Life

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

The sex lives of writers

A fellow writer recently asked me if I would prefer to be famous as a great writer or famous as a great lover. I said a great writer because, well... that’s what you’re meant to say, isn’t it? My friend chose great lover. Why? “There are lots of great writers,” he explained, “but men who are great in bed are rare. And besides, great writers aren’t sexy anymore.” I used to think that when male writers — and I mean novelists, critics, journalists — complain about how literature has lost its cultural significance and that no one cares about the printed word anymore, what they really mean is: no one wants to shag me. And I suspect that they’re right. The era of the Great Literary Sex God is over.

writers

Tuesday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The paradox of political power

Since the founding of the Republic, the average American, if asked to express in a single word what his country stood for, would likely have answered “Freedom!” (or “Fweedom!” as the childe Kamala spake all those many years ago). The so-called American Dream, a concept dating from the 1930s, has always been materialist in nature. H.L. Mencken predicted that the socialists would ultimately fail in their attempt to transform the United States into a Soviet paradise on the North American continent for the simple reason that every American hopes to become a millionaire before he dies. Almost a century later, money is being progressively eclipsed in the pantheon of national values by power.

power

Sunday

Bill Kauffman

Ernest Hemingway’s Idaho playground

In Ketchum, Idaho, heart of the skiing mecca of Sun Valley, my wife and I found ourselves on Picabo Street — the avenue leading to the Warm Springs ski lodge, that is, not the 1998 Olympic gold medalist in the women’s supergiant slalom. We walked past a “private residence club” denominated The Hemingways, which called to mind the author’s complaint that Sun Valley boosters were using him for public relations purposes. “I love Idaho,” Hemingway wrote Peter Viertel in 1948, but “when they are having pictures painted of you and hung in real estate promotion offices it is past time to blow.

ketchum

Monday

Yasmina Green

Underwater yoga: taking wellness to the extreme

I’m holding a respectable tree pose on a sun-bleached jetty above St. Lucia’s turquoise waters. It’s the sort of place you drift off to mentally when you are midway through a peaceful meditation in a reassuringly mildewed London yoga studio. This time, though, I’m actually here and ready to embark on one of the latest wellness trends: a holistic diving experience in the Caribbean complete with breathing exercises and underwater yoga that will allow me to reach “whole new levels of relaxation” and, one hopes, enough spiritual transcendence to get me out of the water if things don’t go to plan. But there are boat engines roaring, tourists being herded on and off and an unusually aggressive coastal wind is picking up, along with the tide.

yoga
Cosmo Landesman

My new life of relative poverty

As I write this, London is so cold that I’m wearing a large, heavy, World War Two Russian army jacket, a wool hat, two pairs of thermal socks, long johns, a scarf and fingerless gloves that allow me to type — the kind Fagin wore in the film Oliver! — and I’m still freezing. But I won’t turn on the central heating because it costs too much. But then, everything these days costs too much, so I’m making radical cuts in my expenditure. How radical? I now make one cup of tea, instead of a pot of tea with three bags. I’ve had to cut back on expensive organic foods — but I’ve kept the expensive organic sex lubricants. I think they call this genteel poverty — or is this gentile poverty?

poverty
Bill Kauffman

The unfortunate ubiquity of smartphones

Arlington, Virginia Wandering through suburban Washington, DC's National Airport — I always liked the libertarianish ex-congressman from South Carolina Mark Sanford for voting against renaming it Ronald Reagan Airport on the grounds that the nomenclatorial decision belonged to locals, not Congress — I was refused service when trying to buy a bagel. It wasn’t because of my race, gender or vaccination status; rather, the eatery in question, which had no cash registers, accepted orders only from smartphones. As I have never owned a cell phone of any kind, let alone a smartphone, I was outta luck. I couldn’t plead food insecurity, to borrow the silly euphemism of our day, for soon enough I would be dining on the nine almonds that constitute an airline repast.

smartphones
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Transhumanism is the most dangerous idea in circulation today

When asked at a 2004 Foreign Affairs symposium to identify the most dangerous of all contemporary ideas, Francis Fukuyama — no doubt to the editor’s surprise — did not cite the heretical view, held by many of his critics, that the end of history is not yet, nor indeed is anywhere in sight. Instead, he chose the concept called transhumanism for that honorable nomination. Whether or not transhumanism is the most dangerous of all current mental constructions, it is certainly among the silliest, demonstrating the degree of intellectual insanity to which the fear of mortality is capable of driving educated people who ought to know better.

transhumanism

Wednesday

Cosmo Landesman

Stuck in a love triangle with a shrink

I’ve met someone. The One. And now I’m in love. It’s a lunatic love, driven by insatiable lust. She’s funny. Smart. Sexy. I’d say she was perfect for me but there’s one major problem — she has another man in her life and refuses to give him up. Let’s call him The Other Man (TOM). She sees him five times a week and tells him all her secrets. I only get to see her once a week and she tells me she loves this man because he listens to her. She is in my bed and he is in her head — by which I mean TOM is her therapist. The One talks about TOM when we’re in bed, and he talks about me during her therapy. I talk about him — and her — to my therapist. My life at the moment isn’t imitating art; it’s imitating bad Woody Allen.

therapist
Oneida
Bill Kauffman

Oneida: the nineteenth-century sex cult behind the flatware giant

If ever I write a sex farce — the demand so far has been muted — I need only head east 150 miles and detour back 150 years to the Oneida community, the utopian experiment in free love that thrived from 1848-80 before the colony’s unorthodox sexual arrangements led to its collapse — and, in a characteristically American turn of events, its road to riches. Headquartered in a sprawling mansion house — open today to visitors of all carnal habits — Oneida was a cerebral nineteenth-century soap opera awash in high-minded American radicalism and directed by the brilliant and charismatic megalomaniac John Humphrey Noyes. As a Yale Divinity School student, Noyes had declared himself free from sin: a perfected Christian.

democracy numbers
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Democracy by numbers

The world of 2023, which scarcely speaks for the intelligence, the competence, or the success of the human race, does revive the age-old question of whether the individual is wiser than the species. One answer, stated in its simplest form, is the old saw that two heads are better than one. But is that true? And if so, are three heads better than two, und so weiter? Where do we come to the end of this? The key to the conundrum relates to government. Does oligarchy provide wiser rule than monarchy, aristocracy than oligarchy, and democracy than aristocracy? Consider the history of Britain and British government over the past centuries. Has democracy, in progressively greater measure, improved the management of British affairs since the eighteenth century?

Tuesday

Cosmo Landesman

The other cancel culture

London, England We discuss and denounce the cancel culture of the woke all the time, but there’s another type of cancel culture that we never mention — the cancel culture of our friends. We cancel each other all the time. You arrange to meet someone and suddenly — you’re canceled! It happened again to me last week. I’d arranged to see a good friend when, a few hours before our meeting, up popped a text that read: “Sorry. Have to cancel x.” She offered no explanation. No signs of regret or guilt. Not even the suggestion that we reschedule our meeting. She wanted to cancel and so, I was canceled. In some ways this is nothing new.

cancel
voting
Bill Kauffman

Voting with a vengeance

Weeks have passed since I voted in the November election, and I'm still ticked off. You would be too if it happened to you. Once upon a time — that is, before 2022 — New York was one of the friendlier states toward third parties. Whether Green, Constitution, Socialist Workers, Libertarian or Communist, all were welcome on the ballot so long as they passed an easily surmountable petition threshold. This pro-participation access was called “democracy.

iowa
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The left’s politics of catastrophe

Having a close, lifelong acquaintance with the animal kingdom, from small reptiles and farm animals to dogs and cats of the large and domestic varieties, I disagree with G.K. Chesterton’s casual statement that the more one gets to know animals, the greater the distance between them and human beings appears. My own experience suggests the opposite. Chesterton had obviously not considered herd animals such as cattle, with their keen instinct for panic that Homo sapiens, taken as a species, so often exhibits. Humanity’s current panic — of global extent, though demonstrated in exaggerated form in the West — touched off by the phenomenon of “climate change” is only the latest historical manifestation of an endemic human trait.

Monday

Cosmo Landesman

How to throw a book party

London The launch party for my book has gotten sensational reviews. “Party of the year!” said one friend. “Simply brilliant!” said another. A hack from the Times declared, “It was like an old-fashioned Fleet Street Party” — by which he meant everyone was drunk, dancing and misbehaving. Unfortunately, my book has not gotten sensational reviews. It’s gotten no reviews — at least from the national press. This is a cause for worry. Or so my publisher Todd Swift of Eyewear Publishing thinks. The day after the party he calls me. I’m still buzzing with my party reviews; he’s buzzing with panic. Todd tells me that no reviews mean we can’t get my book into the major bookshops! I’d hate to see your great book die, he says.

book
Detroit
Bill Kauffman

Detroit detour

Detroit, Michigan A cowboy's work is never done, as Sonny Bono once croaked. (I interviewed Sonny shortly after he was elected to Congress in the Republican wave of 1994. He confirmed to me that Cher thought that the faces on Mount Rushmore were a natural formation.) Segueing from one Armenian American to another: when I lured my wife from the Chandleresque precincts of Southern California to the Edenic plains of New York’s Burned-Over District (“married an LA doll and brought her to this small town,” as John Mellencamp growled), she asked to visit two cities: Utica and Cleveland. Having made her dreams come true, as is my wont, I thought my work was done. But no.

revenge
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The grievance games of the left

In the first week of October 2022, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s perennial man of the Marxist left, former leader of La France insoumise and present chief of Nupes (Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et social), an alliance of hard-left, left and green parties, invoked the jours d’octobre that commenced on October 5, 1789 with the Women’s March from the Parisian marketplaces to Versailles and ended with the more or less forced departure of the royal family for the capital city in the early morning hours next day after several members of the Palace guard had been decapitated and their heads impaled on pikes. It is unclear what that revolutionary year, and the events of October 5-7, have to do with twenty-first-century France.

Saturday

Bill Kauffman

An LA adventure

For years I have read the likes of Raymond Chandler and John Fante and rewatched Chinatown in preparation for our occasional sojourns to Los Angeles (my wife is a native Angelena), but after the stupefaction induced by our last trip, I chose Charles Bukowski, the flophouse poet of hangovers, for our first post-Covid invasion. “Los Angeles is a Cross, and we all hang here, stupid little Christs,” wrote Bukowski in a 1967 letter. That line seems off to me, self-consciously poète maudit, but I always cut poets of place a break.

Los Angeles

Monday

Teresa Mull

With the vintage car enthusiasts at Lime Rock

There’s nothing like the sound of automobile engines at wide-open throttle, whirring by like a squadron of World War Two fighter jets in dive-bomb mode. But at the Lime Rock Park racetrack, the adrenaline-pumping hum is made even more riveting by the fact that you hear the overture of baritone bees before you see what’s making it. Lime Rock is in northwest Connecticut, “between Boston and New York City and is easy to access from all points in the Northeast.” That’s what the website claims, though in my experience, no place between Boston and New York City is “easy to access.” The site is right, however, in saying, “An essential part of the Lime Rock Park experience is the journey here.

lime rock

Tuesday

Cosmo Landesman

I was upstaged by Jordan Peterson

I’ve been inviting friends to my book launch and have gotten all sorts of reasons why they (“sadly”) won’t be able to attend: away on holiday, work commitments, family obligations, etc. But the most interesting reason for not coming to my book launch is one a very old friend gave me: “That’s the night I’m having dinner with Jordan Peterson.” “What?” I asked incredulously, “Are you going to dump me and my big night for dinner with Jordan Peterson?” There was a long pause before my friend said, “Ahh... let me get back to you on that.” This conflict of interests — me versus Peterson — poses an interesting moral and philosophical question for my friend and for all of us: what are the duties and obligations of friendship?

Peterson
british
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The brilliance of British civilization

The day after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I received a note from a friend in the Midwest asking whether I thought the British monarchy would survive her by more than a decade. I replied that of all British institutions the monarchy is the strongest — and that I expect it to last as long as Britain herself. Everything I witnessed in the week after the Queen died seems to me to justify this judgment, in particular the conduct of King Charles III, about whom my friend was skeptical. The events also confirmed my lifelong opinion that British civilization is the finest the world has ever seen; so fine, indeed, that I suspect that the citizens of most countries today are unable to appreciate the nature of its greatness, and how it came to be great; Americans, perhaps, especially.