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 am thinking these will be self-explanatory. Maybe changes in Indiana. So much money for providers and Hoosiers being kicked off Medicaid and SNAP.
There is voting at elections and then there is voting by moving one's feet - or in moving a country's gold. If the US isn't safe for the other country's gold, what is it for us?
Trump likes Putin. Putin is locked in a futile war with Ukraine. Is this why Trump has us in a futile war with Iran - Putin-envy?
I was kicked out of The Cup yesterday, banned from the place, by the owner who had his phone open and ready to the sheriff's website. His righteousness irritated me into a sentence I will not repeat here. Well, my sins and history are mine and I cannot be angry about that. What bothered me was that I am now out of the writing group. I sketched out my absence to one of the others. I expect never to hear from them again.
What puzzles me is how he came to jump on me. I do not recall seeing the fellow before. For a moment, I thought he might be someone I had forgotten. If I had seen him, this was our only time we spoke. Which leaves it possible that someone put him on me. Why anyone would do that makes no sense.
I napped and then fell back into my obsession with my research project. That had me running from 8 pm last night until 3 am.
When I woke around 7:30, I went back at it until after noon. I napped again. I decided it was time to update my record here. When I finish, back to the project.
For the life of me I cannot recall Tuesday.
Nothing new submitted, but there were rejections.
9/10: “After Making Landfall”
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9/8
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Excessive heat and an ear infection could be my excuses. They were real, debilitating, inhibiting a range of actions. I had an incident last Sunday that still bothers me where I almost fainted. It left me light-headed and shaken through Monday.
But the truth is, I got caught up in an obsession. I worked on my research project until I wanted to write nothing more. I blistered my eyes with articles and editing my own work. Why is it that creating footnotes and translating information is both more tiring and less than writing fiction? Fiction feels like painting with sweeping brush strokes and then filling them with details. Writing this article is more like taking tiles to make a mosaic - finding a piece and then aligning it to fit other pieces.
What I had at the end of the week were notes for a supervised release post and nothing more.
I do not seem to recall when the heat advisory started this week. Certainly on Wednesday, but maybe Tuesday.
When Tuesday came, I made enough progress that I decided to treat myself to (finally) seeing The Odyssey. Paying my light bill only strengthened my resolve to see the movie. Using someone else's air conditioning seemed like a very good idea.
Nolan wrote and directed a great movie. Not a perfect movie, though. The criticisms about Calypso are spot on - never have I seen Charlize Theron reduced to a cipher; worse, a sexless, charmless cipher. Yes, there is no sex as in the poem; also, there is not much of the erotic. Yes, Pattinson excels as the villain. What has gone unmentioned, or unseen by me, has been anything complimenting the scenes of Odysseus and Penelope. To them is one the scene of passion. Anne Hathaway is a Penelope that matches the wits of her Odysseus. For all of Elon Musk and the online wankers complaining of Lupita Nyong'o's casting, I have been unable to imagine another actress in the parts she plays. Yes, she has few lines as Helen, but what she does have is devasting. More importantly, as Helen, is her face. No, she has power in her roles that I cannot imagine another pulling off with words, let alone her silence. My biggest surprise was Matt Damon. In my memory are Kirk Douglas and Armand Assante, both more in my mind the adventuring, wily Odsysseus of my imagination. Damon portrays a king with responsibilities to his men; who uses his wits in service to his responsibilities rather than for mere glory. Lastly, the scenes with Circe and Osysseus understate their power and importance.
I suspect it will win Best Cinematography just for the madness of filming directly on Imax cameras. The only competition should be the next installment of Dune.
It should win Best Adapted Screenplay, depending again on the forthcoming Dune.
Nolan should get Best Director for holding its scope together. I prefer Olive Wilde for The Invite; she did more with less, but that will probably be why she will not be in the running. Denis Villeneuve will then be the one to watch for.
And it will be the Best Picture winner.
Wednesday, I made the writer's group. That went well. I think I also made a trip to Walmart.
Thursday back to research and putting together that manuscript and enduring the heat and humidity. I think I finished watching Graveyard on Netflix. It is a Turkish police show that has finished its second season. It is a sort of Turkish Law and Order: SVU. Although I think that lessens Graveyard. It has none of the righteous melodrama of SVU. The social critique of Graveyard actually hits harder by being less overt. A scene between two fathers with one talking about bringing up his son in a world with online hate towards women stays in my mind. Oddly, it also brought to mind The Closer/Major Crimes for all it lacks in the humor of those shows. It is also a workplace drama where private lives often intrude. Last, but not least, its production values and direction are better than what we get on our cop shows.
Friday was the group and shopping at Payless. Nothing much else was accomplished that day besides small work done on the project. I started the second season of Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen. This I finished on Saturday. I am not sure what Ritchie is doing with this; it feels different from what he has done before. He has not been one for paying attention to monsters.
Saturday, I indulged in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I have seen some headlines criticizing this season. I have not taken the time to listen to them. It seems to me the show has not the usual sanctimony of Star Trek. It also seems to be establishing the future in small ways. Not so much in terms of plot but in character. Back to the project, putting off a trip to Payless of milk and disilled water. The things I had not enough hands for on Friday.
Sunday was church. A wonderful time, a settling of the spirit. I had thought I had polished off one section only to realize as I was closing the door to leave that I had not. No, that came after church.
Today, it was up early, computer troubles, dealing with the ear infection, and finishing this post. I have a table to put together and a kitchen to clean. So this is the end of this report. What follows are the things collected during the past week that were supposed to have been published before today.
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My youngest nephew when we last spoke of the Democrats as socialists, and he was having no part of them. He, like his mother, is a Trumper. And now Trump is calling Democrats Communists. I wonder if that old world still holds many in its superstitious awe. Then I consider my youngest nephew. I wonder if he considers Trump's own warming to socialism.
Starting with Trump’s
surprise moves to take a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and then a 10
percent share in Intel more than a year ago, the administration is
approaching $30 billion in equity stakes, warrants or similar plans in
U.S. companies by most estimates, a fairly radical departure from
orthodoxy outside of times of financial crisis — like the massive
government bailouts of 2008-2009 — or world war.
That’s not counting some international arrangements, like the Trump administration’s Aug. 28 announcement that it would take a stake in the Venezuelan oil industry, which it said will be engineered by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.
Todd Tucker, the group’s director of industrial and trade policy, says that Trump’s
early move to demand some corporate governance power in U.S. Steel amid
its takeover by Nippon Steel – not an equity stake, but still a highly
unusual degree of influence in a company – was “pretty ingenious” and
mirrored concepts that had been debated in the early days of the Biden
administration, and in proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Decades ago, a friend of mine who was a Marine captain often talked about the Turks and the Israeli armies as being on parity. He wondered what would be the outcome if they met. Too bad he died eleven years ago.
That the Middle East is hurtling towards a catastrophic Turkish-Israeli conflict
has been apparent for a while. Nothing is inevitable in history, but
the dynamic leading towards conflict has been gathering momentum at a
pace that is startling. Israel is clearly a shark that cannot stop
swimming, and the collapse of Iranian forward-positioned proxies is
setting the region up for the ultimate showdown between the only two
actors with hegemonic ambitions. ‘As Iran weakens, that vacuum will be
filled by the natural candidate with imperial ambitions in the Middle
East, and that is Turkey’, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said recently. He isn’t the only one.
The sentiment now shapes Israeli strategic doctrines, from the
Netanyahu government to opposition leaders such as Naftali Bennett. In
sum, the potential for conflict remains, regardless of who is in power
in Israel. And Turkey isn’t the only actor with hegemonic aspirations in
the region.
Turkey is, however, the other remarkable actor in
this tango: the only power and former imperial entity in the entire
Eurasian landmass (with the exception of, possibly, China) that appears
to simultaneously possess a sense of a residual imperial greatness, a
vision of an overarching historical longue durée (unlike
contemporary Europeans) and a cold, calculated grand-strategy unimpeded
by democratic processes. Turkey isn’t affluent by most western measures,
and yet, for a country that was strategically isolated a decade ago,
Turkey has since positioned itself as the most influential actor in the
region.
***
A recent addition has further empowered the Turkish hand: an emerging
Saudi-Pakistani security relationship that potentially brings Pakistan’s
nuclear deterrence into the wider strategic matrix. From the American
strategic perspective (even without considering the steadily declining
support for Israel among both younger generations of Democrats and
Republicans), it is understandable why this coalition might appeal. The
Americans have been unable to extricate themselves from the region,
partly due to their internal strategic incoherence and an absurd
democratic system that alters US grand strategy every eight years or so.
A Saudi-Pakistani bloc under Ankara’s hegemony, on the other hand,
could contain both Russia and Iran in the region.
***
The United States will, of course, continue to be immensely powerful and
splendidly isolated in the Western hemisphere. But, inevitably,
American retrenchment, either due to imperial exhaustion, debt,
generational change or strategic defeat, will translate into a mad dash
for localised regional hegemony and space for imperial powers with
capacity and ambition. An Israeli attack on Turkey, or an all-out
Turkish-Israeli war over expansionism in Syria or Cyprus, therefore has
the potential to destroy NATO as we know it. But from a strictly
historical perspective, it will be a new hegemonic cycle in a region
that has seen many such cycles before, with an older imperial entity
returning to form.
Detached
from their ethnic and regional origins and attached to class-based
cultures, the British-American traditions Fischer identifies may endure,
as nonwhite immigrants and their descendants assimilate to multiple
melting pots along educational and occupational lines. Already in the
US, college-educated Hispanics tend to share the liberalism of other
college-educated Americans, reflecting the New England roots of today’s
academic culture, while working-class Hispanics are more socially
conservative, and many convert to evangelical Protestantism, with its
Scots-Irish influences.
Meanwhile,
the nativism of today’s “Heritage Americans” on the right is much more
inclusive than that of the Anglo-Protestant nativists of a century ago,
with Irish Americans and German Americans now considered “Heritage
Americans.”
I wonder if there is not a bit of the regionalism mentioned above in the regionalism of Soft Secession? (Sheila Kennedy).
Nearly two dozen Blue states have filed joint lawsuits to block Trump
administration vendettas. Blue state coalitions have sued the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA over rules that tie
disaster and emergency relief money to voter citizenship checks and
local immigration enforcement, and they have mounted coordinated
responses to political assaults on state universities, non-profits, and
local municipal funds. Local and state jurisdictions in those states
have worked to strengthen local laws that limit ICE access to public
property and data.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis
launched a private initiative to encourage Blue state resource pooling–a
project in which states will share staff, legal expertise, and
operational strategies to protect state institutions and coordinate
contingency plans against federal pressure. The initiative is modeled on
previous reproductive rights compacts in which states shared and
stockpiled abortion medication.
The movement toward state-level action can also be seen as a response
to a longer-term fiscal reality: Donor states like California, New
York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts send far more money to Washington
than they get back. The Rockefeller Institute estimates that New York’s
net outflow in 2019 was $142 billion, and that California’s in 2021–22
was $83 billion. Meanwhile, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West
Virginia are net recipients.
Midterms are but 9, 10 weeks away. Maybe we end this silly season of American politics, maybe we can restore American greatness, but I think rejoicing needs await January if the Democrats take enough seats they take over Congress.
The notion of Dresden as an “innocent” city, devoted strictly to culture
and the arts, whose factories manufactured mostly porcelain figurines
and dinnerware along with other luxury goods, such as cigarettes,
cameras, sewing machines, and bicycles, is a myth as well. Almost all of
these factories had been converted to support the war effort.
Cigarette-making machines were adapted to produce bullets. Companies
that made camera lenses focused on creating better, more accurate bomb
sights. Radio, bicycle, and sewing machine makers produced precision
machine tools key to war technology. Even a famous artist’s colony and
school in the northern part of the city had ceased making furniture and
crafts, instead building wooden tail assemblies for planes as metal
became scarce. The colony’s well-known Festival Hall had become an SS
barracks. By 1944, Dresden contained at least one hundred and
twenty-seven factories that manufactured war material, and most
Dresdeners were employed in war work or armaments factories.
My Own Life was published posthumously in 1777 along with his close friend Adam Smith’s Letter to Strahan, which,
with Hume’s blessing, completed the account of Hume’s final period of
illness, in a public letter addressed to Hume’s publisher, William
Strahan. Hume and Smith had been in close contact for over 25 years and,
because they lived in different cities, many of their letters have been
preserved. In January 1776, the famously rotund Hume informed Smith
that he had lost five stone, or 70 pounds. Hume’s doctor, Joseph Black,
told Smith that his patient suffered from night fevers, internal
bleeding and severe stomach problems. The evidence indicates, however,
that despite his failing health, Hume continued to host dinners and
visit friends. The Scottish playwright John Home commented that ‘[Hume]
talks of his illness, of his death, as matters of no moment… I never saw
him more cheerful, or in more perfect possession of all his faculties,
his memory, his understanding, his wit.’
In an interview with witnesses, officials claimed that Weaver was inside
a home, pointed a pink handgun at them and fired around six to 10 shots
inside the home. A video of the incident reportedly showed Weaver
holding the gun and firing multiple shots.
I start with the American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota), Thomas Stearns Eliot (Missouri), Ernst Hemingway (Illinois), Saul Bellow (Illinois), Toni Morrison (Ohio), and Bob Dylan (Minnesota).
But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed,
all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God
and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were
first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo
Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a
mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life
of a community. His many essays and lectures
were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics
have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he
saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words,
the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators
were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well
known to committed democrats like Emerson.
But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of
this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified
common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the
real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the
truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by
society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the
Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of
knowledge.”
That writer, of course, is the late Mr.
Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and
Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older
conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and
the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of
Mr. Berry’s life.
Among the several things that helped turn my life around and gave me the means of putting together the shards of myself, it was Thoreau. The above essay ties Berry with Thoreau and that now makes sense to me and gives depth to Wendell Berry’s Nine Rulesby Ted Gioia.
Gioia's essay provoked this response from my friend KH:
It is an age of
specialization. I used to be able to work on my car, now I can’t. OTOH,
they’re much safer, fewer people are killed in them and they’re
spaceships compared with 25 years ago.
We used to think pagers were amazing. Now we have a computer in our hands.
I’m
concerned with Big Tech but that’s a failure of government to regulate.
Standard Oil and the railroads were once big tech. Then came TR.
If
you want to move to a farm in Kentucky and live off the land, you can
probably eschew all of this. The rest of us have to live in 2026.
