Crawling Through the Weekend

Life As It Was and How It Is

Saturday morning had a surprise. I had slept into until a little after seven. I started working on the ending of “Road Tripping” after going through some of my email. With about an hour of work in, there came a pounding on the door. I had heard someone call out house cleaning before the pounding began. I got up with more than a little annoyance. There was pounding in the door next to me. Some woman was standing on the porch. I took it she was looking for someone. She was angry and looking for someone. I told her to move on. My neighbor was gone. I could tell I was not whom she was looking for. I told her to move on. She did.

I got one call. Work wanted me to come in. I had to beg off having plans with CC last night.

 As for work here, I did get through another notebook of my pretrial detention journal and got today's posts done. Sunday being pretrial detention day.

Today has been writing since I got out of bed a little after 7 am.

“Road Tripping” has been as hard as ever to move forward. I have been on break since a little before 5 and it is now 6:20. I will go back in a little bit more.

I made it to McClure's for Coca-Cola around 11, I think. Maybe earlier. The laundry I put off till tomorrow. I had a long chat with KH. Dinner was soup and a potato and a little roasted chicken. Ticks do not get this full.

Readings:

From Nuvo came this blast from the past: A Slice and a Boot to the Head: Crazy Al's. I saw there The Zero Boys opening for Joan Jett; Race Record opening for The Blasters. That's all I can remember. It was long haul from Muncie. But plenty of the following names were familiar:

Later bands such as The Zero Boys (Where Laurie and Mark Cutsinger's Great Romance started), Latex Novelties, The Hoosier Daddies, Vibrato Fetish, Dow Jones and the Industrials, Last Four Digits, The Late Show, The Race Records and national acts such as The Go-Gos, X, Joan Jett, and the Cramps first played in Indiana.

From Thornfield Hall's Pairing Anne Bronte with Louisa May Alcott came a different reaction. My mother had spent a long time trying to get me to read Alcott's Little Women. I did not do so until prison. I think this failure bothered my mother – not that she said anything, just her behavior. When I did read it, I could not understand why she would want me to read it. Jo gave up her writing. Getting over my initial reaction, I have come to realize it was her way of showing her idealism, what sort of family she had wanted. Seeing the novel this way, I think more highly of it. The essay referenced above gives me other reasons for appreciating Alcott. Give it a look, please.

The Guardian provided Discovery of 4,500-year-old palace in Iraq may hold key to ancient civilisation (I am a fool for all things archeological) and Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive.

I read most of CounterPunch's The Insecure Superpower - if we are insecure it is because of the MAGA Republicans have the stability of toy poodles; ready to bark at the slightest noise.

From Orthodox Scholars Preach, respectively: Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee: Perry Hamalis, Sunday of the Prodigal Son - Sr. Vassa Larin, Sunday of the Last Judgment - Nadieszda Kizenko

Back to the secular world, Orca turned down “True Love Ways Gone Astray.”

Thank you for submitting your work to Orca. As writers ourselves we truly appreciate the time and effort that goes into crafting creative writing. We know a lot about rejection too, and know that even the most positive rejection carries with it the sting of disappointment. So although we have chosen not to publish your story, we wish you well in placing this work in another venue.

Sincerely,

Joe, Zac, Renee, and the Orca staff

Orca, A Literary Journal

Here is a way I could be a useful person: From cradle to compost: the disruptors who want to make death greener . I wonder what my Dad would make of humans as compost.

Dorothy Parker's Ashes is doing food this issue; as usual, more than I can take in at one time; this journal leaves me feeling like a kid in a candy store,

Lapham's Quarterly has a newsletter of which part is The Rest Is History. I cannot resist skimming it, sometimes I find an interesting thing to look at closer, and today it was A Biography’s Tale: On Anthony Burgess by Roger Lewis by Jonathan Russell Clark. For me, it was a hoot to read, a wrestling match with a biography and hero worship:

After reading The Biographer’s Tale, I found myself spending more time in those sections of bookstores. While living in England, I visited numerous cities and in each one found a bookshop to peruse. At a secondhand spot in London, a series of small shelves stood outside the entrance, on which sat the clearance titles, and from which I plucked a volume with a £1 sticker pasted on its bright orange and yellow cover: Anthony Burgess by Roger Lewis. It’s ironic to recall my initial misgivings about the book. I had never read anything by Burgess and only knew him as the author of A Clockwork Orange, so I wondered how it could possibly engage me. Mostly, though, I worried it would be dense and dull.

But the lessons of Byatt’s novel motivated me to push past my reservations and pony up the pound. If biography was an art, one’s knowledge about the subject should be irrelevant. The complex love Edel described should come through. If I wanted to learn how they worked, here was a cheap introduction.

Little did I know, of course, that if I was looking for a biography that either exemplifies a biographer’s love or at least employs the conventions of the form, I couldn’t have stumbled upon anything worse.

This was a wonderful essay to tread, both in execution and subject. It also led me to its publisher, Tasteful Rude. This looks like a very interesting site/publication.

I only heard of the Voynich Manuscript in recent years, but it intrigues me enough to read Researcher discovers unknown history behind the Voynich manuscript, the world’s most mysterious text; although there was not much meat on that bone.

A bit of news I had not heard: A Piece of the Sun Has Broken off and Formed a Strange Crown-like Vortex over It! - a lot of meat here.

On Home and Elsewhere does make one wonder why do we go away from home and why we stay there.

A deeply depressing chart on the future of media - do you watch Fox News? You should read this.

Hanging Around Osgood, Indiana    

I got a rejection, apparently "Colonel Tom."

Thank you for sending your work to the Cimarron Review. Our editors read your work carefully. Unfortunately, it does not meet our current needs.

This does not necessarily reflect the quality of your work, and we wish you luck placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors

and Billy the Kid:

And now it is back to working on my fiction

sch 6:38 pm