Fleeing the Kingdom of Silence

 I got 4 hours of sleep last night. Work was over at 1:40, and I was glad to get out, back strained and tired and just wanted to get home. I needed to get groceries and wound up at Walmart on the north side. I got the items I wanted and caught the next bus back downtown. I was home by 3:30. No nap. I ate dinner. I went to work on rewriting “Old Days Are Not Quite Forgotten” tonight. Cut it immensely. Renamed it “Vestiges and Their Cost.” I know, wacky titles. I tackle racism. Now, I am done with that, so I emailed pay stubs to the PO. Now, I call it a night.

Trump's mug shot is on MSNBC. Whoopee!

The weather outside as of 9:30 pm was not so much hot as warm and close. It is almost suffocating.

From the email this morning:

 Excessive Heat Warning issued August 24 at 2:​46​PM EDT until August 25 at 12:​00​AM EDT by NWS Indianapolis
...EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT EDT TONIGHT...
* WHAT...Dangerously hot conditions with heat index values up to 115.
* WHERE...Portions of central, east central, north central and west central Indiana.
* WHEN...Until midnight EDT tonight.

These 10 Indiana historical sites are “most endangered,” according to nonprofit’s annual list – I wish I had the money for this:

Opened in 1930 at the corner of 13th and Meridian Streets, the State Theatre featured an eclectic Spanish Baroque façade, with white and emerald-green glazed terra cotta. With seating for over 1,500 movie-goers, the interior incorporated state-of-the-art systems, including modern sound and projection technologies and an early form of geothermal heating and cooling.

The theater closed in 2008, and a series of subsequent attempts to redevelop and reopen the property stalled. A pending lawsuit discouraged progress, alleging the City of Anderson contributed to water damage at the landmark in the 1990s by failing to shut off water to the building. The City purchased the theater from an out-of-state buyer in 2019 to resolve the legal issues, hoping the site can become part of downtown redevelopment efforts.

I keep thinking about Christopher Marlowe. Particularly, what I read that Marlowe does not give a moral lesson, but forces the audience to evaluate the character's morality. It seems appropriate for Trump and his minions. 

I like James Jones. MJ. Moore's How From Here to Eternity Contradicted Post-War America’s Wholesome Notions has good reasons for reading Jones.

I also came to read and like Ursula K. Le Guin, John Plotz's Dragons Are People Too: Ursula Le Guin’s Acts of Recognition, points to why she needs reading:

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

Fantasy and science fiction never meant escapism for Ursula Le Guin. The dragons of Earthsea and the reimagined genders of The Left Hand of Darkness were always lenses, lenses she ground in order to sharpen her readers’ focus on everyday life. Indeed, for Le Guin, there was no difference between the stories she invented and everyday stories about the institutions governing our world. The dragons of Earthsea and capitalism are woven from similar material: it is imagination all the way down.

James Baldwin said not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed without being faced. The word for facing things in Le Guin is recognition, or you might even say re-cognition. Her characters—and readers—find themselves forced to think again. When they do so, what had seemed a fundamental truth about their universe turns out to be anything but.

 

Good-night.