Rejected, Bourdain, The Most Encouraging Thing I Have Read In Ages.

 Up and working on my other writing chores. Like this post.

A rejection that came in late from  Open: Journal of Arts & Letters for “After Making Landfall”:

Thank you for your submission. We appreciate the time and trouble you took to give us the opportunity to read your work; however, we must respectfully decline to accept it for publication, as it does not satisfy our editorial needs. We will be glad to learn that this work has received prominent placement elsewhere.

Cordially,

James

Submissions Editor

I came late to Bourdain through my friend Randy K. He came to fascinate me - thoughtful without humbug. I read I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain—until I met him with sympathy, thinking how much his sort of wonder and openness and acerbic wit have disappeared from our lives.

The controversy over The Odyssey is on my mind. So is a comment made by the fellow running the group sessions. He disdains Will Ferrell for being political; he said that was why Ferrell's career has gone down hill. Nothing about Ferrell's talent, nothing about Ferrell's age; only that Ferrell's career died because of his politics.

Actors age out, comic actors age out quicker. That is my opinion. Ferrell's style was outrageous to the point of obnoxiousness. He is now of an age where that kind of routine looks sad, even desperate. That made his shelf life even shorter. Barbie showed he has more life as a supporting actor. And if you think comic actors do not age out, then give a thought to the careers of Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd, Paulie Shore, and Bill Murray. Even the Marx Brothers wore down, and who was watching Bob Hope movies in the Sixties? But this thing of letting private opinions negate a performace, where doe sit come from?

I did not expect much from Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold? for all of its provocative headline. Instead, Carlyn Beccia brightened my day, sparked my tepid optimism.

Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?

A coalition of nobodies dragged it back. How they did it is the most important story nobody tells. Because we are standing at the line again — and this time we can measure it.

***

Now, the finding inside the finding — the one that matters most and gets reported least: MAGA Republicans are not more willing than anyone else to personally commit violence.

Read that again. They don’t want to throw the brick. They want someone else to throw the brick for them.

The researchers are careful about what this means, and so should we be: this is a chorus, not an army. But if you’ve been paying attention for the last three thousand years, that should not comfort you, because the chorus is the mechanism. Societies don’t collapse because millions pick up weapons. They collapse because millions approve and normalize cruelty.

***

And the American host, by the 1890s, was compromised at every level. Tammany didn’t hold a single voter at gunpoint — the ward voted for turkeys, knowingly, for decades. Lynchings drew crowds of ordinary citizens; the photographs sold as postcards at pharmacies, which is a sentence I need you to sit with. Race science filled lecture halls with respectable, churchgoing audiences. Standard Oil’s machine ran on thousands of willing clerks, legislators, and middlemen who knew exactly what they were carrying and carried it anyway.

The political scientist Robert Putnam—who spent decades measuring American social cohesion —found that the Gilded Age was the most atomized, low-trust, every-man-for-himself moment in the American record.

And yet, America survived.

***

The actual first movers were, and I cannot stress this enough, nobodies.

Between roughly 1870 and 1920, Americans went on the greatest civic-joining spree in the country’s history — Putnam’s data show more enduring civic organizations founded in those decades than in any comparable period before or since. Unions, granges, fraternal lodges, women’s clubs, settlement houses, mutual aid societies, congregations, the PTA. Millions of people who had every reason to conclude that honesty was for suckers instead went out and found the other cooperators.

They weren’t being noble. They were being practical: alone, each of them was lunch. Together, they were a market where decency broke even.

***

The threshold is real. The arithmetic is real. And the arithmetic has exactly one input you control. Every era’s turnaround began the same way: some unmeasurable number of people, each acting alone, declined to sell — and then made the single most subversive move available to a member of a collapsing civilization.

They found the people who could not be bought.

 Which is something Donald J. Trump and his ilk will not understand: there is a line where money does not matter. Where there is a different calculus of profit. The Iranians stump him because they do not care about making his kind of profit. The No Kings movement shows that people can act without the help of polical parties. It just takes a little faith.

