The Deluge Is Upon Us

 I woke around 3 AM to a thunderstorm and a heavy rain. It was still raining hard when I woke again around 8. It is 9:25 and it has stopped.

Here is the hard way to find new writers: their obituaries. 

Carl MacDougall obituary  

Following the publication of his first novel, Stone Over Water, in 1989, Carl MacDougall, who has died aged 81, said he did not know why it had taken him so long to produce his first full work of fiction. He had hardly been inactive up to that point, having published a retelling of Scottish folk tales, A Cuckoo’s Nest (1974), and two collections of short stories, A Scent of Water (1975) and Elvis Is Dead (1986), but while these were much admired, it was the novel that signalled the arrival of a major figure in Scottish letters

I do not know what Joe Biden needs to do - Biden faces broad negative ratings at start of campaign, Post-ABC poll finds - since I am just a moron living out in the sticks who shoots his mouth off - but for all his stammer, he can actually form coherent sentences while Trump speaks like a small child, depending on repetition of vapid phrases. I suspect Russia and China have a different view of Biden's mental acuity.

I chose The Work We Can Do Only As We Age: A Conversation with Priscilla Long in the hope of finding reinforcement for my own late-in-the-day decision to return to writing. It also has a tie to the story above about Biden.

Rumpus: The case studies on aging were really effective. It feels like many of the conventional cultural opinions around aging are confining, and wrong, and the stories of people aging with artistry, productivity, resources, intelligence, discipline—they permeate this book. Two of my favorite examples are President Jimmy Carter and Twyla Tharp, and I wonder if you can speak about what moved you about the lives you learned about and their thoughts and practices on aging?

Long: I consider the one hundred or so aged creators (and other active elders) that I put in my book to be my mentors. I want to be like painter Wayne Thiebaud when I grow up, who started a new body of work (the clowns) at age ninety-eight. I want to be like Faith Ringgold, painter and fabric artist who in her early nineties recently created a New Yorker cover. I want to be like Sarah Yerkes, who published her first book of poems after the age of one hundred. The dancer Twyla Tharp is my hero, absolutely. So is Jimmy Carter, who built furniture, wrote, and painted, as well as doing his better-known peacemaking work. And even though I’m not at all athletic, I can use Don Pellman as a model (he broke world records in sprinting and disc throwing  after age one hundred). Why? Because when he reached the age of one hundred, he did not say, okay, well, now I am one hundred, so I can’t run any more. He trained. He followed his dreams. And he achieved some of his goals. I am now eighty years old. My dream is to write ten more books.

It is important to note that a number of these world-class creators are or were disabled. We probably know about the painter Matisse, who began his famous cut-out series from a wheelchair. Alma Thomas, the Washington DC painter (she died in 1978) has had two big retrospective exhibitions in the past couple of years. She was trained in art and then taught art to children for several decades. When she turned back to her own work in her seventies she was severely afflicted with arthritis. She found ways around it and her brilliantly colored abstractions became internationally known.

Also, many of these creators started quite late in life.

Prizes are another way of finding new writers.

I did not know there was a Carol Shields Prize, but it exists: Congratulations to the winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, Fatimah Asghar for When We Were Sisters. I read Shields' The Stone Diaries while in prison. Well, worth finding (I think I saw a copy during my trek yesterday to the bookstore). Shields had an Indiana connection - she studied at Hanover College, and she sets part of her novel in Bloomington.

Australia's The Age has a prize and ‘He has produced a gem’: An ode to humble Australians wins The Age Book of the Year is about this year's winner.

The Literary Saloon keeps track of many, many prizes. That site also maintains a site for reviews, which can be a deep dive, check out the complete review.

I have to admit I read half of The Socialist Calculation Debate and skimmed the remainder, which is no indicator of the article's quality or value, but of my need to get at work. I keep promising myself to read up on irrational economics, it seems to me more descriptive of human behavior, and this article reminds me of this fact. The argument for economics has always been rationality; the same applies to the law. Yet, as a lawyer, the behavior I saw was a far crime from the reasonable man. 

For various reasons, scholars continue to return to the debate, which is now more relevant than ever. Some tinker at the margins, citing overlooked figures and dusty old papers that add fresh texture to the subject. Others consider this controversy as a source of inspiration. Still others fundamentally contest the legacy of the debate and continue to assess its enduring consequences. The political economist Isabella M. Weber has documented how the Austrian School—in particular, Mises’ ideas—influenced China’s “economic miracle.” The historian John O’Neill has applied Neurath’s ideas about “calculation in kind” in the context of ecological economics. Futurist Brett King and academic Richard Petty have exhumed the debate in defense of “technosocialism,” or the belief that effective central planning is increasingly possible given advances in digital technologies. The intellectual historian Tiago Camarinha Lopes has stressed that the debate always reflected a conscious effort on behalf of “capital-allied” champions of capitalism to “discredit” and “disable the rise of communism.” In this view, the debate “constitutes one of the most controversial and long-lasting episodes of class struggle within economic theory.”

Whether one puts great stock in the notion of class consciousness or not, the central lesson of the calculation debate is this: economics is a continuation of politics by other means. Even if Mises and Hayek insisted on the technical nature of their inquest, their position was deeply partisan. This goes for the socialists involved as well, who insisted with equal conviction on the impeccable rationality of their designs. At issue was never simply a disinterested dispute about the nature of rationality or the logic of computation. All participants in the debate maintained spoken and unspoken ideological commitments—to the metaphysical myth of spontaneous order or the Romantic anti-capitalist prophesy of proletarian revolution, and so on. It follows that anyone currently litigating the debate today is guilty of the same, whether they espouse the virtues of the libertarian minimal state or hope to hasten the dawn of “fully automated luxury communism.” Thus, for all its appearance as an academic diversion, the calculation debate had far-reaching consequences. We live and breathe each of them every single day.

 So, I close out here at 10:27, the sun is now shining.

 Please, folks, my Masque of the Red Death: The Play is up on Amazon (just follow that link), and my bank account really would like you to buy a copy.

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