Finishing up Saturday's email patrol.
Riding back on the bus yesterday on the Mall bus, the driver mentioned there had been an explosion on the route. This morning came this confirmation: Dust explosion in Muncie leaves 1 in critical condition.
"Love Stinks" has missing chunks. A little i know where it went, most is a mystery. The opening has been rewritten - where a hundred pages went missing. So I’m a bit of a Luddite and I lost 50 pages of the book: Patrick deWitt from The Brisbane Times did my heart some good.
So, there was the Canadian novelist who had recently taken US citizenship doing the rounds at the Melbourne Writers Festival and elsewhere, meeting people, speaking at length about French Exit, all the while caught up in a writer’s nightmare – missing pages. “That was my sort of realisation as I was walking around town: I’ve lost this book, I’ll start another because this was obviously a cursed book and I should just get on with my life.”
But by the time he got home to Portland, Oregon, he found himself craving what he had written and needing to revisit the character at the heart of the manuscript.
Well, I had all these parts and the second volume done, and no choice but to go back to my earlier draft. KH hates it. I find there are changes I want to do, without knowing whether these were in the last version written five years ago. I go on, feeling like I am going upstream against a river of sludge. Too much to do, so little time I left myself. At, least, I have another example of why I should keep on going.
[Updated 8/13/2023 because I just now got to The Walrus' latest newsletter, and Is a Life Lived through Art Really Lived at All?, a review of Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist; which includes the following:
The Librarianist is most compelling when deWitt commits to Bob’s disappointments and to the notion that reading about fictional worlds can provide meaning—but only to a point. In this ill-fitted happy ending, deWitt returns to his trusted shrug; sure, he seems to say, a life lived through books can probably be worthwhile. For a writer perhaps imagining how he might feel about this devotion in thirty-odd years, it seems like he may be trying to convince himself more than his readers.
If The Librarianist is somewhat lacking in this regard, deWitt at least never strays far from what makes his novels so delightful: his dexterity with language, his interest in what happens when words fail, and the rare moments where they land. He ends on a note that is fittingly trivial. Bob must bob for apples at a Gambell-Reed Halloween event. “Bob! Bob! Bob!” the crowd impels him. Here, the incongruities of language, the ability to twist words at a moment’s notice, are not resolved by reading Tolstoy to the seniors. The pun is undeniably stupid, and Bob cannot help but laugh.]
From earlier in the week: A young mother disappeared 13 years ago. What did it mean?
And that was what struck me like a thunderbolt during the trial, in a way that it never struck me as a younger reporter. Unique was surrounded by possible dangers. Not because of weird, singular circumstances, but because of common ones. She was in danger financially, because of an ex who hadn’t paid child support. She’d been in danger, potentially, from multiple men who had allegedly abused other women. Her health had been endangered by someone who gave her a sexually transmitted disease.
Society has a responsibility to its members. I think we have forgotten that. Or civil society has been denigrated to such an extent that we believe we have no responsibility to others. I think having been through my troubles with depression gives me an insight here. Or call it a sign of my nihilism that:
- there was nothing to be done about all the big problems,
- that our politics trending towards the destruction of individuals,
- that whatever opinions and feelings I had of my own responsibilities towards the wider world, they must be wrong because the wider world thought so
- nothing I did mattered
Unless I want to go get a rope and hang myself, carrying out what I failed to do 13 years ago, then I to change my ways and thinking. No, I cannot solve the big problems, but I can do something about the small ones. From that I can hope that others follow suit until enough of us do make this life better.
We should also ask who benefits when a democratic society says it has no responsibilities to its members.
Along these lines, consider The movie ‘Barbie’ has put the phrase ‘toxic femininity’ back in the news – here’s what it means and why you should care. Does having an equal right to the pursuit of happiness mean that we must be tolerant to the differences of others that do not injure us? Or is an equal right to the pursuit of happiness only permitted within rigid categories?
In her examination of popular discussions of toxic masculinity and femininity, McCann argues that what makes gender ideology toxic is rigidity – adherence to an inflexible gender binary. Gender norms are scripts that direct people to behave in ways that are consistent with one group’s ideas about what it means to be a woman or a man.
Of course, these scripts leave many people feeling uncomfortably constrained – not only the men and women who buck tradition, but also nonbinary, transgender and other people whose existence demonstrates that a gender binary is too simplistic to account for the fullness of human experience.
In the end, the movie “Barbie” recognizes the toxicities of both the matriarchal and patriarchal versions of Barbieland. Director Greta Gerwig’s happy ending requires Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie to leave Barbieland for the real world, where she can forge a unique, less toxic, identity.
Shower. Laundry. Parts of that sludge thing.
