Mario Vargas Llosa, The Odyssey, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Irvine Welsh Walk Into A Bar

One thing lacking during prison was information.  I did not read Llosa, “A Confederacy of Dunces”, or Irvine Welsh until then and without much context. I keep my eye out for articles that will fill in the context for me.

 The Odyssey piece is here because it is so big this summer.

 I hope this helps your education, too.

Mario Vargas Llosa by Gerald Martin review – the Peruvian leftist who fell in love with Margaret Thatcher  (The Guardian)

Gabriel García Márquez is the book’s foil: the magician to Vargas Llosa’s realist, the man who stayed with the leftist tribe while his lesser rival abandoned it. Martin, now the biographer of both, is uniquely placed to reconstruct the most famous right hook in literary history. In 1976, Vargas Llosa floored García Márquez with a punch after allegedly accusing him of overstepping the mark by comforting Patricia during the collapse of their marriage.

The punch marked more than a personal rupture. It sealed an ideological one. García Márquez later remarked that there were only “two soups on the menu”: capitalism and socialism. Vargas Llosa turned up his nose at one and spent the rest of his life gorging himself on the other.

China understands The Odyssey better than we do | The Spectator

The party is afraid not of Plato but of Uighurs, whom it has smeared as terrorists and agitators. What the party actually wants from the ancient Greeks is a pedigree. In November 2024, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a letter to the first World Conference of Classics in Beijing, urging scholars to “embrace the responsibility of advancing classical studies.” A Chinese School of Classical Studies now operates in Athens. A Chinese translation series of western classics, which includes Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau, has sold tens of millions of copies across a thousand titles over four decades.

The West is putting the same inheritance on trial. In December 2024 the British government moved to end the £4 million Latin Excellence Programme. The program had carried Latin into 40 non-selective state schools, where more than a third of pupils were eligible for free school meals. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson had launched it to stop Latin being reserved for “the privileged few.”

The pressure comes from more than one direction. In January 2026, Texas A&M University ordered a philosophy professor to remove readings from Plato’s Symposium from an introductory ethics course or be reassigned, under a new university policy against teaching “race and gender ideology.”
On the academic left, the pressure is harder to describe. The Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta has written that classics was “a cheat code for mastering whiteness.” In that reading, the ancient work must answer our quarrels before it is allowed to tell us anything of its own.

On August 14, The Odyssey opens across most of China’s nearly 800 IMAX screens. More than 250,000 people had registered to see it before tickets went on sale. They probably won’t ask whether Homer needs forgiving. That was always our question, not his.

You might want to think about this one. I am. All the cultural malarkey imposed on us by neurotic, insecure boys like Elon Musk and his online cohorts does not address the poem. All that interests them is their obsessions and terrors for which they want to make use of Homer and his descendants.

How ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ Skewers the Lit Bro Before He Even Existed (Literary Yard) helped me understand a novel that I thought had not aged well and whose protagonist irritated me to no end.

If you finish that novel thinking “Ignatius gets it”, well brother, you don’t get it. And that’s the most Ignatius thing about you.

The dunces were never in a confederacy against Ignatius. He was a confederacy of one, at war with reality. And you will never win that war, no matter how many times you quote Boethius.

Trust me on this one.

I am. Perhaps my understanding was affected by being in prison, reading the novel in isolation, without any knowledge of lit bros.

‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns (The Guardian) because I read The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins while in prison and had seen the movie Trainspotting.

Can Nothing Save Us? is published this month, but it has a long back story. Welsh originally thought he was collecting material for an HBO pilot on the superstar DJ – this was in 2014 – with his friend Calvin Harris. (Welsh also DJs and co-owns a record label.) From the DJ boxes of Vegas, he’d look out at “this ugly scene where middle-aged sleazy guys grind up against young women who’ve been comped for the clubs” – but the project stalled and Welsh realised he had the makings of something different: “A novel about modern America.”

He gave the draft to his editor and some writer friends. “And they all said the same thing. ‘This is shit!’”

Welsh re-read it. “Fuck, they’re right,” he thought.

Rejection must be unfamiliar to a multimillion-selling novelist. But Welsh did manage to sell the screen rights, and while he watched the writers’ room work through his pages, he became “a voyeur of my own material” and understood how to fix his novel.

 sch 8/8

Indiana Gathering of Writers On 09/19/2026

 I ran across this news earlier today and then by accident: 09/19/2026 Gathering of Writers - Indiana Writers Center

Join us at the Indiana State Library when Indiana’s best established and emerging writers will meet for a full day of classes on the writing craft for the  2026 Gathering of Writers Annual Writing Conference, presented by the Indiana Writers Center and the Indiana Center for the Book.

