Considering The Fickleness of Literary Success

 A prophetic 1933 novel has found a surprising second life – it holds lessons for us all by Charlotte Higgins (The Guardian) is an interesting take on the vagaries of literary success.

A few days ago I asked an American acquaintance – as one does these days – where he sees “it”, by which I meant the political situation, heading. He took a breath. “In my opinion, the US is in a very similar position to Germany in 1933-4,” he said. “And we have to ask, could 1936, 1937, 1938 have been avoided? That’s the point we are at. You can try to say fascism couldn’t happen in the US. But I think the jury’s out.”

His words seemed especially resonant to me because I had just finished reading a remarkable novel precisely to do with Germany in 1933-4, a book written in the former year and published in the latter. Forgotten for decades, Sally Carson’s Bavaria-set Crooked Cross was republished in April by Persephone Books, which specialises in reviving neglected works. Since then, it has been a surprise hit, a word-of-mouth jaw-dropper, passed from hand to hand.

 The novel seems to have been well-written without having great success in its time, and the author dying young probably did not help keep it in print.

Carson wrote two sequels to Crooked Cross. The entire trilogy was published by 1938. Then, in 1941, not yet 40, she died of cancer. Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books, happened upon mention of Carson’s work some years ago, in an academic book on female writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Crooked Cross was well reviewed in 1934, but made no great waves and soon sank without trace (though the Manchester Guardian’s founding women’s page editor, the great journalist Madeline Linford, chose it as a book of the year). My personal theory is that it was ahead of the curve, sounding its alarms about the direction Germany was going in before a British public was ready to hear it. It took some detective work by Persephone Books to discover who Carson actually was: born in Surrey in 1902 and raised by her widowed mother in Dorset, she worked as a publisher’s reader. She spent many holidays with friends in Bavaria, hence her deep knowledge of the region.

One of the remarkable things about this book is its immediacy. It was written in the moment, and published quickly. The six-month period that it covers was one of momentous political change: Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis gained an effective majority in the Reichstag, Dachau was opened, and Jews were barred from public-service jobs. At the start of the novel, the characters greet each other with a cheery Grüss Gott; by the end, Herr Kluger is heil Hitler-ing acquaintances in the street and the local church bells have been altered so that they chime with the notes of the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song. Also by the end of this short six months, the loving, close circle of the Kluger family has fallen apart. The attentive reader will have noted, even within the first few pages, for example, that Lexa’s fiance Moritz Weissman, a good Roman Catholic emerging from Christmas mass, also happens to have a Jewish surname.

 ***

Crooked Cross gets no closer to Hitler than that photograph on the piano. All the politics happen at a distance, in the background, and are understood only as their effects filter down to the Klugers and their little town. In fact in some ways it is a conventional middlebrow, domestic novel, somewhat earnest in tone. For me, earnestness is part of its virtue: it does not make the mistake of thinking nazism laughable, as British people often tended to do. Its focus on deeply ordinary people also makes it miles more insightful on nazism, its spread and its appeal, than Flanner’s Hitler profile. The Kluger family, like millions of families across Germany, is deeply marked by the great war, and shaped by economic collapse. The boys have never found meaningful work. Helmy is unemployed, and Erich has an unsatisfying job as a ski instructor. 

 From a forgotten novel to Off-Broadway, interesting: Ty Fanning Will Join Mint Theater's Crooked Cross Off-Broadway (Playbill).

 

sch 10/18 

Wednesday In Muncie With A Camera!

 What I Did This Morning and Into The Afternoon

Another morning where I did not want to get up, but I did. After breakfasting, I headed down to the convenience store for a pack of Luckies. The camera stayed home, and I think that was the first mistake of the day.

Back here, I worked through the emails and started on my submissions. Those wiped out the day until around 2 pm.

