Sloth, Trainwreck? Where I Have Been the Past 41 Hours.

 I accomplished no real new writing in the past 41 hours.

Work I managed yesterday, even though I missed my time by two hours. I woke with a good deal of pep that ended an hour later thanks to digestive distress continued from Thursday, which had been continued from Wednesday. I think that problem has run its course. There was also had a numb right hand which there were problems with today.

After work, I rounded up groceries at Payless. 

Also, I almost fell asleep on the bus. First from work downtown and then from Payless back downtown and then to my room. Yeah, about all the pep I had was when I first woke.

I ate a light dinner, read a little email but could not concentrate on anything longer than a paragraph, quit trying to stay awake around 8 pm, but CC called and let me know she would be around today. This I rationalized by setting the alarm at 5 am. I obeyed the call of the alarm and was up on time. Albeit, that only lasted two hours. Both forearms ached, and I was just plain tired. I woke again a little after ten. Now, I tuned in WMBR and tried adding to the blog. I also fired up LibreOffice. Just before noon, the computer crashed. This got me out of the room for McClure's, which had stocked up on .99 RC Cola. I forgot there was a trip there yesterday morning - I had no groceries, nothing for lunch, so I thought a beef pot pie might not kill me for Friday's lunch (it did not) - but that was how I missed the first bus, being first delayed b y the intestinal problem.

CC called while I was checking out at McClure's. She arrived about half past twelve. She got no work done. Instead, we kept talking and talking for something like two hours. Our history, relations between men and women, my legal problems, religion, about the state of my room, our relations for the future, and she cried about not knowing her future. She thinks, and she provokes me to think. She worries about my memories; I think she is more entangled with those memories than me. Tomorrow, she will be back to work.

After she left, I ate. Now I am hungry, not having eaten much these past few days. I thought to just watch TV, let the rest of the day go by. I should have done so, I have books to read. Then, I should have spent time with my story, not my email and this blog.

I wrote and published It Is a Police Thing at 8:08 pm. I wrote two other posts and scheduled them for publication towards the end of February.

Today was the first Saturday to post on subjects other than Pretrial Detention. Tomorrow, will be only Pretrial Detention posts and my daily Supervised Release post.

If anyone has paid attention, I read The Times Literary Supplement. Tonight I read a very long piece, NB by J.C.: A Walk Through the Times Literary Supplement, which functions as a sort of history of the journal. I was unaware of the Hudson Review until tonight. I notice it accepts stories up to 10,000 words and excerpts of novels. I will put this on my list.

I never really followed Tom Verlaine, I came to Television's Marquee Moon late, in prison, but I found this news a bit jarring: Tom Verlaine, Singer and Guitarist of Punk Legends Television, Dead at 73. If you want to understand his importance, I suggest follow the link above for the song.

If you are interested, check out Scotland’s National Book Awards. 

From The Conversation, I found What’s effective altruism? A philosopher explains, which problem serves a longer post, but I feel the need to be miserly with my time and what I fear are my carpal tunnel infected hands. You can decide what you think of this idea which is as follows:

Effective altruism is an intellectual and charitable movement that aspires to find the best ways to help others. People dedicated to it rely on evidence and rational arguments to identify what they can do to make the most progress toward solving the world’s most pressing problems, such as reducing malnutrition and malaria while increasing access to health care.

A group of intellectuals, including the Oxford University philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, coined the term in 2011. The movement was inspired in part by the philosopher Peter Singer, who has argued for an obligation to help those in extreme poverty since the 1970s.

I leave it to you to make up your own mind about its worth. 

Iranian women still protest, so I took a look at Iranian literature in times of uprising. I recommend you read this. We have jaundiced views of Iran and Iranians in this country. This may give you a different perspective. It may also have a lesson for us Americans, particularly those keen on banning books:

This is a generation that is no longer willing to accept these contradictions and obligations. And unlike previous generations, whose uprisings the regime crushed over and over again in bloody crackdowns (be it the student protests of 1999, the Green Movement of 2009, or the workers' revolts of 2017 and 2019), they refuse to be intimidated, however violent the retaliation becomes. The current protests triggered by the death of the Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022 have already lasted longer than any to date.

What does literature have to do with this – the examples I have mentioned, which only scratch the surface? It is a seismograph of societal developments. Reading books written by Iranian women authors over recent decades, you can plainly see the upheavals and eruptions growing larger and more forceful; you can see how much has been bottled up over time. It was very clear that at some point, all this would light a revolutionary spark.

Literature, and art more generally, not only depicts these developments; it contributes to them. Khomeini understood that, and so does Iran's current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with the censors in the culture ministry and despots in other countries. They know the danger literature may pose to them. In the end, however, censorship is a blunt sword: anything forbidden is interesting – it will no doubt find its audience.

Yes, books are that important. Ray Bradbury knew this.

One thing read earlier in the evening was War and Eschatology by George Persh. I feel the Russians are doing harm to Orthodox Christianity. This essay reinforces this idea. More troubling for my secular friends should be that the Russians are introducing to Orthodoxy a foreign idea, the holy war. Every talking head I have heard on TV fails to mention this problem. Putin will find it hard, if not wholly impossibly, to withdraw from a holy war.

I have had Noblesville theatre students travel to state conference in my Firefox tabs for several days; this post seems as good a place to dispose of it. The article mentions a one-act play competition. It appears that a proposal I made for a state-wide theater competition exists. (See my Revising Anderson) But is so little known of it? Nor can I find any information on whether these plays are written by students, or are ones already published. The Guidelines are very much unclear on this.

Well, it is 11:29 PM. I have almost closed out the day. The WXPN blues show has 31 more minutes.

Aleksandar Hemon I know from writing an introduction to a collection of short stories. LitHub published an excerpt of his new novel, The World and All That It Holds. 

SARAJEVO, 1914

The holy one kept creating worlds and destroying them, creating worlds and destroying them, and then, just before giving up, He finally came up with this one. And it could be much worse, this world and all that it holds, as I certainly know how to get my hands on some interesting stuff around here. Let’s see: lapis infernalis, laudanum, next to it, lavender.

It is short, and explains why he is a notable writer. 

Just heard this on the radio, so I will leave you with Muddy Waters and a guest singer:

 Good night, world.

sch 11:43