Rounding Out Monday: Target, Plays & More Annie Ernaux

I made it to Target. Not that it did me much good - the pharmacy was closed, and it was not in my plans to stick around until they opened. My plan was to take the bus back downtown, and catch the Whitely bus. My knee was hurting. Thing is, the Mall bus was late enough for me to miss the Whitely bus. Instead of just hanging around the bus station, I walked down to the Village Pantry and got me a pack of smokes. It was not such a long wait for the bus. 

Back here, I put away my groceries from Target. I checked my email. Another rejection came in this afternoon:

Thank you for sending us your submission to Perceptions Magazine. Although "Problem Solving" did not receive a majority vote from the board of editors, we appreciate the chance to review your work and the effort you put into your submission. We encourage you to submit again in the future.

Thanks again. 

Sincerely,

Perceptions Magazine

I talked to my sister just before fixing dinner. After dinner, I decided to run through some places to put my adaptation of The Masque of the Reed Death. I wrote that up in Searching for a Place to Submit My Play. The rest of the night was spent in preparing the play for submission (and I screwed that up for one place) and getting it sent off. 

Since then, I read Elon Musk Is Destroying the Myths of Silicon Valley in Front of Our Very Eyes. I agree with this article.  

This morning, I published Come Monday Morning in which I mention Annie Ernaux. This afternoon brought me a newsletter from Jacobin with the headline Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost Is an Antidote to the Boring Moralism of Contemporary Writing. I find these to be the interesting points:

Leaving aside the patronizing tone of the French publishing industry, even the most ardent Ernaux reader might debate the author’s choice to publish the digressive, possibly repetitive, and steeply self-exposing Getting Lost. Yet this is neither the decision of a willful exhibitionist nor a provocateur — in the style of Georges Bataille or the Marquis de Sade — eager to antagonize the establishment at whatever price.

For Ernaux, turning to the minutiae of everyday experience is a way of avoiding the preciousness of a detached writerly persona that seeks to speak in universal tones about its subject or pass moral judgement on the world. Her work, depicting complex topics like abortion, caring for an ailing parent, and maternal ambivalence, has consistently shown that neither stance is consistently sustainable.

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Ernaux’s primary allegiance as a writer — even to the point, she admits, of “danger,” “risk,” and all-consuming “obsession” — is to sentences of uncompromising and forensic truth, rather than to “politics” per se, especially of the identity-forming kind. Within the nonliterary world, Ernaux has been a committed partisan, both of the Yellow Vests movement and of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. She sees no contradiction being willing to think in a serious unconstrained way about the complexities of interpersonal relationships and standing unequivocally behind the oppressed.

Accordingly, she has bristled at attempts by readers and critics to reduce her work to a simple expression of some kind of political identity. “I don’t write with my uterus,” she once famously said, fatigued by always being termed a “woman writer,” “I write with my brain.” The purpose of Getting Lost’s exposure of her most uncensored thinking is to affirm her radical commitment to honesty, however coarse.

Rachel is on. I need to shower and write a letter and get to bed. Tomorrow, I must work.

 sch