Work, Rejection, Factory Work in Indiana, Shakespeare, Vespers

Work was not so good today – my back kind of locked up on me. But I got more time on the clock. I did not get home until 2:30 – 45 minutes instead of 90. I showered, got ready to go to the Orthodox vespers service. I got through some email and reading before the bus came.

Another rejection arrived in my email:

Thank you for sharing your work! We appreciate the time and energy you put into sending it to us.

We’ve chosen not to publish "The Local Boy Who Made Good" at Atticus Review, but we are very grateful for the opportunity to read your work. We wish you well in your continued writing and hope you keep us in mind if you have other things you think might be a good fit!

Sincerely,

z kennedy-lopez

Fiction Editor, Atticus Review

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 Just more proof “The Dead and Dying” stories do not work as standalones.

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From my reading:

I would think we are 30 years from needing to be told this by Michael Hicks: Face facts, factory jobs aren't coming back.

My second question is: “In what year did manufacturing employment peak in Indiana?” The answer to that question is 1973. Nearly every audience has someone who gets close to the right answer. So, what happened?

Well, three big things happened. Estimates vary, but maybe a quarter of factory jobs, mostly from 1990 to 2007, were lost to foreign competition. The rest were lost due to productivity—workers and factories simply got better at making goods. But, there’s a catch even here. Close to half those manufacturing jobs that were lost to productivity and trade weren’t really lost; they were just reclassified from ‘manufacturing’ to ‘professional services.’ These are the people who service robots, design factory modifications, teach Lean Six Sigma, provide security, take out the trash or write computer code.

These facts set up some deep and uncomfortable questions about state and local policy. Right away it is important to note that manufacturing in Indiana is an important and healthy sector of our economy. It is a source of rapid productivity growth, innovation, and wealth creation. Factories can be great places to work, particularly the newer, safer facilities, where workers are better paid. For state and local governments, manufacturing could be an important source of tax revenue to sustain roads, public safety, education, and quality of life.

One thing manufacturing will not be is a growing source of jobs. This has been true for a half century, and it’d be helpful if everyone admitted that obvious truth.

The good news is that should not be a problem for our economy. For every factory job Indiana lost since 1973, other industries created seven more jobs. Most of these jobs pay better than the factory jobs they replaced. In fact, nationwide, the data is even better. We’ve lost about 6.5 million factory jobs since the national peak in 1979, but created more than 66 million jobs elsewhere.

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Of course, we aren’t anywhere near that level of discourse. Instead, we get too many adults telling students to plan on a future with growing factory jobs. And, we have too many communities working to get those new factory jobs, instead of preparing for a different future. That’s a dismal combination of mistakes, that surely explains part of the ongoing stagnation of much of the Midwest.

 Since being home, I hear people my age – and a little younger – complaining about the loss of factory jobs. Twenty years ago, in Anderson, I know there were people waiting for GM to come back – and some of those were people running the town. That I always said they thought it was still 1973 makes me feel a bit more intelligent than usual.

Something we will never see from Indiana's governor: Gretchen Whitmer Is Taking Her Defense Of Abortion, LGBTQ+ Rights Directly To Red States:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has been promoting her state as a place that respects freedom ― as in, the ability to control what happens to your body, who you love, or how you identify yourself.

Now Whitmer is taking that message directly to some states where those freedoms are under assault.

Last week, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) launched a digital ad campaign touting the state’s commitment to inclusiveness and personal liberty. Its target is a half-dozen mostly Southern states where Republicans are in charge and have passed laws restricting abortion, LGBTQ+ rights or both.

There seems to me a connection between the Hicks column above and this headline: Loch Ness monster enthusiasts gear up for biggest search in 50 years.  

Monday seems to be full of stories of delusional types The idea that imprisonment ‘corrects’ prisoners stretches back to some of the earliest texts in history.

The notion that imprisonment can be good is pervasive, but is it accurate? How prison systems think about reform is very different today than how the “Hymn to Nungal” envisions it. Yet the powerful idea that suffering can be good for prisoners has deep historical roots – allowing incarceration systems to claim that the suffering within their walls is compassionate.

I keep reading how the United States Bureau of Prisons backs rehabilitation, and it must be a different BOP that I lived under for 11 years.

 I got home a little before 8 pm. One fellow gave me a ride home. It was a very good time. Why is it that Orthodox Christians can be sincere without also being preachy. Waiting on KH to call.

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I published Shakespeare – The Human Condition earlier today. In this evening's email came my email newsletter from American Theatre with this article by Wendy Smith, Reading Race Through Shakespeare, and Vice Versa. She reviews two books (one mentioned in my earlier post):

Absolutely he does, assert two provocative new books examining the racial attitudes expressed in the plays and in generations of gatekeeping white scholarship. Farah Karim-Cooper, education director at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London and author of several previous Shakespearean studies, takes a wide-ranging look at nearly a dozen texts, aiming to remove the playwright from his pedestal as The Great White Bard and immerse him in the hurly-burly of his time—and ours. Elizabethan particulars that raise contemporary issues are also the focus of Ian Smith, professor of humanities at Lafayette College and vice president of the Shakespeare Association of America, though he takes a narrower approach in Black Shakespeare, assessing Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet (yes, Hamlet) in a dense scholarly text.

I think I like this woman. Shakespeare is better than he is taught. 

Ian Smith gives Shakespeare even more credit in a fascinating exegesis of the first two scenes in Othello. Pointing to the striking contrast between the “black ram,” “thick lips,” and “devil” Moor described by white Venetians in Othello’s absence, and the confident, statesman-like general who enters to calmly explain with dignity the reasons for his marriage, Smith asserts, “Shakespeare mounts an assault on racist assumptions…forcing the English playgoers’ self-awareness of deeply held religious and racial bias.” It’s a stretch to impute this level of racial consciousness to a white Englishman born in 1564, no matter how multicultural Elizabeth society was. (Both Smith and Karim-Cooper spend a good deal of time reminding readers that the Age of Exploration brought many kinds of people to England, including enslaved Africans in the dark early days of the global trade in human flesh.) Nonetheless, Smith’s take on Othello offers much food for thought, as does his analysis of an enigmatic passage in The Merchant of Venice.

If Shakespeare has captured the human experience, then race must be addressed. I thoroughly endorse Ms. Smith's conclusion: 

Any critic who analyzes Shakespeare from a particular point of view—through the critical lens of race, in the case of these two stimulating books—risks being accused of reductive special pleading. But anyone who has seen more than one or two Shakespearean productions knows that his plays not only accommodate many different interpretations but thrive on them. Each new reading enriches our understanding, and none is the final word on his capacious art. By carefully explicating under-known or disregarded race-inflected language and attitudes in Shakespeare’s texts, The Great White Bard and Black Shakespeare take crucial steps forward in this never-finished project.

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I may be reading too much about Christopher Marlowe, but I think a way of updating Tamburlaine. It may be a bit of a burlesque, but it will be making the audience uncomfortable. 

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I will be finishing one more post for this blog, then I am calling it a night.

I talked to my eldest niece. I suggested she go to an Orthodox Church close by to her. She sounded interested.

The vespers service was simple – it is just a prayer meeting, but it was good to be in the community, again. It felt right being there.

sch 9:36 PM