon a day, jacking it up to two gallons a day during flowering. That will produce a healthy harvest. Bigger pots or holes, more water, more buds in the fall.
Be careful not to overwater your clone when you first get it. You want to keep it moist, but not sopping. Apply the finger test: Stick your finger in the top of the pot, and if the soil is dry more than a half-inch down, water. If not, don’t.
6. Let nature take its course. Now you have all the ingredients to grow a nice, productive marijuana plant. By midsummer (August), flowers should be forming; by mid-October or so, they will be ready to harvest. Wait until about half the little white hairs on the buds start turning brown. Some varieties take longer to flower than others. Try to have some idea when yours should be ready.
You shouldn’t have a lot to do other than watering and fertilizing your plant and basking in the gratification of growing your own buds. You can prune the tops of the shoots if you want a bushier plant with more buds, and/or you can prune the bottom branches (small buds and all) later in the year if you really want to concentrate on the bigger buds on top. If you’re lucky, you might have to tie up branches that become so laden with buds they want to flop over.
This is growing a pot plant in a nutshell. Anyone who is actually going to try this should go further in depth. There are numerous how-to books out there, including offerings from longtime cultivation experts like Ed Rosenthal or Jorge Cervantes. There’s a load of stuff online, too. Take advantage of the information that’s out there. You don’t have to be a master horticulturist to grow a pot plant, but it can’t hurt to listen to what they can tell you.
What you do when you harvest the plant will have a big impact on how good it is when it’s ready to smoke. We’ll save the harvest how-to for this fall, closer to harvest time. In the meantime, if you’re going to put a plant in the ground (or in a pot), you should act now. You want them in the ground by around June 1. You can put them in later, but they’re not going to be as productive if you wait.
No, Daryl Hall did not “destroy” me: The right-wing social media mob’s “social justice warrior” narrative couldn’t be more ridiculous
Daryl Hall (Credit: AP/Charles Sykes)
A popular quote often misattributed to Aristotle has the ancient philosopher identifying the defining characteristic of intelligence as the “ability to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
If the wisdom of that idea is accurate – regardless of its actual source – American cultural discourse has reached a state of stupidity so perfect it would appear the result of discipline and commitment, rather than ignorance.
On Thursday, Salon published my interview with legendary singer/songwriter Daryl Hall. Having interviewed Hall before, and enjoying his contemptuous interpretation of the term “blue eyed soul,” I decided to ask for his insight into the current conflict over cultural appropriation.
In my first interview with Hall, he expounded at great length on “the interplay between European and African sensibilities,” and correctly located the power source of American artistic creation and innovation at that generator.
It was obvious that Hall would undress critics applying the cultural appropriation label to everything from dreadlocks to pop music as “dangerous fools,” and it was equally clear that including discussion of a controversial topic in the interview would attract attention from readers not typically interested in the work of his soul and pop duo.
Interviewers have implemented a methodology similar to mine for as long as journalism has existed. The interlocutor asks questions likely to interest the readers, and reports for answers.
Such an elementary truth, apparently, evades much of the right wing social media mob. After Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason, wrote a thoughtful and informative response to my interview with Hall, conservative publications, such as the Blaze, Twitchy, and Newsbusters, characterized my friendly conversation as a combative confrontation in which the singer eviscerated me for “pressing him with political correctness.”
Steven Crowder, a right wing icon who illustrates the deficit of talent amongst conservative pundits, wrote that Hall “destroyed me,” and assumed that when I replied to Hall’s demolition of the cultural appropriation critique with the statement, “I agree with you entirely,” – hardly ambiguous – I was lying or rendered nearly catatonic by Hall answering my question in exactly the way I expected. Crowder’s followers, and subscribers to the Blaze and other right wing sources of bathroom stall carvings, interpreted my neutral question with precisely the same illiteracy: I’m a “social justice warrior” offering my best attempt at exposing Hall as a dangerous threat to multiculturalism. I also must suffer from multiple personality disorder considering that I introduced the interview with 500 words praising Hall.
The social media mob then assumed that Salon was “cringing,” in the words of one commentator, when they published the interview. The obvious question – then why did they do it? – seemingly escapes the steel trap analytical apparatus of people investing hours of their lives into the inane task of cyber conformity to an ideological tribe, 140 characters at a time.
Reality is irrelevant within this conservative cocoon, but at the risk of inviting accusations of masochism, I will correct some of the erroneous assumptions many right wing writers made when they read my interview.
