Goofing

 Sorry to do this since The New Yorker is mostly behind a paywall, but it has consumed my reading lately.

Colson Whitehead’s Big Score - more than Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Lethem, or even Michael Chabon, I think Whitehead is the guy to read and think on what he is doing. Even if he hails from New York.

Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers

On Ogygia, Calypso makes Odysseus an extraordinary offer: if he will stay with her, she will grant him immortality and eternal youth. He refuses, choosing to return to his aging wife and to the certainty of death. If Socrates is the intellectual hero of the ancient world, and Jesus the spiritual hero, Odysseus—hardened, brutal, grief-struck, determined to reclaim his home—is the human hero, the whole man. He accepts death, and that’s one reason he remains essential to us. Nolan faces the challenge of creating a hero for the multiplexes who is ruthless and at times cruel. The audience faces the even greater challenge of accepting a man far more complicated than any superhero of recent years. What’s called for in successfully adapting the Odyssey is a great director and—how else can one put it?—a movie audience capable of courage. 

Consider Why The Odyssey has caused so much controversy. Why complain about a transgender actor or a black one? Who would they have cast? How would they have written the movie or directed it? The director made a choice. The writer made choices. The actors were selected to fit these choices. No one wants to complain about not casting Greeks? Why not complain about not casting real Cyclopes? Why not complain about using English and not Dorian Greek? Purity ultimately kills. Authenticity destroys creativity. Get over yourselves, start creating your own movies, and stop whining about how others do not create to your demands but to their own vision. That seems to be what we are lacking at this time in history: vision.

László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails. Another writer who fascinates me in how he writes and what he writes about. I did a long post earlier today about the Supergirl reviews. This seems to fit in with my obsessions, see what I wrote above about The Odyssey, too. I wonder if technology - especially social media - has made us smaller. Are our imaginations limited by timidity?

So, each novel has emerged from this obsession with perfecting your own prose. Your characters are also obsessives. They are men who seek sacred encounters with rare and beautiful objects: a manuscript, a garden, a whale skeleton, the music of Bach, the books in the New York Public Library, the Acropolis. Almost no one understands or sympathizes with these men. Often, they are destroyed. Some are mutilated. Some die once they realize that, as one character says, “The higher realm had disappeared from the human world.” What is the cost of being obsessed with beauty in the human world, a world of barbarism, where nothing is sacred?

Everything that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation to it, for it to hold our souls.

In my own books, this began to be one of the most important themes for me. I placed this dilemma onto my characters, so that I could tell the story of how they were doing in this question, and how they ended up failing. There is a single personal characteristic to my books: I place my own failures onto this or that character appearing in my novels, so that he is the one to suffer, because I don’t want to suffer anymore.

Are we at an especially low point in our relationship to beauty and an especially high point in our suffering?

There were several ages in human history, and now I’m only speaking of European civilization. From the European cultural point of view there was, here in the Mediterranean, a pragmatic culture which regarded the divine presence as self-evident. To perform a sacrifice in front of a temple so as to influence a god or goddess was not seen as any kind of problem. This kind of relationship made the lives of people living in ancient times unproblematic in terms of the dichotomy between the transcendent and the space of reality. Then, in European culture, Christianity appeared, a religion which made an astonishing discovery, namely, that the primary cause for everything—humans, animals, nature, fertility, the inanimate world, the universe, the cosmos—could be concentrated into one single point. This made everyone calm down, and immediately step into a space where there was no longer any border between the divine and the human real. With regards to human nature, the main question became how this recognition could be distributed throughout a given society, whether in Europe or in the Near East.

Of course, it was never ideal, and it didn’t mean that, as in a fairy tale, everyone could step into some kind of unproblematic relationship with the divine whenever they wanted. God provided a surface for the instance of beauty. This surface was the outward appearance of something, its given form. It was, to express it in very general terms, an entity that could be designated. And then the Renaissance came along, which was also strongly pragmatic, and there were many more possibilities for a so-called educated person, stepping away slightly from the mystical or transcendent relation, to reach a purely human beauty, a beauty created by human means. After the Baroque is when the problems continuously begin to occur. A world divested not of God but of the divine, this was certainly problematic for humankind. You could enjoy it, because the world exists even without God, and we human beings are capable of building whatever we want. Because, well, where are we now?

We’re in a disenchanted technical civilization.

