Returning to Old Ways And Here Ends Another Week!

Greetings from the memory motel!

I did not go to Ball State today. Rain was predicted (but did not come), and more importantly, I was tired. Work was over before 2 pm, and I walked back to my place. By 2:40, I was napping and did not come up for air until around 5 pm. 

Which is when I went back to my old ways. This actually started a couple of days ago, but it was today that I decided to keep going. See, I have started reading law review articles, again. I think I will get to working on my article on Indiana’s Bill of Rights. Why not? I started it over 30 years ago, I might as well finish it.

Of course, I do not have all my Indiana research. That disappeared by the hands of whoever cleared out my office.

Finishing my article had been more of a speculation than a decision until my first break today. I asked a couple of co-workers whether they intended to vote, and if marijuana legalization determined how they might vote. KH and I had discussed in a few emails how poorly Indiana voters turned out for last week’s primary, and the likelihood we would remain under Republican control. 

KH’s position is (more or less) that Indiana citizens are too dull to care about who is running their lives; mine is that Republican leadership encourages those who want to buck the system to leave and that Democrat leadership is too feckless to provide a viable alternative. My meager sampling leaves open the question; it may be that KH and I are both right, just grasping to opposite ends of the beast.

One article I read spoke of natural rights promoting the flourishing of its citizens. Several others supported the first one. What little I gleaned from my co-workers – the subject brought them to an abrupt, sullen silence – leads me to think they do not find Indiana’s government lets them flourish. On the hand, this may be my bias showing. Neither knew that Indiana’s health care system is more expensive than most other states. The older one, a male, reacted to another co-worker saying we should have a system like Canada by saying then you get half your check taken from you; the pro-Canadian co-worker replied that the insurance she was paying for was taking half of her paycheck now. I get the sense she was not happy with the services she was paying for.

So what if we started using the Indiana Bill of Rights to help foster a society that helps its citizens flourish in an equal fashion? Which question led me to decide I needed to finish what I started.

Well, it is 9:45 pm, and I spent the evening a reading a doctoral thesis and putting down some ideas, a thesis statement, into my outline for the article. Wish me luck.

I got some groceries yesterday after laving the courthouse. Right now, I have beans soaking. I wish I could say my diet today was a sane one. Maybe the weariness I have had the last few weeks will go away. I still need to order my CPAP supplies. More things needing done: change of mailing address, change of voter registration. I will do those tomorrow. I promise! Lol.

Back to BSU tomorrow. I think I will read a bit of a novel now, but mostly likely I will just go to sleep.

Sch

5/16

The back hurts, so I stayed offline today. What I did do was go to work, then downtown to change the address on my voter registration, and then deliver the change of address paperwork to the post office. I have never taken so long to put in a change of address. I capped off my travels by going down to the south side Walmart to get me new work pants. The old ones are just over a year old and have holes appearing in them. I hope this helps the knee – the old pants are almost canvas in their thickness.

That it looked like the predicted rain was imminent contributed to my decision to stay put. Well, after I made a trip to the Village Pantry.

I tried calling my cousin, and got no answer. I probably need to call earlier.

Other calls needing to be made: the sheriff, the property management group, K, and Paul S.

I do not think I am actually procrastinating. It is just that I have been tired. Oh, yeah, I need to do something about my CPAP supplies, still.

Some items I forgot to mention:

• The polygraph operator was surprised that I could vote. I am pretty sure that he is a native-born Hoosier. We do not do like the southern states (and, I guess, Iowa) prevent felons from voting. He did not sound like he approved of my being able to vote. 
• During the last visit from the PO, he said he talked to someone, and they did not think anyone was living at this address. I did hear the name, not that it would have mattered. I do not know any of my neighbors, but two by name. Those two I have forgotten. What nettles is he is back making suppositions that come out as accusations completely divorced from reality. Where else would I be staying? I am paying the rent here. Why should anyone know whether I lived here or not? They have not introduced themselves to me, nor I to them. It also shows that my PO does not read this blog, if he reads much of anything. He would know where I am staying, and where I am going.
• A bit of an oddity from last week when I was sitting here in the afternoon, and I heard the sound of hooves on the asphalt outside. I turned in time to see a horse-drawn hearse going by. Surrounded by glass was a casket. I have no idea whose funeral it was. All I know is that I have never seen anything like it before.