8:48
Laundry is done. New draft of "Reunion" done. Lunched. Where does the time go?
The stew is on simmer.
Firefox crashed.
I need to do a little work out. I will ride the bike later, after I get back from running to Payless for water.
1:07 PM
I got my water.
There was quite a wreck at High and Jackson Streets. I was left puzzling over how the one car got flipped over.
I had to wait an extra half hour for the bus, the guy at check out was just the right amount of slow. I did not get back here until around 4 pm.
The stew is good. CC was invited up. She will not make it.
I have been listening to The Sonic Bloom for a little over the past hour.
One post done from my pretrial detention journal. At this rate, I will be ten years before I get all this paper done.
I really want another bowl of stew.
The Cleveland Review of Books published CC Jones' review, The Philosophy of Failure and Failure of Philosophy, and I think it may be I will read it.
In such a frame, all failure is comparative. There is no one true form of failing, no root cause. Only iterations and repetitions of something in some dimension of our lives being out of joint, of not quite making it. Costica Bradatan’s In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility challenges us to dwell on the experience of failing. In four portraits of famous thinkers who in some way failed, we are walked through the dark and at times insidious powers that failure holds for human life. We are asked to feel failure as the wound that it is, as the humiliation we wish to avoid. In contrast, Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay considers the comparative nature of failure by working through all of the forms that failing may take. Guiding us through the ones that have deranged or stunted—at times nearly killed—the project of thinking that we call philosophy, we find that all failure is different.
The sun is also out now. We had a little shower, which got me to run down to McClure's and kept me off the bike.
Maybe I should send the Cleveland Review of Books piece to T2, she di tell me my life was in the toilet.
Gaukroger’s optimism is more a default than an exception. The story of philosophy often assumes, even in its failures, something, somewhere, can be improved, learned, overcome. On the other hand, philosophical pessimism is a mixed bag. It ranges from the thoughtful to the edgy, from the annoyingly insightful to the downright mean. As a tradition, it gets less attention than its bright and excited sibling and maybe for good reason. It is easier to find something enlivening in a philosophical outlook that does not, a priori, condemn us to suffering, that says no matter what we do, we’re doomed so why try at all. The philosopher Eugene Thacker places pessimism historically less in the category of tradition and more in the category of mood: “There is no philosophy of pessimism, only the reverse… What you need is a change in attitude, a new outlook… a cup of coffee.” There is no need for pessimism, he goes on, “though I like to imagine the idea of pessimist self-help.”
Costica Bradatan enthusiastically heeds this call in his latest book In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, which distances itself from any form of redemptive, “rise-and-grind,” podcast-and-kale, self-help regimen. Instead, for our health, we are called to do what makes us uncomfortable: “take failure seriously.” Failure is a pathway to confronting the instantaneous flash of existence that we take ever-so self-seriously as “life”: “As a rule, we fail to take failure seriously,” he writes, and this is a great mistake, he shows us, for failure not only gives us the necessary distance from the world and the self to see the faint arc of how both are composed, but that it may save our lives. As readers we’re taken through a spiraling study of failure, a Dantean route that moves from bodily failure, the failure to engage physically with the world around us, to political failure, failures of statecraft and polis, to social failure, the figure of the loser, and finally to the icy core of it all, “the ultimate failure” to be the person you want to be. In each circle, our psychopompic Bradatan introduces us to a sample of relevant figures and their failures, including Simone Weil, Mahatma Gandhi, Emil Cioran, and Yukio Mishima. Bradatan proves an entertaining, quippy, and insightful Virgil, structuring his arguments around vignettes that are engaging and ruthlessly disruptive to the quietude of our presumed success. He develops miniature biographies of each of the four major thinkers he is concerned with. They are generally entertaining, if not elucidating, about failure in its full bouquet of expressions.
I think I have been here. Seems to me, a chance exists for me to do better than I did. That you are reading this you will see what I am doing with the life left me. Redemption? Not likely. Respectability? Not in my vocabulary - other than in regards The Rolling Stones. Work, live as ethically as I can, set an example of what is to be avoided - if I can do these things, then I have used my time wisely.
6:31 pm
I did not expect much from Sean Alan Cleary's essay, The Uncanny Valley of America’s British Language (also from The Cleveland Review of Books). Then I could not stop reading his explanation of English accents as understood by Americans, English literature and Black British rap. If you are into any of this, read it. Oh, read it any way. It's fun and it's educational.
From the same source: Eli Shoop's I’m A Lot Like You Were: On Robert Christgau’s “Is It Still Good to Ya? is for the rock geeks.
I just finished a piece on writing for next week. My shoulders are stiff and my eyes are tired of this computer screen. I should go ride my bike. Nope, too sleep. First thing after the sun is up tomorrow.
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