Wiped Out

 It is 7:36 pm, and I have written nothing all day.

All I accomplished was to get my hair cut and get some groceries and take a nap. Too long of the latter.

Catching up on some things, such as Granta' Best of Young British Novelists 5, none of whom i have read.

I just finished reading:

We’ve Been Expecting You: Opening the Door to Inclusivity in James Bond - I have read only two of the non-Fleming Bond books, this makes me curious enough to read this new series. I have not understood why the movie Bonds have not taken to filming the continuation novels.

An Angry Red Review of The Donut Legion by Joe R. Lansdale - I have no excuse for reading more of Lansdale, other than a couple of short stories. I have seen some of his filmed stuff and think he is a hoot. So is this very short story.

Marvelous Mystery and Detective Stories - I think I knew 3 or 4 of the writers, none of the titles, and I feel so out of touch.

Two People Ministering the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from Public Orthodoxy was in this week's email. That right-wingers think the Orthodox Church might provide them a home, thanks to Russia, this may be instructive:

A core dynamic of Jewish-Christian relations in the West is the history of anti-Judaism/antisemitism in the Catholic Church and later among Protestants as well, culminating the Shoah. While Eastern Christianity has its own history of anti-Judaism and relationship to world events that demand fuller study, they are different than those of the West. Jews and Orthodox Christians will need to explore this history together on its own terms and in its own context. There are additional aspects of the Orthodox Christian-Jewish relationship that do not fit the dominant narrative, including both points of contact and difference. For example, Orthodox Christians and Jews in the West constitute distinct minorities; exploring together how each community experiences that is an important component of mutual understanding.

Fortunately, we don’t have to start at square one! In the last few years, several important studies have appeared that delve into the unique nature of Orthodox Christian-Jewish relations. These include, but are certainly not limited to, a conference on Byzantine Liturgy and the Jews held at the Sibiu Centre for Ecumenical Studies in July 2019; a volume of the Review of Ecumenical Studies dedicated to the Jewish-Orthodox Christian relations (Volume 11: Issue 2, August 2019); and a two-volume collection of essays, Elonei Mamre: The Encounter of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity (Fortress Academic, 2022) and Tois Pasin ho Kairos: Judaism and Orthodox Christianity Facing the Future (Fortress Academic, 2023), both edited by Nicholas de Lange, Elena Narinskaya, and Sybil Sheridan. Also worth noting are a section of the Greek Orthodox Church Archdiocese of America’s website “Responding to Anti-Semitism” and a recent webinar hosted by the  Orthodox Theological Society in America, “Anti-Judaism in Orthodox Hymnography: Beginning a Conversation before Holy Week.”

As His All Holiness said when we meet in 2021, “Throughout history, our two communities have shared many commonalities. We are two people who have been steadfast in the face of adversity. We are two people who have resisted oppression. We are two people who are ministering the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We are two people that believe in the intrinsic dignity of the human being, fashioned in the image and likeness of God.” This is the strong foundation on which our revitalized and expanded relationship will be built.

I carried an idea of mine into "The Psychotic ape", that ugliness - the meanness, the vileness, the hateful - opposes life. This is one of the things that fed and caused my depression - it is too hard for me to disentangle causation here. I posit the incapability of dealing with ugliness as the cause of nihilism. Which made it worthwhile reading Ugly Beautiful Finding beauty in bland times from Dirt, that beauty needs ugliness and that beauty is not the pretty:

KK: I am very attached to a certain kind of ugliness. Decay is one. I'm attached to the way things die, the impermanence of things. It's been helpful in times of grief for me. It's just how life unfolds. In order to participate in life on earth, we have to let things age and decay. We have to let things go and allow for the process of recycling to happen. There's an element of ugliness that is oddly comforting. 

I wrote once about the dead animals on my property when I was pregnant. I would keep finding these dead animals my dog would kill. I don't know what happened to them. What's uglier than a corpse of a deer? It made me feel very alive to come across something like that. It made me more appreciative of what was going on in my uterus, and it made me excited about life. It makes beauty more apparent.

There’s moral ugliness, too. I'm a bit of a rubbernecker, and I wish I wasn't so attached to listening to true crime podcasts, for example. It's this hideous thing that we’re so curious about. We feel it might protect us or make us feel more alive. I've been a bit repulsed by my morbid curiosities, but they feel useful. In regards to what we’re consuming: I think sacrifice is necessary and important. You're not supposed to have all the beautiful things in the world.

I think I will do a bit more with System of Pay to Stay Behind Bars elsewhere on here.

CC let me know she is getting two and half years of probation. She acknowledges the county is setting her up to fail. I think it is a safe bet. We are too cool to one another for me to feel much of anything at the news.

Here is clmp's April 2023 Roundup of Member Magazines. Issue 18 of Cagibi is here.

Literary Review published two reviews from its archives:

Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald with its What This Odd Couple Loved About Each Other:

It is, in a sense, a ritual story: about society, fame, rivalry, jealousy, and the war to win in art. Donaldson tells it vividly, as a battle of the giants, and an example of how failure destroys, and success does too. In every way, each man was in the books of the other. Their worlds are eternally intertwined, with all that went into them: jealousy, hardness, moral contrast, a brute competitiveness and a pathos that in the end afflicts and surrounds the careers of both men. As Donaldson says, Hemingway treated Fitzgerald with extraordinary cruelty, and even after his death conducted a campaign against his reputation. He concludes:

What Scott loved about Ernest was the idealised version of the sort of man – courageous, stoic, masterful – he could never be. What Ernest loved about Scott was the vulnerability and charm that his invented persona required him to despise. It made for a poignant story, really; one great writer humiliating himself in pursuit of a companionship that another’s adamantine hardness of heart would not permit.

