Insanity, Just Insanity - Revising, Again.

 I am nuts,. After work, I went to Walmart for stew meat and garlic and friend chicken. In hand, I had a sack full of red cabbage slices. Strangeness at Walmart – I am trying to find the garlic when I heard some girl say she wanted some cabbage to make a salad. She looked like a Ball State student and the fellow with her I took to be her father. I gave her about half of my cabbage and a bunch of the sliced carrots. Back here around 4 pm. Only to have the power go out – except for the computer.

After a dinner of leftover beans and chicken, I worked on my novella  “Road Tripping”? I keep getting ideas, or hating bits, and changing things. I want to get it out the door in the near future. However, I am sick of it right now, tonight I want to work on MW's database. I do not find myself a brilliant writer – I come up with something that feels like a story, and then I have to work and work and work to make it even a decent work. Well, decent in that it does not make want to delete the whole thing. Decent for an editor remains an open question, albeit one tending towards not. I worked on the diner parking lot section. It may be that removing three of my characters and the running commentary for a submission to Long River Review may have sparked all these changes. I kicked out much in the way of vagueness, added a bit more biography and tightened the narrator's epiphany in the hope of explaining why there is more of the story. I suppose in a way, this has been for me the hard part of the story, this explanation. The narrator has been up to now more fuzzy-headed on his motivation than I was. Now, he gets the insight that he needs to get back to his family roots to find a purpose for the rest of his life. I do not think I can do a single thing more here. Which is not to mean it is great writing, only I have reached the limits of talent.

I had CC on my mind yesterday. My meditations left me realizing debts have been paid, and that I no longer like or trust her. The latter does not mean I would not try to help her, but the former does say it is time to stop. There is nothing I can do for her since she does not think I can help. What will come her way is obvious to everyone, other than herself. Any further efforts would only be a waste of time and energy and leave her even more angry with me.

On the other hand, there is good news for Muncie in Delaware County home prices rose 11.7% in August, with houses listed at a median of $150,625. Then, too, this might be insanity – do you want to live here?

The median home in Delaware County listed for $150,625 in August, up 11.7% from the previous month's $134,900, an analysis of data from Realtor.com shows.

Compared to August 2022, the median home list price increased 11.6% from $132,400.

Delaware County's median home was 1,800 square feet, listed at $91 per square foot. The price per square foot of homes for sale is up 4.8% from August 2022.

Homes in Delaware County were moving briskly compared to the August national average, with a median of 35 days on the market for listed houses. In the previous month, homes had a median of 33 days on the market. Around 168 homes were newly listed on the market in August, a 35.5% increase from 124 new listings in August 2022.

A bit of fun this morning from Fulling Mill: Wild Trout in Wild Places.

A novel and novelist I never heard of in The Marvelous Real: Leonardo Padura on Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps which goes to show my ignorance and what lies out there to learn from.

In other words: I’ve asked myself why a reader of the twenty-first century, a user of social media, surely, a fanatic or fanatical repudiator of the cinema of Quentin Tarantino, an aloof consumer of “ephemeral” art (a real banana taped to a real wall, sold—just the banana—for $120,000 and immediately replaced by another banana that will be sold in turn), a devourer of Yuval Noah Harari’s unsettling 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which speaks abundantly of artificial intelligence and future uncertainty…why this reader, I repeat, would be interested in reading a novel titled The Lost Steps, which speaks of possible voyages in real time (not virtual, not future) and was published in the for-many remote year of 1953. Why? What might one hope to get out of it?

In this—my ninth or tenth reading of this novel by Alejo Carpentier—convinced that I will still encounter new surprises, that its congenial story will take me in once more, I think of the values and qualities that transform great works of art into permanent revelations, polysemic, defined by their privileged resistance to the blows of time in a war that levels so many walls and pedestals, an unceasing chronological struggle that, in our day, a day of influencers who feign to possess “the truth,” has taken on the proportions of a massacre at speeds so vertiginous they make obsolete by night what was the height of novelty in the morning.

Art entails a kind of knowledge that is undoubtedly transcendent in character. And yet art must be, is, something more. Aesthetic creation possesses the faculty of showing from within to humanity, as a universal entity beyond time, the reality that surrounds it, and of reflecting through it and within it the doubts, uncertainties, and even the revelations and learning that characterize us. Only in this way is it possible to make sense of the fact that today we read, and beyond that are moved by, the classics of the Greek tragedians (poor Oedipus, Prometheus forever bound), that the outrages of Lady Macbeth still horrify us, that the absurd adventures of Don Quixote provoke laughter and compassion in similar degrees. This is why George Orwell’s 1984, written in the middle of the foregoing century with reference to a future that is already past, remains so disturbing and revealing in our present place and time.

Sheriff today. I have my stew in the crock pot, ready to turn on. All the fixings were put together last night during one of Gmail's crashes. No working on "Road Tripping" tonight!

I received a rejection the other day, which I forgot to post:

Thank you for sending us "The Kids Are Not All Right". We appreciate the chance to read it but we won't be able to publish it at this time. We hope you will submit other works. Thanks for supporting the Indiana Writers Center.

Thanks again.
Sincerely,
David Hassler
Flying Island Literary Journal

I did not know it has been 50 years since Jim Croce died. If you do not know who he was, check out the video below. For those who do, give Ted Gioia's Jim Croce and Me.

Must run, now.

sch