Featuring a keynote address and a breakout session from playwright, Andrew Black. Other breakout sessions include poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and more presented by Andrew Black, Rachel Cochran, Kelcey Ervick, Chris Forhan, Shasta Grant, Ashley Mack-Jackson, Karen Kovacik, Natalie Lima, Barbara Shoup, Liz Whiteacre, and more. You’ll leave full of inspiration, armed with writing drafts ripe for experimentation—along with a hundred other writers who feel the same way.

swch 8/16 

 

 

6/5/2010: Law School

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 8/14/2026] 

 Those looking for prurient information should skip this section. I dated only two women while in law school.

I started Valparaiso University School of Law in August of 1984. 

My first semester was rocky. I had been out of school for two years. I was neither certain if I retained any academic abilities nor that I belonged there socially. 

Second semester became a disaster. I came back knowing my mother's lung cancer had returned to kill her and that TJ no longer wanted me. I teetered on the brink of flunking out. That I might not survive scholastically was a first for me.

 Dad offered to mortgage his house. I turned him down. I spent the summer working for him so I could be close to Mom. I got myself onto law review by way of the law review's case comment writing competition. (By the way, I consider my contest entry better written than my law review note which is stilted, pedantic, and boring.) I reverted to a pre-TJ mentality for survival: the professors, the school, became the enemy, my opponents.

I survived the summer of 1985 and watching the effects of chemo on Mom.  With my attitude towards school, I survived. Even with Mom dying in March 1986 and learning in April that my Great-Aunt Elsie had liver cancer, I made it through.

I stayed with and worked for my father the summer of 1986 so I could spend time with Aunt Elsie. She died a month after I started my Fall semester class. I made it to graduation.

 Survive may be a bit of an understatement, as I increased my grade point average and class ranking every semester. This occurred even though in my last year I was on law review, had a part-time job at the undergraduate library, delivered pizzas for about a month, and was a professor research assistant. I always knew how to work.

 I thought law school was a serious place for serious people. They were not the educated morons I met at college. To the disappointment of at least one professor, we were not interested in the abstract, scholarly aspects of the law but in careers that could put food on the table. Thankfully, I was at Valparaiso instead of Indiana University-Indianapolis. Valparaiso offered none of the distractions of people and places in Indianapolis. 

I think I would have done better for myself had offered the clinical class that it now offers. Anyone actually wanting to practice law needs to take clinicals. They will do themselves great harm by avoiding practical experience.

 I will also say that a law school education is one of the best educations anyone can have and more should be exposed to its rigors. However, not everyone should practice law and no one should feel any shame about graduating law school and then foregoing the practice of law. I could not imagine not practicing law. I think now that I was utterly unprepared for the business side of law.

(How to know if you should go into private practice? If you cannot schmooze, if you cannot network with those your business depends upon, then a solo practice is not for you. Also read Jay Foonberg's How To Start and Build A Law Practice.)

Since becoming a felon, I seriously doubt ever being asked back to my law school (or to any other), but for the last twenty years I have wanted to tell law students two words they need for success. Those two words are: cash flow.

I admit creating a serious problem for myself by financing my law school career with student loans. I lost all control over my student loan payments in 1999. I took this path on the advice of my Aunt Mary Ellen's youngest son. Tax policy then allowed deducting student loans. Tax law changed, but being committed to finishing what I started, I took out more loans. Never base any long-term plans on the federal tax law. Doing so truly is building one's foundation on sand.

(Another interruption: with the Great Recession, the firms shed lawyers and student loan debt requires a steady income for younger lawyers. I predict we will be seeing younger lawyers leaving the profession and fewer wanting to go into the profession; law schools will soon find the environment as competitive as we did in private practice. I worry about the smaller cities in Indiana. I have already seen fewer younger lawyers coming into Anderson as solo practitioners. Operating costs have increased. I expect the Anderson paradigm of solo attorneys sharing office space as being extinct by the time I finish my sentence. Which then raises the question of how many people will go without what variety of legal services.)

I left law school for private practice. I had had no plans for myself past graduation. All the reasons I had for law school and going into the legal profession had departed from my life by May of 1987. I was never good at doing things for myself, such selfishness never felt right to me. I had no idea what to do now that I was on my own. No real goals other than to make money. Inertia saved me a lot of thinking, and I was heading back to Anderson.

[It looks like I was not far off the mark in 2010 about new law school students: Law School Enrollment Trends, 1963-2025 (LawHub ). And I was not wrong about law schools, but did not expect it to get worse:

 As for what I saw for Indiana: ISBA Attorney Shortage Plan (Indiana State Bar Association)

They even have a map where there is a shortage of lawyers. sch 8/14/2026]

 

Orthodox Christian Articles I Thought Worth Sharing

Fr. John Chryssavgis cautions against confusing intelligence with spiritual understanding at Clergy-Laity Congress AI panel( Huffington Ecumenical Institute) has much that is ignored by AI critics and fans.

Part of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s “AI Red Lines in Orthodox Theology” project, supported by a grant from the Future of Life Institute, the panel identified five Orthodox “red lines” for AI: that it must never replace human responsibility, never replace human presence, never be confused with the nous, never reduce the human person to data, and never allow capability to outpace wisdom.

Fr. John opened his remarks by tracing the anxieties surrounding AI to older stories about the limits of human freedom, pointing to the myth of Prometheus and the Book of Genesis. 

“The principal lesson gleaned from such texts is that we are not God,” Fr. John said. “Yet, most of us live as if we are God.”

He described a spiritual dimension to modern technology, calling algorithmic innovation a form of idolatry and cautioning that the companies developing AI are driven by profit rather than the wellbeing of those who use their products.

Fr. John connected this reality to a broader anthropocentrism.

“In contrast to the divine mandate in Genesis for us “to serve and preserve” creation,” he said, “we are developing AI with the assumption that its sole objective is to serve and preserve us.”
“We need to re-learn what it means to be a part—unique and indispensable, but one part—of creation. Otherwise, we will treat the world—both other human beings and the rest of creation—purely as raw material for consumption and exploitation,” Fr. John continued.

Fr. John also warned that AI may usher in newer, faster methods of injustice and discrimination.

“Algorithms—especially those that determine employment, housing, and healthcare—tend to replicate or reinforce already existing and deeply embedded societal biases,” he said. “AI is unlike previous technological revolutions—like the printing press or the television—because it can actually decide whom to help or heal, whom to overlook or hurt.”

Turning to the distinction between intelligence and nous, Fr. John invoked the patristic separation of “intelligence” (dianoia or mathematical thinking) from “intuition” (noesis or spiritual understanding). Artificial intelligence, he said, does not have a complex inner worlds, inner motivations, or an emotional landscape, and thus questions about meaning or hope will never be resolved through it.

Fr. John also offered a measured critique of the recent papal encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. He observed that its title refers to human greatness rather than the glory of God, and noted that the piece opens with the story of the Tower of Babel rather than with the story of God’s covenant with Noah to preserve creation.

On approaching our creation “in the image of God,” Fr. John argued for balance. Genesis states that humanity is formed in God’s image, he said, but the same text also describes humanity as fashioned “from the dust of the earth,” sharing its day of creation with every other living creature. 

Forgetting we are “inseparably interconnected with nature,” Fr. John said, leads to a distorted sense of human exceptionalism that is, at best, a “half-truth.” 

The Unity of God’s Church and the Orthodox Church (Orthodox Christian Laity)

The recognition of those churches and communities’ ecclesial nature outside of the Orthodox Church’s canonical boundaries compels the Church to be in an unceasing dialogue and collaboration with them, allowing the Holy Spirit to move all into complete unity with Christ. However, recognizing the ecclesial nature of other nonorthodox Christian churches and communions does not sanction, at least for the Orthodox Church, the practice of intercommunion. The Church’s reluctance to be in sacramental communion with other Christian churches—despite the affirmation that they are imperfectly and incompletely members of the One Church of God—should not be perceived as a sign of arrogance, and neither should it be a source of Orthodox triumphalism or self-sufficiency. It does not allow the churches to become complacent with present relative unity and collaboration. It is a painful reminder to all that the unity of God’s Church requires the fullness of the Apostolic faith, life, and witness. Toward this realization, the churches are called to intensify their prayers so “that all Christians may work together so that the day may soon come when the Lord will fulfill the hope of the Orthodox churches, and there will be ‘one flock and one shepherd’ (Jn. 10:16).

Statement on the Occasion of the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America (Orthodox Christian Laity)

It is in this spirit that we call the faithful of the Orthodox Church in America—and, through their witness, this nation—to repentance: repentance for injustices past and present; for the idols of wealth, comfort, and power that seduce every generation; for the divisions and enmities that tear at the fabric of common life; and for the ways in which we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. A true commemoration of a nation’s founding is not mere self-congratulation; it is a moment of sober examination, of honest confession, and of renewed dependence upon God.

The Church does not speak this word from a posture of superiority. We acknowledge our own failures—in charity, in unity, and in the fullness of our witness to the Gospel. We, too, stand in need of God’s mercy. But it is precisely because the Church has known the healing power of repentance that she cannot withhold this word from the world she is called to serve.

I think therein is an answer to those who can see only America's wrongs and those who pride themselves on being anti-woke. Acknowledging failures must be followed by the repair of damage done. Ignoring our failures is hubris.

