I Was Lied To About 'On Writing' by Stephen King is another testament to that book on writing. As I have written before on here, I was told around the turn of the century to read it, but I did not, and when I did my first reaction was that I had been a damn fool for waiting too long.
I would say at it’s core, the two messages that are strongest in this
book are that of honesty and Joy. Stephen king talks a lot about how
the only way to write things organically and convincingly, whether it be
characters or dialogue or your writers voice, Is to be honest with
yourself, and to put that honesty on the page. I think confirmation of
this was present throughout the entire book, and I can say with little
doubt that Stephen King is genuinely himself.
His next message
however, is about joy, and how joy is both the motivation for writing,
and the point of writing. This is evident from his constant life stories
about his family, his wife, and his children. It even includes his
story of being hit by a car (sorry for leaving that out).
I think to show you the essence of this message, I will leave you with one final quotes of “ON Writing”:
“Writing
isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid,
or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those
who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s
about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay?”
In the book, Gornick provides an insightful and convincing answer to a
question that has always nagged at me, namely: Why do certain pieces of
writing “work” while others emphatically do not, despite the author’s
best intentions and maximum effort?
Gornick begins with a simple observation about selves:
that all of us contain a variety of them. One person might be, for
instance, “a daughter, a lover, a bird-watcher, a New Yorker,” among
many other things. And a piece of writing succeeds when the writer
invokes the best self to tell the particular story at hand.
***
Gornick argues that every work of literature has a situation—“the
context or circumstances, sometimes the plot”—and a story—“the emotional
experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the
thing one has come to say.” The persona is like the bridge between these
two: the vehicle for transforming a situation into a story. At the same
time: By telling the story, the persona comes into focus and this is the story as much as what is told.
This last version of “Agnes” is on my mind. I sent it off to KH with plenty of questions. But the biggest question is why it takes me so long to see how to tell a story best. I still think it comes down to me not seeing the forest for the trees, that obsessing over composition obscures the composition. I take it as a sign that I still do not know what I am doing, and what I am doing then I am not doing a good job.
I finished editing “Agnes” after 10:30 today. So, about 4 hours of work on that.
Beautiful, sunny day, and out of cigarettes I decided I was going to get a pack of Luckies and go to the farmer's market at Minnestrista. Missed my buses going downtown, so I decided to walk from the convenience store at University and Reserve. This was ever so dumb. I aggravated the hernias during my walk without getting any at the market.
I caught the #6 downtown. It was going on 12:15. The Mall bus would be leaving again at 12:45, and “The Death of Robin Hood” started at 1:15. The last Mall bus was at 5:15. I had wanted to go see the movie, editing “Agnes” had left me tired of working on the computer or even going home, so I went to get lunch at The Downtown Food Stand.
There I had a delicious smash burger. They will soon be doing a New York style pizza!
The Muncie Mall is now another derelict, a ghost. It is soon to be demolished, but I wonder if it can regain its role as a commercial center. The true mark of its status is that the Mall bus no longer stops there.
“The Death of Robin Hood”is superb but very serious; not a date movie. It got a little weird as I was blinking out towards the end. Not that it was boring . I just run out of energy kind of thing. That sums me up - tired.
I have been going through my email, eating dinner, listening to YouTube videos.
But I think I will be calling it a night for any more writing.
Yesterday, I started reqiring "Agnes". A bit more than a rewrite and also not quite a rewrite; the dailog changed to another character, the reappearance of the cat put to the end, same ending as the last revision but a bit more added. The one editorial feedback I got was brief:
Although there is much about your story that is commendable (e.g. interesting plot, some lovely phrasing) resubmission has been recommended after additional workshopping. According to FIJ Fiction Editor Joan Hawkins, your story "need[s] to be tightened, and in places, motivation needs to be clarified" while it would "benefit from a supportive writers group critique all around."
Okay, I thought it was tight before and so I had to look at what could be squeezed more. I went into left field to find a squeezer.
