Living Without Systems

 I met Albert Camus in high school; he never quite left me.

The Los Angeles Review of Books published Matthew Lamb's Fame! A Misunderstanding, a review of The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus (Translated by Ryan Bloom. University of Chicago Press, 2026).

During the years when despondency and nihilism took over my life, I did not think about Camus. I forgot many things I did know that if I could have latched onto them, might have led to a different outcome for my life. Camus was one of the first I latched onto as I tried to put together the means of keeping myself alive.  

 I do not think I have enough time left me to read these notebooks, but I want to remember these paragraphs.

And yet, we are currently living through a cultural moment in which, increasingly, political violence is legitimated, in both its physical and symbolic forms, reinforced by the forces of abstraction—media, technology, government, and bureaucracy—and justified daily through individual polemic passing as political debate. To resist it, we need to clarify misunderstandings, not repeat them—to correct errors, not perpetuate them. Now, more than ever, we need the intellectual and imaginative resources to work out how best to live together without appealing to political ideologies, religious doctrines, or philosophical systems.

The work of Albert Camus offers one such resource, but to benefit from this requires a wholesale reevaluation of his life and work, his reception and reputation. Ryan Bloom’s excellent and necessary translation of The Complete Notebooks may finally offer a corrective.

Why do I want to keep them in mind? When I tried to shift my life to fit within the systems that would perhaps improve my income. Work and income were my old life. When I realized I had waited too long, had been too stubborn in my independence, to fulfill my plans, I saw only a ruined life, a wasteland, and felt the butt of a cosmic joke. What I want to remember is that a system, or an ideology, does not justify a life. I did join the Eastern Orthodox Church. That church does not have a legalistic basis for salvation other than to live a Christ-like life. Not much of a doctrine there.

 Our's is an age of tribalism, of drawing ourselves into teams, is to abidicate thought for the agendas of a sect. In The Rebel, Camus argued the response to nihilism is creativity. Humanity is a creative force; Orthodoxy agrees with that. Creativity stymied turns rancid and self-destructive. Yes, that is the voice of experience speaking.

sch 5/12 

 

5/12 to Now: Struggling Through Time

Time got out of hand, and health issues have tripped me up - it has been as difficult to sit as it has been to concentrate. This is another attempt at catching up, of which I have been doing far too much of this year. 

5/12: Relapsing, Losing Time, Muncie Happenings, Southern Indiana Democrat News 

Missed Matins (and then Vespers), piddled with email and blog posts, made a run to the grocery, was late for a lecture at Minnetrista, and ended the night trying to control pain. I think I started Legends on Netflix (which I will recommend).

I got the last 45 minutes or so of Tea & Talk: Dr. Lara Kuykendall— Constance Coleman Richardson and Other Unforgettable Indiana Artists. What I heard most of was about Ms. Richardson. The slides impressed me for not being kitsch landscapes that we see so often in Indiana. The lecturer mentioned her best paintings have a darkness in them. That I saw and it touched a nerve for me. It is what I am trying to do - get at the darkness here rather than perpetuate the sunny naive innocence propaganda of a virtuous rural life. We call that conservatism. Or is it the fodder for our conservatism that makes life here more precarious, more restrained than even in surrounding states, by saying look at how "those" people live, it is so much better here with our green corn fields that "they" ridicule? That we are not being conned into taking less because we are more virtuous than those living in the big cities? One painting had a ruined shed or farmhouse. It recalled the Romantics love of ruins. That is a sign that not all is well with the land. A comment was made about the dominance of skyscapes. That is how it is here in the flatlands. It reminded me of a sentence in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street about the oppresiveness of the wide skyline. As late as I was, it was a good time.

And then a night of trying to cope with the pain and discomfort. 

 Some notable readings:

Farmers Market Returns to Minnetrista With New Features for 2026 (The Muncie Journal) - a wonderful experience, one of the best things about Muncie at one of the best places to visit in Muncie.

Huh? Muncie fashion show puts self-expression in the spotlight (Star Press). This I might check out, even though I am absolutely not fashionable!

GROW WIWO will present its third annual fashion show, "Defined, By Design," on May 29 in downtown Muncie.

The event will be from 5 to 9 p.m. at Canan Commons, according to a community announcement.

This year’s theme highlights individuality and the role of fashion as a form of self-expression. The fashion show will feature five categories, each showcasing the latest spring trends and innovative designs. Attendees will see a range of styles, from ready-to-wear outfits to bold statement pieces, reflecting the diverse fashion scene in Muncie.

