I have seen that movie and it is Bruce Campbell's finest hour. Really. The Feral Historian points out what we missed by seeing only the film.
The Cramps album review:
Does this new Doors live album serve any real purpose now?
More Bo:
sch 11/1
I have never seen the likes of last night's election. The biggest shocker for me was Hamilton County going Democrat and putting J.D. Ford into the House of Representatives.
Now, for a little reading, if you have not had enough news.
No Kings (Sheila Kennedy)
I was especially gratified to see that J.D. Ford won his race for Congress in Indiana’s Fifth district–a seat that national pundits had identified as a harbinger. If Democrats could take that seat, they opined, it would mean the party was headed for substantial victories nationwide. They were right. (I found that result particularly satisfying, because I know J.D., and he’s a great guy, while Spartz is a personally unpleasant individual who–among other things– has refused to serve on Congressional committees– a major part of a Congressperson’s job–while still pocketing her paycheck.)
Here in Indiana, it even looks as if the Democrats will break the GOP’s legislative super-majority. In our very Red state, that counts as a big deal…
Indiana Dems break GOP supermajority in House, notch Senate wins (Indiana Chronicle)
In Madison County, located northeast of Indianapolis, Democrat Kimberly Townsend garnered nearly 55% of the vote to the 45% posted by GOP Rep. Kyle Pierce of Anderson as of 11:02, when the race was called. The incumbent had represented House District 36 since 2022.
Directly west of Indianapolis, in Hendricks County, Democrat William Colteryahn easily defeated longtime Republican Rep. Greg Steuerwald, who has served in the House since 2007. Colteryahn had earned nearly 55% of the vote to Steuerwald’s 45% shortly after the race was called at 10:26 p.m.
Democrat J.D. Ford unseats Victoria Spartz in major upset for Indiana's 5th District (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
Spartz, in an early Wednesday statement, blamed her defeat on changing demographics in Hamilton County, Democratic campaign spending and what she characterized as a dishonest campaign by her opponent.
“This election is a wake-up call for Indiana. An influx of liberal voters has turned Hamilton County, once one of the top 20 most conservative counties in the country, blue — with not enough rural Indiana voters to offset those numbers,” Spartz said. “Democrats significantly outspent us and ran a very dishonest campaign, but I urge my supporters not to get discouraged. We may not win every battle, but WE WILL WIN THE WAR!”
***
“Tonight, voters proved that no seat belongs to a political party. It belongs to the people,” Ford said. “Whether you voted for me or not, I will fight for you. I will listen, show up and never forget who sent me to Washington. To every voter, volunteer and supporter who made this historic victory possible, thank you. Tonight, we celebrate what Hoosiers made possible. Tomorrow, we begin the work of delivering the change they voted for.”
Not that it was a perfect night in Indiana.
Elliott declares reelection victory in Indiana treasurer race, with comptroller vote tight (Indiana Capital Chronicle).
Tommy Tuberville wins Alabama governor’s race; Doug Jones does not concede (News From The States)
Stumbling through the remainder of Sunday night; here are the results.
Fusion Fragment, The Georgia Review, The Adroit Journal, and Epiphany were sent The First Day of Feeling Free.
Haven Spec Magazine - “The Psychotic Ape”
The Four Way Books, Driftwood Press "Plain Tales From The Flatlands”
Come Morning (The Dilettante) I found to be an enticing piece of flash fiction.
Speeding through the streets until your soles burned, you tightened a grip on the suitcase clattering behind you with your whole life on its rollers. One wheel hadn’t been quite right since knocking against a curb several blocks back, and your heart lurched at each ill-timed pop and scrape. It would make sense to turn back now. The place you left barely qualified as a shoe closet, but it had someone to share the bed with each night, to need and be needed by, to plead and prove yourself to—which was almost like love.
Hemingway’s lost generation turns 100 (Engelsberg ideas) takes on my second least favorite Hemingway novel (To Have and To Have Not gets that prize). I have been uncomfortable with The Sun Also Rises since I was an idiot Freshman at Ball State University. No doubt it has power but its characters are such a bunch of creeps.
For a new reader picking up Sun now, it is hard to comprehend how groundbreaking it was in 1926. By now we are used to Hemingway’s prose; his style has been imitated, copied and parodied for a century. His books have become a prop for the tortured, monosyllabic male in mainstream culture (even Jess Mariano in Gilmore Girls is depicted as a fan) – but when it was released, it was radical.
The sentences are stripped almost bare. Short, factual sentences. Dialogue that sounds like a pared-down screenplay: people talking as people actually do, most of the meaning left unsaid, very little spoon-fed to the reader (except, memorably, a slightly condescending explanation of what the drink Pernod is). There are transcripts of drunken conversations with next to no explanation or ornamentation added, and bald descriptions of places that still manage to make them unfold, powerfully, before your eyes, whether it be the central square of Pamplona, a bus climbing the mountains of the Basque Country, or a train rammed with pilgrims who have taken over the lunch car. No superfluous adjectives clutter the images, and they resonate more strongly as a result. The novel was an instant hit.
Sun was never without controversy. It ruined several lives, or at least reputations. Hemingway gave his friends flimsy pseudonyms that echoed the syllables and rhythms of their real names and did little to conceal their identities. Lady Brett Ashley – the novel’s anti-heroine – was based on Lady Duff Twysden, a twice-married English socialite with whom Hemingway was infatuated. Brett’s lover, Mike Campbell, was Duff’s real-life lover, Pat Guthrie. The Jewish American novelist Robert Cohn was based on the Jewish American novelist Harold Loeb, who really had run off to the coast with Duff for an intense but short-lived tryst. The writer Don Stewart, who served partly as inspiration for the character Bill Gorton, said the novel was pure journalism.
The portraits were not flattering. Hemingway depicted his friends warts and all, then added a few fictional warts for good measure. Some of the most damaging incidents – Cohn cracking under pressure and punching Jake, or Brett seducing a teenage bullfighter – were inventions. But crowded in alongside so much that was factually true, the distinction was easy to miss. To add insult to injury, the novel that parodied his writer friends outsold anything they produced themselves. It must have rankled all the more when Hemingway took the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
The Guardian view on Caryl Churchill’s Triumph: a play for today (The Guardian) is here because I read a pair of Churchill's plays in prison and thought he was more than worthwhile keeping an eye on for all that I had never heard of her. She is English, so is my ignorance an American thing?
The Guardian’s Michael Billington called Churchill “theatre’s great disruptor”. With Triumph she is disrupting the conventions of theatregoing itself: a play isn’t always something to be enjoyed between an early supper, interval drinks and the last train home. She has turned the attention economy on its head. Like a Covid-era emergency press conference, Triumph interrupts its audience’s day to make them listen. It jolts us out of our complacency.
October '26 Statistics for the Submission Pit
“Family Lore,” by Téa Obreht (The New Yorker) is probably behind a paywall, so I quoted the paragraph below to give a taste of Obreht's style. The story involves a husband trying to do the right thing, a dog, a possible rabid bat, and a new-born baby. It is a comedy-horror of brilliance. Obreht does not publish like Joyce Carol Oates, but is always worth reading when she does.
When the dog was finally in his arms, his whole body pulsing with the force of his heartbeats, the husband sank his face into the dog’s musty neck and let himself be still. There was so much to lose, and so many different ways to lose it.
The New Yorker: Fiction - Podcast - Apple Podcasts
Science fiction writer John Scalzi discusses his novel 'Monsters of Ohio'
Paris Review: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196
Grammar Rules: Ending a Sentence with a Preposition (Writing Forward) starts with my own opinion and ends with something we all ought to keep in mind.
A longstanding grammar myth says we’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. For years, this myth has persisted, tying writers up in knots and making their heads spin around sentences that simply must end with a preposition.
For example: Which store are you going to?
Folks who were taught (and are now attached to the idea) that one should never end a sentence with a preposition will argue that the proper way to write the sentence is as follows: To which store are you going?
But nobody talks that way.
***
The issue with ending a sentence with a preposition is more a matter of style or rhetoric than grammar. If you want proof, check out this list of references on ending a sentence with a preposition.
So go forth and end sentences with prepositions, but only when it makes sense to do so. Write your sentences to be clear and concise, and you’ll be fine. Keep writing!
I have both doubts and a curiosity about Hemingway Editor. It uses AI, so a mark against it there. I am already finding enough errors with grammar and spell checkers that do not tout their AI roots. OTOH, it might be interesting to see if it produces anything different.
But more importantly, what if one's style is more Faulkner or Jose Saramago than Hemingway?
Writing a Novel in Short Stories by Luis Vocem is here out of my vanity. “Plain Tales from the Flatlands” came from a collection of short stories that interested no one individually or as a collection. They were interrelated but did not run along a plot. I sliced and diced the stories so that they were more connected, to even have a ghost of a plot, and came up with a novella. This short essay let me know I was not completely mad. Perhaps it will do the same for you.
The one thing a short story must do is stand on its own, period. Whether it is the plot of a larger story in something else you’re working on, or minor events around a character, it has to complete its own dramatic arc.
The cycle of creation, editing, rejection, and publishing can take anywhere from two weeks to a year or more. You can be working on one, two, or even half a dozen stories at a time. At some point, you know whether the story needs a major revision or to be put out to pasture. What is most important, however, is not really the story, but YOUR learning process – taking chances, developing your own voice. Fail, learn, learn, learn, revise, revise, revise, improve, improve, improve. There’s so much you can learn. In the short story, it all happens quickly – a luxury you do not have in the novel.
This approach may appear to be more difficult than writing a chapter, but it’s not. Instead, it gives you clarity about the material: Does it have a dramatic arc? What is the realization? Does it stand on its own? What better way to test if the material is good than sending it out and see if literary magazines want to publish it?
For me, the novel-in-short-stories was not a conscious decision. It evolved. One story got published. I could not get one of the characters out of my mind. Then another story related to that character flooded my consciousness. Wrote it. Sent it out, got published. On to the next.
sch 11/1
I just finished reading Go Fast, Turn Left: The Anderson Speedway & Indiana’s Data Centers - Cleveland Review of Book. I thought the writing was good, and it does get at Anderson today (although with a bit of exaggeration, I think, by limiting its perspective to the Speedway), but more importantly to me it left me wondering if I am missing a bit of Indiana. Data centers are getting everyone upset from Indy down to Columbus. It is probably ironic that I who 50 years ago pretty much hated Anderson find myself trying to be a little more sympathetic.
Senator Cruz talks about Brazil's Lula being a Communist, which surprises me since Lula has done nothing to advance a Communist agenda: no Party apparatus determining the government policy, no taking over the means of production.
Did he sleepwalk through Harvard? Maher never pointed out that Trump is taking over the menas of production in America. I guess Cornell did not teach him about Communism, either. So what good is an Ivy League education?
And then there is the idiot in chief: Trump slammed as 'draft dodger' for claiming he'd win Vietnam War in week by bombing US-allied Saigon (Irish Star).
Now for someone who knows what she is talking about and in a way that makes us understand what she means.
I suspect that Texas will go to Paxton after reading Race narrows between a ‘radical Democrat’ and ‘the most corrupt politician in Texas’ in The Irish Times.
In Archer City, a few people were happy to speak informally about the election but shied away from the idea of being quoted in a newspaper and were absolutely against being named. The common view was that they would be voting Republican, because their part of the state is Red and that the Democratic manifesto runs contrary to everything that Texas means to them. One rancher said that he believes these midterms to be more consequential than the presidential elections because of the ramifications for Texas if the Republican Party loses control.
And so who are the sheeple? Lots of Texas backbone and commonsense came out in the full article.
Then there was America's left and right agree: The country they know is slipping away (AP News)
Trump? “He’s the worst president in United States history,” David said from the Wayne County election center. “You get up every day, and you’re like, ‘What’s he going to do now?’” Said Lori: “He’s got the hate just so bad, it’s just out of hand. It’s just out of control.” She fears that if Democrats win widely Tuesday, Trump will “go fricking berserk.”
Trump supporter Therese Mennell gets it. “There’s that kind of arrogant vibe about him that people don’t like, and sometimes I shut him off because of the way he talks,” the retiree said from the Wayne County center. “But, I mean, he’s doing the right thing. He is saving our country.”
Education standards have really slipped because it appears that people really think the Democrats want to change kids' sex:
Here in Red Indiana, I’m talking about ads like those that conclude by screaming that candidate X is “too liberal” for Indiana, while blatantly mischaracterizing that candidate’s positions. (Does anyone really believe that J.D. Ford, for example, has voted to give children sex-change operations? When would Indiana’s overwhelmingly MAGA legislature even have held such a vote? Not to mention how ridiculous this entire argument about school-children getting sex-change operations during the school day really is–parental permission is required in order to give your child a Tylenol. And as one principal recently noted, his school can barely afford crayons, let alone enormously expensive medical procedures…)
There are plenty of other, similarly ridiculous thirty-second spots.
Governance Or Theater (Sheila Kennedy).
Jimmy Kimmel said something to the effect that if you took Joni to school and came home with a Johnny, you picked up the wrong kid.
sch
I spent most of Saturday revising “Plain Tales from The Flatlands”; that is the novella. Then I sent it to FC2. Screwed it up, of course. I decided to change Regina to Rhiannon and then forgot to finish the name changes before submitting. I have sent an email about the MS. I will have it all fixed by time to send to the other contest. I was bleary-eyed and/or going too bloody fast.
Submissions made 10/29:
Experimental Thoughts - Psychotic Ape
Indiana Review, F(r)iction - “The First Day of Feeling Free”
There have been rejections.
"After Making Landfall" was rejected on 10/28
Thank you for submitting your work to West Branch. We are grateful for your interest in our magazine. Unfortunately, we are not able to accept your work for publication at this time.
Sincerely,
The Editors
One from 10/25:
Thank you for submitting “The Aliens Meet The Peach” to Translunar Travelers Lounge. Unfortunately, it's not what we're looking for right now. We appreciate your interest in our magazine.
Sincerely,
Bennett North and Priya Sridhar
Co-editors
Translunar Travelers Lounge
What I did on Sunday, 11/1, is for another post.