Charmolýpē (“Joyful Sorrow”) as the Antidote to Triumphalism (Public Orthodoxy)

 

There is a Byzantine word that guards this mystery from being turned into propaganda: charmolýpē “joyful sorrow.” The word sounds paradoxical because it is a paradox, not of logic but of spiritual truth. It does not describe alternating moods, as if joy and sorrow take turns. Rather, it names a single, integrated experience: joy that has not forgotten the Cross, and sorrow that has not lost the rose scent of the Kingdom. Charmolýpē is not a decorative nuance of Orthodox piety; it is a discipline of the heart. It teaches us how to celebrate without arrogance, how to hope without cruelty, how to speak of victory without becoming triumphalist.

Triumphalism is a subtle temptation precisely because it borrows the vocabulary of faith. It speaks easily of “victory,” “chosen people,” “truth,” “enemies,” “purity,” “greatness.” It appears in religion, ethnicity, politics, even in the Church’s own self-understanding. Its danger lies in replacing the Gospel’s disarming power with a familiar one: the power to dominate, to humiliate, to rank human beings. It imagines that God’s truth must appear as our superiority, that blessing must look like strength. In such a climate, the Cross becomes embarrassing—a means to something more “successful.” Resurrection is reduced to a trophy, and Christ becomes to a tool.

Our time offers many examples of this drift, especially in heated political cultures where leaders are clothed in messianic language: savior, healer, anointed, the one who alone can fix what is broken. In the United States, this temptation has become particularly visible in the way the President has been portrayed by some supporters in quasi-messianic terms, and at times has spoken in ways that reinforce such a narrative. The point is not to score partisan arguments, but to name a theological distortion: the substitution of Christ with a political image of redemption, where salvation is reduced to the triumph of power and healing to the defeat of enemies. When Christian language is recruited to sanctify domination, the Church is no longer teaching the nations; she is being taught by them.

***

 Charmolýpē lives precisely here. Even in resurrection, Christ is humble. Even in glory, He remains the One who poured Himself out. The wounds do not disappear as if they were mistakes. They remain, not as raw pain, but as radiant memory, a witness that love has a cost, and that the cost was freely embraced. This is why Christian joy cannot become arrogant. If the Risen Christ carries wounds into eternity, then the Church has no permission to preach victory as the humiliation of others, or to present God’s Kingdom as a celebration of our strength. To proclaim Pascha truthfully is to proclaim a victory that looks, at first glance, like weakness: a candle flame flickering in the dark.

Relational Authority in the Orthodox Church: The Role of the Laity Within Official Ecclesial Structures (Orthodox Christian Laity)

sch 8/5 

  

  

Sunday With Floodwaters Receding

 Sunday has been spent submitting stories, going through the email, napping, cleaning, dinner, and setting up future posts.

Such a wild and dangerous life I live. 

The Hillbilly Hellcats persist:  

Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold | The Independent

I found the racism of my black Irish childhood embarrassing. Now it has given way to fear – The Irish Times is it a curse of humanity to hate one another?

A giant replica of a kitchen cabinet is unveiled in Indiana | AP News

Hoosier Myths and Legends - Episode 7.2: Haunted Ripley County, Indiana

Thucydides’ account of war is as timely as it is misunderstood | Aeon Essays  

How Imperial Japan turned to the sardine to help build a war machine 

 

Submissions:

“Agnes” went to trampset,  Copper Nickel. The Georgia Review and Chestnut Review

 Rat Bag Lit received “Lessons Learned From A Green Meadow”.

Thankfully, no more rain of any appreciable quantity.

sch 

  

  

 

Movies and Theater, Muncie & Anderson; Books Worth Noting; Kit Marlowe Dies, Again

Ball State's Emens Theater calendar: Upcoming Events at Emens Auditorium.

 Anderson's Paramount Theater is showing movies again! A wondrous place to see movies. I wish more of the films rose to the ocassion.

Movies, movies, movies! Anderson's Paramount Theatre offers slate of free famous films (heraldbulletin.com)

I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP? 

Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?

 

 Books: The Curse of Queen Kelly (Film Comment)

 Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.

‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern  (The Guardian) 

I have a fondness for Llosa & Irvine Welsh & Téa Obreh & Kit Marlowe: 

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa review – Nobel laureate’s final novel is a love letter to Peru (The Guardian)

When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.

Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph  (The Guardian)

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is at times quite astonishing.  

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher review – a masterpiece of criticism (The Guardian)

In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.

***

Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding.

Téa Obreht on Writing a Layered, Intertextual Tale of the American West (Literary Hub) - a delightful writer.

From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was  faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:

 

 sch

   

Another Story Published!

 No church. My ride is sick, my stomach is uncomfortable in a way that I want to stay close to home, and it started raining again. Just what Indiana needs.

I had some good news this morning, another story published: Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1861-1984 (Seven Story Publishing).

 It is a consolidation of some of my Indiana factory town stories into one. The ones inspired by Anderson and Muncie; the smokestack is the old Andaconda smokestack repurposed (btw, Anderson knocked that down). KH dislikes the format. He calls it the Our Town version. I would like to hear your opinion, if you feel like reading it.

sch