 I have about an hour - two hours gone now since I started working this morning - before I need to get ready for the writer's group. If it is not meeting, then I will beat it back here. Meanwhile, submitting stories!

 

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Indiana A Place For Doing Business!

 Not so fast!

For all our Republican General Assembly and Governor doing all they can but selling us outright, it does not seem that we are all that great a place for business investments. Well, businesses that are not sitting at the bottom of the barrel without a need for an educated population, or one that cannot reist any wage thrown to them.

Best state economies in America in 2026 (We're not in the top ten, if you had any doubts).

Indiana is No. 10 on Top States for Business 2026 (But here we are).

And: Hicks: GOP says 'hold my beer' on incoherent tax plan

sch 7/13 

 

The Fog Lifted A Little, So A Better Day

 I have run through Pennsylvania, made a trip to the conveince store and Payless grocery, taled to DM and CC, so not a bad day.

Can American politics get any dumber than what we have with the Orange Buffoon?

It Sure Looks Like Trump Was the One Who Damaged Reflecting Pool (The New Republic )

Ball Memorial Hospital is making news for all the wrong reasons: 'I don't know how we approve this': pharmacy board narrowly accepts drug diversion settlement (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

A rejection:

Thank you for sending us "After Making Landfall." We appreciate you giving us the opportunity to read it. Unfortunately, after careful consideration, we've decided not to pursue publication at this time. Please do not hesitate to submit to us in the future.

Thanks again and best of luck!

Sincerely,

The Editors

Black Fox Literary Magazine

An important philosophical question:

 And some good advice for living:

 

 

Two Items On Islam

No, I am not thinking of converting. Too many things about Islam do not fit with my thinking. However, there has been too much fear and hysteria about Islam since 9/11/2001. Gary Willls is a writer I have been paying attention to for around 40 years now. Seeing Garry Wills and the Q'uran on YouTube, I wanted to hear what he had to say. I think it is sensible.

 

After finding that Englesberg Ideas published The worlds that Islam made by Shiraz Maher. 

Neither McDougall nor Morrissey have written their books as explicit interventions to the current febrility that characterises so much of the public discourse about Islam’s place in the West, but their works are vital interventions, nonetheless. Their authoritative but unobtrusive expositions in a supposedly post-expert era move us beyond a hackneyed and essentialised depiction of a faith that is professed by around one quarter of humanity. Those promoting such a view, McDougall argues, are more often than not engaging in more ‘self-promoting paranoid fantasy than historically informed, judicious realism, but that has not prevented it from selling well’. 

I wonder how much of what think we know of Islam is a fever dream and how much of it is accurate. It could also be that so long as we rave we create our own problems.

sch 7/7 

Thinking About Writing Novels

About all I can do is think. Today was another one of those days of fogginess. I do not know whether it is because of the hernias or not taking my meds as I should. I tried napping and never really fell asleep, only wasted time. I got up after 8 pm and decided to order a sandwich and work on this blog. I have not stepped out of the apartment building since this morning. Not that I feel anything lost, other than time.

Submissions made over the weekend:

 “After Making Landfall”

 Mulberry Literary 

New Orleans Review “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984”: Missouri Review.

Something from the other day: Jack White: Frozen Charlotte Album Review | Pitchfork 

Before the portions quoted below, there as a discussion about French grammar and I wonder if that does not make a difference between their novels and ours. English is far less formal than French. Think about it. 

Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp by Kathryn Scanlan (Paris Review)

A traditional “realistic” novel strives to develop characters with believable physical and psychological detail, but Bessette’s approach might actually be the more lifelike one: while she pursues her narrative with a detective’s intent, the novelist remains more or less visible as the source of the artifice, and she never lets us forget that what we are reading is a text. Put another way, it’s useful to know that Bessette once described her writing as “auto-biographie realiste, non fantaisiste”—“realistic, non-fanciful autobiography”—which makes me think of Gertrude Stein, whose work Bessette read and admired. In his afterword to a later edition of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948), Stein’s short novel about several mysterious incidents that occurred one summer while Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were living in a country house in eastern France, John Herbert Gill writes: “Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer’s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined … The ‘continuous present’ in which Gertrude Stein’s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down.” For Stein—and, because everything she wrote was filtered through her particular consciousness: the first and last person.  