I called the dentist. They did not have my Humana card. I sent it to them, then I heard nothing further from them. They will be closed until Monday,

My submissions:

“Agnes” to Another Chicago Magazine,  Rumpus, The Hemlock Journal, and swamp pink

American Short Fiction, received “Heart’s Judgment Judged”

 To Pulp Asylum, Cold Caller, "The Revenger’s Tale"

Fiction on the Web  - “The Unintended Consequences of Art”

“Going For The Kid” went to Haven Spec Magazine - which I missed as being a duplicate! Moron.

 Peek behind the scenes at how Fiction on the Web chooses which stories to publish - I do not know if this helped still my worries about what happens to my stories after submission is still not clear in my mind.

 I also had running in the background Edward II - Ian McKellen - Timothy West - Diane Fletcher 1969 - Marlowe - Restored 2025 - 4K 

This I found preferable to my memory of the Jarman movie - mostly because of Ian McKellen.

 I also found another local blog: Hiding in Plain Sight (taking in Anderson and Muncie).

Out and About With My New Camera

After lunch and supper, I decided I was going to Minnetrista for an art show. This time I had my camera with me. I took the opportunity to experiment, so please bear with me. Some did not work ; I need to look at the instructions in more depth.

The view from the back of my apartment building:

The view to the north along Reserve:

Reserve looking south:

Muncie's Parking Patrol doing their best:

What I think is an interesting looking house and another failed experiment:

Coming up to Wheeling Avenue:

Crossing Wheeling Avenue to the Minnetrista area:

First stop was White River:

Yeah, there is a tint that was not actually there.

These are the buildings that were associated with the Ball family and remain standing; it is my understanding that these were the smaller buildings, that the larger ones went up in a fire.

There are barn owls in this area:

Then I came up to the Minnetrista Center itself (I believe on the way there, with the river below, I think I saw a kingfisher; only once before have I seen a kingfisher):

They are getting ready for the Luminarian:

And then I came upon the place itself:

These are the pieces I liked best:

From there I needed to take care of some business - my supply of Coke Zero for the rest of the day. This meant along to the convenience store on Wheeling. I cut across the Delaware County Fairgrounds. Here, I decided to more experiments - most of which I will not trouble you with tonight.

I made one stop before the convenience store:

One of Muncie's wonders.

The hands were too full on the way back for more photos. 

Back here around four pm, being gone for about 2 hours, I did the dishes and had dinner. One other blog post was written, about Thomas Pynchon, that is scheduled for the last half of next month. Then I started putting together this post.

Some videos for the day - Klimt, Socialism, Changing Language, King Arthur, Irish pranks, Louis Armstrong live, the doom of Ireland:

I talked to CC. She is supposed to come over. So far, not another peep out of her.

I did plan on a liturgy tomorrow morning, but that might not happen. I still need to get my novels and my mail. I would rather not be distracted by the world while at church.

This post is far too long. I will apologize for that and close out for the night. I might take to bed with Edna O'Brien.

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Writer: Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride is not a name I knew when YouTube's algorithm tempted my curiosity.  What she said, I found interesting - using Method Acting tactics for characters had crossed my mind a long time ago. I always go with those who justify my own ideas. Don't you?

 For what ever reason, give her a listen: 

I was about to add her to this post I was drafting, a grab bag for writers, when my curiosity pushed me to see what else there was about this woman. After all, I shouldn't use justifying my vanity as the only reason for putting her in a post. Yeah, well, I got my ears pinned back. 

I am pretty sure I heard of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, but the author's name did not stick with me.

 Here is what I found from a quick Google search.

Interview with Eimear McBride  (White Review, 2014) - a little history, a little about her writing habits.

Novelist Eimear McBride: studying method acting taught me how to write (The Guardian, 2025)

Making a person is no mean feat – especially in the absence of sex – and for a character-obsessed novelist, nailing it is everything. But when I started writing at the age of 23, all I seemed to possess was an increasingly urgent impulse in my head and an unaccountable blankness where I’d assumed the conduits of inspiration would be. The inner insistence began picking words and persistence required me to follow them up, but how to expand beyond those first fragmentary bursts?

Although largely ignorant of what producing fiction might require, I didn’t arrive at the page by myself. I brought Stanislavski with me. More precisely, three years’ training in his acting method at the then notorious and now defunct Drama Centre London, where I’d been taught how to make a person, from the inside out. Initially, I didn’t connect the worlds. Acting is action. Writing, words. Acting is necessarily collaborative, novels are not. Fiction tends to be made in private, while acting when all alone points to the psychiatrist’s couch rather than the silver screen. On top of that, method actors are regularly mocked for their seemingly over-the-top efforts to inhabit their characters; Robert De Niro’s 60lb weight gain to play the ageing boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull or Forest Whitaker learning Swahili for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. That said, whatever scepticism surrounds the method process, the proof remains in the performance and there’s no denying it often produces emotionally intense, even revelatory experiences for the audience. Naturally enough, I wanted to take that possibility with me.

***

Although Drama Centre taught me many things, the most important “how to” of this technique was introduced right at the start and drummed in until the very end. Even now I hear it being said: “Leave your instinct to judge at the door.” Which makes sense because characters, like people, are not constructed from moral positions. A character needs to be left alone to pursue their own ends. To hover above, directing attention to their flaws, is to make a mere puppet with no real life of its own. It cannot be filled with its own thoughts and repressed emotions or driven by irrational fears and self-sabotaging judgments. As with actors who delve no deeper than caricature, novelists who gloss over complexity for the sake of instruction make people no one else has ever known.

***

For example, I am neither Eily nor Stephen from my new novel The City Changes Its Face and my previous one, The Lesser Bohemians, yet the struggle against brokenness is something I understand. What it is to fail, to try, to need forgiveness, to want to be loved. It doesn’t matter if that understanding derives from other sources because once a shared truth is spliced – or substituted – into the fictional story, its logic will remain intact. Same goes for the girl from my debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, who refuses passivity even when the outcomes of her decisions prove carnivorous. Anyone who has ever had to survive their own bad choices, made on the back of unhelpful circumstances, can find examples to work from within. Or my woman from Strange Hotel who wants to let no one – even the reader – in, but who life happens to anyway. Identifying my own attempts at control, and subsequent helplessness at its loss, created enough imaginative energy that she could grow out in wildly differing directions from me yet remain credible in her own right. More challengingly, of course, this also applies to characters who have harmed and subjugated others, for example Stephen’s mother, or the uncle in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. I have never done what they did, but to write them I had to find the places of compulsion within myself. Make note of its insatiable selfishness and how easily it can run out of control. So, even in the terrible things those characters had done, there was something not alien to me.

Essentially, substitution is about employing a kind of radical empathy. Without empathy, art is nothing more than a flapping mouthpiece for whichever aesthetic, ideology or political point has been placed above the duty to truth. Little wonder then that the method has become so unfashionable of late; in direct opposition to the many locked boxes of contemporary society, which claim we cannot know each other, even in imagination, the method suggests otherwise. That when we allow empathy to lead us down uncomfortable roads and accept that self-knowledge does not always set the heart aglow, we can come to recognise and know one another, deeply, through all the imperfect humanity we share.

Oh, yes, I am beginning to really and truly like this woman's ideas. We could all stand to think about what she says here - even those not writers. 

 Her UK and American publishers: Faber & Faber and 

A podcast, The power of language: Eimear McBride on The City Changes Its Face, from The Writing Centre. Oh, yes, listen to this. She is quite amusing and down to earth, just in case the above might leave you thinking otherwise. Communicate on your own terms to tell the story you need to tell is my takeaway.

sch 10/17 

 

 

 

 

 

Taking A Look At Muncie (Part One)

Rainy, gloomy, cold - November in Indiana.

However, the heat seems to be failing in this building.

I was up early and finished revising “Lessons Learned On A Green Meadow”. The revisions were sent off this morning.

There is this play I wrote in prison with Christopher Marlowe. It has been an irritant to me for maybe a decade. The execution never gets the idea right. I spent some time today listening to podcasts/videos about Marlowe and Shakespeare. They will go into their own post.

