Happy, Happy Labor Day!

Happy Labor Day! I have been working.

I finished typing up “Theresa Pressley Attends Mike Devlin's Viewing.” The “Dead and Dying” stories are typed. The need polishing. I finished last night with 885 words and finished overall after adding almost another 4100 words. It was fits and starts, again. I cut roughly 8 pages from the typewritten MS I brought home from prison. It would probably be more since I added new dialog, too. 

It would have helped if I had gotten up at 5 AM, as planned, instead of 7. Daylight was wasting.

Also done today was my laundry.

I made my daily visit to McClure's. No other exercise. If I do not get this stuff typed my health does not really matter.

 I wrote Why I Think Reparations for Racism Are Just this morning – belated but necessary.

Yesterday (when not writing), I went to church. A very nice fellow gave me a ride down to St. George’s in Fishers. The first liturgy since 2012. It is a beautiful church, beautiful choir, and it got my mind off work and the world. It looks like this will be a regular occurrence from now on.

I napped after getting back. Wasted about 3 hours, included a trip for supplies from McClure's.

Last night, I tried reading Not Showing, Not Telling. It has one fault – it is making me think. I think there will be a longer post coming out of my reading. Meanwhile, writers do check it out.

Some of yesterday's reading I meant to include in the post I did not write yesterday:

Education Minister Norma Foley to back primary schools in banning smartphones (an idea I can get behind here):

Education Minister Norma Foley is to back primary schools which want to ban smartphones and she will give them measures and supports in a significant policy move by the Government.

The Sunday Independent can reveal that, amid growing concerns over the effect of smartphones on children’s physical and mental health and well-being, she is to announce plans within weeks to support schools looking to ban smartphones.

Book reviews came in from The Guardian.

Holly by Stephen King review – unlikely serial killers:

Eleven years later, Holly Gibney has just finished participating in her mother’s funeral over Zoom when a new client, Penny Dahl, leaves a voice message begging her to investigate her missing daughter Bonnie. Slowly, Holly begins to connect the dots between Bonnie and other disappearances in the neighbourhood over the years.

Stephen King’s resilient, solitary private detective has appeared in four recent novels – Mr Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch and The Outsider. But this, as the title implies, is her book. As a character, she leaps off the page – dogged and resourceful, drawn to a profession that requires the sorts of interpersonal skills she struggles with as someone on the autism spectrum, with obsessive-compulsive disorder and sensory processing disorder. “Tears are hard for Holly to handle”, but she has chosen a path where tears are all she sees.

 The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie review – nerds who loved words 

A few of Ogilvie’s dictionary people are lurid characters: she identifies three murderers, one cannibal and several institutionalised lunatics. Noting that “overeducation” was the official reason for confining one unfortunate woman in 1895, she wonders whether the OED can be held responsible for the diagnosis of madness; on reflection she admits that the habit of reading not for overall meaning but to pick out single words suits “quite a few of us who are neurodiverse, or who present on the autism spectrum”. Google nowadays searches texts in the same way, but there is no standard of sanity for electronic brains. Mostly, however, Ogilvie’s obsessives are harmless academics, hoarders of arcane information that passes for knowledge. She visits one Oxford household whose occupants have to sleep in the kitchen because everywhere else is stuffed with papers. Another dotty boffin perambulates in a coat whose 28 pockets store letters, books and philological offprints along with a clanking armoury of nail clippers, a knife-sharpener and a corkscrew, not to mention a scone that he carries for emergencies

Classics question: when does a novel gain this status? (Thinking of Russell Ochoki with this one)

After five years selling books, I find the word increasingly meaningless. Unavoidably, booksellers and publishers are gatekeepers, making these decisions to suit their market and make their product easier to buy. What one person regards as an outstanding example of literature, another will consider drivel. The label "classic" is increasingly bandied about with wild marketing abandon. As a bookseller specialising in modern fiction, I look at a lot of new releases with a slightly jaundiced eye. These days any amiable-looking book garlanded with just one or two admiring reviews looks positively rubbish.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch review – Ireland under fascism 

As Eilish petitions for his release while trying to maintain some semblance of normality for their four children and to care for her elderly father, who is in the early stages of dementia, the safe, ordinary world – a world made possible and predictable by the rule of law – crumbles under her like sand. “What she sees before her is an idea of order coming undone, the world slewing into a dark and foreign sea,” Lynch writes. The question the book repeatedly poses is simple but unanswerable. “I wish you would listen to me,” Eilish’s sister Áine says on the phone from Canada. “History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”

Lynch is not the first male novelist to be influenced by Cormac McCarthy, and he won’t be the last; it’s a debt he acknowledges with one of the book’s three epigraphs, a quote from The Crossing. The influence manifests as heightened, sometimes biblical language, syntax and imagery, nouns and adjectives pressed into service as verbs (Eilish “coins free” a supermarket trolley; is “suddened into” a dark room), some extremely long sentences, and an aversion to semicolons. Now and again it is as though the world of Blood Meridian bleeds directly into this book, as when Eilish “hears behind her the blatter of hooves, turns to see three horses following the road at a canter, two dappled greys and a skewbald that pass by wild-eyed and berserk”.

From Bookforum, Don DeLillo’s novels of the Cold War and its aftermath: 

This paradox—the overflow of information combined with its fundamental incomprehensibility—became for a certain kind of writer the central problem for the novel to attempt to grasp. Of course, there were other sorts of fiction flourishing too: magic realism, social and historical novels, the African American novel, the Jewish American novel, the minimalist short story, forays into metafiction from various angles at various lengths. All of these were more or less subsumed under the umbrella of postmodernism. The sort of novel I’m talking about, often thought of and taught in schools as the quintessential postmodernist novel, also goes by another name: the systems novel. As the name has caught on over the decades and its practitioners have been canonized, its origins have been obscured. The term was coined by the scholar, critic, and novelist Tom LeClair in his 1987 study In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel and expanded upon in his 1989 book The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction.

We retain a loose sense of what a systems novel is by virtue of the fact that LeClair derived his theory from and applied it to novels that are still widely read: the work of William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Coover, Joseph Heller, William S. Burroughs, and DeLillo himself. To read In the Loop today is to notice how far the use of the name “systems novel” has drifted from the terms by which LeClair originally defined it. He was looking for a paradigm and a critical framework more appropriate to these authors’ books than the one primarily associated with postmodernism: deconstruction. He turned to the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, whose magnum opus General System Theory was published in 1968, four years before his death at age seventy-one.

From von Bertalanffy’s “system of systems,” LeClair derived six criteria to define the genre. (1) Systems novels respond to “accelerating specialization (and alienation) of knowledge and work”; “tremendous growth in information and communications”; “large-scale geopolitical crises over energy and exchange (of goods information and money); and “planetary threats produced by man yet now seemingly beyond his control.” (2) They bridge the gap between C. P. Snow’s “two cultures,” the literary and the scientific. (3) “The themes of systems theory are the master subjects of literary modernism—process, multiplicity, simultaneity, uncertainty, linguistic relativity, perspectivism—but in a new larger scale of spatial and temporal relations (the ecosystem) that reflects the new scale of sociopolitical experience, including the rise of multinational corporations and global ecology.” (4) In terms of character, “‘Systems man’ is more a locus of communication and energy in a reciprocal relationship with his environment than an entity exerting force and dictating linear cause-effect sequences.” (5) Systems theory “offers the novelist a contemporary model for hypothetical formulations of wholes.” (6) Systems theory provided a “a doubled or split relation to the idea of mastery, criticizing man’s attempt to master his ecosystem and yet, in its on synthetic act, ‘mastering’ various specialties in large abstractions in order to communicate beyond specialties.”

This afternoon, I poked around The Kenyon Review to see about submitting one of my stories. I read the short story How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter by Theodore Wheeler. This I liked for content and for substance. Still, I went ahead with submitting my “Their Bright Future.”

Just now out of the shower, hoping my ride comes to take me to tonight's vespers.

I found this band, The Courettes, this morning and liked them.

 

Sympathy for the Devil is one of my least favorite Rolling Stones song, but this cover is interesting, and I suggest checking more from this band.

More later?

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