I went to the dentist as planned, but what I did not plan was that insurance was not going to cover the job. $2800+. It is not life-threatening, and no one really cares what I look like. Old and fat and long past being of romantic interest to anyone.

I did get my inhaler prescription. The humidity is coming on hard and fast,

On the way to Open Door, I notice 3 or 4 men on the picnic tables belonging to the First Baptist Church. There was a family there with a car, kids, and dogs, too. They were cleaning the car. I hope they were not living out of their car, but I fear it is possible, 

Decided to clean out the videos I watched on YouTube yesterday. 

Once upon a time, like more than 50 years ago, there was WTTV in Indianapolis. It was the independent station, and it had shows like Cowboy Bob and Sammy Terry. The latter did horror movies on Friday. It was a big deal when Mom let us stay up to watch Dracula; my sisters and me on the couch, ready to be scared. Mostly he showed the old Universal movies (towards the end, he was showing Japanese monster movies), but he also showed things like The Aztec Mummy. 

 I have not seen them in more than 50 years, and I am glad my childish opinion was not wrong. They put me off of Mexican movies until Like Water for Chocolate. One thought I had while watching the video: if Brendan Fraser is coming back with another mummy movie, why not go to Mexico? Do the job right.

Back in the day, the movie theaters at Castleton did foreign and art movies. Breaker Morant was one that I drove down from Muncie to see. Pretty sure TJ was along for that trip.

 Not sure if I really care about the rightness of Morant's conviction as I am reminded that it has been about 46 years since I saw the movie. It sticks in the mind, even if not in its entirety. For all that we have the internet and all our ability to stream movies, we seem to have also shrunken our notions of quality and importance. Not even freedom by way of algorithm, but the bondage of our imagination by mathematical formula.

Didn't TJ and Randy K and me see Heavy Metal at the Anderson Mall theeater? The really old ones? I remember being disappointed that it was not as wild as the magazine. I had been reading that since I was seventeen, maybe younger. Listening to the video, I found why it did not reach the mark I expected. 

 The movie I thought got the magazine vibe right was The Fifth Element.

I can no longer count how many times we watched Game of Thrones in prison. Three or four times, I think. Peter Dinklage and Sean Bean were all that I knew of the cast at the start. I have to admit until this video, I always assumed Dinklage was English. Worth listening to two intelligent men talk about their work.

 

Back to the research, getting inspired to have some fun tonight:

 

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A Grab Bag of Writing Videos

Take all advice with a grain of salt; these have made me think about my writing and in a positive manner. I hope it does the same for you.

 

sch 6/2

Not Exactly A Lost Weekend

 I started this post on Saturday with these notes.

Move over Middlemarch! Readers’ top 100 novels:

Ultimately, even the longest list will prompt thoughts of what we might have included had we been making our selection on a different day, in a different mood. Even a top thousand would result in regret, because the greatest thing about books is that there are an awful lot of them; too many to read in a single lifetime, too wildly various to contemplate in a single frame of mind. Called on to isolate what they think of as the best, readers often feel a flicker of panic – how to whittle it down? – followed by the deep pleasure of contemplating all this evidence of roiling creativity and imagination. We know that the world won’t leave us in peace long enough to read everything we want to – but that doesn’t deter us from the attempt. If lists such as these can never be complete, nor perfect, then they at least remind us that we’ll never run out of reading material.

The list itself. Still a bunch I'v enot read, and several I never had any interest in reading.

Here's an idea: that for all we promote John Locke, secretly we are all Hobbesians.

Finally, a Unit of Measurement for a Certain Kind of Moral Depravity… 

 The Trouble With Narrative History argues that history has no purpose; that is, it doesn't point to some goal that can explain existence. Okay, I can agree with that. That history would lead to a particular destiny put me off Marxism. Whig history with its belief that history showed humanity progressing towards a more moral future would have appealed, but me knowing 20th-Century history, But I am troubled by Alex Rosenberg's essay. He makes much of The Gulag Archipelago  not bringing down the USSR. It might not have, but it did have an effect on people's thinking, Perhaps what bothers me are the claims made for narrative history as the explanation for humanity when it is only an explanation. For I do agree with him about life being an experiment.

