YouTubing! Football -Laying Eggs - Going to The Dogs -Russians In Alaska - Indiana - Paris!

 Some of the stuff that I have been listening to while writing.

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Recent Rejections

 1/4:

Thank you for sending us "Learning The Passion and Control Twist". We truly appreciate the chance to read your work, and we are grateful that you thought of Pinyon as a potential home for it. 

Unfortunately, this submission isn't a great fit for us at this time, but we wish you success in placing it elsewhere.

Thanks again. 

Sincerely,

Ashley Bollinger, Managing Editor

Rory Davison, Assistant Editor

Pinyon

1/5

Thanks so much for your submission. We appreciate the chance to read your work, but unfortunately won't be publishing it in our next issue. Best of luck with finding a home for it elsewhere. 

– The Banshee team

--

bansheepress.org | Bluesky | Instagram

Issue 20 (autumn/winter 2025) out now

Filly by Rosamund Taylor out now

 

 

1/11

Thank you for sending us "Learning The Passion and Control Twist"." We appreciate the opportunity to read and consider it. Unfortunately, we could not find a place for your piece at this time.

We wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere.

Take good care,

The Editors
The Idaho Review 

1/13:

Thank you for trusting us with your work. We appreciated the opportunity to consider "Agnes," but have decided not to accept it for publication.

We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere!

Sincerely,

Redivider

And that is all the blogging for tonight. The email has been whipped!

 sch 1/15

 

YouTubing Politics

Some of the political stuff I have been listening this past week.

Trump accidentally confesses why he is antagonizing Minneapolis

 

 

 Movement of jah people:

 

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For Your Reading Pleasure

 Some items I have read and do not have time to more justice to:

Acid Blues (Slight Return): The music of Jimi Hendrix continues to strike a chord
by James McManus   (The New Republic)

These Are 10 Local Pizza Restaurants In Indiana Loved By The Community - but no Pizza King!

Why Indiana Democrats are running for office. 

Competition And Corruption (Sheila Kennedy) - what is wrong with Indiana's politics = lead me to Independent Indiana.

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard

 Two Short Novels by Colette: “Break of Day” & “Duo” (Thornfield Hall) - because I like Colette.

In Pursuit of Peace, Ancient Athens Created a Goddess (JStor Daily)

After decades of war, the Athenians decided peace would no longer be an abstraction. Instead, it would be personified as a deity, the goddess Eirene, and worshipped as such. To be clear, religion in ancient Greece was not “faith” in the way we understand it today. It did not necessarily guide individual’s private thoughts or provide a moral compass. Instead, it was deeply embedded in public life. Practicing religion was a social and civic duty, aimed at maintaining harmony between mortals and the divine. Religious acts such as prayers, libations, and dedication of votive offerings were typically performed at public shrines and altars. These were visible, communal gestures, often tied to festivals, civic events, or transitions in life, such as marriage, war, or death.

 ***

An idea of desirable, all-abiding, permanent peace was a new concept in the fourth century BCE Greek political thinking. Peace agreements had been concluded before, but they were not meant to be permanent and none of them lasted long. Eirene was the embodiment of a newfound hope for a more lasting peace that could unify the country. However, despite the hopes Athenians placed in Eirene to deliver on this goal, appeals to a divinity could not prevent war. Worshipping a deity did not create practical mechanisms for diplomacy or conflict resolution.

Lift A program supporting films that elevate Hoosier stories and raise the spirit of Indiana

A Brief, Disturbing History of Universal Monster (Crime Reads)

Monica Lewinsky: I was called a bimbo and abused on a world stage (London Times) - a little shocked she is now 52 - where did the time go - but a reminder that deserved better, and it is very good to see that she has survived.

 “And Ye are Witnesses of These Things” Revisiting “Worship in a Secular Age”: Part Three (Public Orthodoxy) is a series I have been reading in the context of creativity, and I get glimpses of a way forward.

