Writers: Anti-Novels? Anarchist Plots?

Having read Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante's Have You Considered an Anarchist Approach to Plot?, and Dan Leach's Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully) (both published on Literary Hub) one after another, I found myself wondering if they are not actually related.

Dan Leach writes about his own experience embarking onto an anti-novel:

And since the speaker/situation foothold was the only foothold I ever needed to get started on the short stuff, I went to work on the novel as if it was the short stuff. Which is to say, I cracked open a new Word doc and a began to pepper its white space with scenes and fragments and voicy little riffs, all of which felt faithful to Junah’s intelligence and connected to Junah’s situation, but none of which necessarily corresponded to novelistic mechanisms such as the “structured” plot, the “measured” tone, and the “well-developed” character.

Okay, that sounds tempting to me - some doubts about doing the measured tone and the well-developed character abide in my mind. Plus, I decided long ago, while still in Fort Dix, that publishing was unlikely, I was too old to actually hone a style and writerly talents, that I might as well throw caution to the wind and write what I want to read.

Again, Mr. Leach, describes something that attracts me because it does describe the world as I experience - with and after my depression - it.

I was writing a hundred-page shoebox likely to resonate with readers on the basis of voice, fragment, and flow. What I wrote, in the end, was an anti-novel. A mixtape. A collage. A text which mimics its conceit: the book the reader holds is the time capsule Junah culls out of his lived life; the shards on the page, the shards of his memory.

He also reminds me what I need to do, to get back to, now I am using now to return to my writing:

And what I discovered (and it pains me to present this as an epiphany, since in 2020 I was three books and fifteen years into my career) is that a pandemic is not an excuse to write the book you can sell—it’s an excuse to write the book you can love.

I know of only one of the novels in Five Experimental Anti-Novels That Break the Form (Beautifully), Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  They should be read, of course, but I want to add up the parts that make think this idea is sound, and that this is 

 ... isn’t just a rebellion against novelistic dead weight—it’s a rebellion against any printed syllable that isn’t exploding with the concurrent mysteries of sound and sense.... Nelson’s anti-novel is like a mixtape without a single bad or boring song. Which is to say, each of the 240 fragments that make up Bluets sings like a standalone poem (yet also miraculously coheres into a book-length meditation on love and suffering)... which tells its story via a year’s worth of customer comment cards, all submitted by an unnamed narrator who treats the fast-food space as a conduit for existential riffing.... this book has sentences (or lines?) so sonically resonant and philosophically interesting that you will linger on a page for half an hour. This book even has a chapter (now infamous) in which the speaker achieves sexual intimacy with a Frosty..... Delivered in dense (but lush) fragments that braid themselves against disparate registers (imagine reading a mini-essay stuck between a folk tale and a catalogue)... This includes the epistolary intrusions of May Kasahara, the labyrinthine computer files of Cinnamon Akasaka, and the deeply discursive frame stories of Lieutenant Mamiya (which could easily exist as a self-standing novella); but it also includes pseudo-newspaper articles, excerpts from whatever history book Toru happens to be reading, and those infamous and enigmatic third-person vignettes towards the end which no scholar has ever adequately explained

Okay, the Frosty sounds demented as well as distasteful, and what really sticks is the mixtape analogy. 

Think about this: Bingo, Bango, Boingo a book by Alan Michael Parker (Bookshop.org US/Necessary Fiction) wherein

Award-winning author Alan Michael Parker displays his love for playful narrative and breaking all the rules in Bingo Bango Boingo, a collection of flash fiction and stories told through Bingo cards

Flip the page. Choose your game. Is it "Community Garden Bingo"? "High School Reunion Bingo"? "Don't Hate Your Daddy Bingo"? Or are you finally ready for "Change Your Life Bingo"?

Featuring 40 Bingo cards, interspersed with flash fiction and an opportunity to try the Bingo game yourself, this is a wholly original collection. Delightful, unexpected, and tongue in cheek--they're stories, they're Bingo cards, they're wild, you'll like them.

