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.
Another two days of not wanting to go out, to do anything. The best I did today was watch Bottle Shock. Go figure. Tomorrow must be different. Even this is just being done to get something done.
Catching up after a period of unwellness has left me without time for more analysis or comments on the following.
I have written much about Orhan Pamuk as I think he has something to say to America in our day and age, as an empire tottering on collapse and facing the costs of our history. Jeffrey Meyers's Symbolism in Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ (TheArticle) does not touch much on this aspect of Pamuk's fiction but does offer insights into Pamuk's skill as a novelist.
Ipek first agrees to escape with Ka, then changes her mind and decides to remain. When the snowstorm stops, Ka leaves Kars on the first train out of town. Liberated from the horrors but weeping about the loss of Ipek, he ends in a dark mood: “All the people on the platform disappeared into the thick-falling snow. As I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimneys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.” Like the snow in Mann and Joyce, Pamuk’s snow is symbolic, thematic and tragic.
Can you dismiss from your mind whatever project you’re on when you’re away from the typewriter?
HEMINGWAY
Of course. But it takes discipline to do it and this discipline is acquired. It has to be.
INTERVIEWER
Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole is finished?
HEMINGWAY
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.
INTERVIEWER
How much rewriting do you do?
HEMINGWAY
It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
INTERVIEWER
Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY
Getting the words right.
INTERVIEWER
Is it the rereading that gets the “juice” up?
HEMINGWAY
Re-reading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.
INTERVIEWER
But are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?
HEMINGWAY
Naturally. But if you stopped when you knew what would happen next, you can go on. As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
And I wanted to include this just for the hell of it:
INTERVIEWER
Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you have learned the most from?
HEMINGWAY
Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinier, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Gongora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.
I have been trying not to be distracted by politics; almost an impossibility. Worse is being distracted by digestive problems. I collected the following since roughly last Friday up to today. I meant to write more, but I needed what energy I had for my fiction.
Even so, it appears that Trumpism and its incipient fascism has come up against the fact you can fool all the people only part of the time.
It may be that I will finally get confirmation that Indiana wants change, what it lacks is a focus and faith to initiate that change.
“Whenever the news turns bad, this creep reaches for one name: mine,” Omar said in response to the president’s social media post. “So let’s make it crystal clear. My name has always been Ilhan Omar. Maybe you should focus on what your VP’s real name is,” Omar said on social media Friday.
“Any other implication is a flat-out lie,” Jackie Rogers, spokesperson for the congresswoman, told the Minnesota Star Tribune on Friday.
Blatant political attack showing the Trump people's inability to make a blatant political attack work.
Three days of gastritis dominating my days. No writing today, other than catching up on this blog. A run to the grocery. MNaybe get my voting done. It could be a full afternoon. The morning has been pretty empty: some reading, a trip to the convenience store, a lot of wishing the pain would subside. Insomnia again has left me listless.
It took all day to write 8 pages & 2293 words. I have got to leave the green curry alone as well as the red. Add to this laziness that has overtaken me these past few months.
All together 72 pages. Taking a break tomorrow. Too tired to work on it now and need to do some other things.
Mostly, I kept trying to catch up on the sleep I did not have the night before. I went to the convenience store.
Sunday:
Liturgy followed by a day of unsettled digestion. A little writing done, some emails deleted, and not much else.
Saturday:
Some writing done, a trip to the Farmer's Market, a convenience store trip, passed on going further from home.
“A Heart’s Judgment Judged” rejected
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.
At this time, the editors at Gordon Square Review have chosen not to publish "After Making Landfall" in the next available issue of Gordon Square Review.
While "After Making Landfall" was not selected for publication, please know that the editors carefully considered your piece.
Friday was the group class. I still need to write up my notes. Two rejections arrived. I binge-watched Lupin on Netflix. Great show, and it looks like there will be more. Omar Sy! And a rejection:
Thank you so much for submitting to the 2026 Boudin Novelette Chapbook Contest. We received an exciting and overwhelming amount of submissions. The finalists are currently under consideration with our final judge, Robert Olen Butler. We enjoyed Plain Tales From The Flatlands a great deal, but I'm sorry to report that it did not make it to our semi-final round.
We're honored that you chose to submit it to us. We have no doubt you'll find the perfect home for this piece, and hope you'll consider submitting other work to our bi-monthly online journal.
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.
