Writers Stuff

 I am old so Lessons on Writing and Life from an Elder (Electric Literature) drew my attention and gave me some hope.

And so, I too am preparing to go. Word by word. I look out my window, from my office where I’ve been writing for these 30 years, and the air is unseasonable warm for March in Minnesota, even if the trees are still bare and won’t sprout leaves for several weeks. It’s a day of mild sun, a little overcast. I’ll go running out there along the river road in an hour or so, trying to stave off time and the body’s decay. I’ll think of this piece and this book I’m finishing. I’ll be thinking of the next book, and the next. It’s what writers do. I’ll feel this pain in the soles of my feet that’s more frequent now, I’ll be aching a bit in the knees and afterwards, with tingling in my calves and feet. I’ll worry about the neuropathy that’s only gotten worse in the past few years or my recent A-fib diagnosis. My body is signaling me—your warranty’s over, nothing more guaranteed. You’ve racked up the miles, only a few left. But I love the fact that I can still run and still write and I feel lucky I’m still here. And as she has for decades, she will be waiting for me when I return from my run, as will the next page on my computer. 

And today, with my knees aching but not screaming, with submissions to make even when the odds are certainly against me, when I have dredged a manuscript out of 2010 thinking it was a matter of only typing when it has turned into a complete rewrite for what worked in 2010 is completely useless, reading articles like Mr. Mura's has me hitting the keyboards.

Out of much to think about in A Few, Good Writing Tips to Keep You on Your Toes (Writing Forward ), I have latched onto these two.

Are you a writer or a storyteller? Writers know how to use their most important tools (grammar and language). Storytellers spin tales. You can be one or the other, or you can be both.

Follow your heart. Don’t write for the market or for your friends and family. Figure out what ignites your passion, and then figure out how to translate that into a story, poem, or essay.

I like to think I am a storyteller, for all they seem to fail as stories, but worry that I am more of just a writer. The answer might come when I stop plugging away.

All I can do is follow my heart. Time is too short for me to do anything else now. Would I had learned that lesson 44 years ago.

And the same with I Took ALL The Advice... by Kristen Weber.

sch 10/11 

 

 

 

 

Madison County Canals, Roman Farming & A New Mary Beard Book

 I have been a Mary Beard fan for may be 20 years and maybe more.  Los Angeles Review of Books reviews her latest under Scatological Graffiti and Other Arts. Which points out why she is so worth reading:

Modest in size but vast in scope, Talking Classics examines both antiquity and its later impact, from the Renaissance to the 21st century. It is especially rich in anecdotes and illustrations. Beard touches on many familiar classical remnants—July and August taking their names from Roman emperors, or Freud’s Oedipus complex. But she also tries to make those distant eras seem familiar—wall scratches, or “graffiti,” in a bar in Pompeii promoting political candidates alongside obscenities and boasts about bowel movements. Next to a latrine in Herculaneum: “Apollinaris the doctor of the emperor Titus had a good shit here.” 

 

sch 10/4

Reminder: Indiana Voting

Just in case anyone reading this actually lives in Indiana:

1-minute voter guide: Indiana's 5th Congressional District (Axios Indianapolis)

You’re not crazy. Voting in Indiana is intimidating. (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

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Bits and Pieces from Last Week

 A little late and from an unexpected source, I found support for my idea that the MPAA and the RIAA should be asking why porn survived into the digital age. That was something that I put out in 2010. The answer given in How porn shapes your phone habits, even if you don’t watch it (London Times) to my question is prosaic: 

The content was just bait to keep us scrolling and watching, while the traces of our most private desires were harvested and commodified.

More troubling now is this:

...Among the earliest people to craft online personas and compete for algorithmic visibility were so-called cam models: sex workers who already in the mid-Nineties began to vie for attention by selling the kind of parasocial intimacy that would later become a cornerstone of the creator economy. Viewers paid for nudity and sex, yes, but also for a sense of human contact. Influencers play with the same dynamic, offering carefully constructed fantasies in exchange for attention and, increasingly, money....

My reaction was it was a freak show, not reality, another thing to traverse while sight-seeing. But then I was never interested in the subject matter. Guess I was lucky, it may have been another in my group sessions went back to it. Leaving me wondering why. There really is nothing spectacular about looking at/watching naked people. I am left to the conclusion that I am missing the point, that I am out of touch.

Impossibility Is a Myth ( The Fence) some true white-collar crime for you art lovers.

Mike Ditka, the quintessential Chicago Bear and a Pro Football Hall of Famer, dies at 86 - law school made me a Bears fan. I have to admit not thinking of Ditka for many years now.

Who Put Bella In the Witch Elm? (Atlas Obscura) something weird to throw a curve in the works.

Because archeology fascinates me still: Ancient Wells, a Persian Trade Jar, and a Mysterious Structure Rewrite the Story of Tamil Nadu’s Sunken City and A 3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Dog Had a Unique Name, an Unusual Coat, and a Rare Hieroglyph ( Arkeonews).

Indiana interstate highway construction costs soar amid inflation, state's own ambitions (Indiana Capital Chronicle) brings me back to a 20 year old question: why not light rail?

 Is it nap time?

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Weird Stuff Read That I am Trying To Get My Head Around Right Now

 Home from church, trying to get through my open tabs. (I am supposed to be making submissions).

What I thought would be quick, quirky reads turned out a lot more.

Especially, Location tracking: ‘I can easily see where 80% of the people I know currently are’ (The Irish Times). I see parents tracking their kids; particularly since I have been dipping into missing person cases on YouTube. When I had stepkids, we gave them a cell phone when they were out trekking by themselves. On the other hand, the idea of tracking one's significant other leans heavily towards the creepy. It might also be the remnants of a bad conscience when, unlike Fats Waller, I was misbehaving.

When Orla Leahy, who is in her 70s, collects her husband from his appointments at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin she puts their dog’s collar, which has a location tracker, on to her wing mirror. “It’s a terrible place to park, so rather than have him waiting in the rain, he can see where I am [on his phone]. It’s a bit stalkerish but it’s a good use of the technology.”

A teenager I know was recently snared having a surreptitious party thanks to the family home’s doorbell camera. Sitting with his parents at the time, we watched all the youngsters coming to their door on his father’s phone before the event was shut down. I couldn’t help feeling it was a bit of a shame.

Someone else describes a friend whose girlfriend kept track of his every movement via location sharing – constantly ringing to ask questions about why he was where he was and who he was with.

We live in a world of surveillance. Our phones track us. Our apps track us. Security cameras on houses and businesses track us. Our data is circulated and shared and sold and hacked and leaked. Increasingly, assisting this process for the corporations who profit from it, we also voluntarily track each other.

Overprotection or rational lifeline? A surveillance state incubated by ourselves or a lack of self-consciousness about privacy? Not sure, but it sounds like an idea for a speculative fiction story.

But then my brain keeps thumping up against real safety concerns:

 

How I Became a Lock Picker is from The New Yorker and behind a paywall. Having watched too many crime shows, lockpicking always looked cool. That it is also a hobby surprised me.

 One day, I tried to open an old mailbox on the first floor. There were six slots, but I had only five keys, each of them as small and toylike as the key to a child’s diary. In an effort to open the last slot, I watched a video about lock picking on YouTube and ordered a set of picks from Amazon. Then I spent an hour unsuccessfully poking my new tools into the keyhole. In the end, I called a locksmith, defeated. A shifty young man turned up and, without even giving me his name, broke the lock with a drill. Before he left, though, he told me that there were groups of people who got together to study locks. I looked into it and found the Open Organization of Lockpickers (TOOOL), which originated in Amsterdam. Its members practice something called locksport.

***

TOOOL has a rigorous code of ethics. To form an official chapter, members must pledge that they will pick only those locks whose owners have given permission. Locksporters should not pick locks that are actively in use, because of the risk of breaking them. They should also be careful about whom they teach. Weyers turns people away when they seem suspiciously eager. Barry Wels, a co-founder of the Dutch chapter, has a security company that opens safes for clients, but he leaves the room when his work is done. “We are never interested in what is inside your safe,” he says on his website. “It is just not our business.”

Hobbyist lock pickers are not burglars, Weyers said, but people who want to master a practical and tactile skill. Once, a local television station profiled TOOOL and asked its members to dress in black turtlenecks and gloves. “That was not going to happen,” Weyers told me. If you truly wanted to get into a locked space, he pointed out, you would probably break a window or destroy the lock with a drill or a crowbar—unless, that is, you are dealing with certain American doorknobs, which Weyers considers inferior. “You will be able to open them after tonight,” he told me.

 

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Reading About Writers & Their Lives & About Writing

 I never finished reading  Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade. Why is beyond my memory. I had read a couple of his short stories and I liked them. It may be that the last story I read in Playboy was one of his. He is one of those guys I know I should pay more attention to as the time gets away from me. Therefore, I am using my time and the space here to suggest you do what I haven't done enough of. 

Literary Hub published Thomas McGuane is Writing the Most Vital Literature of the Trump Era and perhaps this will make my case for reading and learning from McGuane.

McGuane’s subtle wonders work because of their brief length. Novelists in the Trump era combat the daily sturm und drang with extended responses defined by their reach and, at times, their inability to grasp. The novel must develop; nobody wants 250 pages of stasis.

The MAGA faithful, on the other hand, take pride in their intractability. In McGuane’s hands, this other “half of the divide” become ideal subjects for the short story. His characters confront moments of reckoning—some comic, others karmic, often both—where self-belief collides with a buckling status quo.

Which might make A Wooded Shore terribly outré at a time of incipient fascism. (As outré as using the word outré.) But if we engage with McGuane on his terms, our engagement with fiction will extend both our reach and our grasp. What else is a literature for?

One more time for Marcel Proust.

 

 

Eight Writing Secrets:

 

 Alan Moore's writing advice is a little strange, enough so that I think I need to come back to it to make sure I am correct about this: he takes a different approach to make points long-standing.

 I have heard of Pachinko, but knew nothing of Min Jin Lee until this video. Now, I am a fan after hearing what got her writing and what she wants to do with her writing and her life in general.

 

 

I cannot recall the last time I read either Rudy Rucker or Bruce Sterling. Longer for Sterling, and I came to Rucker after I had read William Gibson, Sterling, and Neal Stephenson. It had to be before prison. It is harder to find Rucker's books but do look for them. His cyberpunk is more surfpunk; that is more humorous. Check out Rudy's Blog's for Blog Archive Podcast #119. Writing Cyberpunk. Rudy vs. Bruce.

Read A Writer’s Life: A Life if you are a new writer. One thing I did not know when I was younger was what it was like to be a writer. I wish I had this collection of examples.

Everything you’ve wanted to know (but didn’t know who to ask) about Substack Lit Mags 

sch 10/4 

 

Dining In Muncie Is A Strange New World That Philip K. Dick Might Appreciate

 I think the headline says it all: Woman arrested for pointing firearm at restaurant staff but just in case:

A woman has been arrested after allegedly pointing a gun at restaurant staff during an argument Wednesday morning.

According to court documents, the Muncie Police Department responded to a fight at Mac’s restaurant in the 1100 block of W. McGalliard Road. Police arrived around 10 a.m. Wednesday morning and were greeted by a Mac’s employee.

I really liked Strange New Worlds, it may have done something subtle. However, I am not a Trekkie. Either way you may find Roller Coaster — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Fourth Season Overview (Reactor) of interest.

I have not read enough of Philip K. Dick and he is not my favorite science fiction writer, but I understand his reputation. And I find Ted Gioia a person worth listening to, so check out My Favorite Philip K. Dick Novels by Ted Gioia. I did. Maybe I can find time for them.

 David Robinson Reviews: Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson (Books from Scotland)

Kate Atkinson’s latest, hugely enjoyable, novel Our Noble Selves is so stuffed full of head-spinning whodunnitry and has such a enormous cast of suspects that you can’t help but think that somewhere in her Edinburgh house there must be an enormous whiteboard with all the characters’ names on it, different coloured lines for each, and all of them twisting together and pulling apart before coming together in one great, final explosive denouement.   

 sch 10/8