Taking a look now at Have You Considered an Anarchist Approach to Plot?, its thesis is:

All too often, plot is taught as architecture, as per Freitig’s Triangle: rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. But we suggest that plot might better be understood as an emotional strategy: a controlled burn of surprise, contradiction, revelation. And—we might add–especially, connection.

 Architecture and plotting makes me think of a criticism/comment about Thomas Hardy's plots being architectural. Hardy would never do what Davison and LaPlante suggest. 

First, what do we mean when we say “throw bombs”? We mean inserting any unanticipated event that is completely disconnected (on the surface, anyway) from what came before it.

There are two kinds of bombs: external and internal.

First, external: a surprising (even shocking) event beyond the control of the characters. An earthquake, tornado or some other act of God. Or a stranger or other unidentified character doing something out of the blue that completely disrupts the story.

***

Internal bombs are when an unexpected chain of events is put into motion—but instead of being random and uncontrolled, it can be directly (if subtly) caused by your character(s). In other words, due to who they are, they bring it on themselves.

Here you must be careful not to make it either obvious, or—at the other end of the scale—outrageously unbelievable. It can seem out of character (see nonconforming oddities in our first essay in this series) but it should also be attributable to a herethero unknown (unconscious, hidden) aspect of your character.

What both types of bombs have in common: they should leave you, the writer, with a problem: no idea what will happen next. If you turn your back on cliched or familiar reactions, this can be difficult. If traditional plotting devices are off bounds, you must consider how the bomb changes the characters, the theme, and the situation of the story in surprising yet convincing ways. (Thanks, EM Forster for that nugget of wisdom.). 

So, why cannot bombs be thrown in an anarchic way?

Davison and LaPlante write about using a character's emotions to drive a story:

The other plotting strategy we’d like to explore is when a story is driven, not by events, but by the emotional movement of a character. In our forthcoming book from W.W Norton, The Lab: Experiments Writing Across Genre, we use the example of Lydia Peelle’s story, “Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing.”

You can chart the emotional progression of the story’s first-person protagonist as she navigates the loneliness and heartbreak of a divorce. But this is no cliched break-up story. Instead, you can see how the narrator goes through alternating moments of connection and disconnection as she struggles to heal emotionally. The tension between these coming-togethers and alienations from self and others is palpable, although nothing of real significance happens. And you’re often surprised by the things that connect versus the things that emotionally separate this narrator from other people, and the world. 

I can imagine doing this with fragments - the see-sawing of emotions, the triggers for those emotions, seem to be very conducive to fragmentary telling. Arias comes to mind.

But at the same time, I am wondering if what is being proposed above is all that new. Should I admit here being entranced by John Dos Passos? And by Ross Lockridge Jr? Dos Passos' USA Trilogy (you may also want to read The Modernist Mandate of Montage: John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., Soviet Film Theory, and the Novel) and Lockridge's Raintree County share some similar techniques that are fragmentary; more so with Dos Passos. (Regarding Dos Passos, I also checked out Alice BÉJA's Artfulness and Artlessness, the Literary and Political Uses of Impersonality in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy.)

Then are ideas that Milan Kundera put into his Art of the Novel - that the novel is expansive enough to include an essay, a short story. What I got all those years ago from Kundera was the limit was our imagination and the story needing told.

How does the necessary complexity get into Kundera’s fiction? The process is illuminated in The Art of the Novel by two dialogues which draw on detailed illustrations from his novels and which valuably help one to understand how they work. Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.

Notes on The Art of the Novel (Welcome to ME)

 I am remembering advice I gave to myself about 10, 12, years ago, best exemplified by the following:

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Although not a novel, after reading the review Autocorrect by Etgar Keret review – endlessly inventive short stories (The Guardian), I thought it worth putting in here.

In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he’s interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: “The world is about to end and I’m eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …” Or another: “The aliens’ spaceship arrived every Thursday.” In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: “The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said ‘Make A Wish’ in gold letters.”

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Me at 53 (Part Two): 3/6/2013–3/10/2013.

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from Me at 53 (Part One): 3/6/2013–3/10/2013. sch 7/13/2025] 

I should be depressed that the mail lost 10 pages of my novel. I make $5.25 a month and typewriter cartridges cost $4.00 each. I may never get the thing rewritten! I shrug my shoulders and go on.

My oldest sister wrote me that our father thinks we hate him. I do not. I think I lost my anger about my parents' divorce back in March 1986 when Dad broke down crying at the news of my mother's death. I have a great deal of sympathy for both my father and mother. At 53, I see them having struggled against their lives as best they could. They both had a great deal of pain imposed on them by others and by themselves, and I have no need to increase their pain. Besides, any resentments on my part have been balanced by the embarrassment of my felony conviction.

I seriously screwed up everything. I accomplished everything with my suicide, except my own personal extinction. I have left problems back home and then created more. I solved nothing.

My felony conviction has done two things for me. I have nothing more to run from. The ex-wife complained of my running out whenever there was an emotional crisis. I have nowhere to run and nothing to run away from. I embarrassed myself before the whole world in such a profound manner, I only surprise myself by having withdrawn from the solution of suicide.

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[7/13/2025: Continued in Me at 53 (Part Three): 3/6/2013–3/10/2013. sch]

Happy Bastille Day and Good Night! Indiana's Status With CNBC

i started the day writing - actually, rewriting. Then I sent two pieces off to contests, 

Page One Prize - I sent off the first page of "Love Stinks" - with some rewrites that came to me in the middle of the night when I woke up with indigestion, again.

Writers, check out Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio.

The Cincinnati Review's Robert and Adele Schiff Awards got my rewrite of "No Ordinary Word".

More reading lists courtesy of Google News: Books for summer reading - Overview. I get done with this post, and I'm going to try Gore Vidal before I completely fall out.

These states are America’s worst for quality of life in 2025 (CNBC) - and guess what state is on the list?

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines affordable child care as costing no more than 7% of a household’s income. In Indiana, it costs twice that for a two-parent household. For a single parent, it can cost a stunning 46%.

***

2025 Quality of Life Score: 73 out of 265 Points (Top States Grade: F)

Strength: Crime Rate

Weaknesses: Child Care, Reproductive Rights, Inclusiveness, Air Quality 

Why is that the Indiana Democrats are not yelling about this from the rooftops? Fecklessness. 

I Answer 18 Questions by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker) contains two points I very, very much agree with; school is only the beginning of education. Maybe this is why I feel less threatened by "fake" news and all the other fetishes of MAGA.

It would be hard to call somebody with degrees from Stanford and Oxford an autodidact, but that's kind of how I perceive you— or maybe something like a 'life-long learner' is better?

I do focus on constant learning and mind expansion. I start every day by reading books for two hours—and then I do more reading at night, after everyone else has gone to bed.

So I am an autodidact, although I benefited from the best education that money could buy—or, to be more accurate, the best education student loans could buy. But in most situations, I taught myself.

Consider my involvement in jazz. I learned it on my own, without any teachers. But that never held me back. I performed and composed, recorded and produced, taught and mentored students, even got hired by the Department of Music at Stanford—without ever getting a music degree.

I’ve done that in other situations. The key is to operate without fear—there’s no limit to what you can you achieve if you embrace experiences, and ignore gatekeepers.

You seem to have a catholicity of what you're interested in, to steer clear of compartmentalization, to have an idea that wisdom comes from broadly taking in life as opposed to just moving forward on a vertical career trajectory, and to be engaged in a project of continuous self-growth.

Is that a fair assessment of your outlook? If I'm describing that broadly right, is that outlook something you consciously settled on or is that just kind of how you are?

