[ 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 10/18/2025]
I started reading Tolstoy's War and Peace (Rosemary Edmond, translator; Penguin Classics, 1998) on March 26, and have made 864 pages out of 1,444. Like Napoleon drawn into Moscow, I cannot stop reading. Part of me wishes I had the hardbound edition Aunt Mary Ellen gave us over forty years ago (where did that book go to, Mom? Almost 30 years too late to be asking that question.) Part of me wishes I had made more of an effort with the paperback that was in my office. (And where did that copy go to? Who cleaned out my office, my ex-wife or Yelton? Questions too late to be asked in 2022.) But reflection has me thinking only during this federally funded retirement could I ever have given Tolstoy sufficient attention.
What am I learning from reading Tolstoy? That “good literature” can be fun — that literature requires a good story about interesting people. (I am also nibbling at E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel.) I'm learning the Great American Novel lies in the future — or will never exist. War and Peace concerns itself with narrow social groups covering a wide geographic area — something wholly lacking over here. (How do the top families of New York relate to those of Texas and all those to Chicago and all of those to Silicon Valley and all of them to the powers of Washington, D.C.?) America still lacks any history, creating a national identity. (For all those nationalists who have perverted the federal government into a national, central government, there remains a difference of character still between Virginia and Texas and Indiana and Massachusetts and California.)
I've also come to the conclusion Virginia Woolf undersold herself — the writer obviously needs experience and then a large estate with a bunch of serfs to create the all-encompassing Great Novel! Otherwise, all I think Tolstoy Teaches me is the value of a simple style employed in conveying the truth of events and character.
And just for the record, I've taken to calling it War and Peace and Marriage for Money and Looking for True Love. You'd think old Leo would be as melodramatically sentimental as Charles Dickens, or as gothic as a Bronte, where he is neither.
Russianness — what would be a similar Americanness?
Where, how and when could this young countess, who had had a French émigré for governess, have imbibed the Russian air she breathed the spirit of that dance? Where had she picked up the manner which the pas de chale, one might have supposed, would have effaced long ago? But the spirit and the movements were the very one — inimitable, unteachable Russian—which “Uncle” had expected of her….
Not because I find anything wrong with her writing. It is a sore point with me that I have been so much time on the computer that my eyes hurt too much to read print. I borrowed the collection An Edna O'Brien Reader over 2 months ago and have only now finished the short novel August is A Wicked Month.
The slowness I cannot put down to obtuse prose or a boring tale. The following comes from the last chapter. I think it can be understood out of context - there is a disease, there is trauma related to her son. The prose touches on what has gone before in the plot, then adds the theme of Catholic guilt that encroaches even on those who have left the church.
“I wouldn’t,” she said. Her monstrous affliction had put her out of reach of other people. It was funny to think that insanity was the downfall that used to dog her, of how she might go raving mad like the two women who thrust themselves into the solitary lake. But this was something less pitiful; contagious, and unforgivable in fact. Nothing moved or spoke to her from the real world now unless she saw in it an echo of her own cast-away plight. There could be no chance that anyone would want to help her, any more than she had helped her own son. Fate. Or, created by herself, and her own willful follies. Either way these things had all happened and were floating under her memory’s eye and would be sealed eventually by her death. Dumb and insensible to the call of friendship, sex, whiskey, comfort, she could only contain herself by repeating to herself that there were in the world strangers, doctors, science, drugs—things that could cure her body at least. She thought of the Confessional and that black grille through which she used to murmur “I cursed, I told lies, I had bad thoughts,” and she remembered that she never came away feeling absolved no matter how great the priest’s strictures had been or how painful the penance. Perhaps it was the same with bodily ailments. Her stomach still bore the pitter-patter marks of muscles strained in childbearing, and a neck operation had left a permanent: scar. Nothing healed.
My one trouble is with the setting of the novel. I just checked, and the copyright is 1965. It felt like that time period, the sort that you get from English movies of the time. Rivera hotels and beaches, movie stars and parties, the working mother and divorced wife, no credit cards, no mass tourism, no rock stars (not even a mention of The Beatles), and it reads more like a historical novel now. An alien life. If I am correct in my understanding of O'Brien's career, her own work undermined that world.
Maybe, too, time has gone from when the cachet of sexual adventures as a cure for all ills has become instead a warning of their illusory nature. It perhaps is that O'Brien's novel was at the forefront of this movement. Fear of Flying was about 10 years later.
Then there is a need to get onto my own work. I was supposed to have three chapters done this week. Instead, I revised a short story and worked on blog posts. Not that I cannot rationalize these divergences. The former was working on my writing; especially in how I revise stories and disclosing my laziness. The latter because I was collecting research for later use.
I find her writing charming, even beguiling. Otherwise, I would not regret returning the book to the library. Putting her off to the future feels like I am missing an important experience.
Some other viewpoints. They do better than I do in explaining its plot.
O’Brien really does a fine job of getting into the mind of her character, including the repulsive aspects of her wandering. The reader will want to get into the book, grab Ellen by the shoulders, and shake some sense into her while she’s in France and then will want to comfort her once she is home. The story is a tragedy in the true sense of the word, but if you’re in the mood to catch up on literature you’ve missed, you can do a lot worse thanAugust is a Wicked Month.
It’s so evocative of a time and place and she writes so lyrically about being on holiday and experiencing new things. It’s also a fascinating insight into a woman’s interior life, her sexual desires and her hunger to live life to the fullest.
But it was the switch in mood — from light to dark — that really made an impression on me. It was like a kick to the stomach and suddenly the whole story took on a different purpose and became so much more than I had imagined at the start. It made me think about so much and I can see from having re-read the earlier sections that O’Brien had carefully plotted the entire story arc.
The plot of August Is a Wicked Month lends itself to caricature. It also lends itself to Fanny Hillism. I am not suggesting that the book is pornographic within the meaning of the law, but it is insistently and relentlessly distasteful, sickeningly voyeuristic. I enjoyed Miss O'Brien's first two novels and felt some admiration for her third, Girls in their Married Bliss, which (one can now see) gave hints in the story of Kate of what was to follow. The new novel is a hangover from the Kate and Baba books, a discharge of accumulated bile, to put it politely. The old jokes reappear here, with the humor drained out of them. In the previous novel, Baba suggested that the homeless Kate could safely spend the night in a bath outside an ironmonger's shop on the King's Road as long as she hung out a sign saying, “Keep out. Gonorrhoea”—but there is no Baba here. And Kate didn't like talking to the psychiatrist, “it violated her sense of privacy.” Alas, Miss O'Brien has no compunctions about Ellen's sense of privacy—or ours. August Is a Wicked Month, in spite of the individual talent its author has previously displayed, is a typical contemporary novel. It tells all—it tells nothing.
I felt an emptiness at the end. I understood full well how a parent could close off a dead child's bedroom and leave it untouched until their own death.
All in all, there are plenty more realisations that happen in this book - there is something uncomfortable about reading it as well. I love the way we see this character change into someone who's impulsivity is constantly grabbing hold of them every single time it catches up. The character-centric narrative is written in a style that is both descriptive and relfects the distress of the character each step of the way - it is not done by accident. Among these descriptions there are also quick-fire dialogue sections that reflect upon us the terse responses of real-world conversation. Again, it gives us perspective upon our own lives - are we really living right?
The Commentary reviewer's caricatures and emptiness may be the same as the uncomfortableness here. Maybe time has given us a better perspective, we are now the heirs of this book and the changes of morality that has come our way since 1965. What distresses us is the emptiness, not the sexual games.
Her suddenly unleashed creativity unwittingly incensed Gébler, who appeared at breakfast one morning with a manuscript copy of the novel in his hand. He told her: “You can write and I will never forgive you.” Their marriage was dissolved in 1964 and, against the odds, O’Brien was granted custody of the children after a three-year legal battle in which supposedly scandalous passages from her fourth novel, August Is a Wicked Month, were used as evidence of her wayward character.
Sanctimony has ways of imposing itself - usually in the cruelest ways possible.
A tragedy? I hate using that over-worked term, but it comes closer to that than an empty-headed shocker.
“I met with a man who’s a very rational person,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office following the private Friday afternoon meeting. “I met with a man who ... really wants to see New York be great again.”
“I’ll really be cheering for him,” Trump added.
Standing alongside the president, Mamdani described the meeting as “productive” and “focused on a place of shared admiration and love, which is New York City and the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers.”
When asked by a reporter, Trump even said he would be comfortable living in New York City with Mamdani as mayor, saying they had more in common than he had expected.
In Indiana, the lack of Republican support for a redistricting effort there has led to Trump issuing broadsides at GOP leaders in the state, accusing them of “depriving Republicans of a Majority in the House, A VERY BIG DEAL,” and saying he’d support primary challenges against them. One Republican legislative leader was the victim of a swatting incident at his home hours later.
Bill Maher being cranky about woke, but under it all there is a ray of good sense; we get nothing by being sanctimonious prigs:
The unaccountable barons of Silicon Valley, the main hub of AI, are, along with Trump, the main protagonists in the compelling story of democracies entering a new epoch. How the political and the socio-economic are put together, combining to create a new political economy, is the $64 trillion question. The Greek economist and former politician Yanis Yaroufaxis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Penguin 2024), takes an entertaining crack at explaining how the tech giants make a fortune out of our addiction to small bright screens with their pictures and information, hoovering up masses of data in order to influence our behaviour. It is a prodigious and worrying development.
Hybrid cars run on petrol and electricity. In the US, political life runs on money and social media. The tech oligarchy offers both of them in exchange for proximity to and influence over government. This relationship is analysed in BBC 1’s November 3rd Panorama programme, “Trump & The Tech Titans”, revealing the malign consequences of the US Supreme Court’s 5/4 ruling in the crucial 2014 case, McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission. The five Supreme Court judges declared unconstitutional 1971 legislation which had capped over two years political donations towards federal electoral campaigning, “the aggregate contribution limits”. The issue was deemed to be one of freedom of speech, bearing no negative impacts on government and offering no opening for corruption. The case cleared the way for floods of corporate and private money to enter and shape American politics.
BBC Panorama documented how the extraordinary wealth of the tech titans had been the lubricant for their entering the circles of power. Their wealth is unprecedented: Elon Musk is worth $497 billion; Larry Ellison, who owns Tik Tok, CBS and CNN, $320 billion; and Peter Thiel, around 100th in the global wealth table at $23 billion, is a founder of Paypal and Palantir. All are donors to the Republican party and are close to the Trump administration.
***
What the Panorama programme intimated, though never came right out and said, is that we should be worrying more about Vance than about Trump. The tech barons – and the Republican Party — may well feel their money, influence and future are better invested in Vance than in an aging Trump. For Trump to run in 2028, he would need to tear up the clear constitutional doctrine, enshrined in the 22nd Amendment, that no President can serve more than two terms.
Since before 2016 when he was denigrating Trump, Vance has made a 180 degree turn, and now holds to the whole of Trump’s extreme right-wing agenda. He could even do another 180 degree turn. Vance and the power of his backers — yes, power not “agency” — would mean relatively uncontrolled development of AI. He could also normalise fascist-leaning populism as the MAGA masses tire of Trump. JD Vance is a clear and future danger to democracy.
The problem isn’t that industrial policy has been done badly. It’s just bad economics.
Dreams of reviving manufacturing jobs face the reality that modern manufacturing is capital-intensive and largely automated. Even if subsidies or government loan guarantees spur a factory boom — and history suggests otherwise — it won’t bring back 1950s-style armies of industrial workers unless we somehow outlaw productivity. Today’s factories run on robots and engineers.
Nor will tariffs bring a manufacturing revival. Taxing inputs and components only raises costs, weakens U.S. competitiveness and ultimately punishes the firms protectionists claim to support. True American industrial strength rests on productivity, innovation, competition and access to global supply chains, not on coddling producers behind walls of higher prices.
Mazzucato and her ideological opposites commit the same error. They imagine a politics-free technocracy that can “direct” the economy. In the real world, politics always dominate economics. Subsidies and tariffs are never tools of neutral expertise; they are invitations to lobby. Every “strategic investment” quickly becomes a political IOU.
Biden’s programs came loaded with child-care mandates, union preferences and “Buy American” rules. Trump’s industrial interventions are indeed erratic, but the notion that his protectionism would work if wrapped in a more “mission-oriented” narrative is even sillier. Industrial policy doesn’t fail because it’s chaotic, it fails because it’s political, and human politicians are incapable of the precision markets achieve every day.
After conducting a sweeping review of five decades of U.S. industrial policy, Economists Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Euijin Jung’s conclusion was unambiguous: Subsidies and trade protections for individual firms have been politically irresistible but economically ruinous. Government protection delays economic adjustments; innovation succeeds. In the rare cases when industrial policy showed positive results, the government limited itself to supporting open, competitive research and innovation — programs like DARPA or Operation Warp Speed — rather than shielding firms from competition or subsidizing failing industries.
Talking Points Memo just celebrated 25 years of online political reporting. It’s a “go-to” source for many, if not most, political observers. Heather Cox Richardson, among others, frequently cites publisher Josh Marshall, and TPM is one of my trusted sources for insightful political analysis.
In a recent column, Marshall proposed a basis for evaluating Senators, and I strongly agreed with his criteria for “purging” those who don’t pass his tests. He identifies a series of issues that he says can give voters “a clear indication of whether they are serious about confronting the challenge of the moment or battling back from Trumpism.” He analogizes the process to a status interview you might hold if you were a new manager hired to turn around a failing company–a “sit down” with every employee to determine whether they’re part of the solution or part of the problem.
***
Marshall identifies five issues. The first is the filibuster. He writes that lawmakers who support keeping the filibuster “are not serious about moving the country forward in any positive direction.”....
The second identified issue is Supreme Court reform....
Number three is (finally!) making DC and Puerto Rico into states. He acknowledges that this isn’t as essential as the first two, but it’s very important, and it’s the right thing to do. DC and Puerto Rico should in fact be states....
We now know that Marshall’s number four is especially important. He calls it “clearing the law books.”....
And number five? Here, Marshall proposes something near and dear to my heart: outlawing gerrymandering with a federal legal framework governing how maps can be legitimately drawn....
I think the fellow is right. We need to get over the excuse of how hard it is to amend the Constitution. Terms limits for the Supreme Court and Congress, must be added to the Constitution - among a few other changes.
Overtime with Bill Maher: Killer Mike, Donna Brazile (HBO) has me wondering if Maher understands the military has never had to disobey unlawful orders.
But we allow our best writers a little leeway, and not all experiments can come off successfully. To ask Rushdie to restrain himself would be to lose the good parts too. Think of him like the young pianist in the second story here. At one point her husband says to her: “You’re a genius, obviously, darling, but you’re also driving everyone nuts with your racket.” “My racket,” she replies, “is not only what I do. It’s who I am.”
Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood celebrate Salman Rushdie's latest book, Victory City (PEN America, 2023) - several readings then Gaiman and Atwood discuss the book and writing.
Salman Rushdie on no-platforming, magical realism and America in crisis (2018): Rushdie on his then latest novel, a discussion of magical realism (probably the most succinct description I have heard; probably made succinct by repetition), and - of course, The Satanic Verses. Rather touching, even ironic for the future coming towards Rushdie.
