PUBLISHED!

 I got the heads-up yesterday that "Passerby" was being published by Thin Air Magazine today.

You can read my story here.  

If you do not care to do so, please click on the link since it would be good for the magazine, and they were kind enough to publish me. If you do like the story, please send it along to anyone who you think will be interested. 

I have no idea why an Arizona journal would want one of my grimy Muncie stores, but there it is. And I am grateful for them taking the chance.

I am working on this post and some online reading for a little while longer. Work has left me aching in the arms. I do not feel like doing much in the way of typing, and certainly do not feel creative.

I made it home at 4:30, got some RC Cola at McClure's and paid rent and have not strayed from here. Walking back up to the office to get ice was a chore.

Meanwhile, "Problem Solving" got more rejections:

Thank you for your submission to River and South Review. After carefully reviewing hundreds of submissions for each of our three genres this semester, we have unfortunately decided to not proceed with your own submission. While your work was not chosen this time, we encourage you to try us again in the future. Please note, the open submission period for our next issue will begin in February. Check our website for further details as the time approaches.

Sincerely,

The Editors

River and South Review

###

 Thank you very much for sending "Problem Sol ving" to Boulevard. Although it was not selected for publication, we're glad you thought of us. Good luck placing this with another magazine.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Boulevard
www.boulevardmagazine.org

It is 8:03, and I will do my online reading now while listening to The Sonic Bloom, but there is a Charlize Theron movie on HBO. I had been listening to WXPN until now.

I do not do social media. When I had a law practice, I used Twitter and Facebook to promote the business. I was also less respectably on Yahoo Chat. I miss none of that. As for Google, since my return, what the search engine returns feels far less funky than 2009 and before. I found Gaby Del Valle's short essay in Dirt, Bring back forums about the boring sameness so the present-day internet:

This is not an anti-internet screed. I’ve given myself carpal tunnel from hours upon hours of mindless scrolling. To act like I’m above wasting my life online would make me a hypocrite. But I think there’s something inherently pathetic about the way most of us spend time on the internet. Right now, there are two basic options: you’re either on a website like Twitter, where the feed provides a constant onslaught of information you don’t necessarily care about but are forced to absorb anyway; or you’re browsing TikTok (or your Instagram explore page like some kind of pervert), where the constant onslaught of information is the result of judgments an algorithm has made about you and your interests.

The beautiful thing about the internet, at least in theory, is its ability to connect people across time and space and cultures. In practice, though, we have stan Twitter, esoteric coquette pro-ana TikTok, horny Twitch streamers, and other affronts to God’s creation. The subcultures aren’t the problem; the fact that I know about them is. It wasn’t always this way. You used to have to seek out a scene, even online. Now everything is offered up for your consumption whether you want it or not.

I do hope this blog does not fit into this criticism.

Then I read The New History Wars from The Atlantic. I think history is important, I regret choosing law over history, I think everyone should take an interest in history. Yes, it is generally taught horribly in high school, but the past is the present, history is about all the stupidities and greatness of people. I suggest reading the full article, and hope this tempts you:

Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking. Maybe the directors of The Woman King can be forgiven for their inaccuracies—it is a movie, after all, and films have always been governed by the John Ford rule “print the legend.” But the mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.

Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones? These are uncomfortable but important questions. If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?

I do not understand the current problems with teaching history in high schools. Some people seem to want to ignore slavery and racism in American history. I am pretty sure I got that message loud and clear in high school that there was slavery in America, that there was racism, that some of the Founders owned slaves. Yes, I read books outside of classes, but I thought all that was pretty clear from school. Why the surprise now? I think these people must have been asleep in their history classes. It could not be that they are just raising a stink to raise a stink, could it? 

Go read Gore Vidal's Burr, if you want a historical novel that exposes our checkered Founding. It is from 1973. While drafting this I read Before There Was “Hamilton,” There Was “Burr”, learned a few things there about Vidal's book. Thing is - and here I will take the stand that this is the true American exceptionalism - we try to overcome our failings. Have the French apologized for Algeria? Quit whining about the truth of American history.

I also learned the meaning of catty-cornered.

