Local Musician News!

 Anderson-born Muncie bus driver and musician, Denny Helton. Check him out. I think he is quite ballsy doing this particular song:

I liked the original when it came out when I was in high school. I think it was put down as middle-of-the-road or adult easy listening, when it is actually a rock song for adults. 

sch 11/58

Voted For Harris! Tuesday With A Rat! Genre-Bending! Another Rejection!

I got my email off to the lawyer in Kokomo, cleaned up and headed out the door a little after 11 AM. First stop, was voting. Straight ticket Democrat, all the judges were voted against. Minnetrista was closed, so no apples. I gassed up at Centennial and Wheeling. The car was returned with about 20 minutes to spare. I had time to spare waiting for the bus, so I got some beef lo mein (and I cannot recall the name of the place!). On the bus, I talked to KH on the phone almost up to my drop-off spot.

Back home, I did a little work on my email and watched a little more Longmire. About one-thirty, I decided to lie on the futon with the vibrating heating pad working on my stiff neck and keep watching my show. Only I snoozed at some point. I heard a noise, then I heard another. When I opened my eyes, the rat was making off with the remains of a pack of pita bread. I stirred and he hid in the entranceway. Then he made an approach to the pack of bread. I yelled. He disappeared. I put the pack of bread in the kitchen and under one of the rat traps. There is also a ball of bread in the trap. I wait for his death.

I cleaned the bathroom and the area around my workstation. The bedroom was tidied. Then dishes were washed and I killed the garbage disposal.

I fixed a chicken breast for dinner. More Longmire was watched. 

One thing asked at my polygraph exam is whether I had an unapproved woman living with me (CC). The PO particularly wanted this question asked. I suspect he was miffed at not noticing her property whenever he came in to inspect the place until his last visit. It just crossed my mind that he is more willing to trust the polygraph more than his own judgment and eyes. Perhaps, also, he has never lived with a woman. No way a woman would have put up with my untidiness that should have been apparent to his eyes. I guess he did not look in the bathroom - there is only one toothbrush. When my niece was around ten, she came to visit me and wound up spending time with the two women I was dating at the time. At one, she counted the toothbrushes (she had two daughters) and asked the girlfriend where I slept when I stayed over. Toothbrushes indicate a close relationship.

Yesterday, I drew the remainder of the cash from my old bank. An older woman, about my age, said something to the effect that the current administration had failed to fix all the problems. I asked what problems. Her answer: all the world's problems. I said nothing more; she seemed to require too much of the American Presidency. Reading Populist Apocalypticism in Arizona by Joe Perticone (The Bulwark) today, especially the following, I think I have a clue to that woman's thinking:

Beuter doesn’t have a lack of faith in elections so much as an undying faith in Donald Trump. Sounding much more hopeful than the Republican politicians who all spoke in dark tones during the rally, Avila put it this way:

I am really not concerned about this election at all. I think anyone that’s looking at the facts, it’s a clear cut decision. What he did in four years was incredible. He kept us out of war. We had an incredible economy. And if we look at Kamala’s record, come on. It’s, yeah, it’s pretty easy to make a good decision. I think the people will do that when they get to the polls, or when they make their vote, and wherever they are. I’m good. Not a care in the world.

I did not put the work into my story as was done by the authors profiled in Navigating ‘Dark Space’: How Rob Hart and Alex Segura Mashed Up Spy and Speculative Fiction, but it is nice to have some company in mashing spies and speculative fiction.

More tidying and more blogging will be the rest of my night. I made a run-down to the store for RC and smokes.

Trump has Indiana and KY; Harris has Vermont. Pray.

7:38 PM

Updated 8:34.

The Republicans will still control Indiana. I do not understand the huge numbers of early voters other than people who did nto want to vote today.

What I am seeing at https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/live-election-results/#live-results_state leaves me think any turnout in Indiana is only marginally higher, certainly not anything record-setting.

And another rejection just came in:

Thank you for your submission to Swing. Although we must pass on Problem Solving, we appreciated the opportunity to consider it.

Thanks again. Best of luck.

Sincerely,

Madison Loud

Swing

sch: 8:43 PM 

 

Writing About Small Things; Giving Women Writers Their Due

 The Guardian interviews Deborah Levy: Deborah Levy: ‘A writer’s career is choppy – I was 50 when I found success’.

But why shouldn’t Levy range up and down the creative spectrum? Those idols about whom she writes in the book have all made similar journeys, and Levy is at her most thrilling when defending their right, and the right of female artists more generally, to change direction without getting it in the neck. Take Lee Miller, the Vogue model turned war photographer recently depicted by Kate Winslet. Endless words have been spent trying to understand what Miller thought she was up to, and yet, says Levy, “you don’t really ask how Cocteau put himself together. Cocteau, who I’m very fond of as an artist, could be a director and a critic and a novelist and a film-maker and a poet and a visual artist and a designer. No one’s saying: Jean Cocteau, how did you fit together?”

***

Really, what Levy is writing about in this mode is delight and the joy contained within small things. The Cost of Living, for example, considers the possibility of creating “a utopia in a modest way. When you say that word utopia, it sounds so grand and unobtainable. But in the most modest living space, you know, you can put a table down, and place some chairs around it, and curate the table. Who are you going to invite to that table? And in this arrangement of space, you’re creating something like the life you want. No matter how modest. No matter how grand. The light’s coming in this way, the chairs are arranged this way. This is a small, utopian gesture. But because it’s supposed to be domestic – oh no!”

This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial. In her fiction, meanwhile, characters are inclined to undertake sudden, sometimes dizzying, often baffling changes of direction. In her 2012 Booker shortlisted novel, Swimming Home, this entailed Kitty Finch, a terrible driver, tearing around a bunch of hairpin bends while the man she is with clings on for dear life. Levy has always been bold, she says; there was no sudden midlife change in outlook. When she wrote her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, on a typewriter in the late 1980s, “I had a very particular black eyeliner, silver platform boots, a lot of mascara and a cigarette,” she says. “And there’s nothing that isn’t bold about that book. There’s even a long conversation with a llama in London zoo. That book is about a female banker who feels so powerful and invincible … It’s a kind of state of the nation book, written in the Thatcher years. And you could say that women weren’t allowed to write state of the nation books, and how that book was read then and how it might be read now is different.” 

Why do we ask different questions of women than of men? We saw this during the election in how Harris was asked different questions than Trump. The press gave her a different slant than Trump.

As writers, as human beings, we should treat women in the same fashion as we treat men. Writers, as creative people, ought not have to be told this.

And I like the idea of small things having important stories to tell.

sch

For Trump; Rejections; Polygraph

 Yesterday was another polygraph exam. For the first time, I drove myself. On the way there, I had a call from CC. She was checking out. I was about to blow my stack when she told me she needed to check into an intensive in-patient facility. I may have screwed up one question. Then I went downtown Indy, and picked up Cheryl. I made a detour to show CC St. George's and then to get a fish sandwich from McDonald's. Then it was back to Muncie. I dropped her off at John's and came home.

I had a bloody headache by the time I got back here after 8 pm. The rest of the night, I spent weeding emails and running through Longmire on Netflix. 

Why many Arab voters in Michigan are flocking to Trump ahead of US election - they feel ignored, and:

President Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel amid the horrific atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon has left many community advocates like Luqman so distraught that they are forging an alliance with Trump in the hope of change – any change.

I think that Harris cannot say much - should say much - about Gaza before the election, or else look like she was undermining Biden's diplomacy. She might even actually undermine it.  

And the rejections keep coming.

For Problem Solving:

Thank you for submitting your writing to Passager. We are sorry that your work was not selected for publication this year. This reading period we received thousands of pieces and we loved far more submissions than we are able to publish. 

The editors must agree on all acceptances unanimously. Sometimes our decisions are based on how the issue is coming together, or what we published most recently, and not a reflection on the quality of your work.

Best of luck with your writing—we always hope you keep us in mind.

Sincerely,

Mary Azrael, Kendra Kopelke and Rosanne Singer

Passager Editors

***

Thanks for submitting your work to Ninth Letter. We're sorry this submission wasn't right for us. We appreciate your interest in our magazine, and wish you the best of luck placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Ninth Letter 

"Getting What You Asked For":

Thank you for submitting "Getting What You Asked For." We were glad to have the chance to read your work, but unfortunately we were not able to find a place for it in the New England Review.

It’s an important part of our mission to seriously consider writing by new and emerging writers as well as by those we already know and love, so we read each piece with care. Because we are only able to publish a small percentage of the thousands of submissions we read each year, we often have to turn down very accomplished work.

If you haven't already, please consider staying in touch by signing up for occasional emails from NER.

Thanks again for sharing your work with us.

Sincerely, 

The Editors

New England Review

I need to clean my bedroom, get the car ready for return, and vote. I took a vacation day, so no work.

sch

Early Voting, Indiana Style; Political Podcasts

 I forgot to mention the early voting I saw this Saturday when CC, John, and I went to have pizza. It ran into what I think of as the old, old courthouse and through the almost block-long plaza to the sidewalk on the eastside, the Walnut Street side. Now, this news flash came though this morning: Clerk: As election approaches, more than 13,500 early ballots cast in Delaware County

According to Delaware County Clerk Rick Spangler, as of Monday morning 13,593 voters had cast early ballots locally, and the line of those wanting to vote was "lined around the block" outside the County Building about 9:30 a.m. Monday.

***

Spangler said a total of 1,070 voters cast ballots on Saturday, believed to set the one-day record for early ballots cast in a single day.

