FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 2026
What Yevtushenko said: When we drop in at the medical mission, we treat it as a reading experience. (There tends to be a lot of sitting around.)
Today, we turned to the book we couldn't find a few weeks ago, and we pondered a present-day problem. We're forced to admit a semi-embarrassing fact:
By our reckoning, that book still strikes us as possibly the most interesting book we've ever read.
Your reaction won't likely be the same. Be that as it may, the volume in question is this:
Anne Frank:
The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose
HarperCollins Publishers, 2009
We know, we know—we're wearing you out! That said, Prose began her text with this quotation from John Berryman, who was no one's idea of a dummy:
I would call the subject of Anne Frank’s Diary even more mysterious and fundamental than St. Augustine’s, and describe it as the conversion of a child into a person….
That brief clip comes from Berryman's 1967 essay, The Development of Anne Frank.
This morning, when we read that opening line, we thought of two present day persons. We thought of the people who, just this past week, sat on our nation's most-watched "cable news" program and proceeded to compare James Talarico, first to a well-known deranged mass murderer, then to the apparently deluded leader of a religious cult.
(The first person said that Talarico gives him "Ted Bundy vibes." The second person called Talarico "a terrifying child," then compared him to David Koresh.)
What makes someone a person? Tomorrow, we'll offer transcripts of the fuller remarks by those two present-day people.
Prose's book still sweeps us away. So does the silence of Blue America's AWOL elites—the silence we've often mentioned.
As Prose begins to write in her own voice, she offers this:
The first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank I was younger than its author was when, at the age of thirteen, she began to write it...
In the summer of 2005, I read the diary once more. I had just begun making notes for a novel that, I knew, would be narrated in the voice of a thirteen-year-old girl. Having written a book suggesting that writers seek guidance from a close and thoughtful reading of the classics, I thought I should follow my own advice, and it occurred to me that the greatest book ever written about a thirteen-year-old girl was Anne Frank's diary.
Prose moves on (and on) from there, with the astounding back-story of a very well-known unknown book and its precocious young author, who was actually fifteen when her project was stopped.
What does that have to do with those other two people? We won't try to answer that question.
Tomorrow, we'll record what those two people actually said. Along the way, we urge you to remember this:
No people are uninteresting.
When you smack a hornet’s nest THEY decide when it’s over. We are truly fucked as a nation.
ReplyDeleteSomerby said he was making notes for a novel, but Anne Frank and Francine Prose both wrote non-fiction. Somerby seems to forget that. Using Frank’s diary that way is callous and bizarre, creepy. Is he still “writing a novel” given that he has obsessed over Frank for decades?
ReplyDeleteCorrection — Prose was writing the novel, not Somerby. But it is creepy for Prose too. And it doesn’t explain why Somerby is so obsessed with Frank and this book.
DeleteWhy does Somerby not read new books? Why does he read books about 13 year old girls? And if he likes to know about such girls, why not watch Mean Girls? Or read the nonfiction about such girls?
This is creepy. Prose was a 13 year old girl herself. Why would she need to read about a holocaust victim to find a girl’s voice?
Thirteen is the year when young teen girls think about becoming women and fight with their mothers. The developmental tasks are about accepting a female identity. It is creepy that Somerby obsesses over that transition from a male perspective, not Prose’s view, whatever her reasons for being yet another person to profit from her death.
her death = Frank's death
DeleteYour obsessive habit of insinuating that Somerby is a creepy pedophile is based on your own obvious challenges in understanding the content of what you read.
DeleteMost people read Anne Frank in middle school because that is when it is usually assigned by teachers. The theory is that it will help students understand WWII and the Holocaust. Somerby seems to be fixated on her 13 year old girlhood, not the context of her life.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, most of us consider children to be persons, not becoming persons but already there, even if not adults.
Our AG, Pam Bondi, says stick that oath bullshit up your congressional ass, testimony under oath is for suckers, because fuck you, what you going to do about it
ReplyDeleteOne possibility is that Somerby's juxtaposition of Anne Frank (who was 13-15) with Epstein's victims is meant to imply that they didn't have it as bad as Anne Frank, who bore her trials with fortitude and didn't have the chance to accuse anyone of her murder, after dying of typhus in a camp.
ReplyDeleteWe can wonder whether the use of the Detention camps being built by Trump under oversight of DHS more Anne Franks, along with the many men and women currently enduring illegally harsh conditions. Anne surely has immigrant sisters in today's camps, much less the ones being prepared for future use.
Or perhaps Somerby means to imply that at least the current now-grown 13 year olds raped by Epstein and his clients, are still alive and not dead like poor noble Anne. No legal charges for Anne and her older sister. No snitching on the old men who bought the privilege of raping them whining about being drugged and abused. Maybe Somerby is waiting for those Epstein victims to write their own novelistic journals, before he will care about their ordeals.
All Epstein victims are interesting. It is wrong to moon and gush over Anne Frank while not giving a damn about the 13 year olds who Epstein et al. abused. How do we know Somerby doesn't care? He never mentions them, much less over-praising them the way he and Prose magnify the average girlish writing of a girl transformed into a symbol by her death.
typo correction: [will produce] more Anne Franks
DeleteLet's see: Somerby "juxtaposes" Frank and Epstein's victims without ever "mentioning" Epstein's victims. That's quite a feat.
DeleteThe juxtaposition is contextual not explicit.
DeleteThe fall of the Iranian regime is now assessed as a real possibility. What an enormous gift to the Iranian people that would be, thanks to Israel.
ReplyDeleteI think David is a lot like Ted Bundy and David Koresh. The resemblance is uncanny.
DeleteMaking Persia Great Again
DeleteBtw DiC, beautiful chickenshit use of the passive voice. “Is now assessed”
Deletelol
What a fucking punk cunt you are, we all can see it
"No people are uninteresting."
ReplyDeleteActually, Robert Frost is uninteresting. So is Somerby (mostly due to the repetition).
The broader the generalization, the less the focus on the very details that tend to make people interesting.
If Somerby ever talked about other kinds of people, we might believe he finds all people interesting, but he doesn’t do that.
ReplyDeleteJust heard President Epic Blunder assure the nation that we were doing extremely well in Iraq.
ReplyDelete