News For Indianapolis and Indiana; Science and Literature; Local Excitement

I am tired. It was a nice sunny day, so I walked over the the Sheriff's. I got back here around 3:30.

Since then I have tried to find a new doctor. I found out at lunchtime, I had no coverage at one doctor's- even though the info from Anthem said they were in the network. I am not amused.

All I've got for now is this doctor:

I had beans and pork and tortilla tonight. Same as last night. I did a quick walk down to The Dollar General.

Where does the time go? No idea. I got through the email. I fried some pork on the grill. There was a walk down to McClure's. I fixed this one thing for MW and did some research for her. Firefox kept crashing again.

I get news about my local neighborhood while riding the bus, then it comes through from The Muncie Star-Press: State police: K-9 disarmed, captured fleeing suspect in Muncie. I missed all the hullabaloo. Not being able to recall Saturday night, I might even have been asleep around 10 pm.

 With Gannett dominating Indianapolis and Muncie, with everyone having paywalls (and me with too little money), I ran across Axios Indianapolis. Check it out.

The headline “Ideological Sci-Fi”: A Conversation with Julius Taranto from Public Books suckered me in and I found something quite unexpected and delightful:

KD: Saul Bellow appears as a character, talking with Lens about kind versus honest writing. What do you want other novelists to get out of that exchange?

JT: The relationship between Bellow and Lens mirrors Helen’s relationship with her advisor. Like Perry, Bellow won a Nobel Prize and is obviously brilliant in some ways, while at the same time some of his attitudes have aged like a fine milk. That complex history is part of the way Helen relates to Lens and situates him in the culture. I drew some of Lens’s history from what I understand of Philip Roth, who admired Bellow and wanted his approval and also really wanted to win a Nobel Prize. Lens, like all writers, has an origin and influences, and writers (like everyone) are constantly borrowing and adapting and improving on the work of imperfect predecessors.

As for the exchange about whether novelists should prioritize being kind or inoffensive, this reflects an issue that lots of writers struggle with: How do you let your writing affect real people in your life? We know that writing from fear, or from a desire to be applauded or at least socially benign, will hamstring the representation of messy truth and lead to a lot of meticulous pablum. But at the same time, a big part of doing justice to characters is to treat them with sympathy and kindness. It seems strange that writers would be exempt from extending that habit beyond the page to actual human beings.

KD: Lens calls Cynthia Ozick “one of the only living masters, queen and heir to the glittering world of literature.” What does her work mean to you?

JT: I would normally caution against attributing the views of any particular character to me, the author. But this one I will own. Ozick is a master and a very important writer to me. Her fiction has a dense magic that I wish I could imitate, and her essays are as exciting and surprising as other people’s best fiction. One thing about her that I especially connect with is her uneasy relationship to her own polemical instincts, which she knows can work to the benefit of her essays but need to be undercut in her fiction. She has written a bunch about that problem. I have a polemical side too, which used to have a natural outlet in my legal practice. But I also know that getting past rhetoric is how we get closer to the truth in fiction, so my instincts are always tussling in the way I think hers are.

In a 1983 essay of hers, called “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” she points to something profound and connected about law and politics, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. I don’t know why people don’t talk about her more in our endless discussion about literature’s purpose and relationship to politics. What Ozick suggests, going toe-to-toe with Plato—and in my view winning—is that law and politics deal with justice in large numbers, while literature helps people do justice to each other as individuals. The idea is that literature is about justice even when it’s not about broader questions of morality or politics. Isn’t that brilliant?

I have one of Ozick's novels here, I do need to catch up on my writing.

KD: Only some ideas are awarded the Nobel Prize. What is its value?

JT: The Nobel Prize is a metaphor and a MacGuffin. This book is filled with really difficult problems—both scientific and social—and the prize in the book and in life is to make clear, meaningful progress on something intractable. That’s damn rare, so when it happens we give people some money and a medal. Of course the path to a Nobel-worthy contribution to society is a lot clearer for scientists like Helen than it is for, say, artists. I’m a novelist, so I take art’s value very seriously, but I’m pretty sure it’s not as important as discovering a principle of quantum mechanics that will save us from climate change. I hope readers will feel it’s noble of Helen to chase that kind of achievement—not the Nobel Prize itself, but the contribution that would be worthy of it

Meds! 

 

And another rejection:

Thank you for the opportunity to consider your submission "The Local Boy Who Made Good." We've read it with care but have decided not to accept it for publication.

Sincerely,

The Editors of The Cincinnati Review

That I have revised that story since I submitted it, I guess this vindicates my going ahead with those changes.

Israel looks still ready to invade Gaza. Why are not its critics working to get back the hostages?

I did finish one of my Shakespeare book's, but more on that later.

My niece called and we talked for about an hour. Now, it is time to call it a night.

More meds!

sch