***

There’s the sense here, as Alice Oswald says, that “it’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.” Add to this Bessette’s notion that “traditional prose … even when it has thoughtful and intelligent things to say, remains a very commercial product.” A Poetic Novel, then, is perhaps one from which all the excess—words, commerce, false comfort—has been wrung, because the author (and her reader) is living under duress, in extremity, at a time when the finitude of life is quite clear. All of which is not to suggest that a Poetic Novel must be somber and heavy, because Twenty Minutes of Silence is nimble, playful, funny, irreverent. I particularly like the exchanges between Monsieur the Chief Inspector and his Deputy, who remind me of Chandler’s brutally absurdist cop duos (The Little Sister’s Fred Beifus and Christy French, for instance). Bessette’s impatience with the traditional elements of a novel is apparent: it seems she simply did not write what didn’t interest her. To make a profound book by stripping it to the bone (to the “I,” the first and last person)—to write, as a scrawled note in her literary archives declares, “the biggest novel of the world by the smallest novelist of that world”—that was her ambition. 

This is all for “Chasing Ashes”. I do not know what it will, only that it has to be different.

César Aira’s Art of Not Editing by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer (Paris Review) has this paragraph, it is what I want:

And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. 

Not that I this Aira's talent:

... Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers.

I just feel like my own stuff is so constituated.

Although I am not put off by Dostoyevsky nowadays, I think that has more to do with having joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, there is something true in Mark Nayler's Dostoevsky is a dreadful writer (The Spectator).

Given Dostoevsky’s reputation as one of the untouchables of literature, I was surprised at how bad his prose is. It lacks grace and balance. Instead of taught, stylish sentences, Dostoevsky works in messy, interminable paragraphs that erode the reader’s goodwill. I’m partly grateful, though, because his exhausting prose at least forced me to reflect on the complex relationship between reader and writer.   

And this is not how I would not want to be thought of:

My negative reaction to Dostoevsky, as I recently discovered, places me in distinguished company. Vladimir Nabokov once described him as “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.” Ernest Hemingway had mixed reactions: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” he asked. For Henry James, Dostoevsky’s novels were “loose baggy monsters” and “fluid puddings.” James couldn’t finish Crime and Punishment. Reading it, he said, was “like having an illness.” 

We too often blame ourselves if we don’t like or “get” a classic work of literature, thus absolving the writer of all responsibility. But after battling my way through almost 1,500 pages of Dostoevsky, I’m in no mood to be generous. The fault is mainly his.  

Two rejections came in:

Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall." After careful consideration, we've decided this submission isn't right for AGNI.

Kind regards, The Editors

Visit AGNI Online, featuring selections from our print issues, as well as a trove of new Web-exclusive writing.

To stay connected, sign up for the AGNI newsletter! 

And this for a submission from last year:

Thank you for your submission to Press Pause Press. We did not find "Coming Home" a fit for Press Pause at this time, but we appreciated the chance to consider your work, and we wish you the best of luck finding it a home.

Sincerely,

The Press Pause Press Team

 

 

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We Need Ian Drury's Reasons To Be Cheerful, Pt. 4!

 To point out our reasons to be cheerful.

Or at least less anxious that Cheeto Man is not going to get us all killed.