My editor’s immediate reaction to the interview was a succinct endorsement: “This is amazing.” I have written several essays ridiculing political correctness on the left – the most recent of which is available at Splice Today. I have written books on Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp – two artists profoundly influenced by black musicians – and as I write inside my home office, I’m looking at a picture of Elvis Presley hanging on the wall. If I actually believed that white musicians who play or sing according to a black influence were guilty of a cultural crime, I would have to destroy half of my record collection and disavow two of my own books. In the leap to conclude that I am the stereotype of their limited imaginations, they made fools of themselves, but that is hardly anything new.
The important story to emerge out of the strange response to my interview with Daryl Hall has nothing to do with me, and little to do with Hall. It is an indictment of the juvenile, closed-minded, and thoughtless quality of America’s cultural conversation. More approximate to the playground than the lecture hall, the champions of the new debate, who amass followers like trophies and mistake popularity for insight, are not those who enlarge the collective understanding of politics, economics, and the arts, but those who can most quickly and effectively retreat into their comfortable corners, and safely issue insults with their keyboards.
The narrow mind of the social media mob member cannot function without reflexively categorizing everyone and everything as ally or adversary. Transparently insecure in his own intellect and identity, he must protect himself against any information or analysis that challenges his dogmatic and doctrinal worldview. The social media mob member cannot afford to entertain – to return to the terminology of the fake Aristotle quote – any agreement with a politically opposed publication, or regard the writer for such a publication as neutral – because doing so might cause the house of cards to crumble.
Right wing writers were eager to construct a false dichotomy between Hall and me, and had to deceive themselves into believing that my statement of agreement with Hall was insincere, because to read the interview simply as a literate and normal human being would allow the possibility that the world is full of complexity and contradiction – that people are not cartoons cast into roles supportive of their political perspective – and that not everyone with whom they would normally disagree is a demonic force of darkness hoping to violate everything they consider sacred.
The crisis of contemporary cultural discourse is that instant polarization, and the enthusiasm for division, undermines opportunities for growth and development. In their zeal to believe I am an enemy, the right wing exposed themselves as more eager to hate than to think.
Any reaction to my interview with a pop singer is trivial and largely insignificant, but the derangement of the right wing response to my neutral question for Daryl Hall, and my agreement with his answer, is emblematic of the resistance to thought paralytic to political progress. The vicious hostility toward President Barack Obama, even as he continually and fruitlessly tries to reconcile with conservatives, is a much more critical example of how extreme polarity, and its contestation of the humanity of political opponents, makes democratic compromise and negotiation nearly impossible.
The social media mob would benefit from entertaining the ideas of others and ingesting anti-anxiety medication, and the entire political process would reap the rewards. Otherwise, millions of voters, pundits, and leaders will remain, as one songwriter put it, “out of touch.”
Abbott & Costello go to “Chinatown”: Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling’s “The Nice Guys” is an irresistible, idiotic ‘70s bromance
Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in "The Nice Guys" (Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment)
For reasons that are both glaringly obvious and also run deep below the surface of our culture, Los Angeles has played itself on screen more than any other city in the world. Other places have sunlight and other places have depravity; other places have insane cult leaders and serial killers and people who believe that wealth has brought them enlightenment. But at least when it comes to the collective cinematic imagination, no place combines those things quite the way the City of Angels does.
Veteran Hollywood screenwriter Shane Black is clearly steeped in the conventions and traditions of the L.A. noir genre, which is one of the central factors that makes his diabolical 1970s buddy comedy “The Nice Guys” so entertaining. Look, I’m not going to claim that this showcase for Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling — who play a low-end enforcer and an incompetent private eye, respectively, in the memorably dingy Los Angeles of 1977 — isn’t juvenile, offensive, overly violent and frequently misanthropic. In the very first scene, a teenage boy has a spectacular encounter with a naked porn star, shortly before her violent death. Somewhat later, we get to hear a 13-year-old girl (Angourie Rice, playing the daughter of Gosling’s P.I. character) discussing anal sex with a different porn star, not the dead one. Are you sensing a theme?
Does the relentless atmospheric sleaze of “The Nice Guys” sometimes feel overly calculated, or just dialed up too high? Yeah, definitely. But Black isn’t Orson Welles and isn’t trying to be; he’s the guy who wrote the first two “Lethal Weapon” movies, and then worked his way back into Hollywood’s good graces, many years later, as the writer and director of “Iron Man 3.” He knows what he’s doing and remains in control of the misanthropy, stupidity and violence throughout “The Nice Guys,” which combines a whole bunch of overly familiar material in lunatic, original fashion. If this movie bears a strong generic resemblance to Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent “Inherent Vice” and Howard Hawks’ classic “The Big Sleep,” for instance, it’s self-consciously aimed at viewers who’ve never even heard of those pictures, let alone seen them. Or rather, it’s calculated to reach different kinds of viewers in different ways; Black has loaded “The Nice Guys” with in-jokes for film nerds.
To go even nerdier and more specific, “The Nice Guys” is so closely modeled on “Chinatown” as to be an elaborate pastiche of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic, except turned into an idiotic bromance and updated to the decade when “Chinatown” was actually made. I promise these aren’t spoilers, and anyway the so-called plot of “The Nice Guys” isn’t really the point, but both movies are about high-level corruption and damaged parent-child relationship in the upper echelons of power. While the semi-comprehensible plot of “Chinatown” concerns a scandal surrounding L.A.’s water supply, “The Nice Guys” is nominally about the poisoned Southern California air of the ‘70s. (Believe it or not, L.A.’s air quality was vastly worse then — before the age of catalytic converters and “smog checks” — than it is now.)
To sum it all up, “The Nice Guys” is basically “Chinatown” remade by Quentin Tarantino and starring foulmouthed, updated versions of Abbott and Costello, as played by two of the most recognizable male stars of our time. Make your purchasing decisions accordingly. That’s not some film-critic stretch, by the way: There are several scenes where Abbott-and-Costello-grade slapstick rises to the surface, one of them a mini-masterwork of comic idiocy involving Holland March (Gosling) trying to hold a gun on Jackson Healy (Crowe) while sitting in a toilet stall and using a magazine to conceal his privates. Of course I realize Abbott and Costello could never have done such a routine for paying audiences, but they definitely would have.
“The Nice Guys” is 100 percent not a serious movie and has absolutely nothing to say about corporate power or environmental activism or how the sex industry permeated American culture in the ‘70s or anything else. Still, there’s something to be said for the fact that those things appear in the movie, if only as themes or gags, and that millions of people will watch it purely for laughs. I feel similarly about the running monologues from Holland March, Gosling’s downscale private eye, about how standards of courtesy and decency have been lost and society has become debauched. On the surface, and maybe under it too, that’s dopey borrowed shtick from a guy who’s like a fourth-rate imitation of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer.
But one of the redeeming characteristics of Black’s humor (I would argue) is that it’s always a bit more complicated than it appears. (That was the problem, arguably, with the big-budget ‘90s bombs like “Last Action Hero” and “The Long Kiss Goodnight” that sabotaged Black’s career the first time around.) We laugh at Holland’s “civilization is lost” soliloquies because, ha ha, it’s 1977 and he has no idea what’s coming — except that as Black is old enough to remember, the late ‘70s really were a time of unique decrepitude in recent American history. And then we laugh because he’s the wrong messenger, as a guy who makes a living bilking old ladies and pretending to look for missing people who are already dead.
But Black understands he can push the character only so far, and Gosling does too. This is one of his best and funniest performances, and as big of a scumbag as Holland may be, he still has that adorable 13-year-old daughter around to humanize him. Crowe’s performance as Jackson, meanwhile, is one of the movie’s unexpected delights. On one level he’s an archetypal mid-career Crowe character, a paunchy, hangdog piece of hired muscle plagued with self-doubt. But even as Jackson lumbers around L.A. wearing stubble, a Hawaiian shirt and a blue Pleather jacket, punching strangers in the face with brass knuckles, he remains mysteriously lovable. He forges a spirit-animal connection with Holly (Rice), Holland’s daughter, right after breaking her dad’s arm and leaving him howling on the floor.
Holland and Jackson wind up joining forces, not long after the arm-breaking episode, to track down a missing young woman who starred in a missing porn film, which may include an explosive political message. If you want to start totaling up all the references to other noir plots in that one sentence, go right ahead. As I say, the story’s not important, or nowhere near as much as the clothes and cars — perfect, and not overdone — and Philippe Rousselot’s digital cinematography, which conjures up a ‘70s vibe without outright quotation. (I would argue that no clean-cut L.A. teenager had Sex Pistols or Blondie posters in her bedroom until several years later, but we’ll let that go.) Is it frustrating that Black is slightly too smart for this deliberately dumbed-down comedy and lets us know it, or satisfying that “The Nice Guys” accomplishes more than many officially more ambitious films? That’s a problem for a third-rate noir detective to ponder aloud for a while, before concluding that, y’know, it all depends on your perspective.
“I lost my virginity to a total psychopath”: Lena Dunham publishes her college diary, and it’s pretty much exactly what you expect
Lena Dunham (Credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok)
A refrain I hear often from my fellow old-lady peers goes like this: Thank Christ there was no social media when we were young. The thought being, of course, that given the opportunity, most people would prefer no living record of their most callow, inebriated, impulsive, insufferable moments of youth. We would prefer to pretend we materialized whole, from a cloud of organic cleaning products and CSA-approved vegetarian compost, as fully-formed adults, with the eating, drinking, sleeping, sexual and self-censoring habits to match. This crippling fear of letting the most awful earlier versions of ourselves see the light of day is why we are toiling in day jobs while Lena Dunham basically rules the world.
Our reigning Queen of The Monetized Overshare expands her rule today with the surprise drop of a new chapbook, made up entirely of fragmented diary entries she kept in college from 2005-06. These “creative snippets and observations” have been collected into “Is It Evil Not To Be Sure?,” sales of which benefit the very cool nonprofit Girls Write Now. The limited-edition bound copies sold out immediately, but e-books are still available and very easy to scroll through.
Dunham’s preserved “creative snippets” are elliptical and sometimes daring, and the effect is not unlike reading someone’s discarded Twitter Drafts. This solid example, “you kiss like a two year old on meth,” would not be the most outrageous subtweet I’ve read today alone, but it would make me desperately want to know who it was about. In today’s Lenny Letter, Dunham writes of her form:
I’m not sure what inspired me to record my thoughts this way. While nonlinear observations are now the norm because of Twitter-enforced brevity, at the time it wasn’t such an obvious way to write (unless, like me, you were reading a ton of confessional poetry and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs exclusively). But I think the form mimicked what I was experiencing internally: massive personal growth, the kind that comes from a million tiny shocking moments rather than one big bang. In reproducing the journal entries, I’ve held on to a lot of the unorthodox grammar and punctuation, to keep that immediacy alive.
Because Dunham is either fearless or shameless, depending on who you ask, she likewise does not shy away from preserving such age-appropriate clunkers as, “At the wine and cheese party she whines and eats cheese.”
Much of “Is It Evil Not To Be Sure?” deals with Dunham’s sexual coming-of-age. College sex here is depicted not as the gauzy romps of the nostalgia-driven memoirist but in turns as banal, devastating, and infused with a kind of dread. It is humbling in its accuracy and melodrama. “I lost my virginity to a total psychopath,” the narrator muses, adding, “I saw him shave with his hat on.”
This kind of ritual scab-picking is not for everyone, and even young memoirists write and edit from a distance that allows them to craft a narrative. Don’t expect that from this book, and don’t expect fully-formed essays, such as those found in her collection “Not That Kind of Girl.” But if you have managed to somewhat forget how awful and exciting and earth-shattering and disgusting being a 20-year-old woman can be, expect to be reminded, in detail.
“I don’t drink Starbucks”: 5 revelations from DuJour’s cushy profile of Melania Trump
Donald and Melania Trump in Milwaukee (Credit: AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Julia Ioffe, who received a gross amount of anti-Semitic hate mail after publishing a profile of Melania Trump in GQ, knows better than anyone the occupational hazards of writing about her.
Maybe that’s why Mickey Rapkin, writing for DuJour, took a less demonizing approach. Though DuJour’s profile is far less probing, it did produce some nifty insights.
1. Melania Trump, possibly the next First Lady of the United States, doesn’t get her coffee from Starbucks.
“I drink coffee,” she told Rapkin. “But I don’t drink Starbucks.” (There’s a Starbucks on the ground floor of Trump Tower.) Barron, her 10-year-old son with Donald, enjoys himself the occasional Frappuccino, though.
2. The older Trump kids — Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric — call her to give advice to the presumptive GOP nominee.
“After a speech, the kids are calling me … saying, ‘Call dad and tell him this and that. He’s listening to you,'” Melania explains. “They know I would talk to him and put him in the right direction.”
3. Melania’s first apartment, a small one-bedroom, in New York rented for $2,500 a month
According to Rapkin, Melania’s first apartment, “a small one-bedroom that felt like a declaration of independence,” cost her $2,500 a month. No mention was made of whether utilities were included.
Asked where she went to buy furnishings, “She thinks about this for a second before she finally remembers the name of the store. ‘I went to Crate & Barrel,’ she says. ‘Does that still exist or no?'”
