Closing time for Gerard’s blog – plus an update on the poetry book

The New Neo Posted on by

I knew it had to happen, although I’d been delaying it: closing down Gerard Vanderleun’s blog. For one thing, he left instructions to me to leave it up for two years and then to take it down. So it was his wish. I’ve been tending it by posting photos and open threads three days per week as its once-robust readership dwindled, and now it’s been two years and two months since Gerard’s death.

So it’s time to do it – really, past time to do it. But still difficult. That blog was his lovingly tended work, full of photos and essays and poetry and humor. There were over five thousand posts there, and the number was only that small because he’d gotten rid of everything prior to 2017 except some old favorites. Gerard could be ruthless that way; he was always pruning the blog.

If you go there now you’ll see a message that it’s closed (some strange code has snuck in, too, and I don’t know how to get rid of that so I’ll let it be). I’m busy canceling the autopays and after that the site will probably give forth a basic 404 message. But I’ve edited the essay book and I’ve got the poetry book in the works, with the latter probably due to appear in the next month or two. I’ll announce it here when it’s available for purchase.

But before I closed Gerard’s blog down I copied a bunch more of his essays into another document and I may – accent on the may – decide to put out a second essay book of his. I’m not sure yet if I will, but I’m considering it.

One of Gerard’s readers has also started a new site so that whoever wants to can continue to post and talk: here it is, in case you’re interested.

Gerard really liked the poem The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. And so do I. So for this occasion, I’ll close with a verse from it that seems appropriate:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

The increasingly colorless world

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s part of an essay Christopher Cook wrote yesterday:

I occasionally point this out to my wife as we’re driving along. Why have car colors become soooooooo boring?

The rest of the essay explores ideas about what the reasons might be, and why it also is true in architecture and clothing.

But you heard it here first: fourteen years ago, to be exact. The following was the entire 2011 post of mine on the subject:

Whatever happened to car colors?

It seems these days that gray’s the thing, in every possible shade and tone: silver, metallic, charcoal, light, dark, middling, and every type of gray in between. Much more gray than I care to look at.

I ask you: whose decree is this, and why?

The comments there are quite interesting as well.

But here’s an update: it’s only gotten worse. And yes, clothing is involved too. I know many people – and we’re talking women here, not men in gray flannel suits – who only wear neutrals like black and beige. My closet is very colorful, but maybe that marks me as a dinosaur, fashion-wise.

But perhaps the worst offender in recent years has been interior decoration. For quite a while everything was gray – except for kitchens, which were white. I used to sometimes put a house remodeling channel on TV while I was working, as a sort of background babble, and it featured young couple after young couple looking at perfectly lovely kitchens and saying they of course had to be totally remodeled, with everything white except for silver appliances.

I know some of it has to do with the idea of resale value, and that blandness is inoffensive to most people. Well, it’s pretty offensive to me.

I’ve been looking for a new couch. My old one is uncomfortable (and when I write “old” I mean about 25 years old) and it wasn’t much to begin with. It is a pretty color green, though, and that’s what I want for my new one, too. It can be done, because fortunately there are usually many fabrics from which to choose.

But the salesroom of the store I entered? Everything was beige or gray. And I mean everything. It was uncanny and unsettling, and I even mentioned it to one of the salespeople. She said they were going to be getting a new decorator and more color. Perhaps a trend? If so, it’s one I’d welcome.

Netanyahu explains

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t actually watched this interview with Netanyahu yet, but I’ve seen it highly recommended by several people, including Scott Johnson at Powerline, who writes:

In the interview Netanyahu walks us through all the major decisions that shaped the Iron Swords war thus far. The interview is conducted in Hebrew and posted with English subtitles. This is a remarkably illuminating document on the crucial decisions [he] has had to make in the course of the war so far. Among other things, he frankly describes his interactions with President Biden and other Biden administration officials … [It is a] living lesson in the art of statesmanship.

Here’s the interview:

Reflections on the stock market

The New Neo Posted on by

The stock market partially recovers today, then drops again:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 320 points after giving up an earlier surge of 1,460, while the Nasdaq composite lost 2.1%. Uncertainty is still high about what President Donald Trump will do with his trade war. The latest set of tariffs, including a massive 104% levy on Chinese imports, are scheduled to kick in after midnight.

What does it all mean? It means that people are nervous and that change is in the air.

I watched a good podcast discussing tariffs yesterday. Here it is in its entirety, but it’s not necessary to watch the whole thing to get the gist of it:

The other thing I need to say is that my sense of the stock market has always been that it is risky. Even bonds can be risky; my very first experience with investing came when I was 21 years old and my father gifted me with three thousand dollars and told me to buy a New York City bond with it. My father was ordinarily very good with money, but New York almost went bankrupt while I held that bond and there was a lot of stress involved.

Then, as young parents, my then-husband and I lost an enormous percentage of our still-meager holdings in 1987. I wasn’t the one who had decided to invest the money; my husband was. But it never occurred to me to blame him because without his investing our money would never have grown in the first place.

Then, as a newly-divorced person, in 2008 I lost over half my still-not-enormous worth in the 2008 crash. It came back, but it took a long long time and much angst. I had so many other difficult things on my mind back then that I didn’t stress out too much.

Will this be different? Will this be better or worse? I certainly don’t know. But at the moment I’m philosophical.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is in the news again [see UPDATE]

The New Neo Posted on by

I read about it at Althouse:

I don’t know if Kristol knows what he’s telling us we need to “be,” but he’s upset that “pursuant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to purge so-called DEI content from military libraries and classrooms, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was removed, along with 380 other books, from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library.”

Kristol asserts, despite not having read the book, that “‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ is not ‘DEI content.’ It’s a quintessentially American autobiography—a popular and important one. It’s a book a student at the Academy might want to read for his or her education, or for pleasure.”

Why would the story of a particular individual represent the promotion of the DEI agenda?

Althouse goes on to add that a commenter of hers observed that perhaps this was a case of malicious compliance from some anti-Trump holdover. That’s certainly possible. It’s also possible that in general books that aren’t especially related to naval or military matters are being pulled.

The reason I’m writing about this is twofold, however. The first is that pulling a book from a library or a school isn’t “banning” it or making it so that students can’t or shouldn’t read it, but stories in the MSM about Republicans doing that are common in order to depict them as racist troglodytes. The second is a point about the book itself, which is certainly not a DEI polemic or a polemic of any sort: it’s a coming-of-age story. Because the protagonist, Angelou, was born in 1928 and raised mostly in a small segregated town in Arkansas, of course racism is part of the story. But to me – and I read the book when it first came out in 1969, and even own it – it wasn’t the main part at all.

I was going to write a description of the book here, and then I realized – as often happens – that I’ve passed this way before. Here’s the post I wrote about it in 2014, on the occasion of Angelou’s death. Summary version: it’s a great book. Some people don’t like memoirs, but I happen to like them and this one is excellent, touching, and well-written, and was especially powerful if read when it first came out. It also has the single most compelling and sensitive description of child sexual abuse I’ve ever read. Here’s what I wrote about that in 2014:

The rape that occurs [to the author] later, at the hands of Angelou’s mother’s live-in boyfriend when 8-year-old Maya and her brother have been sent back to St. Louis to live with her, is heartbreakingly rendered. Described from the child’s viewpoint, it somehow manages to depict something that has rarely been conveyed so well: how the child’s starvation for paternal affection can set up the neediness that makes him/her vulnerable, how wily and then how brutal the rapist can be, and how a sensitive child might react. In Angelou’s case, when her uncles took revenge and murdered the rapist, she felt that her talking about the rape had caused his death, and so she decided to stop talking entirely …

Angelou wrote many more memoirs besides Caged, and over the years I’ve read quite a few of them. They’re of interest to anyone interested in Angelou’s life, and they constitute a story of overcoming great odds. But none of them even remotely touches the heights of her first book. I’ve often thought that many writers have one book in them that they must write, are driven to write, and that for Angelou that book was Caged. The rest was commentary.

UPDATE 10 PM:

Apparently Kristol got his facts wrong. See this:

I looked at the list. It is NOT Maya Angelou’s book that is being pulled. It is a collection of “critical essays” about her book. The full title is “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – Critical Essays.” edited by Mildred Mickle. It’s was the “edited by…” That clued me in. Because I KNOW that Angelou’s book didn’t credit an editor. That, and the 2010 publication date. I looked it up. It’s academic critical essay crap.

If the idiots at the New York Times would bother to actually look up what was being pulled…

I also suspect a little “malicious compliance” by whomever typed up the list. They were sly about not including the full, correct title of the ACTUAL book. (The only thing Mildred edited about “caged birds” is this collection of essays.)

Tariffs: everybody’s scrambling, and the EU makes an offer

The New Neo Posted on by

Some news:

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the bloc offered President Donald Trump a deal concerning tariffs on industrial goods.

Von der Leyen said at a press conference (emphasis the LI author’s):

“These tariffs come first and foremost at immense costs for US consumers and businesses. But at the same time, they have a massive impact on the global economy. Developing countries are hit especially hard. This is a major turning point for the United States. Nonetheless, we stand ready to negotiate with the US. Indeed, we have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods as we have successfully done with many other trading partners. Because Europe is always ready for a good deal. So we keep it on the table. But we are also prepared to respond through countermeasures and defend our interests. And in addition, we will also protect ourselves against indirect effects through trade diversion. For this purpose, we will set up an ‘Import Surveillance Task Force’. We will work with industry to make sure we have the necessary evidence base for our policy measures. We will stay in very close contact to minimise effects of our actions on each other.”

Also, there’s this:

President Donald Trump threatened China with an additional 50% tariff if the communist country did not drop its 34% retaliatory tariffs.

Trump has also coined a new word: “Panican,” which he defines as “A new party based on Weak and Stupid people.”

Leftists want to murder Trump, according to polls

The New Neo Posted on by

This news is unsurprising. I noticed the phenomenon among some people I know even in Trump’s first term, and not all of them would even define themselves as leftists. And it’s only gotten worse – plus, as the report describes, Musk is now the recipient of the same sentiment.

Some findings:

Here are some of the troubling numbers, according to the report:

Murder Justification: 31% and 38% of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively. (These effects were largely driven by respondents that self-identified as left of center, with 48% and 55% at least somewhat justifying murder for Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively, indicating significantly higher justification for violence against these figures.)

Property Destruction: Nearly 40% of respondents (39.8%) stated it is at least somewhat acceptable (or more) to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest.

Psychological/Ideological Correlations with Assassination Culture: These beliefs are highly correlated with one another, as well as with the justification of the murder of the United Healthcare CEO and hyper-partisan left-wing ideology. (This suggests that support for violence is part of a broader assassination culture, underpinned by psychological and ideological factors.)

Interestingly, the report finds liberal social media platform BlueSky “plays a significant and predictive role in amplifying radical ideation.” BlueSky has seen its new user numbers surge since November’s election, according to the leftist publication The Guardian. Curiously, the “great X-odus” has been driven by liberals “seeking to escape Elon Musk’s X amid warnings from anti-hate speech campaign groups and the EU about misinformation and extremism on the platform,” The Guardian asserts.

In my experience it’s hardly limited to leftists or young people or BlueSky users, and the people I know who have talked of wanting Trump dead don’t really speak much about Mangione. But I know a somewhat different – and generally older – group.

It is of note that they say these things about Trump in front of me although they already know my politics; I think they are just so very in the habit of speaking this way among like-minded people that they temporarily forget I’m not of the same opinion. In a way, that’s the most frightening part of it – that these not-so-leftist and no-longer-young people feel it’s not only socially acceptable but a form of virtue-signaling to talk about having murderous rage towards Trump.

Personally, although I’ve heard people say they hate Musk – people who used to admire him, by the way – I haven’t heard anyone express murderous rage towards him.

And by the way, no one I know is intent on actually killing Trump. The talk is of wanting him killed or at least dead, as a testament to the intensity of the speaker’s hatred towards this Hitlerian figure. And no, not all the Trump-haters I know speak this way. But a significant number do.

The “allow trans women” (that is, biological men) movement in women’s sports has reached its apogee as two biological men compete against each other in the finals of a pool tournament

The New Neo Posted on by

If you believe that all a person has to do to be a woman is to declare oneself a woman, then it follows as day follow night (or is it night follows day?) that you must support the absurdity of post-pubescent biological men in women’s sports. There’s really no way around that, and therefore many people have chosen that ideology over their support for women’s sports.

My experience with pool being mostly limited to the old movie The Hustler, I never really thought about whether pool is a sport or not. But whatever it is – and I guess it is – men have the upper-body advantage in reach and power.

And so we have this:

Harriet Haynes and Lucy Smith, who were both assigned male at birth, fought for the title at the Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2 in Wigan in the UK this weekend.

Haynes went on to defeat Smith 8-6, but vocal critics on both sides of the Atlantic claimed the real loser in the battle was women’s sport. British former Olympics swimmer Sharron Davies and American former college swimmer Riley Gaines were among those speaking out.

However, others celebrated the achievement and claimed being trans had not given the players any unfair benefits during the game.

Yeah, right. It’s just chance that of all the women on the circuit, two biological men were the finalists:

Opponents of trans players in pool suggest they benefit from various advantages, such as being able to smash their break shot with more speed. While one British pool group, the English Blackball Pool Federation (EBPF), has claimed that trans women benefit from a greater hand span, stronger fingers, and longer limbs enabling a greater reach across the table, according to The Independent.

If you look at the photo of the two finalists here, I think it’s interesting that they resemble each other enough to be siblings.

Open threads and the scrolling days

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been doing open threads every day except Sunday for quite some time. I think they’re a nice addition to the blog and people seem to like them and enjoy the open-ended commenting.

But I’ve noticed an unforeseen side effect for me: a focus on the passage of time. It seems to go more quickly than ever anyway, as we get older. But having to put the date down every day highlights it for more. One day it’s the first of the month; a nice clean slate. Then suddenly, two weeks have passed and it’s mid-month. How on earth did that happen? And then, the end of the month comes all too swiftly.

As my ex-husband said the other day, “a year is not very long.”

It reminds me of this song: