The Good News (not) From Indiana

 Off to a slow start this morning, recuperating from my road trip to Indianapolis yesterday. Indy drivers exhaust me nowadays. 

Yesterday I got a bunch of my cases scanned and sent back, got tired and stopped, came back here and found out I missed two pages in a case I needed to have. The trip wore me out good but I got to thinking that I have to go back now. 

Up earlier today than expected. Thinking about heading back to Indy. 

Only it is gloomy and thunderstorms are predicted. No, I think I will stay here and do domestic stuff. 

Definitely Monday for a return while I have a car at my disposal. 

And I did not get to see The Interview, either. Caffeine. I need caffeine. And a shower. 

I guess Trump did another of his hot air speeches. Cizzilia compared it to Rivera & Capone's vault.

 Trump alleges vast conspiracy to commit and cover up election fraud; any fraud committed was under his watch, nothing said about actual manipulation; too bad hot air is now taken as reality.

Trump addresses nation on election security but offers no new proof: Five takeaways 

The Real Threat to Our Elections Is Donald Trump 

Too bad the President paid more attention to the economy than his wounded vanity: Remarks on inflation, employment and monetary policy (Dallasfed.org).  

Now for the good news (not) from Indiana. ICE is here, ruining lives. School kids  suffer while the state runs a surplus and we spend billions of dollars on bombs for Iran. And the State Of Indiana demonstrates its prudish lack of humor.

Indiana, ICE and the Destruction of Immigrant Families (Mother Jones)

Joanna and her two young sons are US-born citizens. She comes from a multi-generational Latino American family. Manuel was born in Honduras. Indiana has been his home for over fifteen years. He owns a successful roofing business that employs several people. He’s a mentor and leader to them and others in the community. Joanna earned a degree in psychology from the University of Washington. They started a family. They work hard, pay taxes, own their home, have two cars. Their children attend the local elementary school. They volunteer and are active members of their church and their community. Manuel was in the final stages of obtaining permanent residency when ICE “took” him. Their family is one of tens of thousands of mixed-status households in Indiana.

“The new administration thinks, We’re going to just deport everybody and get everybody out of here,” Joanna says. “But there’s not an understanding of how our communities have been here for so many generations, that we are the American community already.”

ICE holding 28 people at Clark County Jail after unannounced operation Wednesday | Indiana (newsandtribune.com)

CLARK COUNTY – At least 28 people were detained Wednesday and Thursday in Clark County and are now being held in Clark County Jail on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to jail records obtained by the News and Tribune.

Reports of an ICE presence outside of the Home Depot in Clarksville fostered some concern Wednesday morning after local activism group Do Something Southern Indiana posted pictures of a black unmarked Ford F-150 with blue and red lights there on Facebook.

Clarksville Police Chief Nathan Walls confirmed with the News and Tribune on Thursday that ICE, or a different agency acting on behalf of ICE, had been in town. He said nobody told the Clarksville Police Department about any immigration-related operations occurring Wednesday.

Cuts to SNAP, Medicaid could impact free school meals at high-poverty schools (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

If a school loses Community Eligibility Provision status, families will need to apply individually to prove they meet income restrictions for free or reduced-price meals.

The income limit for a family of four is $42,900 a year for free meals and $61,050 for reduced-price meals.

Families who earn too much will no longer qualify and will need to pay out of pocket.

The Center for American Progress estimates this would cost the typical Hoosier family with two kids an extra $1,080 a year.

“Inflation’s already pretty high,” said Lyndsay Coe, a single mother in Indianapolis who relies on $302 a month in SNAP benefits and free school meals to feed her daughter.

“We have a bare refrigerator” by the end of the month, said Alexandra McMasters, a single mother of two children living in Clinton.

Laid off from her job in healthcare, McMasters now works part-time for the U.S. Postal Service.

Yeah, I am in that kind of mood this morning - how else to feel with this news? Even though this last bit ought to provoke a good laugh.

Food truck removed from Statehouse Market over slogan; could have free speech implications (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Kirollos Barsoum, communications director of the State Personnel Department, said “Participation of food trucks and other vendors at the Statehouse Market is by invitation and is at the discretion of the State Personnel Department. We routinely evaluate vendors based on a variety of operational and programmatic considerations, and we reserve the right to modify the vendor rotation or discontinue participation at any time.”

The Capital Chronicle also asked for copies of any complaints received and he said “no responsive written records exist.”

Zachary Cormier, an associate professor of law at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, said there could be First Amendment implications. Offensiveness alone can’t be precluded by the government.

For it to regulate that kind of speech, he said, it’d need to rise to the level of obscenity. That standard, while varying from community to community, tends to be high.

“And usually these types of business slogans that are meant to be provocative,” Cormier said, “you know maybe even have some type of sexual connotation or double entendre, don’t normally rise to that level.”

***

Sims, the food truck owner, also felt he didn’t get a chance to appeal or come up with a solution since the email stated the decision was “final.” Nobody had complained to him while at the market, he said, and he’ll lose between $4,000 and $5,000 in revenue from the two Thursdays he’ll miss in August and September. 