So, what should we rely on to cope with the future if not narrative history? The same resource we employ to cope with the biological, climatological, ecological, agricultural, demographic, and medical future: experimental science. We need only figure out how to apply the empirical tools that, with ever-increasing success, have enabled us to cope with nature to our psychological, social, economic, and political futures.

Stories are for children and for the child in us all. Nothing will ever stop us from loving them, at least not until natural selection radically changes our neurology. Narrative historians, like other storytellers, will never want for an audience. But we will all benefit by recognizing what narrative history at its best and most harmless actually gives us — not knowledge or wisdom, but entertainment, escape, abiding pleasure.

 However, I disagree it does not give us knowledge. Histories are the record of the human experience. What we make of that record may be knowledge and wisdom, but that depends on the reader. Where science cannot explain, art might do the job.

 I worked on my research project, went to Payless late in the morning. I wanted to go over to the Farmer's Market but I did not think I could walk over there. The aching was a bit too much. I made it through some movies on Netflix using the Edge Browser. With that browser, I can open Netflix, have it running and alongside it I can have a window open with reading material. I gave up working fairly early in the night. Then I kept waking up throughout the night.

I woke about 7 AM and had trouble walking. Just worn out and hurting. I did not go to church. Later, I spent time reading, writing, and generally being lethargic. A trip to the convenience store was all I could manage. I gave up around 7 p.m.. 

I read part of Persepolis in prison, now Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis and acclaimed French-Iranian artist, dies aged 56. The reason is a shocker.

It is 4:18.  I have a dentist's appointment later today and am not sure what to do between now and then. 

I watched Blonde on Netflix and was impressed. Ana de Armas surprised by being a damn good dramatic actress. I have never been a Marilyn Monroe fan, but watching the movie and remembering some things Joyce Carol Oates said about Monroe, I realized I find the person more interesting than the actress. That whispery voice grates on me.

There I will end this post.

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Misusing Our Military and Our Tax Dollars

 I need to get something out of my system: just being able to blow things up does not win wars.

The opposite I have heard often enough since Trump began his Iran War. I suspect inside President Trump's head there has been on a loop a monlogoue of “Blow up everything! Smash, smash, smash! They'll get down on their kness!”

I do not think Jonathan V. Last's headline of Very Low-IQ Trump Too Stoopid to Win War because under the vitrolic headline is a very intriguing take on the change in modern warfare.

It is true that Trump and the Military-Industrial Complex have been very stupid, but then so were Xerxes, Philip II of Spain, the Zulus at Roarke's Drift, and the French at Agincourt. If you don't get the references, then follow the links before reading any further here.

I could probably make a longer list of the larger military built along the then best practices lost to the smaller military with a new technology. There is money being made in the standard practice, there is prestige in commanding the standard order military, and both create the inertia that leads to defeat.

For us, that started in Vietnam; albeit there was never a clear military defeat there. 

American admirals with prestige were those commanding battleships. Another example of big explosions blinding their adherents to the damage done by one bomb from one airplane. Now, the same inertia exists with aircraft carriers.

English longbows destroyed the armored French nobility.

Smaller, faster English ships sent the Spanish Armada to the bottom.

Drones are doing all of that now. 

If bombs were enough, England would have folded under The Blitz, Nazi Germany would have surrendered during the Allied bombing campaign, and the Vietnamese would have quit at the sight of our B-52s. Even after the Tokyo firebombing and two atomic bombs, Japan almost made us invade them.

Our war plans have been for big wars against the Russians and Chinese. Big armies with plenty of expensive weapons, with the potential of becoming generals and admirals, were sold to us for that kind of war. Iraq was a small-scale version of that sort of war. Vietnam and then Afghanistan were oddities, soon to be discounted by the upper echelons. Only now, as we're seeing in Ukraine, they were the forerunners; the American Civil War's technology and tactics to the First World War's.

Donald J. Trump followed Philip II's into exposing the hollowness of our military's preparedness by misusing our soldiers's and sailors's lives and skills.

Smart, fast, and hard always beats the dull and plodding.

