Sunday's Report

 I woke up rough - the heater too efficient now (why are the afternoons so cool in here?) and having some crazy dream. Breakfasted on cinnamon rolls and milk before checking the email. Out of the email, I came to read the following:

1. Prince and the Remaking of Image in Hilton Als’s My Pinup (Which I liked, it was about Prince, and what is there not to like?)
2. Looking Back (Interesting review of three books and the Greek myths)
3. Marian Keyes, Nick Hornby, Leïla Slimani and other writers on the books that changed them
4. Top Ten 'Rocky Horror' references  (Thinking that is pretty obvious.)
   

An ex of mine asked once if she were crazy before she met me, or if I drove her crazy. This morning I sent her a couple of videos from Alice Jayne and Imelda May. I said they do not answer the question, but she could use them as a soundtrack. Now I am sharing with the world:

Thinking someone else will have some fun with these.

Now to get some work done!

And enough of YouTube: Three Chord Monte with Joe Belock, a Robert Gordon tribute this week.

I completed a post for here out of my pretrial notes. Then I checked my email, The Guardian newsletter showed up.

I read most of I have a loving wife and child, but I feel I don’t want to exist, recognizing the sentiment. I could not read it all, it sounded too much like my old days, and the piece recommended what I have learned from experience is necessary: get treatment. 

Here is some Indiana news I did not know, but only learned of through The Guardian's ‘It’s got nasty’: the battle to build the US’s biggest solar power farm:

When proposals for the largest solar plant ever conceived for US soil started to gather pace – a plan that involves spearing several million solar panels into the flat farmland of northern Indiana – something in Connie Ehrlich seems to have snapped.

Ehrlich, 63, is part of a longstanding farming family in Pulaski county, the site of the new solar project, but doesn’t live in the county and previously only rarely dabbled in its usually somnolent local politics. She has carved out a comfortable life in a sprawling mansion set on 10 acres (four hectares) of land, just outside the city of Lafayette, and is known locally for her donations to medical research and her small fleet of deluxe cars with personalized license plates.

But to Ehrlich the idea of transferring 13,000 acres of prized farmland to solar energy production seems to have been so unthinkable that it demanded an extraordinary response. Within months of the project being proposed she had mobilized her wealth to fund a flurry of lawsuits, spearheaded a sometimes-vituperative pressure group and spent $3m buying new plots of land, including a cemetery, on the fringes of the project.

I ground my teeth a bit at some of the presentation of Starke County, but I kept going until I ran into this paragraph:

To Welker, solar is an evolution of farming rather than a betrayal of it. He already harvests the sunlight for his crops, he reasons, and considers fears of food shortages by taking land out of production overblown given that 40% of all US corn is already mashed up for another form of energy – ethanol, which is added to gasoline. Farmers are also routinely paid by the federal government to keep tracts of land free from crops, in order to bolster the price of corn.

I am for solar. Anything that gets the Saudis away from our short hairs is a good thing. I still do not understand why we cannot use rooftops in the cities for solar panels. 

BTW, the Guardian has about 440 articles on Indiana. I did not read them.

I skimmed Experts fear rising global ‘incel’ culture could provoke terrorism because this incel movement baffles me (who is supposed to be such a great danger to the safety of the Republic). 

Numbers have steadily increased since, now rising to a daily total of 849 references, prompting fears over the movement’s trajectory following a series of terrorist attacks linked to online misogynists.

The incel – or “involuntarily celibate” – movement is an online subculture in which a misogynistic worldview is promoted by individuals who blame women for their lack of sexual activity.

Incels have been linked to violent extremism and are classified by the government’s anti-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, as having a “mixed, unstable or unclear” ideology.

Maybe they should shower, clean their clothes, brush their teeth, and learn to speak in complete sentences before they start blaming women for their social distress. 

Just thought of this bit of advice from Hank Williams, Jr.:

On the other hand, this group of idiots is not breeding and passing along their genetic material.  

It is 9:28. I am going down to McClure's. The sky is gloomy.

It is 1:14, and I have knocked off three more posts for this blog. Look for them in December. I finished with WFMU, and moved over to Dave's World on WXPN.

We were talking about Jamie Lee Curtis at work on Friday. I offer this bit of silliness (and proof there is everything on YouTube!):

Almost 40 years old! Where does the time go? Except for the dream sequence above, I recall it as an interesting movie. I do not think I have seen it for decades.

I called Paul and left a message.

Furthermore, I read Michel de Montaigne's Profitable to Posterity Who should write history?, and Stephen King, The Art of Fiction No. 189. Out of the last one, this hit me upside my head:

INTERVIEWER

When you accepted the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, you gave a speech defending popular fiction, and you listed a number of authors who you felt were underappreciated by the literary establishment. Then Shirley Hazzard, that year’s award winner in fiction, got on stage and dismissed your argument pretty flatly.

KING

What Shirley Hazzard said was, I don’t think we need a reading list from you. If I had a chance to say anything in rebuttal, I would have said, With all due respect, we do. I think that Shirley, in a way, has proven my point. The keepers of the idea of serious literature have a short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside, and too often that list is drawn from people who know people, who go to certain schools, who come up through certain channels of literature. And that’s a very bad idea—it’s constraining for the growth of literature. This is a critical time for American letters because it’s under attack from so many other media: TV, movies, the Internet, and all the different ways we have of getting nonprint input to feed the imagination. Books, that old way of transmitting stories, are under attack. So when someone like Shirley Hazzard says, I don’t need a reading list, the door slams shut on writers like George Pelecanos or Dennis Lehane. And when that happens, when those people are left out in the cold, you are losing a whole area of imagination. Those people—and I’m not talking about James Patterson, we understand that—are doing important work. 

So I’d say, yes, Shirley Hazzard does need a reading list. And the other thing Shirley Hazzard needs is for someone to say to her, Get busy. You have a short life span. You need to stop this crap about sitting there and talking about what we do, and actually do it. Because God gave you some talent, but he also gave you a certain number of years.

And one other thing. When you shut the door to serious popular fiction, you shut another door on people who are considered serious novelists. You say to them, You write popular, accessible fiction at your peril. So there aren’t many writers who would take the chance that Philip Roth did when he wrote The Plot Against America. It was a risk for him to write that book because it’s an accessible novel that can be read as entertainment. It is involving on a narrative level. That’s a different book from Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire—which, by the way, is a damn good book. But it’s not the same thing at all.

INTERVIEWER

Is there really much of a difference, then, between serious popular fiction and literary fiction?

KING

The real breaking point comes when you ask whether a book engages you on an emotional level. And once those levers start to get pushed, many of the serious critics start to shake their heads and say, No. To me, it all goes back to this idea held by a lot of people who analyze literature for a living, who say, If we let the rabble in, then they’ll see that anybody can do this, that it’s accessible to anyone. And then what are we doing here?

Why? Because I bloody agree with him. Because finding one's own views coming out of the mouth of someone like Stephen King, it is very good for one's vanity!

The Return of Jerry Lee Lewis, which I understand he had a hand in doing:

Looking at the calendar, I was to get some submissions made. That will be next after making some more calls.

I called KH. I think Gabb must time calls. We talked a long time and as with DM it shut down. 

Then I read an article on Google Drive, so I spent some time fiddling with that. Looks like I now have an online backup for my writing. I will not call this wasted time.

I submitted "Colonel Tom" to jmww. Then I checked out Necessary Fiction by reading The Cabinetmaker’s Apprentice by Curtis VanDonkelaar. This is the kind of hair-raising story I like, what I call horror. Very good stuff, but I am not sure what I have that might be interesting to them. I finished reading Vanishing Act by Raluca Balasa, which won the 2021 ServiceScape Short Story Award. I submitted "Problem Solving" to this contest.

Last night, after I was supposed to knock off, I read Go to Hellman, written by Terry Teachout and published by Commentary. What I learned from Wikipedia on both Teachout and Commentary, he was a conservative and the magazine started out with an anti-Stalinist agenda. I make these points because Teachout does not think much of Hellman as a playwright (and about any other way possible, but I am not interested in those).

But Hellman went on to say on the same occasion, “I think that is only a mistake when it fails to achieve its purpose, and I would rather make the attempt, and fail, than fail to make the attempt.” And make it she did, most elaborately in The Little Foxes, a frontal assault on capitalism in which the members of a family of exploitative nouveau-riche tradesmen claw one another’s eyes out over a business deal. Here as elsewhere in her work, the characters are so broadly drawn as to border on the operatic. (Indeed, the composer Marc Blitzstein, who shared Hellman’s hard-left political views, turned The Little Foxes into an opera, Regina, in 1949.)

For all its obviousness, The Little Foxes is a consummately well-crafted piece of theater—every corner of the plot is neatly tucked in—that packs the emotional punch of a good B-movie. Small wonder that Hellman and William Wyler later turned it into a successful screen vehicle for Bette Davis. But despite its undeniable effectiveness, The Little Foxes is the theatrical equivalent of a hellfire sermon, one whose villains are all mustache-twirling monsters. Conversely, Hellman puts her mandatory summing-up in the mouth of a self-consciously noble black servant who is no less a caricature than the stone-hearted characters of whom she speaks: “Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.”

When Dashiell Hammett read the manuscript of The Little Foxes, he advised Hellman to “cut out the liberal blackamoor chitchat.” Her unwillingness to do so says everything about her artistic limitations as a playwright.

When Hellman died, Robert Brustein declared in the New Republic that “it may be that her life, with its strong loyalties, combative courage, and abiding hatred of injustice, will eventually be considered her greatest theater.” That is, of course, a polite way of saying that even though her plays weren’t very good, she was still a great woman....

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 One may take leave to doubt that history will judge Hellman so kindly. But even if it should be as forgiving as Alice Kessler-Harris is, it is hard to imagine that Hellman will ever again be seen as anything other than a very minor playwright. The truth is that she was nothing more—or less—than a savvy craftswoman who knew how to keep an audience on the edge of its collective seat. Such talent is by no means to be despised, but neither should it be praised beyond its due, and when the power to entertain is enlisted in the service of propaganda, it is legitimate for the critic to look closely at the ends that are being served.

In Lillian Hellman’s case, those ends were at best naïve, at worst despicable. Except in The Autumn Garden, her uneven but sincerely felt 1951 homage to Chekhov, she was not a dramatic poet but the theatrical counterpart of a political cartoonist, and the not-infrequent brilliance of her draftsmanship should never be allowed to obscure the fact that she freely placed her art, such as it was, in the service of the darkest of masters. Let that be her epitaph.

Not quite the opinion I had of her after reading her plays. Teachout wrote his piece in 2012. I thought differently and found opinions quite different from Teachout, which I put in my posts on Hellman.

Went down to The Dollar General for ice cream and Ben-Gay. It was a drizzly walk, my knee rebelling at the distance. Back here, I ate the ice cream, spread the ointment on my knee, and started working on submitting my stories.

I entered "Problem Solving" in the 2023 Witness Literary Awards. I submitted the same story to Apple Valley Review, The Tonic, Atticus Review, A Public Space, Big Other, Ciphertext, Carve, and The Writing Disorder.

Call Me [Brackets] got "Colonel Tom."

I passed on Half and One after reading the following:

 Half and One is a space for cartoons and comics, journalism and narrative non-fiction, poetry and fiction. At Half and One, we produce original, quality and off-beat written, audio and visual content.

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Our content is fun, informative, interesting, wide-ranging, diverse, and thought provoking.

Pretty sure nothing I am writing right now is fun. I would like to think it is interesting and thought-provoking, but so far not enough to attract any takers. 

Snooping around Big Other, I read However Many Sayings to Live and Die By, by Robert Lopez. Interesting lack of narrative, more like a tone poem, but very impressive for what it is - rules for living in America.

I need a break from the computer.

Changed my mind - done with today.

sch