Donald Trump considers U.S. role as Strait of Hormuz guardian 

The Nato summit exposed the real source of Trump’s power | Robert Reich |  (The Guardian)

U.S., Iran locked in struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz (NBC News)

Trump informs Congress of renewed Iran strikes, starting 60-day clock (The Hill) 

DC insider warns of very real GOP plot to stop Dem takeover after November victory (Alternet.org )

Trump Embraces Australian Retirement System Backed by Larry Fink 

Judge blasts Trump lawsuit against IRS as improper 

'Impeachment Is Next,' Says Senate Dem After Judge Voids Trump Slush Fund Settlement (Common Dreams) 

The Supreme Court’s quiet coup (SCOTUSblog)

The court’s attacks on congressional power have not come through its monumental decisions regarding reproductive freedom, firearms, or presidential immunity. Instead – and more quietly – the court is also attempting to strip Congress of its authority to carry out its most important function: make laws for the benefit of the American people, where the voting population can hold the elected officials who make those laws accountable through the ballot box. As described below, the unelected members of the court weakened this core relationship between the American people and their government by dismantling pro-democracy voting rights laws, inventing new judicial doctrines out of whole cloth to reject duly enacted laws, rejecting administrative expertise, permitting the president to fire the heads of otherwise independent agencies, and dismissing legislative history as a tool for interpreting the legislative intent behind congressional action.

Taken together, this arrogation of power upsets the careful system of checks and balances created by the founders, elevating the court above Congress, a “co-equal” branch of government where the founders believed policy decisions should be made. These judicial interventions have made it harder for Congress to protect civil rights, voting access, and the environment. What is worse, they position the judiciary as America’s primary policymaking body, a role the founders never intended for the courts.

***

As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” 

 

Dispatches From Indiana’s War On Poor People (Sheila Kennedy )

Be we still have Reasons To Be Cheerful, Pt. 3

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Literary & Writing Stuff

 

7/1/2026 Submissions of “After Making Landfall”:

The Plentitudes

Toronto Journal

The Roost  

And of “Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861 – 1984”

Seven Story Publishing 

Today's rejections:

Thank you again for submitting 'The Unintended Consequences of Art' for consideration by The Future Fire. The editors have read this work and after some discussion we have decided not to take it for publication.

We'd like to thank you again for thinking of us with this piece, and wish you the very best with your writing in the future.

Djibril 

Press Blog: http://press.futurefire.net/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thefuturefire.bsky.social

 

***

 

Thank you for sending us "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861 – 1984." Unfortunately, we do not have a place for it at this time. However, we appreciate the opportunity to read your writing and your interest in Peatsmoke.

We hope you find a good home for your work elsewhere, and wish you the best.

Cheers,

Wendy & Bess

-- 

Wendy Wallace and Bess Cooley

Editors, Peatsmoke: A Literary Journal

***

We are grateful that you trusted ANMLY with "After Making Landfill," however, our readers felt that this particular packet was not a good fit, and we will be unable to publish it. We wish you luck in placing this elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors
http://www.anmly.org 

***

Thank you for submitting to Ploughshares. We have decided not to include your submission in an upcoming issue, but please be assured that "After Making Landfall" was carefully read.

Editorial decisions at Ploughshares are often informed by our vision for future issues, and as a result, we unfortunately must reject quality submissions more often than we'd like. Thank you again for the opportunity to consider your work.

For future submission opportunities, please note that our Emerging Writers' Contest is open each year from February 1-March 31 and our Regular Reading Period is open from June 1-November 15.

Sincerely,

The Ploughshares Editors

Good advice: Advice for older writers. Nathan Bransford has a newsletter, I think it is useful and educational about the publishing process.

 The Creative Resistance - by Joe Ponepinto ( Beyond Craft) pokes back at my AI bias. Having found much to my benefit from this Substack, I paid attention.

He noted, “Based on my experience teaching and lecturing across the world, the Creative Resistance is strongest in North America, much less dominant in India, and still less in China and Korea, with Europe somewhere in between. When I taught a class on AI and creativity in Seoul last summer, with students from across Asia as well as Latin America, they had a single concern: please teach us how to use these tools effectively. The only person calling for creative resistance was an American student who had strayed into the class.”

That seems pretty typical of American politics as well.

Maybe that’s the real debate. Many people in the US tend to look at social issues through the lens of politics, and since our politics is so divided, there is little to no middle ground, and no attempt to compromise. The Creative Resistance seems to mirror the us-against-them mentality that dominates our national discourse.