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John Cheever's The Swimmer

 I saw the Burt Lancaster movie several times before I read John Chhever's short story. The story is amazing, the movie's worth is keeping faith with the story.

May you also enjoy this story: 

 

 

 

 sch 5/28

 

Been Spending Too Much Time In 1850

 The research project has taken up my time - still.

There was the writer's group on WEdnesday, but otherwise I have not been anywhere but Walmart and the convenience store. Walking too far is just a painful experience.

I see the surgeon later this morning.

I forgot to add this rejection from Tuesday:

Thank you for allowing Twisted River Review to consider "Pieces About a Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976-1984". We have read and discussed your work carefully, but unfortunately must pass at this time. Your fiction was in the top 25% of submissions for this reading period. Our staff found much to admire in your work, and we hope that you will try us again soon.



We wish you the best in placing your work elsewhere, and we thank you for your support of Twisted River Review.



Sincerely,

Lindsey Paquette

Fiction Editor, Twisted River Review 

And this one from Wednesday for "Saved By Rock and Roll":

We have decided not to accept this submission. Perhaps the links below will help you find another venue for your work:

https://magazine.feedspot.com/flash_fiction_magazine/

http://www.newpages.com/magazines/literary-magazines

https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

https://www.pw.org/small_presses?genre=Fiction&subgenre=9660&perpage=100&booktype=All&format=All

Best wishes,
The BFF Team

Those who think it was better in the past have not spent much time there. 1850 was not that much fun - especially knowing you are seeing the Civil War start boiling.

I have three sections that are functionally done - basic research, text saying what I want.

I am trying to decide whether to take a break or not. It's been an off and on again project for over 30 years. Wearing myself to catch up all that time or taking a break and come back tomorrow is the option. There are other things needing done.

Just for the record CC has been incommunicado for almost two weeks. Her boyfriends stopped calling to see if she was here. Dead or holed up sick? I am not going out to seek answers. 1850 is more important.

 WPRB's Summer schedule!

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Videos! Atwood - Vidal - Doctrow - Beloved - Iranians - Toot tooting Tudors - East of Eden

 Okay, bring out the tar and the feathers. I like Margaret Atwood's Madd Addam trilogy more than I do The Handmaiden's Tale.

 

Morrison's Beloved has too many reasons to read it, but if you have not then made this will clinch the deal.

Also related to Toni Morrison: Namwali Serpell and Dionne Custer Edwards on Toni Morrison’s Sula. I do not know if Sula gets the same attention as Beloved, and I have the sense that it does get anywhere near the attention of Song of Solomon, but it does have going for it the relationship between two women and their lives in a community. Understand that I have not read all of Morrison's novels, there may be a bad one but not in those I have read. Sula is one I have read. (The question of a bad novel is two-fold: is it a bad novel or is it a lesser work by Morrison? The first implies the lack of talent; the latter supposes less effort by Morriso in using her talent. I would give much to write what others might call a mediocre Morrison novel.) 

Gore Vidal in his grumpy glory:

 I have read only one of Deborah Levy's short stories, not any of her novels, and that I regret. The short story knocked me down.

 Reading Doctorow, like reading Gore Vidal, probably dates me. I will admit that the former is probably a better novelist than Vidal, with a reservation for Duluth. Popular, quality novelists who should not be allowed to just fade away. I will hold Doctorow's Ragtime against anything written by John Updike. Vidal's essays hold up in my mind better than his fiction.

 

 

Anne Lamott is someone I like listening to about writing:

 I have meant to read J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter; maybe I will have the time.

Yes, there are Iranian writers. They might even survive Trump's attack on Iranian civilization as well as the Revolutionary Guards..

 

 

Toot tooting Tudors:

I read Steinbeck's East of Eden before I read anything else of his. College, I think. My memory is it was a bit ramshackle in plot. That might have more to do with my having seen the movie version (which seems to have gone missing the past 30 years) and the TV version with the Bottoms brothers (which disappeared almost immediately). The following discussion puts the novel into order for me. I suppose I should read it again, but damn where do I find the time? 

I will close out with an article rather than a video: H.P. Lovecraft: Haunted by History. A good overview of the writer who scared me as a teenager.

 sch 5/29