Reading Around The Internet - From Literary Magazines to Christianity to the World's End to Lost Indiana

 Ted Gioia makes me think, especially with pieces like My 12 Favorite Problems. Why? Here are some examples:

(3) How can creativity, intellectual vitality, and learning be maintained in the face of inescapable obstacles—such as earning a living, or aging, or financial hardship, or residing far from major cultural centers?

No matter how creative you are, you need a supportive environment in order to flourish. But what happens if you don’t have that support?

Do you just give up?

My creative life is rich and vital right now, but I wasn’t always as well situated as I am today. So I spent a lot of time grappling with how to maintain creativity in constrained and demanding situations. And even now, I have to face the inevitable challenge of anybody active in the arts above a certain age—namely, how to foster creativity and self-improvement as I grow old.

Here, again, it’s been useful to formulate the problem in clear terms. That’s because a lot of the battle here is fought on constantly shifting terrain. The demands in your life are always changing—sometimes it’s the job, at other times family responsibilities, or illness, or something else that’s in the forefront of your life.

By facing up to the trade-offs, I’ve learned to find degrees of freedom in situations that otherwise might seem intractable. (For example, how I dealt with arthritis in my early 30s, when I was focused on my jazz piano career.) Every time I survived as a creative person in the face of these obstacles, it made me more resilient and more aware of my capacities and potentialities.

And on a few occasions, I’ve found ways to turn an obstacle into a creative boost—over the years, I’ve exercised endless ingenuity in doing just that. Pulling it off can be remarkably transformative and empowering—but it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t focused on this a defining mission in my creative life.

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(4) How can we avoid cultural stagnation—especially given the obsession with remakes, reboots, spinoffs, and brand extensions of old works by the dominant corporations that control most of the creative economy?I love the tradition, but it’s not healthy when everything new is old. The whole culture is currently obsessed with brand franchises that are carryovers from the previous millennium. I’m convinced that audiences want something fresher than this—but risk-averse corporations won’t even give it a chance.

 Then there is The Hedgehog Review with pieces like Living in a WEIRDER World: Protestant pagans in a post-Christian West.. That reviews Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West by Andrew Wilson:

Two big ideas define the book. The first is that the year 1776 explains, or contains in nuce, every major feature of the modern world as we know it. The second is Wilson’s expansion of Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s label for Westerners: not just WEIRD but WEIRDER. The acronym stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. These are the seven facets that define the unique, historically contingent character of “Western” societies today (Wilson does not like the W-word; he either avoids it, puts it in scare quotes, or replaces it with WEIRDER). Most of the book consists of recounting how each of these traits appeared, took hold, or otherwise began to be disseminated in and around the year 1776.

The story that unfolds is wonderful to read. Wilson has a light touch and an enviable ability to interweave telling vignettes with major events and countless names, dates, and locations without overwhelming the reader. More than two-thirds of the book is straight narrative. Commentary is present throughout, but Wilson clearly wants the work to be accessible to lay readers; his primary audience is not scholars.

I have given up on Protestantism, and would suggest there is a false choice being proposed in this article. Christianity extends beyond the West.

Archbishop of America celebrated Consecration of Holy Trinity Cathedral Indianapolis, Indiana

 5 schools of philosophy that died out - I want to propose they died because they did not contribute to life.

Since I am trying to get my short stories published, I have a vested interest in literary magazines, and they seem to be in trouble here and in the UK: Literary magazines can be life-changing – but they need more support:

Print editions of literary magazines are important. For unpublished, radical writers, they can be life-changing. They give weight to voices that are all too often ignored by the mainstream publishing industry. Working on Bad Form is a privilege, but it is also exciting, fun and, as Sparrow said a decade ago, provides an essential place for authors to have a space to raise their voices. As long as I can, I’ll be printing issues of Bad Form, filled with words by writers of colour. Let’s just hope there will be people who can afford to buy them.

Speaking of literary magazines, give Fahmidan a look.

Aleksandar Hemon on Living at the End of Time (and it is worth reading in whole):

This is in fact the end of time, and you have to be a tech bro or a fascist, or both, to think that we are not at a precipice of cataclysmic loss. The question then becomes why write and publish, or do anything, since it won’t make a damn difference one way or another.

And the answer is love: for language, for imagination, for all those who precede us and all the less lucky ones who will come after us, for humanity. For conclusions still bespeak a faith in the future, even if a limited one. One day, we will unfold these conclusions as stories or music and we will know that we have lived and loved, and we might recall and experience again the joy of being together.

And then there is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

 In Praise of Pulp Fiction: Isa Arsén on Carving Out a Home in a Bygone Genre touches on one of my genres:

The lens of pulp is one of inherently violent storytelling. Depending on who you ask, we live an inherently violent existence and perhaps pulp is simply the most honest expression of that agony—there is beauty in the ugliness, if only we let our imaginations run wild enough to find it. The very concept of hysteria slots perfectly into the subgenre: the affected feminine rather than the divine, the reality of anger and mistake-making and very, very big feelings. That’s what makes my heart sing when I see it on the page. I want my stories intimate, yet big; tidily-plotted, yet endlessly scattered. I want a good time. I want pulp: the place that asks “what if” and proceeds to gun the engine to 80 without waiting to hear the answer.

 Maybe General Motors, and America, have not run out of the ability to innovate: 2024 Chevy Corvette E-Ray Sets America's Sports Car on a Radical New Course. 

Anthology Submissions Call: The Map of Lost Places:

In order to avoid duplicates in the open submission call, locations already chosen by the featured authors are listed below. This list will be updated as the authors make their decisions, so be sure to check back!

• Indiana

Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem: There is yet time to stop the hatred.

 sch 10/14