YOUTH

"That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy.  And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine, yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.  But could my vapour love that scar?  Than I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar"--The End of the Affair

"The pigs are in the street!  The party officials were promising to clean the sky, but they forgot to close the gate"--Youth

For Christmas dinner we didn't bother with anything fancy. Just omelette, cauliflower and apple pie.

Yesterday afternoon I saw the Chinese movie Youth with Moira, Puitak and Gordon.  It's about a Chinese revolutionary ballet troupe in the Cultural Revolution era, with two members who become heroes in the 1979 border war with Vietnam.  I got confused because all those Chinese girls look the same to me! (It didn't help that their clothes and hair were pretty identical.)

We've been watching Errol Morris' docudrama Wormwood on Netflix.  It's about a CIA man who got dosed with LSD in the '50s and jumped out a window to his death, and his son investigating the matter in the '70s.  Pretty unsettling.

I started a little firestorm on Twitter.  Some Tweeter mentioned the "dysfunctional" U.S. general election last year, and I commented, "So when to the Democrats admit their primary was 'dysfunctional'?" Clintonites are still insisting that the only dysfunctional thing about the primary was allowing Bernie to run in it! They look at the 2016 disaster and that's the only lesson they learn?  I still wish that you could remove from your notifications feed likes and retweets of replies to you!

I've been translating the John Metcalf story "Early Morning Rabbits." Its title in French, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese is "Les Lapins du Petit Matin," "Os Coelhos da Madrugada," "Qingchende Tuzi" and "Souchou no Usagi."