It’s great to learn the rules. But it’s even better to invent your own rules.

That gets some people upset. If you bypass the formal credentialing process, the gatekeepers might never forgive you.

But even my approach isn’t always right. In my youth, I would have studied with a jazz teacher if I could have found one—but they didn’t exist in my neighborhood. So I taught myself by sheer necessity.

That’s the best skill you can learn—how to teach yourself. Over the long run, that’s worth more than an Ivy League degree.

I spent most the day soaking in Epsom salts, hoping to do something about this rash on my legs. Not sure if they did anything.

 I worked on the prison journal. I will have pieces coming out here the next few days from 2013.

And that is all there is to say about anything around here, except it is hot and humid, again. I do wish I were not working.

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Writers: Magical Realism

 Like I suppose many people, magical realism came to me from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Joel C recommended the novel while we were both at Fort Dix FCI. Since then, I have found magical realism elsewhere. It serves as an answer to a question that came to me when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write and how to write my stories - namely, the limitation of the realist novel. Even more specifically, where does imagination and dreams and the culture into which we are immersed belong in a realistic novel? Magical realism showed me how it could fit all of those parts of us beyond the reach of the "facts only", journalistic trappings of the realistic novel. When I came to re-read Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County, I found he, too, had a few elements of magical realism. Everything had come back to Indiana, to me being fifteen years old.

From YouTube:

Why Magical Realism is a Global Phenomenon (It's Lit): provides a simple, but not simple-minded exposition of the tenets of magical realism.

The World According to Haruki Murakami: If you can resist the temptation to sleep, the presenter is so mellow, you get a tie into magical realism.

This video brings us back to Colombia, discusses the confluence of history and film, as influencing literary magical realism; it seems to me to approve of letting the weirdness all hang out, and that seems like a good idea to me:

Pardon this slight intrusion:

What is MAGICAL REALISM? Gives us a wide-ranging reading list, corresponding to my own thoughts that magical realism is not exclusive to South America (for all it is a fecund source).

I keep coming back to it as an answer to a question I came up with while in prison: how do I get into a novel the ideas that feed my imagination? Excluding imagination reduces the realistic novel to journalism. If I can look at a plot of land and see Native Americans and pioneers and escaped slaves and modern Americans intersecting, even conversing with one another, as the reality of the place, how else can I put it into a story without magical realism? I want to think of imagination as magic,

Another reading list showing the expansiveness of magical realism (and that imagination as magic is not limited to South America).

Among the many problems of prison is being sequestered from ideas and information. No Google, no Wikipedia. I would also add now no YouTube. One can have ideas and not have any idea if they are shared, if they have any validation outside one's head. These posts about writers and writing are me catching up with ideas I had in prison about writing and about the writers I did read. Salman Rushdie was one writer I finally caught up with in prison. He was also one of the first who pointed out to me that magical realism was not limited to South America. YouTube kicked this video out to me (the mysterious algorithm strikes again!), which answered a question or tow for me. It also validates my own interest in magical realism - that the truth may escape the realistic novel.

Another intrusion, but just trying to make a point here about imagination and the magic of reality:

If magical realism extends across continents and has a history before Marquez, then it is because humanity shares an imagination encompassing a sense of wonder exceeding the literal. We imagine freedom, and freedom lives on in our imaginations. Impoverish our imagination, we lose our freedom. Which is why I close out with the following from Cleveland Review of Books - Gregory Jones-Katz's Imagination is a Battlefield: Elon Musk, Techno-Fascism, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Musk’s contempt for marginal members of American society is typical of techno-fascists. Now the most prominent billionaire contributor to an international far right movement spanning the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Musk has, in so many tweets, called for a “defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the “woke campus,” and cancel culture. In March 2022, Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the left’s cancellation of J.K. Rowling. Ultimately, Musk’s fantasy to buy Hasbro is part of the global far right’s attempt to seize, remake, and control our imaginations. They act with the understanding that the kind of imagination nurtured by D&D has the potential to undermine foundational hierarchies and binaries. 

What does freedom and imagination do other than undermine the clichés and restrictions of literal reality? Consider what the naked sphinx is doing in the Post Office at the start of Raintree County?

But as troubling as D&D’s past remains, the most fantastic power of D&D is precisely the one that, I believe, threatens Musk and the techno-fascist imaginary: D&D is a co-conjured stage upon which players co-imagine boundless possibilities. With an open game licensing concept implemented in 2000, which allowed independent developers to modify D&D as they saw fit, playable races and character classes have long proliferated: over 200 races and 54 base classes, in contrast to the four races and three character classes of first edition D&D. “Dark MAGA” Musk’s attachment to a foundational iteration of D&D is at one with MAGA fixations on past glories of America, such as the auto, steel, and oil industries, which, not coincidentally, were, like D&D, made in the Midwest; but D&D’s player base has, for many decades, extended far, far beyond that space to galaxies far, far away. More than all that, though, D&D “workers” not only create an imaginary world but guide its development and growth. D&D “rulebooks” are in fact guidebooks, and Gygax himself was fond of reminding players to ignore whatever rules they disliked. “Workers”  could therefore change the system if they so wished. While geekdom has been appropriated by mainstream America, D&D and the imaginative play it nurtures can function like a pluralist democracy in miniature. Musk’s attempt to de-wokify the game is rooted in a dream of restricting the game’s diversified play and democratic imagination.

Fantasy and imagination that emboldens and embroiders the literal real enriches our lives.

...My students also tell me that they have completely abandoned the use of moral alignments, a categorization of the perspectives of characters. Their characters’ elaborately imagined backgrounds instead serve as the guidelines for the decisions they make, offering a freedom that I never considered when playing as a teenager. Still, my students also understand that imagination provides the possibility that myth, narrative, and metaphor might rescue humanity from the nightmare of destruction regularly justified by rationalistic claims; they unanimously expressed outrage to me about Musk’s Hasbro tweet. 

And what more can any of us say that better encapsulates the purpose and effect of imagination? 

We need to write; we need to imagine; we cannot let humanity be degraded any further.

We need to let it all hang out. 

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Me at 53 (Part One): 3/6/2013 - 3/10/2013

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 7/13/2025] 

I turned 53 on February 27, 2013. This was my second birthday in prison. I got no birthday cards, and I expected none. Joel Cartiglia gave me a cream cake. Two other inmates wished me a happy birthday. I am so many years older than I wanted to be.

It has taken me several days to get around to writing down these thoughts. I had to answer a letter from my older sister and also one from a friend in Tennessee. And I have been tired. So much for mea culpas. 

I do not feel depressed as much as this feeling of being out of synch. Sometimes I feel as if I am clapping on the off-beat. I feel certain someone will think that appropriate. A great gap seems to open before me whenever I think of the future. I have no thoughts of a future, but I cannot escape the fantasy game. I have two women deserving an apology; one in Anderson and one in Muncie. I doubt the latter will be alive in 20222 and the former will probably care less about an apology from me than the sun cares about the star Altair. About the future, I feel like death seeking a home.

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[7/13/2025:

The woman in Anderson was not happy that I tried to make my apology. It was left on her voice mail; she did not want to see me. That was my ex-wife, A-.

CC did not die. Neither did she change. She accepted my apology without wanting to change her ways. She also seems like death seeking a home.

Just because I stopped being suicidal does not mean that I was not ready to die.

Continued in Me at 53 (Part Two): 3/6/2013–3/10/2013. sch]

Changing Your Ideas About The Incarcerated

 At first, I thought Leigh Sugar's What to Read When You Want to Destabilize the Binaries Between Good and Bad (The Rumpus) would fit in better with a post I am drafting on magical realism.

