Starting Operation Clear Off The Table

 Doings

 I can find some papers, all I can find is my own writing. Therefore, I am concentrating on getting more of this paper typed. Which means less reading that will convince me I just must comment on it. The Supervised Release posts continue, of course, and will more than ever contain notes on what I may have been reading, instead of separate posts. They will probably look more like this post. Also, continuing will be the pretrial detention posts, they are on the desk.

I worked until 1:30 today. Getting home took me 90 minutes. I was tired when I got here – no bike riding, a walk to McClure's my only exercise and departure. E and played phone tag today and if not for her, I would have napped.

Email needed to be done and some reading. I still need to send pay stubs to the PO.

The Afternoon:

I have a cousin who fears immigrants are secretly terrorists, who will hate to see Terrorists Crossing the US Border? Rising Encounters Explained:

DHS sees a direct correlation between the watch list encounters and broader migration patterns in the hemisphere and takes the screening process seriously, said an agency official who wasn’t authorized to discuss procedures publicly.

The department is working to expand its capacity at the border and doesn’t have evidence of foreign plots to exploit perceived security weaknesses, another official, Counterterrorism Coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen, said at a recent public event.

“That doesn’t mean, though, that we don’t need to be concerned about and working hard to address the way in which terrorists or people with terrorism links might exploit vulnerabilities at the southern border,” Rasmussen said.

I think I read part of Ben Jonson's Volpone while in prison, so I am not quite the person Ed Johnson worries about in his The Other Folio: On the Legacy of Ben Jonson, except that I cannot say Jonson has greatly interested me.

Outside of academic circles, where there has been a resurgence in interest, Jonson is a distant third in the contemporary popular imagination about the time period, after canonical Shakespeare and sexy Christopher Marlowe. When it comes to Renaissance theater written by people other than Shakespeare, you’re lucky to see Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus performed, and some edgy directors will give us John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi or John Ford’s fantastically titled ‘Tis  Pity She’s a Whore. Jonson, though it’s not unheard of, isn’t produced as often. Yet Jonson was the great showstopper of the age, revolutionizing the theater every bit as much as the others, writing in every major genre from domestic and revenge tragedy to city comedy, and penning verse that despite its deceptive simplicity is among the most moving of that age. Moreover, while Shakespeare is in some sense a cipher onto which a variety of positions and opinions can be projected, Jonson in his imperfections can seem more real. Shakespeare may have been for all time, but Jonson was so of his own age that he remains more tangible as a personality.

But having read this essay, I think I will need to change my mind and read Jonson. 

Pure curiosity led me to reading Academic Angst Goes Abroad in ‘The English Experience’ by Seth L. Miller. It is a review and the novel reviewed sounds like a good time. What led to my finishing the review was this paragraph:

The novel reunites us with Schumacher’s sarcastic and inert Jay Fitger, a professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, who has been tapped, at the last minute, to lead a group of first-year students to London for a winter term abroad. But Fitger is burned out, to put it mildly. He’s spent far too many years in a system that barely notices him and is still in the thick of grading last term’s finals. The prospect of squeezing in a trip to a city that he hates (it reminds him of his ex-wife and the disappointing time they spent there a decade ago) is not exactly enticing.

A quick resort to Google shows that Julie Schumacher is not a native Midwesterner, but she teaches in Minnesota. 

I then wondered if anyone had connected ms. Schumacher with David Lodge (who I have read and do highly recommend), and, thanks once more to Google, found Biblioracle: There’s the whiff of real student writing in Schumacher’s Payne University novels:

In the end, for me, Schumacher’s trilogy stands with David Lodge’s famous Campus Trilogy of the ‘70s and ‘80s as the go-to source for how it truly feels to make one’s way inside higher education.

Being a Warren Zevon fan, I had to check out the blog, Lawyers, Guns, and Money. I have to say White supremacy and plutocracy noted something I have not seen or heard, for all it confirms an opinion of mine – that the super-rich use racism to stay on top. Succinct and well-written, give it a look. (Book Sales is a hoot.)

I still wonder about David Forster Wallace (I was not happy with Infinite Jest, but did like his Consider the Lobster) and so, reading something like Biblioracle: Patricia Lockwood’s essay about the late David Foster Wallace is, for me, a new lens on an old favorite leaves me feeling less of a philistine. 

