Today there was a late start. However, I did get a new computer ordered (if I have not screwed it up) and to see a movie, Rental Family. Since I went too long catching up with this past Saturday. I will write about the movie later.
I also read Giant Steps: The Boo Radleys (1993) - this Pitchfork review caught my attention because I knew the band's name, even though I could not recall any of their songs. What threw me reading it was how long ago was the band's time. Did I not know of them until prison and I had access to Philadelphia radio? There was this dislocation in my mind between objective time and subjective time.
Wishing I had Ray Davies' optimism, but I guess that is the difference between me in my sixties and him in his twenties.
I read Anton Perfume’ by Kevin B (The Hemlock Journal, Nov 17, 2025) a very short, well-executed story.
Then I finished revising a story. I started on writing about Saturday.
I decided to get out this afternoon and go to BSU. I had a book to return, and I wanted to check out two art exhibits. Hey, I might as well do something different.
It was a sunnier day than Friday. Which was good since I planned on catching the bus into campus.
Sorry about the first one, but this is the inside of Bracken Library. Where in my time there were books and magazines and newspapers are now computers.
The Teacher's College; Delaware County's tallest building.
The back side of the Journalism Building:
The Arts Building:
The North Quad, where I spent most of my time from 1980 to 1982.
There we have the DOMA of Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana:
This is the Arts Building interior coming in from Riverside Avenue:
Lighter coloring than what I recall from my undergraduate days. This from inside the art museum looking down to the southern entrance.
From the second floor, looking down:
The one I got to see was abstract art. Rather good exhibit, really. But it got even more interesting when the person who was monitoring the room decided to get up out of his seat. I had the distinct feeling I was benign watched. Not unsurprising really. I did look very scruffy. I decided to talk to him, and to my surprise he was a creative writing major.
Now, the reason for my subject line: I asked him who he liked reading.
He said he was reading a Stephen King novel.
Okay. That had to be for fun. I thought he likes horror.
I asked if he had read Toni Morrison's Beloved. Drew a blank.
I asked if he had read Clive Barker. Drew a blank.
I asked if he read Joyce Carol Oates. Same response.
He said he had not had a reading class for a while. Okay.
I asked him if he knew Cormac McCarty. He knew No Country for Old Men as a movie. The Road resulted in no response as movie or novel.
He said he had a minor in theater, playwriting was something else he did.
I finally found a name he recognized: Shakespeare. I also mentioned Marlowe and got no response. Not wanting to further disillusion myself, I did not ask about Arthur Miller or Edward Albee or Sam Shepard.
I mentioned Hemingway, but from his response I got the idea he had not read him (I mean, who doesn't have an opinion on Hemingway but the illiterate?)
And when I did mention Dickens, he had read A Christmas Carol - in high school.
WTF? The kid was a senior, preparing to graduate. How the hell is he going to write if he is so ignorant of writers? I have been thinking of what Ted Gioia has been writing about cultural stagnation.
What am I going to do if I ask what they think of Faulkner, and they say who?
Not that I expect to ever hear from the fellow.
Thank you for letting me rant. I have more pictures of Ball State. These were taken as I walked from The Arts Building to The Village (that is, going southeast towards the eastern limit of the university).
From in The Village, what used to be The Pub:
and some other sights:
I could not catch a bus to shorten the return trip, and it turned out worthwhile. I would not have seen a tree growing in the street.
When I got back here, I ate dinner and worked through things here.
Things I have run across that seem to me to have enough value to pass along.
Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains (Reactor) struck me first as a possible source of amusement and ended with a serious idea about writing: compelling characters.
But all of that appears to have fallen by the wayside. Our enemies have become monsters, mindless killing machines, manifestations of Satan on Earth against whom we can enact consequence-free violence. Meanwhile, in real life, we spend every day watching genocidal violence play out on our handheld devices, underwritten by American taxes, with leaders commanding us to despise and drive out the Other—the immigrant, the disabled, the person of colour, the transgender, the Palestinian—with other Others soon to come, and don’t you doubt it.
So yes, Star Trek needs new villains; and I don’t just mean another “Gabriel Lorca”-style pastiche of MAGA politics (though even that might be too much to hope for under America’s—and Paramount’s—new censorship regime). Rather, we need Star Trek to do what Star Trek has always done best—present us with an Other in whom we can see ourselves. Recall that back before the Gorn were “monsters,” they were a rival spacefaring power who sought only to protect their own territory from colonization—a motive that Kirk found sufficiently resonant to spare their captain’s life. And one of Trek’s few “satanic” aliens who actually worked for me was the entity from “Day of the Dove,” who stood-in for the dehumanizing horrors of war and could only be defeated by finding common ground with the Klingons. A good villain is a foil for the heroes—illustrating who they are by way of contrast and forcing them to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about themselves. So the question becomes: what do we want to illustrate about the Federation, a fictional civilization that pulls an increasingly awkward double duty as both an imaginary ideal and a mirror for the liberal world order?
(Too many links lost in quoting, so do go read the original article.)
I could go on; I’m sure that you could think of any number of options and I encourage you to lay them out in the comments. But one thing is for sure: a villain who is simply Evil—“the evil that predates doing evil”—isn’t an interesting foil. Because when the villain is Evil itself, all that it tells us is that the heroes are on the side of Good; and, as history and current affairs show us, once you believe yourself to be automatically on the side of Good, you can excuse doing anything, no matter how evil. A villain in whom you can see yourself is a moral corrective for this tendency.
NCWID 2023 - Keynote Speech: Isabel Waidner has been on my Watch Later list for YouTube for some time. It is almost an hour long. Listening to it, I am embarrassed by my procrastination (not an unusual event in my life. The speech covers a lot of territory that will apply (should apply?) to binary, non-queer writers: the use of genre fiction in literature, starting out writing, negotiating the publishing process, a call for creating literary communities. If that doesn't interest, sorry. Everyone else listen to this video.
From that video, I checked out Comma Press on YouTube. I do not recognize the writers captured in their videos - I suspect them being mostly British - but the topics do not seem bound by nationality.
Far more conventional, even somewhat superficial, is this short documentary on Marcel Proust:
Proust is not someone I thought I would ever read, and if I read that I would like. Wrong. After reading the first two novels of The Remembrance of Lost Time, I worry that will never get back to reading the remaining books. Another thing that I gained from going to prison.
This video on the mistakes made in short stories is staying on my YouTube Watch Later list. I want to study it.
sch 10/19
Sarah Moss's The Stinging Fly Annual Lecture Losing the Plotis fascinating to me:
There
are, I think, ways in which the novelist remains indentured to literary
tradition. Form is form, there is nothing beyond or without it, and
also I am a firm believer in constraint as the enabler of art. If you’re
going to be a novelist, you write something that is recognisably a
novel and that means accepting at least some and probably most of the
rules of novels, which include some form of plot and setting because
there is nothing without time and space, and some form of narrative
because that’s how it is, that’s why readers and writers turn up.
You
can do a yellow polka dot sky if you think it’s worth the effort, and
have disappearing dragons roosting on chimneys. You can play with
whatever magic occurs to you, and I recognise the political and artistic
power of fantasy for those whose real histories are dark. Within the
world of the novel, magic, surrealism and the supernatural still have to
be plausible and make sense on their own terms.
I
try not to be snobbish and old-fashioned about fantasy and sci-fi, but I
find the forms of reality in my own experience quite rich and strange
enough for my purposes and anyway I’m interested in the mundane, in the
days in which we live, while also seeing that that ‘we’ is a dangerous
little word. We white people, we middle-aged women, we Europeans, we
mothers; I hope that what I mean is we on this earth at this time, in
this place we are destroying under our feet through negligence, weakness
but mostly our own deliberate fault; plagued by our particular wars and
plagues which are similar to but different from all the other
interesting times and, I truly believe, terminal. This thought makes me
want to divert towards the purpose or justification for making art at
the end of the world but I resist.
And so I
remain approximately faithful to literary realism, at least, still in
love with it, though as with most lifelong loves not blind to the flaws
and weaknesses. Though I can now dissect the history and ideology
underlying the tradition in which I write, I continue, more or less,
give or take the odd talking raven, to write in that tradition, or at
least from it and maybe to it. My novels are all founded in research,
the kind of research for which you need a university library and it
helps to have a PhD. I like to know exactly what happened to whom in
real life before I start inventing what might have happened to someone
imaginary had they been there and then. I care about the textures of
daily life, the movements of hands and the feel of clothes. Days are
where we live, and bodies are where we live; it seems increasingly odd
to me that anyone has ever been able to imagine the mind as distinct
from the body partly because as anyone who has survived an eating
disorder or a diet or a famine knows, the mind runs on the fruit of the
vine and work of human hands. Without food, no thought; with less food,
less thought. Art as much as sport depends on dinner.
***
You
cannot write a novel in which shit just happens for no reason. I was
going to say you can if you like, there’s no law against it, but it is
my long experience as writer and teacher of writing that in fact you
can’t. Writing creates plot, the linear nature of clauses and sentences
and paragraphs concocts meaning, cause and effect, almost as a
consequence of grammar. The plot may be slight and lack suspense—as the
years pass I am less interested in the artifice of events in fiction—but
it will make itself.
Plots are built around conflict, but there are only a few conflicts to choose from. There is some debate about how many conflicts exist. Some traditions argue for three; others identify four or more. Here’s a list of six:
Human vs. human
Human vs. nature
Human vs. society
Human vs. self
Human vs. machine
Human vs. supernatural
And:
Tips for Devising a Compelling Plot
Goals and motives. Build a plot around the protagonist’s goals. What does the hero want? What does the antagonist want? What do the other characters want? Why do the characters want these things? Goals and motives are the driving forces behind the characters’ actions and decisions.
Stakes. Tensions rise and stakes get higher as the plot unfolds. What will the characters gain if they succeed? What will they lose if they fail?
Momentum. Make sure every scene and chapter move the plot forward in a meaningful way. If a scene can be cut without changing the story, then that scene is unnecessary.
Plot versus character. Avoid plots that overshadow the characters, and avoid characters who do little more than guide readers through the plot. A good balance of compelling characters and a gripping plot results in the best possible story.
Originality. Don’t worry about being original. Focus on developing fresh ideas for your story. Use the other elements—characters, setting, and theme—to enrich your plot and make it feel innovative.
Resolution. When you finish your draft, make a list of the subplots. Are all subplots and the central plot resolved in a satisfactory way? If you’re planning to write a sequel, did you close the main plot but leave a story thread open?
Plotting and planning. Making a list of your plot points gives you a good overview of your story, which you can quickly review to check for flow, pacing, conflict, and tension.
Page-turners. Not all stories are page-turners, but if your goal is to keep readers glued to the story, plan plot points that intrigue and entice them.
A newspaper report about a missing girl, the memory of a midwinter emergency … Susan Choi, Andrew Miller, David Szalay and others on what inspired their shortlisted books
I meant to get back to chronicling the past two days earlier. Then my neck started hurting and I decided I needed a rest. I did not expect that rest to last until around 7:30. Then I needed to get through the email, and watched the end of Hard Boiled on Tubi, and then dinner.
No church today, but no work accomplished, either. I did get up Lahody's Meats for some supplies and to the convenience store for Coke Zero.
It was a good, sunny day.
So, let us talk about Friday's group session. There was the usual chat session, the weekly check-in, and the group leader went back to reading from his computer screen. I think he called it a workbook.
From my notes.
Components of fantasies
Deviant
- Anything that is deviant
(I had to ask what is deviant. The last decade, or so, of my being single, there were women who liked to be tied up and some who liked to be spanked; there was one who wanted to be choked, but that was too much for me. All that seemed to be deviant to me. Then, too, I think Freud said all sex was perverse - or something like that. It was also pretty harmless. Then it got to be me asking how I got dragged into all these proceedings. The answer: I was easy.)
- Deviant is anything illegal
(Without going wild and citing the Indiana Code in all its profuseness, illegality requires a lack of consent. Well, that has never appeared in my history. Certainly not an interest of mine - too much work and the result never seemed likely to be an interesting experience. Maybe that is my problem - more interested in the experience rather than the acquisition. I would rather drive a Bugatti than own it.)
- Must change that into appropriate fantasies.
- inappropriate partners
(I don't think this was expanded upon. Possibly, it was assumed to understood by those with contact crimes to have been the minors they solicited. To me, it is pretty much means staying away from anyone with obvious psychiatric issues, women from Madison County, women without any conversation skills, and those who cannot name all four members of The Beatles. There was one point when the discussion was about fooling around outside of marriage, or a relationship. Well, that would exclude and implicate much of humanity. If followed, it would end many plots of literature; starting with The Iliad.)
- Risky thoughts
(No note on any expansion on this, and none from my memory. However, I think it was here I started thinking the program has put the cart before the horse - which I will write more about below. It also arouses a few thoughts I have had about the process I have gone through and the people I have met during it. There seems to be an inherent fear of ideas. That ideas always lead to actions. Which has left me feeling that others are projecting their ideas and their own desires upon me: the arresting officers from ICE, the United States Attorney, my public defender, prison guards, my PO, and this counseling program. I have had the feeling they think any glimpse of flesh, even a nude statute, would result in me turning into a werewolf and, in the case of the statute, humping aid statute. I am left feeling myself surrounded by men who are far more perverse than I ever was. Then there is the sensation of imposing Victorian morals on us without any faith in those morals. There was a conversation about ethics, wherein the group leader declared ethics as a boring subject. Yet, is it not ethics that this program is trying to instill?)
- how to get away and offend again
(Not something I have seen in anyone in the group. They all look thoroughly chastened by their experiences. I knew of a fellow in prison who talked of moving to Cambodia. That fellow I thought of a psychotic. I checked up on him a few months ago. He is in Illinois. More talk than action, I hope.)
- wondering if person in deviant fantasy would like it
(Also, not something I have seen in anyone from the group. This also ties in what I write more about below, in a general overview.)
- getting closer to that person (inappropriate people)
(This also ties in what I write more about below, in a general overview.)
- talking to inappropriate person about your fantasy
(And here I had to open my mouth again. What got me was the idea of talking to a person who would not be amenable - so to speak - to such ideas. I suggested that was a good way to get one's self shot or slapped, or both. This is something beyond my imagination. It came to me while writing this that my reaction is that I am thinking of adults. One's imagination is limited by one's experience. Or education. It also reminded me of a story told me by mother's sister, Mary Ellen Finholt, who slapped some guy silly when he got fresh with her while working at the GM lab during World War Two. Something similar happened to my mother with one of the boarders; same kind of result. They were both about 5'4”. Not a good idea to anger a Scots/Irish woman.)
- staring at person
(And again, I had to say that staring is always a good way to start a fight.)
- setting up an offense
(Yeah, if that needed preaching, then the promoters of this program have already failed in their mission.)
That was the end, and these are my overarching critiques.
The starting point ought to be the difference between reality and fantasy.
One might have ideas, but recognizing what is reality stifles actions rooted in fantasy.
Reality never matches fantasy.
If you have not learned those two lessons, I doubt any success in dealing with fantasies, appropriate or not.
And there I will end for today. I will catch up with Saturday's report tomorrow. I have photos for that, too.
History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination — that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”
Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.
John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw. It was a comparison Updike was to remember – for all his bland urbanity, on display from start to finish in this mighty volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and did not take slights lightly.
As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic – the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future – his abiding subject was the quotidian life of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of the second world war and the coming of a new technological age in the closing years of the 20th century.
***
Are his books read now? Towards the end he made a glum self-assessment: “I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces.” Perhaps so; but he wrote such prose as to make the envious seraphim sigh.
Overall, the Maginot Line’s contribution to the defence of France was mixed, Passmore argues. It blocked the easiest routes to Paris, Alsace, and Nice and was not the disproportionate burden on spending that it is often thought of as being. It was less susceptible to technological obsolescence than other forms of weaponry, though its construction coincided with a revived emphasis on mobility in battle. But most importantly, the book refutes the portrayal of the Maginot Line as a symbol of a defeatist French mentality that, having been originally propagated by supporters of Charles de Gaulle, has been echoed in numerous studies since 1945.
The club’s main focus was a recurring banquet that featured approximately 15 dishes—delicacies like roasted beaver tail (“It’s filled with meat,” says Lalonde, “but you have to scrape away the outer scale”), and moose muffle stew, a bizarre-sounding dish that includes the animal’s upper lip and nostrils, but is said to be both rich and nutritious. Typically, the men finished off their meal with cups of hippocras, a type of warm spiced wine, while the evening’s entertainment included everything from speeches and dancing to music and plays.
I thought it was time to put together just a Muncie post; these are items culled from the past few days.
MuncieArts - the center of Muncie's artist life. I have been working too much to track their work. That its interests are in the performing arts and public art has let me rationalize my inattention. However, one reason for coming to Muncie was PlySpace. PlySpace — MuncieArts was doing theater, but its website says it is no longer taking applications. I think I need to follow up on that. Also, I better get working on my novel so that I can get to any plays that might support my applying for a place at PlySpace. There also seems to be a dormant film festival: That One Film Festival — MuncieArts. Which leaves me thinking that MuncieArts is more for artists like painters, etc.; News and Events — MuncieArts.
All that led me to poke my nose around Ball State:
Archer was one of five people arrested during the Feb. 28 Board of Trustees meeting, when members of the University Police Department (UPD) removed a group of protesters after they spoke about issues ranging from Ball State’s alleged ties to donors connected to the war in Gaza to concerns about redlining, housing inequity and transparency from trustees about the background of Vice Chair Brian Gallagher.
Cannon refers to Judge Cannon; the defense moved for an acquittal for lack of evidence; and the judge granted the motion.
“Evidence of mere annoyance is not sufficient,” Cannon said, stating that there was no discomfort experienced by any members of the board due to Archer’s actions from that day.
Judge Cannon then said he appreciated Archer’s dedication to the cause, but there are “a hell of a lot better ways to do that,” noting that Archer could have volunteered at soup kitchens or made efforts to help the homeless instead.
Ultimately, Cannon said Archer did “a stupid thing,” but his speech was protected.
I had a medical appointment on Friday morning. An ultrasound to see if I might expect an aneurysm.
Needing caffeine, I made my way down to the convenience store - the same trek I had made the night before. This is what the trip looked like.
Yes, it was another grand gray morning.
In an hour later, I caught the bus from the same spot and had a time to wait for the westbound bus. I got stamps at the post office.
What used to be an area that included a grocery store is now a colony of healthcare facilities.
Which included my destination:
This sign is close by the bus stop, and it tickled my fancy.
The only color in the area: the awning over the skate park:
Afterward, I had time before The Dumpling House opened. I decided to take some pictures of the major feature of Indiana, of this area in Muncie.
Then I decided to see if our gray sky looked any better with filters applied.
Is it a wonder that the worst days of my depression were from this time of the year until around March? I am surprised suicides do not start rising. Since this is what we live with during the holidays, it shocks that rare are the family massacres over turkey and cranberry sauce.
This one does offer more hope, if that does say all that much.
I walked over to Payless to do a little shopping, but mostly to kill time. The view from that parking lot looking north to those banners of American culture: Arby's, Taco Bell, KFC.
Then it was time for lunch at The Dumpling House:
I will continue after lunch with my report of Friday's group session. My ride to church was sick, and I was left home. I need Coke Zero, so taking a walk.
