A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
We can say politicians are crooks. After all, they willsay what they think we want to hear to get elected.
I have thought for most of my life that at bottom politics are about morals, or as KH might say ethics, how we the citizens aim to treat one another.
Politicians are then only tools for realizing how we are live together.
It is not the personal behavior of the politicians that matters; it is not their ethics that should dictate how society functions; but it is our morals/ethical viewpoint that matters.
“The First Day of Feeling Free” rejected yesterday:
We're grateful to have had the chance to read your work, but it's not quite a fit for us this time.
Thanks so much for considering Variant Literature as a destination for your work, and for supporting the magazine. We hope for your success in finding a home for this work, and for all of your creative endeavors.
I worry this describes me: The more we rely on tech, the more we deskill our bodies (Aeon Essays). The PO thinks I am barricaded in my apartment when I am trying to get my writing done, but all that work keeps me pinned in a chair.
We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.
Algorithms that regurgitate patterns and recommendations can release us from the effort of exploration and disrupt the play and curiosity from which preferences are formed and understood.
Thankfully, I have nothing to do with social media.
When Kant remembered a book by David Hume he’d read years earlier, he was woken from what he called his ‘dogmatic slumber’. Kant had believed that pure reasoning could teach us every absolute truth about the world, but Hume had asked a question that that stumped him: what reason do we actually have to believe that the future will resemble the past? We may have seen the Sun rise a thousand times, but how do we know it will rise tomorrow? The belief that the future will resemble the past is, Hume argued, merely a kind of habit. Kant couldn’t answer Hume’s challenge and was silenced for a decade.
When Kant finally broke his silence with the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he offered a radical answer. We can know the world only as it appears to our minds, and that is where our science sits; the noumenal world – the Ding an sich (the ‘thing-in-itself’) – simply lies beyond our reach. Causation is not something we discover in the world, but something the mind supplies for experience to be coherent at all. When we watch a cat push a glass off a table, we don’t see a bare sequence of motions and then infer, by some metaphysical principle, that the push caused the fall. No: we see the push as causing the fall. The causal structure is not a hypothesis we add to the experience; it is part of how the experience comes to us in the first place. It is in our minds already.
So far, so good: Kant has met Hume’s challenge, and the workings of science are intelligible: we are structuring our experiences. But the work is not done, for there remains mathematics, the very language in which the sciences are framed. Hume was content that arithmetic and algebra are merely the unpacking of definitions; that proving a theorem is like unpacking a suitcase to find an outfit. Kant could not leave it there. If mathematics were only such unpacking, how could it underwrite the sciences? Either the sciences tell us nothing new about the world, or something has gone missing from the account.
I never got around to studying Kant. Let me confess to a distrust of German philosophy.
What Dummett took from Frege’s work on logic was that the problems of mathematics are, at heart, problems of language. Where things had gone wrong, he thought, was that Frege had grounded his account in a mind-independent notion of truth. ‘In this respect (and in this respect alone),’ Dummett wrote, ‘Frege’s new approach to logic was retrograde.’ For Frege, logic answered to truth: the rules were good because they preserved something already fixed. Dummett turned this around.
Following Wittgenstein’s later thinking, Dummett argued ‘a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding.’ And understanding, he insisted, must be manifestable: whatever a competent speaker knows in knowing what a sentence means must be something she can, in principle, display in her use of language. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991), Dummett gave this account of language, logic and reality its most sustained form. Our linguistic practices – the ways in which we are prepared to assert, justify and infer – determine logic. Logic, in turn, determines what counts as a fact, what counts as truth, and ultimately what we are entitled to regard as real.
Consider how a child learns the word ‘red’. We do not begin by telling her about light of a certain wavelength, or the metaphysics of colour properties, or the conditions that would make ‘this is red’ true. We point at things. We correct her when she calls a ripe tomato green; we approve when she calls a fire engine red. Over time, she comes to use the word as we do – and at that point, she understands it. There is no further fact, hidden behind the practice, in which her understanding consists. The understanding is the practice, competently exercised.
