Wishing I Had Something Good to Say

 Friday, I spent inside except for a trip to McClure's. It was rainy and cold, and I had no desire to be in it any more than the walk to and from the convenience store.

 Well, there is no telling with politics, maybe even more local politics: 'Blindsided': Democrat kills Delaware County vote centers at plan's final vote.

I wonder if any of those claiming there was 1) a raid on Trump's Mar-A-Lago residence, and 2) it was part of some conspiracy, will read The Washington Post's Showdown before the raid: FBI agents and prosecutors argued over Trump. I doubt anyone reading this thinks this way, but just in case:

Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.

 The Guardian's ‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’ left me surprised and with a bit of yep, that's to be expected:

Gen Z workers tend to be well equipped to edit photos and videos all from their phones, or use website builders like Squarespace and Wix. They grew up using apps to get work done and are used to the ease that comes with Apple operating systems. Their formative tech years were spent using software that exists to be user-friendly.

But desktop computing is decidedly less intuitive. Things like files, folders, scanning, printing, and using external hardware are hallmarks of office life. Do they know what button to press to turn on a bulky computer monitor, when many simply close their personal laptops when they’re done with them? (No, says one Reddit user who works in IT and has resorted to putting a sign over the power button on work computers.)

Steve Bench runs workshops on generational differences in the corporate world. “I joke in my sessions that my Gen Z intern didn’t know how to mail a letter,” he said. “They asked me where the sticker went. I said, ‘Do you mean the stamp?’”

Having no transportation to Indianapolis, I will need to miss IRT's Oedipus Rex, but Nuvo has a review, Experiencing Oedipus Rex. 

I thought to work this up to a separate post, but I will leave you to read Liberal Patriot's "Words Are The Only Victors":

Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City, stands as a testament to its author’s undiminished faith in the power of storytelling to shape individual human lives and societies alike. It’s a kaleidoscopic magical realist fable that’s a pleasure to read, an epic yet brisk tale that holds myriad potential meanings in its passages. An omniscient narrator, “neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns,” relates the rise and fall of a medieval Indian empire as written in verse by an ageless woman inhabited by the local incarnation of a Hindu goddess—albeit “in plainer language” than the original Sanskrit.

At heart, Victory City is a meditation on the broader spiritual and philosophical struggles between fanaticism and freedom, intolerance and liberality that take place in every human society—and how the stories societies tell themselves help define who and what they are. These stories and struggles don’t always have happy endings; successes are always impermanent, always under threat from the forces of reaction and their own inexorable entropy. As Rushdie has an itinerant Portuguese traveler put it midway through the novel, “the truth about these so-called golden ages is that they never last very long. A few years, maybe. There’s always trouble ahead.”

 I have not read Colm Tóibín's novels, but I have read of him, and I fell under the spell of Thomas Mann while in prison. I thought there would be more of the lecture in Tóibín Explores Using Emotional Truths Versus Facts in History Writing at Lowell Lecture. Instead, there was some interesting points including:

Tóibin said the intersection of fiction and reality preoccupies him. 

“[I’m] not just retelling the story [Mann] told… [but] attempting to make him a character in fiction,” Tóibín said. 

Tóibín said he had been fascinated with Mann for many years to the point that he made a visit to Mann’s former California home for inspiration. He described Mann as a “great writer of the eccentric soul” and spoke on what Mann’s homosexuality meant to him. Tóibín, just like Mann, is gay and said he understands the feeling of being closeted.

I skimmed March’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books from LitHub; much of that was interesting, and would be more interesting if I had more time at hand.

Webb Wilder tempted me yesterday, I spent a lot of time with him:

I even went to sleep early. After doing my taxes, I had no great desire to do much more. 

In the morning, I tracked down some lawyers for CC to pursue her SSI case.+

I worked on “Road Tripping” and went through 3–4 pages before calling it a night.

I set the alarm for 5 am. I woke up at 4, 5, 6, and 7. Firefox crashed on me twice. I went to McClure's for another 2 liter of Coke. Firefox crashed again after I got back. I am beginning to think it has to do with the Wi-Fi—I had no problems with the computer last night, only with my energy.

Here I am. with about an hour to do anything with “Road Tripping” and get ready for work.

Maybe I will show more ambition tonight.

Sch 9:22