Saturday
Why the title for this? You will have to go to the end. It is not I am depressed, but as a lark I listened to one more Shakespearean video. Quite impressive performance of an iconic bit. Humility means knowing how little we mean to the universe. Humanity must have faith in tomorrow, else we should have a species-wide suicide. We get up and try not to do harm, we laugh at ourselves thinking we have timeless meaning, and find amusement at what life does bring us.
What can I say about Saturday? I slept in until 7 AM, read some of my email, looked around YouTube, decided to go to the grocery. I left here around noon and got back here around 2 pm. Then I went to work on "Their Bright Future." I finished it about 8, maybe 7. Anyway, I was asleep by 10. What is it that writing a story gets me tired?
I talked to CC; she did not visit. KH did not answer his phone. I talked to DM when I was on the bus.
So much for human contact! I have to wonder if anyone keeps track of my comings and goings and realize how little time I spend in the wider world.
That will continue so long as I have all this paper in front of me.
Anyway, I was too tired to do but make note of the following:
While The French Connection dominated the Academy Awards — and earned William Friedkin an Oscar for Best Director — it is The Exorcist that will keep his name alive. He had the creative vision — and the audacity — to truly shock people with a creepy story based on true events, as well as the brilliance to work with a team that could bring that vision to life with inventive effects and provocative story structure.
What could have been otherwise campy or underwhelming, in Friedkin’s hands, became what The New York Times called “a cinematic study of evil at work in the modern world.”
Devo retires - not my favorite band but still, a shock.
From Bonnie Prince Charlie to Richard III: other historical faces brought to life - Bonnie Prince Charlie looks like a twit and Richard III does not seem a villain.
Speaking of Richard III, I ran across these two while knocking around YouTube:
I was too tired of typing and this computer screen to do any writing here.
Something I was going to post separately:
Just some sites and pages I read the other night, 8/17
- 37 Wonderful International Literary Journals
- Influencer Noir: 11 recent and forthcoming novels examining the dark side of internet fame
- Five Novels Portraying Toxic Religion
Sunday
David Bowie's top 100 must-read books - a bit of insight into Bowie's mind, he was more than just The Thin White Duke or Ziggy; I noticed he also read Ann Petry.
Ned Beauman wins Arthur C Clarke award for ‘bleakly funny’ novel
His winning book is set in the 2030s and follows the search for a surviving colony of a hyper-intelligent species of fish. Beauman was announced as the winner of the prestigious prize – which celebrates the best science fiction novel published in the UK last year – at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.
Beauman’s novel is a “biting satire, twisted, dark and radical, but remarkably accessible, endlessly inventive and hilarious,” said judging chair Andrew M Butler.
Venomous Lumpsucker is Beauman’s fifth book. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2013 the author was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists.
His latest novel “takes science fiction’s knack for future extrapolation and aggressively applies it to humanity’s shortsighted self-interest and consumptive urges in the face of planetary eco-crisis,” said the award’s director Tom Hunter. “The result is a bleakly funny novel where the only hope for our species is working out the final punchline before it’s delivered.”
The Fraud by Zadie Smith review – from Victorian London to slavery in Jamaica
The Fraud is a curious combination of gloriously light, deft writing and strenuous construction. There’s a risk of readerly bafflement as bright shards of narrative are shaken into unpredictable combinations across time and place. But the novel’s hybridity becomes part of its fascination. It slows and expands lavishly in honour of its Victorian subjects, yet its chapters are elliptical half-scenes chosen with modernist economy. Happily its eight “volumes” can be bound with one spine. Here is historical fiction with all the day-lit attentiveness that Eliza hopes for: “stories of human beings, struggling, suffering, deluding others and themselves, being cruel to each other and kind. Usually both.” Generous and undogmatic as ever, Smith makes room for “both”.
Academy of the Heart and Mind published a very charming poem, The Heart’s Reflection by Adegboyega Kayowa.