I am not smart enough to understand how this does not justify the pragmatism of William James:
The constitution of our language is our current practice for public discourse. As it is extensible in this way, what we claim as ‘true’ is not a fixed structure with a ceiling we are forever failing to reach, but something that can change. Gödel’s verdict never applied to mathematics, but only to some edition of the constitution. Within the Sandqvist system, we can attend to the extension systematically. Hilbert’s words outlive his programme: Wir werden wissen. We shall know. Not because the answers are waiting at the end of a ladder, but because truth goes exactly as far as we have built the rungs.
Cicero (and other Roman writers), influenced by Greek philosophical explorations of virtue, might sometimes attribute to women virtue of a more generalised kind. But the Latin term virtus never completely lost its association with masculinity. Noting the word’s derivation, Cicero observes in his treatise on the management of emotions, the Tusculan Disputations:
the proper virtue of a man is above all courage, whose particular functions are contempt for death and pain. We must exercise these qualities if we wish to be virtuous, indeed if we wish to be men.
Closely concerned with philosophical approaches to dealing with grief and the fear of death, this treatise is also about what it means to be a man and how manhood can be forged in – and by – challenging circumstances. ‘For surely virtue [virtus]gives sufficient to make us live bravely; if bravely, sufficient too to make us high-souled and in fact never appalled by any event and always undefeated,’ he asserts. Similar concerns surface in other works he wrote around this time: in On Ends, he stresses the importance of self-control – which he defines as avoiding behaviour that’s ‘unmanly’ – parum virile.
I don’t think of myself as a person who has strong feelings about surprise in general. I don’t hate or love surprise parties; I try to be adaptable when a day goes not as planned and surprises me, for better or worse. The only kind of surprise I actively avoid is the jumpscare, but that’s because I hate being scared. I’ve never been a reader who focuses on seeking out the new, the “original,” the thing I’ve never seen before, though I’m always pleased when I stumble across it. I tried to think of the most surprising book I’ve ever read, but it was harder than expected. I just don’t think about books that way. Does that mean the twistiest? The most shocking? The book with the most gasp-inducing moments? (I can do that: That scene in Code Name Verity, or the moment in The Saint of Bright Doors where something is understood about the narrator. I gasped, and turned back, and read both those scenes at least twice.)
I tend to think instead about whether a story showed me something cool, or looked at a familiar situation in a different way, or was structured intriguingly, or had characters that I wanted to understand. Did the writing sing? Did I want to crawl into the world and never come out?
Is newness surprise? If a book shows you something new, is that inherently surprising? Am I splitting hairs? Possible. Merriam-Webster’s third definition of surprise is “the feeling caused by something unexpected or unusual.” Perhaps my sense that “new thing” and “surprising thing” are not necessarily the same thing is not borne out by the dictionary.
But even more important since I think it can apply far beyond the practice of writing:
This is the thing about Davies’ remarks: I don’t think he’s really talking about fans. It’s too generous a word for people who have learned a detail from a leak and decided that they know how it’s all going to go and they can’t be wrong about it. I don’t prioritize surprise in the narratives I find interesting, but I do prioritize a capacity for surprise in myself. A capacity for surprise is a willingness to be wrong. A willingness to be wrong is, one one level, a willingness to find joy and delight and meaning where you didn’t expect it. On another level, it’s the only way I see to move through this world: to learn, and change, and keep doing both.
Yeah, think about that.
And back to technical issues, have a look at How to format a book manuscript(Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing).
Literary agents and the various professionals you will work with throughout the process will absolutely view your manuscript as a proxy for your overall digital fluency. Being bad with computers is not necessarily a total dealbreaker, but there are more demands on authors than ever, and it could hurt your chances.
There isn’t an ironclad industry standard format for manuscripts that’s as exacting as, say, a Chicago Manual of Style. Instead, there are a mix of “must haves” and “some people do these things.”
