Life was dark and crisscrossed, and the flashlight of truth and justice was dim and clumsy. ―Tim Garvin, A Dredging in Swann

Greetings from the Far Left Coast.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (2020) is a film by Hungarian writer-director Lili Horvát, featuring Natasa Stork as an accomplished neurosurgeon who returns to Budapest after falling for a Hungarian doctor she met at a conference in New Jersey. Márta Vizy's former professor and new boss is perplexed by her decision to leave the US and her position at a first-rate institution where she distinguished herself. None of her new colleagues, he tells her, is in her league. Her new office mate advises, "We bring our own toilet paper," when she points out where the coffee machine and the restroom are. It is customary for a patient to leave an envelope with cash for the surgeon after an operation. "Why did you come here?" the older doctor asks. "Personal reasons," she says.

János Drexler remains affiliated with Márta's new department but now devotes himself to teaching and writing. He is the author of a celebrated new book scheduled for publication in the US not as a medical text but as literature. The plot thickens when Márta calls out to him on the street outside the hospital. He turns, stares, says he does not know her, and walks away. She collapses.

Their eyes met at the conference, she tells her therapist, and she thought, this is it, this is who I've been looking for. During a break they chatted over coffee and spoke vaguely of meeting someday at a spot she loved on the Pest side of a bridge. Two months later she returned to Budapest. Now she wonders if she has lost her mind, thinking maybe she wanted it so badly she made the whole the whole thing up, filling in every detail so she now believes it really happened. Her therapist speculates that she wants him to diagnose her with a personality disorder. That would be an explanation at any rate.

In the meantime János's actions and words are ambiguous. He shows up to observe a complicated and delicate surgery she performs flawlessly. Afterward he praises her skill, saying that she broke off the procedure at just the right point. Ninety-nine out of a hundred would have gone one step further into the brain and the patient would lost the ability to speak. "I almost did," she responds.

Márta does some minor stalking. Surreptitiously goes through his mailbox at the hospital. Chance encounters are not entirely chance. She attends a book signing where he makes a point of presenting her with a copy of his book. Does he remember her? Is his interest purely professional? Or is he putting the moves on her after his own reticent, fumbling fashion? There is something in his gaze more searching than merely curious. Unless she imagines this, as she perhaps imagines she sees him lingering across the street from her apartment. Maybe they are just two brilliant, lonely individuals whose social skills are on a par with mine.

Márta is enigmatic, reticent, stubborn, brilliant, possibly delusional, definitely compelling. Preparations to Be Together is a suspenseful psychological tour de force that left me wondering where it leaves Márta and János. Hopeful but uncertain was my state of mind, and maybe hers.

I had never heard of Lili Horvát or Natasa Stork before I happened upon their film while scrolling through Kanopy in search of something to watch on Saturday afternoon. Horvát is an impressive filmmaker and Stork is marvelous. I hope to see more of them.

Jane Harper is a terrific novelist. I have read three novels found in the mystery section at the library (The Dry, Force of Nature, and The Lost Man), all set in small, isolated towns in the Australian outback. The Dry and Force of Nature have the same protagonist. Plots center around a mysterious death that at first appears to be the result of an accident, albeit a barely fathomable one. There turns out to be more to it in each case, with sources in secrets from years past, dysfunctional families, small town ostracisms, misunderstandings that arise because people do not talk to each other. And are stubborn. Harper brings to life characters who are complex, flawed, wounded in all sorts of ways. The stories begin slowly and become more and more engaging as they unfold and we come to care about what happens to the people in them.

Tim Garvin's A Dredging in Swann is another good read. Set in a small town on the North Carolina coast. Written with wit and verve. The dialogue can be dazzling, some of it almost too good to be realistic, yet so good it does not much matter whether it is realistic. Good writers make their own realism. As with Harper, the characters are engaging, complicated, damaged yet decent, relatable. We care about them.

A strain of wishful thinking runs through the general pessimism that colors much of what I write for the blog. My commentary about politics and current affairs has grown repetitious and tedious for me. I can only fear that readers are bound to have similar reaction. Drat. I need to do better.

Jonathan V. Last does better when he takes apart Andrew Sullivan's weekend "jeremiad against the 'mainstream media' that tracks pretty closely with the Matt Taibbi-Glenn Greenwald-Bari Weiss view: that one of America’s most pressing concerns is woke activists at the New York Times." Eviscerate is the technical term for what Last does point by point to Sullivan's argument. Last's conclusion:

But someone has to defend the honor of the dreaded mainstream media. Because here is the very boring truth about "MSM narratives":

The media is a vast space where actors and institutions are interconnected, but operate semi-independently, according to a variety of incentives. Sometimes independent actors make good-faith mistakes. Sometimes they make bad-faith mistakes. But in most cases—in nearly every case, actually—the marketplace of ideas eventually wins and the truth outs.

The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication…Is the journalistic mode great? No. Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others. (Andrew Sullivan and the Narrative of the "MSM Narrative")

Democrats in disarray. Two reports from Politico:

The Philadelphia suburbs buried Donald Trump in 2020.

One year later, after enabling Joe Biden to flip one of the nation’s most critical swing states, their lurch in the opposite direction is a cause for alarm among Democrats.

(Holly Otterbein, GOP roars back to life in Trump-resistant Pennsylvania suburbs, November 14, 2021)

"Republicans very clearly see the Virginia campaign as a playbook in the big U.S. Senate races in 2022. I think you will see a lot of the same," said Morgan Jackson, a top Democratic strategist in North Carolina, where Richard Burr’s seat (and with it perhaps the balance of power in the upper chamber) is up for grabs. "You ask voters who they trust more on education, they always trust Democrats—well, we let them undermine that in Virginia, and that’s ground that we have to go back and get. It’s a blueprint for Republicans. And if we’re not listening as Democrats, then that’s our fault when we lose." (Michael Kruse, The Parental Revolution Is Bigger Than Critical Race Theory, November 9, 2021)

And one at Axios:

Terry McAuliffe's debate remark dissing parents allowed Virginia Republicans to mainstream an issue that was already burning up Fox News. The day after Glenn Youngkin's victory, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said the party will soon unveil a "parent’s bill of rights." Democrats are now playing defense on education—an issue they used to own. (Jim VandeHei, Post-Trump GOP doctrine)

Two trials. The Kyle Rittenhouse proceeding is a cluster mess. The judge seems to be a raving whack job, the prosecution a team of bungling feebs, the accused a kid who killed two people and considers himself the victim.

The romanticization of violence for a good cause, which is to say, a cause one supports, is nothing new. It is now a feature baked into the American landscape.

In Illinois, a 17-year old boy was inspired to grab his AR-15, drive to a neighboring state, and take the law—and the lives of others—into his own hands. At which point Kyle Rittenhouse was viewed on the right not as a cautionary tale, but a hero. Conservative media personalities celebrated that he had "a couple of pelts on the wall" and was “gonna have to fight off conservative chicks with a bat." (Ryan Busse, Prepare for the Shock Troops, The Bulwark, November 11, 2021)

Freddie deBoer has a good column on Rittenhouse and related themes I have written about in this space, to wit, a growing and disturbing trend on the left of center to rationalize and justify riots as somehow positive forces for change. I am a broken record, I know. I say it again anyway: This stuff is wrong, stupid, and counterproductive, blockheaded all the way around.

DeBoer's When You Condone Chaos, You Condone the Consequences of Chaos is worth reading in full (I came to deBoer by way of Charlie Sykes, who made reference to him in When You Summon the Chaos.)  Here is the opening:

I have neither any legal expertise to bring to bear about the Kyle Rittenhouse case nor anything particularly novel to say about it. I think that, in a just world, Rittenhouse would be convicted both for a weapons possession charge and for reckless endangerment. As much as a part of me would like to see him go down for the actual killings, those charges seem to be vastly more complicated matters, especially given Wisconsin’s particular self-defense statutes. Certainly there should be some serious repercussions for carrying that weapon illegally and firing it in a way that endangered innocents. Otherwise I don’t know what the appropriate punishment would be, and my thoughts on Rittenhouse’s trial would inevitably be more about what sane and sound gun policy would look like rather than about his specific case.

However, I do want to say this. At the time of the Kinosha [sic] riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another.

Down in Georgia and the trial for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery: McMichael père et fils are vicious brutes who should be imprisoned never again to see the light of day.

Aaron Rogers. Blockhead.

Essay topics and titles under consideration:

• What do I think I am up to anyway?
• Thinking about slavery
• Surrealist women

Two new blog posts:

• That Didn't Go Well, November 5, 2021. Tuesday's election results were disappointing but not surprising. As Charlie Sykes put it, why can't we beat these guys? You know, these guys: The Republican Party—populated with cranks, crooks, clowns, bigots and deranged conspiracy theorists—has spent five years alienating women, minorities and young voters. The party… remains in thrall to a disgraced, defeated, one-term president, who is reduced to issuing increasingly crazed screeds…read more>>

• Establishment liberal? Quelle horreur!, November 12, 2021. I stand accused by the Pew Research Center of being an establishment liberal. This calumny cannot pass unremarked…read more>>

Keep the faith.

yr obdt svt

Pictured below: View from the deck one night last week