I was up at 8 am, caught the bus downtown a little before 9 and was at the grocery at 9:28. For the first time this week, the morning had gone as planned.
I will not talk about what I spent at the grocery. Payless may not be accurate as a descriptor. I have not looked at my EBT or bank balances - too cowardly to know the facts.
Forgot to mention this last night: What’s So Bad About Melodrama? In Defense of Forgotten Classic Random Harvest (I have seen the movie; it is a rather enjoyable.)
It is 11:40 am and I have days of work to catch up on.
I think beavers are cool, so I had to take a look when the LitHub newsletter showed a link to Part Bear, Part Bird, Part Monkey, Part Lizard: On the Deep Weirdness of Beavers. Nice bit of writing - part science, part history, part current nature writing.
1:51
I have gotten 2 posts done for this blog. They will appear later this month under the "On Writing" tag.
I just read A ‘Woke Army’? Republicans turn final House hearing on far-right violence into a clown show. Several years ago, a friend told me I was delusional. I felt that I had done a pretty good getting the paranoia under control, so I said there was a difference between playing a long-shot that one knew was a long shot and playing one thinking it was a sure thing. It left me a little tender on the subject of delusions. And the delusional. Consider this from the preceding:
The GOP’s witness, IWN’s Asra Nomani, titled her testimony, “Woke Army unleashes a new racism on kids” on Twitter. She opened by pooh-poohing the idea that white supremacy poses any kind of serious threat, claiming: “Every single person is opposed to the idea of white supremacy.”
No doubt this will come as a surprise to people like Donald Trump’s recent dinner guests, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, not to mention all the white nationalists who rubbed shoulders with Donald Trump Jr. and Steve Bannon at that recent black-tie gala in New York—as well as the army of explicit neofascists who promote white supremacy under the banners of outfits like Patriot Front.
Nomani, who specializes recently in so-called “parental rights” (think “Don’t Say Gay”) activism continued: “But we cannot replace an old hierarchy of human value with a new hierarchy of human value that demonizes children,” holding up a children’s book she claimed made white children feel badly about being white.
“Why is this a threat to our democracy?” she asked rhetorically, holding up a pair of posters that had briefly appeared in a classroom display of student-created posters—and seemingly oblivious to those students’ own free-speech rights. “Because we then have posters like this one in the Los Angeles school district. What does it say? F America, with KKK replacing the C. Because the idea is that our nation has become a white supremacist nation, and that is not true. That is not the reality. And we can see exhibited here today this poster also, F the police.”....
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Raskin also inquired about Nomani’s “Woke Army” claims, asking Segal: “I just want to be clear about this, because we’ve been focused on violence today: Is there such a thing formally, literally, as a ‘Woke Army’ that has ever killed anyone in a synagogue like the Tree of Life synagogue, or a church like the Emmanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina, or a supermarket like the Tops supermarket, or a Wal-Mart? Does a ‘Woke Army’ exist as a violent threat to the American people?”
Segal readily answered: “I’m not aware of any Woke Army other than in a semantic argument type of way.”
Indeed, statistical studies of domestic terrorism and political violence have been unanimous on this point: Left-wing violence and terrorism, both in the United States and abroad, has been for decades relegated to a relative handful of incidents, while right-wing violence, in contrast, has been on a straight line rocketing upward in the past decade.
Plenty of quotes in the original article needing to be read to get the full sense of the delusional. Thank you, Daily Kos for giving me a good scare today.
I have not seen this reported elsewhere, but it is important: U.S. attorney general moves to end sentencing disparities on crack, powder cocaine. This disparity and the problems it has caused have been known since the particular sentencing guidelines were instituted.
Critics of the longtime policy have said it is a relic of Washington’s misguided War on Drugs era that targeted Black and Brown communities, resulted in overpopulated prisons and strained federal and local resources at the expense of more-effective strategies.
Worried about reading Proust? Don’t, just jump right in from The Brisbane Times:
Suppose we take the plunge: how should we go about reading Proust? Jach says you can start reading anywhere. To get the most out of the novel, you have to be hooked, and that might not happen if you start with the first volume, Swann’s Way. The novel gets better as it goes along: over 13 years of writing, Proust discovered how to write his novel, and also what it was really, really about. Jach’s favourite sections are the love story of Albertine and Marcel, and the summing-up section in the last volume, Time Regained.
Washington Post books enthusiast Michael Dirda recommends you start with Swann in Love, part of Swann’s Way. He once read the whole novel in a college French course, and came to feel its characters were more real than the people around him. Now he’s reread Swann in Love as a stand-alone novella in a new translation by Lucy Raitz.
