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.
I was there in May and I was shocked. You can see my photos of the place here.
There is something creepy about the decrepitude of the malls. Strangest may be that I was never one for malls - too many people milling around like cattle awaiting for the cute to open at the stockyard. Still, there is a loss of energy, jobs, companies that they seem to memorialize.
I would turn the Anderson Mall into a park for solar panels. Maybe Indianapolis will have a better idea.
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What was a teacher's college is now a business school.
The good news is that the United States already has a brilliant solution to this tension. It is called the First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, so long as it is not imposed on anyone. So, Islam, too, should be freely practiced, as long as it is not imposed on anyone.
The bad news, however, is that there are voices on the American right today who explicitly argue that while their own religion is, of course, protected by the First Amendment, Islam is not—because, they say, it is not merely a religion but a “political system” that will always seek to subvert, conquer, and subjugate everything else.
When this failed to materialize, the obvious corollary kicked in. That despite Du Bois’s pessimism around his perceived failures (about which Chad Williams has so piercingly written in recent years), and at first glance counter-intuitively, the First World War didn’t in fact end at all, and hasn’t ended yet. The continuity between a sense of time and place where with ‘no justice’ there would be ‘no peace’, connects past and present in this way in a depressingly obvious way. That there is also a sense in which wartime over environmental and ecological resources and capacities remains, seems to me another lasting lesson of the global intellectual history of wartime, alongside the resurgence of contemporary debates about data and information management, economic planning and the limits of libertarian approaches to markets and politics, and that one thing a serious and credible political theory and intellectual history should try to show, is how the liminal qualities of our present were shaped in ways that we ourselves are often not completely certain about.
I came to this question by way of the class the government requires of me. We were talking about cover versions one day. The instructor is a musician on the side; he has been a guitar player for 20 years. I mentioned Ike & Tina's version was a better version than The Beatles. He gave no indication of having heard their version. He agreed Tina's vocals had to add something to the song, but denied better musicianship. Now, I grew up with Playboy seeming to always name Paul McCartney the best bass player every year they did the best musicians of the year. I think John Lennon was a great rhythm player. George is a good guitarist and I have seen him in a video clip and admit he was outclassed the more the Sixties went on. I have heard drummers denigrate Ringo in favor of Keith Moon or John Bonham, and I disagree. Ringo does what a great drummer is supposed to do—keep the band together.
I decided the question could be answered by looking at which of the four were asked to play on other's records.
Almost no one asked Paul to play bass on their records, Harrison got bored with the music business, I think Lennon collaborating with Elton John and David Bowie needs attention, but The Beatle who people wanted playing on their records was Ringo.
Every decade there is a popular new translation. In the 1970s and ’80s, it would have been Richmond Lattimore’s, with its pared-down style, then considered closest to the Greek. And Robert Fagles’ gorgeous, lively translation, published in 1996, outdid Lattimore’s in beauty of language and poetic style. And now there is Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation, published last year, which was praised by Jorie Graham and Lee Child.
Of course seeing the film of The Odyssey – twice – has inspired me to reread the epic poem (Fagles’ translation). Before I make a few comments about Book 22, let me talk about the cast of the movie.
Short, to the point, and a post I agree with in the most part. I have not read The Odyssey since the movie came out, but i do not recall it leaving me tired.
I like how this documentary points out the difference between Hemingway as a man, a writer, and a myth.
Christina Anderson: “Man In Love” (The Yale Review), I have draft plays I need to get back to, but they worry me since I know so little about stage craft. Ms. Anderson annotates her play. I like the play. Her annotations give me ideas.
More Hemingway! I was disappointed by For Whom The Bells Toll when I read it again in my fifites. This podcast almost restored it for me.
The Sun’s Song, by contrast, has an all-male-identifying cast and consists of several acts and intervals. It alternates time periods and takes place across many different parts of the globe. It is the story of a father and a son, and it delves into questions of masculinity and intimacy; the wild earth and the wild in us; the politics of climate change; and the consequences of not dealing with your own hurt. I hope it will premiere in 2028, although it is still very much a work in progress. I am sharing an excerpt of the current draft below, along with annotations to provide insight into the play and my artistic decisions.
Again, I learned from the excerpts.
Not sure if I ever posted this style analysis of Hemingway and feeling too lazy to check myself.
I am not sure why Jonathan Frazen gets on my nerves. That he is about my age and from the Midwest and can damn well write, I ought to be less cautious about him. It goes back to The Corrections and a sense that he treated Midwesterners as bumpkins. That he's way smarter than I ever could have been might be in there anyway. All the same I read what I can about and by him, such as The Guardian's profile pieceJonathan Franzen: ‘It’s still mysterious to me that I was angry for so long’.
Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no! When he’s working on a scene, trying to capture a character or get the tone right, he’s not thinking in moral terms. “If you’re really engaged with that, it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul,” he says. “I don’t really care about bettering my soul. I care about getting it right,” he adds. And then, the reflexive edit: “Which is a pretty good ending line.”
A review of Library of America's Nineteenth Century short stories:
I know why I like Toni Morrison, another Midwesterner. She looks at America without blinking, without any sense of picking easy targets. Reading Tracing Shadows from Lapham’s Quarterly reinforces my bias.
That said, to pretend that just because an author was not racist, their character’s point of view or diction is not racialwould be just as much of a folly. In American literary criticism up to that point, Morrison reflected, “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference...Every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.” In other words, when it comes to the way race works in literature, denial and finger-pointing are equally childish.
Morrison’s posture was instead to treat race and racism as worthy of interest, but unworthy of debate. Eschewing the representation game of bewailing the absence or distorted presence of race in American literature, she told us: Look again! No need to destroy the canon. No need to deify it, either. Why not just read it? This begins with something as simple as the act of noticing.
But I have spent too much time with Indiana's history of racism.
Morrison’s reading of Moby Dick spilled beyond “Unspeakable Things, Unspoken.” In a 1990 interview about her argument, the journalist Bill Moyers declared to her, of the bestselling books on the eve of the Civil War: “Your people never show up in the novels of that time.” Morrison gently contested this, saying, “Well, they do. They show up...It’s in Melville, it’s everywhere in Poe.” These are aesthetic figures rather than three-dimensional characters: “getting a truly complex human black person in a book in this country in the nineteenth century was unlikely. Melville came probably very close with…classic complexities, but not real flesh-and-blood people.”
She raised a pattern in Moby Dick as an example of this complex symbolism: “He gets into bed with him in the very first scene. Ishmael goes to bed with Queequeg. Each one of those white people in Moby Dick has a black brother. They’re paired together. Fedallah is the shadow of Ahab. Queequeg is the shadow of Ishmael. They all have them, and they work together in tandem.” She explained that, “even though the realistic representation is not there, the information, subtextual information…is all self-reflexive, it’s all about the fabrication of a white male American.” This is one meaning of her title, which also appears as an uncanny refrain in her 1987 novel Beloved: “Unspeakable things unspoken. Always we are defining ourselves by the other.”
No kidding. My research project has brought home to me that liberty exists only in opposition to tyranny, including slavery. That it has no definition other than as dialectic.
In her brief analysis of Huckleberry Finn in Playing in the Dark, she castigates the way critics of Twain’s 1884 novel had thus far tended to “focus on its celebration of savvy innocence, at the same time voicing polite embarrassment over the symptomatic racial attitude it enforces.” Morrison, by contrast, never dismisses or defends the racism in that novel in her writings on it. Instead, she considers its aesthetic and ideological function—and its narrative one: “Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed...freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement.”
Lolita has never rested easily with me, a brilliantly written novel about characters I do not like, but the following has me seeing more that might make me more sympathethetic.
There is now a documentary about Salman Rushdie being almost killed. I offer you two reviews.
It is hard to say which time zone of the film is more viscerally shocking: the grisly footage of Rushdie being stitched and stapled back together in 2022, or the murderous hatred that roars out from news headlines in the months and years following the fatwa. In the US, the office of the Riverdale Press newspaper is firebombed after it runs an editorial about the book defending free expression; in Pakistan, six people are killed in riots; in Japan, a translator is stabbed to death; in Italy, another translator is stabbed in his home, while, in London, an effigy of a mutilated Rushdie is paraded through the streets by a furious crowd, some of whom declare on camera that nothing less than hanging will satisfy them
This is a simple but strong document about the importance of art as a way to comment on the world, the artist’s resilience in the face of the controversies their work might inspire, and the determination not to let violence be the answer to everything. These may seem like obvious concepts, but as this film clearly shows, we need constant reminders.
For something a little lighter, two videos about Dorthy L. Sayers. I think there is a bit of an oversell of her as neglected but then I am one of her fans.
Today, I went to Asian Market and to Ball Memorial. There was someone at the hospital's entryway asking if we had been exposed to measles. Not a good sign, I think.
Talked to DM for about an hour on the phone.
I have not been able to sleep well. I am still doing that tired but cannot sleep thing. I want to go out this evening but I am getting to the point where I cannot keep my eyes open. Is it me or the apartment? I felt peppier outside.
