Moving slow this morning, a half hour to get out of bed. Stiff from sleeping, certainly not from work, I set to going through the email. That did not take long. I did crash Firefox, again.
I read the short story Anyone Can Do It by Manuel Muñoz on the ZYZZYVA. A San Francisco journal of arts & letters. I liked it, very well executed story about migrant workers, but I swear I read it before.
I read Oozing Class The leaky fictions of Wolfgang Hilbig, which is a review of a novel by the late Hilbig. This made me think of Indiana, and the Midwest:
This is a histrionic kind of pessimism, one that very few working-class East Germans—especially those who didn’t leave town to become famous authors—would likely identify with. But Hilbig is a maximalist, after all. And, while neither The Interim’s C. nor the narrator of “The Memories” is a neo-Nazi, he seems to be hinting that historical discombobulation, poor working conditions, and an inability to speak about the past might feed into the persistence of far-right politics in Eastern Germany. (In the last federal election, Thuringia’s District 194—home to Meuselwitz—was won by the far-right AfD.) If Hilbig’s cohort of Easterners, particularly those of the working class, don’t always manage to articulate an enlightened sense of their own historical guilt, this might have more to do with their fractured and repressed biographies, and less to do with a lack of education about liberal democracy, the explanation favored by smug Western journalists. When West Germany’s Ruhr region began its transition away from coal and steel industries in the 1970s, the process was cushioned by an active welfare state and significant cultural investment: the area gained museums about its industrial heritage, even an archive for workers’ literature. In East Germany, by contrast, reunification was an abrupt, impatient lurch from one administration to another—as well as the rapid collapse of mining and heavy industry in most towns. Denied the opportunity to process their biographies in public, a decent share of Easterners have found themselves vulnerable to the “sulfurous vapors” leaking out of C.’s Holocaust & Gulag box.
The one source of hope in The Interim appears to be literature—throughout Hilbig’s work, writing is pretty much the only thing that keeps absolute despair at bay. C’s alcoholism is fueled by his writer’s block, which the drinking doesn’t help. While C. shares many of Hilbig’s biographical details, they differ in their literary productivity. Hilbig’s mechanisms were never quite so jammed up: in just over twenty years, he published thirteen books of fiction, three poetry volumes, and a handful of other texts. Writing, for him, meant dipping into the world’s essential sludge and emerging with some sense of renewal. His Gothic dissolutions can be unsettling, but their upside is something like negative capability: whatever gets dissolved can also be reconstituted.
I have reading to do, checking out places to send my stories.
I started the day with Fiona Apple, so here she is:
Time for work, it is 6 AM.
I spent most of the day putting glass bottles on a conveyor belt. Tired when I got to work, and even more tired when I left. That and the pain in my lower back did not leave me very ambitious. I chose to forego fasting for dinner. I did the same for grocery shopping. Having paid my rent, I walked across the street to Puerto Vallerata. There was a line for a table, and not liking their food all that well and not liking their service at all, I left. Eating at the bar Cheers did not give me any joy, so I decided to order a pizza. I am much too lazy.
I managed to stay awake until about 8:30. Not that I can recall what I did except watch HBO while I chewed my way through a spinach and cheese pizza from Domino's.
Starting Saturday morning by trimming the email and reading stories. It is 4;3.36. I woke about an hour ago, I thought 7 hours was long enough time in bed. Now, about the stories read this morning:
Hiding Spot by Caroline Kim - an immigrant's story, a story about addiction, a story about family. I like it. The prose is certain, steady. A slight shifting of POV for a few paragraphs was interesting, probably necessary. This was published by New England Review.
But even more difficult than that had been how living with others made her feel pressed in, like being on an elevator with too many people. She was conscious of holding herself in, the presence of others a corset that kept her from breathing freely. Early afternoon at the dry cleaners had always been her favorite time of day. Mr. Lee, who had opened up at six in the morning, would go home to take a nap, Ken was safely at school, and customers were busy doing other things. She would sit slowly eating her lunch at the counter, watching the street through the window, people walking their dogs, getting in and out of their cars, always eating, drinking, talking on the phone, and she loved the separation she felt from the world then, letting herself get lost in her own thoughts, not even of anything important, just idle thoughts that made her feel alive and present, that made her feel just like the bird she saw making an arc at the top of the window pane. It was peace she felt then, not being anything for anybody, not even herself. That was freedom. That was what she supposed Ken was chasing through drugs and alcohol.
I went back to sleep for three hours, listening to Greaser's Lunchbox and waking to The Record Sto'. I walked down to McClure's and switched to WMBR when I got back here. I had thought to go to the Minnetrista Farmer's Market, but do not see that happening this morning. Grocery shopping, yes. That will need to wait till around noon.
Back to the stories read:
I finished An Easy Meal by Heidi Bell, also from New England Review. A bit of ambiguous fable, that leaves me admiring the prose while not comfortable with the open-ended meaning. My uneasiness might be more honestly put down to knowing I could manage this kind of story, this kind of content just is not in me.
Once again, out the window—and into the midst of a miasmic cloud of creativity born in a human city. It gathers strength and mass over the river bobbing with the sewage and junk necessary to Civilization. The cloud carries Fox along until the Storyteller reaches in and plucks him out, throws him into a thicket far from the home he remembers and longs for with all of his senses.
He is wearing a short childish dress now, which his tail can’t help but lift in the back, exposing his haunches. He draws his testicles up even tighter against his pelvis, to keep them safe. The Storyteller has changed the nest on his head to one of golden hairs, which curl every which way and interfere with his peripheral vision. He peers out from the thicket into a clearing wherein stands a little house.
I like to think about this as I sit staring into the hull of the Patagotitan’s rib cage. Some 223 different sauropod bones were exhumed from layers and layers of sediment, the mudstone and sandstone chipped away from them, the dust brushed off. Eighty-four of the bones could be pieced together to form the titanic skeleton that rises as high as forty-six feet and extends for 120. I like to think about this. I don’t know, though, what Miles is thinking when he sits here on this black bench that, in the dim light, is almost invisible against the equally black wall striped with shadows of the Patagotitan’s enormous ribs. He will sit here and stare for a while, sometimes a quarter of an hour, hunching his small body in the inexplicable cold of the room, his soft face solemn and close-lipped.
I do not think New England Review will like anything I have, certainly not anything I have on hand to shop around. KH would say it was MFA writing, and I think I will agree with him. I wrote him early this morning how I forgot to mention yesterday while talking with him on the phone how grim were most of my stories. Well, that is how life seems out here. I heard something last night on MSNBC how the Midwest felt alienated from the rest of the country, being left out by the loss of industry. The East Coast just noticed this? Maybe they should have been listening harder. One thing I have tried to do with my writing is to not fall in line with Gene Stratton Porter and Booth Tarkington and lean more towards Michael Martone, Theodore Dreiser and Nelson Algren. Algren's Nonconformity did not knock KH as much as I thought it would, but he now lives up in Canada, and I think that might make a difference. Canada felt to me a most decent place. Reading Alice Munro's short stories in prison did not change my mind on this, nor did read Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. I do not mean to be grim for the sake of being grim, I am shying away from nihilism, for the reality I see is people trying to keep going when the world seems against them with the means left to them; people with intelligence and feelings as well as those who lack either; people living lives of quiet desperation who have more going on inside than they let the world see. T2 told me she thought my writing too dark without ever giving me any indication of having read what I wrote. Guess it is another of my character defects.
Whew, I dd not mean to write all that.
Supervised release has now gone on for a year. Other than the difficulty with getting this laptop approved, I must say it has fallen lightly on me. So lightly, I really wonder about its purpose. I cannot see how the government has been any help to me. I do feel like I am giving purpose to the employment of federal probation officers, that is all. You can check out the other notes under Supervise Release to judge my opinion.
Last month, I meant to mention it has been 7 years since Joni R died, and the same for Ray and Wayne Skinner. It would be good to have Wayne to talk about Ukraine. I still envy how Joni had the backbone to check out on her own. More debts needing paid. No escape attempts allowed with debts being owed, that is my promise now and has been since I got lucid.
In a week, it will be a year since my sentencing. Interesting to judge myself in my pretrial detention journal - I keep telling KH he was wise not to publish it - and a real pain to type. I recall feeling the need to get things out, as if I were clearing a table. To say what I had kept inside my head too long. That shows in my syntax and how I make some jumps of logic. My training was to make a record and so it was done and so it is being published here. Other than my haze, the early start of ideas I thought came later has surprised me. I thought I had a better memory. I used to have a better memory. Although, how I express my ideas has had me blushing in spots, I stand by most of my ideas (where I disagree with myself, I have added comments). Interesting how little Indiana changed during my stay in New Jersey.
I meant to start working on this pile of notebooks from 2010. I think I will put that off, go out into the wider world. Maybe I could still make it to Minnetrista and I will get to Payless for my groceries. The bus will come around in another hour. I have time to read another story and shower. I think you have heard enough from me today.
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