Wallace’s erudition, his humor, his willingness to blend the low and highbrow felt like the kind of attitude I would like to project to the world, even as I understood my more limited intellectual firepower. I would have called him my favorite writer, no doubt.

Lockwood discusses both aspects of Wallace the writer and Wallace the person that perhaps should be grappled with as we consider his work 15 years after his death in 2008. We know that he stalked and intimidated a romantic partner. We know that he could be crude and unkind. He never purported himself to be a saint, but sometimes in death we decide those things don’t matter, and maybe we shouldn’t.

Lockwood suggests that years on, as fresh and new as Wallace’s work seemed to be at the time, perhaps it is not as innovative as once believed and that turning Wallace into a guru is a dead end.

It is also comforting to see my own diagnosis of not belonging to Wallace's generation has some support.

I noted Alexandra Chang in Women Writers, Books By Women, and in The Millions newsletter I received to there is another interview, Alexandra Chang Is Compelled by Constraint. I like the sound of her. She discusses her stories, and she hits on a point of which I am curious:  kishōtenketsu. If I were not trying to get stories written i prison over ten years ago into an electronic format, I would be delving into this idea. I am not so happy with the idea of resolution – I am not sure if it happens, as in a permanent solving of the problem featured in the story.

AS: You mentioned that the story “Unknown by Unknown” follows a particular structural pattern. Can you talk more about that?

AC: It’s based on kishōtenketsu, which is a Japanese term for a traditional four-part structure that’s common in classical (and contemporary) East Asian literature and storytelling. I believe the form originated from a structure of early Chinese poems. Some people call it a “plotless” story structure, but I disagree. There’s plot, in the sense that there is cause and effect at some point, it’s just that there aren’t traditional Western elements of rising action, climax, and resolution. A lot of my stories lean more toward kishōtenketsu structure, but I made it explicit in this story by dividing it into four sections.

Those four parts are, traditionally:

1. Ki/Introduction: In “Unknown by Unknown,” I just set up the character and her voice, and establish that she’s going to housesit.

2. Sho/Development: Expanding on the introduction; the narrator lives out her housesitting days. There’s more on setting and her routine. Nothing changes here for characters.

3. Ten/Twist: This is probably the closest to a climax. Something unexpected happens and this changes the character’s world or situation. (I guess I won’t spoil the story here.)

4. Ketsu/Conclusion: I like the use of the word conclusion, rather than resolution. It typically isn’t a neat ending, and the character doesn’t necessarily triumph or grow in any way. It’s just what happens after the twist.

I was never interested in virtual reality, yet I had to read after seeing this headline in an email from The Nation: The First Great Novel About Virtual Reality?

Users tapers to a slow end after Miles gets fired. His wife detaches herself from him; his kids grow distant; and he drifts away from the tech world, though not far. It is not a satisfying ending—nor should it be. Among the novel’s strengths is Winnette’s ability to capture the dissatisfaction that life online generates. While other novelists have focused on the addictive, sickening effects of endless scrolling, Winnette highlights the opposite: the slow numbing of the imagination that comes from hooking it up to machines. He renders this hooking-up literal with the Egg, but really, Miles subjugates himself to technology the moment he begins working in tech. It will not be news to many readers that handing your imagination over to capitalist powers tends to lead to destruction and unhappiness. Even so, Miles’s downward spiral is an effective and upsetting reminder that there’s more to lose on the Internet than just time and money.

Folks, the government thinks I am a very dangerous person because of what I once did on the Internet. I used to think this was a silly idea, then along came the January 6 insurrection. What I saw scared me and sickened me and angered me, but I did not think of acting out in the real world what I played with online. A caning video did not make me think reenacting that video was a thing to do. I did have a conversation with a friend at Fort Dix FCI (a SO also, but one who was more involved with viewing than me who was trying to get in good with a woman of 34 years in Columbus, Ohio). He told me he was scared that he might act on what he saw. That the prospect scared him, I think indicates the likelihood of taking action was slight. I am not a Luddite, regardless of what some friends might say, but I am one who thinks there is a danger on the Internet. There are weak-minded people who cannot (do not?) differentiate between what they see and hear online and the real world. They are not all Trumpers. It is also dangerous to attribute the danger to an erroneous cause. Call me lucky, that where I got compulsive about clicking links and spending time was Wikipedia.

