Tuesday - Trending Up?

I did not make it to the insurance agent today. I did  get to Payless in the morning for a few things I wanted to fix for lunch and items I had not bought at Walmart. Then was a stop at Ball State's Daily News. The big thing was the eye doctor. The glaucoma has abated.

The front room's reorganization started today.

A trip down to the convenience store after dinner.

I have been listening to The Pretty Things over the past few days. They are famous for being one of the British invasion bands who never made it here. I am a little surprised. No more than a little. They are what The Yardbirds might have been with a better singer and definitely what they might have been with better songs. In the line of The Rolling Stones, but not so macrabre. Speaking of The Stones, this is playing right now:

 

Interesting take, far less poppy than the original (which is one of my favorite Stones songs.)

Yesterday another rejection for “First Day of Feeling Free”:

Thank you for sharing this work with The Adroit Journal, and thank you for your patience as we consider and discuss submissions. We hope this note finds you well.

After a review of your submission, the staff has unfortunately decided that this submission is not right for us. Best of luck placing this work elsewhere, and thanks again!

Sincerely,

The Editors

The Adroit Journal

www.theadroitjournal.org

Some amusements;

The 100 Best Indie Rock Albums of All Time (Pitchfork) (because I actually know a few of them!)

It's a Wonderful Life - Muncie Civic Theatre 

I plan on doing the mail, a couple of more posts and then call it a night.

Tomorrow, back to my fiction. 

 

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Today, So Far (Plus Pieces on Writing)

 If the weekend was one debacle after another, today has been a whimpering, lamed progress towards not much.

I went to Walmart first thing this morning to buy a new belt. When I got back here, I lost all energy and fell asleep until almost 11 AM.

I got through some of my emal. There were two other posts finished. The bedroom and kitchen tidied. Then I wrapped up this one. I want to get  to Vespers, so that is all for now.

Storytelling: Writing Chapters and Scenes (Writing Forward)

Each scene is a miniature story within the story and has a beginning, middle, and end. A scene opens, there’s conflict, and then the scene closes. At the scene level, conflict is usually minor; the larger story conflict is spread throughout the entire story.

Some storytellers say that each scene should contain an emotional transition, which can help build tension into a scene and gives the story emotional flow. If a scene starts on a positive note (the protagonist is happy), then it can end on a negative note (the protagonist is sad). These emotional or tonal shifts don’t need to be intense or dramatic. Something as simple as showing a clumsy character spilling wine all over his white shirt can give a scene a downward emotional shift.

However, these emotional shifts are not required—and in fact, they’re not always possible. Some stories require a series of scenes that maintain a constant tone without significant emotional shifts.

The core function of any scene is to move the story forward with plot and character development. The more development a scene contains, the richer it becomes. One scene can move the plot forward while another scene develops the protagonist, but if the plot and character development can be contained within a single scene (rather than two separate scenes), then that scene will be more powerful.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks reveal the strange workings of his imagination

Hawthorne’s notebook fragments are wide-ranging, but certain themes repeatedly crop up: the psychology of divided selves, tensions between men and women and even possibilities for a better world. As he hopefully imagines in a stand-alone fragment: “Cannon transformed to church-bells.”

Who was Hawthorne the writer? A neo-Puritan moralist? A social realist? A modernist? A romancer? The fragments complicate rather than answer such questions. In his preface to “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne remarks on his desire to “keep the inmost Me behind its veil.”

But with the help of the fragments, we get behind the veil, at least a bit – and glimpse something like what Sophia believed was the spirit informing Hawthorne’s writing.