Need to get ready for the rest of my day. 

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Indiana politics making me roll my eyes with disgust: Really, Indiana? (Sheila Kennedy). 

Indiana to end race, gender preferences in state contracts (Indiana Capital Chronicle) letting people get access at jobs they were kept from by prejudice and then calling them that chance is now considered to be racism. We have become a nation of thumb-sucking victims. But the real story is beyond that  - it is about power. Indiana's Attorney General submits an opinion to the Governor on how to bypass a statute rather than have the supine Republican General Assembly repeal the law.

I think I will need to look at that opinion for my research project.

 Independent tops spring secretary of state fundraising, Democrat amasses general election war chest (Indiana Capital Chronicle) will Greg Ballard or Beau Bayh deliver us from our one party government?

Senator Jim Banks introduces bill on birthright citizenship 

Banks’s office said in a statement that the bill would find that “illegal immigration and birth tourism constitute an ongoing invasion and amends federal law to confirm that children born to illegal aliens and birth tourists are not entitled to automatic citizenship.”

“The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision was an unprecedented assault on American sovereignty, and we must do whatever it takes to save our country,” Banks said in the statement. “I’m leading the Citizenship Act to reverse the effects of this consequential ruling and ensure the millions of illegal aliens that invaded our country can’t continue to exploit our immigration system.”

We have no more Dick Lugars.

A new news outlet for Hoosiers: FPI News - Independent statewide journalism in Indiana. We need more of this!

 

sch 7/16 

Bad News and Other Stuff

 The writer's group did not meet.

I got word from the doctor that they moved my surgery and I need to be there at 5:30 Am. Not a problem if I had my own transportation. My sister was to take me, so I called her. The number I have is an old one and the right one was lost when my last phone died. Emails were sent without a reply. Grasping at straws right now.

I spent most of yesterday working on submissions, and not in the way I intended.

“The First Day of Feeling Free” - Strange Pilgrims - is actually a chapter from “Chasing Ashes”. I spent several working it around into more of a standalone piece. LibreOffice has taken to shutting down and I do not know why.

“The Unintended Consequences of Art” - The Submission Pit - was meant to go elsewhere only it had been previously submitted and the site would not let me use the same title. Witless, I decided to send it to this site with a change of the name of the aliens instead of changing the title.

A little less mopey. A nap in the evening. Email worked on. Some side reading, even if not of what I should be reading. I started a new short story just to get a paragraph out of my head. Not much of a day. 

 Being a Novelist Only Costs Romantic Compromises and Debilitating Debt (Electric Literature ) is a story I want to recommend.

I read Lolita in prison. Nabokov's writing was the best thing. Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes's The Spurious Perversity of Lolita (Book XI) does put some of the novel's problems in perspective.

In his essay, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Nabokov argues that, “if one begins with a ready made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.”  By the way, however, this doesn’t mean that anyone, including Nabokov, believes that the reader should be giving H.H. the benefit of the doubt or a charitable reading; the foreword to the novel is framed as an editorial note by a fictional psychologist, Dr. John Ray, Jr. who calls H.H. “horrible,” “abject,” and a “shining example of moral leprosy.”  So, no one goes into Lolita thinking he’s the good guy––or at least they shouldn’t.  

Professor Dwyer reconstructs her students’ claim that “by assigning Lolita I am perpetuating trauma and may even be perpetuating rape culture.” And retorts “this last suggestion runs so counter to my own beliefs about what literature does.”  Because there’s an important distinction to be made, which nowadays seems to have become forgotten when it comes to works of literature: representation does not equal romanticization.  

Nabokov goes on to say: “Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.”  The tedious and benighted nature of this procession strikes a clear resonance with his own text.  I had a wonderful literature professor who told us never to read the back of the novels we were reading in her class....

***

And another thing, Lolita is more about America, postwar America—it’s temporal setting—and present-day America than anything else.  Hand-in-hand with H.H. being the quintessentially unreliable narrator is the novel’s quintessentially Americanness presented in its tropes: the road trip he takes with Dolores, the life in suburbia in which he first encounters her, the U.S. popular culture allusions strewn throughout the novel, the fact that it begins with an extensive allusion to Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”  Just as we ought to be suspicious of H.H.’s nomial transfiguration of Dolores into Lolita, erasing the pain and replacing it with imposed seductive obsessions, so should we throw a scrutinizing eye on the narratives the U.S. was/is weaving about itself.  