4. The first time Melania met Donald, he was with another woman and tried to pull a sleazy switch-a-roo.
“Donald had arrived with another woman — and tried to get Melania’s phone number while his date was in the bathroom,” Rapkin wrote.
That’s the late-’90s equivalent of meeting on Tinder. Trump’s nothing if not “classy”.
5. Melania is as obtuse as her husband on immigration.
She immigrated to the U.S. by means of an H1-B visa that “generally requires a bachelor’s degree or higher” (which she doesn’t have) and, “due to some congressional technicality,” disproportionately favors models over computer scientists by a ratio of 2:1.
In short, Melania Trump by no means took a conventional route to citizenship. She very much lucked out.
“The law needs to be changed to help those kind of people,” Melania argued. “But they can’t just sneak in and be here. That’s what I’m saying. I do have sympathy. I’m a very compassionate person. But don’t sneak in and stay here without papers. We need to follow the law. If the law needs to be different, we need to do that.”
Curtis Sittenfeld’s updated Jane Austen influences: “CrossFit, reality television, Skyline chili, Gloria Steinem”
For May, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to five authors with new books: (“Enchanted Islands”), Anton DiSclafani (“The After Party”), Geoff Dyer (“White Sands”), Curtis Sittenfeld (“Eligible”) and Paula Whyman (“You May See a Stranger”).
Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?
SITTENFELD: It’s about finding love in the most unexpected places, and by the most unexpected places, I mean Cincinnati, Ohio.
AMEND: Keeping secrets, the puzzle of identity, the family we make, female friendship and SPYING!
DYER: I guess travel and the search for change. Places and the things in those places that don’t change – which become more apparent in the light of transitory things that do change (aka the people there). In other words the relation of incident –or incidental – to the essential. Sometimes they’re very different, sometimes practically synonymous.
DISCLAFANI: The life of an obsessive friendship. Houston in its 1950s heyday, watered by oil and populated by spectacular characters. A secret.
WHYMAN: It’s about lust and anxiety and elusive contentment, about dealing with sexuality and class and racial tensions as a teen and onward into middle age. It’s about living in D.C. when you’re not in politics. It’s about difficult siblings, difficult marriage and kids; about how we struggle to change and adapt, yet we’re never sure that we’re living the best way we can. It’s a book about how we become ourselves.
Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?
AMEND: My frenemy, solitariness (not to be confused with loneliness), searing equatorial heat, aging, my mother’s book club.
DISCLAFANI: Seeing Texas from the backseat of my parents’ rental car, as we visited relatives in both the glamorous parts (Houston) and the less glamorous parts (Hereford). My grandfather, who was a waiter at the Cork Club and stole Glenn McCarthy’s solid-gold lighter after McCarthy didn’t leave a tip. The way my father still tells people he’s from Texas even though he hasn’t lived there in thirty-five years.
DYER: Going to places, living the years. More specifically certain marks made –and seen – in various landscapes.
WHYMAN: Terrorism, and the way fear has changed everything. A question asked in a psychological study: Can one’s personality change over time? Bad ’80s music. Marion Barry and his Murder Capital. Driving in D.C.’s rush-hour traffic. The awful roommate, and the apartments where I lived in my twenties. ABC After-School Specials. My brother. Every place I’ve ever felt like an outsider. All the birds. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Talking to high school students in Harlem. Talking to strangers on Amtrak. The sweating, shirtless boy mowing the lawn; the smell of gasoline and smashed-cut grass.
SITTENFELD: CrossFit, reality television, Skyline chili, Gloria Steinem, Silicon Valley, and Regency England. The usual!
Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?
DISCLAFANI: Faintly then hugely pregnant. Writing about characters who drank like it was their job when I could not. Thinking lustily about various 1950s cocktails. Revising with infant in next room.
AMEND: Student essays, boy trouble, student stories, man trouble, student problems, guy trouble, turning 40, and then, hallelujah, sabbatical!
SITTENFELD: Suburban Midwestern parent stuff.
DYER: The usual. Continuing deterioration of tennis game, for example, plus succumbing to and recovering from injuries. Ever-increasing irritability. Plus, unusually, I moved to California – which strangely did nothing to ameliorate the last mentioned category of “the usual.”
WHYMAN: Pre-dawn running. Preteens become teens. DC, New Hampshire, New York, Key West. One teen comes out. Play guitar badly. Vertigo and broken bones. Ill, aging parents. Fail at meditation. Mysterious ailment. Give up all the foods. Death, unexpected. Discover The Balvenie. Keep running. Miss having a dog.
