Friday's Notes

 Up before the alarm, again. I did not get much sleep last night, but I had some strange dreams. Part of one sticks in my mind: running, as in moving one's feet like a runner, up to South Bend with my cousin Paul.

I did some reading before the bus came. Breakfast was an apple.

From The Brisbane Times: How to solve the puzzle that’s Bob Dylan? The answer is in the songs. I missed that one from last month.

Also, from The Brisbane Times: Eyes on the prize: The up-and-coming writers impressing awards judges. I continue to ask - not entirely selfishly - why Indiana has nothing like these prizes, and where are they in America?

Every year, book publishers are inundated with manuscripts written by budding authors, hoping for their big break. To help sort through the mass of unsolicited proposals, publishers often turn to emerging writers prizes: apart from money and mentoring, the recognition gained via awards helps authors get eyeballs on their words. Surveying these awards is one way to help put together a picture of the up-and-coming authors set to storm the publishing world.

And an answer is to be found here. 

 Annie Ernaux 's Nobel Lecture is online:

 This is how I conceived my commitment to writing, which does not consist of writing ‘for’ a category of readers, but in writing ‘from’ my experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior; and from my longer and longer memory of the years I have lived, and from the present, an endless provider of the images and words of others. This commitment through which I pledge myself in writing is supported by the belief, which has become a certainty, that a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.

We see it today in the revolt of women who have found the words to disrupt male power and who have risen up, as in Iran, against its most archaic form. Writing in a democratic country, however, I continue to wonder about the place women occupy in the literary field. They have not yet gained legitimacy as producers of written works. There are men in the world, including the Western intellectual spheres, for whom books written by women simply do not exist; they never cite them. The recognition of my work by the Swedish Academy is a sign of hope for all female writers.

In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and/or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies.

For a different kind of writer, see Sad Girl Manifesto from The Baffler.

I did not know there was Joyce Carol Oates Prize: JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST ANNOUNCED BY NEW LITERARY PROJECT.

MiniMag has a new issue here.

It seemed a very long day at work. I had to struggle very hard to keep myself going. It was not the work was onerous; just that it seemed to take so very long, measured against the clock. It was rainy and cloudy, and the outside lights were on before 6 pm. I stopped off at McClure's, and got 3 bottles of RC Cola. The first they have had all week.

Back in the room, I ate dinner, and have been doing some reading this evening:

From The Guardian: Georgia girl, 12, killed by father after family court grants him custody.  First rule of family court: judges think if both parties are unhappy with their decision, then they have done their job right. Secondly in Indiana, between grandparents and parents, the grandparents have to show that the parent is unfit, and their having custody is in the child's best interest (take a look at In re Paternity of LJS, 923 NE 2d 458 - Ind: Court of Appeals, 2010.) Third, I had a Madison County judge give custody to a father at an interlocutory (the hearing to set up temporary arrangements) hearing because the mother had tested positive for marijuana from a birthday party a month before where the children were not in attendance but where the father had been invading the marital home, harassing wife by empty the dirty litter boxes on the floor because the judge did not think anyone smoking marijuana should have custody of a child; the same judge did not believe the mother was the problem, even after a custody evaluation, until she kidnapped the child. Judges are not exempt from being idiots.

From HuffPost: Donald Trump Jr. Blasts Deal Freeing 'America Hating' Brittney Griner. So much for "America First" - so for much standing up for Americans. What a bunch of creeps.

Also from HuffPost: Attorney Claims Trump Would Have Immunity Even If He'd Said To 'Burn Congress Down'. The creeps keep sprouting up like mushrooms. We have Presidents, not kings. The President can do the wrongs that kings are exempted from. I cannot yell fire in a crowded theater, nor can I incite a riot. Donald J. Trump cannot try to overthrow the Constitution and then claim the Constitution as his protector - for it was the Constitution that made him President. To give him a pass would destroy our Constitution, our freedoms, our country.

’My Fourth Time, We Drowned’ by Sally Hayden has been announced as the ‘An Post Irish Book of the Year 2022’. Because I am sick and tired of the creeps ruining my country. 

‘My Fourth Time, We Drowned”,  the first book written by Hayden, was triggered by a Facebook message the writer received asking for help from an Eritrean refugee held in a Libyan detention centre. The title is a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa, including dozens of first-hand narratives from people currently living in Libyan detention centres, revealing that they were all incarcerated as a direct result of European policy. This book is about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent.

 I mentioned the new Star Wars show Andor in Ruined Thursday, Going Nowhere. Today, The Los Angeles Review of Books has a piece on the same show, Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor”. Not your usual appreciation of Star Wars, but maybe what I need to dampen my cynical views to the stuff since The Empire Strikes Back.

THE PRIMAL SIN of Star Wars — or the thing that made it great, depending on your perspective — is its adolescent narcissism, from Lucas naming the protagonist after himself to creating the Force as an in-universe stand-in for his own desires. Why, after all, is the force so strong with Luke? You know the answer, and it has nothing to do with midi-chlorians: he’s the film’s most very special boy, not an ordinary kid at all, but a prince, a hero with a destiny, and his father’s only son. The Force is the effect of the camera and protagonism — a diegetic trace of extradiegetic will — fulfilling the child’s wish to be the center of the universe. It makes the universe his toy: Lucas created it, so the universe obeys Luke’s commands.

The author has given me a wholly new view of the franchise. 

From Psyche, I read If madness is like drowning, then writing is my raft ashore:

It feels un-feminist to credit my nervous breakdown – or even O’Keeffe’s – to the presence or absence of men. However, it is hard to escape that characterisation. We are driven mad by circumstances. Women creatives – artists and writers, musicians and ballerinas – are fraught with this tension. They weaponised their own fragility to create art and to heal. In her essay ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), Virginia Woolf talks about being haunted by an angel – the ghost of a perfect woman, submissive and pure, one who hides that she has a mind of her own. Woolf was so bothered by this phantom, she ended up killing it. And when the angel is killed, all that remains is a common woman with an inkpot, says Woolf. The common woman’s imagination seeks dark pools. It swims ‘where the largest fish slumber’. The depth of a woman writer’s sorrow is an ocean trench, and the saltwater stings her, before allowing her to rise to the surface. Unlike the angel, the writer is an oddity. An aberration.

I wonder often, if I am not on the brink of mania, or writing through the too-muchness of my emotions, would I be as simple and unremarkable as Woolf’s angel? One of my biggest fears before starting a course of psychiatric medication was precisely this: what if my creativity was mere pathology? Would I cure away my penchant for words and syntax? Would I stop being the aberration I thought I was?

In Coco Mellors’s novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein (2022), her depressed artist protagonist wonders if one can have depth without cutting open one’s own heart for public consumption. Can one be recognised as suffering without swimming naked in the public oceans of abnormality? Could the quirks of our brain rest easy without pushing us into frozen catatonia? I do not have answers. I suppose it will be a perpetual exercise to try to find words for the liminality in which I often find my inner life. There is the churning of the whirlpool of the unconscious, the swift stream of Ophelia’s brook, the dark rivers upon which Charon waits – hand outstretched for a final fare. Yet there is also the blue ocean flanked by warm sand on a seaside trip in the summer, the cool of the River Cherwell as a friend punts and I laugh, a strawberry ice cream cone in hand. There is the River Thames, peeking from the distance when I look out my office window in Covent Garden, my gaze meeting the London Eye.

I suppose there are no easy metaphors to find. Water takes the shape of its container, madness the shape of its vessel, too. There’s a shore at the end of the waves, though. To drown is not the only course. I can write my way to a raft that will carry me to land.

Yes, we can write our madness and perhaps right it, too.

I have spent the last 12 years trying to overcome the nihilism I plunged myself into. Still, I had to read Psyche's How to be a happy nihilist. Come on, that title is a WTF kind of thing, an unbeatable inducement to one's curiosity. Some bits:

Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances: ‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’. But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim (skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression.

Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout.

The fixation with making all areas of existence generically meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly really, really matters. Daily newsletters flood our inboxes, prescribing never-ending tasks and goals to meditate over and mark as complete. In the shower, we listen to podcasts about making this day count, then towel off and cram in a few minutes of mindful journalling about what we managed to meaningfully achieve the day before.

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So what’s the alternative? Is the answer to embrace a state of pointless, nihilistic chaos? Yeah, pretty much. At least that’s what’s worked for me.

For the past few years, I’ve been consumed by nihilism. Reading that, it would be fair to assume things haven’t been peachy. But my descent into the controversial philosophy hasn’t been a grim road of despair and hopelessness. Quite the opposite. It’s become one of the most illuminating and fortifying parts of my life.

Rejecting the urge to seek and denote meaning to all things has changed the way I assign value and spend time. It has challenged what I focus on and, most importantly, what I disregard. I’ve found that a kind of optimistic or ‘sunny’ nihilism highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the power of sunny nihilism, it’s necessary to begin with the philosophy itself.

Er, I am not sure if I agree. I do agree that if everything matters, then nothing matters. This does not seem to me a very modern problem. When in recorded history have we not needed to select gold from dross. Seems to me this started with Socrates. Regardless of what I did with my own life, one must make choices - one cannot date the brunette and the blonde at the same time. I think I can make choices of what is meaningful and what is crap without calling it nihilism.

One more bit, explaining the types of nihilism:

Breaking it down further, the American philosopher Donald Crosby divides nihilism into four main forms: moral, epistemological, cosmic and, perhaps the best-known, existential. Moral nihilism rejects fundamental ideas of right and wrong; epistemological nihilism takes issue with absolute truth; cosmic nihilism considers nature to be inherently indifferent and hostile; and finally we reach existential nihilism, in many ways the culmination of all these considerations, which probably keeps most people up at night – the basic idea being that there is no meaning to life, everything is pointless.

I still entertain the cosmic nihilism - I am pretty sure the universe has no interest in me or in you. I think I can live with that. What got enmeshed with my depression and which I am trying to overcome is existential nihilism.

Read it, if you like, and feel free to leave a comment below.

From Daily Kos, it was Loud white woman lawmaker from Georgia thinks she could have gotten Herschel Walker elected and Dr. Fauci interrogated by Missouri AG about social media. And I thought I was nuts.

From the Writer's Notebook: Book Recs: My Life as a Godard Movie by Joanna Walsh.

I have been listening to WPRB since a little after 6 pm. Go Hanna! The following I heard on Hanna's show, liked the sound of it, and found it on YouTube:

I found CC. Well, I found where she was a few months ago. It was where I thought she had gone to ground. Which irks me - I could have had it all wrapped up with her months ago.

I have some typing to do, and no plans on going anywhere else, so I close out with this report at 9:05 PM.

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