a monopoly on natural beauty
August 4, 2021
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Rob Browning — Flyer
Rob Browning — Bubble
Rob Browning — Smoke and Hedges
WEATHER REPORT 🖼
I spent July in three states: Maine, Connecticut, and unemployment. Quick notes below.
Maine: Maine is stunning, I might even say it’s beautiful if I wasn’t constantly having to defend my claim that Iowa has a monopoly on natural beauty. I can see why the Boston Brahmins worked hard to keep this corner of the country hidden. I ate lobster and drank blueberry ale. I brooded on the beach. You can do that in Maine, brooding on the beach. When it rained, I read.
Like all of the north woods, Maine feels like a boundary. We stayed in weathered clapboard houses, painted in soft pastels, at the tips of rocky, stringy peninsulas called fingers, as if some giant died and fell, arms outstretched and hands half-submerged in the grey Atlantic. I felt connected to the land because it’s on the same latitude as the Midwestern city where I grew up. Note: this latitudinal consonance does not, so far as I know, extend to Serbia, Crimea, northern Uzbekistan, Mongolia, or the other denizens of the 44th parallel.
There are no ugly homes, nobody knows how to build them. I’m not sure I fully understood how much Maine tonally carries Stephen King’s novels, rather than the other way around. People live in Victorian houses, for God’s sake, houses with turrets and spires.
Connecticut: I was in Connecticut for a party. Technically I was in Greenwich, which is as much a part of Connecticut as I am a Martian. I have a novelistic interest in Greenwich, because the town is predicated on the idea that enough money and taste can make life good. The underlying assumption is false, but the commitment to it is so complete as to force a semblance of the intended effect: the houses are beautiful, the lawns are beautiful, the people are beautiful, the water is beautiful. Humanity sneaks in, naturally, there are broken marriages, alcoholics, abandoned teenagers, but even these are played upon an outsized stage, with props that lend themselves to gossip and salaciousness.
You only get so many great parties. Maybe two, in a good year. This was a great party, the lost boys and girls of New York City floating back from Wall Street for a night, back to the bosom, mother Greenwich. There is talk of marriage and engagements and it sounds like talk of alliances and inheritance. After my third espresso martini, a father tells me that he doesn’t buy futures on any of his daughter’s boyfriends and absurdly I reply, I know what you mean. The dance floor fills with women and their mothers. The DJ plays corporate bangers and yacht rock and every ounce of dopamine in my brain streaks multicolored through my veins and pours out of me in a sweat that mingles with rain and smears slick on the floor.
Sunday is a great deficit. An essential lack of feeling or else only the sensation of suspension over a chasm. But the light is soft and the house is big enough for me to find some shaded chair by the pool where I can lie alone and listen to Billie Holiday. The partygoers go about their lives. I leave, taking a train home and loosening my grip on understanding.
Unemployment: Have you ever had Grillo’s pickles? Their dill spears are unbelievable, hands down the best store-bought pickles you can find. When the cucumber vines in my garden finally started producing (and producing, and producing) fruit, I began to pickle, using bushels of dill and a modified mommy blogger recipe in the hopes of making pickles that even vaguely resembled Grillo’s. As it happens, it’s not particularly difficult. My pickles turned out better than I ever could have hoped for. They are the best pickles I’ve ever tasted — I think so and other people have told me so. After a friend helped me out with a chore, I paid him with a jar of pickles at his request.
How can I ever look at a tub of Grillo’s in the grocery store the same way? Why would I pay $7 for store-bought pickles when I can pay $15 for the raw ingredients it takes to make mine? This is the pinnacle of my gardening experience, it is all I ever hoped for. They say you should never meet your heroes. In mason jars, in a rice-vinegar brine, I met mine.
CONTENT CROP 🌾
EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL AND NO ONE IS HORNY || Blood Knife
Actors are more physically perfect than ever: impossibly lean, shockingly muscular, with magnificently coiffed hair, high cheekbones, impeccable surgical enhancements, and flawless skin, all displayed in form-fitting superhero costumes with the obligatory shirtless scene thrown in to show off shredded abs and rippling pecs.
And this isn’t just the lead and the love interest: supporting characters look this way too, and even villains (frequently clad in monstrous makeup) are still played by conventionally attractive performers. Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland. No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful.
And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.
note: hmmmm I love half of this and hate the other half therefore it is Good
Great Jones Cookware and the Illusion of the Millennial Aesthetic || The New Yorker
“Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?” the subheading of Fischer’s New York essay asked. Perhaps it will fade out when customers learn that a compelling narrative is not the same thing as the integrity of a product or of the business selling it. We’ve seen many times before how the growth-at-all-costs startup mentality can backfire. In the D.T.C. sector, the suitcase brand Away and the menstruation-friendly underwear brand Thinx both suffered damage to their buzzy reputations when their co-founders were exposed as manipulative, erratic bosses.
note: annals of the millennial aesthetic
Wendell Berry’s Long Obedience || Plough
“I just happen to have no appetite for glitz and glamour,” Berry explained in a 2008 interview with The Sun Magazine. “I like it here. This place has furnished its quota of people who’ve helped each other, cared for each other, and tried to be fair. I have known some of them, living and dead, whom I’ve loved deeply, and being here reminds me of them.”
note: Thursday is Wendell Berry’s birthday, which serves as yet another opportunity to share one of my all-time favorite passages, from Berry’s The World-Ending Fire:
One early morning last spring, I came and found the woods floor strewn with bluebells. In the cool sunlight and the lacy shadows of the spring woods the blueness of those flowers, their elegant shape, their delicate fresh scent kept me standing and looking. I found a delight in them that I cannot describe and that I will never forget. Though I had been familiar for years with most of the spring woods flowers, I had never seen these and had not known they were here. Looking at them, I felt a strange loss and sorrow that I had never seen them before. But I was also exultant that I saw them now — that they were here.
For me, in the thought of them will always be the sense of the joyful surprise with which I found them — the sense that came suddenly to me then that the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know. What lives are still ahead of me here to be discovered and exulted in, tomorrow, or in twenty years? What wonder will be found here on the morning after my death? Though as a man I inherit great evils and the possibility of great loss and suffering, I know that my life is blessed and graced by the yearly flowering of the bluebells. How perfect they are! In their presence I am humble and joyful. If I were given all the learning and all the methods of my race I could not make one of them, or even imagine one. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.“A Native Hill”, p. 28-29
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
A Russian research module recently misfired its thrusters after docking with the International Space Station (ISS), causing the ISS to spin out of position and lose altitude control:
[The NASA flight director] said that after Nauka incorrectly fired up, the station "spun one-and-a-half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before coming to a stop upside down. The space station then did a 180-degree forward flip to get back to its original orientation," according to the report.
Scoville also shared that this was the first time that he has ever declared a "spacecraft emergency."
Today (Aug. 2), NASA representatives confirmed to Space.com that Scoville's representation of the incident is accurate. "Those numbers representing the change in attitude are correct," they said. "We'd reiterate that the maximum rate at which the change occurred was slow enough to go unnoticed by the crew members on board and all other station systems operated nominally during the entire event."
. . .
The crew, working together with ground teams, helped to counteract Nauka's thrusters by counter-firing thrusters on the Russian module Zvezda and Progress cargo ship. Additionally, 15 minutes after starting to fire, Nauka's thrusters stopped, though Scoville said he didn't know why the thrusters did so.
The Atlantic also reports that communications were disrupted: “Twice, ground control lost communications with the crew for several minutes. The longer the space station remained off track, the more scrambled its operations, including the communication system and solar panels, could become.”
That is one complicated and frighteningly fragile tube in the sky.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(Memoir, 1942. $10.)
There was a time when my Group volunteered for service elsewhere against aggression—in Norway, and again in Finland. What were Norway and Finland, I used to wonder, to the soldiers and petty officers of France? And I would say to myself that in some confused way those men were volunteering to die in a human cause symbolized by mental images of snow and Christmas sleigh-bells. The salvaging of that particular flavor in the world seemed to justify, in their eyes, the sacrifice of their lives. Had we of France meant a kind of Christmas to the world, the world would have been saved through our being.
The spiritual communion of men the world over did not operate in our favor. But had we stood for that communion of men, we should have saved the world and ourselves. In that task we failed. Each is responsible for all. Each is by himself responsible. Each by himself is responsible for all. I understand now for the first time the mystery of the religion whence was born the civilization I claim as my own: “To bear the sins of man.” Each man bears the sins of all men.
note: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, better known of as the author of The Little Prince, was one of the few pilots in the French Air Force who flew reconnaissance missions against Nazi Germany before the fall of France in 1940. Flight to Arras details a near-suicide mission and the resulting effect on de Saint-Exupéry’s philosophy on nations, war, and humankind. It is one of the more arresting memoirs I’ve read. de Saint-Exupéry wrote the book in exile, in New York City, working to convince the United States to enter the war.
update on The Brothers Karamazov: I finished. The last few hundred pages were a slog. And what can be said? It was a masterpiece. It must have been, otherwise why did I spend all that time reading it. The characters are sharp and intense, yes, particularly the father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, surely one of the slimiest characters in literature. Above all, it was as solid of an encapsulation of Dostoevsky’s philosophy — Russian Orthodox conservatism triumphing over “anything is permitted” — as you’re likely to find.
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Everybody online is bickering about Hungary. Hungary this, Hungary that, how about you see if your wife is HUNGARY and take her out to DINNER.
First, some background: prior to — and partially as a justification of — the Trump presidency, conservative commentators caught on to the idea that the liberal capture of democratic institutions was a fait accompli. Playing by the rules, the argument goes, is a losing strategy when your opponent is willing to exercise power and supersede the rules to achieve their policy aims. As I have mentioned before, this is a Schmittian mode of friends-and-enemies politics, articulated by Sohrab Ahmari in The Spectator last year:
The left has a crystalline moral vision (moral by its own lights, at any rate). To the liberal mind, norms and procedures are worthwhile only insofar as they help advance this vision. If existing norms and procedures fail to do that, well, new ones will have to be found. The point isn’t to uphold some neutral ground that different groups might contest, with winners and losers periodically switching places. The point is to win. Decisively.
After Trump proved unfit to meet the challenges posed by captured institutions and his own carelessness, commentators on the right sought new champions, anyone willing to cut against the grain of a flattening, homogenizing liberalism.
This is where Hungary comes in. Tucker Carlson is hosting his show in Hungary this week and interviewing Victor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister. Orbán is a cause célèbre among populist conservatives precisely because of the perception that he is willing to champion nationalist and culturally traditional politics against a globalist and culturally liberal consensus. (Poland, too, is included in the idea that cultural conservatism is alive and well in Central Europe.)
Gladden Pappin (?) writes in Newsweek:
The real reason that Poland and Hungary have been demonized in the United States is that they represent a successful alternative to the failed American combination of industrial and family collapse. In recent years, Poland has pursued a policy of modest domestic re-industrialization, while also supporting Polish families with direct government support. Hungary has done the same, including appointing a minister of state for family affairs (Katalin Novák) tasked with helping Hungarian families thrive.
A national industrial policy and federal support for families are both popular planks in the new right, so it’s not a huge surprise that people like Rod Dreher are visiting, living, or studying in Hungary. For what it’s worth, David Frum compares right-wing commentators who support Hungary to the left-wing useful idiots who toured “gruesome communist regimes.”
Which brings us to why the left really hates the right’s embrace of Hungary and Poland, other than the fact that these poor nations have been sucked into the if-you’re-for-it-I’m-against-it shit blender of our culture wars:
“Orban has skillfully and relentlessly deployed a right-wing populism focused on the failings of liberal democracy and the allure of an older national story: Christian identity, national sovereignty, distrust of international institutions, opposition to immigration, and contempt for politically correct liberal elites. Smash the status quo. Make the masses feel powerful by responding to their grievances.” (Ben Rhodes in The Atlantic)
The content and tone of which are best encapsulated in any number of articles along these lines: TUCKER CARLSON IS JOINING THE RIGHT-WING PARADE TO “ILLIBERAL” HUNGARY (Vanity Fair), Hungary turned to authoritarian nationalism. So Tucker Carlson went to Hungary. (WaPo), Tucker Carlson Is Moving His Whole Damn Show to Hungary (Vice).
Coincidentally, this weekend’s Formula 1 race was held at the Hungaroring outside of Budapest. Sebastian Vettel, a four-time world champion, wore apparel protesting a recent Hungarian law “banning schools from using materials deemed to promote homosexuality.” Orbán has said that “the new law aims to protect children and does not discriminate against sexual minorities.” (Reuters)
Vettel and three other drivers were formally reprimanded by the FIA for not taking off their t-shirts before the Hungarian national anthem, though the reprimand was unrelated to Vettel’s advocacy.
Explaining the pre-race procedure, Masi said: "Earlier this year, following discussions internally with the FIA and F1, we clarified that we wanted to keep giving the drivers the ability to have the moment to show their support for WeRaceAsOne however they chose to.
"But then the national anthem for a particular country should be respected with all drivers wearing their race suits.