Yet this current technical civilization is astonishingly genial, even with all of its enormous problems, because it appears to be almost unlimited. And since the human being is dangerous, therefore the technical civilization that he has created is also dangerous. But the relation to this border has fundamentally changed. Ever since the Enlightenment, let’s say, the modern human being does not require this relation to the border. Michelangelo is a fridge magnet now. He is a photograph I take as I stand in front of a statue by him. But he is still good. Other things are still good. The “Mona Lisa” is good, that magnificent temple so close to where we’re sitting is good. Everything is good; the main thing is that I can’t experience it.

If we were to ask—how many people are on the planet now, maybe eight billion?—if we were to ask five billion tourists if they knew something about the Acropolis, I think everybody in this room would be very sad. The answer would be, Yes, I saw the Acropolis, it was very beautiful, but let’s say that the sun was shining a lot that day, and I hardly saw anything of the Acropolis, because I didn’t bring my sunglasses. We can call this deterioration, but we could also describe it as something else: that the demands of the modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern person have changed. This person demands a life in which pleasure is granted the primary role. This is a very comfortable attitude for such a creature as man.

It can be imagined that this is not a negative process. The important thing is the beauty that Michelangelo created, or the beauty that was constructed by the genius or geniuses who made the Acropolis. But it is likely that there will be ever fewer of us who feel this way. Our relationship to the past has radically changed. A good half of it is misunderstood. Culture today, during this flowering of European populism, is nothing more than a kind of ridiculous right-wing or extreme-right-wing ideology of tradition, in which culture is noble, and makes me noble, and anyone unwilling to accept this becomes my enemy. A kind of emotional relation comes into being, but it is an absolutely negative emotional relation.

I’m very happy that I’m as old as I am, because I truly feel sorry for the ones who are young. I can lament a cultural age. Perhaps this isn’t even an age in that sense of the term, not in the sense that the Baroque or the Roman or the ancient Greek culture represented an age but, rather, the entire occurrence of human civilization to date represents one single epoch, and that is over. If it is really over, I’m very happy to lament over it.

*** 

 To me, this is unacceptable. The first movement of despair, when a person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background whatsoever. When a human being loses his sense of identity, there will be a need for so-called national identity and similarly idiotic ideas. Traditionalism, or clinging to it, is already a political category. Let it remain so, or, better yet, let it not play any role in the political sphere whatsoever, if only because it can only lead to enormous problems.

***

It is clear what rebellion in relation to the part means. In an unbearable situation, it becomes impossible to further withstand a certain state of affairs. Here we are speaking of some concrete matter, a given oppression, layoffs in a factory, a bad pension system, and so on. However, rebellion that relates to the whole gives birth to despair. Human existence senses that something impedes it from subsisting. This is like when a person is in complete darkness, and they see nothing, and they are afraid, they tremble, and they flail around. You must imagine an enormous darkness, where a person is searching for some kind of light, because this person is simply attempting to rebel against the darkness by trying to remedy their own state of despair, and this is the rebellion of the person’s whole mind, namely, it is when a person can no longer withstand their own self, and considers not only human life in a given situation to be unacceptable but also the entire world, the entirety of human civilization, the human condition, and attempts to somehow box themselves out of it. I do not wish any of you to experience this. I do not wish it for you, or for myself.  

I have not seen Doonesbury for maybe 30 years, maybe more, but it got its hooks in me when I was only 18. Now, there is a biography of TRudeau and a review of the biography from  Los Angeles Review of Books, The Deadline Dickens.

Weekly Readings #229 (06/22/26-06/28/26) - by John Pistelli is another provocation, I am never sure if I understand Pistelli's ideas and then I am not sure how to apply, but I still like butting my head against it all.

(3) 52 An Interview with Robert J. Sawyer & The Peking Man  

And that is how I goofed Sunday evening away. 

sch 6/28 

Doing Great in America

How can this be true?

Among countries for which we have food security data, the U.S. ranks 30th out of 37.

Our data for the right to food in the U.S. spans 2015 to 2023. The U.S. food score fell slightly during that period, from 81.9% to 81.1%. This means that as the U.S. got wealthier, Americans got hungrier.

Or this?

U.S. health scores have been relatively flat for a quarter century, rising from 79% in 2000 to a high of 82% in 2012. In 2023, it had receded to 80%. The rising scores were likely due to more Americans gaining health insurance following the Affordable Care Act’s rollout. The later decline was caused primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Or this?

The country has been losing ground on work and pay for 25 years. After accounting for how much richer the U.S. has grown, its score fell from about 62% in 2000 to 51% today. This reflects the growth in economic inequality, with the gains in wealth skewing toward the richest Americans.

Or this?

The U.S. scores a 76% on the overall right to education, placing it 20th among 38 OECD countries. It’s behind Japan and the U.K. but ahead of some peers, including Canada and Norway.

Americans are not as well off as people in peer nations – US safety net’s shortfalls show up in global data (The Conversation).

Why is this so? Maybe this is the answer: The American myth always came at someone’s expense. Now, it’s all but collapsed (The Guardian ). What that essay does not quite say is that MAGA is small-minded, small-souled, and mean-spirited, and Donald J. Trump is the hairball they have spewed forth into the world.

sch  

 

 

 

 

Let's Go Crazy: Supergirl

 I finished a draft for a story - after five hurs - ate breakfast around 2:30 pm and instead of cleaning up and doing some housework, I looked at Google News. More press for Supergirl. I have already made my point that it is an ok movie. But what as bothered me is the reaction to it. The reviews I find more interesting, maybe more than the movie which was more entertaining than mind-blowing.

'Supergirl' review: Let Milly Alcock party harder next time - Los Angeles Times

As usual, there’s a tyke in trouble: 13-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a fellow orphan with a ramrod disposition and a tidy brunet braid that gives away that her character is modeled on Hailee Steinfeld’s vengeful teenager in “True Grit.” Ruthye wants to hunt and kill the creep who murdered her family. Unlike Supergirl, the child thinks it’s healthier to exorcise — not imbibe — one’s heartache. The duo visit an Epstein-island-like planet of kidnapped breeding women where, in one of the script’s subtler sick horrors, the locals imply that pubescent Ruthye is more valuable than aged 23-year-old Supergirl. (Although some of the caged extras appear to be as ancient as 30.) It’s yet another swiped idea, this one from “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for a minor story beat that’s unnecessary. Still, Alcock reacts with exactly the right note of disdain: “Cool,” she croaks. ‘Nuff said.

The True Grit copy ends quick and conclusively, unless you've never read the book or watched both movies. Supergirl is not Rooster Cogburn, nor is Ruthye Mattie Ross from Yell County. Mattie Ross has more to do with Lobo. Only when Supergirl rises to the occasion of being Supergirl is there anything like the arc Charles Portis gave to Rooster Cogburn. It might also be noted what happened to Rooster after the main events of the novel - he reverted to his low-born, anti-social ways. Supergirl gives the hope that Kara has found her way back to people. Not that script makes this clear. Still, it is different from any other superhero movie I can think of right now.

Still, the production design has imaginatively askew takes on the mundane: gridded jail cells, plodding space buses, clumsy oxygen suits that shimmy on with a satisfying squeak. When Supergirl makes a pit stop at a celestial convenience store, she samples a snack that I’m forced to call poop-corn. If “Supergirl” sells enough of it, hopefully Alcock can rampage again in a more confident sequel that truly cuts loose.

That might be the most fun scene. What the movie bodes for the DC's cosmic stories may be most interesting. More about that below.

'Supergirl' Review: Super-Horrendous

James Gunn, along with Peter Safran, knew that he was launching DC Studios right into the teeth of superhero fatigue. Gunn got asked a lot about how he was going to avoid that, and the key thing he said was: We’re not going into production on any movie until the script we have is rock-solid. For that was the overriding problem with the superhero overkill era: The films had lousy scripts, which were used as grids on which to layer the visual effects. Gunn was right to want to take the comic-book genre back to well-structured screenwriting basics. So what has he done in his second DC outing? He’s given us a comic-book movie with the worst script I can remember. (It’s by Ana Nogueira.)

What about all those Sony Spider-verse movies that bombed? No, the script is not Citizen Kane; it is not Iron an; but neither is Superman v. Batman. 

I’ve never bought the idea that movies were ruined by “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” but watching “Supergirl” you might well think that they were ruined by the Mos Eisley Cantina scene of “Star Wars.” Because that seems to be the movie’s dominant influence. One set piece after another features rubbery creatures with heads like melting anvils and tentacles coming out of strange places, as if this, after 50 years, was still charming and awesome. (Industrial Light & Magic is one of the film’s visual-effects houses.) Actually, the cantina scene was corny even back then, and creatures like these now make you feel trapped in a Muppet movie.

