Thursday's Readings

 Doing the laundry, waiting on the sister, having done a few posts and reading already.

Only human: why is cinema so hungry for cannibals? - read because once upon a time I recommended some movies to another Anderson lawyer, and when he finished he asked what I had about cannibals. I had not thought about it, but Parents and Lucky Stiff were funny. Those two are not mentioned in this article.

Pure curiosity got me to Coins study suggests ‘fake emperor’ was real, say scientists. Same with ‘He kind of amps them up’: ‘Kevin’ the ringleader as turkeys terrorize Massachusetts town, and Pinocchio review – Guillermo del Toro’s dark, sombre riff on the Disney-sweet fairytale.

More serious concerns got me to read ‘The US can still become a fascist country’: Frances Fox Piven’s midterms postmortem:

She has raised red flags over the vulnerabilities of the country’s democracy, the inequalities baked into its electoral and judicial systems, and how poor Americans, especially those of colour, are forced to resort to defiance and disruption to get their voices heard. Now, with the Republicans having taken the House of Representatives, she foresees ugly times ahead.

“There’s going to be a lot of vengeance politics, a lot of efforts to get back at Joe Biden, idiot stuff. And that will rile up a lot of people. The Maga mob is not a majority of the American population by any stretch of the imagination, but the fascist mob don’t have to be the majority to set in motion the kinds of policies that crush democracy.”

Literary Review republished Hilary Mantel's Journeys Into the Interior, a book review:

Sometimes it seems that the real division between people has nothing to do with talent, wealth or beauty. For some people, life’s hard, and for some it’s easy; there’s not much logic attached to the division, and one half of humanity certainly doesn’t understand the pleasures and pains of the other. In A Life of One’s Own, first published in 1934, Joanna Field quotes Anne in Crome Yellow – ‘One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones. There’s nothing more to be said.’ She herself is of the contrary, self-analytical persuasion, and these two books, first published in the 1930s, constitute an enquiry into her own nature.

It is an earnest, honest nature, without, it seems, the sauce of arrogance or the spice of humour. Through her own diaries and doodlings, we meet the author as a young working psychologist in London. At 26, she has a sense that real life is passing her by; that important things are happening, but always in the next room. She undertakes ‘mental training schemes’ and blames her lack of willpower when they fail to bring results. She goes to conferences about the lot of the poor, and in one of her pockets carries a scrap of paper with a quotation from Virginia Woolf. And though she says that she hates ‘dowdy, arty women,’ one somehow imagines this pocket; it must belong to a garment like the Woolfian cardigan that Edith Hope wears in Hotel du Lac. A Life of One’s Own is a record of seven years’ self-observation. What are the facts of my life, she asks; what will make me happy? Even the facts, she finds, shift according to the way she observes them. Her intelligence has been trained in a way which blinkers her; it has shut her off from a world of direct sensory experience, and prevented her, quite literally, from knowing her own mind. A sort of free association in writing gives her some clues; important things are going on, but not in the next room. They are going on below the surface of her conscious mind

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Her aim is laudable, in this second book. If we would each turn inward, she believes, and view our own images, and formulate a personal mythology, we would not be at the mercy of the myths pedalled by Hollywood, by the newspapers, or by politicians. Never too late to mend, perhaps; but while she is preoccupied with the meaning of the Adonis myth, what’s budding in the grove, circa 1937, is National Socialism.

These are the dear, dead days, before feminism, before socio-biology; each generation has to discover for itself the beast in man, not to mention the beast in wimmin. These books have an archaeological fascination. The author delves through the layers of her own mind; and in parallel we see the accretion, stratum by stratum, of some of the present century’s most influential ideas – as well as some of its most specious.

My sister and my cousin and I had a good time having dinner and talking with one another. It has been about 20 years since I last saw my cousin. How old we have become, how many roads we have traveled, times shared go back quite a way.

I do want to do much tonight. Too full of too much food, tired, but still I have only so much time left to me.

I saw my father's grave and said my good-byes. It would have been more satisfactory wither tha tI had died long ago, or had been home sooner.

Asimov's did not like my "Psychotic Ape":

Thank you very much for letting us see "The Psychotic Ape."  We appreciate your taking the time to send it in for our consideration.  Although it does not suit the needs of the magazine at this time, we wish you luck with placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Sheila Williams, Editor
Pronouns: she, her
Asimov’s Science Fiction
www.asimovs.com

Rather a surprise it came so quickly. It will go out again.

Also, in the email from The Woodward Review:

Thank you so much for your submission to Woodward Review. While we're grateful to have had the chance to consider, it wasn't chosen for our upcoming issue. Thank you for thinking of us as a home for your work.

As writers and artists ourselves, we say sincerely: keep going.

The Editors

So, it goes.

I found Seyfert's potatoes are long. I had begun to notice they were missing. It seems things, people, keep slipping away. Once I found knowing that an intolerable pain. Always losing what I cared for, there seemed the only solution was losing myself. Nowadays, I try a different way of adjusting to the flux.

I submitted "The Psychotic Ape" to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

It is 9:34 pm.

"Problem Solving" was sent off to  Delmarva Review while I listen to the TV.

I am bookmarking everything else I have found tonight. 

Good night.

sch