I have been up for 3 hours. I have deleted the old blog, thinking this may improve my readership here. Bookmarks have been pruned.
While pruning, I ran across "Inactive Shooters" by Chad Lutz, a poem. I suggest you go read it and think about it.
Also read this morning: A Summary and Analysis of Immanuel Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’:
‘What is Enlightenment?’ is concerned with every citizen’s public right to use their reason: everyone in a civilised society, Kant argues, should have the freedom to question the status quo and take part in a debate about how society should be governed and maintained. But such public rights and freedoms need to be balanced by the citizen’s private or civic responsibility to obey the law, and observe the status quo, when required to.
In other words, even while we discuss and philosophise about how to improve society, we have to live in the one we currently have, and civilisation would break down if people chose, for instance, to stop following laws they considered unjust or refused to pay their taxes because they disagreed with the levels of taxation.
‘What is Enlightenment?’ is fundamentally a clarion-call to people about the need to ‘dare to be wise’. What is required is not merely intellect but also a willingness to engage one’s reason and exercise that reason upon the everyday things that govern our lives: political systems, financial structures, education, trade, and much else. Enlightenment is mankind’s coming-to-maturity, a willingness to think for oneself and emerge from an immature state where we hand over the power and responsibility to authority figures, whether they’re priests, doctors, teachers, or politicians
Now, I am going to work on submitting my stories.
"Problem Solving" went to Route 7 because nothing else was open now.
Headlines from The Guardian were arrived in my email.
Casablanca at 80: a golden age classic that remains impossible to resist
Uniting America review: how FDR and the GOP beat fascism home and away
‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity
It is now 6 pm.
I finished the story. KH now has a copy, poor fellow.
A nap and a trip to McClure's happened earlier today. The rain had stopped, then it started again. Now it is just wet outside.
The search for CC has hit another wall. Fears of relapse. Funny thing is CC and KH and K would all have an agreement about my attraction for crack cocaine. I have felt none such thing, even when I was running with the crackheads. Certainly, I have felt no desire since I have been in Muncie. The thing was having a secret life. Well, those compartments all got collapsed back in 2010. These notes do not, I think, put them back together again. The thrill of a secret life was my motivation before my arrest. No thrill when all is known. That my behavior feels like such utter silliness now also helps.
Want something to think about? Want to correct behavior? Then give A sobering note from Finland about America's role in all of this from Daily Kos a read. The country wants me to act responsibly; I want the country to also act responsibly.
About acting responsibly, Donald Trump's pals make the news on Daily Kos, Proud Boys fold like a cheap suit, Oath Keepers raked by judge on way to trial
While the United States Supreme Court continues on its merry way of disrupting the country: Roberts joins dissent blasting extremist Supreme Court conservatives for abusing the shadow docket.
Not quite as interesting as its title, but Napoleon's Life—and Mysterious Death—in Exile might interest anyone whose not read anything about Napoleon.
Confession: something about the strangeness of the Basque language fascinated me for decades. Hand of Irulegi: ancient bronze artefact could help trace origins of Basque language has some news on that. But where did these people come from?
Self-explanatory: Robert Clary, the last star of the 'Hogan's Heroes,' dies at 96.
This will take some explaining: Wilko Johnson obituary.
WXPN played the album Wilko made with Roger Daltrey, and I liked it for all of not having a clue who was Wilko Johnson.
Listen and enjoy:
"Problem Solving" got another review, but a rather nice one:
Thank you for allowing us to read your submission. While there was a lot that we loved about your work, we won't be moving forward with it for this issue. We truly hope you will submit with us again in the future.
Thank you,
Andrew Beasley
I have read a lot about Octavia Butler; enough that I will try to find one of her books this coming year. Regardless of how many rejections I get, hers was a much harder row to hoe. You think you got troubles, read The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler The girl who grew up in Pasadena, took the bus, loved her mom, and wrote herself into the world.
