Diary

It looks as if winter is starting to wind down. After several warm winters in a row, this was somewhat of a shock. This is the first year that Lake Champlain has frozen over since 2019, and the ice fishermen are out. I haven't had much trouble, since my road is well-maintained and I have a good snow blower. The oil delivery truck got stuck – it didn't have snow tires – and I helped the driver free it. He was very appreciative and said that we should get together for a beer when it warms up. The only disadvantage is that Buderus boilers don't always follow the thermostat exactly and the house can be colder than you would like. In Middlebury it didn't matter as much because of the wood stove. So I started to wear hats around the house for the first time in several years. Exercise has been somewhat more difficult, because of the snow. I have been hiking between snow storms, but that isn't enough. I've done some longer jogs in the basement, and today I drove downtown and walked around on the sidewalks.

Entertainment is also problematic, since I don't like TV programs, and the news quality is quite bad now. It doesn't help that I hardly ever enjoy new films. On top of this, I don't care in the slightest about professional, college or high school sports. I also ignore the Olympics and film awards. There is very little programming that appeals to me other than some NPR programming during the day. Also, PBS NewsHour no longer broadcasts on weekends due to funding cuts, and I had thought that the weekend broadcasts were better than weekday broadcasts. I now watch BBC News on weekends, but that is sort of generic. I am working my way through the Criterion Channel, but the pickings are slim. I just rewatched Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) and still find it amazing. I highly recommend it. 

I'm trying not to burden you with Trump talk and still think that he's on the way out. Still, it is an incredible state of affairs to have a president routinely violate the constitution and break other laws with impunity. It is a little difficult to know exactly what John Roberts thinks, but even though he seems to have come out as a right-wing Republican, he may intentionally be allowing Trump to have enough rope to hang himself. Trump is so incompetent that it's pretty much a sure bet. This way, the supreme court may avoid the appearance of partisanship by cracking down on Trump too early, and, over time, because of his stupidity, Trump is actually making a stronger case against himself. Furthermore, because Trump's popularity is declining, his supporters will have time to adjust to the collapse of MAGA. It is also likely that, because of Trump's negative impact on the economy, Charles Koch and the tech bros may soon rein him in. Small business owners already hate him.

I've become a little tired of writing about the arts, and, for a change of pace, I'm about to start on a new book on geology.

Trump Flunked Out of Autocracy University

In a newly-released document, which is thought to have originated in Russia on the dark web, it is claimed that Donald Trump took secret online classes on autocracy and voter suppression. Autocracy University is thought to be led by Vladimir Putin and has a history going back several decades. Early graduates were Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Russian graduates include Dmitry Medvedev and Nikolai Patrushev. More recently, Steve Bannon graduated at the top of his class. Current students include Nick Fuentes and J.D. Vance, who take evening classes. Stephen Miller applied several times but was rejected because of his Jewish heritage. He was told that if he brushed up on his Hitler imitations and publicly renounced Judaism, he would be reconsidered. Benjamin Netanyahu was also rejected but obtained clandestine course materials through the Mossad. Nicolas Maduro was previously enrolled but flunked out while Hugo Chávez was still alive. Although Jeffrey Epstein never enrolled, he was on friendly terms with some of the graduates and occasionally advised them on money-laundering techniques. There is no evidence that Xi Jinping has had any involvement with Autocracy University, though some have reported that he may be on the board of trustees. 

Ordinarily, Autocracy University is tuition-free. This is because autocrats as a group have sufficient funds to keep it in operation and consider it to be an investment in their future. Their ideal student is an angry, poor, white, non-Jewish male from the lower or lower-middle classes. Exceptions are made for Asians and Africans who are otherwise qualified. Donald Trump was one of the earliest applicants, and he was initially rejected because he didn't fit their student profile. However, when he began to take an interest in politics, the university made an exception for several reasons. First, he did not qualify for tuition-free enrollment, and they charged him one billion dollars. Second, they saw immediately that he could easily be manipulated by flattery. And third, recognizing that, because he was white and rich, Americans would never recognize him as a Russian mole. To make matters even better, they determined that, because of his narcissism, he himself would never realize that he was a Russian mole.

It is unclear exactly when Trump began coursework at Autocracy University. By 2016 he exhibited some authoritarian behavior during his first presidential campaign, and he may have taken classes before then. Although, by all indications, Trump never completed his coursework satisfactorily and was mildly reprimanded several times, he remained an enrolled student primarily because the trustees came to see him more as a strategic asset than as a competent student. Specifically, Putin wanted a compliant American president to assist him with his military objectives in Ukraine. Trump was cooperative with Putin during his first term, but the Russo-Ukrainian War didn't begin until 2022, when he was out of office. In his second term, beginning in 2025, Trump was supposed to immediately pressure Volodymyr Zelenskyy to surrender to Russia. That failed to work. Furthermore, when Trump's tariffs disrupted international trade, Xi Jinping is thought to have criticized Trump to the oligarchs. Above all, Trump had taken a course in minority suppression, which he never completed. There is an entire chapter in that course on never allowing the public to see evidence of the punishment or assassination of non-minority people in their countries. According to the leaked document, after the January 24, 2026 shooting of Alex Pretti and the following news coverage, the board of trustees held an emergency meeting and expelled Donald Trump. He will not receive a diploma. They also discussed whether Nick Fuentes or J.D. Vance should be promoted as Trump's successors and grant them early degrees.

Note that this information will not appear in the American news media because of its ongoing suppression by the Trump administration.

Éric Rohmer: A Biography V

I did finish the book, though it does not quite live up to my biographical ideals. There is a great deal of information provided about Rohmer, but nearly all of it is in the strict context of filmography. He made a large number of films, and I've only seen a fraction of them. Toward the end of his life he worked on The Lady and the Duke, a historical drama set during the French Revolution. Unlike most of his films, it had a significant budget and a large crew, and, while it received positive reviews, it seems forgotten today. Of the films that I've seen recently, I'll just mention my favorites. I'd say that A Summer's Tale is my favorite, because it draws excellent performances from the actors, and the subject matter is one that Rohmer obsessed over for his entire career: the relationship between the sexes (before LGTBQ came along). For me, Rohmer is one of the few filmmakers who portrays women whom I find interesting. This is displayed in their perceptiveness and complexity, and is something that you don't generally see in films, particularly in American films: for that matter, those characteristics often seems nonexistent in American women. My second favorite is probably Claire's Knee, which, besides the beautiful scenery, includes interesting young and older women and good dialogue. The Jerome character and Claire's boyfriend, Gilles, seem self-centered to me, as do many of Rohmer's male characters. I guess My Night at Maud's is my third favorite. It suffers from being in black-and-white, and I don't really identify with the male protagonist, Jean-Louis, who is a devout Catholic. Maud is really the only interesting character, though she doesn't get much screen time. Jean-Louis ends up marrying Françoise, a Catholic who had been having an affair with a married man. There is an interesting twist at the end if you watch carefully. Five years later, Jean-Louis and Françoise go to the beach with their young son and run into Maud. Apparently Françoise and Maud know each other and are not on particularly good terms. After briefly talking to Maud and Françoise separately, Jean-Louis realizes that Françoise had been having an affair with Maud's husband just before she met him. Another film that I like, perhaps not as much, is A Tale of Autumn. This features Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, two solid Rohmer long-timers. It is a little unnerving because the subject is middle-aged dating, an unsettling subject for me, but it has a happy ending. It also features a new young actress, Alexia Portal, who is rather strong-willed and brushes off her philosophy professor, who is pursuing her. In the other Rohmer films that I've seen, there were things that I disliked that were not offset by other features. In many of his films, Rohmer recorded the background sounds himself, and there are often very loud roosters in the morning. There can also be very loud insects on summer days.

The major deficiency of this book is that Rohmer's private life is practically invisible. You don't really find out about how well he got along with his wife and children or whether he maintained a good rapport with his brother. In a practical sense, he seems to have been a workaholic who spent very little time at home. This may simply be a manifestation of Rohmer's personality, but it could also be an intentional effort by Rohmer to prevent his family from knowing about his work life. Over the years, he became extremely close to Marie Rivière and Françoise Etchegaray, and Françoise never met his family until 2009, when he had a stroke. While Rohmer may not have been involved in any extramarital affairs, I think that the absence of information about his family life disqualifies the book from being categorized as a biography. It might also have been interesting to know more about his brother, René Schérer, who wrote about Charles Fourier, the utopian theorist who had been popular with George Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist friend.  

Éric Rohmer: A Biography IV

Rohmer's filmmaking career was extremely long, with his first major film releasing in 1967 and his last in 2007. It is confusing to follow his development, but, to some extent, he followed a pattern in which his early theme in the late 1960's was relationships between men and women, his middle theme in the late 1970's was more complex dramas set in Napoleonic and medieval times, and in the 1980's he returned to his 1960's themes. Part of the confusion has to do with the fact that none of his films were made in an industrial environment like Hollywood, and Rohmer's development as a filmmaker at his own pace reflects a transition from amateurism to professionalism without much external assistance. During most of his career, his films were made under extremely spartan conditions that would not be tolerated by most actors or cinematographers. He did all of the writing and casting himself and was generally incapable of raising the funds necessary for larger productions. I think that this was largely related to his introverted personality and penny-pinching habits. He seemed to prefer to do everything on a modest scale. Toward the end of his career, he had name recognition and a large assortment of supporters who had worked with him over the years, and, to some extent, his late films may be construed as better-made representations of his earlier films, though, because he was much older then, there are more middle-aged characters.

