Hello, friends and enemies. I got two things on my mind: it’s hot as fuck and the U.S. is a fucking joke of a country. Sorry, we’re getting off to a bleak start here.
It’s 111 degrees at nearly 7 p.m. while I’m writing this (it’s 90 degrees at 9:30 when I’ve returned to proofread). It’s been over 100 degrees every day this week and I’m pretty tired of it. It is difficult to be hot! I take SSRIs and I’m not built for this. Even lying around and reading my books, I am hot. I am also having hot flashes on top of it all! Of course I think about global warming and the fact that it’s only getting worse.
The Trump v. United States ruling that the Supreme Court issued this week is about the worst thing that could have happened, despite the fact that this outcome was highly predictable. The justices Trump appointed are doing their job of shielding him from consequences. Biden and his administration haven’t done enough to stop the forces that brought us the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and the continued machinations to get Trump back into power. As the LA Times reports, “The court’s six conservatives, all Republican appointees, said the Constitution has an unwritten immunity clause that shields presidents from being prosecuted or held to account for violating criminal laws when they are exercising their official powers.” And from al-Jazeera, “‘These are certainly the kinds of powers that are much more familiar to dictators than they are to presidents of democratic countries.'” This is obviously alarming. The president could do whatever they want, like jail political opposition (I’m thinking of the ubiquitous “lock her up” chants from 2016), for just one example. I’ve seen some comments that Watergate is retroactively legal, which is wild.
I think this is a major inflection point for our country. What is maddening about this, to me, is Biden has said he “will respect the limits of presidential power.” This would be a noble sentiment in a normal, peaceful time. This is not that time. We know if Trump wins the election, he’s planning to enact Project 2025, which is an extreme right-wing plan to overhaul all levels of government, gut the civil service, get rid of the Department of Education (among others), and many other horrible things. Trump is absolutely going to take advantage of the impunity the office of the president now offers. Even before this ruling, Trump proclaimed “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” While I respect the idea that Biden shouldn’t abuse this power, I also think that he has to, or Trump will make everything so much worse for us all. Maybe if six Supreme Court justices think they’re above the law, Biden should have them detained and appoint all new justices. Maybe he should purge congress of everyone who refuses to codify the right to abortion or single-payer health care until we get the government we deserve. Is this ethically correct? Absolutely not. Do I support authoritarianism? Also no. However, we are on the precipice of something terrible that has been building for at least the last decade (or arguably since Reagan) and there will be no coming back from a second Trump term. Biden now has the power to do something. Just literally anything. Yet, he’s refusing to act out of a sense of morality that belongs to a different century.
Personal Life
I figured I should update everyone after mentioning last time that I was proofreading my blog at 9:45 on Saturday night and still hadn’t had dinner. I did woman up and drive to Del Taco after that, rest assured.
On a more serious note, Kirk’s mom passed away almost two weeks ago now. Kirk and his dad are doing okay, but everyone seems really tired from the emotional blow and the work of caring for her in her final days. Thank you to everyone who has shared nice thoughts about this, I do pass them on to Kirk.
Books and Other Words
I think Jhumpa Lahiri is more known for her novels—and perhaps now her translations of novels from Italian—but I have only read her essays on language and translation. I loved In Other Words, which I read in 2016, in part because I rarely encounter fellow travelers in learning a language for the simple love of the game, but Lahiri wrote a whole book about it in the language she learned as an adult! Her new book, Translating Myself and Others, is in the same vein except she’s speaking from further along this path. She has now published translations of multiple Italian novels and is teaching translation at Princeton. She’s living the dream! This work is a series of essays that blend personal experience and literary criticism on the topic of translation. Lahiri discusses Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a work that serves as a guiding star in her work as a translator (especially the myth of Echo and Narcissus), her thoughts on the Italian books she’s translated, and the compelling character of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci seems to be something of a patron saint of translators for Lahiri and she draws inspiration from him and his corpus of letters and journals composed while he was imprisoned during the Mussolini regime. Lahiri explains that Gramsci dedicated himself to studying his languages while in prison, frequently requesting grammars and dictionaries from his family. He wrote at one point “My state of mind is such that, even if I were sentenced to death, I would continue to feel calm and even the evening before my execution perhaps I’d have a Chinese language lesson.” Antonio Gramsci: Relatable language-learning king. Lahiri includes a list of books for further reading at the end of Translating Myself and Others and now I have ten more books on my reading list.
