Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant
Greetings from the far left coast where the mood is somber here at the Portable Bohemia nerve center. News from Ukraine is grim. The Ukrainians are running low on ammunition, troops, and air defenses. Russia, with a huge advantage in ammunition, artillery, and manpower, is battering cities and infrastructure with a mix of drones and missiles. A major summer offensive is anticipated. "Russia's strategic objective this year may not even be territorial. It could simply be to crush Ukraine's fighting spirit and convince its Western backers that this war is a lost cause" (Gardner, Urkaine could face).
The House returned from recess at the beginning of last week and we are still awaiting a vote on aid funding promised by the speaker. Mike Johnson reportedly has committed to bringing it to a vote this week. "Then time will tell just who has fell / And who's been left behind."
Initial reports I have seen indicate Iran is willing to declare mission accomplished after a somewhat token retaliatory gesture in response to Israel's attack on an Iranian consulate building in Damascus that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander and six other officers. "Biden reportedly told Netanyahu during a call on Sunday that he won’t support an Israeli counterattack against Iran" (Hirsch, Can the Middle East).
The hawkishly inclined here and in Israel bristle at Biden's efforts to de-escalate the situation. John Bolton is at the head of the line:
Bolton said Biden is an "embarrassment to the United States" for urging the Israelis to not retaliate, per an interview on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday.
"This is an American interest to make sure that Iran, which is the principal threat to international peace and security in the region, is, at a minimum, put in its place, to spare Israel, to spare the Gulf Arabs, to spare us, from the threat that they pose," he said. (Miranda, Biden Gets Pushback)
Does Netanyahu calculate that widening the conflict will draw the international spotlight away from Gaza? Might hardliners want to see the U.S. drawn into war with Iran? What to make of Benny Gantz's statement that Israel will "exact the price from Iran in the fashion and timing that is right for us” (McKernan, Borger, Israel).
Kelly Garrity, ‘Delusional’: Bolton blasts Trump for saying Iranian attacks wouldn’t have happened on his watch, Politico, April 14, 2024
Michael Hirsch, Can the Middle East Avoid All-Out War?, Politico, April 14, 2024
James Mackenzie, Israel on edge for Iranian retaliation after embassy strike, Reuters, April 12, 2024
Bethan McKernan, Julian Borger, Israel on high alert as it weighs response to Iranian attack, The Guardian, April 14, 2024
Shauneen Miranda, Biden gets pushback over telling Israel to avoid counterattack on Iran, Axios, April 14, 2024
I am reading Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson. It is early Atkinson, published in 2000. She has been a favorite since I happened on her Jackson Brodie series two years ago. This one does not disappoint.
Near beginning Effie, a student in the Arts and Social Sciences at Dundee University in Scotland, describes a friend who knocks on the door chez Bob on a Monday morning at seven. (Bob is Effie's boyfriend, the first person to cross her path on the morning she decided to lose her virginity when he swerved his bicycle to avoid a dog and ran her over, breaking her wrist.)
Small and thin, Terri was dressed, as usual, in the manner of a deranged Victorian governess. She had the pale pallor of a three-day old corpse on her cheek and, despite the dark on the unlit stair, was wearing Wayfarer Ray-Bans.
…She held out a hand, palm up, and said, 'Give me your George Eliot essay,' her face as expressionless as an assassin's.
Following a digression concerning Bob, the description of Terri resumes.
Terri was a little mid-western princess, a cheerleader gone bad, She may have once had corn-fed kin back in the heartland (although it was easier to imagine her being hatched in the nest of a prehistoric bird) but in time they had all died or abandoned her. Her father, an executive with Ford, had enrolled her in an English Quaker boarding-school during a brief secondment to Britain and had carelessly left her there on his return to Michigan.
Terri liked to keep her ethnic origins chameleon, sometimes hinting at Italian, sometimes pogrom-fleeing Russian, a touch of the Orient, a hint of the Hebrew. Only I knew the dull mongrel mix of Irish navvies, Dutch diarymen and Belgian coalminers who by mere genetic chance had given her the appearance of an exotic houri or a handmaiden of Poe.
The year is 1972. The introduction of Terri and Bob is followed by a bravura parody of a tutorial conducted by "an argumentative Marxist, whose lectures are drenched in references to Derrida, Sontag, Robbe-Grillet as he rattles on "blah, blah, blah…or something like that" about a literature that "in its multiplicity and plurality…cries out for a new hermeneutics."
"When words no longer strive for mimesis they become dislocated and disconnected. They illustrate in themselves the exhaustion of forms. Writers who eschew mimesis, looking for new ways of approaching the fiction construct, are disruptivist—challenging what Robbe-Grillet refers to as the 'intelligibility of the world.'" Archie paused. "What do you think of that statement? Anyone?" No-one answered. No-one ever had any idea what Archie was talking about.
This takes me back to my dizzy youth when I tried to get my head around Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, that whole scene. If I had any idea what I was talking about, it was not much. The book comes with the customary disclaimer: "The University of Dundee portrayed in this book (and especially the departments of English and Philosophy) bear little resemblance to real life, past or present." Note the qualifier "little."
As is her custom, Atkinson presents a cast of multitudes, wacky eccentrics, students who read The Glass Bead Game and Gormenghast, faculty jousting for the department chair to come open when the "sometimes lucid" current occupant, "who had recently taken his first tottering steps into dotage," steps down, Archie the prof's wife, a part-time lecturer in the Philosophy department, "infected with the writing sickness," Effie trying to write the first draft of a story due end of the the week with
the sound of music coming from the other room…loud and indistinct. It sounded like Deep Purple but could have been anything with a drummer really…Bob and Shug descending slowly into reefer madness, talking about a fantasy future in which they co-owned a vastly successful head shop and spent all day discussing the finer points of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
A twin storyline has Effie relating these stories about her college days to her mother, pondering her own provenance, the father she never knew.
I wondered if perhaps Nora had got with child through a secret passion— impregnated by some black-hearted scoundrel, a passing vagabond perhaps, a groom in the stables or a gypsy in a wood—and her angry father had thrown her out of the family home to find her own way in the world. I imagined her locked out in the cold and the driven snow, giving birth to me—her bastard daughter—in some freezing hovel.
"Was it like that?" I ask her, as I have asked her many times before.
Nora looks at me thoughtfully.
—Not exactly, she says.
This is but a taste of it.
Memo from the editorial desk. I note for the record minor edits I would like to have made to the April 1 newsletter. I wrote in precipitous haste, as Samuel Johnson put it:
In the next to last paragraph about the Easter kerfuffle, the last sentence should substitute "should" for "would," so that it reads "No one should think Johnson possesses that much integrity."
In the next section, which begins "The best comment I have seen thus far on the NBC-Ronna Romney McDaniel fiasco", I should have written "One of the best comments…"
New at Portable Bohemia Substack:
About Progressives, Patriotism, and NPR, April 6, 2024. I have looked to public broadcasting for coverage of news and current affairs for much of my adult life. PBS NewsHour has been a go-to resource since the McNeil-Lehrer era. Co-anchors Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett…read more>>
Quest (a poem), April 9, 2024. So much has been happening since the beginning of T.S. Eliot’s cruelest month that National Poetry Month kind of got lost in the shuffle here at the Portable Bohemia nerve center. April opened with your oft humbled scribe deep in the muck…read more>>
Poems That Reward a Second or Third or Ninety-fifth Reading, April 13, 2024. Harold Bloom, whom I cite almost reflexively when writing about poetry, counseled memorization…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
