Sunday Follies

3000 words yesterday. 1400 today. I am going through the short stories, trying to get some order restored. Not bragging – it is damned tiring. And we are not talking bout revising them, yet. Albeit, the last two I do not see much revising to be done.

I have found a new rockabilly band – Jack Rabbit Slim – that is superb. 

And this morning, I acquired a new chair.

 Stumped: Beckett and Pinter come out to bat in delightful literary game sounds like an interesting play, but I read Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot when I was around 15. Harold Pinter came to be read at a much later age, when I was in prison.

There is something of the parlour trick about Shomit Dutta’s two-hander featuring Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. The play opens with the two men waiting to bat at a cricket match in the Cotswolds. This scenario is fact-adjacent: Pinter and Beckett were friends and they both played cricket. Into this mix swirls Dutta’s own cricketing interest: a classics scholar, he was a member of Pinter’s showbiz cricket team, the Gaieties Cricket Club. So the action in the play is not based on actual fact, but facts underpin it all the same.

The two playwrights banter in smart lines that contain the linguistic playfulness of Beckett and the prickliness of Pinter. In describing a cricket match played for Trinity in 1925, Beckett says he was “mopped up by a bowler named Towel”; puns abound in this playful text. Barry McGovern sports a Beckettian tuft of hair, and Michael James Ford’s hair is darkened to mirror Pinter as a younger man. The performances are not impersonations as such, rather more interpretations. A wry, cranky humour underpins McGovern’s spiky Beckett. Ford, as Pinter, is a more pacifying presence, easing the irascible older man along with placations and whiskey.

Then, too, there is cricket, a game I find incomprehensible. 

I have read little of Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem and one novel), but I find her intriguing. (I had a teacher in high school upon whom I had a crush who had a Didion book in her classroom and I tend to associate them). So I recommend “The Only Sensible Person in the World”: 10 Perspectives on Joan Didion from Ted Gioia.

Another rejection came in the email:

We have carefully considered your submission, "Aftermath," and regret that we do not have a place for it in Indiana Review. We appreciate your support and wish you luck placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Indiana Review

 I talked to CC, said she should come up for dinner – talk about holding out hope in the face of reality.

Which is why I submitted stories this afternoon.

• “The Sloe Gin Effect” went to The Bookends Review and The Talon Review.
• “True Love Ways Gone Astray” went to Mud Season Review and The Write Launch

 I edited “True Love Ways Gone Astray” since both publications had a 6,000-word limit. I did it by a massive cut at the beginning, a shorter and tighter opening, and a little off the back. There was no need to cut anything from the middle. It came to me while I was trying to think what to submit, and it came to me to turn “True Love Ways Gone Astray” into more of a group portrait. It is now not so much of a story of one person who is surrounded by others. I liked what I did enough to place a $5 bet on the piece.

 

It is 5:48 and I want to take a short bike ride.

The bike ride happened. The left knee is bothering me nowadays. 

I also walked down to Dollar General. I went through 4 liters of Coke Zero. Also, I needed a block of cheese.

Dinner was good. I did some tidying up. A pretrial detention post. A call to my niece. Nomu CC, of course.

Done for the day.

sch 9:13 Pm