So there is this new movie, I think it is called Ken and Barbie, have you seen it?  Ken is pretty awesome.  He does Beach!  I love that.  And Barbie is good too.  Jenny is Barbie and I am Ken.

At home, Jenny and I have been watching Succession, which I am embarrassed about.  I tried really hard not to get sucked in, but here I am.  I told Jenny she was Shiv and I was Roman.  She said if she was Shiv I must be Tom.  No way.  I am never Tom I hope.  They are, of course, all bad, but at least Roman is funny sometimes, and good looking.  Jenny says Kendall is good looking but not true.  He has a weak chin and he is just pathetic.  Jenny has always had questionable judgment in men, imho.  

Logan Roy, the dad, is just purely bad, unleavened by humor nor humanity, though he does have a certain energy I suppose.  I hate it when he is on the screen.  And it is pathetic how everyone is always trying to ingratiate themselves to him. Don’t they know that as a grown child it is foolish to place too much weight on a declining elderly person’s opinion of you.  I do not hold the elderly in universal high esteem.  Some of them seem to have learned very little in their long lives.  But since I am getting older every day, if you want to hold all the elderly in high esteem, that is ok with me.

The power of Logan Roy is something to take note of. It derives, I suppose, from his aggressive personality combined with wealth.  We all like to think we cherish our independence and freedom, but there is a good argument to be made that we just mouth words about freedom when what we really want is a strong daddy figure to tell us what to do.  The popularity of Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, Berlusconi, and Trump is the evidence.  Buried not too deeply in human programming seems to be an urge to bow down to a perceived aristocratic lord.  Like Logan Roy.  Yuuch.

I must admit Succession can be compelling.  Greg’s character is funny, hopeless, and freshly conceived.  Shiv’s conversations with her mother are a perfect cocktail of love and contempt.  A lot of us can relate just a little bit.  Shiv, Kendall and Roman are awful to each other, but never quite lose their connection as brothers and sisters.  I don’t have siblings and mostly don’t miss it, but as Shiv and Kendall walk hand-in-hand to the press conference after Logan’s death, for a minute it made me wish I had a sister or brother like that.

To balance all this pop art, I’m reading Proust.  I’m 5% in. I know he has a terrible reputation as the most boring writer ever.  But it’s not true.  You do have to get past the first 1% of the book, about 50 pages, then Proust finds his footing I would say.  He is funny.  The other day, Jenny and I were in the car listening to David Sedaris who lived in France for a while, learned French, and wrote about the experience in Me Talk Pretty One Day.  By the way, despite making fun of his own bad French, I heard Sedaris speak French on the radio, and he is clearly quite competent.  Proust is funny like David Sedaris.  They both make the same kind of droll observations about the people around them and they can both be self-critical in a funny way.  When I read Proust now, it is David Sedaris’ voice I hear telling the story. Proust is just a little sexy too I should warn you. Vive la France.

What does Proust write about? Nothing, there is no plot.  He just writes about what happens to him day to day, and what he thinks about.  You are just there in his head with him.  Thomas Wolfe was like that.  Elena Ferrante’s and Virginia Woolf’s books feel like that. Knausgaard writes like that in My Struggle.  By the way, Knausgaard gets a name drop in Succession.  When her husband Tom muses about quitting Wayco and taking a long vacation, Shiv snaps at him, What are you going to do Tom, lay on the beach and read Knausgaard all day?  Auto-fiction, it may be called, is when the author appears to simply write about his or her life, observations, and thoughts.  Another well known piece of writing that was famously about nothing is Seinfeld. It is funny to think of Seinfeld as literary fiction, but there it is. 

Auto-fiction is addictive.  Everyone’s life is a novel just waiting for a writer to tell the story.  After reading auto-fiction, pure fiction can begin to seem a little contrived. As Knausgaard says, the problem with fiction is it isn’t true.  How much of your life do you want to spend reading stories somebody just made up?

On the other hand, sometimes fiction seems to capture the human experience pretty well.  Take Hamlet or Harry Potter for example.  They  may be fictional, but they are so completely human it doesn’t matter.

Anyway go see Barbie, I guess.  

                                                       –Ken-enough