What I’ll cover in this post:
Why you shouldn’t mimic the formatting of a finished book
During our session, Katie did something unexpected: she shared her screen with me and opened a spreadsheet she started 25 years ago to track her submissions. She scrolled through quickly to show me every line that says “Rejected.” She laughs that her relationship with literary rejections is one of her longest-standing relationships.
For every prestigious acceptance she’s earned over the years, there are countless rejections that came before those. She shared a story about how she and her fiction-writer husband used to keep a “Rejections Jar” in grad school where they put a one-dollar bill in for every rejection they received. When the jar filled up, they took themselves out to dinner.
Since the whole idea of story subtext is that you’re not supposed to look at it in the direct light of day, writers often get the feeling they’re supposed to tiptoe around their own stories’ subtext, never looking at it.
This is exactly what you shouldn’t do.
It’s true you’re not going to give your readers a direct look at your subtext, but you absolutely must be thoroughly familiar with it. The subtext must exist—the iceberg must be under the water—if the story on top is going to have any chance of floating.
Create your story’s subtext deliberately. This requires an absolute understanding of your characters’ backstories, motivations, and goals, as well as a firm grip on the world around your characters. This doesn’t mean you have t0 know all of this right away; it may be something you discover as you uncover the shape of the story for yourself.
Point being, I’m a firm believer that people’s experiences of art—films, books, music, etc.—are as formative as any other experiences, and it’s precious and dishonest to pretend otherwise. In Fail Sons, specifically, Scott is a former magazine editor, and his midlife crisis is connected to his newfound feelings of obsolescence. It’s not just that he’s out of a career, but that he’s spent his adult life building a cultural knowledge base that seems to have been rendered worthless by things like recommendation algorithms. In the book, his constant cultural references tend to fall on indifferent ears, and I think that among many other things, Fail Sons contains a comic but earnest lament for a social language that’s quickly going extinct.
A rejection that came in on 10/14:
Thank you for sharing your work with us. We often have to turn down well-crafted writing, and while "The Unintended Consequences of Art" isn't quite right for our current needs, we appreciate the time and effort which goes into every submission we consider. Thank you for sending your work.
Yesterday, I had another of my days where I had no interest in going anywhere and I did not. Not to the grocery store or to Vespers. It carried over a bit to today, and I did not make make Matins.
I intend to do more this morning. I need to justify my existence somehow.
And a rejection:
Thank you for trusting the novel/novella reading team at Split/Lip Press with your book! We have received your submission and look forward to reviewing it over the next few months. We intend to reply to all manuscripts no later than December 15, 2026—if you have not received a response by 12/15/26, please check your spam filters before querying on the status of your manuscript since Submittable responses are sometimes mistakenly flagged as spam (and we don't want that!).
I had a doctor's appointment and then time running CC around. Right now, very dissatisfied with my choices for breakfast, so off to Payless. Protein is needed.
Trump’s posting may have already landed him in trouble. At a hearing Monday, the preservation group mounting the legal challenge against Trump’s federal takeover of the course introduced the president’s own Truth Social post as evidence that the government plans to proceed with renovations “IMMEDIATELY!”
Reyes hauled government officials back to her courtroom Monday to keep pressing them for information about who, exactly, was responsible for greenlighting the tree removal and other plans for the park.
“There is no universe in which all of this just coincidentally happened at the same time,” she said Monday. “There just isn’t.”
The judge said she didn’t know who to believe: the Justice Department and top parks officials, or the president of the United States.
“Do I believe the president of the United States, or do I believe you?” she said. “What do I do if I believe President Trump that there is an imminent closure?”
Reyes also wanted to know if any government lawyers wanted to come forward to say they agreed with Woodward’s attempts to knock her off the case. She later withdrew her request, saying that “we all have better things to spend our time on.”
Woodward told her the initial request was “inappropriate” and instructed Justice Department attorneys to ignore it.
