Writer Related Items

Things put off as I worked through my research project. 

A Scottish hospital. A dying man. A fascist doctor. Will we listen? (The Herald)

We know how the story starts: on a bright cold day in April as the clocks are striking 13. We know how the story ends: in the basement of the ministry of love with a cage full of starving rats. And we probably feel like we know what the story means, what it’s saying, what it’s warning us about. Yet here we are, the story is happening again, and in a different way: in a hospital in Scotland, with a dying man, and a fascist doctor. It is unexpected.

I wonder, as it gets going, this brand new version, if it can have anything left to say, or at least anything surprising. Everyone has read the book, and everyone’s familiar with its dark and disturbing iconography: Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police. These are the phrases we use to talk about the state we’re in. They form the questions we ask. Has fiction become fact? In what ways is 2026 like 1984? How Orwellian are we really?

***

The solutions to all of this are harder to come up with – at one point, the Scottish doctor wonders what the way forward might be and Orwell shrugs and says “I don’t know” before coughing up more blood into his handkerchief. In a way, it’s the bleakest, most dystopian way to end a bleak and dystopian story, but the comfort for us, in the audience, is that, even though the parallels are there and they’re strong, Winston’s world is much, much worse than ours, which means there’s much more hope in our world too. It’s hard to watch at times, but perhaps this version of Orwell can remind us of the basics, the sums that make us. Such as two plus two equals four. And Winston’s final desperate statement of an un-disputable, un-editable fact: it takes two to be human.    

  10 Reasons Why We Didn't Accept Your Submission (Thin Skin) - read this and it might help you revise.

From Literary Hub: What Weimar Berlin’s Most Famous Plays Revealed About Artistic Freedom and What Latin American Literature Can Teach the Current Leaders of Latin America. The latter has more humor than the former, but both should widen your horizons.

A good refresher covering everything:  All about perspectives in novels  (Nathan Bransford)

Q: Can stories with unsavory characters find a home in today’s lit mag landscape?

Processing: How Nicholas Russell Wrote Observer

Asking Confidently and Advocating for Your Work

That can feel pushy at first. Self-centered. Why should someone want to read my writing? Answering this question is key to seeking your audience’s attention. No matter who you’re speaking to, let whomever is considering your work know quickly that your writing is worth their time. And tell them why, succinctly. In my experience, when I can confidently advocate for myself and my work, the reader—agent or editor—will be more willing to entertain the possibility that it IS worth their time.  

We Were the Mulvaneys  JCO writes about her novel.

Finally, I have to say of We Were the Mulvaneys that it’s the novel closest to my heart. Passages were transcribed in white heat, as in a fevered dream. I was scarcely inventing or imagining, only just “remembering.” My writing is so much about homesickness. The rural landscapes and waterways of upstate New York, where I was born and grew up on a small, not-very-prosperous farm north of Lockport. The sights, smells and texture of life in a small town. The intense emotions of high school life, ephemeral anxieties and joys. The wounds that can cut deep, and scar for years, or a lifetime. 

 Novelist Annie Dillard has died (NPR).

I read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while in prison. I thought it was wonderful and recommend it as being along the lines of a modern Walden.

Margaret Atwood: ‘God made the middle finger for a reason’ (London Times) - always witty, always worth listening to. 

“They don’t want Democrats being elected.” Wry insouciance vanishes, and raw exasperation with Americans enters her tone. “Yeah, so how about voting this time, instead of doing what you did with Hillary Clinton, because she wasn’t perfect enough? And how far did that get you, nincompoops?”

Atwood has no time for ideological purity or extremism on either left or right. “Defund the police was a really stupid idea,” she says. “An awful slogan. What did they think was going to replace it?” To many fans’ disappointment she won’t even call herself a feminist “because there’s too many different kinds, so what are we talking about?” I suspect she is bored with being asked about gender politics, and when I say so she looks relieved.

“I’m the human rights generation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made up for a very good reason, so that’s my point of reference. And if you want rights for women, you also have to have human rights for men.” She fixes a stare. “Radical idea, right? But it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. So what kind of gender politics am I interested in? I’m interested in the legal kind. I’m interested in whether or not you can have a credit card. Or whether or not you can have an abortion, or whether or not you can wear trousers to the office.”