Dinner time. 6:55

The Evening:

I cannot get the beans done. I ordered just now (7:40) from Panda Express.

Zadie Smith, Gen X Writers, Wondering Where I Fit In:

I quote a lot from Come as You Are by Adam Kirsch, a review of Zadie Smith's new novel. First, because I find Zadie Smith fascinating in and of herself. Secondly, because of the literary history of which I had no idea and was (am) rather removed from. 

Batuman was a college sophomore in 1996, presumably experiencing many of the things that happen to Selin in Either/Or. But by the time she began to fictionalize those events twenty years later, she joined a group of writers who defined themselves, ethically and aesthetically, in opposition to the older representatives of Generation X. For all their literary and biographical differences, writers like Nicole Krauss, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin share some basic assumptions and aversions—including a deep skepticism toward anyone who claims to speak for a generation, or for any entity larger than the self.

That skepticism is apparent in the title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. Smith’s precocious success—her first book, White Teeth, was published in 2000, when she was twenty-four—can make it easy to think of her as a contemporary of Wallace and Wurtzel. In fact she was born in 1975, two years before Batuman, and her sensibility as a writer is connected to her generational predicament.

Smith’s latest book is, most obviously, a response to the paradoxical populism of the late 2010s, in which the grievances of “ordinary people” found champions in elite figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rather than write about current events, however, Smith has elected to refract them into a story about the Tichborne case, a now-forgotten episode that convulsed Victorian England in the 1870s

***

What Smith is dramatizing, of course, is the experience of so many liberal intellectuals over the past decade who had believed themselves to be on the side of “the people” only to find that, whether the issue was Brexit or Trump or COVID-19 protocols, the people were unwilling to heed their guidance, and in fact loathed them for it. It is in order to get to the bottom of this phenomenon that Eliza keeps attending the Tichborne trial, in much the same spirit that many liberal journalists reported from Trump rallies. Things get even more complicated when she befriends a witness for the defense, Mr. Bogle, who is among the Claimant’s main supporters even though he began his life as a slave on a Jamaica plantation managed by Edward Tichborne, the Claimant’s supposed father.

I have returned to writing fiction after giving up any effort in this direction after 40 years. I do not know if I belong to anything like the generational grouping described here.

 By the end of the millennium, this was the familiar voice of Generation X. Loquacious and self-involved, its ironic grandiosity barely concealed a sincere grandiosity about its moral mission, which was to defeat despair and foster genuine human connection. Jonathan Franzen, Wallace’s realist rival, titled a book of essays How to Be Alone, and for these writers, loneliness was the great problem that literature was created to solve. “If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness,” Franzen wrote in his much-discussed essay “Perchance to Dream,” published in these pages in 1996. Eggers seems to have taken this idea literally, creating a nonprofit, 826 Valencia, that advertises writing mentorship for underserved students as a way of “building community” and rectifying inequality.

If sincerity and connection were the greatest virtues for these writers, the greatest sin was “snark.” That word gained literary currency thanks to a manifesto by Heidi Julavits in the first issue of The Believer, the magazine she co-founded in 2003 with the novelist Vendela Vida (Eggers’s wife) and the writer Ed Park. The title of the essay—“Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!”—like the title of the magazine, insisted that literature was an essentially moral enterprise, a matter of goodness, courage, and love. To demur from this vision was to reveal a smallness of soul that Julavits called snark: “wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake,” a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” For Kafka, a book was an axe for the frozen sea within; for the older cohort of Gen X writers, it was more like a hacksaw to cut through the barred cell of cynicism.

