★★ The sky was cloudless again but it scattered the light anyway. The morning air would have been mild and pleasant if it had come at noon; instead, there was the sun flaring in from a building top and giving a passing plane a menacingly exaggerated glow. Dirty haze crept up the sky and a fishy smell hung on the air. By late afternoon an ostrich-products vendor in the Greenmarket was praising the breeze aloud as it went through. The sun still hurt the eyes where it got through the obstacles, straight or on a bank shot. Mostly, though, there was deep shade, with a lingering warmth confusingly overlaid on the fleeting daylight.

Image: Christopher via Flickr

Back in the spring, a friend sent me a tweet about authors of color and autofiction, by Tony Tulathimutte, the author of Private Citizens. My friend made the point was that writers of color rarely escaped the umbrella of autobiography, and, as far as the larger American literary establishment is concerned, our novels and short stories are inherently true, one-hundred percent of the time.

novels by poc are typically read as autofiction by default & I want to read something about that

— Skeletony Tula ☠ (@tonytula) April 20, 2017

It doesn’t matter where we’re coming from. It doesn’t matter what we’re writing about. What matters is that this audience, which is to say the audience inclined towards reading supposedly literary fiction, and the editors and the agents and the critics and the educators upon whom the genre’s laurels mostly rest, at least on paper, is predominantly white. But once every third blue moon, they’ll come across an author who is not; and her contributions to the canon are treated as anthropological excavations, and as crossovers for mass (white) audiences, rather than intentionally crafted art.

For as much as the events of the past weekend were framed as Trump going to war with the NFL, our bum of a president did Roger Goodell and the league a huge favor. All they had to do was release a few limp-dick statements tsk-tsking Trump’s comments for their divisiveness, come up with a few meaningless shows of pseudo-solidarity like we saw in Dallas last night, and poof: Suddenly the anthem protests aren’t about a very specific set of problems plaguing this country, but about “unity,” a cause more hollow than anything 25 branding execs could ever dream up in a conference room. Roger Goodell is on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Colin Kaepernick isn’t.

Ultimately, it’s all about marketing! Taking a knee is fast becoming the new safety pin.

I was walking up Lafayette Street yesterday and I passed by a poster of Andy Warhol and I started thinking about his embrace of celebrity and his adoration of vacuity and his elevation of frivolity above all other things, and how even though it was acknowledged at the time that he had successfully identified the dead-eyed fatuity at the heart of American culture better than almost everyone else, we didn’t give enough credit to how accurate and prescient he actually was. It’s too bad Andy Warhol isn’t alive to see how horrible everything is now: I can’t think of anyone who would enjoy it more. Anyway, here’s music.

★ At 8:30, already any exertion beyond the minimum would bring the heat pressing in. Forty-five minutes later, just stepping out into it again was enough. The elevator was crowded with people trying to get outside, and the line at the coffee shop stretched clear out the door. The middle of the day married the thick heat of high summer with the sharp, dazzling light of fall. Walking into the sun made the scalp sweat. A trip to the playground brought the six-year-old back sweat-drenched and mosquito-bitten. The mosquitoes and mildew were both on the attack, more than they had been in the worst of July. There was never a cloud in the sky. The west turned smooth yellow, then on through the other colors to twilight. Some invisible irregularity caused the sequence to mix ever so slightly, sending blurry and edgeless fingers of  pink up into the blue.

Ben Stein as The Economics Teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

The nation’s kids scrutinize all the nation’s teachers every school day. All those kids are growing, and their minds are developing, and they’re prone to note the oddities of their teachers’ personalities, sartorial choices, and pretty much everything else. So you’d think that when those kids grow up, become writers, and depict teachers on TV and in movies, the detail they absorbed back then would get incorporated. But it rarely does. Why? I’d say, simple as it sounds, it’s because kids are emotionally vulnerable and the strongest resonances of their teachers—really good or really bad—stick with them. Kids are kept in the thrall of teachers every school day. All that rigorous character analysis of their teachers they mentally conduct while staring straight ahead, off to the side, or at that hard gum stuck to the side of the desk, is bound to fade in favor of a few emotionally resonant moments.

Because of this emotional imprinting, we see a lot of caricatures—strict binaries even—of very good and very bad teachers. The bad ones are legion in TV and movies. Take Ben Stein as an Economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, droning on about supply-side economics and repeatedly asking in that immortal monotone: “Anyone, anyone?” The boredom gripping the room is well beyond existential, seeming to provoke even paralysis. The students, clearly in anguish, are staring straight ahead, while one student is even sleeping soundly, a small puddle of drool gathering next to his head on the desk. What makes the Economics teacher a bad teacher is obvious. He combines many of the worst bad teacher traits—bland, cold, uncaring—with an affectless affect. The aridity of his instruction is palpable, almost sublime in its ineffectiveness. Oscar Wilde thought it was absurd to consider people good or bad because, in reality, they were really either charming or tedious. Most kids, I think, feel the same way about teachers.

Image: Tom Taker via Flickr

“I was thinking of using the internet to flame people I don’t agree with. Any advice?” —Travis the Troll

When the internet was first invented, did they ever have a sense of what it was truly meant to be for? Probably not. They probably thought they could just share knowledge with each others. I feel sorry for those first internet users. How silly they were, sharing knowledge. Or feeling the wonder of connecting with people all over the globe instantaneously. What became clear over trillions of internet interactions over the last 25 years that it was a great place to tell people off from a great distance.

In person, I am a pretty easy-going guy. There’s very little you can say to me that will upset me in any way, except possibly that you love me and want to date me. That will make me nuts. Otherwise I take all the little sleights I receive during the day and I will hold them inside me until I am home on Twitter. Then I will select some obscure poet with questionable manners and take it all out on them from the distance and safety of my dumb computer. Or at least I used to—it seems a little rough to pick on poets in the Age of Trump. And we’re all feeling pretty miserable as it is, so being ‘satirized’ by some loud jerk is really just the cherry on top.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★★ The forecast was more promising than the gray out the windows was. Soon enough, though, the sun burned into view. The humidity had not budged. By noon the clouds were down to a thin filter, but then the light weakened again. Workers were out on the roof deck across the way, restoring the cushions to the outdoor furniture now that the high-wind warnings were over. A wholesome light returned, and with it a swelling breeze. A spaniel on a leash bounded around a corner.