One thing I started in prison and want to finish.
Now I need to attend to my research on Raintree County.
News from The Muncie Star-Press: Legislators hear concerns about potential property tax relief before session starts.
Other matters discussed at the preview included finding a purpose for the state's surplus, estimated to be be about $4 billion after the state sent $200 checks to Indiana residents last year.
Rep. Sue Errington, D-Muncie, said that she is a follower of Ball State University economist Michael Hicks, who has been arguing for years that the government needs to invest more in quality of life matter for people in Muncie and improve and invest in the local schools. Education is where Errington says she would invest the surplus.
Errington said that beginning teachers are not paid as much as they should be in Indiana.
Prescott said the state should be cautious in spending the surplus.
Another episode of Greaser's Lunchbox over with.
Time for a late lunch, ang a break.
A trip to McClure's looms in my future.
2:33 pm
I had lunch, kind of watched but mostly listened to the movie The Last Movie Star (the last half was best, and Burt Reynolds is the reason to watch the thing; he has class and style, and would be dead a few months after it came out, and kept at my research on Raintree County.) I did a piece on Indiana writers - a by-blow of the Raintree stuff - that I scheduled for 12/30.
Taking a bit of a time out, I read 10 Things Crime Writers Should Know About Guns not sure what I would learn, and some details were learned not known before, but it was even more amusing.
Of The Psychedelic Genesis of the Doors: A Conversation with Robby Krieger, I did not finish. Whatever fascination The Doors had for me was gone long ago - like when I found The Velvet Underground.
I checked out the Herald Bulletin's obituaries. Saw neither anyone I knew nor myself.
There are new editions of Cutleaf and Minimag, and I do not see having the time for either.
I did read a good chunk of CounterPunch's The Left and Ukraine, and this Left is not the fantasy of the Republican Party. I found a part shocking. In the break room at work this past week, one of the vocal Trumpers got talking about Ukraine as being corrupt. Russian disinformation hits Indiana, too. Even after this article, I remain in favor of Ukraine. Like democracy, Ukraine is not perfect, but it is better than the alternative.
Ukraine is the third case. But doubts have now started to creep into my mind over how far to support the Washington line, particularly over the issue of how this terrible war can be brought to an end. Some US officials, including senior military men like Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently began to advocate negotiations on the basis that Ukraine will not be able to drive all Russian forces out, whatever extra military aid the US and its allies pump in. This is a welcome point of view. But it is still swamped by the Biden administration’s majority position which effectively gives the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy a veto over whether to accept negotiations.
This sounds democratic, but it would be more convincing if Zelenskyy and his colleagues allowed Ukrainians an open debate about whether to continue the war. On the contrary in recent months, virtually unreported in the almost universally pro-Zelenskyy Western media, the Ukrainian government has shut down eleven opposition political parties. It has brought in legislation to give the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting unprecedented power to control the print media on the lines of the controls it already has over broadcasters. Zelenskyy apparently wants to suppress discussion and conceal the fact that millions of Ukrainians believe the hope of complete victory is an illusion in spite of recent military successes and that it is better to sue for peace and save the country from further death, destruction, displacement and misery.
The Gallup organisation organised a telephone poll of Ukrainians in September. It found that masses of respondents did not share the official line of flag-waving support for the military. Although 76 per cent of men wanted the war to continue until Russia is forced to leave all occupied territory including Crimea, and 64 per cent of women had the same view, the rest — a substantial number of people — wanted negotiations.
And I cannot say this is a bad idea:
It is time for the Left to find its voice. We should publicise these opinion poll findings and call for a ceasefire. Let the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, by himself or through the appointment of an authoritative envoy, contact Kyiv and Moscow and try to broker an immediate cessation of hostilities. Take advantage of winter and the general reduction in military activity and freeze the conflict where it is.
At some point there will have to be negotiations about a political end to the war and a withdrawal of Russian forces but it will take months, if not years to achieve agreement. The priority is to stop the killing and this can be done at once. Let the Western Left, in solidarity with progressive forces in Ukraine and Russia themselves, take up the burden of campaigning for an armistice, in other words for peace.
Music for this evening:
It is snowing and in the high 20s and I need to make my expedition to McClure's.
7:12 pm
I went to McClure's. It was cold. I watched The Banshees of Inisherin, and finished my Raintree County research. I have a toothache. This is the end of the day. Closing out with The Pogues, for some reason I cannot put into words - other than it seems the thing to do.
sch 12:10 am 12/18/22
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