Good morning. Hello. How are you? #711
The Hours Before Dusk by Jenna Matecki, presidents criming, Old Town Road in a war doc, searching for an e-paper PDF reader.
Good morning! Hello, there. How is your Wednesday? Week seems to be humming along, can’t complain. Apologies for the two typos in the subhead yesterday. Man. Last thing I write on one of these GMHHAYs, the subhead. I guess I saw the finish line and wiffed it. Whiffed it? That seems more right, we’ll throw an H in there.
No big tantrum by Jane yesterday, no work emergency, really what more could you ask for out of a day. Finished Only Murders in the Building which was super fun. I love that show, but I’ve decided that it’s a bit too sloppy to actually, you know, guess who the murderer is. Which is fine with me because I’m terrible at guessing the culprit in mysteries, so I am just watching it as a comedy, and it performs admirably as such.
Congratulations to my friend Jenna Matecki who’s first book officially went on sale yesterday. You may recall I went to New York for her book party last month. This is that book. You should consider buying it. It is lovely. It is a series of essays, prose poems, really, about various geographic locations on this planet Earth, though they are each about so much more of that. I keep telling her it reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s early poetry, such as the Spice Box of Earth but then I sent her the song “Nights of Santiago” as an example of the evocativeness of the book, and I don’t think she liked that very much because, really, when you come down to it, “Nights of Santiago” is a beautiful song but it’s also just a song about boning someone’s wife while on tour, and that is… well, Jenna’s book is not about boning people’s wives when you’re on tour. Hrm I am sort of losing myself in the metaphor here. And as we all know, I am not exactly a poetry expert (despite hosting a poetry show on the radio in the 90’s). So, maybe don’t believe me on that part. Anothe reader said it “Reminds you of who you once were, the version of yourself you remember most fondly.” And that really nails it on the head. I felt younger when I read this, more alive, idealistic again. Or in a different way. Time travel.
I am in the market for a PDF reader. It is a whole different universe. Basically PDFs are a problem in my reading workflow and they are piling up. I like reading books on my phone — I just jack up the text size real big for my blind eyes and let ‘er rip. But this does’t work for PDFs because the layout must be maintained. And so you’re scrolling all over the damn page constantly and it is exhausting. I do have a Kindle but I never use it and it is small. I could read PDFs on my iPad, and I try, but it is too heavy to hold for long periods of time it feels like I am giving myself a repetitive stress injury I swear. I do not like iPads. So I got it into my head an ultra lightweight e-ink reader would be awesome. A big one that could show a whole page more or less 1:1. And such a thing does exist, but there seems to be only one available in America, the Onyx Boox Max Lumi 2. But the thing is, like, $700 which is insane. Also it is overkill. It’s a tablet that happens to have a PDF reader, but also has a stylus and runs a ton of apps, and also the thing is too thick and weighs more than 3 pounds. There are a host of smaller ones — ten-inch diagonal screens — and some of them are pretty light. But is ten inches big enough? I got bad eyes and the whole problem here is the 1:1 printout of a PDF. BUT, they seem to posess technolgoy where you can soom in and get rid of the margins, and most PDFs I read — Supreme Court decisions and academic journal articles — have pretty big margins. So it might be enough? But these are like $300 - $400, so also a gamble. Also they all come from madeup companies, I swear. It’s like a whole parallel world where all of the major manufacterers are companies you’ve never heard of. It is a niche world to be sure.
Then there is the Japanese market, which seems to have multiple products that fill my needs exactly, like this gorgeous Fujitsu Quaderno, which has a 13” screen, fits an A4 sheet (which means it fits an American standard sheet as well), and is less than 400 grams (it is 13 ounces). But a) it is only for sale in Japan so you gotta buy it from some weird reseller, b) which means it might be hard to return if it doesn’t work right, especially with language considerations and c) it is nearly eight hundred dollars. That seems.. insane. So… maybe one of the 10” models is actually enough?
If any of you have had any experience with these boys (Youtube slang), drop a line and let me know?
We got through Nixon finally resigning in my history of conservatism books. Dude really shot himself in the foot at the end. Released a bunch of tape transcripts. He had doctored them, and it was clear that he had pretty much lost touch with reality in terms of what the public would find morally acceptable or not. His doctoring wasn’t near enough to make them seem benign to the public. The author called it the greatest political miscalculation of his career and that seems an understatement. They were terrible, and then even more terrible when the impeachment committee got ahold of the tapes and compared them to the transcripts and realized that they were even worse. The impeachment hearing actually, though, seemed very much like Trumps’ impeachment hearing. Some larger percentage of Republicans had a sense of decency and voted to impeach, but we are talking maybe half here, compared to maybe 10% with Trump, so, like, you know. Not super awesome in either case. One Republican congressmen really went out on a limb and said “look all this stuff is bad but you gotta throw out this count and that count because they smack of politicicizing.” Cuz, you know, taking a half million dollar bribe to lay off an antitrust investigation is a thing the Dems would to too. Which, honestly, given JFK, RFK and LBJ, fair point. Then he’s like “which leaves us with these actually really bad crimes like using the CIA to tell the FBI to stop investigating crimes but we don’t have any smoking gun on this one so, you know, he said vs he said here.” To which Barbara Jordan, who seems amazing, gave what is regarded as one of the best speeches in the history of America and, man, it really is something. But that did not cut it because Republicans protect their own.
So then the very next day Nixon helped everyone out by releasing a smoking gun concretely proving he directed the CIA to stop the FBI from investigating crimes. Really helpful, Dick. Thank you.
Yesterday I was gonna write that one of the big differences between Trump and Nixon is that Trump did not self-incriminate in that way, but after the self-leaking of this letter from the Archivist of the United States last night, I am not so sure. Thank you, Donald, for concretely proving you knew what was in each and every box. Maybe there’s just something about the constant, intense pressure in these situations where you just crack and expose your criming.
Man, I love using “crime” as a verb.
Anyway, through it all, to the very last moment, Ronald Reagan stuck by Nixon’s side, refused to condemn. Even when Nixon hoisted himself on his own petard, the most Reagan could muster up for outrage was that we really oughtta let the process play out.
Also right to the end, Karl Rove was astroturfing, making hundreds of fake phone calls to the capitol switchboard in support of Nixon. That guy. Something else. I wonder what he is up to today. Hrm. Seems he just taught a course at UT Austin:
Rove worked as a guest professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall semester of 2021. He taught a course for UT's Plan II Honors department called Modern American Political Campaigns. Each week Rove invited guest speakers for the students to interview including James Carville and Mary Matalin, former Secretary of State James Baker, Jonathon Swan, Ken Melhman, and others. The class was protested by a variety of students accusing Rove of being a war criminal.
In college I would have skipped that, obviously, but in hindsight that would probably be a thing worth taking, if for no other reason than for the writing material.
Anyway, I’m excited to finally get to Ford and then Carter, even though I know we’ll be spending too much time on Reagan. I was alive for this period, and yet I feel like I know less about it. Innocence of children, and then of course, thinking you know a thing because when you were six an adult told you “how things were,” which of course was biased and dumbed down.
Watching the Ken Burns doc The Vietnam War last night and as they were showing horrific images of battlefield devestation, I thought “hey wait a minute, I recognize this song, this is ‘Old Town Road,’” because half the soundtrack is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and they re-used portions of their instrumental album Ghosts I-IV for the soundtrack. I mean, to their credit they wrote a lot of original music too, but c’mon man the film is like 17 hours long, that’s a lot of music to write, even if you’ve got Yo Yo Ma helping out with the soundtrack (man imagine the gravitas you posess to get Trent, Atticus and Yo Yo Ma to do your soundtrack). But boy it really changes the tenor of your horrific battlefield scenes when they are scored to an instrumental version of “Old Town Road.”
Got a live mix for you, pretty mellow, not gonna lie. Picks up for a second there in the middle but lol, not really. It is good, though. I promise. I miss live music. Making good progress on my plot to get to Boston for Bauhaus. Feel good about that. And we have Spiritualized in September here in NC and Emma and I are thinking of going to Merriweather Post Pavillion for the New Order/Pet Shop Boys tour — I am suddenlyworried I am never gonna see any of these bands again as all my favorite bands… get old. But my god, that PSB/NO tour is so expensive it really is absurd. For bands that have played club tours in the last decade, neither exactly at the height of their popularity. It is rough.
Until tomorrow!