A Lost Weekend?

 Where did the weekend go?

What I remember of Saturday.

Yesterday, when I called Kh, I told him I had no idea where ther time had gone. Yes, I had been to Payless, getting what else I needed for my pork and beans. Yes, I walked down to The Attic Window where I bought a skillet and two bowls and some CDs. Did I go to McClure's for smokes? Maybe.

I had a time with the crock pot. First, I left in the morning for Payless thinking it was on. I got back to find out I had forgotten to plug the thing in. Then I had it on high and not on low as I meant. Yes, I ate a bit later than expected, and I had way more beans than I expected. The pork jowl was a great addition. I called CC and asked if she needed to eat. Of course, she made no appearance. Her life is constant turmoil.

I got a post or two done from my pretrial detention journal. Notes from reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. They will start running tomorrow.

The weekly newsletter went out. Still only two subscribers.

I trimmed down the email.

I continue reading up on Kit Marlowe.

Which is all I recall of Saturday.

Saturday's reading, and some comments:

Extension granted in lawsuit challenging local government for failure to redistrict by deadline

 The Anderson City Council has been given more time to respond to a lawsuit filed against them for failing to draw new redistricting maps before the 2022 deadline. The council now has until Aug. 8 to respond to the lawsuit alleging its failure to redistrict is a violation of state and federal law.

The city council met in executive session last week, but had not yet decided which attorney would represent them.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday by the League of Women Voters of Indiana, Common Cause Indiana, Anderson-Madison County NAACP and two individual voters.

These organizations have expressed concerns about the equity of voters under current Anderson district lines.

This makes no sense. It seems to me that the very people the Democrat Party depends upon are complaining about representation, and the Democrats control city government.

 Getting Away with Murder: The Millions Interviews Ursula K. Le Guin - back in the day, I passed on reading Le Guin, then I read more about her while in prison, and then I did read her and was bowled over. I suggest you read her, start with this interview. I think this captures what I like about the interview and about her:

TM: I know you’ve written that science-fiction writers are not prophets. But is there any thing that has happened in your society during your writing life that has happily surprised you?

UKLG: Hmm…That’s not particularly a question to me as a writer, is it? Just to me as an American.

TM: Yes. Just curious.

UKLG: Well, pure happiness is such an endangered thing. This may sound sort of trivial, but I took geology in college, one semester. And I liked it but I couldn’t stick with it. I didn’t want to be a scientist anyway. But when they began figuring out plate tectonics, when they began figuring out how the Earth is put together, why we have mountain ranges, why continents drift and so on…That was an intellectual revolution that I lived through week by week as it developed. And it was wonderful. It was so terrific to realize that geology of all the stable solid sciences was just coming to pieces at the seams and discovering the world all over again and finally getting its feet right on the real world instead of on a lot of theory. That was so cool. I think science – not technology — science is one of the best things we do. And then there are artists who have come along in my lifetime, like Saramago, [who I wouldn’t have discovered] if they hadn’t Nobel-ed him. “Wow! There’s a man like that, writing like that, in his 80s.” I don’t know if things are better or worse. It’s always the best of times and the worst of times, isn’t it? But I’ve been glad to be alive while things like plate tectonics and Saramago were going on.

Ann Patchett is a writer I have read about and not read, but after this profile in The Guardian, ‘In a world that is going to hell, there is still so much joy’: Ann Patchett on finding happiness, I may track down one of her books:

 With her focus on love and marriage, and some sort of redemption however serious the subject matter, she is at odds in today’s climate of angsty millennial fiction. “I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain,” she admits cheerfully. “So, people give me grief about being too hopeful or too cheerful or too interested in family – it doesn’t matter. I’m not writing all the novels. I’m not the novelist for the age. You want horror, you can get horror. You want dystopia, you can get dystopia. You want disaffected ennui and depression, you got that covered.”

Her retort to those who complain that her fiction is “naive” or even Pollyanna-ish is: “How many serial killers do you know?” She likes to write about the people around her. “If you are writing about mobsters and murderers and psychopaths, then people say: ‘Oh, you’re telling the real story.’ And I think: ‘No, you’re not. Because you don’t know those people.’”

In case anyone wonders why the screenwriters and actors have gone on strike, Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking from The LA Times might give you a clue:

But it’s not, ultimately, technology that’s at the root of the problem. It’s that the studio executives both new and old have embraced the powerful — and ultimately disastrous — magical thinking pumped out by Silicon Valley for the last 10 years.

Studio heads are touting the disruptive properties of digital streaming, the transformative power of AI, a brave, unpredictable new world for entertainment writ large — and how writers and actors must adapt to this new future. But just as it did when it was issuing from the tech sector during the 2010s, this talk too often amounts to a smokescreen that lets executives and investors line their pockets and risks leaving workers holding the bag.

***

First, we need to understand why the 2010s may well come to be remembered as the great decade of magical thinking for Silicon Valley. Drunk on a truly transformational first decade of the 21st century — one that saw Google, Amazon, the iPhone and social media storm the world stage — flush tech investors turned their sights toward the next generation of startups, eager to see them do the same.

The formula for seeking out that next multibillion-dollar “unicorn,” in hindsight, was pretty simple: The next wave of startups had to promise that it would disrupt a stale industry with a newer, high-tech, app-driven alternative, promise the potential for vast scale and promise that it could do so fast. So we saw the rise of Uber and Lyft, each of which vowed to revolutionize transit, and we got the likes of WeWork, which set out to usher in the future of co-working, and Theranos, which would do the same for at-home blood testing.

***

As with the biggest companies of Silicon Valley’s magical thinking era, it’s often hard to parse whether the ones touting the game-changing technologies themselves even believe in these visions — do studio execs really think consumers want to watch a parade of digital replicas of their favorite actors parroting lines from an AI-generated script? Or are they simply aware that the mere threat of such a future gives them leverage and power over the workers of today?

In the end, the answer is immaterial. Silicon Valley’s invasion of Hollywood brought with it science fictional notions of growth for the industry, a penchant for secrecy and unaccountability and the expectation that it could get away with treating workers like robots or invisible code. We’re seeing what happens when those notions meet, for one of the first times, with a powerful, organized resistance.

  Think about it. 

From Public Orthodoxy: The Conspiratorial Cleric

Indiana should do as Illinois - ban book banning. How To Own A News Cycle: Book Censorship News, July 21, 2023:

Perhaps the part of this that is most enraging though is that even when the story is deemed patently false, these outlets keep their names and reputations growing. First, through infiltration like above. Then through stories like this very one and the one linked above at the Poynter Institute: debunking the stories continues to raise their profiles, and yet, debunking is a necessity in a world of mis/dis/mal information perpetuated and circulated by these very outlets.

What I did today:

Up at 6 am, since I slept in until 7 on Saturday.

I started as I usually do with email and then started on my pretrial detention journal. I have posts on that subject extending to Sunday.

Nothing submitted, I put that off until Wednesday. However, I did convert Masque of the Red Death: The Play into a paperback for Amazon. I will know around Wednesday if it is acceptable.

I heated up my pork and beans. No one to help me get them all eaten. Idea for the next time: do not use the whole bag of beans.

I talked to my sister and to K. 

Now, I close out this post, which I have been adding to all day.

 Now for Sunday's Readings:

11 Words for Miserly People - this is one is a bit of fun from Merriam-Webster.

Booker winner Hilary Mantel on dealing with history in fiction  - would I had been a historian.... Anyway, my fiction is interested in history. I think we are our own and the wider world's history. Mantel was a great writer, read her Thomas Cromwell novels after you read this:

What underlies the objection, I think, is not just misunderstanding of history itself, but contempt for its uses. It is true that in the days when statesmen and generals learned history (probably tables of kings and queens by rote) they were not conspicuously good at avoiding the errors of their predecessors; each turn of events seemed to strike them with the force of novelty and, startled, they would proceed to cock it up all over again. Henry Ford's contention that "history is more or less bunk" is perhaps not as crass a statement as it is often taken to be, because a good deal of what we think we know about the past is unverified tradition and unexamined prejudice. Tables of kings and queens, though not very useful, are at least verifiable, but no one learns that kind of history any more, and much of what we retain about the past is a collection of factoids, received opinions and accumulated moral judgments. This argues for better history, rather than less history. To try to engage with the present without engaging with the past is to live like a dog or cat rather than a human being; it is to bob along on the waters of egotism, solipsism and ignorance.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey. Immersion in history doesn't make you backward-looking; it makes you want to run like hell towards the future.

Long, long ago, I decided knowing history lets you know when some politician is bullshitting you. I notice this when I talk politics with acquaintances and family who do not know their history. 

What's a Competitive Works Clause? A Nuts and Bolts Post is for the writers or lawyers or the writer/lawyers reading this blog. It is from the Agents and Books on Substack.

How to utilize feedback to improve your manuscript - more on this later.

Special Ops: Lioness review – like a female Mission Impossible - saw the ad, had to read the review, wish I had Paramount+.

How to Publish a Book on Amazon in 6 Simple Steps.

 How to utilize feedback to improve your manuscript, and How to Use Misdirection in Your Story for Greater Impact, I think deserve their own post.

Blowback review: Miles Taylor on the dangers of a second Trump term 

 Even after the scores of Trump books which have assaulted our bookshelves, Taylor still manages to reveal a few fresh moments of astonishing evil or narrow escapes from Armageddon. These include Trump’s musings to his then chief of staff, John Kelly, “that he badly wanted to strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon”; the president talking about his daughter Ivanka’s “breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her”; Steven Miller’s eagerness to eliminate the judiciary (“Yes sir, a country without judges would help”); and Miller’s equal affection for genocide, revealed when he interrogated the commandant of the US coast guard about why he couldn’t use a drone with a missile to “obliterate” a “boat full of immigrants” in “international waters”. International law would be a problem, the commandant explained.

The substantive part of Taylor’s book is devoted to waking up Americans to the very real dangers of a second Trump presidency, including plans to “manipulate the justice system to cover up corruption, punish political enemies and reshape US courts”.

Trump wants to be a dictator. He says everything but the d-word itself. So I have these questions:

1. Do you really want to vote for someone who wants to overthrow American democracy?
2. Do you not understand he wants to be a dictator?
3. Is it that you do not believe he wants to be a dictator?
4. If #3 is yes, then why do you want to vote for someone whose words you do not believe?
5. If you want a dictator, how do you think this will improve your life?

Paris Review opened to the public a Clarice Lispector story, which I read, and was very much impressed. That story is One Hundred Years of Forgiveness, and this is a paragraph:

No one ever knew this. I don’t regret it: a thief of roses and pitangas has one hundred years of forgiveness. The pitangas, for example, asked to be picked, instead of ripening and dying, virgins, on the branch.

 Having seen the name Lispector and having finally read one of her stories, I thought it was time to find out more about her. Which led me to Slate's The Unusual Mind of Clarice Lispector: The Brazilian writer’s Complete Stories reveals she was a genius on the level of Nabokov. Seeing the reviewer was Jeff VanderMeer (if you think you have seen all that science fiction can do, I recommend his Borne.), I read the review, and here are some snippets for you:

The Complete Stories also reveals Lispector’s questing, ever-roving engagement with language, her lifelong task of making words do things other than originally intended. “The cruelty of the world was tranquil. The murder was deep. And death was not what we thought,” Lispector writes in “Love.” These are not common juxtapositions, but sentences that require the reader to splice in what’s left out or to make uncomfortable leaps. They are also the hallmarks of an unusual, creative mind.

***

In these stories and in her later, more mature work, the effortless way in which Lispector enters the private lives of her characters creates a sense of intimacy with the reader. But the other key element is the sober focus brought by the acute intelligence of her characters. Even the drunkest or least fortunate of her protagonists are sharp, questing people who have interesting views of the world.

This quality manifests itself, at times, in a sense that the author herself feels trapped by words, frustrated by them. Take, for example, the woman getting drunk by herself in “Daydreams and Drunkenness of a Young Lady.” “Her snow-white flesh was sweet as a lobster’s,” Lispector writes, followed by a destabilizing clang: “the legs of a live lobster wriggling slowly in the air.” And then, Lispector twists once again, refusing to sit still: “And that urge to feel wicked so as to deepen the sweetness into awfulness.”

***

Reading these stories, I had the same feeling I had when I first read the collected stories of Angela Carter and of Vladimir Nabokov: that something lives beyond the skin and in the skin, and you welcome the invasion, you begin to long for it every time you’re away from the book. You read slow, you read fast, you hold stories back and then devour them, you dread that moment when you’ve finished the last of them. Because the strangeness is familiar and yet different than you’ve ever encountered before. Because life seems more vital, almost hyperreal, after reading Lispector, and it is harder to ignore the hidden life surging all around you, in all its many forms.

 2022 Page One Prize Winners from Gutsy Great Novelists are worth looking at. I have to consider my own work. The number one winner is like my own stuff more than the others, but I find it quite good.

 Good advice:

Now, I need to get back to Marlow and ready myself for work tomorrow. 

Tomorrow, perhaps a church service; perhaps, I can get started on my grant letter. No writing until I get to Tuesday.

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