Frankly, I cannot remember much of the afternoon. A nap around 2:30 only to have a call from CC about 45 minutes later. Then the apartment building dropped off the portable heaters. 

I decided to go off to Walmart, but with CC calling back, the bus was missed. I caught the 4:30, and then I almost did not get back until around 6. Going to north Walmart is a PITA.

I talked to Paul S while I was out at Walmart. That takes care of all my social life. 

The brain and my eyes want to take a break. Maybe I can finish Edna O'Brien?

Paul S decided to get me a camera instead of just giving me a recommendation. It has taken me over a week to figure out how to get the photos off the camera. Don't ask. I was never as smart as people thought.

This is the first photo I took:

Dawn coming over the convenience store at Reserve and University.

The view from Riverside looking south along Reserve - the neighborhood.

The following are from my trip to Ball State on 11/12/2025 for the print sale at the Journalism Building.

These are the buildings on the north side of campus. The Duck Pond is directly to the north.

Where the Cow Path used to be.

The same up towards where LaFollette Hall used to be; that is the Communication Building in the center.

That is what McKinley looks like north of Bracken Library. The bell tower is obscured.

And that is the bell tower.

This is one of the robots used to get food around campus.

Interior of the new Journalism Building (across from Bracken now). This is a dining area. They've got restaurants in there!

This is looking from the Teachers College to the southeast corner of Riverside. Sursa Performing Hall is at the corner. All from the past 20 years.

I have absolutely no idea what are the foundational sciences, but it is a building along what used to be Martin south of Riverside.

I got a rejection from The Yale Journal for“Agnes””. 

Song for the day:

That will be my day.

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The Electoral College - Free Tuition!

 Just wanting more people to watch The Loophole That Could End The Electoral College - it seems American high school no longer teach civics or history.

sch 11/16

For Writers (A Grab Bag)

 Read the Winners of American Short Fiction’s 2025 Insider Prize (Literary Hub)

9 Podcasts That Welcome You Into the “Literary World”  (Electric Literature)

Screwing up your endings?

 Mistakes made on page one:

 I do not know who Sarah Perry is, but she discusses her writing here:

A quick Google search found Sarah Perry's website, and that gave me her bio:

SARAH PERRY (she/they) is a memoirist and essayist who writes about love, food culture, body image, trauma, gender-based violence, queerness, and the power dynamics that influence those concerns. She is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; and Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover, a memoir in 100 short essays that came out in February 2025 from Mariner/HarperCollins.  

My takeaways were two - that writing is a craft, and we need to work at it; and technique is a collection of tools.

Subplots -  How to Write Better Subplots - is a lot shorter than reading Shakespeare, the king of subplots.

Southern Literature documentary | 1963–1999. 

Let me say that this Yankee likes Southern writers. Just as about as much as I dislike the South. I do not know if there is a connection, or if it is a connection I do not want to acknowledge. I have been attached to, intimidated by, inspired by William Faulkner since I was 18-years old. Tennessee Williams was another Southern writer I knew of when I was younger. Thomas Wolfe overwhelmed me in my mid-twenties. Then I quit reading. That was what prison and your tax dollars let me do: read. I finally got acquainted with Eudora Welty, William Styron, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor. Following the cast of the documentary, I also read Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.

What I found in Faulkner was history. That seems to play through the genre. Of course, that history is how the South deals with the Civil War and its aftermath. In that, there is a thing I saw shared with the Midwest. Another was the religious aspect - rampant Protestantism (excluding O'Connor, of course). What I did not see in my Midwest was its history was the effects of capitalism and of winning the Civil War. What I resent is the overshadowing of the Midwest writers and writing - we are the region that gave the country four Nobel winners (Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison). However, The Southerners took their demoralization and turned it into art while the Midwesterners, more generally, turned it into sentimentality. One takeaway from the documentary I want to mention before ending this paragraph; the South seems to have been as accepting of people taking up writing in the same way they accepted musicians; neither was a notable feature in Midwestern culture (we would point out the need for a job first).
 A beat sheet for short stories:

 Okay, if writers are supposed to be reading, and if I am going to stand up for my idea that American writers need to read foreign writers, then I need to post this video here. The most dangerous novel of all time? I cannot think of another novel quite as gruesome in its imagery and imagery that is put in service of its story. Perhaps, the Great American novel needs more metaphor and less realism?