***

Research suggests that people are having a lot less sex, I tell her. Last year, for example, a study by the Institute for Family Studies found that weekly sex between Americans aged 18-64 fell from 55 per cent in 1990 to 37 per cent in 2024. The number of 18 to 24-year-olds who’d had no sex at all in the previous year had doubled since 2010.

“That’s interesting. Well, silly old them. Enjoy it while you can, kids.”

She pauses, then volunteers languidly: “I still get letters from pervy people. Which I’m considering rather flattering, actually, at my age. And no, I am not going to put on black leather and high heels and walk all over your face. Dream on, wanker.”

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September Is Now August Part Two

Nothing is going on here. I have spent the last few days on my project, when I was supposed to be doing other things. I have left the apartment onlly to make it to the convenience store. Plenty of groceries in the apartment. The heat has been leading me back into the bad habit of napping. I did get through last week's mail.

I have talked to CC and KH. I need to call E and Paul S. DM did not return my call. 

News from Indiana I like to share. 

 The Indiana-Based Bourbon Brand That Outshines E.H. Taylor And Blanton's 

What is that mushroom cloud? 

 Navy installing advanced nuclear microreactor at Indiana command

The Pentagon announced Wednesday that the Navy is planning to install Indiana’s first advanced nuclear micro modular reactor at Naval Weapons Station Crane by September 2028.

The reactor’s deployment helps carry out President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order calling for the swift integration of nuclear power within the military, with a goal of having at least one working reactor on a military base by Sept. 30, 2028.

 Your 2026 Indianapolis fall theater preview

 A rejection arrived this week:

9/14 

Thank you for sending us "Agnes." We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but unfortunately this submission was not right for us.

If you decide to submit to us again, please wait at least six months from now before you do so.

Thank you for thinking of us, and—

Best wishes,

The Editors of Copper Nickel

Belated news from Anderson: Workers go on strike at Coca-Cola Consolidated in Anderson - WRTV 

 

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Trump Mania

 It is not Iran who is jacking up gas prices, it is Ukraine!

 Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel fuel, citing a global shortage 

Remember this: America's economy is booming & great! 

Trump urges rapid interest rate drop after Fed announces quarter point hike 

What alternate reality? 

How MAGA Bewildered Voters Into Its Alternate Reality 

Plenty of right-wing listeners use these shows as their primary news source. They’re not listening to Ben Shapiro for his “take” on news they already consumed elsewhere. They’re listening to Ben Shapiro to find out what’s happening in the world in the first place. It’s a replacement for mainstream media, not a supplement to it.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission.

sch 9/18 

 

Washington Irving; A Movie Review; Chuck Todd About 9/11

What I was doing on 9/11, other than reading and researching and working on my research project. 

Starting off with a film review: ‘Hope’ Review  by Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark). 

Washington Irving is making a slight comeback. Preparing to be Forgotten: On Philip Lopate’s “A Washington Irving Sketch Book”  (Cleveland Review of Books) is the second review I have seen of this book. I first knew of Washington Irving from the Authors game. Looking back, it was an antique game when I was a kid. My mother's mother gave it to us. It seems it was a game she had played when young. Anyway, I did read The Knickerbocker Stories while in prison. All I can say is that I prefer Irving to James Fenimore Cooper - Irving has more humor. As to this review:

Lopate’s A Washington Irving Sketch Book is the tribute of one minor writer to another. It’s a collection of essays examining individual facets of Irving’s life and work in roughly chronological order. Each of Irving’s major works is given a chapter, but so are disparate topics like his bachelorhood, his affinity for painters, his melancholy temperament, his forays into paraliterature, and the house he built in the Hudson Valley. I don’t call Phillip Lopate a “minor writer” in order to demean him. It’s a phrase he applies to Irving in this book: “I am not trying to promote Irving to the top levels of the American pantheon. I agree, Irving is a minor writer.” And it’s a phrase Lopate has applied to himself, for instance in an interview in Tablet Magazine in 2023: “I didn’t imagine [as a young person] being a successful ‘minor writer.’ I have my place in the culture, not a huge place, but it’s respectable.” He is known as a personal essayist and anthologist of personal essays. He considers Irving a model. So what makes them both minor writers? 

 The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey? (Los Angeles Review of Books). I tried reading Campbell while in prison. He was one of the few books I did not finish. There was something about his thesis or his writing that I found tedious. It is good to find my dissatisfaction is shared by others.

