If You Know What I Mean - Thursday and Part of Friday

I woke up with the left arm throbbing, again. At 9:45, I went off to Central Indiana Orthopedic. Then sent me to Well Now, who wanted me to make an appointment with Central Indiana Orthopedic, the preliminary diagnosis is tendonitis. I left Well Now with a splint and instructions: ice, ibuprofen, rest and exercise. I have done all but the exercises. I called off work today. As I told Kh, after leaving the clinic, for the first time in my life I feel I cannot physically do something I ought be able to do.

I did make the interview at one. Losing wages and hours does not sit well with me. I still like my money much too much. Thing is I cannot wreck myself with repetitive motion.

I have been doing the ice and the splint. I hurt less. No longer getting bowled over with the throbbing.

KH says these posts sound like I am falling apart. Maybe I am, but I want to make the record that I am persisting and I am not succumbing to depression. Not quite like it was when it was colitis and my insides were bleeding, or when I kept having staph infections that kept debilitating me.

Around 6, I decided I could get at my email. Here are the results.

From LitHub:

    “It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas … Portis’s other novels weren’t exactly Westerns—more like Southwesterns, Headed Easterns, and Getting Losterns—but they are all populated by equally memorable figures…It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too. Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country … ‘Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,’ he once explained. That’s true, yet Portis was selling himself short. Although his novels have the fun of farce, part of what’s so charming about them is their relentless plausibility….Even the most outlandish of Portis plots are populated by the kind of Everymen found in almost every Zip Code in this country: barmaids, shopkeeps, shade-tree mechanics, high-and-dry hippies, would-be writers, secretaries, veterans, junkyard scrappers. They are themselves a kind of Library of Americans, and Portis is excellent not only on their day jobs but also on their daydreams and stray thoughts and endogenous knowledge of the world…The descendants of circuit riders and frontier evangelists, they are trying to make sense of the moral universe they’ve inherited and the modern world they’re making as the gravitational pull of grander virtues weakens … Portis’s plots hark back to those moral pilgrimages of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Bunyan. But the stakes in his work are never quite salvation or damnation—there’s nowhere as high as Heaven or as low as Hell. Instead, his pilgrims traverse the eschatological latitudes in between, relying for guidance on the modern scriptures of advertising, legal writs, and road signs … In a Portis novel, when you ride off into the sunset you have to make camp in the dark.”

–Casey Cep on Charles Portis’s Collected Works (The New Yorker)

How a Young Sam Shepard Vowed to Never Become His Father 

Haruki Murakami's new novel hits bookstores in Japan, 1st in 6 yrs - shows the virtue of revision and persistence:

        A similarly titled novella -- "The City, and Its Uncertain Walls" -- was released in a literary magazine in 1980. As it was labeled a failure by Murakami, it did not get novelized.

    "I had published the story in a half-baked state (in a literary magazine), and regretted it very much. I always wanted to give it a proper form," the 74-year-old said in a recent interview.

    The new book is a full-length novel broken into three parts. The first part, told in the first person, reworks the 1980 novella, with the narrator entering a city with high walls where his adolescent crush had told him her true self resides.

    In the second part, the protagonist returns to the real world and becomes the director of a small town library in Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan, where he has a mysterious experience.

    A narrative structure that toggles between one world and another is characteristic of Murakami's stories.

22 (More) Adaptations Better Than the Books They’re Based On 

WHEN LITERARY LEGENDS MEET

 

From Public Orthodoxy OF CAMELS AND GNATS by Fr. Bohdan Hladio. More on the Orthodox Christian problems in Ukraine.

 

4/13 9:39 pm 

And for some reason, like maybe my mind blanked out, the foregoing did not go up last night. Instead, I find it almost 24 hours later sitting under drafts.

 

This morning I submitted some stories and found a possible gig.

I left around noon for Hitachi. After stopping at McClure's, I rode the bus over to the factory, feeling bad about having to tell someone I could not do the job. That is a first for me. I had the splint on most of the morning and when I left.  I think this thing is a bigger problem than I thought. There is no sense in trying to do what I cannot do well. I also have an interview tomorrow with a gardening company.

 

Except no one was there. I called in, per instructions. Quitting via voicemail felt cheap and a cheat. I will need to go back Monday.

 

I stopped at Aldi's, but the checkout line was too slow, and I meant to catch the bus downtown. I ditched all the groceries, only to miss the bus. I walked over to Asian Kitchen and had lunch. Looking at the clock, I decided I could walk back quicker than taking the buses. Which let me find the place for tomorrow morning's interview.

 

Back here around 2, rent paid, I checked the email and did a little reading, Then around 3, I stopped to ice down the arm. Back around 4.

I need to see about fishing this year: Stillwater Fly Tying Strategy.

Going to do a separate post on Joseph M. Keegin's A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived, published by Psyche.

Hypertext Magazine got "The Local Boy Who Made Good", The Baltimore Review was sent "Aftermath", and "Colonel Tom" padded his way to Arboreal Literary Magazine.

More to come.

sch 5:21 pm