I've never read "Atlas Shrugged," but after all these years, I'm adding it to my Kindle.

I'll explain this to you, but could you please, if you need a Kindle, use this linkto check out the spiffy new Kindle Fire? Or go in through the Althouse Amazon portal and buy whatever you want, including a copy of "Atlas Shrugged," if you, like me, have some use for it. Or do you already have it on your shelf? I know at least one of my readers kept 2 copies of "Atlas Shrugged" on his shelf, and perhaps he systematically handed off copies of it to people who wandered into his lair and said, "Why do you have 2 copies of 'Atlas Shrugged'?"

I hope you enjoyed the quality of my commercial effort, above, and feel inclined to show your appreciation by using those links, or just by continuing to read this. You've wandered into my lair, and maybe you're saying "Yeah, why would anyone after resisting 'Atlas Shrugged' all those years finally relent?"

And it is many years. I'm quite old! I don't need any philosophical-ideological mental nourishment to power me forth in this life. It's not breakfast time chez Althouse. When I was young, a classmate — this was high school — chided me for not reading anything that wasn't assigned by teachers. That wasn't quite true — though I did apply myself assiduously to consuming whatever the government indoctrinators put on my plate — but I was quite sensitive to insinuations that I was in any way not a good person. And I read the book this teenage boy insisted on giving me: "Anthem." Sorry, old man who was once that boy, but it didn't change my life, it's still the only Ayn Rand book I ever read, and I don't remember anything about it, other than that it might have been science fiction.

The reason I'm downloading "Atlas Shrugged" into my Kindle this morning is the reason I buy most of the ebooks I buy: I want to be able to do searches, find the context of quotes, and cut and paste text into this blog. I happen to need "Atlas Shrugged" right now, because Ted Cruz — the filibustering Ted Cruz — was quoting from "Atlas Shrugged," and I was using a quote on the blog, in the previous post, and I have a lot more to say about the quote, and I can't do it without the context.

Having written that long post, I found myself going into my own comments section to say something more. Quoting the first line of the passage Cruz had quoted  — "There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong..." — I said:

That's already wrong!

2 sides to every issue?!

Ridiculous.

I was about to add:

I guess she may mean, there's what's right and however many other things people might think, all those other things are wrong. All those other things constitute one side, the wrong side.

Who thinks like that?! I don't believe that anyone who thinks like that can ever get elected to public office (unless they lie to people along the way).

I've never read "Atlas Shrugged," but I know it's a novel. If Ayn Rand is so dedicated to the truth, why did she write fiction? I assume it's so she could say drastic things with deniability. Those quoted lines are said by some fictional character, right?

And that's when I needed the text.  I do a search on the word "poison," the most distinctive word in the passage that springs to mind. (From: "In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.") Actually, there are other distinctive words, more likely than "poison" to pinpoint the text I want. "Knave" and "transfusion" would have been better bets. "Poison" appears 9 times in "Atlas Shrugged." (Boldface added.)

Without us, they are corpses and their sole product is poison, not wealth or food, the poison of disintegration that turns men into hordes of scavengers. p. 620.

Okaaay.

Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy’s mother.... Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal. p. 994. 

We're closing in on page 1000, and still, I've not reached the "poison" I'm seeking.

"Then I saw what was wrong with the world.... Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce.... so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collective countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values— the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win— and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’" p. 1048

No, that not it. But we seem to be getting warm, because the transfusions are there now too. It's the image of the tube that has good lifeblood coming from the able people who are getting poison back. And here's the quote I'm looking for, on page 1054, and we're deep into a long peroration, too long and too late in the story to put me in a position to call Rand out for taking cover within fiction.

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world....

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

“You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels— and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil."

Is this cranking you up? It doesn't work on me. I think moderation is a virtue, but in this imagery, virtue is blood, evil is poison, and moderation is a tube. You're supposed to feel this as a flashy display of reason, but it's full of emotional bluster and heavily reliant on metaphor. I'm being asked to regard myself as a rubber tube.  No.

I'm blogging, so I can just say: No, I am not a rubber tube. But if I were a writer of 1000-page novels, I would see that I could pronounce a single word in my mind. I would pronounce it. The word would be "No."

I'm not accepting this picture of life in terms of people with good blood and people with bad blood and everyone else as a bunch of tubes conducting a big old transfusion that's just got to stop, so this ongoing peroration — a filibuster of sorts — feels nightmarish. It contains enough reason and coherence to pull listeners along, to make them feel smart and energized. That's the most dangerous sort of irrationality. Completely irrational speakers repel all listeners. But this sort of material draws people in. The way to draw an audience is with a transfusion of irrationality and rationality — to be the rubber tube.

"Why is the Nobel Prize in Literature almost always given to a novelist, never a scientist?"

"Why should we prefer our literature to be about things that didn’t happen? Wouldn’t, say, Steven Pinker be a good candidate for the literature prize?"

Good idea. (An idea in the form of 3 questions.)

This is related to my strong belief that schools should teach reading through nonfiction literature. This opinion was surprisingly controversial, and it heightened my suspicion of those who become adamant about the lofty regard that belongs writing in the fictional mode. It's funny that what's not true must control the highest position.

The 3 questions above are from the famously atheist Richard Dawkins, and my statement that begins with "It's funny" feels like an invitation to atheists to say something about religion.

And in my mind, I hear — though there is no sound — religionists and fiction lovers alike clamoring to talk about greater truths.

Rush Limbaugh cites facts that raise the "the obvious question: How do elections happen the way they do?"

The facts:

CNN is down, the networks are down, while conservative books sell through the wazoo and end up number one on the New York Times list.

The most listened to radio talk shows are conservative.  The most watched cable news network is conservative. ... We own books; we own talk radio; we own cable news. 

His answer is:

We're nowhere in the pop culture.  We are nowhere in movies.  We're nowhere in television shows.  We are nowhere in music.  Nowhere!

On the fiction side of books, we're nowhere, in terms of what conservatism is, being cool and plot lines and that kind of thing.  We're not in the classroom, we're not in academia, we're not the professors and the presidents of universities.  We are not school superintendents.  Those are very crucial because they get people when they're young, young skulls full of mush. They get to make and form those brains and basically propagandize them and indoctrinate them however they wish.

It wasn't liberals who originated the idea that has most famously been phrased: "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man." That was the methodology of traditional religion. Liberals — of both the right and left — should value the autonomy of the young. They should revere it. They should perform their sacred duty to develop and guide young mind. Yet they fight for the power to indoctrinate. Shame on all of them.

The central characters in good pop culture stories tend to be free and independent, so Rush's frustration that conservatives can't get hold of the "fiction side" of things is reason for hope. Left-wingers of the big government variety should have the same problem appropriating pop culture. Even if the various stars mouth left-wing propaganda, they can't imprint that agenda in the stories, which require strongly autonomous heroes and heroines.

"To live intensely, as he wanted, would speed up the illness and shorten the life available."

"In 1901 at forty-one, now ill beyond any denial and forced to live in the warm climate of the Black Sea, Chekhov married a lively and successful actress who worked in Moscow. The frequent trips from the hot south to the freezing capital were, his doctor observed, the worst-case scenario for his sickness. And indeed so many of Chekhov’s characters seem to make the worst possible, if not suicidal, choices."

"In such situations, it is not ever an animal’s 'fault' — it is the dog-owner’s fault, of course."

"Seeing a dog-owner with a massive dog, we are likely to think that the dog-owner is enjoying his spurious power: he can cause extreme suffering, if he wishes to, and so we must be grateful that he is reining in his animal, which would love to bark and rush at us. A dog is an expression of its owner’s fantasy-self—perhaps?"

Says Joyce Carol Oates, explaining her story "Mastiff," which begins:

Earlier, on the trail, they’d seen it. The massive dog. Tugging at its master’s leash, so that the young man’s calves bulged with muscle as he fought to hold the dog back. Grunting what sounded like “Damn, Rob-roy! Damn dog!” in a tone of exasperated affection.

Mastiff... massive... master...

Rob-Roy?

Robert Roy MacGregor (Scottish Gaelic: Raibeart Ruadh MacGriogair; baptised 7 March 1671 – 28 December 1734), usually known simply as Rob Roy or alternately Red MacGregor, was a famous Scottish folk hero and outlaw of the early 18th century, who is sometimes known as the Scottish Robin Hood. Rob Roy is anglicised from the Gaelic Raibeart Ruadh, or Red Robert. (He had red hair, Ruadh being Gaelic for red-haired, though it darkened to auburn in later life.)

Names. What does it mean to name the dog Rob-Roy? Oates's scary mastiff isn't even red. He's black.

We were out on the north shore of Lake Mendota the other day with our borrowed black dog named Zeus. Along came another black Lab. "What's his name?" we ask, and the man says, "Thor."