Trumbo is on HBO. As a movie it is a bit uneven, maybe predictable, but I like Cranston. More importantly, it made me think about Americans cruelty to one another. What is said about Texas Governor Abbott and Ron DeSantis and Trump and the others MAGA happy politicians – they revel in cruelty. Why should they do that? Is there something deeply wrong with us as a people? Is there something in how we have organized our society where we find release in hurting one another? I have been reading up on Christopher Marlowe. There is much being made in several books on the turmoil in Elizabethan society – its uncertainties of morality, its pursuit of power for the sake of power – that I see reflections of, or as shadowing America. We have people wanting a Christian nationalism – regardless of the other people injured or killed – so long as a white supremacist fantasy is realized. We have a political party long claiming its moral conservatism that has claims its leader is above the law and the ends justify the means; the ends being retention of its power in the face of mass disapproval. There is something here that needs to be examined by a better mind than mine.
I started Hans Kundnani's ‘The Eurocentric fallacy’: the myths that underpin European identity from The Guardian, found it was not quite what I thought it was and did not finish, but that counts more against me than it does the article. It does point out an issue I did not know about with the European Union, and it may reflect a issue with America:
The European tendency to mistake Europe for the world – what might be called “the Eurocentric fallacy” – has obscured our understanding of the EU and its role in the world. It has led to an idealisation of European integration as a kind of cosmopolitan project: what I call the myth of cosmopolitan Europe. A better way to understand the EU is an expression of regionalism – which is analogous to nationalism, rather than the opposite of it, as many “pro-Europeans” imagine it to be. Thinking of the EU in terms of regionalism rather than cosmopolitanism also allows us to understand more clearly the tensions within the European project.
America has its own regionalism. Sorry, I never saw grits until I was 35, but I had plenty of hominy when young. Americanism as a form of cosmopolitanism?
I still have too much to read, I question whether this is another symptom of my release from prison – trying to catch up on everything at once.
I walked down to McClure's for caffeine and nicotine. The leg is better.
Mere curiosity led me to John Lepley's review, Somebody’s Gotta Do It: On Erin Hatton’s “Coerced” and Eyal Press’ “Dirty Work”, from The Cleveland Review of Books. Since I am supplementing my Social Security with dishwashing and the like, I have seen many people who are barely surviving on their work. When I saw “prisoners,” I had to read:
At first glance, graduate students in the sciences, college athletes, workfare recipients, and prisoners might not have much in common. But Erin Hatton, a professor at SUNY Buffalo, draws out their parallels. Each group clashes with cultural assumptions about “workers.” Nobody would deny that a forklift operator moving a pallet from a semi-truck to a warehouse or a radiologist processing an MRI are “workers.” But what about a college junior who plays point guard on her school’s basketball team, or a felon serving a fifteen-year sentence who separates clothes in the prison laundry? There’s a lack of consensus about whether the basketball player and prisoner can be considered “workers” and if they are entitled to a share of the profits they generate for their university or have the right to quit a prison job that negatively impacts their health.
The exclusion of Hatton’s subjects from workplace regulatory regimes has significant material consequences. For the most part, they do not have the protection of laws governing hours of work and overtime, minimum wage, or health and safety, and the right to organize. These exclusions, Hatton argues, render them vulnerable to something she calls “status coercion,” which is more insidious than the typical economic compulsion facing most workers. It’s instructive to compare Hatton’s subjects with those in “caring” occupations like nursing and early childhood education. In spite of gendered stereotypes that deem them selfless caregivers driven by altruism, they have legal recognition as workers and enjoy basic rights on the job. However, the power relationship between prisoners, graduate students, student athletes, workfare recipients, and their supervisors is remarkably one-sided.
***
The cultural, institutional, and legal gatekeepers that determine who is and isn’t a “worker” rest on shifting ground. On the one hand, not all of Hatton’s informants even consider themselves workers. These assumptions, indeed, amount to a sort of “common sense.” On the other hand, cracks in consent are challenging their hegemony. Prisoners in the United States and United Kingdom are channeling their grievances through the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. In September of 2022, its members organized work stoppages in Alabama’s thirteen state prisons as striking prisoners refused to clean laundry, prepare food, and perform maintenance and custodial tasks that they were not paid for. At the close of 2022, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that governs private sector labor relations, concluded that student athletes are employees under the National Labor Relations Act, creating a path for them to unionize. Coerced makes an important contribution to these efforts because it shines a spotlight on attitudes, practices, and policies that many people accept as natural and self-evident and, therefore, can be changed through collective action.
Federal prisons have Unicor. The Bureau of Prisons describes the program as
UNICOR is the trade name for Federal Prison Industries (FPI), a wholly owned Government corporation that was established by Congress on June 23, 1934. Its mission is to protect society and reduce crime by preparing inmates for successful reentry through job training. UNICOR is entirely self-sustaining, receiving no appropriated funds from Congress and operating at no cost to taxpayers.
UNICOR is first and foremost a correctional program. The impetus behind FPI is not about business, but rather inmate release preparation. UNICOR assists offenders with acquiring marketable job skills so that they can one day become law-abiding, contributing members of society. The production of items and provision of services are merely by-products of those efforts.
The east compound of Fort Dix had Unicor for a short time while I was there. What I recall is they disassembled abandoned computers. There was to be a new program on the west side, of what sort I cannot recall. I am not sure what sort of post-incarceration work is taught by destroying computers. What the inmates wanted was the increased income for the purpose of buying commissary. More slave labor than job training.
Clark has produced an exceptional book and a complicated commentary on power told from the perspective of a thoroughly horrible individual. Perhaps due to the seemingly harmless and chic premise of a working class female photographer, Irina Sturges, getting a big break, I expected this book to position itself within a lush landscape of romance and personal growth surrounded by Italian villas and cigarette smoke. Instead, it wrapped me around its finger and spat me out horrified.
***
A murderer can be a victim of violence too and, perhaps I am affording too much of an agenda to a novel that was deeply morally confusing, but I felt a finger pointing at myself as the reader, daring me to lessen my empathy towards Irina in light of her full story. It is a confounding and visceral testament to the fickleness of solidarity and morality, to the extent of being almost pointed, accusatory—and rightly so.
I am going to work on my pretrial detention journal for the next two hours. The sun is coming up.
6:48 am
I got a little sidetracked. I had two journals to check out: Copper Nickel and Call Me.
From Copper Nickel, I read Amelies by Molly Beckwith. I am not sure how to call this one – a creepy psychological thriller or a coming-of-age tale, only it was very, very good. I think it will stay with me for a long time. I have nothing like it. The Self-Hating Book Critic, an essay by Jessa Crispin, rocks:
I want to tell them: this world is not for you, you are better without it. Outside the gates, not in. This world was in fact, in part, designed specifically to keep you out. It does not want you. It will not nourish you.
And just because you gain entry for one fleeting moment, do not think for a second that you haven’t stomped all over the even less desirables on your way in, don’t think the system has suddenly become tolerant.
But people outside the city’s walls long for entry; it is the set-up. That is how the city controls the frontier.
More interesting would be to exist outside the walls, and learn how to raid the city for whatever it is you need.
Not a place for an old white guy from Indiana, but I do like their attitude. They are just working from a different place than me.
For a critical culture to be vital, it has to be aware of its placement in the system. It has to see that system as broken. It has to respond to its brokenness.
It makes sense to me that when the system goes wobbly, the critical culture responds by saying, “From now on, we will only run positive reviews.” It is a long list of publications and critics who have come out saying this, from The Believer to Buzzfeed to assorted Internet communities.
But that of course is not criticism, it is enthusiasm. And enthusiasm only happens in long form when all uncertainties and unknowns have been weeded out. When expectations are met.
It is a way to regain control. Uncertainty causes anxiety, and when things are already uncertain due to a literary system in flux, it is easier to close off, to shut the gates, to only admit those whose entrance is guaranteed. To, you know, review your friends.
I am even more at sea with Call Me. Although, I found their book reviews interesting, but they sound like a fun bunch. I will hate spoiling their days sending them a piece. If I understand correctly they are looking for pieces that celebrate something. Those I do not have.
I need to think.
8:17
I re-read “Reunion” and “Their Bright Future” and “Blue Eyes Flashing Doom.” I made changes to all of them – mostly correcting omitted words, but with TBF I remixed its opening.
“Reunion” went to Copper Nickel, and TBF went to Sequestrum.
I started something new with something old with the crock pot.
Time to do the laundry.
11:47 AM
The laundry is in. I am getting to be an airhead – I could not find the laundry soap. I put off email from late last week to this morning, so I am putting off my pretiral detention journal.
There were some interesting bits to read:
- The Lost Cosmonauts of the Soviet Union: Did the Soviets leave dead cosmonauts in space? from The Hidden History substack. Looks like a place I could get lost in, so I am staying away – for now. The secret history of Oreos does intrigue me.
- Roman road network is mapped out after discovery in Britain sheds new importance on small Devon town – archeology has always been an interest.
- Edgar Allan Poe on PBS's American Masters. I am choosing to listen instead to Uneasy Listening.
Speaking of Substacks:
- The Deep Dive: Lots of reading lists, but I had to take a look at Revisiting The Bard, With Four Productions was worth the time (and it has links to YouTube clips of the performances!)
- After Babel: looks like a lot of social media affecting mental health. I agree.
- The laundry is in the dryer. The crock pot is slower than my stomach. Modern Medieval is a site in which I could disappear, so I do not even tempt myself with even one article. I do follow its recommendation to Historians At The Movies: History, film, pop culture, and other shenanigans. Of course, I had to read FURY (2014). Luckily, it is a podcast.
- Woven Tale Press has a new issue out. Good art work, it is set up as a flip-book (that's my best description considering my ignorance). This format looks really, functions likea real magazine, and I would like it much better if I could get the print the right size for my eyes and for the screen. I will call this a laptop problem.
I unsubscribed to Half and One. For once, I feel left behind by the age. Or maybe because it has a different sense of humor than mine. Or maybe, it is just that I am primed to cut down all I can as I work through my stuff on this table. I do not think I want to pay $10.99 to submit one of my stories; I guess I lack the faith.
Laundry done. I am going to fix me a salad. Cheese and an apple last only so long.
1:24 PM
Some more poetry: From Anne Mikusinski, Observation and Other Poems, and published by Academy of the Heart And Mind.
The Paris Review released its interview James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78. For my purposes these were the points I latched onto:
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a reader in your mind when you write?
BALDWIN
No, you can’t have that.
INTERVIEWER
So it’s quite unlike preaching?
BALDWIN
Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
Which makes sense in that people do not pay for sermons and sermons get in the way of stories. If there is any preaching it is not in the particulars of the story, but its whole. That this novel (or whatever) is a creative act and that is what people do, create.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think painters would help a fledgling writer more than another writer might? Did you read a great deal?
BALDWIN
I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. I’m sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn’t experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. The French gave me what I could not get in America, which was a sense of “If I can do it, I may do it.” I won’t generalize, but in the years I grew up in the U.S., I could not do that. I’d already been defined.
And I had to go to prison to see the worth in my stories. I suggest Paris, instead.
KH should like this bit:
INTERVIEWER
Do you agree with Alberto Moravia, who said that one ought only to write in the first person, because the third projects a bourgeois point of view?
BALDWIN
I don’t know about that. The first person is the most terrifying view of all. I tend to be in accord with James, who hated the first-person perspective, which the reader has no reason to trust—why should you need this I? How is this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page?
Thing is it seems so much that I see published now in the journals is in first-person. It is not a natural for me, but I am trying.
INTERVIEWER
What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer?
BALDWIN
Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
INTERVIEWER
Can you discern talent in someone?
BALDWIN
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
INTERVIEWER
Would you suggest that a young writer from a minority consecrate himself to that minority, or is his first obligation his own self-realization as a writer?
BALDWIN
Your self and your people are indistinguishable from each other, really, in spite of the quarrels you may have, and your people are all people.
And that sets the bar, doesn't it?
I sent off "Reunion" to Southern Humanities Review, their Online Fiction Feature. TBF went to The Georgia Review.
Apex Magazine has a new issue. I read Linda Niehof's The Discarded Ones because I am a sucker for ghost stories, especially ones that include passages like this:
But then I saw it.
The very bottom cage at the very end of the room.
It hovered there, faceless of course. But just in the way that it wobbled against the bars it looked young. And hopeful. And scared.
Exactly the way I felt.
The Paris Review also released a short story, Edna O'Brien's Dramas. I have read about her and an interview, too. This was the first time to read one of her stories, I think. Very Irish. I would like to read more.
I am tired of the computer screen. I think the soup is done. Still not been able to get at the journal. So, I will be back here later.
3:40 PM
Dinner eaten, having read a little, I am succumbing to the desire of my eyelids.
Never did get to my journal.
sch 5:33 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment