Up and At Them

 I woke a little after 4 am. The room was a bit warm, but it is 28 degrees outside. 

I got at my stories and did some reformatting. Reading Shunn on proper formatting, I saw that left alignment is the proper method. I like justified; a carry over from my lawyer days. Justified gives me the sense of a finished piece. Oops.

Being Friday, the Brisbane Times book review newsletter arrived in my inbox. 

Forget Netflix’s gloomy Marilyn Monroe movie. Read the masterful book instead is more an overview of Joyce Carol Oates. I think JCO is brilliant, and as good an example as anyone in the "backwaters" of the Midwest could find to follow.

What was there in Oates’ life that might have led to this fascination, this diligence, this compulsion? She too was a young hopeful girl growing up in poverty on a farm. Her parents were decent people, but they didn’t have a book in the house: it was the gift of Alice in Wonderland that put her onto reading and ultimately a college education.

Her ancestry was Hungarian, Irish and, she discovered late in life, German Jewish: her beloved grandmother came from a family that had emigrated to the US and passed themselves off as non-Jewish. There was violence in the family: her grandmother was the sole survivor when her father murdered his wife and himself.

Why it’s time to get lost in the greatest novel ever written is about Marcel Proust. KH always laughs when I say this writer's name. Probably not the most likely writer for a person like me, but after reading the first two installments of his novel, I am unabashedly hooked. This article does a good job of explaining why Proust attracts us:

A hundred years ago this week, on November 18, 1922, Proust died in his bed at the age of 51. By then the first four volumes of his masterwork had been published, and they’d made him world famous. The remaining three would appear posthumously. Proust was still revising them when he died. Right to the end he kept compulsively adding sentences in the margins.

The day after Proust’s death, the poet Jean Cocteau came to pay his respects. Proust’s body was still on the bed. The manuscript pages of his novel sat in neat piles on the mantelpiece, “continuing to live,” said Cocteau, “like a ticking watch on the wrist of a dead soldier.”

I was expecting a lot of Proust’s bed, then. I was picturing something grand and next-level comfy, possibly a king size, at the very least a queen. But it proved to be a rickety-looking single, with a visibly subpar mattress. It looked like something from Alcatraz.

Bedding technology has come a long way since Proust’s day. The art of novel-writing, on the other hand, reached an all-time peak in Proust’s rudimentary cot. Nobody has ever written a greater novel than Proust’s, and the chances that anyone ever will are close to zero.

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Whatever translation you read him in, it’s important to know what to expect from Proust. Don’t expect a rollicking plot. On the surface of the book, very little happens. A publisher who rejected Swann’s Way said: “I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.”

A tip for philistines: never begin a sentence with the words “I may be dense, but …” Reading Proust for the plot is like reading Dan Brown for the intellectual fireworks. Proust isn’t the kind of writer who tells you a slick story and leaves no imprint on your mind. Reading him is like making a lifelong friend.

Indeed, you soon find that it’s Proust who’s reading you, and helping you read yourself. He’s always moving from the particular to the general, always looking to draw universal lessons from his private sufferings. “Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strength of the mind,” his narrator observes in the final volume.

I found out there was a brilliant idea out of Anderson - Flagship announces pitch contest with a twist: 

Three local small businesses will have an opportunity to expand their services — and, organizers of a new event hope, their impact on the community — during a new pitch competition planned by the Flagship Enterprise Center.

Flagship Pitch Anderson, scheduled for early next year, will be open to for-profit business owners looking to expand their current products or services within the city of Anderson, according to a news release from the Flagship Enterprise Center.

Instead of being geared toward startups, the competition will invite entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas for expansion to a panel of judges for a chance to win a prize package to help them implement those ideas.

Too many businesses get to the point where it is grow or die, and they need as much attention as start-ups. 

I had a little panic this morning - having the cash for a bus ticket. I found the necessary amount in coins. One new thing for me is the check being direct deposited and me using my debit card to buy everything. Only the laundry and the bus take cash only.

The Times Literary Supplement is sending me its newsletter, again. Considering the zombie is up and moving once more, I thought it'd be interesting what the English think about our former president. I suppose ‘Be there. Will be wild’ is probably an English understatement, but this ought to chill anyone who thinks Trump is the answer for our country:

American Resistance loses something by not detailing some of the more outrageous ruses to which the White House staff resorted to derail Trump’s wilful tangents, perhaps out of Rothkopf’s desire to play down the aura of conspiracy. In Fear, Woodward records how in early September 2017, Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and by then the president’s chief economic adviser, chanced on a letter lying on Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. It was a one-page draft from Trump to the president of South Korea, terminating the US-Korea free trade agreement (Korus). Trump had been threatening this for months, arguing that it was a huge waste of money, while his staff had been protesting that it was the foundation of a hugely profitable trade relationship, a crucial military alliance and a no less crucial shared intelligence operation in the region. Cohn simply removed the draft from the desk. The president failed to notice that it had gone and temporarily forgot about the subject. Korus remained.

Trump’s staff secretary, Rob Porter, pulled a similar trick by deftly removing from the Resolute Desk a draft statement withdrawing from the Paris Accords, which Trump was about to have read out to the press (see Fear). The withdrawal did of course take place in the end, but only after proper discussion. Another such episode took place just after the 2020 election, on November 11, when Kash Patel, a mysterious figure who had somehow crept on to the National Security Council, slid a one-page memo across the table to General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, directing him to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan and Somalia. This was a long-held aim of Trump’s, but he had never managed to get it past his advisers. And he didn’t now. Milley took the memo to the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, and had it withdrawn (see Peril).

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Trump’s extraordinary threat that, if returned to office, he would seek powers to fire every employee of the federal government is in one sense laughable. No conceivable US Congress would pass such a law. But it surely suggests his prevailing itch: to abolish a government based on laws and substitute for it a government that simply expresses the unhampered will of the president – what you might call a Shallow State. The midterm elections did not produce the “red wave” predicted by Republican zealots. Quite a few of the candidates endorsed by Trump failed to win. At the time of writing the Democrats look set to lose control of the House, as sitting presidents usually do these days, though only by a hair’s breadth, but they have clung on in the Senate. All the same, nearly 300 candidates at state and national level declared themselves as “election deniers”, well over half of whom won their races and are now in office. Trump is certainly weakened, but it is too soon to write him off for 2024 – he has been dismissed as a freak show so often before. We have miles to go before we sleep.

Which makes the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day uncanny in its timeliness. 

a pro-democracy podcast, those who do not understand democracy should click here.

I do not want to go to work. I want to stay here and get my writing underway. If I am not careful, I might never leave here. But I go now.

Question: why has no one read the Ross Lockridge post at the top of the page?

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