Weekly Readings #247 (11/03/26-11/08/26) - by John Pistelli

... There is no one book you can read to make you a great writer if you don’t otherwise have it in you to be one and no one book whose omission will doom you if you do have it in you. Both anti-intellectualism and an idolatry or fetishization of mere bookishness4 can mislead an author. Modernism, for example, bore witness to both tendencies: Lawrence at his worst over-valuing blood and instinct while Pound sank his poetry under trivia he thought the key to history. I got to certain books late in life myself. I don't think I read the Aeneid—and even then only in translation—until I was 30, a more foundational text (until its displacement by the full recovery of Homer) it’s hardly possible to imagine. You should read the most obvious classics that still have currency sooner rather than later. If you’re reading this but haven’t read Hamlet, please stop reading this right now and go read Hamlet. In response to a similar question earlier this year, I noted that the core works of the western canon, everything before the explosion of print culture in modernity, are a fairly small and manageable set: the Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the major Greek tragedies (the Oresteia, the Theban plays, Medea and Bacchae) and Platonic dialogues (the Apology, Symposium, Republic), Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the major plays of Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, The Tempest), Milton’s Paradise Lost. But you don’t need to read all of those before you write a novel. The “western canon,” which is essentially a 20th-century construct (cf. Naomi on “Great Books”), was not always equally available to all the great writers. Dante did not read Homer; Shakespeare did not read Homer or Dante. As Ian Watt long ago pointed out in The Rise of the Novel, many of the early major novelists, like Defoe and Richardson, were in fact marked by their non-elite non-education in the Greek and Roman classics, which they either didn’t read at all or read in translation, as we tend to do. I did hate the way the rival identity politics of the last decade and a half dismissed so many still good and still relevant classics, the English canon of poetry and novels, Shakespeare and Jane Austen, because the one side regarded them as white imperial oppressors and the other side as effete relics for the liberal elite. When I wrote this a few years ago, people responded as if I’d meant to criticize “the woke”—and I don’t have a lot of patience for left-wing canon-smashing when a left-wing defense of the canon as extending high culture to all is the more obvious and (if I may) dialectical position—but I actually had in mind some of the more literalist exponents of “men’s literature” who often establish their bona fides by going on podcasts and saying they don’t read such gay stuff as Austen or George Eliot.5 To return to your question, though, let me cite the aforementioned Pound in one of his sounder judgments from ABC of Reading, a book I’ve carried around with me since high school despite my generally not being a Poundian: “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree,” his enlargement of the equation he chanced upon in a German-to-Italian dictionary, “Dichten = Condensare.” The prerequisite to serious writing, then, is not reading this or that particular work, but a period of immersion in—serious contemplation of—some number of the greatest works where language is so charged, both to study consciously how this energizing can be accomplished as a matter of method and to incorporate unconsciously the experience or what I have elsewhere called the music of such intensive energetics....

Think about this because I am thinking about this, something I have been known to do much of:

... One final piece of advice though: read poetry no matter what you intend to write. Poetry is the base or basis of all literature, its taproot into the vaster reservoirs of orature, of music, of dance, as well as the form in which language is always maximally charged. We read prose sentenced by sentence, sometimes even paragraph by paragraph or chapter by chapter, but poetry word by word.

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Research, Amusements & Place I've Stuck My Nose Into The Past Few Days

With the hope that your sense of discovery might be ignited, I put together this post. 

Inheriting Wendell Berry (The Hedgehog Review)

We don’t need our elders to be perfect or even good; they just need to set us listening in the right places.

Jimmy movie review & film summary  - makes it sound like the movie avoids my biggest fear of being schmaltz. World War Two changed Jimmy Stewart, and that change should be respected.

Tabu (actress) - Wikipedia

I should let go of Nolan's The Odyssey, but it is hard when something like The Pyrrhic Victory of Nolan’s Odyssey (Antigone) comes to my attention.

 Few films have managed to divide critical opinion so thoroughly as Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The divisions break across political affiliations, cultural backgrounds, and even prejudicial expectations: some critics found their pre-release presentiments – whether for good or for ill – firmly validated; others were taken completely by surprise, pleasantly or otherwise. Given the turbid clamor of critical opinions, I believe some elucidation of Nolan’s poetic vision may be in order.

***

In Christopher Nolan’s vision, Odysseus’ victory at Troy was personally, politically, and existentially Pyrrhic. Every element of the film – its plot, its characters, even its casting – is in service of this ominous message. Nolan emphasizes those aspects of the poem that allow him to communicate this message, and he either minimizes or deletes everything else.

I recognize the movie I watched more in this essay than in any other. 

A medieval map mystery may finally be solved (Big Think). How to resist maps and mysteries?

First, a quick refresher. A portolan chart is a nautical chart of the Mediterranean, western European, and northwest African coasts, criss-crossed with dense color-coded web-like networks often called “rhumb lines,” dotted with harbor names written perpendicular to the coast (so you had to keep spinning the chart to read it). The charts are calibrated with little beaded scale bars marking off distances in miglia, or so-called portolan miles whose roots remained enigmatic for decades until Marelić’s recently proposed explanation. (A Portolan mile is a bit shorter than a modern statute mile.)

***

“The immense accuracy of coastline renderings on portolan charts, which, as far as is known, suddenly appeared in mid- to late-13th century, was never fully and objectively explained,” says Marelić.

***

Claudius Ptolemy, the 2nd-century astronomer whose Geography dominated Western cartography during the Renaissance, underestimated Earth’s circumference by about 29%. Measure out two degrees of longitude along the Mediterranean’s mid-latitude using Ptolemy’s too-small Earth, and you get almost exactly 125 kilometers — which just so happens to be 100 portolan miles, the length of one grid square on these charts.

In other words: The miglio isn’t a freshly measured medieval nautical mile at all. It’s a fossil, the shadow of an ancient astronomer’s arithmetic error, smuggled across more than a thousand years and built into every portolan chart’s ruler.

***

Lay all of Marelić’s studies end to end, and a single picture emerges. The portolan chart wasn’t a eureka moment of 13th-century Italian seamanship. It was a very good copy — or, more precisely, different copies — of cartographic knowledge that was already ancient before the Middle Ages even began, filtered through at least one confused but conscientious medieval hand, and finally dressed up with compass roses and scale bars to look shipshape for a new seafaring age. 

History of Maps: Mercator & Equal Earth Proejction (HISTORY)

The Lost Kingdom of Apalache (History Today)

The story may have been more than just pure fiction, however. Rochefort, unlike More, was a real traveller and was connected to transatlantic information networks. Huguenot refugees did flee their ruined colony in 1565 – at least 150 of them, according to a 1565 report by the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés – and some ‘fled into the mountains’. Rochefort may have heard survivors’ stories, even if they were embellished. He may have then added elements from native folktales, including Mexican stories of their origins in a northern realm with a lake and sacred cave, the fabled land of Aztlan. Rochefort mentioned that centuries earlier a group of Apalachites had migrated south, eventually forming a group in Mexico called Tlatuici, meaning ‘people from the mountains’. There they settled ‘in a neighborhood similar to the one of their birth, situated at the foot of the mountains on fertile land’. Rochefort’s narrative was a cross-cultural fantasy, blending indigenous and European utopian ideas, and fragments of stories he had heard on his travels.

Finally, Rochefort’s account was not dissimilar to the actual American southeast, which was not a blank slate. It abounded with large polities, late Mississippian paramount chiefdoms with capitals that could be properly classified as cities, the most famous being the late-medieval metropolis of Cahokia (near present-day St. Louis), which declined in the 12th century but inspired waves of successors. In north Georgia, in the 15th and 16th centuries, the chiefdom of Coosa lay not far from where Rochefort placed Apalache. Several Spanish explorers reached the capital, population 5,000, after a trek through the mountains, and encountered a king carried by retainers on a litter. Rochefort’s story may have been an exaggerated account of Coosa or another similar chiefdom. The ‘fabulous stories’ may not have been purely fantasy.

China's Overlooked Role in World War II (HISTORY) raises a good point. Maybe several.

Had China surrendered in 1938 as expected, World War II’s entire trajectory would have changed, according to Mitter. “The escalation that Japan had to go through in the following years because of Chinese resistance would never have happened. That means no Pearl Harbor because without the escalation of Japanese attacks on China you don’t get the desperate hunger for resources that leads ultimately to the oil embargo and President Roosevelt’s decisions in 1940 and 1941. And if you don’t have Pearl Harbor, you don’t have an Asian war that can then be joined with the European war.”

***

The Japanese surrender, however, did not mean the end of war in an exhausted China. The country’s civil war reignited and led to Mao’s communist revolution that toppled Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government in 1949. As China and the United States went from friends to foes, public memory of China’s role as a member of the Allies faded on both sides of the Pacific.

“After 1949, when Mao and the communists won power in the mainland, the one thing that became pretty unacceptable, certainly at the central level, was anything positive to say about the Chiang Kai-shek regime,” Mitter says. “During the high Cold War, both the West and China had strong motivations not to revisit the story, and therefore for more than a quarter century it essentially lay in the shadows of historiography.” 

Archaeologists at This Ancient Maya Metropolis in the Forest of Belize Are Debunking Long-Held Myths About the Mesoamerican Civilization

The Maya lived in a world where kings had cosmic power and a cyclical calendar ruled every aspect of life. Still, strolling through Caracol’s elegiac splendors, one can’t help thinking about how these ancients grappled with the most essential elements of the human experience: community, sustenance and survival in an interconnected world.  

Why the dilettante is the anti-hero of our over-optimised age (Aeon Essays)

Merriam-Webster defines the dilettante as ‘a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge’. Encyclopedia.com calls the dilettante someone who cultivates an interest ‘without real commitment or knowledge’. Cambridge settles for someone whose understanding ‘is not very deep or serious’. Collins gives us someone who ‘seems interested in a subject … but does not really know very much about it’. None of it is flattering.

Clearly, the dilettante is no aspirational character. No university markets itself as training the next generation of dilettantes; no magazine runs a ‘dilettante of the year’ issue (except, perhaps, for the excellent Idler publication). He – for the dilettante is, historically and in popular imagination, so often a ‘he’ – is in essence an amateur, a role defined by wide interests and narrow expertise.

  ***

But what if the scheme has it backwards? What if the dilettante’s perpetual movement from one thing to another is not a failure of nerve but a different and defensible way of being, one whose exploratory zeal turns out to be just what a hyper-specialised, over-optimised and all-too-serious world needs most? Then the dilettante would turn out to be not a capricious buffoon but a kind of modern anti-hero. That, I argue, is a dilettantism worth defending. 

 ***

Further, the dilettante is no dabbler. The dabbler scratches the surface of interests, whereas the dilettante, I argue, can and does go deep – without, however, anchoring a sense of self in any one interest. This also sets the dilettante apart from the flâneur, Charles Baudelaire’s urban wanderer strolling through the city’s offerings, sampling everything, invested in none of it. The dilettante is deeply engaged in interests, and more an active participant than a passive spectator.

***

The more important aim, however, is to show dilettantism as a way of living that offers more than we might think. It is a life liberated from specialisation, instrumentalisation and meritocratic bean-counting, as well as from a Protestant work ethic that is suspicious of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Arguments denigrating specialisation in education and vocation are well known, as are those championing well-roundedness and the virtues of the liberal arts. Though similar in spirit, this defence of dilettantism is less about the purpose or outcomes of academic or professional life and more about making the mental switch away from the socially conditioned pressure to find your thing and stick with it to an open and exploratory pursuit of pluralistic interests. Reclaiming this sense of joyful experimentalism is intended to show dilettantism as a mode of abundance rather than deficiency. 

All that sounds well enough. Odd that the internet has not encouraged exploration of pleasure rather than pron of various sorts. 

 The key to perceiving dilettantism as abundance instead of deficiency is to appreciate the sense of freedom it affords. It is, in the first place, a negative freedom, a freedom from the constraints that otherwise bind professional practitioners. More precisely, it is a freedom of mobility within a practice.

Where is our curiosity? Some of mine follow. 

11 brilliant albums that nobody understood when they first came out

The Rolling Stones Singles 1963-1966 | ABKCO Music & Records, Inc.  

Chuck Berry – Go Go Go Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

Bob Dylan – Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

10 open-source apps every Windows user should download in 2026 – for free - ZDNET 

89 Funny Scottish Memes About Life In Scotland | Bored Panda 

Things less happily noted:

What happens after a faulty DNA report unravels a rape case

Salon, internet’s oldest general interest publication, shuts down after 31 years | US press and publishing | The Guardian

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The Last Of Politics, I Hope

 I am happy enough with how the midterms went. I am unhappy to see Indiana's bail amendment passed. But time will tell if the Democrats prove themselves effective or spiral out in wasteful actions. 

I have too much on my table that has been distracted by the condition Trump has put this country into. So, back to that and turn the damper down on my political concerns. 

A look inside how Democrats made big gains in the Indiana Legislature (Indiana Capital Chronicle) mostly follows the national trend that Trump needs a kick in the shins. However, the Indiana Democrats still seem to lack vision:

Despite being a former Allen County Democratic chair, Meehan received no money from state party committees. She unseated Morris with 51% of the vote, even though she had less than $10,000 in campaign cash. Morris had more than $200,000  

What voters want after Democrats' big gains in Indiana 

Several voters who helped Democrats flip seats said Republicans are out of touch with the challenges in their lives and communities.

Lisa Stump, 64, lives in Osceola, a small town a few miles from Mishawaka. She will also be represented by Wait. Stump said she supported some judges she described as Republican, but otherwise she voted entirely for Democrats.

A widow who now works as a crossing guard, Stump used to work in RV manufacturing. She said she’s seen jobs in that industry disappear and wages fall.

Stump was glad to see DeVon defeated because she does not believe he has done much for the area. She wants Republican state leaders to focus on serving Hoosiers.

Elon Musk is about to learn how much America hates him (The Independent). Yep.

Braun: Election results a 'wake-up call' for GOP (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

I am too lazy to follow up on how many Republicans lost who beat the anti-gerrymander Republicans. I do not think there are many. At least, no one has made a point of connecting winners to that issue. 

Two major Election Day developments can help improve government in Indiana  (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

Straight-ticket voting was likely a factor for Bayh, but not the reason he won.

Nearly 127,000 Marion County voters cast straight-ticket Democratic ballots, compared to 40,000 for Republicans, according to unofficial Indianapolis election results.

Interestingly, Bayh wants to get rid of straight-ticket voting. And there have been bills to do so led unsuccessfully in the past by Republicans. While it would no doubt help Democrats in many parts of the state, he acknowledged it could hurt his party in Marion County.

“I don’t support policies because they benefit my political party,” he told the Capital Chronicle last week. “I support them because they’re the right thing to do for the people of our state.”

Allen County — which in 2022 had nearly double the straight-ticket Republican ballots than Democratic — saw Republican straight-ticket ballots only slightly leading Democrats.

In the end, it’s clear Hoosier Republican voters crossed over to support Bayh. He reached 1 million votes — well above the 742,000 the Democratic nominee received in 2022.

I remain agnostic on whether another Bayh will improve the Democratic Party in Indiana. I want to see action on direct access for referendums, which Beau is supposed to be backing.

This rural county has the worst voter turnout in Indiana. Why? How is it possible not to know you can split your vote?

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Writers: Cormac McCarthy and Viet Thanh Nguyen

 Two different pieces about two wildly different writers. I have read more McCarthy because there are more of his novels. 

 McCarthy clued me into the fluidity of genre. There is also the matter of violence. It is America, but McCarthy seems to romanticize that violence. I prefer Joyce Carol Oates on violence - it is brutal without any romance.

 Why Do Cormac McCarthy’s Books Exist? (The Dispatch) is a review of a McCarthy biography, so a bit of a slender reed for commentary. Consider this, though:

 Where did this darkest of dark visions come from? Like McCarthy, many people have had abusive and uncomprehending fathers. Many people have been divorced and tormented by guilt. But why was this man in particular the midwife of these novels? Daugherty’s biography fails to provide an answer to that question. It has illuminating comments to make about and connections to draw from the work, but we don’t get a sense of the white-hot heat of a mind in dialogue with itself—wrestling with evil, dabbling in evil, and turning away from it. We learn about the troubles McCarthy both suffered and instigated, but we don’t see his mind in process, taking on that trouble and transforming it. (And that was Thomas Carlyle’s definition of genius: “transcendent capacity of taking trouble.”) We don’t get a sense that some unusual power was at work here. But it was. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen has made me think more since while I read The Sympathizer, I have read more of his essays and interviews. From him or Junot Diaz I came to the idea that our immigrant writers give us insights into America that might not come easily to natives. EQUATOR's The Quiet American Writer is an interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen that contains what has made him important to me.

 

Pankaj Mishra: What does it feel like to be described as an American writer in a post-American world? When you and I started out thinking about writing, America was the hegemonic power – not just politically, economically or militarily, but culturally, spiritually. The catastrophic loss of American cultural capital and moral prestige is the most extraordinary event of our times. What is it like to be a writer from the US now?

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I came of age in the US after 1975, when my family arrived as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War, during an interregnum in American power. The US had been checked very heavily by its defeat in Vietnam, and by the time I got to university it was trying to reclaim that power. The period from 1975 to [Desert Storm in] 1991 was a moment of quietude in the American empire as it regathered itself.

At that point I considered myself an Asian American writer, or a minority writer, and that identity fit perfectly within American multiculturalism. After 1991 and 2001 it became clear to me that multiculturalism and diversity were insufficient languages to describe systems of inequity and power. 9/11 ushered in the moment we’re still living in: the complete visibility of violence in American society – at home, as there always has been, but also an attempt to reclaim power on the international stage.

For long, I fought not to be introduced in the US as a Vietnamese American writer – a writer with adjectives in front of his name. It was always a pleasure to go abroad and be introduced as an American writer. It allows me to talk about myself as an American who is American because he was a refugee from an American war, and as an American who needs to take responsibility for what the US is doing. Even if I am deeply opposed to what it is doing, I am still implicated in it.

That’s the obligation, or choice, offered to American writers, including so-called minority writers. We could embrace our minority identity and seek inclusion in the empire through these now-contested ideas of diversity, equity and inclusion. Or we could stress our identities as Americans and embrace that complexity – which means not renouncing our complicity in empire but foregrounding it.

***

The temptation for liberalism – and this is why both Baldwin and King didn’t trust American liberals – is to sacrifice genuine equality as long as the exercise of American power is genteel enough not to threaten their profits. Writers are part of that system. It’s entirely possible to be an American writer of a racialised, minoritised or colonised background and be rewarded for your work, so long as you don’t question what must come first but is never spoken of: the maintenance of American power. What’s spoken of explicitly is how to make America a more just society, which is code for how to fine-tune American power, or imperialism, from the inside, so there’s less disruption at home. No one questions what happens beyond American borders.

***

Coming from India, I’ve always found this odd. To be a writer or intellectual there meant being critical of the political establishment and of your nation-state, especially when that state was suppressing some minority. So this complicity strikes me as very strange. I suppose it’s one of the unrecognised disadvantages of belonging to a very rich, powerful country: you aren’t able to develop enough critical or intellectual resources to write about the world in an interesting way, because you’re always within the system, unable to step out of it.

What American writers write about are the dysfunctions of living within an empire, without using the word empire. There are plenty of novels and works of nonfiction about the terrible things that happen within American society: an unjust education system, a prison system unequal in its application of justice, even young urban professionals addicted to cocaine. These dramas reveal that the US is not a perfect society. But each writer looks at a small piece of it and doesn’t connect it to the operations of the US as a whole.

***

To bring it back to literature: in the West, there’s a huge emphasis on the human. Art should be about the human, about humanity, about what brings us together universally. But your example of India being inspired by Israel points to other things that make us human too – our inhumanity, our desire for power and conquest, our capacity to do evil and then to forget that we did it. Part of what imperial and national power wants is to erase the links that would let people understand that what Israel is doing now is what the US did then.

Both the interviewer and the writer mention the history of American anti-imperialism starting with William James and Mark Twain. It is a bit like Jewish anti-Zionism, existent and ignored. That is one defect, but a minor. It is why Orhan Pamuk interests me with his perspectives on a post-imperial culture.

America had an empire on this  continent before it went overseas. Everything past the Atlantic Coast was an imperial project. Ulysses S. Grant recognized this fact in his Memoirs when he discussed The Mexican War. Some try to shuffle this off as woke and I read those attempts at propaganda.

Within that continental empire, there was also the capitalist empire. GM treated its factory towns as colonies. We have ignored that fact, too, for all our politicians and pundits lamenting the Rust Belt.

Realism should match reality and perspective determines reality. The broader the view, the closer we come to the truth. Hopefully, there are those with better skills than me to go forward with these ideas.

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Batting and Striking Out

 No Vespers. Did not get the insurance taken care. Grocery shopping punted. 

But I did make it to the dentist, the bank, and The Downtown Farmstand of r lunch, and there was a nap when I got back here. Maybe I finally got the pinched nerve in my  neck solved.

And I write this post. 

More shocks for Indiana Democrats: Dem challenger defeats Indiana House GOP leader in stunning upset (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

All the fear of Muslim politicians comes from where? I mean other than mercenary motives and native bigotry. Anyway, Arwa Mahdawi's put paid to that Get ready habibis, Abdul El-Sayed’s ‘shawarma law’ is coming to the US  (The Guardian ). Michigna showed it was better than its Republican leaders.

Looks like a missed a closer showing of Rocky Horror: GALLERY: Rocky Horror Picture Show 2026. 

Was one of the great novels of the Enlightenment written by a man who thought he was a werewolf? (The Guardian)

Potocki’s book has fervent admirers among contemporary novelists like the French Prix Goncourt winner Mathias Énard and Poland’s 2018 Nobel prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk, who has described it as part of her “literary first-aid kit”: “I open a page by chance and I draw a good dose of creative energy. All of the vital force of literature is there in its purest state.” But it’s fair to say that because of its inherent weirdness The Manuscript from Saragossa has never managed to establish itself as a classic of the European canon in the way that other roman-mondes such as Don Quixote or Boccaccio’s Decameron have. Yet, precisely because it is so open to interpretation, its influence on visual artists has been incredibly varied.

Music | The Joeys - a band to check out.

Articles • EQUATOR - a magazine to check out.

Good night.

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Rejections & rejections + Books & Broad Ripple Review

 Mostly writing and being ill these past few days. Today, the dentist, insurance agent, and grocery shopping. It would be good to do Muncie's First Thursday and Vespers. I have been too obsessed with my novella to expect I can accomplish anything.

A book I am tempted to buy: Literary Voyagers a book by Andrew Wittkop (Bookshop.org US).

Broad Ripple Review | Substack - still hoping to publish here.

A rejection received today that was not quite a surprise as I sent the wrong story:

Thank you for submitting "The First Day of Feeling Free" to Fusion Fragment. Unfortunately, I've decided not to accept it for publication. Best of luck in finding a home for it!

Sincerely,
Cavan Terrill
Editor, Fusion Fragment