Alien came to mind along with Star Wars. Maybe even more in the atmosphere. Before Alien, the science fiction aesthetic was sterile cleanliness; after, it had a lived-in messiness of use and decay. That DC has a multi-species universe the creature designs had to follow the cantina scene's multitude of designs. Frankly, this felt like the greatest stretch of imagination in the movie.

'Supergirl' Review -  Milly Alcock Rises Above Poor DCU Growing Pains

Pulling from Woman of Tomorrow was a striking choice for a film adaptation, showing audiences a different interpretation of Supergirl than they might be familiar with and providing a unique foil to Corenswet’s boy-scout Superman. It’s genuinely refreshing to see this version of Kara on screen, as Supergirl is bravely uninterested in toning down her flaws and eccentricities. Yet, Kara is still a lovable character, and Milly Alcock slips so comfortably into the role. Alcock gives Kara pathos and a razor-sharp edge that carries the entire movie, sometimes even doing the heavy emotional lifting that the writing and directing fail to deliver. I hope to see Alcock shine in a film more worthy of her talents in the future.

This might be the best criticism I have seen; it runs through several reviews. Is it because our society has gotten so misogynistic? Did the men start crying and booing when Ripley killed the alien in Aliens?

Is this a cool neo-space western? Is this a grounded character study? Is it a flashy space opera? Supergirl never seems to commit to anything. Ana Nogueira‘s script prefers to sheepishly flirt with all these tones rather than balancing them. The main conflict of Supergirl also feels strangely disconnected from Kara herself. Notably, Captain Marvel (2019) had a similar problem, where all the most compelling character development occurred in flashbacks. It’s not that these heroines are hollow; it’s just that we rarely see them make choices that shape who they are in the present storylines of their films. Honestly, it’s maddening how little the creatives learned from the past mistakes of other female-driven comic book movies.

***

It’s far from the genre’s worst, especially within the standards of what the DC franchise has delivered in the past, but Supergirl deeply suffers from not knowing how to build a film around its iconic heroine.

★ ★ ½

I Wanted to Like ‘Supergirl’ (And I Kind of Did, Sort Of) 

Alcock successfully sells a character who doesn’t know what home is and identifies with nowhere, using copious amounts of alcohol to dull the pain of her past. However, the film fluctuates wildly on whether it wants to be an origin story, making an emotional connection with Kara difficult. The narrative expects the audience to understand her trauma without elaborating on it early on, meaning she initially just comes across as a drunk trying to be funny.

***

That disconnect is exactly why the viewing experience is so frustrating. There are so many noteworthy moments buried inside a disjointed narrative that it creates a constant push-and-pull; I didn’t know whether to lean in or pull away. The relationship between Supergirl and Ruthye lacks chemistry – it feels quite tame – but the dynamic of Kara stepping into a “big sister” role to warn Ruthye that revenge yields no rewards works beautifully in the film’s key moments. Kara’s evolution into the hero we expect is genuinely impressive when it finally arrives, especially since she spends most of the film out of costume. And the brief cameos from Superman himself are wholesome enough to conjure a smile – a sweet reminder of a cousin looking out for family.

The foundation of a great story was there, and the character development was exactly what the audience needed; it just required tighter direction. To prove the point, Jason Momoa pops up as the chaotic-neutral Lobo. The cameo is designed to provide comedic chaos, but it feels incredibly tame. Instead of landing jokes, it just feels like Momoa throwing his weight around and shouting his lines, with little consideration for comedic timing or whether the character fits the scene.

I never had any interest in the character or great expectation of the movie, but Alcok's performance is what stitches the script together. 

Supergirl Review: Unnecessary Tie-Ins & Incomprehensible Action

Much like the Levity Test for awards hopefuls, there’s a similar test I have for action movies and sci-fi blockbusters — not a test, per se, but more like a common marker of baseline competence. I call it the “who is doing what and where” test.

That’s not a demand for more exposition, or that filmmakers pre-fill every “plot hole” and explain away all the movie magic. It’s simply a plea for coherent visual design. I tend to be invested in the action of an action-based movie when I can tell who is doing what and where. Without that, it turns into a montage of blurs and reaction shots that kills all suspense. Rather than being on the ride, I’m simply biding time between outcomes. Remember when filmmakers could convey a basic sense of spatial awareness? We used to be a proper country.

Take the Harrier Jet sequence in True Lies. The whole thing is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. It’s goofy, to the point that you wonder how much is even meant to be taken “seriously,” and some of the effects even look kind of chintzy to modern eyes. But there isn’t a single second of it that leaves you wondering who is doing what and where. Whatever you think of the ride, you’re on it. James Cameron builds suspense and wonder through carefully constructed frames, allowing this big, sort of idiotic cat-and-mouse game played with hovering fighter jet to work as both drama and slapstick. “Believable?” Maybe. But really who cares, it’s gorgeous.

Interesting test. I like it. I also like how he nails a few more references, potentially even more pertinent than True Grit.

The only way to save the dog from a protracted, painful death is to find Krem and retrieve the antidote. Kara has three days to do so (the relativity of time on different planets is never addressed, perhaps mercifully so). And so, even if Kara is ambivalent about helping Ruthye, she has to find Krem in order to help her dog. Popeye, John Wick, Princess Bride… what was I saying about obvious influences?

On the one hand, it’s rather refreshing that the James Gunn-era of DC has, on some level, solved the stakes-inflation problem that bedeviled the MCU. Where every plot was about a big bad planning to destroy the Earth, all life in the universe, the very fabric of reality, etc (exhausting!). They solved it largely by ripping references from other movies, sure, but still: an improvement. That being said, if you’re going to make a movie that rests on a mission to save a cute dog, maybe just use a real dog? There’s a limit to how much I can care about a “dog” rendered in mediocre CG. I suppose I can understand the need for CG when the dog is doing super stuff, but not when he spends most of the movie lying sick on a table or doing regular dog things. Could we not find a real dog? It’s not like there’s a shortage of real dogs in the world.

Good point about the dog, too. Probably a problem of finding the right-looking dog. Even more in making the point about raising stakes. I see it as a coming of age story for Kara, not the usual beat up on the villain superhero story. Still the script muddles that point, but I am willing to give them points for making the try. 

'Supergirl' is a grim, violent, and depressing superhero movie

When we first meet the titular Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, she's a sad, lonely, drunk who spends her days hungover and her nights drinking heavily with her dog. She's taken off to a planet with a red sun, which removes her powers and makes her vulnerable like an ordinary human, so that she can feel the effects of booze. She abuses it to avoid her real feelings of anger and abandonment stemming from deep childhood trauma and a sense of parental abandonment that the film slowly reveals. 

If that isn't bright and cheery enough, she quickly gets caught up in a young girl's quest to find the Brigands—leather-and-spikes-wearing space raiders who murdered the girl's mother, father, and brother in front of her, in one of the movie's two (!) separate on-screen family massacres. It turns out that the Brigands are essentially an intergalactic rape and sex trafficking gang who make a practice of abducting, imprisoning, and sexually assaulting young women, whom they call brides, to perpetuate their all-male society. 

Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and Cruella), the movie is tinged with the sort of Heavy Metal-esque trippy pulp weirdness that Gunn is known for, but it comes across as forced and tonally at odds with its hero. The whole thing plays like a fourth-rate Mad Max ripoff, but without the pedal-to-the-metal action sequences or the single-minded vengeful fury. It's not fun. It's barely even righteous. It's just miserable. At one point, Supergirl flat-out murders a guy by pushing a giant sword through his neck. Somehow, I suspect even Zack Snyder would be appalled. 

Which makes me think it did not fit the reviewer's expectations rather than finding any good in what was on the screen. 

Review: “Supergirl” is Perfectly Fine, Which is a Little Disappointing - Blog - The Film Experience

It's not like the film does anything wrong, it's just slight. I love not having a plot hinge on universe-changing implications, but this film just establishes the Supergirl character enough to lead to other stories. Table-setting is always a part of the deal with these connected universe stories, but it's surrounded by such low stakes and forgettable characters, it's hard to care...

None of this is the fault of Milly Alcock, who gives her all to the character of Kara Zor-El/Supergirl. Any characterization of hers is lush, full, charismatic, and welcome. At the same time, despite making a Supergirl film, the filmmakers go out of their way to act like you should care about the Brigands, Kryptonian backstory, and the logistics of red, yellow, and green suns. It's a very busy film for essentially a plot that contains two simple story elements.

