How stupid are Ohioans? We're about to find out.

Vent Haven Museum, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky

  

     "Willful ignorance" is a familiar term, almost a cliche.
     Yet you don't see it used much of late, which is too bad,  because it's a useful concept in understanding our current political landscape.

     Look at the scandal over the vile attack ad put online Monday by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Some MAGA operative tracked down the estranged mother of  the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton, and has her saying that Acton "lied her entire life."
      The GOP is putting millions of dollars behind the ad.
     You can see its appeal. "Even her mother thinks she's a liar," Strong stuff, if you stop there, will yourself to ignorance, learn nothing more, and do not permit yourself to actually examine the facts of the situation.
      Which are as follows: Acton was abused as a child. Raped between the ages of 1o and 12 by her step-father. The husband of the woman in the Ramaswamy ad, Donna Arthur, who remained married to her husband. A court took Acton and her brother away from their mother in 1978. They've had no contact since.

     The briefest survey of the facts casts the commercial in the light of a loathsome piece of bald deception, one that even some Republicans have decried.

      But not all. The liar, bully, fraud and traitor Donald Trump of course supports it. As does his morally void lapdog, JD Vance. In a decent world, the ad will ensure Acton's election and, looking at the polls, she seems on her way to that. It was an act of both desperation and folly, elevating Acton while reminding everyone just how bad a person Ramaswamy truly is.

     Nor is he alone, The episode is a reminder of an essential truth that is often lost in the fairness rituals of journalism: these are bad people, doing bad things. Trump is a bad person who ruins everything he touches. JD Vance is a bad person. Marco Rubio is a bad person.

     As for the excrescence, Ramaswamy, you might be unfamiliar with the hedge fund billionaire. His sole previous appearance on EGD was in 2023, when he participated in the Republican presidential debates, will give you a sense of the man:

     Thirty eight year old wackjob/businessman Vivek Ramaswamy promptly pronounced "climate change is a hoax,” and claimed, vis a vis nothing, that "more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” In general, Ramaswamy was an incandescent spotlight of batshittery, confidently airing a variety of specious theories and crazed policy proposals, and was probably the big winner of the night, if drawing attention to yourself, your destructive hopes and fierce, misplaced self-regard can be considered winning

    He's gotten worse since then. Bad people seldom get better. Just the opposite. They deteriorate, driven to more extreme acts trying to support the unsupportable. 
     You can't be a good person and support Trump. Oh, you can have once been a good person. And you might do some good things that you can use to argue otherwise. But by now, the situation is undeniable: MAGA is moral poison, a toxic delusion based on lies, used to hurt people, dependent on the aforementioned willful ignorance. There's no reason that shouldn't be said, loud and clear and often.

'Oh noooooooo!'

     Harry Weese was a great Chicago architect whose love of triangles has already been dissected here on EGD — his two most significant Chicago buildings are the SwissHotel, an equilateral triangle at 323 E. Wacker, and the Metropolitan Correction Center, an isosceles right triangle at 71 W. Van Buren. 
     His other downtown building, the Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist, 55 E. Wacker Drive, is certainly not a triangle. More of a, well, I'm tempted to take inspiration from my colleague Lee Bey calling the new entrance to the Museum of Science and Industry a "carbuncle" and label it a "boil." Round in a bad way. He should have stuck to triangles.
     Which is ironic, because Weese's true masterwork is also not a triangle. Nor is it in Chicago, In fact, it's not a building at all, but the Washington DC Metro, whose vast, vaulted poured concrete interiors were designed by Weese. I feel a burst of Chicago pride every time I travel through them, such as a recent visit to Washington to meet Grandbabe #3. 

    I figure, at least a few readers don't know about this, and might appreciate being informed.
    The visit, I'm pleased to report, went very well. Grandbabe #1, now 16 months, seemed to remember me, or at least took to an older gent who did nothing but to read to her and tell her stories and dance and sing and whatever else she cared to do. 

