I started this yesterday with some notes to things readon Thursday, Sorry, I have been just too tired by the time I should be writing up my day.
Thursday dealing with dad's trust led me astray. I was supposed ot get with Gabb and see about a doctor and read my mail, before getting at "Road Tripping." I did almost none of that. I think I worked 2, 3 paragraphs of my story.
I even got home early - around 3, 3:30. It had been a full day at work. Oh, yeah, I grabbed the #2, then I made a stop at the convenience store on Jackson, grabbing the same bus as it headed back into town. That way, I need to go nowhere after I got home.
The pork shoulder was done. I ate some of that.
Tired during the day, tired at night, and tired when I woke up yesterday.
What Does “Fascist” Actually Mean?
Rather than treating fascism as a singular event or identifying it with a particular configuration of European parties, regimes and ideologies, for the purposes of thinking in and against our own day we need ‘to see fascism within the totality of its “process”’ This also entails approaching fascism in the longue durée, to perceive it as a dynamic that precedes its naming. It means understanding fascism as intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination – which, albeit mutable and sometimes contradictory, have a certain consistency at their core. W. E. B. Du Bois gave this core a name, still usable today: ‘the counter-revolution of property’. For all their deep differences and dissimilarities, the Ku Klux Klan terrorism against Black Reconstruction, the rise of squadrismo against labour organising in Italy, or the murderous codification of neoliberalism in Chile’s constitution can all be understood under that heading.
I do not intend ‘late fascism’ to operate like an academic brand, in competition with other names for our dire present. It is there to name a problem. At its most basic, like ‘late capitalism’ or ‘late Marxism’, it gestures toward the fact that fascism, like other political phenomena, varies according to its socioeconomic context. More provocatively, perhaps, it underscores how ‘classical’ fascist fixes – so intimately bound to the capitalist crises of their time, but also to an era of mass manual labour, universal male conscription for total warfare and racial imperialist projects – are ‘out of time.’ Ironically, many intellectuals and agitators leaning toward fascism today are actually profoundly invested in fantasies of a white, industrial, patriarchal modernity that have the post-fascist, post-war period as their seedbed. To recognize fascism’s anachronism is cold comfort, especially when liberal and neoliberal fixes to planetary crises – especially to disastrous anthropogenic climate change – are themselves criminally late and inadequate, leaving much room for manoeuvre to the radical right, which is able to reinvent its fantasies of domination directed at ‘women, nature and colonies’ in profoundly destructive ways.
An unreflexive struggle against fascism runs the risk of becoming sclerotic, self-indulgent or complicit with the very processes that body forth reaction, the lesser evil lending a hand to the greater one. When it does not question its own theoretical frameworks, its own habits of naming or indeed the pleasures of innocence, heroism and righteousness that may arise from these, anti-fascism can be its own lure.
Indiana has a lawyer shortage. What might state lawmakers do to help?
Justin Forkner, chief administrative officer for the Indiana Supreme Court, told members of the corrections panel that Indiana has about 2.3 layers per 1,000 residents — below the nationwide average of four lawyers. That puts the state in the bottom 10 nationally for available counsel.
“Indiana has a lawyer shortage, and it’s growing. This is a challenge,” Forkner said, referring to the ratio of lawyers to residents in Indiana that is continuing to decline. “It’s certainly, I think, impacting our criminal justice system. It’s hitting us across the board, across the state, and all types of cases.”
Indiana has some 19,000 active lawyers on the rolls, he continued, although that includes many that don’t currently practice. Forkner said the state probably has 15,000 to 16,000 lawyers actually practicing.
A 2020 report by the American Bar Association found that 40 of the state’s 92 counties had fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents.
But the Bride refuses to vanish. She has, appropriately enough, come to life from Shelley’s dead material to join the horror-myth pantheon. Freed from the original text, she continues to explore liminality, femininity, and monstrosity as a character in movies like The Bride (1985) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) or as an allusion to or inspiration for pop culture properties ranging from the Hotel Transylvania movie series to Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Ruins in Rain City: Trouble in Mind and the Career of Alan Rudolph
Although there were some positive notices about the Trouble in Mind when it was released, no critic was more pleased than Roger Ebert, who awarded the film four stars in the Chicago-Sun Times. “To really get inside the spirit of ‘Trouble in Mind,’ it would probably help to see ‘Choose Me’ (1984) first. Both films are the work of Alan Rudolph, who is creating a visual world as distinctive as Fellini’s and as cheerful as Edward Hopper’s. He does an interesting thing. He combines his stylistic excesses with a lot of emotional sincerity, so that we believe these characters are really serious about their hopes and dreams, even if they do seem to inhabit a world of imagination.”
While I can see the influence of both Choose Me and Trouble in Mind in the work of Wong Kar-wai and Steven Soderbergh, director Alan Rudolph has never gotten the accolades or awards that some of his contemporaries have received, but that never stopped him from further delivering wonderful films including The Moderns and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. Recently I watched his brilliant stalker thriller Remember My Name (1978) for the first time, and was impressed all over again.
Friday, I stopped off at the attorney's for a short bit. Oh, yeah, before that I got ice cream at Bloom's Downtown. Damn the calories. I had survived the week.
At home, I did get an email off to Gabb. They sent me back an email they would get back in 5 working days. I out off the email until today. So tired, I laid down for an hour. That did no good. I worked on "Road Tripping" after eating dinner. I gave up, decided ot rea up on Marlowe. I also watched Bill Maher.
Sleep came in snatches. About midnight I woke up and had a smoke, The cat that showed up Thursday night was back and I fed it some more of my pork. Really good looking cat, paisley markings (I forget the name for them), sweet thing. No cats, no girlfriends. Sorry, I am widnign up my lfie, not starting anything new.
Saturday morning and I start off working on "Road Tripping." Doing what I had not done last night. I did sleep in a little, I took a break around 9 to make a trip to McClure's.
I listened to a Hammett documentary while I revised my own story.
It is 10:21. I am on the last section of "Road Tripping." I want to move an argument up in the story. I need to do laundry. WMBR's "Backwoods" is on. Music does not distractt he way words do. Later.
12:34 pm Okay, I am in the last section. Time to pause. Make soem notes here, do my laundry.
Looks liek I missed more excitement in the area near me: Police: Ball State student arrested on machine-gun, recklessness charges. And a Ball State student, too? Guess, he will not be getting his degree any time soon.
1:29: crashed Chrome, started the laundry, answering emails, working on posts while I do the laundry.
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