I got to the sheriff's after work, then I almost fell asleep on the bus back home. Maybe it was the sandwich I got at Twin Archers. I did sleep for about 2 hours this afternoon.
I am now being tracked by FeedSpot, which has a list of Indiana blogs.
I have spent the evening trying to get through my email and failing. Some highlights follow. What I did not get done today, I pushed off to the future.
One of my versions of "Psychotic Ape" got another rejection:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read “The Psychotic Ape Pays A Visit.” I appreciate the time and effort you took to send it in for consideration. Although it does not fit the needs of the magazine at this time, I wish you luck in placing it elsewhere.
I hope you will continue to consider us for future submissions.
Warmest regards,
JW Stebner
Editor in chief
Hexagon SF Magazine
This was my latest version, which is a bit of a downer. I am thinking this will be a story that willl not be sent out again.
One problem my writing lacks, or so it seems tonight, is Don’t over-explain default objects and gestures, another very good post from Nathan Bransford. Redundancy of words, ideas may be more of a real issue for me. I do my own typing, I do not want to type one word more than I need!
....the controversies of Hunter Biden – a podcast from Ireland's The Independent.
Data gathered from the UK Biobank, an online database of medical and lifestyle records of around 500,000 people, suggests middle-aged and older adults who consumed a daily 30g serving of nuts – including walnuts, almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, hazelnuts, and pistachios – were less likely to report taking antidepressants or getting diagnosed with depression.
While the findings, published in the journal Clinical Nutrition, do not explain why this happens, the researchers speculate that anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties of nuts may have a protective effect.
The team said nuts contain essential nutrients – in the form of bioactive substances such as phenols or phytosterols, essential micronutrients, fibre, high-quality protein, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, and vitamins – that could play a beneficial role in mental health.
From Ploughshares and Amelia Brown: The Destruction of the World in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes its title from Blake, from one of the poems that Dizzy and Janina have translated together, called “Proverbs of Hell.” The poem reads: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. / Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” Together, the proverbs are a kind of satanic boast, focused on human power and the right to pleasure-taking. Blake is a constant fixture throughout Drive Your Plow—short couplets of his precede each chapter, and there are several scenes devoted to watching Janina and Dizzy translate. Despite all of this attention paid, Janina admits to not being quite sure what to make of him: “I couldn’t make head or tail of the beautiful, dramatic images that Blake conjured up in words.” In fact, Blake introduces contradiction into the terms of the novel. Towards the end of “Proverbs of Hell,” there is a line that seems to contradict Janina’s perspective entirely: “Where man is not nature is barren.” The poem is from a larger work of Blake’s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which is, at its core, about contradiction. Hell encourages revolt, and Heaven order. Somehow, Blake argues, we each need to find our balance between the two. It is impossible to be a human and not look for what can help us thrive. But it is difficult to look constantly for what we can take without harming the people and world around us. In Tokarczuk’s terms, people give themselves the right to determine what is useful, but we also give ourselves the power to decide when we (and others) have taken enough.
Is there anything that can withstand the onslaught of our search for utility? In describing her “useless” friends, Janina gives us her answer: “A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.” Until the “useless” are all gone, we might add, from our perch at the end of the world.
The Rumpus reviewed The Mind of a Female Killer: My Men by Victoria Kielland, which I actually blundered into, but had seen a notice of this novel elsewhere. Indiana plays a big part in this novel.
My Men, a novel by the Norwegian writer Victoria Kielland, offers both a dark twist on the immigrant novel and a lyrical retelling of a gripping true-crime case. Based on the real-life story of Byrnhild Størset—a Norwegian woman who came to the United States in the late nineteenth century, whose name was later Americanized to Belle Gunness—My Men diverges from the traditional portrait of an immigrant adjusting to a new life and depicts instead a woman driven by punishing circumstances of intense poverty, social ostracism, and gender-based violence toward notoriety as America’s first female serial killer. Gunness’s story has inspired ballads, films, a work of nonfiction, and a novel by another Norwegian writer which was written originally in English. For Kielland, who writes in her subject’s first language and centers her novel on Gunness’s interiority, Kielland avoids the pitfalls of distance and exotification that other works about Gunness might be more inclined towards to get as close as possible to her protagonist’s psychological landscape.
The real Belle Gunness immigrated to America from Norway in the 1880s, settling first in Chicago where she had an older sister and working grueling, underpaid jobs as a domestic servant and butcher’s assistant until she met and married Mads Sørensen. The couple owned a candy shop, though later it and their home suspiciously burnt down. Two infant children, supposedly their own, later died, and then Mads also passed under murky circumstances. In all cases, Gunness collected gains from insurance policies. After Mads’ death, Belle purchased a farm in La Porte, Indiana, and married her second husband, Peter Gunness. He, too, died of a suspicious injury, with the insurance money ending up once again with Belle. After this, Gunness began luring potential suitors to her farm, tempting them out of their solitude through “lonely hearts” classifieds, only for them
About this novel:
The novel’s prose is characterized by a highly saturated, ripe sensuality that remains palpable and powerful in the translation by Damion Searls. At moments, the writing soars, and these tend to be the moments of not only intense emotion and interiority but also of propulsive storytelling. But there are times when one wonders if Kielland’s insistent use of rhapsodic corporeality—of touch, toxicity, surface, and color, of creaking and leaking and blending and blurring—is a needless endeavor to avoid what are frequently perceived as the usual traps of prose in thrillers: the traps of being overly simplistic, inclined to cliché, and willing to sacrifice poetry at the altar of page-turning plot. As a corrective, Kielland’s prose occasionally lapses into an opposite sacrifice, that of pace and clarity at the altar of poetry.
But this lyrical waxing doesn’t take away from the persuasion of My Men, a necessary repudiation of the uplifting immigrant arc, a kind of antithesis to Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Both novels use determiners in their titles, the former inspiring menace and the latter evoking affection; both are centered on late nineteenth century working-class émigrés who find in America an overwhelming combination of a seemingly endless, open landscape and a community of closed minds. But while Cather’s eponymous Antonia rises above rumor and gossip through resilience, optimism, and an irresistibly endearing authenticity, forging happiness on her own terms, the story of Kielland’s Belle is alternatively uncomfortable and haunting. It is one so often not told because of what it says about our history and society. Both stories are based on real women, though only the latter made headlines (the woman who inspired Cather’s Antonia led a blissfully unremarkable life, if that in itself was not remarkable in a climate so deeply inhospitable to women and working-class immigrants).
Nine Novellas For Our Current Age of Distraction – in case you are looking for something to read; from LitHub.
I managed a trip to McClure's before the monsoon hit. It is still raining.
I am going to turn off the TV, listen to some music and read. I finished Henon's book on Marlowe.
sch
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment