Monday - Paychecks, Sloe Gin, Cormac McCarthy Inspires & Terrifies, Meanings

 I was up early and started on finishing my rewrite of "The Sloe Gin Effect." Three hours and it wore me out. I made a small change in the ending, downsized much of the opening. Paul S. got the first look. This was a story I read half of in one of our prison writing classes. Paul S. had been waiting for the rest of the story for over 8 and a half years. He liked it.

I have spent the afternoon reading articles online and taking care of the little bits of business I planned on doing today. Fairfield Hotel went with someone else. Not really surprised by their silence. More surprised that Chili's has a paper check for me. I assume they had that when I was fired. Tomorrow I retrieve my pay.

I walked down to McClure's for smokes and got 2 bottles of RC Cola.

My neighbor has kept to himself - so far. I remember Sartre said hell was other people. 

The music getting me through the morning and into the afternoon:

 

Joe Blelock's Three Chord Monte has kept going since I came  back from McClure's.

"Road Tripping" received its first rejection:

Thank you for submitting your work to Straylight. Although we enjoyed reading your submission, "Samuel C. Hasler," we're afraid we won't be able to use it in our upcoming issue. Feel free to try us again.

You can find us online at http://straylightmag.com/, or follow us on Twitter @StraylightMag and Facebook as Straylight Literary Arts Magazine.

Sara Guthman
Straylight Literary Magazine
http://straylightmag.com/

And "Colonel Tom" got one more:

 Thank you for sending "Colonel Tom" to the minnesota review. The editors discussed your work with interest but unfortunately, we are not able to accept your submission at this time.
We appreciate the opportunity and hope you will consider sending us more in the future.
Sincerely,
The Editors
the minnesota review

KH and I exchanged some emails today. He thought my stories were not catching on because I was not quirky enough. Well, "Road Tripping" is certainly quirky. There is proof of what? I am still not quirky enough or too quirky?

Reading Subterranean Treasures Cormac McCarthy’s late style by Nicolás Medina Mora in The Nation leaves me wondering what I am doing with my writing and if the fault lies in my lack of thinking big enough or deep enough. Or do I even have a target?

cCarthy’s latest novels, then, are both new and old, high and low, philosophical and plot-driven. His procedures are modern, but his themes—like those of most modernists—are ancient: The concerns of Alicia and Bobby are those of Antigone and Hamlet. The Passenger and Stella Maris thus combine the best aspects of McCarthy’s early and middle work and remake them into a novel synthesis that exceeds the sum of its parts: a late style that doesn’t just elaborate on previous efforts but also casts them in a new light. The philosophical intentions that animate this late-career shift are clear: McCarthy isn’t interested in convincing us of the meaninglessness of existence, but in giving us the tools to create meaning where otherwise there would be none. There’s a reason Western literature returns again and again to the concerns of classical tragedy: The form is curative, or at least palliative. Like the dramas of Euripides and Aeschylus, McCarthy’s account of Western disillusionment possesses a certain therapeutic quality—a sense that if one manages to confront the fear and trembling at the heart of being at once conscious (and thus limitless) and mortal (and thus limited), one might be able to work through the grief and horror and, if not transcend them, at least learn to live with the fact that we will never be at home in the world.

Bruce Krajewski's review from the Los Angeles Review of Books, No Frigate Like a Metaphor: On Hans Blumenberg’s “The Readability of the World” left wondering if there is meaning to be had in this world.

Thus, Blumenberg dishes “disappointment” to his audience. Like Stanley Cavell’s famous statement that our relationship to the world is not one of knowing, Blumenberg wants to focus on the limits of, the longing for, and sometimes the tragedy of comprehension. Our failures to know have produced “historical attitudes ranging from resignation to fury at the world.”

Our push for knowledge causes us to read what is not there. “[W]e see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they certainly are not there. Symmetry is another example, as are silhouettes in inkblots […] all this is not in the things but in us.” Worse is that Blumenberg asserts that the image of reading results in unnecessary distortions of the human condition. He asserts that “the world itself is nothing like a text.” History is on his side: there exists “an ancient enmity between books and reality,” Blumenberg writes. “[T]he book […] remains the figure of a covert longing for a more accessible understanding than that offered by the jargon of theoretical specialization.” In other words, books are an illusory shortcut to encyclopedic comprehension, including encyclopedias, a beloved genre of the Enlightenment also explored in Readability. “Those who ask for more will receive less,” Blumenberg says as a warning, for example, to those who imagine that reading travel books makes one as “worldly” as the traveler who writes about the journey. We need to be on alert when “bookish experience comes to rival worldly experience.” Why? “The whole has a different criterion of reality than its parts,” says Blumenberg, even if many humans behave as though nothing is incapable of being separated into parts.

But screw it, I no longer want to lie down and die. I refuse returning to apathy, nihilism. My health is better than it was in 2009; the Zoloft aids and abets in keeping my depression under control. I will keep on trying to be meaningful, even if it is only to myself.

But as I say that, I must return to Mora and McCarthy:

The formalist in me would be perfectly satisfied with the architectural elegance found in McCarthy’s late style—how its formal containers (i.e., its embrace of confusion and discontinuity) fit perfectly around its content (i.e., the notion that while life is meaningless, it’s also beautiful, and that this beauty is enough to make it meaningful). But the structuralist in me is equally grateful for McCarthy’s lucid confrontation with the decadence of the West, and perhaps even more so for his defiant refusal to surrender to that decline. Because, as it turns out, The Passenger and Stella Maris may not be as apolitical as they seem at first sight. Could it be that literary New York’s fixation on the Ópera Prima is but an outward manifestation of a collective act of repression, a defense mechanism designed to keep the culture of a declining empire from confronting the fact that the United States is not living through a youthful Renaissance in which everything is new, but through the postindustrial equivalent of Late Antiquity? Could it be that McCarthy’s rejection of ordinary coherence is not only a tribute to a soon-to-be-anachronistic modernism but also an injunction to rouse ourselves from our post-historical ennui, our punctilious privilege-accounting, our self-satisfied anxiety, our paralyzing guilt? Could it be that, in old age, McCarthy sees something that in our youthfulness we refuse to see? In Stella Maris and The Passenger, McCarthy invites us to consider hopelessness not just to give us hope but to compel us to make use of it. Having lived for nearly 100 years, he has given us what may well be the last great novels of the long 20th century. He may also help point us in a different direction for the twenty-first.

I will assume McCarthy points the way to meaningfulness - being understood may be eluded and also seems irrelevant to the will to meaningfulness - an assumption acquired by bias of having read Albert Camus' The Rebel - but that passage just quoted leaves terrified that all I am doing is running in a circle of obliviousness. That I might not be seeing and understanding the clues surrounding me. It may well be that I give up my efforts at what I call playing witness to my times and world. We will see, won't we?

Now for something quite different, from Public Orthodoxy comes Carrie Frederick Frost's Let’s Make History: Ordain Deaconesses in the Orthodox Church Today. Reading it, one may learn how to be innovative and traditional at the same time. It is one of the things I find most attractive about Orthodox Christian thinkers. They know the essence of their beliefs and find ways to implement that essence in new places.

Counterpunch's U.S. Decline in Perspective of a Global Democracy by Daniel Warner should be a wider read. What worries me about Mr. Warner's vision is not anarchy, but the preservation of anti-democratic powers.

I need to start dinner, microwaved spaghetti. I will be staying here tonight, so the County of Delaware will be safe. There will be more blogging done tonight and Perry Mason.

sch 6:19 pm