links, or it didn't happen

Just the facts, please, and, haha, also some longer quotations than usual.

I. Four Public Servants Walk Into a Bar I've never recommended the Huffington Post so many times in one sitting. I'm shamed. I'm shallow, I guess. But this first piece is an interview with four federal employees who quit their jobs under Trump. Don't come to be convinced of anything except how useful it is to sometimes hear personal anecdotes. Not definitive as argument, but still enlightening. These are the experiences of four different people, including this one clearly conservative accountant type:

I see the structures of our representative form of government as the container, and then the policy as just whatever you dump into it. What has concerned me is the assault on the container. When you have a president who retains his financial interest, even if you’re supportive of him, you can’t know what his decisions are based on. And that becomes particularly acute when you see him praising [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan for seizing more power, or inviting the murderous [Rodrigo] Duterte to Washington, when he has property interests in Turkey and the Philippines.. . . 
In addition, two of the waivers were given to a group of employees that seemed to include the individual who issued the waiver. He may have just given himself a waiver. At that point I realized these guys were capable of just about anything. And they had also started to adapt to my going public with these ethical breaches by simply cutting OGE off. That put me in the position of knowing I would have to certify a number of White House financial disclosure reports without knowing what the appointees did for a living. So I became concerned that I would be window-dressing for corruption.

II. Translatable 

This is the new best opening to The Odyssey.

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain 
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how 
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

The translator, classicist Emily Wilson, has some additional thoughts on the moral bias of previous translations.

Richmond Lattimore labels the [female] victims as “creatures,” and Stanley Lombardo calls them “the suitors’ sluts.” But there is nothing in Homer in this passage to correspond to the modern pseudo-moral judgments of words like “sluts,” “whores” or “creatures.” We may be tempted to assume that ancient texts will articulate benighted ideas that “we” have now risen above; but this is a clear case where modern bias has been projected back onto antiquity. My Telemachus says that the women “lay beside the suitors.”

III. Eats Shoots and Waves

Also at the Paris Review, someone has overthought a wonderful sentence by Virginia Woolf, but at least they have produced this neat, historical summary:

The grammarians’ demand for formal completeness dates back only to the middle of the seventeenth century, and so it is much younger than the ancient idea of a complete thought. The syntactic pattern underneath is older than both, and most linguists today take it to be the activation of a language faculty that has evolved over tens of thousands of years. That there is a law in this sentence, wherever it lies, is apparent any time we try to break it. “The trees”: is that a sentence? No. We are left hanging, wondering what the trees are or do or suffer. 

The sentence in question is great, to be fair: "The trees wave, the clouds pass." 

IV. What Gunshots Do to the Human Body

Ah, yes. More politics. My politics? My thoughts? Those are pretty simple, man, so I'd rather have you read this article about the lived horror of gunshots. Not just chest-beating statistics we all shout at each other, but the chipped bones of it all. Follow a surgeon in one of the country's deadliest trauma departments:

The main thing people get wrong when they imagine being shot is that they think the bullet itself is the problem. The lump of metal lodged in the body. The action-movie hero is shot in the stomach; he limps to a safe house; he takes off his shirt, removes the bullet with a tweezer, and now he is better. This is not trauma surgery. Trauma surgery is about fixing the damage the bullet causes as it rips through muscle and vessel and organ and bone.. . . Every so often, [Goldberg] may also have to break the patient’s sternum—a bilateral thoracotomy. This is done with a tool called a Lebsche knife. It’s a metal rod with a sharp blade on one end that hooks under the breastbone. Goldberg takes a silver hammer. It looks like—a hammer. She hits the top of the Lebsche knife with the hammer until it cuts through the sternum. “You never forget that sound."

Leah Libresco has argued some conversely hard things about gun control, but even in her doubt about curbing gun violence with restrictions, she admits that mass shootings are one of the few outbreaks we might affect. I'm not sure I agree with her all that much on this subject, but she brings some quantitative rigor to a rightfully emotional conversation.  

V. Opinion

Everyone should listen to more books, especially if those books are works of poetry. I'm three-quarters of the way through The Iliad, and that's me, ye unlettered fool re: the long history of literature. I only finished reading The Odyssey for the first time this year and I had to listen to that one as well. When I finally get to The Aeneid, that long-delayed sequel/reboot, I hope to do the same. I've tried to keep the print editions of such texts nearby, usually a different translation by accident, so I can check my favorite spots, compare and remember the best moments. I, uh, often don't do that. Long may the oral tradition survive. Some books don't work, often some authors' entire oeuvre. Denis Johnson is too dense to overhear. But that's fine. Listen rather to E.M. Forster.

An anodyne polemic, this: audio makes words live in a different way. Listening expands the reading.