This is the news that jumped out off The Guardian's headlines this morning around 5:30 AM:
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being author dies aged 94:
Czech writer Milan Kundera, who explored being and betrayal over half a century in poems, plays, essays and novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94 after a prolonged illness, Anna Mrazova, spokesperson for the Milan Kundera Library, has confirmed.
Famously leaving his homeland for France in 1975 after earlier being expelled from the Czechoslovakian Communist party for “anti-communist activities”, Kundera spent 40 years living in exile in Paris after his Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979. There he wrote his most famous works, including Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and later left behind his mother tongue to write novels in French, beginning with 1995’s La Lenteur (Slowness) and his final novel, 2014’s The Festival of Insignificance. He was often cited as a contender for the Nobel prize in literature.
“Like all great writers, Milan Kundera leaves indelible marks on his readers’ imaginations,” Salman Rushdie told the Guardian. “‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Ever since I read this sentence in his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, it has remained with me, and illuminated my understanding of events all over the world.
“Later, a second idea of his, that the novel descended from two parents, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, gave me a valuable way to think about my own literary parentage – definitely on the Shandean side of the family tree,” the novelist added. “A third concept, that of the ‘lightness of being’, warned us that life allows us no revisions or second drafts, and this could be ‘unbearable’, but it could also be liberating.”
For more, go here.
Went to work. I almost dozed off on the bus. Went to the sheriff's. I got home around 4:15. I ate dinner. Then I meant to take a shower. No Water burst forth. Maintenance came around and let us know there will be no hot water until tomorrow. No bike riding.
So, I dove into my email.
Leslie Van Houten, Follower Of Cult Leader Charles Manson, Released From Prison (I guess with Charlie dead, the world is safe from his women)
Inside The Hunter Biden Doom Loop (I do not get the excitement over this. Trump's DOJ did not investigate? Then it did not do its job - do the Republicans not see this? Or is that Trump's DOJ did investigate and missed evidence? Then it means Trump's DOJ was incompetent.)
Giuliani’s comments reveal something the GOP is trying to keep hidden and something the average voter ― confused by an array of unfamiliar names, obscure officials and incremental advancements ― might miss: The bribery allegation against Biden that Republicans are now investigating is essentially the same thing President Donald Trump pushed against the Democrat four years ago, leading to Trump’s first impeachment.
“I spent over a year and a half in Ukraine trying to get this information on behalf of Trump, and we could never get it because it was obviously not true,” Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American former business associate of Giuliani’s, told HuffPost.
***
(Republicans choose to ignore the fact that Trump gave his daughter and son-in-law White House posts, pardoned political allies and never divested from his business, which received millions in payments from foreign sources during his time in office.)
Indiana Vehicle Fuel Dashboard:
The Indiana Vehicle Fuel Dashboard is designed to provide public information about the types of vehicle fuels in the state and how it trends over time. The dashboard allows users to explore Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) registration data from January 2018 to present. Use the dashboard to explore vehicle registration counts for the entire state and filter the data by your specific interest: by county, year, fuel type, vehicle type, and/or weight category (for applicable vehicle types).
If you are looking for station locations for your alternative-fueled vehicle, visit the Alternative Fueling Station Locator.
Ted Gioia's Here's My Mission Impossible Article—But I Refuse to Talk About the Movie. (No, he talks about the theme - kind of cool, if you are a music fan.)
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead review – a dazzling sequel to Harlem Shuffle:
Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realised sequence that began with Harlem Shuffle, intricately depicting cultural history and family drama with the compelling energy of a crime thriller and the sharp wit of social satire. Harlem itself is one of the lead characters, and there are echoes of other chroniclers of this burg such as James Baldwin and Chester Himes. In ambition and scope, in the way the intimate is so deftly weaved with the epic, one is also reminded of Balzac. Whitehead has embarked on a great comédie humaine of his own.
How one of Canada’s ‘oldest unsolved and most unique’ cases was cracked (I'm a fool for many things, including cold cases getting solved.)
(Indy) Summer Art Adventures - when I miss having a car.
Bowie Haunts Himself, a review of Bowie's Scary Monsters by Guy Mankowski.
Vividly set in the social context of the day, in a world overshadowed by the scary monsters of Reagan and Thatcher, Steiner shows an unusual ability to capture not just the geist of that era, but also its quiddity in its very lack of cohesion. The Reagan / Thatcher saturated West was a place burdened by the longing to continue communities in which people had found an identity, whilst the outriders of globalisation dismantled those ramparts. Capturing these undercurrents (a present haunted by its past, being dismantled by expectations for the future) requires a writer with a novelistic taste for abstraction. Someone who will pull out the fragments and displaced emotions within the shards of Bowie’s reflected experience. Will the fragments of prose Steiner inserts between song analyses be for everyone? Well, form certainly reflects content. Indisputably, Steiner captures the resultant album’s frantic, layered, teeming quality in a lavish writing style.
He captures too the fragmentation not just of this era but of Bowie. An artist who in constantly ‘ripping it up to start again’ became more a site of multiple identity haunting, a walking palimpsest; a puppet who’d learned to be his own puppet master. A man ‘making transgression his safeguard against forced normality’, terrified by a domesticity that was, in fact, being shattered not just for him but for generations to come once the free market was unleashed. As Steiner says, at this point Bowie was an artist meeting the times and his past. It was ‘like the future arrived to fulfil an alternative present’.
The Drift has put out its 10th issue.
Is Seneca staging a comeback? Maybe… - I read one of Seneca's philosophical texts while in prison; stoicism is attractive to me; but I am beginning to think there might be something to his plays. This piece follows on the Antigone article I noted here.
Well,"Aftermath" got a rejection:
Thanks for sending us your work. We're sorry to say that your submission isn't right for The Sun. (If you've submitted multiple times, you can click the "View Submission" link at the end of this message to see which submission we are responding to.)
This isn't a reflection on your writing. The selection process is highly subjective, something of a mystery even to us. There's no telling what we'll fall in love with, what we'll let get away.
Writing is hard work, and writers merit some acknowledgment. This note doesn't speak to that need. Please know, however, that we've read your work and appreciate your interest in the magazine.
We wish you the best in placing your writing elsewhere.
The Editors
The Sun
I managed another post of my pretrial detention journal.
Time to call it a day.
sch
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