The previous record, set in 2020, was 696 early ballots cast in a single day. That record has been exceeded several days over the past week, the county clerk said.

In 2020, a total of 12,153 Delaware County voters cast in-person early ballots.

This year's early voters have included many casting ballots for the first time, Spangler said, a group that includes both young citizens and older Delaware County residents who haven't voted before.

I had a text from MW yesterday, she reported a report that the Madison County Courthouse was packed with people wanting to vote early.

Saturday, I saw - and consider my distance is no longer all that good - a group that seemed a fair mix of Muncie people, and of genders.

I have no idea who is voting early. Does this portend a Democrat revival in Indiana, or will the Trump vote be even greater? I guess we are about to see what Hoosiers are made of - democrats or pro-authoritarians?

The Bulwark Podcasts

I shall be doing my own voting in the next few hours.

sch

Christian Nationalism is Not Christian - An Orthodox Priest's Viewpoint

 From Public Orthodoxy, a few days late: The Christian Nationalist Threat to Freedom of Conscience by Very Rev. Dr. John Jillions (Public Orthodoxy)

According to the US Constitution, the government’s duty is to guarantee us—and everyone else—1) the right to exercise our faith and conscience freely and 2) to not impose its own or anyone else’s faith and practice on us. The only way to protect our own rights is to protect the rights of all, regardless of how diametrically opposed or even abhorrent their way of life and choices may appear to us. The framers of the US Constitution recognized from the start that protecting freedom of conscience would be a continuing issue, even after the ratification of the Constitution in 1790. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1818 letter to a Jewish leader, “…[More] remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice. Public opinion erects itself into an inquisition, and exercises its office with as much fanaticism as fans the flames of an Auto-da-fé.” 

As a priest of the Orthodox Church, I would generally be thrown into the basket of “religious conservatives.” But not all conservatives are the same, and I’m most worried about the powerful public opinion of Christian nationalists. Although surveys regularly show that the role of religion in America is shrinking, recent decades have shown an increase in the political power of religious conservatives and their success in shaping legislation, the courts, and the executive branch. And in this way, they are eroding the separation of church and state, the constitutional right to freedom of religion for all, and the prohibition against privileging any one religious view in the governance of the nation.  

***

While a case can be made for defending many of these faith-based aspects of American civic life, today’s bald-faced political rhetoric about Christian nationalism would leave America’s Founders dismayed. They had seen European and early colonial theocracies leave a trail of intolerance, persecution, torture, and execution. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and others respected the rights of the various Christian denominations and other religious bodies but wanted nothing to do with privileging one group over another.  They were determined to put the infant United States of America on a new and original path that guaranteed both freedom of religion and freedom from religion.  They had little tolerance for religious intolerance.

sch  

 

 

Firing Up The Magic Mountain

I want to get past the election, past a bit of legal business, and get onto "Chasing Ashes." Reading The magic of Thomas Mann by J.C.D. Clark (Engelsberg Ideas) is an example of a piece that makes me both write and consider what I want to write about.

Rival superpowers, rising inequality, environmental degradation – today’s visitors to Davos have their own subjects to discuss. The naïve fatalism Hans displays is not the sickness of contemporary society, and to a modern reader the tuberculosis cure is more likely to recall the recent confinements of Covid. Similarly, the displaced existence of the sanatorium patients suggests the alternative communities found online, where truth is hidden among the complex webs of conspiracy and falsehood. ‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual’, Mann writes, ‘but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.’

The warning of The Magic Mountain endures. At the Berghof Sanatorium, scholarship is a seduction and argument, a kind of enchantment. While learning offers the illusion of understanding, intelligence cannot protect you from illness, nor does dying guarantee any insight. ‘What we’re here to do is to get healthier, not cleverer,’ Hans is warned, yet he himself must pass through disease in order to be cured, must face the spectre of death to overcome its fascination. Reading Mann’s masterpiece again, 100 years after publication, that lesson becomes a slender source of hope. For it hints that our present upheavals are not signs of sickness, but the first steps towards recovery.

 I read Mann's Magic Mountain while in prison and wondered why no one said this is a long book worth reading. It is. Go read it rather than wait. It may have fewer jokes than Ulysses, and it is shorter than Proust, but it has its own sense of humor and depth that does not depend on anything esoteric. 

But for "Chasing Ashes", it makes me wonder if I have thought enough on the societal aspects. Tunnel vision or information silos will not suffice. Ideas pop up that need interrogating - not just on the personal level, which has been the concern in what I wrote in prison and the one written since.

I also have a theory - not quite tested yet - that Magic Mountain influenced what I consider to be the Great American Novel: Raintree County. Ross Lockridge, Jr. interrogated American ideas through conversations between his characters in a way that did not stop the plot. Character developed through exposing the ideas of the characters.

sch