Like many tales of compulsion, Campbell’s Hero brings dangers to those who put their faith in it. The first is a serious misunderstanding of how myth works. Myths and traditional stories function in specific environments for reasons bounded by time and place. Common traits are interesting, but the differences — what we might call variations or multiforms — cannot be ignored.

The second is the existence of an ideal form in myth. How we talk about and choose to accept differences is important. Calling one version of a story a “variant” implies, wrongly, that there is an authoritative and original form. This is a top-down version of storytelling that often misses the significance of the differences themselves. Famous things we think we know about ancient myths are mere possibilities contingent on their time and place. In many stories, Medea did not kill her children. In a majority of tales, Oedipus had children with someone other than his mother.

The Monomyth is the ultimate example of this simplifying of narrative patterns. It reminds us in a way of the Greek myth of Procrustes, the criminal hotelier who cut guests up or stretched them out to fit the bed of his choosing. Campbell started with a thesis and a fictive metric and then cut global myths to fit his Odyssean bed.

Another challenge comes from what audiences know and expect. As defenders of Campbell will argue, much of what he suggests is meant to be allegorical. The hero’s journey is not supposed to be a simple narrative pattern; it is instead a psychological, even mystical, exploration of the self. But his language, which is derived from myth, is slippery — and due to its outsize influence it affects how people understand ancient traditions. Modern notions of the word “hero,” for example, assume essential goodness or imply selfless deeds on behalf of others. Ancient heroes and figures from myth are anything but essentially good. Within ancient myths, heroes are young people in their full strength; they are part of a generation before the “iron” age of modern humans, marking the transition from a time when gods and people shared the earth. They can also be exceptional figures who follow a pattern of withdrawal and return to their communities, suffering pain and inflicting suffering in turn.

 Twenty years after 9/11, Chuck Todd asks if we have harmed ourselves.

 sch 9/11

Competing For the End Of The World!

 Trump downplays the need to check AI development, second federal judge freezes Trump mail ballot order (AP News)

President Donald Trump told reporters Sunday that the United States is leading China in the development of AI. He added, “frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.” While Trump acknowledged the need for some regulation, he provided no specifics about potential rules. Read more. 

Er, what do we win? The ability to destroy humanity? This AI thing makes nukes look like a sorry excuse as a means for human extinction. After all, somewhere a human being decides to start a nuclear war. AI takes away human choice.

AI Is a Test of Our Maturity. *Gulp* (The Bulwark)

Mike Johnson says AI companies should ensure safety, not Congress 

Who then should ensure the safety of Americans? AI? It makes me wonder who is paying off whom.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that artificial intelligence developers, not Congress, bear responsibility for ensuring their products are safe and rejected a national moratorium on AI buildout during a Sept. 13 appearance on CNN's "State of the Union."

The Louisiana Republican said there was an "obvious corporate responsibility" but pointed to competition with China as a reason to keep Congress from imposing regulations.

"We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us, and that’s the challenge," Johnson said. "If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American."

The very people who designed this monster that cannot be controlled and are making big bucks from it are to be trusted with the safety of the country? 

 Think about it. The Republicans are blithely leading the charge into AI that may bring about the end of the species. No way not to see a vote for any Republican other than as an endorsement of irresponsibility and mass suicide.

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Saturday I Stopped At Eden But Blew Through Hope

I decided to go to the Columbus, Indiana Scottish Festival. CC and my niece had been invited to go along. CC was otherwise busy. I never heard from the niece confirming she would come up from Tennessee. DM had problems to deal with. But I wanted to get out of Muncie, so I rented a car.

 

Of course, I got a late start. It had been raining, and I do not think I ran out of rain until south of Greenfield. 

 

Pendleton had some sort of festival going on in the park and I byapssed that. My curiosity about the effects of the big flood was nothing compared to my reluctance to get caught in a mob before Columbus.

 

Eden from what used to be the Irving Materials office. There used to be trophies in this building, I saw them first more than 50 years ago. I was much older when I learned this was the headquarters for Irving Materials, a large provider of gravel and road building supplies. IMI is still around, but long gone are the trophies and this spot as its headquarters. 

 

Anyway, that is the center of Eden. This is me heading towards Greenfield. This would have been before 1 PM. A gray, lowering sky had me wondering if I had made the right choice, but my other choice being the Penrod Festival in Indianapolis would not have been any better.

Then I came into Greenfield:

 Where US 40 (The National Road) and State Road 9 meet, the government centers of Hancock County and Greenfield:

 The south side of Greenfield, away from the interstate and the north side's gauntlet of franchise restaurants and strip malls.

 Passing out of Greenfield, now in the land south of 40.

 Coming into Shelbyville:

 

I did not manage any photos here. I did not stop or get stopped by a red light. There are points here I would like to come back to check out. Not least what looks like some good fishing spots on Blue River here, 

Moving south, what is the chief feature of the Indiana landscape in Summer. 

After this, I passed through Hope, Indiana. Not a bad-looking little town, albeit not interesting enough for me to stop. I did call CC. She now wished she had come along. We made plans to go on another road trip together the following day.

I came to the end of State Road 9 and probably took a wrong turn here. On the other hand, is it a wrong turn if one doesn't turn? I wound up going out of my way to the south end of Columbus. Now, I had not been here in 25 years, and then not in this area. Quite commerical with all the usual suspects: Lowe's, Walmart, and franchise restaurants. All in all, I have to say Columbus looked better than I remembered. I had not seen its best when I was younger.

 I finally found myself downtown. This area I knew. The park at the headwaters of the East Fork of the White River was here; this was where the Festival had been held before the turn of the century, Here was the courthouse. For those who do not know of Columbus, it is known for its modern architecture. I managed a few shots to give you the flavor.

 I should admit here that I left without the address for the Scottish Festival. I drove through the park where there was something going on that looked far larger than the Scottish Festival had and without any Hibernian vibes. However, I got some views of the river and good access spots for fishing.

I left the park thinking I would go to Indianapolis. Then I saw a sign for the Scottish Festival and I finally reached the Bartholomew County Fairgrounds. For about fifteen minutes I was out of the car. I was very late and I missed the dog trials and who knows what else. What follows looks a little disappointing, so take that into account. The photos loaded here in reverse order of being taken.

I have no idea what this fellow was doing. I saw nothing about a reenactment of Bannockburn. 

A Morgan, a car I had never seen before. When I approached it, I thought it was an MG.

No dog trials but someone brought a Clydesdale.

I had been on the road for about 3 hours by now, There was a whisky tasting at 5 pm, but between me driving and not having any idea what to do for another 90 minutes, I saw no reason for staying. I could still make The Penrod Festival.

When passing through Garden City, Indiana, I was struck by how Hoosiers affix city to places that are little more than wide spots on the road and could disappear if there was a strong enough wind. 

My next stop was Edinburgh, Indiana. There were a few more wrong turns there, too.

The discount mall at I-65 and US 31 has grown up. It seems I was last there with T2, and that would be close to 30 years ago.

Edinburgh, Indiana, was the birthplace of my mother's father. I had never been there, pretty sure neither my mother or her sister had been either. As far as I know, no one has been here since my grandfather left home years before World War One.

It was a good-looking town; its principal industry used to be oak veneer. I have no real idea what that is  apart from having to do with wood and furniture. I wonder if it was this prosperous when my grandfather and his brothers left for the wider world. I think that was the end of the Downes family in the town.

An interesting house:

 

For some reason this historical marker differs from the official name.

The historical downtown, maybe it was known to my grandfather.

Evidence you never know what you might find in a small Indiana town; a Jaguar parked on the street.

For me, a marker that you know you are in southern Indiana, the JayC grocery store:

 

 And that was enough for me. I was getting tired and decided to go home. By the time I hit I-465 in Indianapolis all I wanted to do was get back home. I got back a little after 6 PM and was exhausted. I piddled with my obsession. Watched His and Hers on Netflix. Went to sleep. 

Church on Sunday, no word from CC, and I went home. I have to admit I could have gone nowhere else. I don't remember Kerouac getting so wiped out from his road trips, but then I am about 40 years older than he was. I slept for about 4 hours after church and still felt wiped out. I got enough energy up for a trip to Payless for dinner supplies. I spent the rest of the evening being a zombie in front of the computer.

I made it through one book review from The Guardian only because it was about Dianna Rigg: All About My Mother by Rachael Stirling review – a joyous love letter to Diana Rigg.

The car needs to go back, I have been at this post for about two hours. If only I could have gotten myself out of bed at six! Laundry needs done. I need to leave you with what is here.

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