By unreasonable stroke of luck, I found out that Scott Thompson was running yet another one-man show. I’d last seen him in 2018 – a tight and well-constructed act that ended with an request from the crowd for one of his many oldies but goodies. (Everything, and everyone, is an oldie here.) “I knew I should have rehearsed this,” he said, and still pulled it off impromptu.

The one-man show I saw on January 20 was a one-man shitshow. It took place in what barely constituted a “theatre,” located as it was in the bottom corner of a gruesome postmodern condo, with asymmetric zinc cladding, on Bathurst at Queen. (I like postmodern buildings.)

I remember getting yelled at by a functionary at a Broadway theatre in the ’90s that every show starts at 8:00, and that indeed was the listed start time. A flotilla of eldergays and equally fat cranberry-dyed faghags muttered to themselves, when I “nonchalantly” walked “past” the place at 7:40, that they wouldn’t be opening the doors till 8:00. Nope: They didn’t let us into the house for a full hour. Certainly gets one in the mood for ribald comedy to stand interminably in the cold next to a screechy streetcar turning circle (and hidden washroom frequented by drivers and cops). [continue with: Buddy Cole taken off life support →]

Halide, the camera application that actually takes good pictures, won the Apple Design Award. (Then again, so had Interarchy, now dead as a doornail, with no replacement remotely as good.) Halide’s cocreator, Ben Sandofsky, is a homophobe and a blackmailer. (Also “deranged”?) [continue with: Contempt →]

I maintain this list since Artforum cannot manage to render or typeset such a thing.

2022

1. Peter Von Kant

2. Eo

3. Everything Went Fine

4. Sick of Myself

5. Bruno Reidal, Confessions of a Murderer

6. Detainee 001

7. Dinner in America

8. Will-o’-the-Wisp

9. Smoking Causes Coughing

10. Bones and All

2021

1. Annette

2. Summer of Soul

3. Vortex

4. France

5. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

6. Mandibles

7. Red Rocket

8. The Tragedy of Macbeth

9. Saint-Narcisse

10. The Onania Club

Previously:

It is torture to read a novel not just because nobody in it goes to the bathroom, spends every night watching TV, or surfs obsessively on their phones, nor just because the novel was permanently discredited by David Shields’ Reality Hunger as a Victorian form that has not evolved. (I’ve never been the same.)

I decided to fact-check my ass. I looked through Publishers Weekly and (lying) Times best-fiction-of-2021 lists, located novels set in the present day, and downloaded their ePubs via Library Genesis. I set about searching through these full texts for telltale tokens:

• email E-mail · E‑mail · electronic mail

• TV · television · show/program

• bathroom · toilet (⁓ paper)

• Facebook · Twitter

• Gmail · AOL

• laptop

• printer

• Skype · FaceTime · WhatsApp · iMessage

• social media · social-media

• Spotify · iTunes · Pandora

• stream · Netflix · Hulu · Amazon

• texted (only that token)

• voicemail

• website · Web site

After plowing through three E‑books, it became clear that the discriminating tokens were exactly and only email (that rendering; confoundable with voicemail), TV (case-sensitive), and bathroom. So for the remainder of the subject cohort, only those tokens were searched for. (I’ll still report variant renderings from those first three novels inspected.)

Accordingly, and contrary to my postulate, only Cloud Cuckoo Land and Second Place conjure worlds we are not living in. Second Place cannot even acknowledge that TV exists, though it does go to the bathroom once.

Notes

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You? includes something resembling a self-parody, or a sentence from a TOEFL study guide:

   Opening a private browser window on her laptop, the woman accessed a social media website, and typed the words ‘aidan lavin’ into the search box.

   (Did she type the single quotes? Publishing cartels remain incompetent at typography and copy.)

2. Assembly: “I almost start scrolling, down to where I know I’ll find my sister’s name, with the link she sent me yesterday to some show or other we’ve both been wanting to see. Instead, I let the screen dim, then flick, to nothing. Absent my phone’s glow, the dark is perfect.”

3. In Wayward, “TV room” was one usage. Then, for bathroom: “ ‘Who puts a bathroom off a kitchen, you know? And this door—’ ”

4. Apples Never Fall even acknowledges talk shows: “In fact, Savannah seemed to treat her and Stan as if they were talk[‑]show guests and she the host.”

5. I did not include tokens found in publishers’ front or back matter, self-evidently.

6. Hillary Clinton’s coauthored book was unlocatable. I rather expect it mentioned email.

An amazingly original piece of work by Tilcsik et al., “Concealable stigma and occupational segregation: Toward a theory of gay and lesbian occupations” [Administrative Science Quarterly 60(3)], came up with a theory of which occupations gay males and lesbians might choose, then tested that theory. The results are so accurate the whole process seems like it was run in reverse.

The authors propose that gays and lesbians both prize “task independence,” i.e., potentially homophobic bosses not breathing down their necks. Both groups further prize “social perceptiveness,” which could be seen as actually applying one’s social skills instead of keeping them in reserve.

The bothersome point in the paper is entertaining the idea that gay males’ and lesbians’ job choices are a puzzle. I can’t take that puzzlement seriously. It amounts to wilful blindness on the part of gay-money researchers, who reach for ever-more-bizarre and counterintuitive explanations for the jobs gays and lesbians do. They’re just not willing to admit that gay men are too sensitive to duke it out with straight guys on the job (my terminology). Oddly, they’re also not willing to admit that a lot of dykes are diesels who are perfectly fine repairing such engines. Everything is dressed up as discrimination or some kind of youthful trauma (see below).

Tilcsik et al. helpfully quote some other research that shows discrimination is not a plausible explanation for gay and lesbian job choices. That’s as plain as the nose on your face, or the acute accent in András Tilcsik’s name.

Running through a set of statistical surveys, what jobs did the authors identify as typical of gay men and lesbians? You’ll never guess!

Shocker.

Meanwhile, leftist gay publications (tautological) continue to lie about the legitimate gay and lesbian community. A glorified blog of some kind claimed that gays’ near-invariant choice to enter untroublesome cultural occupations or quiet office work instead of shipping out to the oil rig is straightforwardly the result of bullying in school.

No.

Gays are temperamentally different from heterosexualists, save for the uncounted few gay boys who were masculine from birth (and, for example, always liked football). I have read what I believe is all the research on that topic and have asked scientists directly, yet nobody has an estimate of the percentage of young gay boys who are, in effect, straight-acting. That’s how rare they are.

Of course the rest of these boys are going to become, say, stewardesses or actresses. Getting called a fag in high school, which would now get the harasser booted out of that school, has no bearing on anything. Indeed, faggy young gay boys can really fuck up straight boys’ lives by untruthfully squealing to the principal that the real boys called them a name. It’s the maladaptives who have the power now.

Apple will now forestall implementation of its threat to inspect your private photographs and text messages, and eavesdrop on your Siri commands, for suspected kiddie porn. The entire infrastructure is wrong in principle, but critics of Apple’s plans have their own ideas of what “principle” might entail, and it always means “make sure my political enemies are harmed but my allies are protected.”

It was particularly risible to read that Apple’s surveillance mechanisms might be reused by some kind of authoritarian or repressive régime. Apple already is one of those. Its authoritarianism merely pleases the political biases of the far-left Apple press. [continue with: Apple already is a repressive régime →]

Hey, Retard! is what the game-changing E‑mail software from Basecamp is not called. Its name is just Hey.

The great Jason Fried of Basecamp, author of so many bestsellers on usability and the futility of meetings at the office, charges you a hundred bucks for the worst E‑mail software in three decades. Hey.com is the IBM PCjr of electronic mail. [continue with: Simpletons and slow children now have their own E‑mail software →]

Shawn “Toxic” Smith will bill you 200 bucks an hour for men’s therapy. (No less than that fee – for philosophical reasons, he states.)

Relationship Repair

I offer solution-focused couples therapy to eliminate hurtful, destructive patterns and create a loving and supportive relationship.

I dared to E‑mail Smith regarding an unrelated issue. He replied by calling me names and musing that a certain flavour of burden he imputes I am dealing with is my entire fault. He’s the hurtful one, yet I am deemed to engage in destructive patterns.

I infer that Smith will take your money and fake like he is nice and caring in the Frank Mackey manner, all the while shit-talking you behind your back. He’s willing to malign gay men he’s never met, so I put little past him. In no respect is this tolerable behaviour from any kind of analyst, let alone one who uses the title Dr. and boasts he is licensed.

Though I was only ever a listener, I recall better treatment from call-in shows on AM radio in the ’90s. Shawn T. Smith is indeed toxic, hurtful, and destructive, and he is a danger to any man seeking his help.

Lydia Perović (no relation) interviews a mainstay of this Weblog, Russell Smith, and gets everything wrong that could be gotten wrong, from facts to copy to mondegreens to ‘apostrophes and ‘quotation marks’.

The YA is largely targeted at young girls. And I know this form my son; there are now a lot of middle grade books aimed at boys. But now we’re moving into the YA phase. There’s almost none I can find. I’m reading him old, really problematic adventure books that he absolutely loves. Biggles. This is so English. Biggles is a series of stories about a First World War pilot and adventurer, written by a British army officer in the air force of the time. He wrote them in 1920s 30s, 40s, and it’s all upper class British “fighting the Hun and the Bosch” and daring-do adventuring and getting out of scrapes and escaping from behind German lines and it’s classist and xenophobic and tremendously exciting for a 12-yo boy. There are all kinds of stereotypes about ‘silly Frenchmen’ and ‘uptight Germans’ but it’s intra-European so it’s fine.

Is an inability to publish correct type and copy another reason why literature is dying? (Is such a death deserved, even merciful?)

Perović and Smith operate in a world where Reality Hunger was never written. Of no surprise whatsoever were Perović’s absent questions on plagiarism.