***

More than anything, Supergirl is ultimately forgettable. There isn't much to hang your hat on, though I was mildly entertained. It's a terrible middle ground to be when you put this much money and effort into a large-scale universe. It's an underwhelming start for the character, despite Milly Alcock's best efforts.

Grade: B-/C+

Supergirl Should Be Ashamed of Itself - Reactor for an all out demolishing of the movie.

I find myself agreeing with the grades given more than some of the written commentary. But I come back to my main question of late: by what standards are we judging and can those standards survive judgment?

sch 6/28 

I finished my forays into Supergirl with this video that does a better job than most of the above review of distinguishing between the movie-in-and-of-itself and the novel-as-part-of-a-series. I will admit, grudgingly, there is an aesthetic to the series, but I remain convinced it is it the financial that overtops the aesthetic. YMMV.

 sch 6/30

   

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

  

 

  

Monopoly Is Not A Good Thing

 I have been surprised by the talk of fighting monoplies popping up of late.

 The Important Missing Word That Discredits the Centrists’ New Letter ( The New Republic)

Ah, but that last one … and here we return to the Suozzi letter. It sings the praises of competition. Great. I’m all for it. But what force today in the United States is crushing competition? It’s not the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s not the government. It’s not Zohran Mamdani.

It’s the billionaire class, or “the Epstein class,” if you prefer Jon Ossoff’s acerbic locution. You call yourself a capitalist, Tom Suozzi? Well, monopoly is the most grotesque perversion of capitalism that exists. There’s a reason Adam Smith hated monopolies. Centrist Democrats should familiarize themselves with that history, if they don’t know it.

Before that I listened to this interesting interview about monopoly and privacy. I got a shock that the Paramount-WB merger will leave the company in $80 billion worth of debt. They shackling themselves for what purpose?

sch 6:17 AM

Victims of Status - What I Don't Get about The Manosphere

Out of my many sins neither playing the victim nor blaming others for my lack of success can be counted. Blaming myself, punishing myself for my errors were to the point of encouraging self destruction. 

So I read things like Mitch Brown's Angry and lonely after my marriage ended, I came dangerously close to embracing the manosphere (The Guardian) to understand what is not part of me.

The feeling of abandonment is my strongest memory from that time. My world became tiny and that’s where my dependence on the online world grew. None of the content I was consuming was overtly harmful; I wasn’t looking for dating advice or tips for the gym. I understand now that it was the subtle thread of misogyny that wove its way through the content fed to me by the algorithm. I watched videos of people criticising feminist voices like Abbie Chatfield and found myself agreeing with them. My political beliefs started to change. When things fell apart at work, I blamed everyone but myself. It felt like the world was out to get me, that I was being punished for being a man. I was angry, lonely and stuck in a cycle of victimhood. The content told me someone else was to blame and I believed it. 

Misogyny affected me in high school. Girls did not like me, and I had a bad habit of falling in love. But I finally got lucky, I found someone loved or close enough to salve my heart. The old bluesmen were right: the ain't nothing like a woman. 

That I would later attract crazy women, maybe always did according to my father, was not always a bad thing. 

 Crazy is not always a perjorative.

I see the danger of these online voices for young men and I understand the lure of victimhood, the attraction of blaming external forces for your own suffering. But it’s not real. There is a quote attributed to film producer Franklin Leonard: “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. It’s not.” I understand that for a lot of men, who perhaps don’t feel particularly privileged beyond the fact of their gender, this can be a difficult idea to understand.

But rather than shaming these men, we need to sit alongside them, understand their pains and frustrations, and guide them to take accountability for their own lives, happiness and impact on others. I am lucky to have had two women who did this for me. It is so often women and gender-diverse people doing this work, the groups most likely to be harmed by men’s behaviour. As a man and a father, I believe it is now my responsibility to model this for the men and boys in my life. And that starts with these conversations, as shameful and uncomfortable as they can be, about how men can end up in these spaces in the first place and how they can get out.

What a would where such children masquerade as men. Where whiners hold high office.

 

I was taught the world owed me nothing, you 've got to make your own way. What has changed?
 

Find the worth in yourself, not in something stupid like status. This is a democracy, not an aristocracy. Doing gets you further than being.

Brush your teeth, learn to make women laugh, do not think you deserve a damn thing from them, and then you might just get lucky. 

 sch 6/27

 

Heat Advisory Without Air Conditioning

 Oh, boy.

I went to the hospital to check on whether there was paperwork I needed for the pre-op. Also, I paid a bill. Then I decided to run up to Enterprise to get a car. No car. So, I ate at Burger King. I think for the first time since I got home.

I went out about 9 and got back home around noon, to a steam room. I had put in a repair order for the air conditioning on Sunday. No one had come. Why not I found out later.

A bath to make the heat and humidity tolerable. 

Then it was time to head back to Enterprise. I got a little Nissan, then off to the property management company. I did not want the car towed. While there, I found out the work order had been cancelled. That got fixed. 

I did a little drive around Muncie, ending up at the west side Payless. The car had air conditioning. 

That got me back here around 6:30. Mierable, I must remember not to eat solid food. And the closeness of my rooms did not help. I cannot remember what I did after 8:45. Then, too, I am not sure what I did before!

I could not sleep, I have been up for three hours now. I went out for smokes and RC Cola. The car had air conditioning, remember? Strange how quiet the town is. I do not think there are any all-night restaurants. It seems I was told the bars close around midnight now. Little traffic, but it is probably safer traffic than before I went away. I do not know how much of the change is due to things like COVID-19, but I think the town is getting old like I am. 

Early Migration to Indiana (Before Railroads) goes back to this past weekend and I have not had time to add it on here. 

Same with “Copperheads in Indiana” Civil War Roundtable w/ Author Nancy Baxter:

  

And what I am trying to do:

 sch

Writing Updates: Craft Articles & My Submissions

 I spent most of yesterday trying not to overheat and working on “After Making Landfall”. I did a couple of posts for publishign later in the week.

(3) The 53rd Try Was the Charm - by Marcia Yudkin persistence.

(3) There Are More than Five POVs - by Lincoln Michel  explains why I have been having trouble with POV as an idea because I have been focusing on who has the information and how it is conveyed. Five seems like my experience.

Look, I said this was going to be a pedantic and low-stakes post. But for fun I’m going to offer a different taxonomy of POV based more on storytelling than grammar. From a narrative perspective, I think there are three main questions as far as POV goes. 1) Information, aka what can the narrator know and convey to the reader. 2) Filtration, aka whose consciousness(es) is information filtered through. 3) Modulation, aka how is the narrator shaping information for the assumed listener.   

(3) The Writing Advice I’ll Never Give You - by Kristen Weber: Just read it.

(3) Lit Theory 101 | Voice, Consciousness & Distance 

Today we’re tackling the topic of VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.

And the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every failure in writing is a failure of voice.

This ties into the POV essay above. 

Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:

When you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from the agent who speaks.

A first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was — seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into sentences.

 ***

If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing against each other through the same syntax.

Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10, for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is, narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach from a human body.

So much for headhopping, sort of. Shifting without attribution seems to be headhopping.

 

Walter Mosley: “A Novel is Not a Machine” (Literary Hub). If you have not read Walter Mosely, you might overlook this. You're mistake twice over - not reading Mosely is the first.

All the readers of Dorn have interpretations that come from their histories, their particular intellects, and desires, and yearnings they might not be aware of. That’s the beauty of fiction; it is a continually mutating protoplasm in the minds of readers. This colorless, almost invisible ever transforming blob of reactions is the party. It is not a machine. It is not good or evil, bad or boring—it is a cry in the dark, a hope looking for a harbor, something that pretends to make sense but, in actuality, is much deeper than that.

And let’s not forget the original definition of the term, the word novel; it means that you’re about to encounter something original, different, unique. And so, when the critic in your newspaper, your classroom, when the editor in your mind, or of your book, tells you that your novel would make a poor coffee percolator (or potboiler) you tell them, thank you, because the novel you created (and that is recreated by each and every one of your readers) is an ever-transforming document that grants the power to evolve in the minds of the many. From Conan the Barbarian to Othello the written word has the potential for transformation no one can predict.

 

 6/28-29 submissions

Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art, Mudroom, The /tƐmz/ Review got “After Making Landfall”.

 Going out soon. Still no phone, and the heat advisory continues.

sch