Click here to go to my new website. http://peter.murmann.me

Thy NY Times provides an excellent behind the scenes account of the major surprise this year. Majorie Taylor Greene went from being the strongest support to a frequent critic.

Click on graphic to get to article.

Click on picture to play video.

After 35 years, Home Alone holds up. It turns out I had never seen the original movie, only the sequel. The film is cute. Macaulay Culkin delivers a spectacular performance for a nine-year-old. If you want to enchant your kids, this is a wonderful holiday movie. I watched an interview with Macaulay Culkin recently on Jimmy Kimmel Live; as an adult now 45 years old, he comes across as charming. He watches the film with his young kids, and they are presently not old enough to realize that the kid in Home Alone is actually their father.

Recently, I saw a clip from Forrest Gump, and this inspired me to watch the film again. I had these memories of Forrest Gump: he’s not very smart, and he’s best friends with a Black man who he later goes into a fishing business with in the South of the United States. The film holds up even after 30 years. I found it interesting that I had no memory of the love story that is at the center of the entire film.

In my first viewing, I also did not fully appreciate how the director was perhaps, on purpose, choosing a very low-IQ person to be the hero of his film when the U.S. had been moving towards a meritocracy for the previous 30 years. What makes this film comic is that Forrest Gump, despite his low IQ, is winning prizes right and left, and he happens to stumble into the middle of world affairs without understanding what is going on. It turns out my memory was wrong. Forrest Gump never went into the fishing business with his friend. The friend is killed in Vietnam. They had made plans to open up the fishing business after the war, but Forrest has to do it on his own. And what a business he makes of it. If you have never seen Forrest Gump, treat yourself to it.

I watch Jimmy Kimmel opening monologue regularly. I am glad that ABC put him back on air and did not cave to the threat’s of Trump and the FCC chair Brendan Car.
Never was I so excited to watch his show. I was filled with anticipation. How would he address public about what happened.
See for yourself.

Great visual article in The NY Times, giving a glimpse of his 90,000 item archive.

I am not sure how I became the owner of this book. I found it on my bookshelf this summer.
The only thing that was clear is that it was bought in my local bookshop because of its label
on the back cover. Did I buy it? I typically do not buy contemporary novels because I want
novels to have withstood the test of time before I give them my attention. Did someone give
it to me as a present? This is possible. I live in the summer, surrounded by woods, in a
wooden house.

This is what happens in the novel. Three men moved into the Canadian
wilderness to disappear from civilization. I am not that extreme. I go into the village almost
every second day to see friends. But then, I am not running from the law as these Canadians
are. Some of them are also doing illegal stuff. Before long, a photographer shows up who
wants to capture their life story on camera. When another woman shows up in the
wilderness, the placid life of the hermits is turned upside down. Love moves in unexpected
ways. This is a wonderful story that becomes better with every page. After finishing the
book, I researched it on the internet and learned that it became an international bestseller. I
am still not sure how I became the owner of the book, but I am very glad that I read it this
summer.

The best thing about this rather uninspired romantic comedy is the destination: I wanted to buy a ticket to Bali as I was watching “Ticket to Paradise.” The second best thing is the chemistry between Julia Roberts and George Clooney. You can sense that the two genuinely like each other. As they tell the story, Clooney would only do the film if Roberts was playing the female part they are having fun. Instead of watching the film, travel to Bali.  It just moved on my bucket list.

Important article by David Brooks in NY Times.

He writes: I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews.
It’s not just my nostalgia that’s inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher’s Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O’Hara. From a recent Substack essay called “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was No. 3 in 1958 and Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” was No. 1.

Today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publisher’s Weekly yearly Top 10 best-selling list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?
I’m not saying novels are worse now (I wouldn’t know how to measure such a thing). I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, “The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.”
As a result of this assumption, novelists were accorded lavish attention as late as the 1980s, and some became astoundingly famous: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. Literary talk was so central that even some critics got famous: Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin and before them Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. There were vastly more book review outlets, in newspapers across the country and in influential magazines like The New Republic.
Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the internet. It has destroyed everybody’s attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. As Yingling points out, the decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet was dominant.
People still have attention span enough to read the classics. George Orwell’s “1984” (an essential guide for the current moment) has sold over 30 million books and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” has sold over 20 million. Americans still love literary books. When the research firm WordsRated asked Americans to list their favorite books, “Pride and Prejudice,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Great Gatsby” and “Jane Eyre” all came in the Top 10.
People still have the attention span to read a few contemporary writers — Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith, for example — and a sprinkling of reliably left-wing literary novels: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.” It’s just that interest in contemporary writers overall has collapsed.
I would tell a different story about the decline of literary fiction, and it is a story about social pressure and conformity. What qualities mark nearly every great cultural moment? Confidence and audacity. Look at Renaissance art or Russian or Victorian novels. I would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years.
Go back to the 1970s and artists and writers were attempting big, audacious things. In literature there were Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift.” In movies there were “The Godfather” — I and II — and “Apocalypse Now.” Rock stars were writing long ambitious anthems: “Stairway to Heaven,” “Free Bird” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Even the most influential journalists were audacious: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson. Everything feels commercialized, bureaucratized and less freewheeling today.
The literary world was especially hard hit. Something happened to literature when the center of gravity moved from Greenwich Village to M.F.A. programs on university campuses. When I got out of college I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings I thought to myself, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?” It seemed like a small and judgmental world.
Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable. (On the right, by contrast, it seems that you get rewarded the more objectionable things you can say.)
In 2023, The British Journal of Social Psychology published a fascinating study by Adrian Luders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle. They looked at a sample of the American electorate (mean age 34) and analyzed their opinions on issues like abortion, immigration, gun control and gay marriage.
They found that left-leaning people tend to have more extreme and more orthodox and tightly clustered views on these issues. If you know what a left-leaning person thinks about immigration, you can predict what he thinks about abortion. Right-leaning people tend to have more diverse and discordant views. A right-leaning person’s view on immigration is less predictive of his views on gun control. There’s more conformity on the left.
This accords with my experience. When I visit a school in a blue part of the country, students often say they are afraid to speak their minds in class. It also reminds me of a study Amanda Ripley did with the polling and analytics firm PredictWise for The Atlantic in 2019. That study looked at which counties in America were the most open-minded and which counties were most prejudiced against their political opponents. There was plenty of intolerance on the right (especially in Florida), but the most intolerant county in America appeared to be Suffolk County, Mass., which includes the city of Boston, and the Bay Area wasn’t far behind.
Conformity is fine in some professions, like being a congressional aide. You’re not being paid to have your own opinions. But it is not fine in the writing business. The whole point is to be an independent thinker, in the social theorist Irving Howe’s words, to stand “firm and alone.” Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts, and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage.
If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them, and of course your writing will be small and just like everyone else’s. If you write in fear of social exile, your villains will suck. You’ll assign them a few one-dimensional malevolences, but you won’t make them compelling and, in their dark way, seductive. You won’t want to be seen as endorsing views or characters that might get you canceled.
Most important, if you don’t have raw social courage, you’re not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what’s going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America.
In 1989 Tom Wolfe wrote an essay for Harper’s called “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he tried to inject a little audacity into his fellow novelists. He implored his fellow novelists to get out of their intellectual ghettos and write big, audacious novels that could capture an age, the kind of novels Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis were doing in their day. Wolfe did that himself in 1987 with “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” his sprawling novel about all layers of New York society — which holds up very well today.
We have lived, for at least the past decade, in a time of immense public controversy. Our interior lives are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith. I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms. And yet sometimes when I peek into the literary world, it feels like a subculture off to the side.
Which brings me to the good news. If the problem with literary fiction is social pressure and a failure of nerve, then that can be solved. I am told, by someone who teaches young writers, that right now there are bold young novelists doing important work. It makes sense to me that they will want to break out of the constraints that others have lived by. Maybe there are stars coming up just on the horizon.
Literature and drama have a unique ability to communicate what makes other people tick. Even a great TV series doesn’t give you access to the interior life of another human being the way literature does. Novels can capture the ineffable but all-powerful zeitgeist of an era with a richness that screens and visual media can’t match. It strikes me as highly improbable that after nearly 600 years the power of printed words on a page is going to go away. I would put my money on literature’s comeback, and that will be a great blow to the forces of dehumanization all around us.