And this warning is more relevant than ever.  As Professor Breen points out, we are living in a world where young girls are, and have been since before Nabokov’s novel, serially commodified.  The darkest side of this perverse cultural valuation has been presented to us in its most bare-face cruelty in the release of the Epstein files.  How Nabokov’s gripping, seductive prose hides within it profound violence teaches us to be disgusted with that behavior and that deliberate erasure, which stands in stark contrast to the way that the glorification of the modeling and beauty industries that incessantly and insidiously hide, suppress, and normalize the abuse and exploitation of the young and vulnerable.  In the past five years, there has been a meteoric rise of young women commodifying their own bodies on platforms like OnlyFans.  While it is not a larger institution, like in modeling, these platforms operate on a false sense of empowerment.  While they purport to empower women by allowing them to take agency over their sexuality and monetize it on their own terms, the nature of this digital sexwork platform differs little from ages-long the capitalistic and patriarchal exploitation of young women.  The narrative of self-empowerment that OnlyFans promotes can be much likened to the narrative that Humbert Humbert weaves of Dolores’ seduction of him: false, and created by the person in power who benefits from the vulnerable’s participation—which is never the vulnerable party herself.  

 The online morons hating The Odyssey movie have also attacked the translator Emily Wilson. From Emily Wilson on Porous Boundaries and the World of Homer (Los Angeles Review of Books), I think she sounds charming, well-intentioned, and competent.

CC and I were supposed to see a movie. Shew was too tired, it was too hot. Not that I really expected her to go along. Since I was waiting for a call from my sister, I stayed home wating for her call.

Reading around this morning, awakening before the alarm:

‘The China Question’ by Ho-fung Hung review (History Today)

Despite its historical focus, The China Question is not written for historians. It is very much a ‘Grand Theory’, supported by rich case studies drawn from a wide-ranging secondary literature. While its ambitiousness is laudable, it also opens up some pitfalls. An attempt to recount 800 years in 260 pages necessarily results in a loss of nuance. One of the more problematic aspects of Hung’s argument is its own replication of a binary view, much like the orientalism he critiques. His suggestion that for eight centuries almost all Western writings on China swung between two equally orientalist poles ends up overlooking the enormous ‘third space’ that has long existed in between. Martino Martini, for instance, wrote two extraordinarily erudite accounts of China’s chronology and geography in addition to his punchier account of the fall of the Ming, painting the empire and its history as connected to, but different from, Europe’s. Where Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault – earlier Jesuit missionaries in China – argued that the Chinese were peace-loving and thus ‘differ greatly from the nations of Europe’, Martini offered more nuance. In his lengthy Chinese history, Sinicae historiae decas prima (1659), he explained that, rather than being timeless and unchanging, Chinese wartime strategies depended on their particular contexts and often involved learning from their enemies. Many of Hung’s case studies contain complex perspectives which he overlooks. Indeed, his decision to see things as either Sinophilic or Sinophobic risks simplifying rather than critically probing the historical record. This is perhaps best captured by a table produced at the end of the book: ‘Eight hundred years of fantasy-fear cycles’, covering different ‘fields’ – from ‘Catholic scholarship’ in the 1240s to ‘Political discourses disguised as scholarship’ from the 1990s to the present – gives a binary overview of the evolution of attitudes towards China, tracking the pendulum swing from Sinophilia to Sinophobia. 

 “The Odyssey” Movie Review (The New Yorker): wanted more Bronze Age barbarity.

Strange Pilgrims (@strangepilgrims): "Albert Camus on life and freedom" 

 Counterbalancing the idiocy of Indiana Republicans (which is for another post):

Indy queer horror film 'Jodi' to premiere at Tibbs Drive-In 

Arts & Culture - Mirror Indy 

Off to Indy today for another visit to the law school library. 

 

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Reading Lists, Writing Examples, Making The Writing Work

 I got suckered a little by the following video, then I realized it's value.

 It gives us a list not compiled by some stody old fart. That's its value.

7 Habits of Highly Annoying Novels - by Cristin White - pay attention to his editing of one passage, if nothing else!

Why Multiple POVs Can Make Readers Love Your Characters More - Helping Writers Become Authors is important to me because this is what my “Dead and Dying” stories turned "Scenes from a Small Indiana Factory” has been trying to do. So far, no success. Whether that is because no one outisde of Indiana finds the stories interesting, or because I borrowed my presentation from The Spoon River Anthology, or both, occupies my mind. Maybe it will find a home for publication before I die.

 The Story Hook Writers Miss (Not the One You Think!) has something that I particularly like, support for my own ideas. It came from reading Bertolt Brecht wanting a theater that made people think. My response was that 's cool but how do you keep their behinds in theater seats? People have to feel some attraction to the characters, that's how we keep them in their seats. This is one thing that I am still working on; it seems with my latest revisions, I am getting closer. Now, do I have time to make it all work and write something worth reading?

Think about it. Hemingway does it. Toni Morrison does it, too. 

Talk about the ultimate wounded hero, the defiant underdog, the man risking loss, the man fighting for his ideals against the world: Done Quixote? Film archivists on quest to finish Orson Welles passion project (The Guardian). Do I mean Don Quixotic or Welles? Take your pick; take both.

Never Publish a Book Without Checking This (I’m an Editor) is way ahead of where I am, but for two things. I like BookFox and its advice. Second, it reassures me that I need to work on making sure the opening chapter establishes the book. (I need do some work on that!)

 

All of which leaves me feeling like this:

 sch 7/15

 

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: