Friday Night Is Becoming Saturday Morning

 I would like to say I was productive, having been home since around 1 pm.

I cannot feel it, though. Firefox is back to regularly crashing. I never cleaned out my email. I got three new posts done. Not including this one.

On the positive side, I spoke with my niece for about 90 minutes.

No bike riding, the heat got to me while waiting on the bus. I even napped for a hour or so this afternoon.

Some of the reading from today:

I had the same thought as Jonathan V. Last while watching the overage of Trump's arraignment yesterday, and was glad to see his A Message for the People Who Run Cable News: You're Doing It Again. Stop It. Did we really need to see the blow-by-by of his progress from New Jersey to DC?

The star of the story is the rule of law.

I know: “The rule of law” doesn’t drive ratings. It doesn’t have influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. People don’t wear rule-of-law regalia to massive rallies and fly rule-of-law flags in boat parades.

But if you don’t present the Trump trials as stories about the rule of law, then they become stories about Trump.

The Times Literary Supplement published A world beyond: Suburban life meets the fantastic in Rachel Ingalls’s fiction, a review by Joyce Carol Oates. 

From The Baffler, I read Empty Suits: On Javier Marías’s spy fiction, just because spy fiction has always interested me, and I learned this:

His attraction to the genre isn’t terribly hard to pin down. Marías’s thematic hobbyhorses—among them parallel chronologies, alternate selves, and the existential vertigo kicked up by our contemplation of the contingency of living—map cleanly onto the lineaments of a traditional spy plot, with its false identities, double-crossings, and de rigueur flirtation with geopolitical catastrophe. His preference for pressurized, obsessional narratives seems relevant as well. Spy novels, after all, tend to be hermetic and self-contained—as well as, on the whole, broadly conservative in their politics. As Nicholas Dames has pointed out, spy novels “narrow the world to the dimensions of agencies and their rivals or targets,” and have as their “ideological dominant a pessimistic, fatalistic nationalism.” The world of the spy novel is “a world where the revolution will never come,” where the possibility of “rapid change” is replaced by “the glacial melt of national power.” Stasis is ever the endgame, the ultimate mark of a job well done. And while Marías could safely be described, per The New Yorker, as “a pedigreed leftist of the old school,” a certain high-handedness has long characterized his politics.

The spy novel also allowed Marías to literalize what had always been a somewhat hazy set of philosophical concerns. Since the 1990s, these musings had found a handy container in what Marías deemed, slightly torquing Shakespeare’s phrase, “the dark back of time.” (For his densest treatment of this existential entrepôt, see, not surprisingly, 1998’s Dark Back of Time.) It’s a nebulous category, though the gloss provided in Tomás Nevinson does a good job of capturing its paradoxical extensity—it is, we learn, “perhaps the most densely populated area of all, the resting place of what existed and what did not exist.” Think of it as the dustbin of history, a sort of singularity where actions and thoughts, drifting back along the etiolating stream of time, become so attenuated that it no longer matters whether they happened or not, were acted upon or weren’t.

The melding of reality and fiction, the desperate fashioning of self-narratives, and the acts of violence sometimes necessary to keep these stories from falling apart that inhere in the world of spy fiction find their mirror in the lived experience of Spain post-autocracy: a subject which Marías, in his late career, also became more interested in. (He was twenty-four when Franco passed away in 1975, and thus came to maturity during a period of “historical limbo” when his country’s recent past was actively being negotiated.) One of the products of this turn has been the revelation that Marías’s dark back of time has always had a submerged corollary in the pacto del olvido, the tacit policy of amnesty for past crimes adopted in Spain after Franco’s death.

If this all sounds like a potentially unwieldy layering of themes, rest assured it is. Marías’s genre outings have been typified by a magpie mentality that rarely ends up managing its many interests in anything resembling a unified way. These tendencies are more than apparent in his most sustained literary engagement with the art of spycraft, the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, comprising Fever and Spear (2002), Dance and Dream (2004), and Poison, Shadow and Farewell (2007). They are narrated by Jacques (or Jacobo, or Jaime) Deza, who first appeared as the nameless narrator of All Souls.

 Okay, this interests me, now to find the time to read!

Who was Duns Scotus? 

As a Scotus scholar, I welcome this century’s revival of interest in Scotus. But a more fruitful way to indulge that interest, especially for those just starting their intellectual journey with Duns Scotus, is simply to try to take him on his own terms, engaging first-order questions of philosophy and theology with Scotus, and resisting the storyteller’s urge to situate this or that feature of Scotus’s thought within a narrative that explains why we are where we are now. It really is just as possible for a person of the 21st century as it was for a person of the 14th to wonder whether God exists, or whether universals are real, or whether objective morality requires a divine lawgiver. When we ask these questions now, we’re asking the very same questions they were asking then. And, thanks to the efforts of the dunces who for centuries have kept alive Scotus’s memory, editing and transmitting his texts, and writing papers and books trying to explain his thought, we can welcome Scotus into our own puzzlings over these and other perennial questions. At the speed of philosophy, 1308 is not so very far away after all.

Delaware County reporters chronicle area unsolved mysteries in 'Cold Case Muncie' 

An admission, I am a Sigourney Weaver fan (since like The Year of Living Dangerously) who lacks whatever streaming service is running The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart review – Sigourney Weaver is on blazing form.

I'll watch Weaver in anything, maybe not so much Matthew Broderick, but I will read an interview: ‘My legacy? I’m Ferris Bueller’: Matthew Broderick on life, love and opioids.

Yes! Amazonian prime: why Wonder Woman 3 will be the star of the new-look DC multiverse.

Updated for 2023: The 20 Best Carp Flies - Fly Fisherman and The 50 Most Influential Fly Fishers.

Some reading from earlier in the week (meaning I am cleaning out my Clipper extension)

The Complicated Afterlives of Roberto Bolaño

Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

‘I thought people would throw bottles’

...While other parts of the nation broil in alarming heat, here there is an airy mountain breeze and pin-drop silence as a production of Medea, by the German director Frank Castorf, plays out.

It is not what the traditional crowd is accustomed to: combining Euripides’s text with excerpts from Heiner Müller and Arthur Rimbaud, it features not one murderous mother in Medea, who kills her children as revenge against her unfaithful husband, Jason, but five actors (Stefania Goulioti, Sofia Kokkali, Maria Nafpliotou, Angeliki Papoulia, Evdokia Roumelioti) who appear simultaneously on stage as different versions of her.

There is more avant gardism, from Castorf’s characteristic handheld cameras to Aleksandar Denić’s set, featuring a rubbish tip and tents that hint at a consumerist, late-capitalist wasteland but also a refugee camp. It is a nod to Medea’s outsider status – a woman from Colchis marooned in Corinth, a land that no longer wants her – and modern-day Greek refugee camps such as Lesbos.

***

There are those who feel these ancient plays represent Greek identity and to tamper with them is to undermine that identity. But for Flatsousis, this is a misunderstanding: the tragedies are not for Greece’s perception of itself. “For me as a Greek director this legacy is not a burden. It may sound weird but I think Greek tragedy is not our heritage. It speaks about big things and it speaks for all of humanity. I try to avoid this idea of ‘my’ heritage. My heritage as a human could also be Shakespeare or Brecht.”

Flatsousis points out that even the ancients were “re-telling” stories rather than inventing them – so Euripides reworked the plays of Sophocles, who was in turn re-telling those of Aeschylus, while all three were re-shaping Homer’s oral stories.

Must sleep… Have a visitor in the morning.

sch