Another story published!

I have been remiss thanks to the surgery and recuperation to mention Academy of the Heart And Mind publishing Ahab In The Moonlight!

Another piece from my long-gestating “Chasing Ashes”.

It is free. I would love to hear any comments.

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3/2/2026 - A Rejection and A Submission

[Moving stuff back from my abandoned WordPress blog.]

 “Agnes” rejected:

We regret that we are not able to place your work in EPOCH, but we do appreciate your submission. The volume of submissions prevents us from commenting on every one, but please know that we did review your work and gave it careful consideration.

Sincerely,

The Editors

And I submitted “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984” to Joyland Magazine.

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Notes From The Weekend

 Dedicated followers of passion: the Kinks’ 40 greatest songs – ranked! | The Kinks | The Guardian

 The-Brick-Foxhole-vs-Crossfire.pdf

 Madison County Democratic Party

Nolan's 'The Odyssey' ruined a poem I never bothered to read | Opinion

 Think of intelligence in terms of goals, not brains | Aeon Videos

 Toward the Next Century of Carmen Martín Gaite - Public Books

 “As Good As It Gets”: Talking Liberalism with Kevin Schultz - Public Books

 Think of intelligence in terms of goals, not brains | Aeon Videos

 After 60 years, scientists uncover metformin’s hidden brain effects | ScienceDaily

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There's something About Icelandic Literature

 Halldór Laxness’s Independent People  (thank you, Joel C for the recommendation) and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir's The Greenhouse while in prison. Eye-openers both.

There’s Nothing Provincial About This Three-Volume Icelandic Saga (The New Yorker) is behind a paywall that you might get one free view of an article, so a bit longer on the quotes than I intend to do from now on.

About the book being reviewed:

Jón Kalman published “Heaven and Hell” in Icelandic in 2007. The series’ other two volumes, “The Sorrow of Angels” and “The Heart of Man,” came out in 2009. English translations, by the redoubtable Philip Roughton (who also translated five of the Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s novels into English), followed in the U.K. between 2010 and 2013. But his translations of the trilogy have only become available in North America over the past year and a half; the final volume was published in June. 

What there is about Icelandic literature is its blend of the visionary and the brutal:

The effect of fiction on a reader’s mind may be numinous, but novels rarely succeed if their material isn’t concrete. Jón Kalman’s sense of physical texture, via Roughton’s translation, is as concrete as can be, vivid and poignant. Consider the tiny gaps in an isolated farmhouse’s stacked rock walls that prove useful for storing the children’s baby teeth, a charm to insure the children’s longevity, even though the walls of the kitchen hold the teeth of one of their sisters who has died there the year before. Or the grass blades moving almost imperceptibly, “like rows of venerable statesmen.” Or the boy running “like a scream.” Or the many arresting sex scenes, as graphic as they are incisive about the characters’ emotions, that vary from the taboo to the treacherous to the grotesque to the transcendent. Take the case of Salvör, a maid—savagely beaten and raped by a husband she burns alive in their house—who is later granted the mercy of another kind of man in the local postal carrier, who, for his part, has made his first appearance in the story frozen to his horse. The two spend the night together, and she later compares their encounter to “going through the horizon.”

For the contemporary English-language reader, a three-volume saga of a young man’s journeys through harsh weather, close friendship, and erotic love calls to mind Cormac McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy.” But Jón Kalman’s trilogy is less a hero’s journey and more a deeply psychological stripe of the social novel in the nineteenth-century tradition. The boy is less a hero than a central node, less an Odysseus than a Dorothea Brooke. His effect on those around him is, like hers, incalculably diffused—in his case, amid a village thick with merchants, farmers, drunken scholars, despicable Danes, and stalwart young widows. Among the most memorable of the widows is the landlady Geirþrúður, a name that combines the words for “spear” and “strength” (think “Gertrude”), a coal-eyed former chambermaid who married a man more than thirty years older than she, inherited his house and money, and now feels free to sleep with whomever she wishes, thank you very much, and will contrive a way to preserve her freedom and to care for those she believes need it in whatever way she thinks best.

Having nothing to do with Iceland: 

 

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King Arthur & Odysseus & Albert Camus

 I have been a King Arthur fan since reading T.H. White in high school. I even read Le Morte d'Arthur back then.

The Case for King Arthur (History Today )

None of this excludes the possibility that the later legend might have been based on a fictional character – that remains a strong argument – but the evidence demonstrates that there are several possibilities for a historical Arthur which can withstand the rigours of contemporary source-criticism. Asserting that Arthur was certainly a myth is, therefore, no longer credible.

It is not true that I bend my ear every time Joyce Carol Oates speaks, but maybe it comes close?

Joyce Carol Oates Defends 'The Odyssey' After Translator's Viral Slam 

In general, Oates said she liked Nolan’s film: “[I] highly recommend both Nolan’s film and the 1997 miniseries co-produced by Francis Coppola. The adaptations are notably different: one American, with the brooding middle-aged-boy-hero Matt Damon; the other very Mediterranean, with charismatic Armand Assante who more naturally inhabits the role … no reason why Nolan, or anyone else, should not re-imagine/re-envision a classical hero through the prism of his own invention.”  

 I have eaten dinner, a big bowl of soup, have finished watching Tulsa King and Strange New Worlds. The former works, if you forget the sociopathy of mobsters exposed by The Sopranos. The Trek show has grown on me, as has Anson Mount. The real Trekkers I guess are not happy with its experimentation. That I find its most interesting aspect.

The Absurdity of Albert Camus (History Today)

The key, Camus believed, was to differentiate between rebellion and revolution. As he saw it, revolutions sought to protect freedom and humanity against injustice by creating a perfect social order – in other words, by putting an end to history. The problem is that in trying (and failing) to create an ideal society, revolutions end up crushing the freedom and humanity they purport to be defending. This was especially true of the French Revolution, but no ‘revolutionary’ regime was any better – or worse – than any other. In this respect, Camus believed, the Soviet Union was indistinguishable from Nazi Germany.

Rebellion, by contrast, should respond to injustice by emphasising a shared humanity and by clinging doggedly to the value of human life. It required not just individual commitment, but solidarity with others. As Camus pointed out in Neither Victims, nor Executioners (1946), it should not aim to end history, but to ‘fight within History, to preserve from History that part of man which is not its proper province’.

Camus gave vivid expression to this in The Plague (1947). Set in Oran, in Algeria, during an outbreak of the plague in the 1940s, the novel has been widely recognised as an allegory of the German occupation of France and is, in many ways, a blueprint for his concept of rebellion. As Ronald Aronson has argued, it ‘conveys the unheroic determination to do what must be done in the face of a total threat’. Although the journalist Rambert, for example, initially tries to flee, he eventually resolves to stay and – realising that the plague can only be combatted through solidarity – accepts the risks that entails.

 

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Why Write

 Reason 1,235, but a good reminder.

Writing Needs Ego (and that’s okay)

Ego makes you write, because you are integral to creation. It literally comes out of you, specifically. The desire for it to be good, beloved, accepted, or the temptation to outsource the hard part in favor of sparing our emotional stability, is an act of pride. Both are intrinsically tied to the act of creation. Believing your work is important enough to dedicate time to is the first step. Continuing to do so in the face of countless pressures saying you can’t, shouldn’t, or won’t, is every step following.

Art is dismissed enough as it is. We can’t keep dismissing ourselves too.

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Politcal links for the day

 Don’t Be Fooled: America Hates These Toxic Right-Wing Gasbags | The New Republic

Are we losing our freedom of speech? • Indiana Capital Chronicle

 

ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to ‘core financial stability’ | Economics | The Guardian 

 

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