Ending the Work Week On a Downbeat Note

 Friday has been a day without any great motivation. I got out of work earlier than expected, and it felt like a good thing. I had plenty to keep me busy, and my mind occupied, without ever feeling bright and peppy. I passed on the food stamps office, I just wanted to get home. I had a hope of throwing this sort-of headache I have and it persists. I refuse to nap; neither do I want to take out the bike. It is a beautiful day. I have been here now for three hours, read some of my email, and from that some of my readings follow.

I did separate posts on Arianna Reiche's Blurred Lines: A Reading List of Metafiction from LitHub; Siddhartha Deb's review of three of DeLillo's novels, Secret Histories: Don DeLillo’s Cold War from The Nation; Open Ears: Kelefa Sanneh On What Popular Music Can Teach Us About Each Other by Finn Cohen; The pronoun quandary that keeps filling up my inbox; Michael McGirr's review of Simon Winchester's Knowing What We Know: The Transmission Of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom To Modern Magic, Are we heading for the end of our intelligence? from The Brisbane Times; and Zadie Smith's On Killing Charles Dickens from the New Yorker.

Other items read follow.

Astronomers observe time dilation in early universe 

Here is a very short story that I did like, Doubtful Sound by Eleanor Catton, published by Granta. It seems less like a prose poem, which is what a lot of very short stories seem to me. This is its opening paragraph:

Eight months after my divorce from Dominic, I saw a woman he had led me to believe was dead. Her name was Kayla Kimrey, and she had worked as a cleaner at Dominic’s firm until – so he had told me – she had overdosed on fentanyl sometime towards the end of 2018. I knew nothing else about her life, and if I asked any further questions about the circumstances of her death, then either Dominic didn’t have the answers, or I’ve since forgotten what they were. I am sure I would have said that I was sorry – she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five – and I expect that Dominic probably quoted some statistic off his phone about chemical withdrawal or per-capita prescription volumes or the relative potency of fentanyl to other drugs; nothing about the conversation struck me as peculiar, at any rate, and after it, I scarcely thought of Kayla Kimrey until the day I saw her lining up to board the boat to Doubtful Sound.

And another very short short story that I read this morning, eyes still blurry from sleep, that also grabbed my attention: Only the Moon Comes Back by Elizabeth Erbeznik (from ArtWife).

His name meant “life” but everyone called him Marcel. His smile got into my eyes and I blinked back light when he appeared at my door with gifts that fit in the palm of his hand: a mango, three lychees, a single egg that hurt me, finally, to crack. He made my breath flutter inside my chest like scattered birds, but I left anyway because my future seemed endless and every path open.

The Guardian's The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup.

Anna Sublet's review of Deborah Levy's new novel, August Blue, Seeing double? Here’s a quiet novel with a raging undercurrent, in The Brisbane Times. I have read one of Levy's short stories, and am very intrigued by what I read of her novels.

Something I think needs to go into my "Road Tripping" I found in Lithub's Ali Bryan on Finding Community, Authenticity, and Acceptance in a Small Town:

Soon, I made friends. It would be too late to become one of the popular girls, but standing out as the only visible skater girl and not feeling like I had to change anything about who I was, was also exactly how I fit in.  When there’s no place to hide, you be yourself. I had friends whose parents were academics. I had friends whose parents never finished high school. I had friends who smoked, friends who snowboarded, friends who drove around in trucks with flame decals and blasted I Like To Move It at 3 a.m. I joined the local air cadet squadron. I played on the school soccer team. I hitchhiked and hung out under covered bridges. I had friends who were hungry, and friends who had everything. They were all real and I loved them equally.

I read part of Technology, Attention, and the Extremely Long Paragraph, thinking it might illuminate a discussion I have a had with KH about attention spans and writing and publishing. I need to go back to it.

Break time: 6:30

Well, not much to say 3 hours later.

I did some more reading: 

Prigozhin’s Putsch Propped up Putin  - from The Bulwark, may deflate some of those who thought Putin would soon be gone.

With Affirmative Action Gone, We Should Focus Admissions Policies on Poverty, which is the second time I read something along these lines. I cannot find the other; the memory is going. Anyway, I suggest the article, especially if this point hits you between the eyes.

What’s true in housing values tends to be true in other areas of concern. In a recent book, Carol Graham of the University of Maryland and Brookings Institution finds that non-college-educated whites display higher levels of distress and hopelessness than black and Hispanic Americans, and appear to be substantially less likely as individuals, families, and communities to make the investments in education and training that would allow them to advance socially and economically. If the key factors driving poverty are unrelated to race, then it would make sense to move away from approaches to poverty that focus on rooting out systemic racism (which, I hasten to add, is a real problem) and toward systemic disadvantage that looks for the causes of persistent poverty wherever it occurs. In addition to helping us see the causes and effects of poverty more clearly and design better remedial policies, deracializing poverty would also very likely have the benefit of broadening the base of public support for programs that improve access to opportunity for all disadvantaged people.

Then I was on a phone call and then back here trying to find an old friend. 

I closed out the night checking out the blog Janet Reid, Literary Agent for advice on query letters. I made some changes to the one I started. 

I redesigned the blog. I liked the old design because it let everyone see what all was on the site. That is the posts, the side menus were a little too obscure. Now that I have started the email subscription service made that obscurity a problem. 

I am going to be a bit harsh here, if you were getting emails from notifying you of updates, these emails will end. I assume anyone who doesn't want to subscribe to the weekly newsletter, does not want any emails updates. That means I have been imposing on you, I apologize for this.

Then I decided to check out Google News. That crashed Firefox, and I decided it was time to call it a day.

Saturday morning has been a slow crawl. I did not want to get out of bed, and so I did not until 40 minutes after the alarm first went off. It is gray, overcast, drizzly outside. Still, I walked down to McClure for caffeine and nicotine.

I knocked off what is new on the email. What I have found: a site for Irish obituaries; that Todd Rokita continues to shoot off his mouth, Indiana AG Todd Rokita calls out Target over LGBTQ+ support. We fact-check his claims. (more on this later); and Untold Dylan published A Dylan cover a Day: Shelter from the Storm

Now, it is time to work on my query letter and get this on the blog.

I talked my sister into coming down for the farmer's market. I think some grocery shopping needs to be done. I want to buy a crock pot.

After that, I will put time in on the pretrial detention journal with the hope of getting back on track with that in the coming weeks. I need to get paper moved. It also has the benefit of giving my brain a rest - I just need to type and not get too upset at my prose.

My first newsletter goes out today.

sch 8:06 AM