[ 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 10/18/2025]
Ah, yes, a fight somewhere last night (5702? 5703? What rumor flew last night during recall had the trouble at the opposite end of the East Compound from me in 5751), and so one-way moves from unit building to mess hall and back. No moves since we've been back in the unit building. Read a chapter or two of War and Peace. Loafed. Did our usual 10 AM stand up count. (The federal Bureau of Prisons does not do much with us, the prisoners, but it does worry that we might not be in our twelve-man rooms for our stand-up counts.) We have two more today - 4 PM and 10 PM, as done every weekday. Saturday and Sunday, the government takes an interest in our morning whereabouts. I figure no typing on, "The Old Days Are Not Forgotten". I do have more of War and Peace to read; 1,370 pages to be exact.
I need to call Dad and Melissa. Dad to see if her got my last letter and if he read "Reunion". Melissa, to see if she's still alive.
Anxious over the stories. A friend from the writing group has "Basketball". Cathy P has "Mr. Morgan Has A Problem". KH has everything written, except "Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing". I find myself wanting validation - or, at least, feedback. Some reassurance I have talent and not what I always thought was just kind, patronizing words. Sweazy was wrong - criticism, justified and rational is a help, a need for me. I fear I've gotten too involved in my fiction, that I am talking to myself. Thanks, Mom, for leaving me hating what you called "me living in my own world". Yes, I know you meant to help prepare me for the ugliness of the real world. Instead, I've got this aslant perspective, a feeling of tiptoeing along the fault lines of insanity, of having a default mode of hedging my bets. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan still refuses to work on Maggie's farm. Would like to have heard Russell's final verdict on "Basketball" (for which I need two minor additions.)
And I wanted "The Old Days" in a form Joel could see before he departs this wondrous place. Latest scuttlebutt has a fight in 5702 and 5703 and the track. Considering how we got patted down and how containers carried by some got searched, I'm thinking the guards were looking for weapons. Yes, this is supposed to be a low security facility. But we get blacks and Hispanics (take your pick of place of origin: Puerto Rico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, and some other places) gangbangers, motivated by money owed for hooch, gambling debts, or mere boredom, combined with too much energy. Prison does not encourage irony - although it is a fertile source [for irony 10/18/2025]. Those in the fighting - maybe even those caught fighting - could wind up in a camp - an even lower security level prison - where I cannot go, being a SO.
Maybe I will work on "An Equitable Division" and my letters this afternoon. Do all that longhand. Meanwhile, I need to get ready for lunch.
The movies Ragtime and Reds are two movies I have not seen in years. The latter I saw twice in the theater, and Ragtime I saw on HBO back in the day (like 40 years ago). I have not seen either in decades. Nowadays, I think of Ragtime as James Cagney's last movie (there was something on TV, but I'm not counting that), and for Reds is the greatest anti-Communist movie ever made.
I read John Reed's book, Ten Days That Shook The World, soon after seeing the movie; it covers the Bolshevik Revolution before Lenin took over the soviets. It seemed to me that the democratic soviets would inspire an American to think this was the future. Reed did not live long enough to see Communist Russia. In the movie, it is Emma Goldman who sheds light on the anti-democratic future coming to Russia.
I read several things by E.L. Doctorow before Ragtime. Going to prison let me catch up with that one. I suppose no one reads Doctorow nowadays. Too bad.
Redtime is an old essay from Film Comment. It being Fall, I may be getting too sentimental, but it seems to me we have substituted flawed movies of reality for silly superhero pyrotechnics. I am also left wondering if the disappearance of these films from our consciousness has not made propagating the ideas that would now destroy American idealism easier. The deeper we got into costumed fantasies, the further we got from our history, letting those who misrepresent that history a free rein.
These are all from yesterday. There are a couple without the experiments in filters, but I have tried to give you the original without enhancements. Yes, I am still learning. For anyone who has not seen my post from last evening, Wednesday In Muncie With A Camera!, these are from the Delaware County Fairgrounds, the Minnestrista Center, and the buildings that are in the Minnestrista area. I am not sure the exact location of the sidewalk.
These are from Tuesday night, from my expedition to Muncie's north side Walmart - ah, the beauties of a rainy November night in Muncie, Indiana! They make you wish you were anywhere else!
