Hi, my darlings.
The vice presidential debate last night GAVE ME LIFE. As a native of the lamentable state of Indiana, I find Mike Pence absolutely reprehensible, and it was a great delight to see him so adequately HANDLED by [s]Mrs. Officer[/s] the Senator from California, Kamala Harris. She was cool, collected, and armed with just as many facts as she was withering, impatient, and unenthused facial expressions. But she also brought to the debate a level of preparation such as we have not seen in a presidential election since 2012, answering questions directly (how refreshing!) and speaking to, not at, the American people. And not for nothin, of course: as a woman, and in particular as a woman of color, she would never have gotten away with the torrent of evasions, pivots, and blatant disregard for the agreed upon rules of the debate that the current VP spewed last night, a sludge of half-truths and outright lies so rank with its own bullshit that at one point, a large fly alighted upon Pencey’s shellacked pixie, setting up camp there for so long I grew concerned for the lil guy. (In a breathlessly expeditious turnaround, the Biden campaign is already hawking branded fly swatters that read “TRUTH OVER FLIES.” Alas, this is where we are, folks.)
As a symbol, the fly was auspicious. There’s always been something vacant and dead-eyed about Michael Richard Pence, a vacuity so pronounced you wonder if there’s actually any consciousness inside him at all. Lies tumble out of him with such ease (and, unlike his running mate, with such finesse) it’s practically robotic. On the Internet, he’s often been referred to as a corpse, so last night’s unexpected Dipteraean visitor felt like the appropriate familiar of a man so empty inside he easily claims a rigid and legalistic Christianity out of one of side of his mouth while out of the other he defends a man as decidedly un-Christlike as Donald Trump. Coupled with the vice president’s suspiciously pink left eye, its own source of distraction from the jump, the fly’s arrival felt like a divine sign: here is an evil man. We’ll just add it to the list of freak occurrences during this administration that would seem to suggest some powerful deity is both irritated and active. (We won’t even talk about the obvious dandruff dusting his lapels.)
In other news, it was nice to wake up to the discovery that Louise Gluck has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I met Gluck, very briefly many years ago, after a reading in Chicago. She was gracious, smart, of course, and quietly glamorous, and had very encouraging things to say to the young undergraduate I was then. Here’s a conversation between her and Peter Strekfus that I LOVE, and here she reads from her collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, which won the National Book Award in 2014. And, just cuz, here’s FABULOUS photo of Gluck from 1977, courtesy of Isaac Fitgerald’s Twitter:
All for now, kids. Try and enjoy your day.