Seeing a dog-owner with a massive dog, we are likely to think that the dog-owner is enjoying his spurious power....

I google for an image of the god Thor, and Google autocompletes to Thoreau...

"The idea that 'shame works' — that stigmatizing behaviors and shaming the people who do them are necessary and honorable tools of public policy..."

"... is a recurring theme in both conservative and more communitarian/paternalistic liberal rhetoric. It’s often based on personal experience, or home truths from one’s mom, and because people do sometimes say that shame worked for them I had a hard time articulating why I rejected this rhetoric so completely."

Writes Eve Tushnet, who figured out the answer from reading "Middlemarch."

What? You're ashamed never to have read "Middlemarch"? I'm not, because I have read it, not that I remember the part about shame.
I remember one thing about the book: Some lady was hugely supportive of her husband's writing, but then — spoiler alert! — after he dies, she gets a good look at his supposed magnum opus and it's no damned good at all. Did I get that right? I read it decades ago, and though I've seen it listed among the top books that you're supposed to read — at least if you want to be considered a reader of serious literature — I don't think you need to read it. You're off the hook — in my book — for not reading it. So no need to approach this discussion with any shame about that. And I'll just leap to what's so bad about shame that reading "Middlemarch" made Eve Tushnet capable of articulating. Then we can discuss what's so bad about shame. (You can also discuss how "Middlemarch," specifically, elucidates things, or how reading serious literature enables us to fathom complex concepts.)

Tushnet looks at "what I was like in the year or two before I quit drinking":

During that time, when I knew that I had a serious drinking problem but hadn’t yet quit, shame completely corroded my moral sense. It isolated me. I felt like there was nobody I could trust or talk to. I had no hope of change and no sense that there was any way out. I was able to imagine taking actions to hide what was going on, but stopping was completely unimaginable....

When people try to shame you, you might "just get[] angry... and totally reject[] their judgment... and decide[] to make [your] way in the world while paying them as little attention as possible."

Shame is closely allied with disgust, and we attach it to things like poverty at least as often as to actual wrongdoing. Few people feel guilty for smelling bad or getting their period in gym class; plenty of people feel ashamed for those things. This makes shame inherently a more suspect tool. It’s also inherently more tied to outside opinion than guilt is. This is part of its usefulness – like I said above, shame forces you to see yourself through other people’s eyes, which can be a powerful corrective – but shame does involve a kind of outsourced or socialized conscience.

In "In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves," Bret Easton Ellis — author of "American Psycho" — complains of his victimhood, as a gay man...

... at the hands of "The Culturally Correct Gay Elite," who enforce a strict stereotype of gay men as victims, to be coddled like children and who punish any gay man who — like Ellis — "makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It."

Within the clenched world of the gay PC police there has been a tightening of the reigns. It’s as if in this historic moment for gay men we somehow still need to be babied and coddled and used as shining examples of humanity and objects of fascination—the gay baby panda—and this is a new kind of gay victimization. The fact that it is often being extolled by other gays in the Name of the Good Cause is doubly stifling.

Okay, Bret. Much as I agree with you about the problems of infantilization and political correctness, I've got to further victimize you. Not you, the gay man. You the writer.

1. A "tightening of the reigns"? Especially when writing under the title "In the Reign of...," you need to know your metaphors. There's a difference between what kings do in their domain and the leather straps a rider uses to control a horse.

2. If you're offering to be the cutting critic and what you're criticizing is putting gay men into the victim role, don't whine about your own victimhood. It's incoherent. Be cuttingly critical and take the consequences.

Factoid about Ellis: "Feminist activist Gloria Steinem was among those opposed to the release of Ellis' book ['American Psycho'] because of its portrayal of violence toward women. Steinem is also the stepmother of Christian Bale, who played Bateman in the film. This coincidence is mentioned in Ellis' mock memoir Lunar Park."

More recently, Ellis got in trouble with the "gay elite" for tweeting that "openly and famously gay Matt Bomer who is publicly married to his partner seemed a weird idea for the role of the very straight BDSM freako Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey." Ellis needs people to understand — and he's hurt that he was disinvited from the GLAAD awards —  that he "never said Gay Actors Can’t Play Straight Roles." Rather, he "thought this because of Matt’s easy openness with being gay... and with baggage that I believe would distract from the heavy sexual fantasy of that particular movie."

A key exchange in the first section of the book is Anastasia’s open questioning of Christian’s sexuality and his insulted denials—with Bomer in the role, it becomes a very META scene. Right now, in this moment, this particular casting would be a distraction—the public/private life of the actor mixed-up with playing a voracious het predator.