This was the environment—quiescent in politics, self-consciously sincere in literature—in which Smith and her contemporaries came of age. Just as they started to publish their first books, however, the stopped clock of history resumed with a vengeance. It is unnecessary to list the series of political and geopolitical shocks that have occurred since 2000. For the millennial generation, adulthood has been defined by apocalyptic fears, political frenzy, and glimpses of utopia, whether in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 or in New York’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

I came too late for Sixties style idealism – as well as being in the wrong place geographically. However, I did come in time for Nixon and Vietnam and the Oil Embargo and Watergate and stagflation and the collapse of General Motors. I do not think my generation – let's call them the Class of 1978 – were not idealistic, but rather cynical and practical. For music, we did not have (first-hand, anyway) The Beatles or Jefferson Airplane or The Rolling Stone or Bob Dylan. We had KISS and David Bowie and Lyrnyrd Skynryd and Bad Company and Elton John and Black Sabbath. Kurt Vonnegut was big. So was science fiction, like Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert. None were part of our generation.

The dream of uniting the sophistication of art with the straightforwardness of justice also animates Lerner’s fiction, where it often takes the form of rueful comedy. In 10:04, the narrator cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, but when asked how often he has been to Zuccotti Park, he dodges the question. His activism is limited to cooking, which he pompously describes as a way of being “a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community.” That the dream never becomes more than a dream betrays Lerner’s similarity to Lin, Heti, and Cole, who frankly acknowledge the hiatus between art and justice, though without celebrating it.

Zadie Smith has always been too deeply rooted in the social comedy of the English novel to embrace autofiction, yet she also registers this disconnect, as can be seen in the way her influences have shifted over time. When it was first published, White Teeth was compared to Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld as a work of what James Wood called “hysterical realism.” The book’s arch humor, proliferating plot, and penchant for exaggeration owe much to the author Wood identified as the “parent” of that genre: Charles Dickens.

When Smith says that a woman “needed no bra—she was independent, even of gravity,” she is borrowing Dickens’s technique of making characters so intensely themselves that their essence saturates everything around them—as when he writes of the nouveau riche Veneerings, in Our Mutual Friend, that “their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new.” Dickens is a guest star in The Fraud, appearing at several of William Ainsworth’s dinner parties, and the news of his death prompts Eliza Touchet to offer an apt tribute: “She knew she lived in an age of things . . . and Charles had been the poet of things.”

But Dickens, who at another point in the novel is gently disparaged for his moralizing “sermons,” is no longer the presiding genius of Smith’s fiction. (Smith wrote in a recent essay that her first principle in taking up the historical novel was “no Dickens,” and she expressed a wry disappointment that he had forced his way into the proceedings.) Her 2005 novel, On Beauty, was a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and while her style has continued to evolve from book to book, Forster’s influence has been clear ever since, in everything from her preference for short chapters to her belief in “keep[ing] one’s mind open.”

***

Whether they style themselves as humanists or aesthetes, realists or visionaries, the most powerful writers who were born in the Seventies share this basic aloofness. To the next generation, the millennials, their disengagement from the collective struggle may seem reprehensible. For me, as I suspect is the case for many readers my age, it is part of what makes them such reliable guides to understanding, if not the times we live in, then at least the disjunction between the times and the self that must try to negotiate them.

I belong to the Boom Generation; its tail end, to be specific. After reading this article and while writing this bit, I decided to see who are considered Boomer novelists. I do not agree the AARP's novels are Boomer novelists – they may have influenced Boomers, but I do not think they were all written by Boomers. Of Grandfolk's Ten Top Baby Boomer Authors Review, I only recognize Stephen King. I am not sure that Freelance Writing's The Genesis of Boomer Literature: A Brief History, even though it contains a definition:

    A definition has already been put forward by two writers, Stephen Woodfin and Caleb Pirtle who are members of the group:”Boomer books reflect fundamental human issues and can be any genre, but they are character-driven stories centered around those who have the experience to understand life: its trials, its tribulations, its triumphs, and its contradictions.” And that understanding can only come about with the accumulation of years and experience…

Wikipedia has a list of novelists born in 1960. I am the same age as Ian Rankin and Kenneth Branagh and Jeffrey Eugenides; I have no idea what we all have in common.  Wikipedia also has a page for 1955 in literature, also with a list of births. Here I recognize quite a few names. Nope, I am not sure what I do have in common with other Boomers.

KH thinks I am having trouble placing my stories because I am writing about people my age, and I am writing in the times I have lived.