I forgot about reading ‘War can never be understood’, but this account of Ukraine may help, a review from The Brisbane Times:

At a philosophical level Kurkov meditates on the burden of competing versions of history that are used to justify or reject the basis for the Russian invasion. In this part of Europe, it is customary to invoke events that occurred in previous millennia to justify current actions. Nothing that happens is forgotten, it seems, and yet the narrative of the past is rewritten endlessly. “For many people, history has long since ceased to be a science and has become part of literature. It is edited just as a novel is edited before it is published.”

A dark irony of the current invasion, according to Kurkov, is that it will result in Ukraine becoming permanently autonomous from Russia. The unintended consequence of “Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine as an independent state”, he believes, is that it has “contributed to the strengthening of Ukrainian national identity”.

And then How Much Control Do Humans Have Over Their Lives, Really? since free will interests me. One thing that attracted me to Orthodox Christianity was its emphasis on free will: God gave us free will, so that we could choose Him rather than being forced into a relationship with Him. See, long ago William James taught me about free will. When I was depressed, I gave up on that idea and fell back into fatalism. I suggest you read the article I mention above, if you have an interest in psychology and/or free will; this is from the article:

Today, we know that intrinsic motivation is a real thing and that it is really important. Self-directed exploration and play are primary factors in human learning and development. Our curiosity, more than anything else, is what promotes deep and lasting learning, not the grades or the praise we receive.

I did not finish American Horror Story' Needs to Be Killed Off this morning. I have tried watching this season without much luck. It is on too late, I have been too tired, and the bus comes too early have been the excuses I gave to myself. Reading this article, I had to admit I just did not like this year's story, not for it gay themes but because it was boring:

But the striking thing about American Horror Story, and the implied audience to which it is directed, is that nothing, really, is repressed. Sacred cows are slaughtered in every scene; plotlines are stacked on top of nonsensical plotlines (Roanoke! Aliens! The Antichrist!), as if Ryan Murphy had a checklist of every awful thing you can dream up and was methodically, joylessly, working his way down it, transmogrifying cruelty into content.

Indeed, if American Horror Story has any literary antecedent, it is not in the classics of horror but in the pornographic and violent excesses of the eighteenth-century aristocrat, novelist, and serial rapist known as the Marquis de Sade.

T2 had a Sade novel. In The Rebel, Camus wrote about Sade, and I decided to read the Sade novel. I found it dreary and dull. Again from the essay:

Rather, Sade luxuriates in transgression as the very thing that separates us — the knowing, smart, self-aware philosophes — from the mere sheeple, the rubes, the people still dumb enough to believe that there is a distinction between good and evil, still gullible enough to believe in God. Transgression — pushing human ingenuity as far as it can go — is the thing that makes us godlike. Our ability to imagine and enact sets us apart from the animals — and the other human beings that, in this schema, might as well be. “I am only sorry that no God really exists,” one character muses, “sorry, that is, to be deprived of the pleasures of insulting him more positively."

It is precisely that worldview that dominates every episode of American Horror Story, but stripped of even the pretense of philosophical justification. American Horror Story is a horror-show for a contemporary American audience in which very little is held to be holy, and nothing is buried very deep. It is a horror story for a culture profoundly uninterested in caring about anything enough to be horrified by it in the first place. Although the show occasionally pays disingenuous lip service to being about our shared cultural sins — the original sin of racism in Coven; homophobia in Freak Show — it primarily functions as a BuzzFeed listicle in narrative form: a way to showcase .GIF-able moments of our most beloved cult theater stars doing, well, some freaky shit.

You might want to read the whole essay, not only if you are a fan of AHS, but for what it says about the hollowness of our culture. I have seen some of what is written about, I have participated in some of what I saw, but I came to find no amusement in the emptiness. I thought my life had no purpose because the world lacked any purpose. Suicide seemed the best way to get out of that mess. My failure as a suicide brought me back to Camus (among others) and trying to see how I could change my life, and there was how I came to see KH was right about me returning to writing after 40 years of not taking seriously whatever skills I had as a writer.

The right forearm keeps cramping, so I will bid you all goodnight.

sch