This series of essays attempted to revisit and extend Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s sacramental critique of secularism. Christian life in a secular age requires an askēsis of epiphany—a disciplined way of seeing and living out the sacramental continuity between worship and world-facing witness, fulfilled in the joyous recognition of Christ always in our midst. John the Baptist, St. Maximus notes, leaped for joy in his mother’s womb at the first sight of His Lord. And even now, “just as if He were enclosed in a womb, the Word of God appears only obscurely, and only to those who have the spirit of John the Baptist.”[viii] This spirit of joy, this askēsis of epiphany, leads us to truly grasp the perennial relevance and promise of his resounding proclamation, issued to a world shrouded by darkness and the shadow of death: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” (Mt 3:2). 

Christ, Epiphany, and the World’s Essential “Sacramentality” Revisiting “Worship in a Secular Age”: Part Two 

One more post  and I am done for the day.

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Degenerate America and Its Cure

 We are living in a dark time when the fantasies of 79-year-old toddler may get us all killed. He has our own track for the same fate as his casinos, his university, every other venture he has embarked upon: ruin.

America's jungle law, at home and abroad (China Daily) lets into the mind of the Chinese government:

From invading a sovereign country and forcibly seizing its sitting president, to the fatal shooting of a woman by an ICE officer in Minnesota, a chilling logic emerges. The US government is now sliding into a Hobbesian state of nature at home and abroad, where force replaces law, and power overrides accountability.

Once, Washington at least offered excuses — democracy, freedom, human rights. Now, even that pretense is fading.

With plans to raise US military spending to $1.5 trillion by 2027 while withdrawing from 66 international organizations, the US is dismantling the very rules-based system it once claimed to lead.

So people are asking — quietly, uneasily: Is the United States preparing for another world war?

And you think the rest of the world is not thinking the same thing - that America now threatens human existence?

Empire of Vice by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Boston Review) works the same line.

At first glance, virtue signaling and vice signaling might appear to be opposites, with virtue signalers associated with do-gooders and vice signaling with more cartoonish villainy. And indeed, vice signaling is related to cruelty, schadenfreude, and evil generally. A virtue signaler is trying to look good and a vice signaler is trying to look bad—but not to everyone. A vice signaler typically violates moral or other standards of an out-group precisely in order to look good to the fellow members of some in-group. Vice signaling, then, is typically a version of virtue signaling rather than an alternative to it.

But there’s an important catch. When we virtue signal, we are appealing to our tribe’s own values, however shallow or hypocritical such appeals might be: it is the fact that our in-group treats supporting this charity or using those pronouns as a demonstration of kindness and respect that allows one to try to gain clout by adhering to the rules despite having less savory motivations in one’s secret heart. But when one vice signals, the out-group’s values take center stage—in order to be shirked rather than lived up to. The moral commitments of the in-group are basically irrelevant: all that matters is owning the enemy, in Trump’s case the libs. And the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior.

Consider now how Donald J. Trump says the only limit is his morality. What moral character has he shown during his lifetime?

Back to Táíwò's essay:

Unlike complex strategic objectives that involve prioritizing and maintaining strong diplomatic relations, the thrill of vice signaling—and the training—is heightened by saying the quiet part out loud. That is exactly what Stephen Miller, now White House deputy chief of staff, did on CNN earlier this week. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world,” he told Jake Tapper, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” 

That is a Hobbesian viewpoint. 

Signaling vice: Trump appears to flip off Ford worker calling him a ‘pedophile protector’  (The Hill).

Some here might see the danger Trump is putting us into: Republicans vow to block Trump from seizing Greenland by force. Time will tell. I think Trump wants to turn Minnesota into his version of the Reichstag fire.

But others continue to feed his vicious desire for attention and the power it gives him: Venezuela’s Machado says she presented her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump during their meeting. Like a toddler, he responds to bribery.

The danger he presents to us may survive, even if he is stopped from making himself , and the rest of us too, an ass in the eyes of the world: Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota after protests. 

Why I Try to Be Kind:It’s an axiom that technologies reshape ethics by James McWilliams (Hedgehog Review) offers a cure.

If such an explanation for the death of kindness seems dauntingly decentralized—as if meanness has metastasized in every organ of the republic’s body—there’s actually an empowering benefit to thinking in these terms. When we understand kindness to be dying in the trenches of daily life, it imbues discrete acts of kindness with targeted political force. It becomes a way to resist the increasingly popular call to “f**k your feelings” while establishing a habit of discourse rooted in the virtues of attentiveness and empathy. 

As such, it invites everyday citizens to make the personal act political and to pursue reform through coalition building as an alternative to the echo chambers of hate. To appreciate how the recovery of kindness in the public sphere—one act at a time—is the absolute essential prerequisite for reclaiming a politics of virtue, we first need to better appreciate the deeper reasons for the demise of decency. 

***

It might seem simplistic to argue that a more empathetic political process begins with being kind. What might happen if the majority of Americans figured out how to make kindness cool, decency a radical virtue, commonality common. Why might that then lead to a real reason to fear empathy?

Because kindness softens us into unity; it is in itself a commonality, and it leads us to other commonalities. Even Trump said after a meeting with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, “We agree on a lot more than I would have thought.” We tend to think that we are deeply polarized—as if we are on opposite end zones of a football field—when we are in fact on opposite 40-yard lines. The hateful rhetoric just makes us think that we’re further apart than we are. It instills ideologically the distance that, in Madison’s day, existed geographically. 

So overcome the distance, choose to be kind. It’s an act of rebellion. And the implications for human happiness and democratic politics are immense. Maybe even enough to save us. 

 Fascists think strongmen protect them. History proves them wrong, but they pay no attention to history. These types always think them special, that they are not restrained by the rules of human nature. Strength is not talking tough; it is born of action - against the strong. Bullying is the work of the weak. Strongmen never attack those they think are strong. Bullies despise democracy because the demos will not recognize the self-aggrandizement of the bully.

Democratic societies succeed because they are not reliant on the delusions of the bully.

 The lack of resilience in society has negative consequences beyond the financial impact. The armed forces cannot fulfill their mission for long without public support. It is resilience that enables the government to fulfill its mandate of guaranteeing external security. However, for a society to develop the willingness to become resilient, its government needs to communicate very clearly to them what is at stake. Democratic societies are threatened by hybrid warfare, and ultimately what is at stake is nothing less than the defense of the democratic form of government—or, to put it more dramatically: defending how we live and how we want to live.

What Happens if Russia Wins the War it Started in Ukraine? 

 sch 1/15

 

 

 

Days Gone By

 I have been working on my novel. Except for yesterday and today, I have been a homebody. The back has been a problem - except when I have been sitting. This makes waking up a chore; a painful event.

 Monday was the worst.  Tuesday was better - I made   a run to the grocery for Coke Zero. Cigarettes, too, I think. But I got chapters done.

Wednesday, I took a friend to the airport, and he lent me his car for the duration. On the way back, I stop and a Jack-in-the-Box for lunch. It was okay. When I got back here, I had been on the road for 4 hours. I napped. After 5:30 I started back on the novel.

I overslept this morning, but I got two more chapters done. I also made another grocery run and stopped at the bank. Back here, Paul S called me.  I went back to work on the novel until I fixed dinner.

And that brings me to now. I think I will work on the blog for the next hour. 

Tomorrow: the dentist, group, polygraph. 

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Sorry About The Hiatus

 It seems the past week has been an up and down one. 

Insomnia and then oversleeping. It has hit me again.

Christmas in the church under the Julian calendar.

Going nowhere but church, grocery, and the group session because I have been working on “Chasing Ashes”.

However, I did draft a post for my daily report; only I would find myself too tired to work on it. This is what I have collected this past week.

Another writer that prison gave me time to read was Iain M. Banks. Not heard of him? He was Scottish, didn't write YA dystopias, and none of his books were adapted into film, and so has probably escaped your attention. If you want to write science fiction, then he needs to be read - he creates a future civilization that does not feel like a retread of our current models.

For a second opinion: Our verdict on The Player of Games: Iain M. Banks is still a master (New Scientist).

But there is also so much to think about, from the nature of life in a utopia where there are no challenges left, to what it means to be a human in a universe where vast Minds take charge of everything. And that’s not to mention the joys of the plot – I was almost shouting at the page when Gurgeh was tempted into cheating at the game of Stricken by Mawhrin-Skel, and I was utterly swept up in the Azad games. This was a real win for me, and I’m going to go back and reread lots of other Iain M. Banks as a post-Christmas treat.

An inside look at college in Indiana Women’s Prison  

 I never saw many of Bardot's films when young, and when I came of age she had retired. I never understood the mystique. For me, the French actress that meant something to me is Catherine Deneuve. Even after reading, Brigitte Bardot was a zeitgeist-force and France’s most sensational export (The Guardian), I still do not understand what was the fuss.

 

Wednesday's rejection for “Coming Home”:

Thank you for entering the 46th "On The Premises" short story contest. We received 507 qualified entries. Of those entries, 10 made it to the final round of judging. We're sorry to have to inform you that "Coming Home" was not among them.

If you are interested in getting a critique of your entry, please go to https://onthepremises.com/getting-critiqued/ for instructions. Critiques cost $15 in US dollars.

Issue #46 will be published in February 2026 Our next contest, a mini-contest, will begin at the same time and will be announced in the February newsletter. Look for it, and keep reading and writing!

Sincerely,

The "On The Premises" editorial staff

www.OnThePremises.com

 Essay | 41 Numbered Paragraphs About Dementia and Fiction by Caleb Klaces - The London Magazine

Literary Hub » What Happens When Gen Z Encounters Catullus’s Filthiest Poem? Rachel DeWoskin

The pious John Milton, noting that virtue cannot be known without knowledge of its opposite, argued against censorship: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.”

Cloistered virtue, indeed! How can we know what’s virtuous, gentle and good, without reading, acknowledging, and parsing its opposite? And how can we stand up to corrosive and inhumane forces without naming them? It is an ignorant and unreasoned stance to argue that reading the adversary of virtue will set an example, trigger, or otherwise amplify bad behavior. To admit what hurts, agitates, and offends us in fact illuminates what is complicated and good in us. Catullus openly mocked not only his rivals, but also leaders, generals, and their allies. He hated Caesar’s friend Mamurra, a wealthy, corrupt engineer whose bourgeois degeneracy made him a tempting mark.

***

 Catullus’s vast capacity for love and sweetness is made all the more visible by his unflinching view of humankind; we get to measure the distance between what he hates and what he loves. Sometimes, as in 85, “Odi et Amo,” “I hate and love,” they are one and the same. And this is true of all of us. Poem 5 contains thousands upon thousands of kisses for his Lesbia; 51 has her laughter bringing him near death, his first sight of her rendering him voiceless with love.

Book banning is a movement against being or feeling alive, seeing with clarity what is already good and what can be made better. It is truth banning, and while it particularly silences vulnerable people, it also closes possibilities and voices for all of us, narrowing the narrative of our society and obstructing our views of what is essential to see.

 Literary Hub » The Publishing Industry is Capricious… Gamble on Yourself

Not that the publishing industry can’t or shouldn’t address the more general problem Kuznetsova highlights, which applies to this dictum, too. And I do think there is a fairly simple formula more conducive to giving the best literary art the best chance at commercial success: hire a diverse array of editors, pay them a living wage, and let them buy the books they like best. It would be great if someone tried this! But regardless, the only recourse for serious novelists is to stand by their work irrespective of market response, rejoicing in any commercial success for the sheer good luck that it is.

***

 If the contemporary institutions we might expect to reliably support high-quality work only do so haphazardly, I think there is another to which we might turn. A hypothetical institution, admittedly, but one that unfailingly supports the mindset I find most conducive to artistic productivity: your own house, turned into a museum after you die.

I am not being glib. Fixing your sights on a post-mortem house museum simultaneously incentivizes you to embrace the models, work ethic, timeframe, and material surroundings most conducive to creating the highest caliber art of which you are capable.

#50: Five for Them, One for Me, with Lori Rader-Day

5. WRECK YOUR HEART feels like a love letter to Chicago. You’re an Indiana native, but you’ve lived in Chicago for some years now, and Dahlia’s (and your own) love for the city feels palpable throughout. There’s an unexpected but very real sense of community in the book. Talk about how you wanted to portray the city in WRECK YOUR HEART, and what you wanted to spotlight.

Back to the story of how this book was written. I started it in 2020 as a writing challenge, I put it away never expecting to see it again, published my book Death at Greenway. Meanwhile, I got started on something else and sold that book on 50 pages. But almost immediately I realized I didn’t know if I could finish that book, at least right that moment. There was a tone to it I didn’t know if I could sustain—a fun, buoyant tone. I had I had just started treatment for aggressive breast cancer. So I poured my feelings about that into a different book, written quickly, and sold that instead. That was The Death of Us, a book I am very proud of but also realize is the darkest of all my books. Well, yeah. To recap: the pandemic, hardest book of my life (Greenway), then cancer.

All this to say, when I was facing cancer, writing and my writing community were the largest part of what kept me sane. Writing reminded me who I was, even when my brain was literally losing some cells and I couldn’t think straight. The mystery community was so generous and loving. 

Dreaming of writing your novel this year? Rip up all the rules! | Creative writing | The Guardian 

Literary Hub » Here Are Your Guides Through the Opaque World of Book Publishing

My Adventures as "Rosamond Smith"

Sara Paretsky - Bestselling Author and Creator of Private Eye V.I. Warshawski

Literary YardAndrey Platonov, The Forgotten Dream of the Revolution, Tora Lane

Literary criticism can suggest other avenues of inquiry, and Lane concludes on an intriguing perspective of Platonov’s place in today’s world as an author of relevance. Read together, her introduction and afterword endeavors to explain that relevance by posing the question—“Is it possible to reach an understanding of Communism in literature that is not communist literature?” Given the endless resurrection of socialism and its abject failure time and again as a viable form of social organization, it is hard to make a case for Platonov’s idealistic notions of a literary revolution ever evolving out of a decidedly aliterate culture.

In the end, Lane answers her own the question—”To the extent that the modern world in general and the realization of Communism in particular prefer the illuminated world of outer appearance, the nocturnal experience of shared existence in the Inner is also diminished or even extinguished. . . The problem with the myth of the Communist utopia, as Platonov tells it, is not the myth itself, but what happens when the myth purports to be real.”

Subjectivity Is A Thing In Publishing (Babbles from Scott Eagan )

Yes, we are very much trying our best to be rational and looking that things objectively and whether or not a book is marketable, but let's be honest, we are all still human. We all have our own likes and dislikes. There are simply times when we read a proposal and something just doesn't click with us. It is that simple. Does it mean the book is not marketable? No. Does it mean the book is poorly written? No. It just means, it isn't right for us. 

This is part of the reason why I am always pushing for you as authors to take the time to truly research those editors and agents. Find out their likes and dislikes. Don't just see if they acquire your genre, check to see what it is about that genre that they like and hate. 

***

You can even see this by looking at sites such as Publishers Marketplace and seeing who editors and agents are signing. You will see a pattern really fast and figure it out. 

My verdict – and votes – on the seven finalists for Europe’s Car of the Year (Irish Times)

An Askēsis of Epiphany Revisiting “Worship in a Secular Age”: Part One (Public Orthodoxy)

As prescient as Schmemann’s remarks may appear to us today, they were (and remain) inconvenient to those who would attempt to construct from them a programmatic response to secularism. Indeed, contemporary “anti-secularists” often fail to grasp the spirit and subtlety of Schmemann’s critique and miss that it is, in fact, a penetrating self-critique of Christianity: defended solely as an institution of moral order; confined to the formal rites of the Church; wielded as a world-denying (yet deceivingly worldly) ideology. Above all, Schmemann urged Christians to treat secularism as a self-imposed and self-perpetuated tragedy: a scandalous, intergenerational failure to transmit the life-giving and life-affirming message that “the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Only this paradox and the Person it points to can provide the basis of an Orthodox Christian response to secularism—one that renounces every easy lapse into antagonistic ways of thinking and being and embraces instead the evangelical and incarnational work of witness. 

 Trump’s anti-globalism looks like old-school Yankee imperialism (Washington Post)

We are so screwed - at the mercy of an idiot with power and no morals:

In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said he didn’t see himself bound by international law. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he told the paper. He also explained that ownership of Greenland was “very important” from his perspective, “because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” He said he could be willing to sacrifice the NATO alliance for the sake of his expansionist desires

 Why Scotland lost its tongue (Englesberg Ideas)

There were two rejections that I have not yet put in here.

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