Monday, Monday

 Did the job interview.

Got to work.

KH saved my ass, again.

"True Love Ways Gone Astray" was rejected:

Thank you for sending us your piece. We want you to know that we enjoyed reading your work, but we didn't feel it was quite right for Southern Humanities Review at this time.

We wish you the best of luck in placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Southern Humanities Review

And so did "Colonel Tom":

Thank you for sending us "Colonel Tom". We appreciate the chance to read it. Unfortunately, it's not quite right for Monkeybicycle so we're going to pass. Do feel free to send us more of your work though.

Thanks again, and best of luck finding a home for this piece.

Sincerely,

Monkeybicycle Staff

I went to McClure's. I got a 2 liter of RC, and still have $.79 out of $38 on my EBT card.

I talked to KH tonight. I should call K and my sister, Instead, I am going to watch Perry Mason, and call it a night. 

Before the show starts, I looked in on the Cleveland Review of Books.

• Jenna Goldsmith reviews How to Speak Midwestern |
• Bryan O'Neill reviews Land of Progress: On Jon K. Lauck’s “The Good Country” ( A History of the American Midwest 1800-1900)

I found the former quite amusing, but the second hits close to home with my "Chasing Ashes" and "Road Tripping":

This is where the argument really gets interesting. In defining itself against those two, especially as successive waves of migrants took the land as their own. The Ordinance was anti-slavery, and each state outlawed the practice. As Lauck points out, each state also argued fiercely about whether to free slaves that were in the states, remnants mostly of French rule—and this usually happened. There were also deep arguments about the rights of fugitive slaves and free Blacks in terms of suffrage, housing rights, jury rights, and more. And while the states usually came down on the wrong side of things, Lauck argues the votes were always contentious and very close. 

Does that count for anything? After all, what good does it do to the disenfranchised to brag about how close they came to having rights? But the closeness of that debate, as Lauck presents it, was at least much more so than was happening in the settled and sclerotic portions of the country. As he points out, the free Black population in Ohio grew from 337 in 1800 to 36,000 in 1860, from both escaped slaves and from other non-slave states. Ohio, and the whole of the Northwest Territory was for free Blacks what it was for others: a land of a new type of freedom.  

With respect to Native American displacement, the rights of Black people, and of women, it’s clear that Lauck wants the record straightened. He argues that debate about their political sovereignty was the flint to the spark of actual democracy. That it was in these debates that abolitionism bloomed. That the space accorded competing ideas (not a stereotypical Midwest virtue) culminated in the anti-slavery Republicans, real Lincolnism (and Lincoln himself, of course) and armies of boys who hated the slaver South. 

That's it.
 

 sch