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Weekend Butler: A new movie for sentient adults. What punches harder than a mantis shrimp? My fan mail. Paul Simon, and more.
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Published: Sep 08, 2021
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Weekend
STEEL CHAIR TO THE HEAD
I own the book. I’ve never read it. I feature it because I love the title — it exactly conveys the humor and absurdity of professional wrestling — and the art is completely in your face, like a visual chair to the head.
WEEKEND MOVIE: SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
Premieres on HBO, 9/12. Adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 Swedish classic, and starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain.
WHAT PUNCHES HARDER THAN A MANTRIS SHRIMP?
Mantis shrimp pack the strongest punch of any creature in the animal kingdom. Their club-like appendages accelerate faster than a bullet out of a gun and just one strike can knock the arm off a crab or break through a snail shell. These small but mighty crustaceans have been known to take on octopus and win.
Could a robot punch that hard and fast? To find out, read this.
PAUL SIMON
At the 10th anniversary of 9/11 at the WTC memorial. The song is obvious.
FAN MAIL:“IN YOUR OWN VERY SMALL WAY, YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO THE DEATH, MAIMING, AND ENSLAVEMENT OF MILLIONS”
In the beginning, my former friends believed, COVID killed fewer people than car crashes or drownings. Then, as deaths mounted, they saw conspirators using the lockdown to gain control of the global economy. The vaccines triggered their assault on science. When vaccinated people got sick, they sneered. (I call them “cheerleaders for death.”) They recently sent me videos featuring so-called experts who assert that 50 million Americans will die… from the vaccines. 600,000 dead from COVID? “Everybody knows that never happened.” Ivovmectim? It saved many lives in India. State a fact from “corporate media,” they deflect. They not only know better, they know everything.
These are highly educated people, mind you, who have achieved much and now seem reduced to writing insulting emails — like the headline, above — to “sheeple” like me, who aid and abet the global police state. The upside: They’re not vaccinated, and won’t be, and when a vaccine card becomes the ticket of admission to pretty much everything, as it will eventually, they’ll essentially be under house arrest. I see a lot of GrubHub and Uber Eats deliveries in their future.
You can’t reason with people like these. You can understand how smart people get crazy. Read The True Believer.
While I’m at it….my former friends won’t need them, but you might: vaccination card folders.
ITALO CALVINO: “I’D LIKE TO SEE YOUR FACE IF THEY FORCED YOU TO HAVE AN OPERATION WITHOUT ANY RECOURSE TO HOSPITALS UNDER PAIN OF IMPRISONMENT.”
My never-delete email comes from Letters of Note, an English site that features a relevant letter every few days. To subscribe to the newsletter, click here. This week’s letter, clearly inspired by events in Texas, was written by Italo Calvino, one of the greater Italian writers of the last century. In February of 1975, the same month the Constitutional Court of Italy ruled that Article 546 of the country’s 1930 penal code—the prohibition of abortion—was unconstitutional, Calvino was alerted to an anti-abortion essay written by friend, scholar and fellow novelist Claudio Magris. Calvino sent the following letter in response.
Paris
8 February 1975
Dear Prof. Magris,
I was very disappointed to read your article “Gli sbagliati” [The Deluded]. It pained me a lot not only that you had written it but above all because you think in this way.
Bringing a child into the world makes sense only if this child is wanted consciously and freely by its two parents. If it is not, then it is simply animal and criminal behavior. A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes—as it is already to a large extent—no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a “free-range” warren but a “battery” one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.
Only those people—a man and a woman—who are a hundred percent convinced that they possess the moral and physical possibility not only of rearing a child but of welcoming it as a welcome and beloved presence, have the right to procreate. If this is not the case, they must first of all do everything not to conceive, and if they do conceive (given that the margin for unpredictability continues to be high) abortion is not only a sad necessity, but a highly moral decision to be taken with full freedom of conscience. I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life. Abortion is a terrifying thing.
In abortion the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman. Also for any man with a conscience every abortion is a moral ordeal that leaves a mark, but certainly here the fate of the woman is in such a disproportionate condition of unfairness compared with the man’s, that every male should bite his tongue three times before speaking about such things. Just at the moment when we are trying to make less barbarous a situation which for the woman is truly terrifying, an intellectual uses his authority so that women have to stay in this hell.
Let me tell you, you are really irresponsible, to say the least. I would not mock the “hygienic-prophylactic measures” so much; certainly you will never have to undergo a scraping of your womb. But I’d like to see your face if they forced you to have an operation in the filth and without any recourse to hospitals under pain of imprisonment. Your “integrity of life” vitalism is to say the least fatuous. For Pasolini to say these things does not surprise me. But I thought that you knew what it costs and what the responsibilities are if you bring other lives into this world.
I am sorry that such a radical divergence of opinion on these basic ethical questions has interrupted our friendship.
– Calvino
