Ron Hogan

Plenty of people are doing a better job than I can critiquing the politics of this essay—I’m wondering when book publishers ran out of literary fiction for Lit Hub to feature. (Full disclosure: In 2021, they ran an excerpt from my nonfiction book, but at least THAT was on creative writing.)

My reaction revisiting Ken Russell’s The Devils last week was very similar to Lily Osler’s. Although the film never explicitly names it as such, preferring (I think) a broader critique of power, the story of Loudun is very much a warning about the dangers of unchecked Christian nationalism.

One of us in chains, et cetera et cetera. The program is universal human rights. Get with it.

A serial rapist was elected twice as President, a fact we don't reckon with nearly enough. Now one of two major political parties has been molded in his image, run for and by violent sexual abusers who hate women.

“I didn’t intend to tell you any of this, when I started this story—I wanted to tell you about a song, and the boy I sent it to. But…pulling one thread of the song sent the whole world tumbling out.” My favorite Jude Doyle essays are the ones where he pulls some thread and a whole world spills out.

Lord I see what Brazil and Serbia have and I want it for myself

I want to say Jim Henson would never, but then I remember that the Muppets literally started out in television commercials, so.

ART IS BACK, BABY!

This is loads more fun than the time they lip-synced to “Jackie Wilson Said” on Top of the Pops and the show’s producers threw a photograph of Scottish darts champion Jocky Wilson up on the backscreen.

🎶Well, that's the way that I want it to stay / And I always want it to be that way for my Lula / L-U-L-A, Lula🎶

Bully’s confusion is understandable! In truth, we mourn the passing of Lola.

LET’S GO LULA! 👏🏻👏🏻 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 LET’S GO LULA! 👏🏻👏🏻 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Well, maybe I can take a step toward proving it…

Like, being relieved that your parents are no longer around to pressure you to, say, get a finance job or be an heterosexual is understandable. Being relieved they’re no longer around to tell you to stop treating your preferred sexual partners like means to an end rather than people? Grow up, dude.

This is what Tommy believes in his heart, but was too chickenshit to come right out and say last weekend.

The New York Times, folks. It would be funny if it weren’t so nauseating.

Exactly this. (Also: thread.)

But wait! We should talk about the artistic vision that Art Spiegelman could only fulfill with the help of AI, as described in the PW article: “a cover sticker ironically depicting the burning towers* as candles on a birthday cake.” *Yes, THOSE burning towers.

Two campaign texts, received less than an hour apart. Who authorized these? Because they’re just SAD.

Try to live your life such that, when you’ve fallen on hard times, and people learn of your circumstances, the overwhelming response in the comments is NOT “Gee, I feel really bad about those cats.”

What kind of pathetic loser sends his wife out to take credit for a ceasefire that the pope had actually secured a week earlier? (One who’s lost 17-20 points among Catholic voters, for starters.)

It Is a Fearful Thing to Fall into the Hands of the Living God, Charlie Brown

Why, This Is Hell, Nor Am I Out of It, Charlie Brown

Why, This Is Hell, Nor Am I Out of It, Charlie Brown

I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind, Charlie Brown

Like, apart from the obvious mendacity of right-wingers claiming THEY were openly making fun of “Lady Graham” while he was alive, I can think of few things that would interest me less than a Turning Point USA spokesperson’s comments about something put together by the Young Turks.

“Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point USA spokesman[,] dismissed the documentary’s political significance in a Thursday post on X. ‘This is why we called him Lady Graham. This isn’t an October surprise, we’ve known this for years,’ he wrote.” I call BS on the claim right-wingers *openly* mocked Graham.

FINALLY had a subway ride long enough to finish reading Caitlyn Paxson’s fantasy romance A Widow’s Charm on my iPhone and it included the first two chapters of the sequel, Rogue Charmers, which puts the queer energy front and center, as a bonus, and I am 100% on board for this novel when it arrives.

Of all the examples of corporate media’s moral cowardice, this is by far one of the most blatant.

Amy Acton just sent me a text saying that she and Ramaswamy are tied in the polls but “my grassroots fundraising has dried up in the last 24 hours” and, look, if the Acton campaign WASN’T getting a huge influx of outrage-driven cash yesterday, I have a lot of questions about the American people.

Ruin a song by adding "In my pants" "Comfortably Numb in My Pants"

This remains true today, and is perfectly articulated in this instance.

I can't find the person's tweet now, but my all-time favorite variation of "what would the founding fathers say" is "What do you mean there are Catholics on the Supreme Court"

Retvrn to the classics!

“The geolocation of the original message indicated that it likely came from a police station in Aix-en-Provence… Students have transformed the nonsense phrase ‘Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres’ into… something akin to the great Steve Buscemi ‘How do you do, fellow kids’ meme of the 2010s.”

JK Rowling: hello today's children Rowling: can i interessst you in a harry potter? Rowling: itss a rollicking adventure sstory about a gender conforming boy who lovess sssport

🎶We can hear it now Starting to get loud News of liberation A world that makes us proud🎶

That Ramaswamy’s response to the backlash is, basically, “I don’t know what really happened in Acton’s family, but I DO know she’s a creep” further solidifies his shittiness.

The GOP has just made Amy Acton’s mother the most highly visible example of the moral and spiritual rot at the heart of the “estranged parents” panic.

“A search of her co-conspirator’s phone found that she had googled ‘zip ties near me’ two days before the attack.” She also saved all her correspondence with the “scarification” specialist she hired to slice up her skin to make the staged assault look more realistic.

One out of every six Americans surveyed saw empathy as “a danger that can lead society away from God.” But TWO out of every five White evangelicals hold that opinion.

John Cleese is out there doing his best to make John Lydon look like a reasonable centrist.

Oh! Over the weekend, I was standing in line at the small corner grocery store and the radio station they play in the shop went with “Choosing Texas,” so despite my best efforts I *have* heard it, and honestly it sounds pretty much like every other country song I’ve heard on pop radio since 1981.

“To put it another way, so many leftists are so antisemitic simply because that’s how we’ve trained ourselves to talk about anyone we don’t like.”— @goldwagnathan.bsky.social It’s a strong essay. You should read it.

“We can argue about the meaning of Zionism as a political philosophy, and the implications of the Israeli geopolitical project, but adopting a neo-Nazi insult as our own means we are also adopting neo-Nazi patterns of thought, and from that invariably flows neo-Nazi behavior.”— @liberalcurrents.com

Several years before MASH debuted as a series, the producers of Hogan’s Heroes released a single episode that did not have a laugh track dubbed in. I saw it once, late at night. It was painful.