Interesting insight... from a gay man who wrote about the ultimate "het predator" in "American Psycho." 20 years ago, when Steinem registered her complaint, we didn't know that Ellis was gay. He sat back and let the feminists develop all our theories about the violence in the hearts of heterosexual men:

A designer serial killer, ["American Psycho"] Bateman knows from Tumi leather attache cases and wool-and-silk suits by Ermenegildo Zegna and wing tip shoes from Fratelli Rossetti....

But his true inner satisfaction comes when he has a woman in his clutches and can entertain her with a nail gun or a power drill or Mace, or can cut off her head or chop off her arms or bite off her breasts or dispatch a starving rat up her vagina.

Can we go very META on that?

"There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female..."

"... were being systematically removed from the category American novelists and assigned to the category American women novelists."

I remember going to bookstores, circa 1990, where "Fiction by Women" was a separate section from "Fiction." These were places that were pro-woman, I'm quite sure, because I remember seeing Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae" displayed with a warning label that it might not be what you were expecting and that you should bring it back for a refund if you bought it under the mistaken impression that it was good feminism and then found yourself offended.

ADDED: The biggest problem is leaving the male category plain rather than calling it "American men novelists." (Is the parallelism jarring? It should be "Female American novelists" and "Male American novelists.")

"Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre?"

Asks NPR.

If you think the answer to that question is the genre is already there, it's called science fiction, then you are missing the key word literary.

The linked article talks about a new novel — "Odds Against Tomorrow" — and what "literary" means is conveyed by statements like this by the author Nathaniel Rich:

"I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality.... which is that we're headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it's the novelist's job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?"

And:

"I don't think that the novelist necessarily has the responsibility to write about global warming or geopolitics or economic despair.... But I do feel that novelists should write about what these things do to the human heart — write about the modern condition, essentially."

Rich says "the novelist," but he means the literary novelist. This superior individual is the one who understands that it is his job to understand deeply what is happening deep inside. Those sci-fi genre writers might describe what happens to the exterior world, but the literary writer describes what that world does to us... to the heart... the human heart. What's the point of saying "human heart," by the way? Was it possible to to think we were talking about other beast's heart? Perhaps extra words seem literary.

"Odds Against Tomorrow" was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which I just mentioned 3 days ago in a discussion about self-publishing that made a distinction between sci-fi and "high-end literary fiction." Sci-fi might do well self-published as an ebook...

But high-end literary fiction? Think you can attract the readers of that kind of material without a brand like Farrar Straus & Giroux attached? It's "high-end" and "literary" because high-end literary experts have done the filtering. Without that, all you have is pretension from an earnest soul who is self-publishing. How do you get that absurdly clunky vehicle going?

Speaking of extra words seeming literary, "high-end literary fiction" was not my phrase. It came from a literary agent. A high-end literary agent. 

IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 has some great "Climate Change Fitzgerald" material, riffing on the old "Gatsby" project sentences. For example: "Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering due to Climate Change."

This is a game we can all play. Here's mine, based on my favorite of all the old "Gatsby" sentences: "He went out of the room calling 'Ewing!' and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, extremely sweaty young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scant hair scorched blond by the overbearing sun of Climate Change."

Is traditional publishing particularly bad for "high-end literary fiction"?

That's what's said by Sloan Harris, at the literary agency ICM, which is starting a self-publishing service.

For certain clients, Mr. Harris said, self-publishing “returns a degree of control to authors who have been frustrated about how their ideas for marketing and publicity fare at traditional publishers.” Both Mr. Harris and [David] Mamet said that the big publishers focused mostly on blockbuster books and fell short on other titles — by publishing too few copies, for instance, or limiting advertising to only a short period after a book was released.

Mamet, who's self-publishing his next book (a novella and 2 short stories "about war"), said:

“Basically I am doing this because I am a curmudgeon... and because publishing is like Hollywood — nobody ever does the marketing they promise.”

Traditional publishing may be bad, but that doesn't mean self-publishing will be better. Have you got some unpublished "high-end literary fiction" lying around? Do you have any idea how much of that sort of thing there is washing around on the hard drives of the world's self-appointed geniuses? What if it were all suddenly available on websites like Amazon?

You already know David Mamet. He got the NYT to write an article about the book he's self publishing next week. Here's a picture of him gesticulating (perhaps "about war"). It's got a caption telling us he's Pulitzer Prize-winning. He doesn't like the traditional publisher's marketing, and look how well he's doing his own marketing. I'm sure he'll do just fine.

And so will other people who can leverage publicity. And writers in popular genres like romance and sci-fi may succeed. But high-end literary fiction? Think you can attract the readers of that kind of material without a brand like Farrar Straus & Giroux attached? It's "high-end" and "literary" because high-end literary experts have done the filtering. Without that, all you have is pretension from an earnest soul who is self-publishing. How do you get that absurdly clunky vehicle going?

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.

"The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness."

"Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. Not for him the strenuous athleticism — which is the novelist’s daily task — of laying out his deepest griefs and shames before the world. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others."

Janet Malcolm, "The Journalist and the Murderer," page 159.

"Is it okay to make a fiction film, "inspired by actual persons in a trial" — but not even "based on a true story"?

HBO's movie with Al Pacino as Phil Spector says "it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment upon the trial or its outcome."

Of course, filmmakers — particularly one as talented as writer-director David Mamet — are entitled to artistic license. But the problem here is that the movie blends fact and fiction into a misinformation smoothie. Characters bear the actual names of participants, dialogue is lifted directly from trial transcripts, and Al Pacino nails Spector's shuffle and rasp. But when the movie jets off to the land of make believe — as it often does — there's no red flashing light to warn the audience....

In lieu of examining Spector's actual case and what it says about the American legal system, the film prefers to meditate on what HBO calls "the nature of celebrity" and how it contributed to the supposed framing of Spector. There are long stretches in which former pals, lawyers and the defendant himself muse on the larger reasons for the injustice.

"It's called envy," Pacino-as-Spector says. "Extraordinary accomplishments … transform the grateful into an audience and the envious into a mob."

I respect Mamet enough to withhold judgment until I see the film. I'll get back to you on the subject. But since a real woman was killed, and I think — in real life — we know Spector killed her, there's at least some disrespect entailed in portraying Spector as innocent and railroaded.

A work of fiction can explore an alternate history: What if Elvis didn't die, but went into hiding? What if... whatever all that crazy stuff is in the movie "JFK" happened? It could be just junk, feeding fantasies of what we wish had really happened or what would be thrilling to discover had happened, but it could be a serious work of art. I'm trying to think of how it could be great fiction. I'm projecting on to David Mamet what I want to be true of David Mamet and perhaps it's a serious contemplation of what we/Mamet project onto Phil Spector, the truth of what we want to be true.

Fictional characters with Wikipedia pages written almost like the pages of real people.

Here's an example:

Ethel Roberta Louise Mae Mertz (née Potter) is one of the four main fictional characters in the highly popular 1950s American television sitcom I Love Lucy, played by Vivian Vance....

Born around 1905 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her father, Will Potter, owned a sweet shop and soda fountain with the slogan "You can lick our cones, but you can't beat our sodas!" Ethel has had a career in music and acting, yet got her start at Albuquerque's Little Theater, singing her signature number "Shortnin' Bread". A flapper in the 1920s, she met and married Fred Mertz either in 1933 (episode #2) or 1927 (episode #42)... Their wedding anniversary date is May 3rd (episode #121). After eloping (episode #113 - "Ethel's Hometown") Ethel worked in vaudeville with Fred before settling down and purchasing their own brownstone apartment building in New York City, containing the apartment they rent to Ricky and Lucy. ...

She has a fine soprano voice, among other artistic talents, but unlike Lucy is now unambitious and content as a housewife and landlady. Somewhat lonely, she is devoted to Lucy and her family. Despite her commonsense outlook, she is often fascinated by the possibilities for excitement opened up by Lucy's mad schemes. Although continually complaining about Fred's penny-pinching and other faults, she defers to him far more than Lucy does to Ricky....

Now, this article is is flagged with an exclamation mark and "This television-related article describes a work or element of fiction in a primarily in-universe style." Going to the link, I see:

The problem with in-universe perspective

An in-universe perspective describes the narrative from the perspective of characters within the fictional universe, treating it as if it were real and ignoring real-world context and sourced analysis. The threshold of what constitutes in-universe writing is making any effort to re-create or uphold the illusion of the original fiction by omitting real-world info.

Many fan wikis and fan websites... take this approach, but it should not be used for Wikipedia articles. An in-universe perspective is inaccurate and misleading, inviting unverifiable original research. Most importantly, in-universe perspective defies community consensus as to what we do not want Wikipedia to be or become....

What an amazing effort Wikipedia is. I was charmed by the elements of what I now know is called the in-universe perspective, and now I also see how it conflicts with the grand enterprise of Wikipedia and the mechanisms of arriving at and enforcing the community consensus of what Wikipedia is or should be.

Why did I look up Ethel Mertz? 1. Meade asked me if I got his joke in the "Purchase of the Day" post.  2. I grudgingly admitted that I knew the song "Hey, Look Me Over," but I didn't think many readers would get it. 3. I played this YouTube of Lucille Ball singing the Broadway tune "Hey, Look Me Over," because I thought it would make Meade laugh because we laughed a lot 2 nights ago when I streamed "Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying To Murder Her" on my iPad and we've been referring to it ever since. 4. YouTube prompted me to play "Lucille Ball Loved her Ford Skyliner Retractable Hardtop," which included a segment with Fred and Ethel doing a song-and-dance routine. 5. I said "Weren't Fred and Ethel in vaudeville before they became landlords?"

Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon streaming video, iPads, cars with retractable hardtops, television, Broadway, vaudeville... I love America.

The fiction of nonfiction and the uninterestingness of someone else's dream.

From Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murder":

Where the novelist has to start from scratch and endure the terrible labor of constructing a world, the nonfiction writer gets his world ready-made. Although it is a world by no means as coherent as the world of fiction, and is peopled by characters by no means as lifelike as the characters in fiction, the reader accepts it without complaint; he feels compensated for the inferiority of his reading experience by what he regards as the edifying character of the genre: a work about something that is true, about events that really occurred and people who actually lived or live, is valued simply for being that, and is read in a more lenient spirit than a work of imaginative literature, from which we expect a more intense experience. The reader extends a kind of credit to the writer of nonfiction which he doesn’t extend to the writer of fiction, and for this reason the writer of nonfiction has to be punctilious about delivering the goods for which the reader has prepaid with his forbearance. Of course, there is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art. As the novelist must curb his imagination in order to keep his text grounded in the common experience of man (dreams exemplify the uncurbed imagination—thus their uninterestingness to everyone but their author), so the journalist must temper his literal-mindedness with the narrative devices of imaginative literature.

1. That's one of my favorite books, which I was just rereading last night and which I just bought on Kindle instead of typing out the last sentence.

2. One copies a larger chunk when it's not a matter of typing out each word!

3. I used the phrase "someone else's dream" in the post title because there's a song I like with that title. It's not this Faith Hill song, which I'm noticing for the first time because I'm Googling looking for the one I like, which is this. You have to get to the second page of search results to find the one I was looking for, and there's even another song with that title — by Laurie Anderson — before you get to the Youth Group one. These are 3 completely different songs, and the phrase is used to mean 3 distinctly different things:

A. She was daddy's little girl/Momma's little angel/Teacher's pet, pageant queen/She said "All my life I've been pleasin' everyone but me/Waking up in someone else's dream..."

B. You know those nights/when you're sleeping, and it's totally dark/and absolutely silent, and you don't dream/and there's only blackness/and this is the reason/it's because on those nights you've gone away/On those nights you're in someone else's dream....

C. Let's all go to the holy soul/to that soulless hole where the restless people go/To shout, oh you never got out/Don't you hate it when they just say hi?/They don't see the sadness in your eyes /Oh yeah, let's dream it down/You're having someone else's dream...

4. If other people's dreams are uninteresting (because they contain too much fiction) and if it's bad to find yourself in someone else's dream, why is "dream" such a buzzword in American culture today? In the field of politics, we're played by characters who talk about dreams. The President of the United States introduced himself to us as a man composed of someone else's dreams.

5. A stock message to schoolchildren is that they must have dreams and that their dreams not only can come true but actually will come true. That seems designed to counteract what we presume they are thinking: Nothing big will ever happen to me. We seem to assume hopelessness and rush to dispel it. But why do we think that assertions about dreams would accomplish such a feat?

"Be a Sadist."

Rule #6 on Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing a short story:

No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

This is a problem I have with fiction. Characters are created for you to care about and the author invents torments for them — for us to enjoy. Have you ever written a fictional story and experienced sick excitement as you contemplated what you were about to do that poor unsuspecting sympathetic character you created? Or do you only read fiction. If you're able to get into fiction, is it because you fully trust the author to deliver the titillation of bad things happening to this sweet leading character?

This is a line of thought that brings me back around to an opinion I've arrived at from other directions as well: Give children nonfiction to read.