Reading, Reading...and Binge-Watching Netflix

Item)  Edmund White's silly, shallow, snobbish, ill-written memoir about his life and loves in France:  Easy to see why Gore Vidal so detested this inconsequential faggot and his inconsequential work.

Item)  A late (2013) collection of (humoristic? aphoristic?) essays entitled Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, by David Sedaris:  The Turn to the Right, taken first (that I know of) with Sedaris' breath-takingly racist but still funny essay on the nastiness of Chinese cuisine (reminiscent of Prince Philip's "If it has four legs and is not a chair, etc.,"), has become a lemming-like swan-dive into the icy, black, poisonous fjord of grimly contentious bigotry.  Is this a White Southern thing?

Item)  Fred Kaplan's methodical, detailed biography of Gore Vidal, full of priceless details and informative analysis, including the astonishingly veracious judgement of Judith Calvino:  "GV had no unconscious...."

And binge-watching on Netflix:

1) Sense8: Adorable (watched it twice in five days).

2) Daredevil: Not implausible.  C'est à dire, if I found myself living (say, because I were born there, and were, sort of, cursed to be there) 24/7, 365/52--immersed, up to the eyes, in crime-infested, corruption-infused, all Jews and Vulgar Minorities NYC--I would think it only natural to be a blind, pro-bono lawyer/defense attorney by day, and by night a super-hero fighting crime and injustice.  It'd be maybe the only way I could respect myself.

3) Royal Pains:  Awash with ugly, self-conscious (and soo not cute) Jewishness (and far, far too many semi-naked women). Jewishness I think is what it is: Intrusive and obtrusive vulgarity, a harping on family relationships (especially the father and the younger brother, both of whose characters are odious), a jaw-droppingly shameless, bare-faced ethos of advancement through exploitation of social contacts, the occasional unwarrantedly insistent yiddicism ("yenta mouth"). Whatever it is, it makes my flesh crawl.  How I know that it's Jewishness, however,  is even to myself a Dark Mystery unillumined by my reading (I have never read Portnoy's Complaint, nor would I, ever) or prior life-experience; but it (my knowing) seems to imply that I am, despite myself--and despite my conscious dissociation from my ancestral Puritan Origins--endowed with a Mayflower Madame's instinctually Jew-loathing WASP sensibilities.