It is 7:38. I am going to start back on my pre-trial detention journal, intending to start publishing after May 24.

sch

Friday – came home feet and back aching, so I napped. Walked downtown to get the bus to BSU since the sun is shining and only a 30% chance of rain.

I called the property management group – Middletown Properties – about the oven and furnace, only to get voice mail. The sheriff will need to be called on Monday. I called my cousin, and still no answer. I did call K and talked with her during my lunch break.

On the way to Bracken Library, I stopped at Greek’s Pizza in The Village. I was not happy with the service, but I was still tired and wrote my disgruntlement off to me being a grump. I ordered a small gourmet meat lovers – if I am going to blow a fast, I might as well do it right – and was greatly disappointed. The dough is not the same old dough. It was crispy, tasteless, disappointing.

While there I noticed the one waitress working. I could not place her until I realized she reminded me of Stephanie W., who I figure she is dead now 19 years. Her oldest children should about the same age as was their mother when I met her. Her youngest should be out of high school. These calculations make me feel old – even older when I think Stephanie should be closing on 47, if she were still alive. How have her children fared? Do they have her energy without her self-destructive streak? Is Ted still alive? Since I was maybe eight, the intersections between people’s lives have interested – streaking by, maybe some gravitational pull brings us closer to others than to some, perhaps what I see was unseen by the other, or they saw me and I did not notice them, and influences ranging from the ineffable to the heart-breaking coming and going from one to the other.

What We Can Learn From Ancient History (and what we cant?) diverted me for a few minutes and it may even been a profitable diversion:

The Bronze Age collapse has long been a topic of wonder and speculation among archaeologists. It entered popular consciousness more recently, thanks in large part to the historian Eric H. Cline’s 2014 book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. That book, which has recently received the graphic-novel adaptation reserved for the biggest pop-history hits, became a surprise bestseller for Princeton University Press. In it, Cline told the gripping story of sudden and seemingly inexplicable downfall of Bronze Age civilization, and he pinpointed its climax to an individual year: the titular 1177 B.C.

What are the lessons in all this for us today, Cline asks? He suggests that, to become resilient like the Assyrians and the Phoenicians, we should be as self-sufficient as possible, as a hedge against fragile global supply lines; prepare for extreme climate events by maintaining healthy supplies of drinking water; and do our best to keep the working class happy. This last point is fine advice, though it doesn’t necessarily follow from what we know about the collapse, given that we have no specific knowledge of any working-class revolts coinciding with the end of the Bronze Age. “Defend the coasts from marauders” might be more apropos, if less applicable.

Instead of preparing for the next calamity, Cline might have spent a bit more time on the benefits of collapse. Getting rid of centralized power may seem like a step backward in the short run, but it has its advantages in the long run. In Greece, the world of the Mycenaean god-kings and their palaces vanished, never to return. Hundreds of years later, the polis, still our model for politics and political engagement, arose in its place. Similarly, in the Near East, the kingdom of the Israelites sprang up in the power vacuum left by the retreat of the great empires. Maybe the real lesson of the Bronze Age collapse is to go with the flow, and trust that after a few centuries of warlords and swords, something better will spring up in their place.

If you have seen the movie, you will want to read THE ESCAPIST JOYS OF THE LAVENDER HILL MOB:

It is about two men, neighbors in the small Battersea London neighborhood of Lavender Hill, who become unlikely collaborators, compatriots, and friends by giving into their desires and pursuing a life of crime. Our hero is a mild-mannered bank transfer agent played by Alec Guinness (known best by younger generations for playing Obi Wan in the original Star Wars), and a frustrated artist played by Stanley Holloway (best known as playing Alfred Dolittle in My Fair Lady), who team up to commit an extraordinary heist.