Testing George Saunders' Universal Rules for Stories is a reason I rewrote the end of "Road Tripping" last night after taking a bath in the White River. It is one I am keeping around, it may be the sort of thing that will improve my short story writing.

Another item that YouTube's algorithm turned up for me is I'm an Editor. Here’s What I HONESTLY Think About Your Manuscripts. This one, though, I approached with trepidation. The title given it left me expecting nonsense. Um, whoever posted this video with this title did a disservice to the video. What is actually presented is far more interesting than the clickbait worthy headline. It is also more useful - at least, for me - than expected. What we get is an editor going over actual manuscripts. Yes, the manuscripts are not within a genre I would write in, and maybe not you, either, but listen to the advice given. She has me already understanding better what I need to do - and what I might actually be doing right. 

 Write Conscious has another overheated critique of Stephen King's On Writing. Larry Sweazy recommended the book to me around the turn of the century; of course, I do not read it until I was in prison. As I recall, the memoir section was skimmed (if not skipped over), and the advice seemed sound, but what I thought made the book for me was King including his revising of a story. When young, I thought the first draft could be the only version - the honesty in its immediacy being forefront in my mind. I did not know that the real work is in its revision. Revising possesses its own honesty; maybe its true artistic honesty. Take it on your terms.

 Anthony Burgess interviewed gives me a wholly new view of the man. Working class background with an educated voice; a bit of dissonance. Some talking about writing, some about his novels; some about his life. From 1989, he was closing in on his end. 

 

 sch 10/17

Indiana Senator Todd Young About The Government Shutdown

 This post almost did not get written.

I received Senator Young's press release days ago. It is partisan, banal, even soulless. Did such a piece of self-serving flummery deserve any attention for all it annoyed me? I finally decided to do this post to assuage my bad-temper and for not much else.

President Trump cut off 600,000 Hoosiers from SNAP. I do not know which is worse - Trump starting citizens as political blackmail, or that over a half -million Hoosiers rely on food stamps. 

Trump the great businessman and dealmaker did nothing to end the shutdown other than thunder and rage.

The Congressional Republicans and Trump rescissions had already shown they could not be trusted to hold to spending agreements: Congress rescinds $9 billion meant for foreign aid, NPR and PBS (NPR) and Trump Attempts Pocket Rescission to Cut $4.9 Billion in Foreign Aid  (American Enterprise Institute).

Blame it all on the Democrats, not on Republican concern for the common good being untrustworthy.

Read Senator Young's concerns for children. I have put the link at the end of his press release. He mentions nothing about making sure Indiana children can eat.

But mostly it struck how mediocre a Senator this state has in Todd Young. He is not Dick Lugar.

Government Shutdown is Over

On Monday night, I voted for a bill to end the federal government shutdown. The bill passed the Senate, and my colleagues in the House passed the bill on Wednesday night, allowing President Trump to sign it into law. The bill includes a continuing resolution to reopen the federal government until January 30, 2026, along with full-year appropriations bill for Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, and the Legislative Branch. The temporary stopgap will allow Congress to continue working toward full-year bills for the remaining federal agencies.

I have said over and over again that Hoosiers didn’t send me to Congress to shut down the government. Over the past six weeks, I voted 15 times for a clean bill that would fund and reopen the government, but Senate Democrats blocked the first 14 attempts. I am frustrated that the shutdown dragged on as long as it did and negatively affected our country in so many ways. I am grateful for all of the dedicated federal workers, such as our service members and air traffic controllers, who continued to work throughout the shutdown.

It’s time to get back to work on all of the important issues facing our country. Read more here.

Protecting Young Hoosiers (Senator Young)

Can Indiana not do better for itself?

sch 11/16