What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?
AMEND: “I bought this book because there was a dog on the cover, but there’s no dog in the book!” Also, “There’s too much about the characters. They just talk to each other for the whole book.”
DISCLAFANI: Quiet. Depraved. Boring.
DYER: “Formless” or “Unstructured.” Structure’s actually a strong point. So the way some people thought Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi was two half books masquerading as one complete one was irritating in the extreme.
WHYMAN: I’m grateful for reviews and reviewers, and it’s a bit early for me to have anything to complain about. Can’t I say what my favorite comment is, so far? Blake Bailey called me a “more erotic Lorrie Moore.” I’d like that on my tombstone. On the other hand, over the years there have been a couple of reviews that misspelled my name. One called me Rhyman; the other called me Whynot. Both of these errors are entertaining, and I’m thinking of changing my name.
SITTENFELD: Hmmm…autobiographical? (Because how can the reviewer know? Unless the reviewer is your mom?)
If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?
WHYMAN: Conservation biologist, maybe with a special interest in lizards. I once wrote a novel chapter from the point-of-view of an anole.
AMEND: Woman of leisure. I think I’d be excellent at it. Also, I’d like to be in charge of rail travel in this country. I have a lot of ideas for Amtrak.
SITTENFELD: I’d be either Kelly Clarkson or a social worker.
DYER: The life of any kind of sportsman.
DISCLAFANI: Medicine. I like the idea of trotting around a hospital, ever-alert. And what you did would automatically mean something.
What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?
SITTENFELD: In graduate school, I learned incredibly important lessons about structure from my advisor, Ethan Canin: how to think of the work as a whole, how to consider which scenes go where and what information should be revealed when. I think I’m decent at keeping a novel chugging along, making the reader want to know what happens next, which tends to hinge on structure, even as structure should essentially be invisible. As for what I’d like to be better at, I’m aware that my prose is more often workmanlike than actively lovely. I’m not a huge fan of gratuitously, self-consciously exquisite sentences, but I could no doubt be a bit more elegant overall.
WHYMAN: I think I’m better at dialogue, wry humor, and sex. I wouldn’t mind if the the plot thing came more easily.
DYER: Good at structure and form – coming up with new structures, new forms. Not good at character or plot – don’t care though.
DISCLAFANI: I think voice and setting are my strong suits. I’d like to get better at plot.
AMEND: I find dialogue easy to write. Plawt, not so much. I can’t even spell it. The spying section of Enchanted Islands brought me to tears several times.
How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?
DYER: I reject the question because I would never think anyone should give a toss about anything I say about anything. My whole writing life has been built on the assumption that no one was listening. Hello?… Hello…? Is there anybody out there…?
DISCLAFANI: I don’t think about it. I try to approach writing as a job: I write novels. People read them, and are hopefully moved or entertained or both.
SITTENFELD: Ha! I ask myself this very question every day. But in a way, operating on the assumption that you don’t matter that much is liberating. I can be criticized or ignored for whatever I write, so I might as well write what I want to.
WHYMAN: I wrote the kind of book that I would enjoy reading, and I’m hoping there might be a few others out there with similar reading proclivities. Also, I have children, so when I talk, I already assume no one is actually listening.
AMEND: I was dipped in a font of Arrogance by my father at birth. Only my heel where he held me is vulnerable to Doubt.
Jeb Bush proves he can be just as racist as Trump: Says taco bowl tweet was ‘like eating a watermelon and saying I love African-Americans’
Jeb Bus (Credit: Michael Holahan/The Augusta Chronicle via AP)
Jeb Bush proved he can be just as racist as Trump when he attempted to discredit his former rival’s infamous Cinco de Mayo tweet. The real estate tycoon was pictured eating a taco bowl with his thumbs up and the caption “I love Hispanics,” to which Jeb compared “It’s like eating a watermelon and saying, ‘I love African-Americans,” The Daily News reports.
“Showing your sensitivity by eating an American dish is the most insensitive thing you can do,” Bush told Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad in an interview published over the weekend. “To say this, next to all things he already said, is a further insult.”
Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican, failed to make his point and to defend Hispanics, using equally questionable racial stereotypes.
“What Trump did was so insensitive,” Bush said. “Not all Hispanics are Mexican. Not all Hispanics eat tacos.”
Trump has not responded to Bush’s comments.