And now to finish off my email.

I forgot to mention I finished Euripides' Helen. I am not sure what to make of it.

Sch 

Backstory and Trauma Plotline

 Reading The Past Is Never Dead: On TV’s Backstory Problem by Elizabeth Alsop left me concerned with my novel "Love Stinks." Originally conceived as a screenplay wherein I would dramatize my characters' memories. I was very much taken with a scene with Willem Dafoe in Boondock Saints where he recreated a murder scene. I was told it was too complicated for a movie. When I moved the story over to a novel, I kept the memories as flash cuts for one particular character; the other is more resistant to her memories and I let her control them more.

Ms. Alsop's thesis is, I think, here:

The result is a show that, as Andy Greenwald put it in a recent episode of The Watch, is “too busy loading everyone with past events, past trauma, past things that needed to be healed through the mechanism of these six episodes.” But, he adds, this orientation also makes it “emblematic of where we are with TV.” Not only does the overreliance on flashbacks threaten to create a kind of narrative monoculture, in which many series, regardless of genre, now appear to follow the same sad, inevitable arc; there’s also a knock-on effect for audiences, who are being supplied with ready-made motivations for all character behavior. Increasingly, viewers’ inferences are being preempted by these instructive look-backs, counteracting what is arguably among the chief pleasures of watching serialized narrative. The problem, then, is not just that there are too many flashbacks but that TV seems to have so thoroughly co-opted them for traumatic-explanatory purposes as well.

Yes, there is a trauma that splits the two leads apart; for one, there is also the shock of his father's death; and for the other, there is a history of an abusive father. There are also some far-from traumatic memories. My theme is history - and history has its traumas - and we need to deal with the problems of history, or else we are doomed to die in a stagnant pond of our own making.

She leaves me happy not to own a television:

The trauma-fueled flashback, in short, has come to feel like a mark of bad-faith storytelling: a device used to promote the illusion of narrative complexity where little may actually exist. The impression of style produced by these temporal anachronies—once cutting-edge, now commonplace—appears for now to be persuasive to audiences, trained by a generation of post-network television to associate time-jumping with narrative richness and density. But when it comes to all this backward glancing, more may actually be less.

Stagnation is not the only thing I see, it is a feeling of part circle jerk and part self-flagellation. That does not interest me. How we react - acceptance or rejection of the trauma; the overcoming or repression - interests me far more.

Consider how Trump uses our history - things were better back then for people like us, and they will be again if I get power. He is even more vague than usual about what has changed, how it has changed, or what he can do to bring back the glory days. This I call repression, if he means giving back to the high school graduates of the working class a path to middle-class jobs (let us forget about automation, for example), or that white high school graduates will remain in political power regardless of demographics (which overlooks the disparity of wealth and income and health between whites and blacks; which refuses to acknowledge the violence that prevented the equal rights promised by America, the promise that did make America great.) Maybe Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days" did capture how some Americans repress their traumas.

On the other hand, I cannot think of any better declaration of resisting the traumas of history than this.

sch 5/5

While I Have Not Yet Read Rachel Cusk, She Intrigues Me

 So, I took some time to read her interview of Ira Sachs, I’m Only Interested in the Real: A Conversation Between Rachel Cusk and Ira Sachs. Only it was Sachs who made go "Oh, yeah."

I think what hurts is often the encounter with capitalism and all its tangents, in the sense that you’re making something that’s deeply personal, and then it arrives and it becomes a commodity, and that’s by nature painful. Specifically, it’s like encountering two bodies—you have the critical body and you have the industry body, and both of them can hurt you and also make your future less certain as an artist. That’s what you encounter as you release something into the audience and into the world.

I have such reverence for the novel, and I appreciate you seeing in the work an aesthetic that is maybe grounded in the novel, because I would say my education as an artist began with the novel. The novel has been more important to me than any other art form—particularly when I was really young. But I’m always interested in how I fail to achieve certain things that a novel can do and that writers do.

The difference is between film and the novel, but can failures be more instructive than successes? 

sch 5/5

Is Indiana Improving Its High Schools?

 I am not so sure after reading Consider this curmudgeon confused on latest diploma move by Niki Kelly. Here is what our General Assembly has done:

But diplomas have been specialized and complicated in recent decades. In some ways, the Indiana Department of Education’s move to streamline Indiana’s diploma system will alleviate some of that.

The state would move from four or five types of diplomas to two: Indiana GPS Diploma and GPS Diploma Plus.

State officials and stakeholders also want more kids taking more college classes and getting workplace credentials. It seems Indiana students are having trouble completing high school coursework proficiently and yet we are pushing them to do even more.

But the formula to earn a diploma would still be complex, involving words like pathways, work-based learning and apprenticeships. And slowly, education seems more about training workers than teaching students.

But I thought that was the purpose of Indiana's education system - turning out bodies willing to take a wage that barely gives them purchasing power. 

I had to agree with Ms. Kelly in the following, just as they gave rise to a question:

I also don’t know why, suddenly, young adults can’t seem to handle basic tasks. Or at least that’s what employers are saying. Going to school itself taught me about showing up on time, completing my work, communicating with others on projects and the consequences of a bad grade when I slacked off. All those things translate into the workforce.

But if they didn’t, that’s why we had part-time jobs. For me, it was dipping ice cream and ringing up gas sales at a convenience store or selling CDs and, gasp, vinyl records at a music store in the mall.

Why, suddenly, does that need to be part of my diploma?

Could it be the kids know they are being slotted for a life of dead-end jobs?

sch 5/5 

MFA Programs Killing Creative Writing?

 Bill Morris' Does School Kill Writing? made me laugh and feel my continued efforts were not wholly without merit.

In a dazzling essay in the London Review of Books called “Get A Real Degree,” the brainiac Elif Batuman deftly fillets McGurl’s claim. “According to the internet,” she writes, “writers have, in fact, been going to college for hundreds of years.”  In a footnote she lists dozens of writers, from Balzac to Joyce to Graham Greene, and the universities they attended.  She concludes: “I have been able to find only a handful of famous novelists who, like Hemingway, avoided university in favour of journalism.”  She names Defoe, Dickens and Twain.  (The deftness of this filleting job is greatly enhanced by “according to the internet” – sly shorthand for “as any high school sophomore with a laptop could have found out.”) 

Batuman, a Harvard grad with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford, argues persuasively that the problem is not that virtually all American fiction writers go to college and that growing numbers of them then go on to grad school; the problem is that they study the wrong things.  She comes down squarely in favor of writers studying literature as opposed to studying how to make fiction.  After conceding that the creative writing program is equally incapable of ruining a good writer or transforming a bad one, she asks: “Why can’t the programme be better than it is?  Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves?”

***

So I’m dubious when people fret that school is killing writing – that college boys ruined newspapers and the growing horde of creative writing MFAs is ruining American fiction today.  Flannery O’Connor graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent some time at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and neither experience bleached the color, the humor, the horror – the felt life – from her fiction.  Sometime in the early 1960s she wrote: “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers.  My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.  There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher…  In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel’s worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story.  In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.  We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly.  What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

sch 5/4 

 

I've got a 30-minute walk ahead of me and I really have not had dinner.

I got the email down to three. No phone calls made, and it is 8:49 PM.

The reading I did that I thought worth making a note of follows.

 Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov - JStor

Tim Hortons Is Brewing an Idea of Canada That No Longer Exists

Why I would like Disney+: Doctor Who Season 14's Opening Scene Is Hard To Watch If You're Already A Fan.