      We spent a good amount of time stacking colorful boxes and then knocking them over, which I pretended was a shocking event — I put my hands on my ears, elbows out, stared wildly, and uttered a boggled, "Oh nooooooooo!" — a good-natured mix of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and Macaulay Culkin's hands-to-cheeks dismay gesture in "Home Alone." She would mimic the expression, to my delight, pressing her hands to her ears.  It soon became the payoff of the stacking process, and we would press our hands on our ears and beam at each other in mutual admiration, truly happy to be sharing this secret, this incredible witty spin we had invented. 
    The other noteworthy moment came when, suddenly at a loss for a story or song, I noticed her toes and went for the traditional. "This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef..."
    At that point, for the fourth little piggy, some long-dormant neuron fired and I said, "this little piggy had LESS roast beef than the previous piggy, but still enough roast beef to meet his nutritional needs."
   Where did THAT comes from? All I can think is that my wife, who is nothing if not kind hearted, felt bad for the hungry little piggy, denied roast beef, even though it only existed in myth, and decided to give the poor notional swine some cold cuts. Or it could have been me, making fun of her kind-heartedness. 
     Anyway, part of effective parenting (or, I suppose, grand-parenting) is keeping the process interesting for both yourself and your charges, and this door opening for the fourth toe, formally called the digitus quartus pedis (Latin for "fourth toe") or the "ring toe," to correspond with ring finger, has kept me creatively engaged. 
     "This little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy COULD have had roast beef but, being a vegetarian, opted for a chive cake instead...")
      A chive cake being an actual foodstuff that I watched this girl knock back at a Laotian restaurant. You learn a lot in this grandparent business, if you do it right.  

Two thumbs down

Rendering of proposed Siskel and Ebert statue 

    

     My first thought: there already IS a bad statue of Roger Ebert, down in Champaign. Do we really need another? As for Gene Siskel, well, best to draw the veil.  

     To be located on private property, so they're of course free to do whatever they like. And this is in the fine tradition of godawful tourist trap TV tributes, bronzes monstrosities of the Fonz and Bob Newhart and whomever. Just as postage stamps never again are the honors they once were before Thin and Fat Elvis, so bronze statues long ago sank from equestrian honors bestowed upon heroes to metallic essays in fatuousness. This is not to take anything away from Roger Ebert, whom I knew and admired deeply. But he already has his deathless tribute: his words.
     The thing is unveiled in 2028, and I'll probably never see it — most people won't, there being no compelling reason to step foot in Prudential Plaza. I guess this is supposed to draw them there.
      Will it? Have you ever gone anywhere in Chicago to look at a statue? I mean, I'll pause passing the Kup statue on Wacker Drive — quite a good, stylized work that has some of the panache the man himself possessed — maybe clap a comforting hand on his foot and say, "Oh Kup, you wouldn't recognize the place." But I wouldn't cross the street to do it.

 

A-line dress

     I went to the Obama Presidential Center Museum on Monday, for an interview and to accompany my sister, visiting from Texas — it was the one place in Chicago she asked to see. I just was there in June, so didn't give the place the most careful once over. 

   However, we did pause in front of the display of the First Lady's couture — I thought Debbie might like it — and noticed something I'd missed before. This sleeveless A-line dress that Michelle Obama wore on vacation a few times while her husband was president. What makes it noteworthy is not the designer, but where it was purchased: Target. The dress cost less than $40, and she wore it between 20o9 and 2013.
     It seemed to symbolize a lot more than a piece of discount clothing. I probably don't need to point out the yawning gap between that sensibility — a celebration of the dignity and worth of ordinary Americans — and the current plutocratic crew in the White House. We are so far from that, with the Oval Office festooned with gilt loving cups and faux gold crap and half the White House being ripped up, it seems, to satisfy whatever shrieking midget dictator-manque is crouched at the back of what's left of Donald Trump's decaying mind, I figured, it might be worth remembering that not so long ago we had a First Lady who wasn't a contemptuous Eastern European courtesan and a president who wasn't an odious liar, bully, fraud and traitor servicing Vladimir Putin and betraying democratic Ukraine along with most closely held American ideals and interests. If you're paying even the scantest attention, you don't need me to explain why this is horrendous. The New York Times editorial page did a good job of that Wednesday. Here's the gist:
     "He is aiding an autocratic leader and dangerous adversary of the United States who is waging a brutal war against a democratic neighbor. Mr. Trump is doing so partly in the faint hope that gas prices, which have jumped because of his reckless war in Iran, will fall over the next two weeks and help Republicans avoid big losses in the midterm elections. He is damaging America’s national interest, and likely sacrificing Ukrainian lives, for his own political interests."

