Friday - Pooped - Indiana Writers, Roller Derby Queens - A Novel Thoreau

You might take a look at Stoicism in the Fourth Satire of Persius. Yes, it may sound a bit scholarly, a bit dull, but with stoicism having a comeback, with the current state of our politics, this article is a bit of a kick in the shins:

In his Fourth Satire,  Persius examines people’s false impressions of happiness, when Like Alcibiades, they fixate on pleasure while underestimating the value of the inner world. He who is truly free is free from passions and pleasure; Persius reinforces this truth in the minds of his readers, so that they may attain the only genuinely worthwhile achievement, which is, to virtue. As Epictetus says:

Attend therefore to the appearances of things that you receive from the outside world, and be alert, because what you must guard is nothing small: it is dignity, trustworthiness, stability, freedom from passions, freedom from sorrow, freedom from fear, an undisturbed mind – in a word, liberty.

I read it first thing this morning, around 5:30, because the prose is far more sprightly than its title.

I have not made my ind up about Passager as a place to put my work. It is geared towards writers of 50+. Well, I qualify for that. I am getting a bit leery of submitting “The Dead and Dying” stories separately; I am seeing them as too linked to one another. Yet, these and the speculative fiction stories are all that I have on tap. Maybe, maybe. I started re-writing “Reunion” for “D and D” last night. I want to get that done, then I will see where I go next.

The bus comes in 23 minutes. Time to dress.

Grocery and laundry and bike riding and more writing is the plan for the day after work.

6:07 AM

Off work by 11:30, I caught the bus downtown and was home by 12:30. I paid the rent and then heading out for groceries. Except one bus was late, and then I missed the first bus back from Payless. I finally got home around 3:30. I wanted to nap. I wanted to start my stew. No nap, and the stew, may be waiting till tomorrow. I still want to nap. 

No mention of T.E. Lawrence in The Arab Kingdom.

I have heard a few seconds of Metal Machine Music, and it is as unlistenable as anyone has told you, but here is the story in Lou Reed's own words: “Relentless F*cking Noise”: Lou Reed on Making an Unlistenable Album.

Blandness – a vice, I can agree with Rushfield: William Friedkin and What Hollywood Has Lost.

5:30 PM

13 hours later - 

I did take that nap. Just an hour, not 13 hours. 

I walked down to McClure's when I got up, around 7. I was not sure if I was going to make it back. Woozy, still tired, and walking was just a strain.

I started rearranging my stuff. I did not finish that.

I put away the stew.

Lack of pep is probably not a good condition when I decided to revise the closing of Road Tripping. It sounded too damn mushy still. Yes, it is supposed to be a journal event entry but…. Now, I just went out and got some air and decided to lop it off. All of this just because I wanted to get it all up to Google Drive as a backup!

I also remembered to do something that crossed my mind the other day. I am not sure if you know The Caine Mutiny was also a play. Of course, there is a Wikipedia entry. Here is the link. Now, I am trying to get my woozy brain around the idea of Lloyd Nolan as Queeg (which I like) and Also Charlton Heston (that one feels really weird). Why did this interest me? Because KH and I were talking recently, and I said I was thinking of Trump as Queeg. He does not look like a man who needs ball bearings.

I also read this review, Returning to Walden, which left me wishing I were younger and healthier, because I do like the idea the author is pursuing: 

You only need to wade a few steps into Henry David Thoreau’s Walden before tripping over these words: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” For an author like Thoreau, an active and outspoken abolitionist, the insensitive aphorism seems like a profound contradiction of his character. In A Fugitive in Walden Woods, author Norman Lock imagines an appropriate response to such a statement, delivered by the novel’s narrator, Samuel: “It is much, much worse, Henry, to be driven by a vicious brute whom law and custom have given charge over one’s life than by an inner demon.”

***

The novel comes as the next installment in Lock’s series of American Novels, each of which engages with seminal nineteenth-century American authors and ideas. In each volume the first-person narrator functions as a kind refractive lens, bending and blending together a generation of texts and ideas within a single mind, and yielding a spectrum of impressions on the development of American culture and identity. But the book does more than parrot various ideological positions. A Fugitive in Walden Woods bursts with intellectual energy, with moral urgency, and with human feeling. Lock’s characters are not reducible to their ideas, but rather animated and complicated by them. In this way the novel achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life.

IU Press has published A Flame Called Indiana: An Anthology of Contemporary Hoosier Writing. I admit I know only one name, Michael Martone, who I believe is the best Indiana writer.

Get to Know Indiana Author: Michella M. Marino  - a YouTube interview, a history of roller derby. Muncie has a roller derby team. No, I have not been to see it.

 

One more crash of Firefox and I called it a night. I read about Christopher Marlowe. About 10:45 I just went to sleep.

 

Now, I am up. Laundry and cleaning and writing and getting some exercise.

 

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