I checked out a couple of literary magazines: Blanket Gravity and The Wild Umbrella. Maybe, if could get the blog under control and get back to writing fiction. However, I want to point this out about Blanket Gravity:

Blanket Gravity: Free online magazine with art and literature for people in mental health crisis, having a hard day or season, looking to feel connected with themselves or something outside themselves for a moment.

From Public Orthodoxy: The Orthodox Church of Finland and the War in Ukraine 

A post I forgot from this past weekend: Doing My Time Saturday Afternoon - Paul Auster, César Aira

I skimmed Free Speech Is a Black-and-White Issue: The Millions Interviews Paul Auster, an archives release.

TM: When The Tortilla Curtain came out, some people attacked T.C. Boyle for appropriation, despite his sympathy and skill evoking the undocumented Mexican experience.

PA: Nobody owns the imagination. If we didn’t have the power to project ourselves into the minds and bodies of other people, people unlike us, I don’t think there would be such a thing as society. We wouldn’t be able to communicate. The whole idea of being a person is the fact that once you reach a certain level of mental and emotional maturity, you’re able to look at yourself from the outside. You’re able to see yourself as one person among many. Millions, in fact. Which then you take that one step further and you realize then you have to have the ability to project yourself onto others in order to try to understand them. Either sympathize with them, empathize with them, however you want to define it, but without that quality we wouldn’t be human beings. So, every time I hear someone get up and say: “You can only write novels about people exactly like yourself,” they’re saying that there is no such thing as the imagination. Which means people are not people [Laughs].

I can agree with imagination meaning human.

 César Aira must have a better memory than I have now, that was my first thought reading César Aira’s unreal magic: how the eccentric author took over Latin American literature.

...Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” he told me, casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”

I should send this bit to KH who says he has no time for writing: 

The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”

Speaking of time, I have now found another writer I do not have the time to read! 

I do not see how I can finish the email today. I am getting tired of reading this computer screen. If I hurry, I might catch the bus home.

3:19 PM 5/11

And here I leave you,

sch 5/13

Thinking of Just Deleting All My Email

 Yesterday was a long day. Church in the morning, a nap when I got back, and then I did laundry. I decided around 6 pm to come over to Ball State to get online. 

CC had slept most of the day, so I was left to my own devices. That means I tried ripping through my email. No luck in getting to the end, so I am thinking of just deleting even more of my emails.

I read Archaeologists find new clues about North Carolina’s ‘Lost Colony’ from the 16th century because this topic has fascinated me since I was a kid.

Excavations in March 2024 followed discoveries in the summer of 2023, when archaeologists from The First Colony Foundation uncovered what they believe are tantalizing clues. They dug up shards of Algonquian pottery dating back to the 1500s, along with a ring of copper wire they believe could have been an earring once worn by a warrior from an Indigenous tribe.

Two three posts were written, but they will not be published for another week, or more.

 Tired, looking at getting up at 4 AM, and confronted with a crash with Chrome, I walked back home. No caffeine in the house, so left the laptop at my place and went down The Village Pantry.

It was a little after 9 Pm when I left Bracken Library and almost midnight when I finally fell asleep.

I must have worked on the play before I went to Ball State. I think that is done.

This morning, I ate some oatmeal and tried working on a new short story. The mouse went out, and the keyboard went a little nuts, so I quit that even before I had to leave for work.

A long morning at work, I caught up with today's work and Friday's leftovers by 10 AM. I was getting grouchy by the time I left, I had to get my counseling appointment.

I was early to the counselor. Good session, he keeps me moving forward. We talked about what worries me with the group sessions, that it will not keep going forward but will want to go back over ground I think is well-tilled.

CC could not join me for dinner, so I stopped at Jimmy Johns on my way to Bracken Library. I am here now — 5:57 pm — and looking back, I do not know of any accomplishments being made today. Let us see what happens in the next 3 hours.

sch