That helped with the motivation, I think. I could have just spelled out the woman had been fighting against death since she was 11, and she thought forcing her daughters upwards the social ladder. Especially since I had all that in every version of this story.
Not sure why it would need a writers group critique all around. I am not even sure if the Muncie writers group is meeting. I went WEdnesday and no one was there. I also got no emial that it was not meeting. Paranoia is creeping in, but I chose to ignore it. I could email the leader if I were not working on the writing as hard as I have been.
I finished today. Well, all but the editing. I am too tired for that right now.
Yesterday, I went to the sheriff's. The DOC decided I am seriously dangerous, and I am now on the lifetime reporting list. Before it was 25 years, of which I have 20 more years. Pretty sure that was a lifetime sentence as well. Oddly, the officer said something about my PO requesting an update. That seems strange, a little out of what I understand to be his remit.
Whatever I ate the day before caused me no small amount of pain. I also aggravated the hernias. Worn and hurting, I had problems concentrating enough to work on the story. I did some more research for the con law project. Then I just shut down my brain by watching Netflix.
Another thing I did was change my syntax. It seems when I get away from the straightforward reporting of events, I start doing even stranger things. The tone, the pacing, came to me Wednesday night when I was trying to sleep.
I did get some reading of the New York Review of Books while I was stuck at the courthouse. Maybe I should go more often.
But this morning I jumped right into the craziness. I missed my bus downtown because I was writing. A similar thing happened this afternoon, where I look at the computer clock and it is an hour or more since I last looked.
Group, Payless, Dumpling House, and it was over 90 minutes getting back here.
The representation of marginalized identities in power, business, or media is often hailed as indisputable proof of progress. But this representation does not yield improvements for most people who share those identities any more than having monarchs and emperors of a certain race or gender has improved conditions for workers and peasants of the same race and gender during history’s millennia of slavery, serfdom, and conscription. Such representation is more often used as a tactic for blocking egalitarian policies than for achieving them.
After all the time I spent in the debates of Indiana's 1850 constitutional convention, the more I am thinking such articles are too realistic for Americans' brains. Well, white Americans.
The scariest thing since my release is me agreeing with Mona Charen. Check out her How to Keep Loving America.
America has demonstrated a capacity for self correction in the past.
Suffrage was gradually expanded from white property owners to all white
men and then to black men and finally women. Slavery was obliterated by
the Civil War. The greed and peculation of the Gilded Age gave way to
the progressive era. McCarthy’s reckless bullying was rebuked by
Congress. Nixon’s crimes were followed by government reforms.
It’s possible that we have crested as a nation and are now in permanent decline. As Shakespeare said,
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood
leads on to fortune
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Perhaps we’re past
it. But when you consider our strengths and our virtues, giving up on
loving this country and working to steer it towards a better future
would be a tragic dereliction.
Needing something lighter to rundown the time before calling a night, I checked out movie reviews. I must admit I was curious but not so keen about Spielberg's new movie, and the review from The Guardian pretty much sucked the keenness out of me.
I cannot remember the last time I sawa Spielberg movie at the theater. Looking at this filmography, it was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and before that Catch Me If You Can.
Edward Burns used to make movies that I liked to watch but he has gone under my radar for a long time now. I saw the preview for his latest on YouTube, and today rogertebert.com put out a review, Finnegan’s Foursome:
“Finnegan’s Foursome” is a lot like those Adam Sandler comedies he would make with his buddies that were secretly just paid vacations. The film has little going on other than the Finnegans playing golf and arguing with one another. There are no discernible subplots of any importance, and the petty rivalries between the foursome are just that: petty and easily resolved. Freddy doesn’t just have a chip on his shoulder over his dad’s absence and unbeaten streak; he’s carrying an entire tree log. He’s easily the most unlikeable of the bunch. Burns is usually pretty good at finding the charming lug within the acerbic exterior, but he misses the mark here.
Refreshingly gracious, Early’s management of humanity in “Maddie’s
Secret” is the heart of this film. Bolstered by his always-confident
panache and showcasing a new dexterity in nimble storytelling and
emotional arcs, Early’s debut is exciting: a debutant ball for a new
voice in filmmaking, unafraid of kitsch, camp, and unabashed tenderness
riding in tandem with humor. It overflows with affection for everyone,
but of course Maddie in particular, the film’s love letter to the
contemporary woman: an inheritor of patriarchal and misogynist
pressures, a self-starter, a mediator between the real and ideal, and a
defiantly passionate figure of resilience.
I know the name Dwight Macdonald. He is one of those names lurking in footnotes, or even in the main text, of the times between WWII and the mid-Sixties. So, Geoff Shullenberger's review essay Dwight Macdonald’s American Century(Compact) looked like a way to add some fill to that hole in my education. It helped to want more. Going to college years after the fall of Saigon, I can see why I did not hear more of him then.
The Macdonald essays collected in the new anthology Atrocities of the Mind
focus heavily on America’s wars and showcase the consistency of his
oppositional posture throughout the period of American ascendancy.
Macdonald departed from Partisan Review, the flagship magazine
of the anti-Stalinist left and incubator of the New York Intellectuals,
after Pearl Harbor, over his fellow editors’ feeling that now “it was
their war and their country,” which he didn’t share. He launched his own
magazine, Politics, as a venue for what remained of left-wing
opposition to the war. Macdonald’s venture helped launch a number of
careers, including that of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills and
the social critic Paul Goodman, and introduced the writing of Simone
Weil to US readers; George Orwell was an admirer and contributor.
But I think I do like him:
What set Macdonald apart from his later New Left antiwar allies—and
their successors today—was that his views didn’t proceed from any
abstract ideological commitment to “anti-imperialism,” much less to
sympathy for the political causes of America’s enemies. Instead, his
concern was with “the horror of vast technological power exerted in
war-making.” The technological transformation of warfare had brought
about a state of “perfect automatism” characterized by an “absolute lack
of human consciousness or aims,” culminating in the construction of the
nuclear doomsday machine. Rational technoscientific methods had given
rise to an entirely irrational, mechanized system that seemed
increasingly bent on human destruction.
I forgot he was the one who coined the phrase Masscult. What the essay does with that is worth clicking on the link and reading for yourself.
For decades, the court operated under a healthy, if unspoken, anxiety: the fear of reversal. This fear once acted as a structural brake, reminding the justices that if they strayed too far from the constitutional mainstream, the system would push back.
For instance, the 11th, 13th, 14th, 16th and 26th Amendments to the Constitution were passed to overturn Supreme Court decisions. Congress has reversed several decisions by passing statutes as well, as exemplified in the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009. And the Supreme Court occasionally overrules itself, including overturning Bowers v. Hardwick, which allowed states to criminalize same-sex sexual relations, in 2003.
But the constitutional changes came at a time of crisis; the 13th and 14th came after the Civil War (and with the Union controlling enough states to pass them). The others were tune-ups to the constitution, mechanical upgrades to keep the government functioning.
What has become our de facto method of amending the Constitution is Supreme Court decisions.
The statutory revision process - Court striking down then Congress reworking - is the reason FDR floated a plan to pack the court.
That same process has a flip-side: Congress passing to the Court the job of completing legislation. I first noticed this in the snail darter case.
We have a dysfunctional Congress, so his solution feels impractical:
The most effective way to achieve this is a two-pronged structural reset. First, Congress should exercise its clear constitutional authority to
expand the size of the court. Second, and more crucially, the justices
should no longer sit as a permanent, monolithic body of nine. Instead,
they should be required to hear cases in randomly assigned three-judge
panels with final decision-making authority.
Okay, I agree with expanding the Court. There are nine Justices and around 13 federal circuits, so on a workload rationale there is a need for an expansion.
Not that expansion by itself is enough to curb the Court from becoming a branch as a partisan extension of the elected branches. It only ups the partisanship to four more nominees.
What Mr. Collins has done is apply the operations of the federal Circuit Courts of Appeal to the Supreme Court. It is clever, it may even improve its operation. I suppose there might be the right to an en banc hearing. It may be the only way to keep a 13 member court from becoming unweidly. What it does not do is prevent ideologues intent on forcing their ideology on all of America. It does not look upon the Senate milking partisan issues for their campaign funds as an issue underlying a court intent of ideologues. Not even his staggered appointments seem fitted to this problem.
Coupled with a larger pool of justices appointed across multiple
presidential administrations, this system would dilute the
winner-take-all stakes of judicial appointments. It transforms the court
from a partisan prize into a functional institution where the law is
shaped by a diversity of perspectives, rather than the iron grip of a
permanent majority.
There is another power Congress has over the Supreme Court and that is impeachment. It seems Justices Thomas and Alito have given Congress non-partisan grounds for their ethics. Others may have provided other grounds. That might give the court an incentive to impose on itself truly effective ethical rules.
Expansion, term limits, impeachments, and staggered terms are all good ideas and are necessary. However, there is one greater remedy: reinstating the amendment process, perhaps even making it easier. Until the federal government understands it does not run in a closed loop, there will always be a risk of ideologues intent on working their will on the people.
I cannot think of anything better than being on the other side of Donald J. Trump in a negotiation. One can be sure that he will grab the glory of the show and you will walk away with the substance in your back pocket. In fact under the cover of the Trump claiming victory and his greatness, you will not be noticed dumping the real profits off at the bank.
He said Zelenskyy had no cards to play, that Putin had executed a brilliant real estate acquisition. Now, Zelenskyy has the world paying him for drone tech, and Putin's real estate is all in grave sites.
The North Vietnamese Army did not defeat us; the Viet Cong did because they exploited our foolishness. The same with the Taliban. But we did not pay them off. We faced up to the hubris and fears that got us into Vietnam. Perhaps we will learn from Afghanistan.
Reading What’s in Trump’s reported 14-point MOU with Iran (The Hill) all I could see is ignomny and defeat, no learning from the mistake of Trump's excursion, nothing but a spinelessness. Even Nixon's peace with honor was not this dishonorable. The one thing I cannot get away from is that this is just what we deserve for our arrogance, for letting Trump anywhere close to the Oval Office.
I have been spending too much time doing research, trying to catch up with 30 years in a couple of weeks, but going down rocking. Reading and writing until my eyeballs feel like pinpricks and my brain is swirling. I started doing this thing of sleeping for a few hours and then getting back up to work.
Starting the day with new stuff from Ray Wylie Hubbard:
There has not been much to report. I did the group thing last Friday. The notes are around here somewhere. I think I will add them separately.
CC was found and she is alive.
I made it to church Sunday. The standing wore me out and I did not accomplish much else on Sunday. About the only other places I have been have been Payless or Walmart or the convenience store. I just came back from the convenience store.
Oh, I did laundry one day. Thursday or Friday. I talked to the niece when I did. Yes, it was Friday.
Another thing from last Friday: the phrase "all this useless beauty" got stuck in my head. It came to me as part of a song; one I could not remember. Then I tracked it down a few days later.
I have been keeping to Coke Zero or to one 2-liter of RC Cola.
We had heavy rains last night, after I called it a day.
I have decided that the Georgia Supreme Court writes tiresome opinions. It must be an institutional thing, since the same style persisted over 30 years,
The law is not a profession; it is an obsession, more like a disease of the brain.
Rock on.
I started this post days ago, meaning to write around these things.
There was something atavistic about the skunks, their ancestors living under my house generation after generation. I felt watching them Woolf’s deeper, darker explanation for why, while indifferent, nature soothes the afflicted. “Inside the transcendent communion with nature,” she wrote, “resides the most disquieting fact of existence—the awareness of an unfeeling universe, unconcerned with our fate.” This indifference calmed and conciliated compared with the weight of my loved one’s concern.
This sounds more like me up to 2010:
Woolf understood that those in pain are susceptible to illusion. “This monster,” she writes, “the body, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of wings into the rapture of transcendentalism.” It is assumed by believers that religion comes down from above, but if God exists, human bodies made him. The idea of the supernatural felt disrespectful to the stark reality of a damaged body like mine.
***
Woolf called illness, “the great confessional,” a rare space where “truths are blurted out.” But I had found her truths existential, and almost impossible to bear: “…how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads…”
The odd thing since I got home is that with my body falling apart I have not succumbed to the weariness and then the depression as I used to . I have learned to work around the problems and the pain. More importantly, I have medical insurance and a willingness to use that I did not have once upon a time. It is also good that I have done much to eliminate the stress, have learned to pace myself, and do not have a life where I have to keep throwing myself against a wall just to survive. On the other hand, the bureaucracy that has undertaken supervising my life does not understand that I have time only for writing, that is my job before I kick the bucket, my poor PO seems to think I am an isolated misanthrope when I feel like nothing of the kind.
When I was young, I was quite the reader of Heavy Metal. It seems to me now that that stopped in my thirties. Perhaps because the magazine became harder to find; perhaps because it no longer amazed me; perhaps because I turned to things that would make me money. Will it survive? Will its survival matter? Have our times gotten too shriveled with conservatism.
Anatomy of a Galileo Forgery(JSTOR Daily) forgeries are so much fun, yet this one on this day when lethargy has begun to overtake me again, I am troubled with the thought of history being undermined.
Both of De Caro’s copies of the Sidereus had a title page blemish that turned out to match perfectly a legitimate 1964 facsimile copy of the book. In that facsimile edition, a photo retoucher had failed to correct a paper blemish that the camera read as an ink dot … and here it was again four decades later, pointing to one of the sources of the De Caro fakes.
Detailing a trail of shady library exchanges; forgeries used to replace stolen originals; originals with added forged details to increase their value; and multiple forged copies (De Caro claimed he made five copies of Sidereus Nuncius), Wilding argues that the SNML “is merely the most sophisticated example we have so far detected in a long run of forgeries, whose primary aim was to stand in as surrogates for stolen copies.” Eager to disabuse people of rooting for clever forgers and the schadenfreude of seeing experts conned, Wilding writes, “these books are the product of organized crime” undermining history and the institutions that make history possible.
But is not history always undermining itself?
We found out today that Donald J. Trump has not even made an agreement to end his “excursion” into Iran, but only an agreement to make an agreement. How many will tout him as a genius? That he is the greatest dealmaker in history? Plenty.
And I’ll mention one point in particular that seems not to be getting the attention it deserves. The memorandum of understanding to be signed Friday reportedly says that Iran will not impose tolls in the strait of Hormuz for the next sixty days. This is presumably the basis of Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll-free.” But the government of Iran says that the strait will operate in the longer run “under Iranian arrangements.” This seems likely to be true, since Iran has established the principle that it can close the strait, has paid no price, hasn’t repudiated a right to do so in the future, and will be more interested and able to enforce its will in the months and years to come than we’ll be able to stop them.
***
Could the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing? Could it provide a spur for us to arrest and reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence? Indeed, the American people don’t seem to have been too impressed by Trump’s White House cage circus. Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?
Why It Matters(Sheila Kennedy) should leave depressed about the people but I think there are more who want to be better human beings, who think Trump and his ilk are not better human beings. Meanwhile, we live with their stupidity.
Gerrymandering in Indiana is worse than 95% of the U.S., new report says (wthr.com). The Indiana Supreme Court wrote in its last abortion case that if the people of Indiana have control of the legislature and can amend the constitution. Quaint legal fiction or a delusion, I leave to you, dear reader. I think it is BS. Indiana is in the hands of one political party that will not let the people decide for themselves.
Over time, a dominant party tends to fill watchdog roles — attorneys
general, inspectors general, ethics boards, judicial appointments — with
loyalists. These watchdogs may not be corrupt themselves, but they tend
to become less aggressive when it comes to investigating the ruling
party.
Long tenure also gives a party time to build patronage. Government
jobs, contracts, licenses, and permits flow disproportionately to allies
and donors. What begins as political favoritism can gradually morph
into corruption (Illinois and New Jersey are classic examples of states
where decades of machine politics have created cultures where
“transactional behavior” is just “how things work”).
In competitive states, scandals can be exploited by the opposition
party, but in states where the opposition is permanently weak, the
dominant party doesn’t have much incentive to police itself. The
discipline imposed by an external threat is missing.
This year, for the first time in a long time, Indiana Democrats are
running candidates in most of the districts thought to be “safe” for
Republicans, and the new Lincoln Party is also attempting to upend the
GOP’s lock on Hoosier governance. Perhaps the state is on the cusp of a
revived competitiveness–and a more competent and less corrupt
governance.
Reading American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present (Literary Hub) is a good antidote to my thinking that Trump is a giant hairball in our national history, it is time for us to just shut up and get off stage. He is that hairball. Diving back into legal history keeps reinforcing the idea that if you think there has been no systemic racism in this country then you need to look up the word thinking in the dictionary. It has been here, it lingers behind the mean-spirited cowardly parasites who think birth gives them status. What is also to be seen is how we have tried to follow our better angels. I thought in the following to see a glimpse for a better future.
Such is the problem of patriotism: a higher law that is really a lower law, because it substitutes a theory about America for the reality. It esteems the state above the person, the shell above the contents, in the hope that what is good for one will be good for the other. It has never worked that way. Where patriotism has meant exceptionalism—the belief that America was born to lead—it has wreaked havoc on the cause of democracy and fair dealing, at home and abroad.
America’s descent, on its 250th anniversary, to the demagoguery of an unapologetic nationalist is not the aberration many want it to be. It is the consummation of forces that have been latent from the start: a rumbling warfare between a political theory of equality and a more visceral urge for mastery. And while “America First” may represent a particularly abrasive form of the phenomenon, it cannot be isolated from a tradition that has long confused the strength of America with the substance of democracy. When the answer to Donald Trump is a renewed and refined patriotism, drawing on the example of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that claimed nearly a million lives, it is clear that we need to go deeper.
***
My conviction, as a true believer in what the journalist Randolph Bourne called the “American promise,” is that America needs to shed the conceit of exceptionalism to fulfill its democratic mandate. We must lose the myth of preeminence to see the world as it is. From foreign policy to health care, education to the environment, questions of freedom and justice have been lost in the mists of national pride: the still-religious intuition that we have already arrived. The paradox, as Bourne defined it during the nationalist frenzy of World War I, is that America will have to become less patriotic before it can recover what is true and beautiful in its creed.
There are so many areas in which America excels Europe, thought Bourne, but in patriotism we follow and regress. As the irrepressible Emma Goldman lectured a jury, as she defended herself against charges of conspiring against conscription, there are more kinds of patriotism than carnivals of self-regard.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” she told a court in 1917, “we respect your patriotism. We would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for one cannot believe that love of one’s country must needs consist in blindness to its social faults, to deafness to its social discords, of inarticulation to its social wrongs.”
“Our patriotism,” she continued, “is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” Goldman loved the American people, and the “great possibilities” of a free society, but she hated the “cant” of an Americanism that trampled on freedom and expected to be thanked for it: the misconceived idealism that deemed a flag more precious than a person. Patriotism, Goldman argued in an earlier essay, had become a “Moloch” and a “menace to liberty,” a value that cheerfully “abrogates the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” When a court could sentence a man to ninety days in prison for quoting the nation’s founding document, in a manner supposedly subversive of the war, the crisis was complete.
LaCroix concluded with the observation that, at the time of that
speech, the young Lincoln “did not know what was coming.” He had no
inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, but
what he could do at that time of his life was offer his listeners a set
of ideas that would attach them to civic life rather than alienating
them from it.
There was much more. The full video of her address is available on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/1199018583#t=1h18m28s. It
starts at the 1 hour 18 minute mark, and I strongly encourage you to
click through and watch the entire speech, which was far more powerful
than my efforts to describe it.
I had not heard the phrase “the mobocratic spirit,” but it is a perfect description of MAGA.
What Lincoln understood and emphasized was the central element of
true Americanism, which is allegiance to a specific approach to human
governance. It is that allegiance that separates citizens of the United
States from the “blood and soil” beliefs that underlie fascist regimes
and motivate Trump’s MAGA base. In a recent speech, Georgia Senator John
Ossoff recently reaffirmed Lincoln’s understanding of what makes one an
American, insisting that “Our national greatness flows not through our
blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race.
We’re a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions.
And that is what makes us exceptional.”
I finished with "Stranger Things" and "The Sandman" on Netflix. Winona Ryder has now graduated to mother roles and seems so far from Heathers, but damn she has got a way with an axe. "The Sandman" left me as cold as the graphic novels did until Shakespeare showed up. There is a dreaming, indeed.
Over on YouTube the algorithm turned up a Cary Grant movie I had never heard of This Is the Night . That it had Thelma Todd was what attracted my attention. I knew about her death but could never recall her from any movie. Attractive, funny, and, yeah, I can see why her death was a shocker. But it was another actress who caught my attention -Lili Damita - the rather notorious first wife of Erroll Flynn. I had never heard anything of her acting, so her being a charming fireball was a surprise. However, the fascinating thing about the movie was the opening; never seen one like it, call it jazz on film.
I was less impressed by The Brasher Dubloon; the novel is not my favorite Raymond Chandler novel, I like even Playback better; the movie is uneven, reminding me of better actors in the role such as Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum, but it beats Altman's The Long Goodbye.
This is the kind of movie that needs to be remade - good enough and could be better.
The same with this one, that never seems to come to life, and I understand why I have not seen it in too many decades to admit.
Thank you for submitting your piece "Agnes" to Thin Air online.
Our editorial staff has given it careful consideration and
unfortunately must pass at this time. Although we are not accepting your
work, our team was excited to have the chance to read and consider it.
We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Kruger, Web Editor
And this was not much of a surprise:
Thank you
for submitting "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984." We
regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest
in The Paris Review.
I need to make some calls. I thought of calling KH last night when I got thinking of the distance between old songs and today. For some reason, I got to going through Hank Willaims Jr. songs just before bedtime last night. He's not a soul singer like Waylon, but I like what he's doing now with country blues. That got me thinking about late style. He got pressed into the service of a country music that had little to offer him, he moved over to a more rocking, outlaw style, then got popular and somewhat stupid about politics, and with the country blues he is putting out music that has feeling.
Speaking of Waylon, this just came across the speakers from an old live song, something I used to think was corny and now sounds like a better view of America than is coming to me today.
The sheriff called the other day, wanting to do an interview as the DOC has implemented some new rules. I have no idea what the rules are. So, tomorrow I go out there, taking a break from work to satisfy some bureaucratic fears about my existence. Your tax dollars at work.
The writer's group meets today, and I intend to be there. Also, I need to hit a grocery. And deposit my Indiana tax refund. I probably should take time for my mail rather than my email.
I am supposed to be working on "Agnes" - maybe I can get to it this afternoon. It will let me get a grip on this research project to not be working on it all day today.
And that is pretty much life as it is here in Muncie. The sun is up now, two hours after I came back from the convenience store and started cleaning up this post. I suspect a few more will come out that will be more political,
And it could be time for breakfast.
Maybe I did get to you, I do know I got where I am going.
I understand Kundera's star has faded somewhat. Maybe that is for the best, instead of the fame we are paying attention to what he says. I have been spending time away from fiction and digging into 1850 Indiana, and I have spent time listening to Gore Vidal on YouTube. Historical amnesia is on my mind. Do we forget to cover our pains? Is there a glimpse at tyranny through the rewriting of history? Yes, probably a bit of Orwell hiding in there, too. There is a problem with the exceptions to a rule, a beauty to a simple narrative. People will latch onto x because if it is too confusing, perhaps frightening, about the truth being x + m + e + a times 33.