Among the 14 “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” as outlined by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, are “Either/or Thinking,” “Fear of Open Conflict,” “Belief in One Right Way,” and “Perfectionism.” As a white person who came of age in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, I recognize these characteristics in my own history and tendencies, and that of so many institutions (educational and beyond) in which I’ve been involved. Additionally, I have severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition that is evident across time and cultures but whose symptoms often overlap with those described in Jones and Okun’s “Characteristics of White Supremacy,” particularly with regards to “Either/Or Thinking” and “Perfectionism.” The precise details of how and when and why these qualities show up in my mind and actions (often unintentionally), and/or whether a certain urge is due to white supremacy culture/my whiteness or my OCD, are less important than the fact that they do.

Instead, it made me examine my own thinking. 

Either/or thinking never came easy for me after I got to be a teenager; maybe before then, Black and white thinking always left a fool. Then I read in John Toland's Hitler that either/or thinking was a hallmark of Nazism. Another good reason for embracing ambiguity.

Perfectionism was always put to us by my mother as a goal that we could not attain. The only perfect being was Christ. Another point in raising one's child in the church - the knowledge that perfect is impossible. The best we can do is try doing our best.

My mother's family is chiefly Scots and Irish. No worry there about disdaining open conflict.

Outside of Christianity, I do not know of one right way. My methods were always more experimental. Even within Christianity, we do not know who God will save.

Then the essay goes into how we view the incarcerated; even providing a reading list. And that, folks, is why you should go back, click on the link to the essay, and read it. The prison system allows us to exercise our collective Id without distinction on the less fortunate and stupid as well as the malignant. Not all the incarcerated are malignant growths on the body of civil society; they may even be the products of our civil society.

sch 6/30

It Has Been A Good Enough of A Vacation - Stories Written, Superman, Inequality

Group therapy was moved to last Thursday, so I took Thursday and Friday as vacation days. It will hard going back tomorrow. 

Nothing to report about the group meeting - I do need to set down my thoughts, so far - as nothing much happened, other than the discussion about Elon Musk. What I am getting from the group meetings is a vibe that lets me understand MAGA. 

I spent too much time sleeping. Yesterday, I just fell apart after running over to Payless. Friday morning I went to see Superman. It was kind of a reward for revising "Colonel Tom" for what I hope is the last time. I probably should not have eaten the buttered popcorn, it caused me problems until the wee hours. I also treated myself to barbecue ribs at The Downtown Farmstand on Friday night. I wrote some more, I went to bed early, and then in the middle of the night I woke with indigestion creating a rebellion in my stomach. Only a little vomiting gave me any relief. I stayed up and read a little and then slept in.

The stomach continues to bother me. Less RC Cola seems like a good idea.

The front room and the bedroom were not cleaned, as I planned on doing.

I finished rewriting "No Ordinary Word" last night. Not quite the production I wanted, but then I lost all energy late yesterday afternoon. I finished it after I slept like 6, 7 hours last night.

About Superman, I had wanted to see it and the selections at the local theater almost dictated seeing it (kids shows, three horror movies and F1). I have been a fan of Superman since I was a kid and saw the George Reeves TV shows on re-run. I went to see the first two Christopher Reeves movies at the theater, and left so very much impressed with them. I even went to see The Return of Superman at the theater. The Zack Snyder movies I had to see on the TV screen - not the same as seeing them in the theater. Now, about this one.

I went to see it. I loved it.

It is a love story- or a collection of them. Lois Lane may be the best since Margot Kidder; maybe even a little better. (It actually lets her be smart and independent and competent; it also gives us something I do not recall from Kidder - a romantic vulnerability.)

I disagree that Gunn botched the metaphor about being an immigrant. It's about identity - the conflict between what parents want and the child deciding what they want.  It is about being human. That is the real center of the film - amidst all the whiz-bang action, and is the real plot hidden in the amusement park of a story. The emphasis is not on the super but the man. Strange to think of someone with all that power just trying to be a decent human being. This is not Peter Quill, who is a boy who never had to grow up, but a very powerful being trying to be a good person. 