***

The above opinion of AI by people in other countries is closer to my own. I see it as a useful tool to enhance my work. It allows me to do research much faster4, and it occasionally offers input that augments my thinking, much like a human work partner. Its errors are annoying, but I believe I have the experience and judgment to weed them out of my work process.

I don’t use AI for writing. I don’t use it for planning or to brainstorm. I don’t use it to edit my work5. I am not tempted to use it for those purposes, partly because I have what I consider a very strong imagination, as well as decades of experience in creative writing and just don’t need it, and mostly because LLMs are tools that rely primarily on compilations of standard, mainstream literature, and I don’t want to write like that. They mimic writing styles, rather than attempt to create anything imaginative or original. They are useful as writing tools mostly for people who do not really know how to write.

I do not see it useful for my writing, and after too many years of doing my own research (and still regretting two errors), after letting one other person, someone I trusted at the time, I do not outsource my research.

Something a little different: On the Mark by Florence Hazrat review – a fascinating history of punctuation ( The Guardian ).

 Writers themselves, of course, have always guarded their own punctuation ferociously. (“I absolutely insist on this comma,” wrote Baudelaire, putting a removed one back in on a page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.) Editors remove commas or dashes at their peril; equally, Hazrat shows neatly how, in adding a ton of commas to Jack Kerouac’s draft of On the Road, his first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of the prose. This is all evidence for her admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.

Ivy Compton-Burnett's forgotten genius (Engelsberg ideas). A short piece about a writer I do not think I had heard of but the site turns up interesting items of all sorts. From what I read, complicated and distinctive, with the possibility of fomenting some ideas.

 Ivy Compton-Burnett’s literary method is quite unique, relying almost entirely on dialogue to drive the action. There is very little exposition, scene-setting or character drawing, and plot, as such, is perfunctory, often drawing on creaky devices from Victorian fiction. ‘As regards plot’, she wrote, ‘I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.’ Compton-Burnett’s dialogue is quite extraordinary – it has to be, as it has so much weight to carry. Her characters talk endlessly in long, formal, finely nuanced conversations which seethe with dark subtext, unspoken motives and fierce passions. These have to be read with close attention to discover – gradually or, often, explosively – what is really going on. It could be anything, up to and including murder. You have to be on your toes even to keep track of who is speaking, as these conversations often involve several people, sometimes talking over each other or aside. It’s rather like listening from outside a door – something Ivy’s characters frequently do, in the course of uncovering what is really going on. They also have a habit of suddenly materialising from nowhere, like Jeeves.

***

It is unlikely that these novels will ever again have a wide appeal – they are too challenging, in too many ways, for a modern readership – but it would be a sad loss if they were forgotten. Ivy Compton-Burnett is a true one-off, and her novels are like nothing else in fiction: others, including Henry James and Ronald Firbank, have written novels in dialogue, but they are nothing like Ivy’s. She even, it seems, defeats AI’s mimetic abilities: I recently challenged a chatbot to produce a passage in Compton-Burnett style and the result was thoroughly unsatisfactory – whereas Firbank came out well. Ivy herself once said, ‘Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.’ It is well worth resisting the urge. 

And a cautionary story, the despicable treatment of a female writer: She Wanted to Be Seen as a Writer. The World Saw Her as a Sex Worker. (The Walrus )

Arcan’s untimely death forced a re-evaluation of her work and persona. Posthumously, she was transformed from a frivolous, middlebrow enfant terrible into a subject of serious erudite study. Critics have been perturbed that Arcan embraced conventional scripts of female beauty and sexuality. Feminist critics have had a difficult time figuring out what to make of her contradictory politics, her obsession with death, and her grim view of female subjectivity. For others—like the Tout le monde en parle panellists—her manicured, surgically enhanced good looks were evidence of hypocrisy, given the biting assault on beauty culture she levelled on the page. Their absolutist logic is unable to parse the messy reality that a person can be intellectually critical of the same norms in which they are psychically invested.  

sch 7/6