“I’m the one who’s going to say how we move today,” Reyes fired back. “Not you.”
At the end of Monday’s seven-hour hearing, the judge said her family members have texted her “freaking out” over reporting that her office has received death threats because of the case.
“A federal judge is getting death threats over a golf course,” she said. “I really don’t think that’s what the founders envisioned.”
Trump is only in Kansas because the Republican Party is polling historically low, putting normally safe candidates in jeopardy thanks to his own bad economic policies and an ill-advised war he started. Republican Senator Roger Marshall was expected to coast to victory in the state, but is now polling neck and neck with Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton.
Trump’s fearmongering over the invented specter of riots is a desperate effort that isn’t likely to sway any voters on the fence, who can plainly see skyrocketing fuel prices and inflation with their own eyes. Besides, if Republicans lose big, which side of the American political divide, based on recent history, is more likely to violently protest?
But even assuming that those Democrats succeed at the polls, even recognizing that most of them are both competent and well-intentioned, there are systemic barriers that will prevent them from making the sorts of changes that most Americans want to see. I have frequently posted about those systemic flaws: gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Electoral College, the incredibly damaging Citizens United decision that has allowed people with money to dominate the voices of the electorate in general…There are others.
No surprise, then, that when I started paying attention to the race, the 5th District contest continued to languish in the leading handicappers’ Safe Republican categories. In recent days, the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and Inside Elections have moved the seat to Likely Republican; Sabato’s Crystal Ball still has it at Safe Republican. None of the three has it in a genuinely competitive category.
They may be right that there’s nothing to see here. Still, there have been signs of greater-than-expected ferment.
In the May 2026 primary, Spartz’s opponent, veteran Scott A. King, took 40% of the vote in a two-way race; King narrowly won the votes from Delaware County (Muncie) outright. That’s after a campaign when King was essentially an unknown and had few resources to work with.
In the general election, an internal poll from Democratic challenger, former state Sen. J.D. Ford, found Spartz with just a two-point lead. Spartz’s recent email communications have taken a more aggressive tone than one might expect from someone running a shoo-in race, including complaints about allegedly stolen yard signs and AI-generated attack ads against her. She’s even asked Ford for a debate, so far unsuccessfully — an unusual dynamic for a safe incumbent.
What I meant to do this morning I did not do. I am running down to the convenience store and then try to accomplish something before I meet CC tonight.
Some reading from last week until today as I try cleaning out my email and tabs.
Not an actress I paid much attention to for all of having watched On The Waterfront and North by Northwest multiple times:Eva Marie Saint’s stolen glances (Engelsberg ideas). R.I.P.
Amy Winehouse is someone I noticed but did not fall over while she was alive. I saw her on Jool Holland's show and was amazed by her voice and her hair (as in was it all hers?) Since her death, she seems another talent who could not take the attention and judgment of the more malicious. Amy Winehouse: the lost interview — ‘If I die tomorrow then cool’ from The Sunday Times brought back all those feelings and opinions.
The EI Podcast / Reinventing Disraeli may be for specific interests, but give it a shot. Disraeli was an interesting character in his time and the podcast gets to that.
A book review, one that disappoints me since I have read a little of John Boyne and found him readable, but this review seems like he had a good diea and lost the thread: The Weight of Angels by John Boyne review – what if Oscar Wilde had lived?(The Guardian). I can imagine several paths Wilde might have taken if he had lived, but anondyne is not what comes to mind.
It is unpopular to like Andrew Jackson. That Trump adores him only adds to the problem. Yet, there is something admirable in such a madman who does not deny his madness. That he threatened to hang John Calhoun balances many of his sins for me. He stood for a Western egalitarianism. Yes, that excluded anyone who was not white. He was and is not alone in this thinking. But remove the bigotry and there is a democratic spirit that broadened America. Dispense with the man; keep what was good for our use. Searching for Andrew Jackson (Fall 2026, Volume 71, Issue 4) n:134246