Firefox crashed after writing a long paragraph, it is 10:51, and I am not sure if I want to rewrite that paragraph. What I will say instead, is that I do not feel the part of any generational thinking. I do not see that what I call the Class of 1978 were particularly idealistic; we had seen the failure of Sixties idealism; we were practical, needing to make a living. The “producer” of the Lerner example (see above) sets my teeth on edge. I may not have had great faith in action, but I have no respect for the dilettante do-gooder. In fact, I find do-gooders to be dangerous people, idealists seeking to make reality conform to their ideals regardless of the death toll incurred while imposing their ideals. Injustice may be the target of art, but enforcing justice belongs to the political world.

 Indiana news:

Foster children sue DCS in class action suit – Indiana Capital Chronicle:

Ten children in the state’s foster care system sued the Indiana Department of Child services (DCS) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana on Wednesday, alleging that the agency failed to provide for the children’s care and left them in placements known to be “dangerous.”

“DCS’s system failures are well-known to state officials, who have failed to act to address those failures. The lawsuit seeks a range of remedies, including lower caseloads, the development of additional, appropriate placements and services, and far better accountability,” a press release from the national nonprofit A Better Childhood said.

What's great about Indiana – how little changes here. A person could be gone from the state for 11 years and not be terribly confused by what is going on in the state.

Book banning, reshelving has reached ridiculous heights – Indiana Capital Chronicle:

Indianapolis author John Green last week brought national attention to an ongoing attempt by the Hamilton East Public Library to move young adult books to adult sections. And while he got a reversal, hundreds of other books have been similarly mislabeled — the issue is far from over.

The turnover of four appointments last year at the Hamilton East Public Library introduced new members — including conservative hardliner and pastor Micah Beckwith — who set their sights on limiting access to books, especially in the children’s and young adult section.

Some other book banning news: Districts Are Turning to AI to Ban Books: Book Censorship News, August 18, 2023, and Teacher Loses Appeal To Get Job Back After Being Fired For Reading A Book To Her Class.

No, I do not approve. I have one question: who benefits from banning books?

Which leads to - 

The End of America? 

It is time for a change. The Electoral College proved the failure of The Founders' vision by electing Donald J. Trump. The Electoral College was meant to check the people from electing a would-be dictator. 

 From The Washington Post, American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.

The newer element, which has gathered strength in recent decades, is the deepening polarization of the political system. Various factors have caused this: shifts within the two parties that have enlarged the ideological gap between them; geographic sorting that has widened the differences between red and blue states; a growing urban-rural divide; and greater hostility among individuals toward political opponents.

The result is that today, a minority of the population can exercise outsize influence on policies and leadership, leading many Americans increasingly to feel that the government is a captive of minority rule.

Twice in the past two decades, the president was elected while losing the popular vote — George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. That had happened only three times in the previous 200-plus years. The dynamic extends beyond the presidency to the other two branches of government.

A new Washington Post analysis found that four of the nine current justices on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population. Since 1998, Republicans have had a majority in the Senate a total of 12 years but did not during that time represent more than half the nation’s population, The Post’s analysis of population data and Senate composition shows.

The Post also found that during Trump’s presidency, 43 percent of all judicial and governmental nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. Under President Biden, not quite 5 percent of nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.

The state of democracy is not uniformly negative. In moments of crisis especially, elected officials have found common ground. At times, government action does reflect the public will. Under Trump, bipartisan congressional majorities passed and the president signed multiple rounds of relief during the covid-19 pandemic. Biden and Congress came together to pass a major infrastructure package in 2021. Last year, there was bipartisan agreement on legislation to spur production of semiconductor chips in the United States.

At times, protection of minorities and their rights from the will of the majority is needed and necessary. Checks and balances afford further protections that nonetheless can seem to hamstring government’s ability to function effectively. But on balance, the situation now is dire. Americans are more dissatisfied with their government than are citizens in almost every other democracy, according to polling.

Henry Brady, professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has been studying these issues for many years. As he surveys the current state of the United States’ democracy, he comes away deeply pessimistic. “I’m terrified,” he said. “I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”

And there I leave. Hopefully, you learned a little, and maybe I have given you something to think about. Have a good day.

sch