I woke before the alarm clock, thought of just sleeping in. Then I remembered it was Monday. Work lies ahead. I got out of bed. Chewed on some cheese and drank some caffeine. Foggy and chilly outside. Started writing this post.
Laundry was done yesterday.
Beans in the crock pot. Figure I will be home around 3 pm, so they should be done after 9 hours. Cooking in the liquid from yesterday's roast.
Cleaning up the Google Keep notes.
The Book Banners on the Left (Got to be fair here.)
Brando Skyhorse on the fantastic art of revision. (No reads of what I am posting about writing, but I persist.)
Helen of Troy Real—Not a Myth: Reimagining Helen’s story in early Hollywood.(Well, it is a bit of fun, and we need more of that, don't we?)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained how stupidity enables MAGA (I read Bonhoeffer in prison, applicable in this day of rising fascism. No one reds my political stuff, either. All I can see those who advocate a civil war want is to burn down the house, the equivalent of a toddler's temper tantrum. I doubt The Talking Heads will reform to be this civil war's house band.)
In Germany’s case the “act of liberation” was the country's destruction as it lost WWII. Who knows what will cause the MAGAs to come to their senses? With luck, an energized Gen Z will push an aging reactionary mob to the sidelines. With no luck, it will be the civil war Trump and his dead-enders are fomenting.
Or the end could be decades away as the Republicans at the state and federal levels shred democratic norms like ballot access, streamlined registration, early and mail-in voting, ballot measures, and representative districts while armed Brown Shirts patrol polling stations — reducing America to a Soviet-style shithole.
On the last, although I like to be right, I would prefer circumstances to prove me guilty of hyperbole and just plain wrong. Fingers crossed.
And What About Emmett Till's Killers? Turns Out The Local Black Community Took Its Revenge.
Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? (Don't you wonder why?)
When the Welfare Rights Movement Was a Powerful Force for Uplifting the Poor (When America tried rising to greatness.)
How Succession saved the English language (a show that never got my attention)
Truth being, all whines are futile. As individuals, we can resist of course, refraining from freebie and megabucks, yet one person’s defiance is never a wrench in the works. The battle is doneski. Were this power-play a boxing match, us-versus-US, the fight would long have been declared, seeing American English declared the winningest.
Lately, however, there’s been a counterpunch, a steady tide of British terms seeping into American dialogue. New Yorker Ben Yagoda, a retired professor of English, calls them NOOBs – Not Once-Off Britishisms. Back in 2011, commissioned by Slate magazine, Yagoda collated a swag. Some were subtle, like run-up or advert, presenter over anchor. While others felt faddish, like laddish or gobsmacked, telly or kerfuffle, twee or plonk.
A man at the cultural cliff-edge: How Frank Moorhouse broke the mould (biography can be guiding light, if you've got the imagination to learn. Like we need more boisterous spirits than sad sacks and whiners; the signs of the Trump Era.)
WHO WOULD BELIEVE A PRISONER?: INDIANA WOMEN’S CARCERAL INSTITUTIONS, 1848–1920 by THE INDIANA WOMEN'S PRISON HISTORY PROJECT (Hey, Indiana writers!)
Many stories have been told about Frank Moorhouse: of the writer who challenged orthodoxies around sex in Australian literature in the 1970s; of the bon vivant who won an international award in 2007 and immediately blew most of the prize money on a dinner for the assembled writers; of the author of Grand Days, which was famously knocked out of contention for the Miles Franklin Award for being insufficiently “Australian”.
In this, the first biography of Moorhouse, Catharine Lumby takes on the task of telling these stories and more with a lightness of touch that captures the vibrancy and contradictions of Moorhouse’s life.
6:13 AM
The beans turned out quite nicely.
I got off work around 1:50, walked over to 8th and Batavia for the bus, thought I missed it, but it was just very late. I got home before 3 pm.
I piddled a little, nibbling a bit, walked down to McClure's for a Coke Zero, and have now finished dinner.
Some news for the day:
- Indiana attorney general sues hospital system over privacy of Ohio girl who traveled for abortion (Rokita is at it, again.)
- Ball Brothers Foundation helps fund new canoe, kayak launches on White River in Muncie (the river is very, very low, and I see little in the way of fish – seems to me to be very optimistic but cool that they are using the river. I cannot see this happening in Anderson.)
- 'Do your job, bud': There's a lot to learn from Fetterman's takedown of Gaetz (I really like Fetterman.)
- Plot vs. Character in Storytelling
From my Clippings app:
North Woods by Daniel Mason review – an epic of American lives (This sounds interesting – as in, it may teach me something.)
The story is told in fragments that capture the lives of the inhabitants of this place. They include a young couple who have fled a Puritan colony, Native Americans defending their territories and an English soldier who decides to give up “the smell of gunpowder” and devote himself entirely to apples. There are also jealous sisters, a man engaged in “Southern business” (hunting for a runaway slave) and a hunter who hires a medium to lay ghosts to rest. His attempt fails entirely because, for Mason, history is raucous and rowdy. No character in his novel is ever entirely dead. All reappear repeatedly – and their echoes are felt in the text.
The Long Game: Inside Sinn Féin by Aoife Moore review – going mainstream.(I am far more ambivalent about the IRA than when I was young; this did not help.)
The Early Days of American English
How does it feel to read your favourite living writer after they die?
And now he wasn’t. In his superb memoir Experience, Amis describes how we engage with our favourite books. We have “a conversation” with them, “an intense argument.” We read them “frowning, nodding, withholding, qualifying, objecting, conceding – and smiling, smiling first with reluctant admiration, then smiling with unreluctant admiration.”
That’s how I’d always felt reading Amis. Now that he was dead, an unfamiliar ingredient was added to the brew: trepidation. How does it feel to read your favourite living writer when that writer stops being alive? I didn’t want it to feel any different, but I feared it was going to.
One change was apparent straight away. The things about Amis that once made me frown or object seemed suddenly unimportant. Losing a favourite writer is like losing any loved one. You forget the valleys and think about the peaks. You see the life whole. In the shadow of Amis’s death, I had no urge to revisit his lesser works. I wanted to go back to the masterpieces.
I have to work on a database program, and there are two other separate posts I want to write. I should take out the bike, too.
Ciao.
sch 4:48 PM
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