Far into the book, the authors are beginning to make more interesting comments about Rohmer. In the making of The Green Ray (1986), Rohmer hired Françoise Etchegaray as a supervisor. Under a tenuous agreement, his frugal tendencies precipitated a reaction:

These temporary conditions did not fail to create certain tensions. Especially when Rohmer, at the end of a lunch with volunteers playing secondary roles, quibbled about paying for their meals and ended up leaving the restaurant after furiously throwing the bill on the table. The next day, Françoise threatened to abandon everything if he persisted in acting like an ill-tempered miser.

She was the first to dare stand up to him, and that did not necessarily displease him. She was the first, especially since Barbet Schroeder with a willingness more complete than Marie Bouteloup's, to go to great lengths to realize the great Rohmerian dream: working from day to day, with the means at hand, without worrying about the constraints of traditional production (assistant, scriptwriter, work schedule) and freely adapting to circumstances.

There is also discussion as to whether Rohmer was politically incorrect. On the surface, he appears to have been: minorities are not featured in his films, women may seem to behave subserviently, and all of the characters belong to the bourgeoisie. The only thing that he seemed to have going for him was an interest in environmentalism. From my perspective, he had a right to explore in his films life as it was while he was growing up. As someone who grew up far from Paris and was born in 1920, I think that he is allowed to have some 19th century characteristics. For the most part he was apolitical, and his brother, René, described him as "a ferociously independent anarchist." To this I would add that, although some of the men in his films might be described as male chauvinist pigs, the women stand up to them quite well. Rohmer's women are often more thoughtful, observant and articulate than the men, who sometimes seem a little out of touch with reality, especially in his early films. I particularly like A Summer's Tale (1996) in which three young women and one young man have encounters in which they are all on equal footing. If you watch many Rohmer films, it becomes obvious that he absolutely adored women, and they are the centerpieces of his films. He is never attempting to transform them into dutiful housewives.

I am nearing the end of the book and will make one more post.

Diary

I seem to have cut back on my "Diary" posts recently and decided that I should write another one. At times I thought that I may have been making too many of them, and now perhaps not enough. These posts add a dimension to the blog, which may otherwise become a bit monotonous and overbearing, with serious (or pretentious) topics. It is probably healthy to indicate that an actual human being is writing this blog. I attempt to rethink the blog periodically in order to decide whether or not I should change anything. For most of its life it has had very few readers, and I know a few of them. Because I have been posting on it regularly for twelve years, and because of the way that search algorithms work, the number of pageviews started to increase steadily during the pandemic, and it went from about 200 pageviews per month in 2019 to about 25,000 per month today. I currently don't need any additional income, but it would be possible to put advertising on the blog if I started to go broke. However, I would hate to force people to watch those stupid LiMu Emu & Doug advertisements just to read the blog, and that isn't under consideration at the moment.

This is the coldest winter here in several years and resembles 2014. That can make life a little more difficult for some, but I can handle it – because I'm a Vermonter! Some things are actually easier in these conditions. The snow is fluffy and easy to remove, and, without thawing and freezing, there is no ice on the roads or my driveway. These conditions also draw a large flock of goldfinches to the feeder. The squirrels have a dedicated snow trail from the woods. One slight disadvantage is that, since I don't drive as much during the winter, the car's battery doesn't get charged up as much. Also, because the mailbox is a quarter-mile from the house, if the only driving I do is to the mailbox, it can be hard to restart the engine because the battery hasn't had a chance to recharge. When the temperature is below zero, your cold cranking amps are very low. But this isn't a serious problem, since I have a good battery charger and can restart the engine almost instantly. The battery is now eight years old but works fine. Other than this, the only problems are dry skin and insufficient exercise. The skin part is easy to handle with moisturizing cream. For exercise, I did go on a regular hike once in January, between snow storms. The rest of the time I just do jumping jacks and pushups inside. Also, because I now have a large basement, I'm doing indoor jogging. I don't actually like jogging, but it's an easy way to get your heartrate up. I think that half a mile would be about twenty-five laps, but so far the most I've tried is ten laps (it gets pretty boring). There is still the growing problem of low-quality television and news – including PBS – but that is a year-round problem.  

For entertainment, I am continuing my attendance of performances in Middlebury. Last winter I saw Steven Osborne, who is an extremely talented pianist. This year, because my grandson is a budding pianist who already has paid performances, I took the whole family to the Middlebury Inn for dinner, and then we all went to see Nahre Sol at the college. She is amazing! I had often wondered what would happen to classical music – would it die out? I now think that it could be having a resurgence, albeit with new compositions. There has always been a subculture of classical musicians, but you hardly ever hear about it these days. Although I have no musical training, I occasionally go to Musical Assumptions to remind myself that there are still civilized people in the world. The barbarians are at the gate, but I think that civilization will survive.

I will continue with Éric Rohmer on my next post.