Up north here, we often forget there is life further south: Indiana Primary: What southern Indiana Democrats are facing Republican incumbents this November

 5/13: Writer's Group, Emails, Not Much Else

The writer's group still likes what I am reading of "Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory Town." The reading was a bit tough; the pain throbbing was a distraction.

I got supplies at payless. Forgot to go to the bank to check on a transaction.

One thing I will put into another post is my listening to Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk videos on writing.

5/14: Published, Email under Control, Miserable Afternoon and Evening

 I have already published the news about getting "Going For The Kid" published. Corresponded with KH and talked to him. Off to Payless for meds. The evening and night spent going between bed and bath. Nothing good to say about anything.

5/15: So Far, Not So Much

Up around 5 AM and have not accomplished much in the past 3 hours or so of work. Two, three, other posts cleaned up and set to be published after this. 

Group session later, and still have not gotten my notes on here.

 Consdering a road trip only I cannot get myself together to get ready for it.

CT scan later this afternoon, maybe find out what has been causing my problems.

Mostly, I am just tired and wanted to sleep. 

 sch

Rejections 5/13-5/13

Yesterday was a very bad day, so please bear with me as I catch up. 

 Rejections:

Thank you for submitting "After Making Landfall" to Chicago Review. We are sorry to report that we have decided against it, but we wish you luck placing your work elsewhere.  


Sincerely,

Chicago Review

And: 

Thank you for your submission to The Saturday Evening Post. After careful consideration, we are sorry to say that we will not be publishing your story in our publication. Because of the sheer volume of freelance submissions we receive, we regret that we are unable to provide a more personal response. For many reasons—from subject matter to style to the limitations of space—we sometimes must reject well-written, insightful stories. 

We are indebted to independent writers like yourself, without whom publishing our magazine and our online content would not be possible. 

Sincerely,

The Saturday Evening Post Editors
3520 Guion Road
Indianapolis, IN 46222
SaturdayEveningPost.com 

Trying to crack the professional ranks did not work:

 Thank you very much for letting us see "The Psychotic Ape."  We appreciate your taking the time to send it in for our consideration.  Although it does not suit the needs of the magazine at this time, we wish you luck with placing it elsewhere.

For the best sense of the fiction we're looking for, I recommend subscribing to Asimov's or picking up an issue to get a feel for what we publish.

Sincerely,
Emily Hockaday, Interim Editor
Pronouns: she, her
Asimov’s Science Fiction
www.asimovs.com

But Freedom Fiction Journal picked up "Going for The Kid."

 

5/13 

And for Thursday, one for "After Making Landfall":

Thank you for submitting to Tahoma Literary Review. We have read your work with interest, but it does not meet TLR’s current editorial needs. We appreciate your efforts and your interest in the journal, and wish you all success in placing this work in another venue.

Best,

Ann Beman

Prose Editor

Tahoma Literary Review

Things could be worse:

 sch 

Republican Virtues

Republican virtues - underlying the idea of the classical republic was a virtuous citizenry. When the citizens lost their virtue, they lost the freedom of their republic.

Too bad we have people wanting the Ten Commandments in schools when we should have Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. 

In Vice, Virtue And The Bill Of Rights Sheila Kennedys comments on another site about this subject. This paragraph stood out from the rest:

America’s history should not be whitewashed. We have frequently fallen short of the civic goals and governing philosophy embedded in the Declaration, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But we have also honored the men and women who exemplified the civic virtues identified above–the civic leaders and elected officials who worked for justice and served with integrity and prudence, who have insisted on honoring America’s professed values and working for the common good. 

No one is perfect - that is the core of humility. A country cannot be more perfect than its people. 

Speaking of humility: My Father’s Conservatism. (The Dispatch)

“You don’t ask a person a question like that.” I still do not know, and there’s a chance he does not remember. He’s not culturally conservative either; my father has always been more of a “live and let live” kind of guy. I am talking more about the plainest meaning of the word conservative. The man is careful and circumspect.

He’s uncomfortable speaking in absolutes and is careful about asserting knowledge or skill, even in fields where he’s an expert. He’d rather be quiet about what he knows on the chance that his passivity opens the floor for someone else to share. “Ask so-and-so about that, he knows a lot more than I do,” he always says. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. But the point is that he does not care about being perceived to know a lot, he cares about being honest about the limits of his knowledge. He has no shame in appearing uninformed. My father is perhaps the wisest person I know, simply because he has never imagined himself to be.

*** 

 My father has always told me: “As soon as you think you got it all figured out, that’s the moment you don’t.” The vast expanse of information, the limitation of time, and the flawed nature of our species constrain our ability to ever know all that much. Yet, as long as we understand this, we’re capable of acting with wisdom. Sadly, it seems such self-awareness has gone out of fashion. When expertise, accrued knowledge, and circumspection become suspect, I’m not sure what about today’s “conservatism” is all that conservative anymore.

 Frankly, that is the conservatism I can get behind.

Rather than replicate the list of virtues and vices from Ms. Kennedy's site, here is the original list.

Reading a list of ARISTOTLE'S Virtues and Vices, I cannot find anywhere Trump and his pals fall within the definition of virtuous.

Not to be found on any of the lists is irony, which Samuel Loncar argues in Irony in the Age of Trump is a virtue needed nowadays.

The metaphysics of irony, its committed stance on what reality is like, becomes evident by observing those people for whom irony is a foreign condition, like a certain kind of ideologue (the kind that seems to dominate social media and news). Confident that the world is exactly the shape that they see it as, and that all it needs is themselves and those like them to be put to rights, they experience no tension in whole-hearted commitment to their cause; they take delight in the denunciation of their opponents as the unwashed and unrighteous enemies of the good, i.e., themselves. They live in a world cramped enough to be commensurate to their self-righteous egos. In such a world, irony is a crime against reality.

Irony’s opposite, then, is not sincerity. It is identification without remainder: humans lost in their causes, with no subjectivity left, nothing that cannot be fully commensurate to the world and clearly expressed. Irony is impossible for the fanatic, the anti-ironist who is thus himself an irony, for he fails to see the absurd contradiction between his small ideas and the big world that will surely fail him, contradict him, and refuse him his dreams, all of which he will ignore and deny while preaching his gospel. Comedy is one of the last preserves of irony, a safe space for the sacrilege that is the backward compliment meaning pays to piety after gods have died. This is why the surest measure of the totalitarian attitude is the hatred and suppression of comedy, which takes as its bread the contradictions, the ironies, of our lives.

I agree irony is a virtue needed more than all the certainties of social media and the tribes populating them.  

sch 5/12 

 

Another of My Stories Published!

 I got the word this morning that Freedom House Magazine published Going For The Kid. It is free to read, so please give it a read.

A bit of an adventure/crime story set in an alternate America circa 1972. 

The publisher says it can also be found at: https://www.instagram.com/freedomfictionjournal/ and https://www.facebook.com/freedomfiction/

Thanks.

 

sch 

 

Russia and the United States: Imitation Might Be Sincerest Flattery, But Is It Smart?

 Hanna Notte's This Is Not the World Russia Wants (Foreign Affairs) raised everal questions that I am going to throw out into the ether.

First the thesis:

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine marked only the peak of Russia’s long turn toward revisionism. Since the Cold War ended, Russia has sought to shape Europe’s security architecture and impose its will on smaller neighbors. The Kremlin has also clashed with the United States and Europe at the United Nations and in other multilateral bodies. Its leaders condemned the concept of a rules-based international order as a Western invention meant to cement U.S. hegemony. Styling itself as a vanguard promoting a more multipolar order, Russia sought to increase its own global clout, unencumbered by restraints and rules.

But now it finds itself in the curious position of watching the United States behave more like Russia. On the surface, this may seem a boon for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead of contending with a Washington that resists his land grabs and tussles with him in multilateral forums, he has a simpatico U.S. president who appears to ascribe to his might-makes-right worldview. Donald Trump has bashed international institutions in language reminiscent of Russian broadsides, withdrawing the United States from dozens of UN agencies and stripping them of funding while launching a rival conflict-settlement body, the Board of Peace. And he has asserted a right to coerce, even attack, smaller countries in the style of Russia’s bullying.

My questions:

1. Is this a benefical unintended consequence of Trump's foreign misadventures abroad?
2. Can we now see Putin is a fool and Trump is even more foolish calling him a smart one? 
3. What happens to us when China also rejects the rules and begins bullying its neighbors?

 ....And although it has lent Tehran some support in the form of targeting data and operational guidance, Moscow has refrained from intervening directly to defend Iran in the current war. Russia’s refusal to risk entanglement on behalf of its partners has been a matter of political calculation, not just a function of resource constraints. Still, as Moscow sees it, Trump is shaping a world in which “the weak get beaten,” as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a March interview. To ensure that the United States cannot beat Russia, Russian experts and officials have hinted, it must leave no doubt as to the formidability of its nuclear weapons.

And this wants me to substitute Russia for us:

 Instead, by dismantling the post–Cold War international system, Trump is taking over Russia’s mission. And Moscow will have to contend with something messier, a world with no stable frameworks or reliable rules of the game.

sch 5/8 

 

What Has Not Changed In Over 50 Years: Gore Vidal, Garry Wills, Nixon

 I was working on a post, getting distracted by an eruption of pain, when I ran across the first video below.

Garry Wills came to my attention during law school with his Inventing America. I kept reading him over the years, but not exhaustively. 

Gore Vidal, I have been reading since Burr, and have tried to read as much of him as I can.

Because of these two writers, I would not call myself either a liberal or a conservative. I would have called myself a cynic at one time. Today, I will call myself an ironist.

 Vidal and Wills do not meet in the video. Too bad, that would have been an interesting conversation in my opinion. 

I went looking for a possible meeting of the two. No luck. 

However, I thought that I would tack on some of what I did find. Both Wills and Vidal have faded over the years. Vidal is dead, but his work declined before then. Wills is in his nineties which makes him somewhat retired. 

The sad decline of Gore Vidal, America’s most acerbic writer and fearsome feuder (The Independent) does a very good job of summarizing his career (albeit it omits his playwrighting career).

But Vidal was much more than a talk-show star and literary gadfly. He deserves respect for his historical fiction. Vidal’s profound sense of America’s past was demonstrated in his Narratives of Empire novels – Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000) – which, taken together, offer a coherent view of the nation’s decline. I would also highly recommend Essays, United States 1952-92, a deserved winner of the 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Some books, including his religious satire Live From Golgotha, are perhaps best forgotten. 

I did not like The Golden Age; Live From Golgotha, at least, has humor. Here is the conclusion:

Although it is only 13 years since Vidal left what he called “this ark of fools”, he already seems a polymath from a lost age, the sort of acerbic, insightful political commentator missing in a social media age of foghorn popular pundits such as Piers Morgan. But when all is said and done, fame is fleeting; Vidal’s desire to be remembered as the person who wrote the best sentences of his age was always doomed. At Harvard, according to Leslie Morris, the Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, the item that attracts the greatest attention is Vidal’s screenplay for the porn film Caligula – which he himself described as “easily one of the worst films ever made”.

Garry Wills at 90: The influential historian has become his own iconoclast (Chicago Tribune) performs a similar service for Wills.

Thankfully slower, you might say: For six decades, including 30 years at Northwestern, Wills was an intimidating, supremely confident, fearless intellect, a provocative iconoclast so prolific that his 50-odd books include classics (“Inventing America,” “Nixon Agonistes”), game-changers (“The Kennedy Imprisonment”) and one Pulitzer winner (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”), as well as works on religion, theater, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, politics and religion, politics and paranoia, opera, the A-bomb, the Greeks, the Romans. To say he challenged conventional wisdom is to understate the subversion that Wills became known for: His books advanced the idea of Nixon as the sympathetic “last liberal” and Reagan as a self-mythologizer. He argued a president is not really a commander-in-chief. He argued the United States does not have a Constitution if one politician holds the unilateral authority to launch nukes. Here was a Catholic who wrote a book on why we didn’t need priests. Here was a pacifist whose father taught boxing.

Here was a conservative — “I’m still conservative by temperament” — recruited to the National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. himself, who would then be arrested for protesting Vietnam. Here was a historian summoned to the Obama White House in 2009 to give a new president some advice. The room included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, Douglas Brinkley and Wills, and when it came time for him to offer wisdom, he told the president to get the hell out of Afghanistan, quick.

The closest I came to Wills and Vidal crossing paths is in Garry Wills says people are being taken in by the Buckley myth (HNN excerpting part of a New York Review of Books essay (which may be behind a paywall).

I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public. There is more intellectual insight and incisive commentary on a single night of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show than in all of the mean broadcasts of Buckley and Vidal. One of the broadcasts, which the documentary makes much light of, took place while police and protesters were battling in the streets of Chicago—and things were not going so well inside the TV studio either, since at one point Buckley said to Vidal, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.” 

sch 5/6