The dog actually works. Strange, but true. I came back and looked through some of the reviews, and Krypto gets mentioned - usually in a negative way. Also getting mentioned  - and often the focus of much criticism, is Gunn's sense of humor. I would say the most obvious outcroppings of funny involve Krypto. As well as a very emotional outburst from Superman. I remember Krypto from when I was very young; I do not think I really cared for him then.

Hoult is the most comic-like Lex Luthor. 

Finally, it is no more goofy than Reeves in Superman II. It did not feel like a warm-up for a sequel. Gunn could walk away with just having done this movie. Or a source for spin-offs - The Justice Gang serve their purpose in the story and the story fits in their presence without pointing the way to a spinoff. There is more feeling than what has been common in these superhero movies. All the real fanboys can argue over the details like Talmudic scholars, missing a couple of what I think are the important points: this is not Citizen Kane or La Dolce Vita; and for all you have invested your life into Henry Cavill or Christopher Reeve, you miss the importance of addressing every work of art on its own merits. 

It was worth the money. It was good to see that Warner Brothers knows how to make a superhero movie. That's good enough for me.

The reviews I collected, some of which left me wondering if they saw the same movie:  Superman review – is it a bust? Is it a pain? James Gunn’s dim reboot is both (The Guardian); Superman movie review & film summary (2025) (Roger Ebert); ‘Superman’ Review - by Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark); and Fans are Missing the Point of Superman's Parents' Message.

My three favorite reviews came from YouTube; the last I disagree with most until he starts criticizing superhero movies in general, and then I found him spot on.

Since I was working on my short stories, I read Cups of Kindness, published by Pangyrus. The subject is a marital crisis approached through a family get together and the choice to have children. I admit to dissatisfaction with the opening - but I will put that down to me being distracted and not giving the text its proper respect. The pacing, the plotting hit the right marks. The ending, subtle and organic. When I went back to "No Ordinary Word" I started paying closer attention to my own pacing, and to how the story appears to be about one character and is about two others, but is about only one thing. So Cups of Kindness is a story worth your reading and your consideration; especially for its irony.

Inequality has risen from 1970 to Trump − that has 3 hidden costs that undermine democracy (The Conversation) is my shot of politics for you.

1. Fraying social bonds and livelihoods

Not just an issue of income and assets, growing class inequality represents the fraying of American society.

For instance, inequality and the resulting hardship are linked to worse health outcomes. Americans die younger than their peers in other rich countries, and U.S. life expectancy has decreased, especially among the poor.

Moreover, economic struggles contribute to mental health issues, deaths of despair and profound problems such as addiction, including tobacco, alcohol and opioid abuse

***

2. Increasing corruption in politics

Inequality is rising in the U.S. largely because business elites are exercising more influence over policy outcomes, research shows. My related work on privatization explains how 50 years of outsourcing public functions – through contracting, disinvestment and job cuts – threatens democratic accountability.

Research across different countries has repeatedly found that higher income inequality increases political corruption. It does so by undermining trust in government and institutions, and enabling elites to dominate policymaking while weakening public oversight.

***

3. Undermining belief in the common good

National aspirations have emphasized the common good since America’s founding. The Declaration of Independence lists the king’s first offense as undermining the “public good” by subverting the rule of law. The Constitution’s preamble commits the government to promoting the general welfare and shared well-being.

But higher inequality historically means the common good goes overlooked, according to research. Meanwhile, work has become more precarious, less unionized, more segmented and less geographically stable. Artificial intelligence may worsen these trends.

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Yet democratic decline and inequality are not inevitable. If restoring broad prosperity and social stability are the goals, they may require revisiting the New Deal-style policies that produced labor’s peak economic share of 59% of GDP in 1970. 

And for everyone having a bad day, I ran across this yesterday:

Now, I need get ready for church.

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