When she learned she could make a living doing this, she never let the thought go. Later, she would call it her “positive obsession” and would put it all on the line. Her mother’s youngest sister, who was the first in the family to go to college, became a nurse. Despite her family’s warnings, she did exactly what she wanted to do. That same aunt would tell Butler, “Negroes can’t be writers,” and advise her to get a sensible job as a teacher or civil servant. She could have stability and a nice pension, and if she really wanted to, she could write on the side. “My aunt was too late with it, though,” Butler said. “She had already taught me the only lesson I was willing to learn from her. I did as she had done and ignored what she said.”
Butler would grow up to write and publish a dozen novels and a collection of short stories. She did not believe in talent as much as hard work. She never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they should learn, study, observe, and persist. Persistence was the lesson she received from her mother, her grandmother, and her aunt. In her lifetime, she would become the first published Black female science-fiction writer and be considered one of the forebears of Afrofuturism. “I may never get the chance to do all the things I want to do,” a 17-year-old Butler wrote in her journals, now archived at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. “To write 1 (or more) best sellers, to initiate a new type of writing, to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer prizes (in reverse order), and to sit my mother down in her own house before she is too old and tired to enjoy it.” The world would catch up to her dreams. In 2020, Parable of the Sower would hit the best-seller list 27 years after its initial publication and 14 years after Butler’s death. After years of imitation, Hollywood has put adaptations of nearly all of her novels into development, beginning with a Kindred show coming to Hulu in December. She is now experiencing a canonization that had only just begun in the last decade of her life.
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What the archives show is how much she struggled with hope herself. She was “a pessimist if I’m not careful.” When she was working on a novel, her drafts tended to reveal the crueler sides of human nature. She didn’t like Lauren Olamina at first because she saw the character as a power seeker. Earlier iterations of Parable depicted her as a calculated leader who orders assassinations on her enemies and puts shock collars on those who try to leave Earthseed. But the version of Lauren in the finished book is wise, practical, strong — someone who could grow a community into a movement. If Butler had been writing idealized selves since childhood, Lauren was the young adult she wished she had been, and her rise into myth has come to resemble her character’s. You could understand this as a function of her desire for commercial success: We all need heroes. But another way to see it is that hope is not a given. It was through rewriting that she was able to imagine not only the darkest possible futures, but how to survive within them. Hope and writing were an entwined practice, the work of endless revision.
And without planning, The Paris Review sent a link to the interview Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203. I found this interesting and instructive:
INTERVIEWER
Why do you write science fiction?
BRADBURY
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.
INTERVIEWER
Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not?
BRADBURY
Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery.
I dropped in on HarlanEllisonBooks.com just to see how one of the great short story tellers was faring 2 years after his death. It looks like he is doing fine.
It is 7:38. I need a break from the computer.
I have showered, and started yawning so hard, my body shakes. Thinking it is time to end this post.
I have to make some notes on Artfulness and Artlessness, the Literary and Political Uses of Impersonality in John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy by Alice Béja. I remain fascinated by his ideas.
This peculiar blending of artfulness and artlessness was saluted by Sartre as a literary feat in his 1938 article “John Dos Passos and 1919.” Sartre writes of Dos Passos: “he has done everything possible to make his novel a mere reflection. […] The reason is that his art is not gratuitous; he wants to prove something. But observe what a curious aim he has. He wants to show us this world, our own—to show it only, without explanations or comment” (Sartre, 2003 363). Later in his essay, Sartre emphasizes that the world Dos Passos presents to the reader is, however, no mere reflection, but a carefully constructed object: “I know of none—not even Faulkner’s or Kafka’s—in which the art is greater or better hidden” (Sartre, 2003 364). Considering the trilogy as a work where art is “hidden” might seem paradoxical, given the way in which the author openly displays the structure of his novels, in which the various modes of narration are typographically separated from each other and identified by their titles (“Camera Eye,” “Newsreels”…). By comparing Dos Passos to Kafka and Faulkner, Sartre implicitly characterizes this hidden art as eminently modernist, thus going against the conception of modernist novels as artefacts concerned with showing their art rather than hiding it. The technique of montage, to which Sartre refers, thus appears as both a way of bringing the novel closer to a hypothetical “truth” of existence and a device that enables the writer to reintroduce, through the impersonality of collage, a form of narrative authority, of “hidden artfulness.”
Talk about writers with ideas....
Good night.
It is 8:54 pm.
sch
I read this. Interesting about Butler.
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