Oh, I see. Still, defending Mailer’s comments about women writers at this point is a little like forgiving Hitler for his poor table manners.

Yeah, her defending Bloom’s caddishness is gross. I’m all for liking someone or admiring their work in spite of their poor choices (within reason), but it’s dishonest to
pretend that there was never anything wrong with those choices in the first place.

It is NOT my favorite. I also partly feel frustrated with people who call themselves contrarians, because it’s like — would you call yourself a full-time agree-er with this same amount of pride? Probably not, right? Because probably that would make it sound like you weren’t doing a ton of independent thinking? So why is going all the way in the other direction any better??

😀 Thanks!

I know, right? I have never ever ever accidentally sexually harassed someone. IMAGINE THAT.

Well, I’m in it! It was filmed in and around Kenyon, so the kids and I spent all day pretending to eat brunch in the background of a now-defunct hotel dining room while Josh Radnor, Elizabeth Olsen, Richard Jenkins, and Kate Burton pretended to have brunch and conversation in the foreground. Kate was nice enough to come by our table early in the day and caution us not to actually eat the food, because then we’d have to keep eating it all day. We then gamely massaged jam onto toast, pretended to sip oj, and played with the eggs while the actors tried to get all the lines just right.
The scene with the alum and the prof is Josh Radnor and Allison Janney, both of whom actually went to Kenyon.
Now I know what I need to bring as your present when I come to visit in June!

GOD ME TOO. The sooner that can happen, the happier I will be. An excellent step in that direction would be killing with fire the notion that men don’t have feelings and are incapable of emotional complexity. It would help us alllllll.

Hahaha, you’re welcome! Any time!

Oh, yeah, all that evolutionary biology crap. My philosophy teacher in high school made short work of all that mess by telling us that a theory is bad if it’s not able to be proved wrong. And evolutionary biology is like Tarot cards — if your idea doesn’t fit perfectly in one particular context, you turn it around and make it say the opposite. Like I was reading something the other day that said humans cry because there’s an evolutionary benefit to soliciting nurture from the people around you, BUT that people often cry privately because crying in public could be a sign of weakness, so there’s an evolutionary benefit to NOT letting people see you. Bros. You cannot have it both ways. Just admit we don’t know.

tl;dr: Sometimes it’s just people being jerks.

Ahahahaha, yep, it’s true. Freud was very flawed! A genius! But flawed. I was coincidentally reading The Chosen at the same time I was reading this, and all I could think was, damn, lady, Chaim Potok in 1967 had a more nuanced grasp on Freud than you have.