I have much less to say about this book, but I also read Kate Elliott’s Furious Heaven, the book that follows Unconquerable Sun, which I mentioned in my last post. This book has a lot more space military action than the last one as Princess Sun starts advancing her campaign against the Phene empire. I liked that this book gave us some interesting perspective on the logistics of getting everyone into place for a space battle and I appreciated the ongoing intrigue and character development. Unfortunately, I must wait a few months for the third book in the series to see how things wrap up.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden via The New York Intelligencer. I don’t know if Biden has dementia or what but come on. Just retire. This whole generation needs to retire! Why do you want to be 81 and signing up to work for another years? Why be 90 and die in office (Dianne Feinstein, looking at you!) There’s simply no need for this.
- The Great Unconformity via Sara Kendzior’s Newsletter. I often turn to Kendzior when real life seems too insane to bear. She’s a scholar of authoritarianism and she hasn’t been wrong yet (unfortunately).
- Give us something to believe in via Badreads. This is another perspective on the current political moment that I liked.
- Despite seismic concerns, last segment of Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail line is cleared environmentally via LA Times. For something good: we’re finally getting somewhere with this high-speed rail! I would love to take a damn train to visit my family in southern California but an Amtrak trip from Sacramento to San Bernardino has a posted travel time of 24 hours. For reference, it’s a seven hour drive.
TV and Music
If you’re not listening to Chappell Roan yet, you need to get into it. I don’t have any deep thoughts, but I love her album. I really like Red Wine Supernova (and I am desperately hoping someone mashes it up with Champagne Supernova).
Corporeal Form
I mentioned last month that my doctor wanted to do a heart monitor test (apparently called a “holter monitor,” I thought they doctor had been saying “halter” until I saw it in writing) because I’ve been trying to figure out why I get light headed and my ears pound any time I bend over. I’m pretty sure the body is not supposed to do that, but I guess I’m not a doctor! I wore my little heart monitor thing for 24 hours and the cardiac lab said my lowest heart rate was 45 beats per minute and that they didn’t see anything weird in my data. My doctor followed up with an email to tell me nothing is wrong. Cool! I’m glad to hear that nothing is wrong with me because one particular test didn’t find anything notable (EYE ROLL!). I honestly don’t know where I’m going to go from here. Maybe just straight to med school and do it myself?
Wikipedia
I’ve been slowly working on translating some articles from Icelandic and I have decided I’m going to do all (or as much “all” as one can get) the articles in this topic. I started with an article about Glaumbær, a place in Iceland, and that linked to a bunch of nearby places in Icelandic Wikipedia, but not English, so then I wanted to translate those articles and fill in this little network of information. This has turned into a project of translating all the articles about places in the county of Skagafjörður. I’ve got 40-some short articles in my list to look forward to. I even made a new category for it on Wikipedia (Nine of the articles in there are ones I translated), which was new and exciting for me. What really got me stuck on this subject was learning that, in the 1990s, a bunch of smaller counties, called hreppurs, merged to form modern government entities. There are 11 (I think) of these hreppurs that formed Skagafjörður and none of them had articles in English! So, uh, that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m not sure it sounds like this can be fun to other people but I’m really having fun with this and working in a single topic is getting me to really learn some of this vocabulary, so that’s cool too.
Kitchen Witchery
Given the heat, I have been focusing on using the instant pot and the grill and making big batches to avoid cooking. I cannot abide any more heat in my house than absolutely necessary right now. Last Sunday I made albóndigas (Mexican meatballs) from the Mi Cocina cookbook, along with beans and arroz rojo. We had the meatballs for two dinners then I made some chicken in the slow cooker and combined that with the rest of the beans and rice to make burritos. On the fourth, I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, just out of habit I guess. It didn’t feel like there was much to celebrate but we love a good meal and it was too hot to cook indoors so I went for it anyway. The best new recipe I made recently was this slow-cooker peanut butter chicken. It was super easy and really good. This one is going into my regular rotation for sure.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has been obsessed with being inside this particular pair of pants I have that simply belong to him now. He loves being in things and under blankets and there’s something about these pants he just loves. I can now say “do you want to get in your pants?” and he will trot over to get in the pants. Cats are weird and very funny.