     Not much else worth saying beyond that. I have no idea if the elections are going to help, or if Donald Trump will merely declare himself king while the military seizes control and a third of the country applauds like seals. Whatever happens, we must remember that we weren't always like this — that isn't an opinion, but a fact. And I believe we won't be like this forever. That is an opinion, a hope really, but one that I'm sticking with and sharing because the alternative is just too horrible to contemplate. We will not be like this forever, but oh boy, it sure fucking feels like forever right about now.

Polish poet turns words of Holocaust victims, perpetrators into shards of 'memory activism'

 

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski 

during the war we laid out bodies like wood
but after the war we laid out wood in the forest
like bodies freshly felled.

     Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is not Jewish, but reads his poetry like an Orthodox Jew praying, bending at the waist, rocking forward and back.

I went with my child to the forest and cried helplessly with him
tears dripped from my eyes and the child wiped them away with his hand
and I so regretted I had brought him into the world

     He’s in a third floor conference room at the University of Chicago, reading to about two dozen people, gathered on Monday morning to hear him.

they didn’t know where to run since it was an open field and they ran in circles
how we laughed
and before we killed them
we even whistled some tunes

     Kwiatkowski is reading — loudly, with little inflection — from his book “Crops,” translated from Polish by Peter Constantine. More a pamphlet than a book: 19 small, hard, stone-like poems over 32 pages.

my father
a decent office worker in the railways
never took part in any of the shootings
he was just doing his job
organizing transports
eastward and westward
north and south
back and forth

     The poems are his, but the words aren’t — he gathered them from taped testimonies, combining victims, perpetrators and bystanders.
     “I didn’t change any of the words,” he says. “But still I’m framing it. I’m choosing the fragments. I’m responsible.”
     I’m here because he sent me “Crops.” I read it in less than 10 minutes, but the book rearranged my brain, providing necessary starkness, a counterpoint that I’ve been missing. Over the years, we’ve seen the Holocaust transformed into entertainment, especially on social media. Once there was one Anne Frank. Now there are 6 million. The Holocaust has been retrofitted into a bracing tale of courage, resistance, and redemption. The Holocaust is not a tale of courage, resistance and redemption. It is an epic of cruelty, obedience and horror.
     Kwiatkowski agrees.
    “Most art about the Holocaust is kitsch,” he says.
     Kwiatkowski gathers words, but doesn’t mince them, which makes him a controversial figure in Poland, where depictions of the Holocaust that don’t relentlessly depict the Poles as either victims or heroes are highly unwelcome. The Polish government once demanded that the Sun-Times take down a column of mine suggesting otherwise and, when the paper refused, we were sued. We won, because this is America. Whether it stays America...

To continue reading, click here.

Quite radiant

     Any Sunday worth the name should include time spent sprawled on the sofa with the Sunday papers. 

     But this Sunday saw a house full of family, here to see my sister. My brother and his wife stopped by bearing a shopping bag filled with peppers from their garden. My son and daughter-in-law brought their dog Virginia and my grandson. My wife grilled up an excellent flank steak, the baby was passed around and admired, and a good time was had by all. 

     So the papers didn't get read. Nothing is perfect. When Monday morning I found myself going to Hyde Park again — second time this week, to the University of Chicago, something you'll read about tomorrow — I grabbed the Times Book Review to read on the train. I figured, the news could wait. 
     The section included A.O. Scott's review of "The Radiance," by Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Scott calls the book "autofiction," a term I hadn't heard before — not stories about cars, but a fiction/nonfiction blend about "a man named Ayad, who shares many traits with the real-world Akhtar."       

     While Scott couldn't quite tell what he was reading — "Is this a campus comedy? A novel of ideas" A medical mystery? A spiritual quest narrative?" — the bottom line is, he liked it. "Whatever this book is, it's alive."
     But that's not why I'm sharing this with you. The campus section draws this description. "Ayad's class is stocked with the kind of overmedicated, trauma-curious, identity-obsessed youngsters who have figured in countless op-eds and magazines stories over the past couple of decades. The fluctuating power dynamic between them and their instructors, and the overall climate of hypersensitivity, ideological conformity and bureaucratic surveillance that hovers over the college, are by now commonplaces of fiction and creative nonfiction alike."

     Scott might read a lot more than I do, so he seems to think these are stock descriptions. To me, they don't seem very commonplace at all — certainly not nearly commonplace enough — and I wanted to share them. Identity-obsessed. Hypersensitivity. Ideological conformity. It is really refreshing to see someone just come out and say it. 

'I look forward to reviewing your proposal and learning more about The Quest for Pie.'

     Scams suck. You don't even have to be taken in by them. Just the fact of their existence. They're so depressing.
     It was such a beautiful fall afternoon Sunday. We took my sister to the Chicago Botanic Garden and just wandered around. The air was fragrant, the light, golden, the colors varied, the crowd, happy.
     Yet I was grimacing, mulling over an email I had gotten the day before. It began:

In Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life, what stands out is the refusal to treat recovery as a simple turning point between a troubled past and a better future. Your account of loving your work and family while remaining attached to alcohol captures the contradictions that make addiction so difficult to confront...

     Do you see the markers of AI in that? The lack of a salutation. Using the full title, including sub-title, of the book. The generic summation of the book's reception — in 2012. I should have just deleted it and kept going. I've received a number of similar book marketing scams before.
     But this wasn't a shill for book marketing. It was, supposedly, from the executive publisher of a London imprint. Another sign. Why would someone that high up be trolling around for mid-list authors? Over the weekend. They wouldn't. I should have just deleted it.
    But hope is a funny thing. I checked online, on the publisher's web site. She was a real person. Only this email wasn't from that person. I was fairly sure of that. The email ended in ".gmail." Another giveaway. I wrote back: 

Thank you for your kind note. There are so many AI scams related to book publishing, I hope you don't mind my asking you a question: how did "Drunkard" come to your attention? Thanks.

       She replied, beginning:

I came across Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life on Amazon, and I was drawn to the candour and perceptiveness with which you examine addiction, recovery, and their effects on personal and family life.

     The "u" in candour was good. English spelling. But again, the subtitle. Still — and here I did the part I'm embarrassed about — I took 10 or 15 minutes and composed an email about where my career is right now, and what project I'd like to see published: the unpublished memoir I wrote about going out West with my boys, "The Quest for Pie." That means a lot to me. I sent the email Sunday morning. She wrote back immediately.
     Another tip-off. What publisher is writing to anybody Sunday morning? Or Sunday evening, assuming she's in England? Which she — if it's a "she" — is not. Things move slow in publishing.
     I'll spare you the rest. We went back and forth a bit. I made it clear I'm not paying for anything. "There are two things a man should never pay for," I wrote. "One of them is editorial direction." She said that is fine. 
     But as I walked around the garden, I realized. "This isn't real. This is someone in Ghana using AI to mimic an editor." I should have known that. I did know that. Yet proceeded anyway, on the slimmest, most pathetic hope. What really bothered me, I think, is that I couldn't figure out what the scam is. Maybe this is like a romance scam, only targeting authors. We'd go over the book for six months and then she'd spring the trap. 

     That might have been what really saddened me. The knowledge that this is our future, being forced to decide, again and again, if something is real, is human, or just another attempted rip-off, a little better disguised than previous attempts. Email has become a street jammed with pick-pockets and muggers, with fewer and fewer actual pedestrians in between. The ability to see through this, to decide who's who, to determine if something is the work of humans, or not, is going to be increasingly important. And exhausting. My gut told me: this isn't right. Listen to your gut. And to experience. 

     The lesson of experience is clear. In 34 years since my first book came out from St. Martin's, no publisher has ever reached out to me with this kind of query. Never. When something has never happened before, the odds that it is happening now go way, way down. Truth might be a hard road, but allow yourself to stray from it and you quickly go into the bog. I wrote back, and said what we need to do is set up a Zoom call to discuss this further. I assumed that will be the end of it.

   Not quite. When I got that first email on Saturday, I did, immediately write to the publishing house itself, an interesting group called Bookouture, to see if their executive had indeed written to me. I'm not a complete fool. They wrote back early Monday:

Good afternoon Neil,
Thanks for getting in touch. We are aware of emails currently circulating that are impersonating our editorial staff, and our cyber team is investigating this issue. Please be advised that the email you received was not sent from Ruth, or anyone at Bookouture – we would suggest reporting the message and blocking the sender.
Thanks so much again for alerting us.

Best regards,
The Admin Team

    Well, there you have it.