Yet as a pair, an odd couple, a Gog and Magog, these two writers are still at the heart of twentieth-century American fiction. The Great American Novel of the first half of the century always was a game for the boys. 

Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde with Epic Fairy Tale Told as a Shakespearian Tragedy:

But even more significantly, in an era when much women’s fiction tends to be domestic, psychological, and personal, the epic scope and ambition of this novel demands attention. Oates has been fearless in taking on a subject that crisscrossed almost every important strand of mid-twentieth-century American culture – sports, religion, literature, theatre, politics, and, of course, the Hollywood dream machine. Apart from her, only Don DeLillo, among today’s American novelists, would be able to handle such a huge cast of imagined and real characters, among them Darryl Zanuck, Van Johnson, Richard Widmark, Marlon Brando, John Huston, Joe DiMaggio, Billy Wilder, Tony Curtis, Arthur Miller, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and JFK; or weave in such a complex background of political and historical events. This is truly the Balzacian novel towards which Oates has been striving throughout her career.

Finally, there was All Three Coplands Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man.

Going on 10 pm, I found much of interest in How Christopher Burney Discovered Mindfulness in a Nazi Solitary Confinement Cell:

Many books have been written about the joys of the contemplative life. But I only know of one written by a prisoner in solitary confinement.

Christopher Burney (1917-1980) had it worse than almost any inmate today. Captured by the Nazis in occupied France, and held in Fresnes Prison, he survived on a single daily bowl of watery soup with a little bread—and even that was taken away sometimes in punishment.

His tattered blankets offered little protection against the cold. At one point, guards even removed his thin mattress, forcing him to sleep on the stone floor.

But worst of all, Burney constantly feared torture and execution.

###

But over time, Burney managed to reach some higher realm of contemplation. This is perhaps not surprising—philosophers as great as Socrates and Boethius found inspiration while awaiting execution. What makes Burney’s case so fascinating is that he was not a trained philosopher or scholar of any sort.

Yet he now embarked on detailed meditations on the great problems of human existence. He explored the paradoxes of free will, the nature of individual responsibility, the dualism of soul and body, and other issues that a philosophy grad student might examine. But in Burney’s case, he had no teacher or texts, merely his own intellectual resources and dogged persistence, fueled by the empty hours.

He shares many of his musings in Solitary Confinement. Sometimes the results are impressive. For example, he dug deeply into the nature of evil—something that a prisoner held by Nazis would inevitably think about. This issue has bedeviled the greatest minds since the earliest days of rational speculation, and Burney came up with a theory surprisingly close to what Boethius had concluded in his own prison cell back in 523 A.D.

Just as light possesses power, and darkness is merely its extinction, so too does good contain an active energy that evil can never match. On this basis, Burney abandoned the conventional view that good and evil were polar opposites—instead adopting a scale in which “only positive degrees of good” had meaning and efficacy. This allowed him to accept everything with an embracing mindset of optimism—"the good in life,” he declared, “is no longer overshadowed by its imperfections….The tiniest window bringing light will always dominate the bleak and oppressive walls.”

So, finding freedom in prison is not so strange.

I did get out more job applications. Wendy's did not call "one way or another". Of course, not.

One of the emails had a link to The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs, a story I do not think I have ever read, and still have not.

I actually looked at this yesterday, 6 literary masterpieces that almost never saw the light of day, of which I have read I have read all, but I saved listing it here because I wanted to read a story linked to it, Some Introductory Thoughts on Great Books and America (2011). Some items from the last article that might amuse, shock or upset:

5. These observations may seem condescending (because they are). But they’re not really critical. If you really are performing responsibly the duties given to you by middle-class life, there isn’t that much time to read. (I, for example, have been told, with justice and on behalf of charity, that I think I have more time to read than I really do.)

6. Even the author of the greatest book written on America, Alexis de Tocqueville, didn’t think most Americans should read the great books written by the Greeks and Romans. He even said there’s no higher education in America, because there’s no class of people freed from work for leisurely contemplation.

7. Tocqueville observed democratic middle-class people aren’t proud enough to believe that they’re essentially more than beings who work. So they don’t regard philosophy, science, poetry, and theology as intrinsically pleasurable and choiceworthy pursuits. Science, for example, they think of as useful for making work easier and more productive and for making lives more secure and comfortable.

8. In an obvious way, Tocqueville seems to have been wrong to say there could be no higher education in a middle-class democracy. In A Chronicle of Higher Education, you can read that more young people than ever are in colleges and universities–the education we call higher–today.

Biden is running for President.

Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist 

Ryan Webb's gender claim creates outcry at Delaware County Council meeting

Killer who stabbed man five times following row outside nightclub jailed for nine years 

Cabinet split on proposed changes to abortion law as Greens back reform 

Trump reacts to Biden 2024 announcement with misinformation-filled rant 

 ‘That was one of the things I was going to take out!’: Lucinda Williams on her soul-baring memoir

Muslim minors in US targeted in Islamophobic discrimination  

Inflation easing, but rents, energy prices still rising 

And so, good night.

sch