While submitting my story today, I listened to this on C-Span2 Blowback - A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump. I did not know until today that he is a fellow Hoosier, which makes him an Indiana writer.
I submitted “The Rational Actor” to Poor Ezra’s Almanac, Orca, and Cool Beans Lit. This I did after I walked down to The Attic Window (I have a new belt and a new jacket) and then I went to Dollar General. Fall is here – the temperature is down, and the wind was up. Walking by the Old Rooster Tail, I saw some fellow in a hoodie seated in a chair and who seemed to be sleeping in there. Strange. I tidied up a little. Melanie from DIY called, and we spoke for a while. I have caught up on the email – mostly. I worked on this post and another.
I recommend reading Carp Fishing in America by Mark Thomas, and published by Orca; a very interesting twist that I did not see coming. Teaching us to be careful of judgments.
I also poked my nose in at Paloma, but did not submit anything there. Instead, I read The beautician and the baked vegetables by Vasundhara Singh, which I recommend you also read.
I gave Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy a look, maybe a future submission, but a journal that definitely intrigues (if I had more time!):
Book XI is a journal of literary philosophy—or, if you like, of philosophically informed creative work—which we might think of as the book that Plato might have added to the Republic. The imaginary book, we might say. And if, as philosophers like to say, all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then what could be a more fitting title for a journal that brings together creative writing and philosophical reflection?
I have a few others. still need to get at my pretrial detention journal.
Historically, packaging was wax paper’s fundamental duty. As a promotional pamphlet from the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Co. circa 1930 put it, “Waxed paper today is the most popular and universally used of all papers for protecting foodstuffs.” Its oil and waterproof qualities safeguarded raw meat, dairy products, packaged bread, and other ingredients from spoiling or going stale from transit and on the shelf. In the 1930s home, wax paper served the same freshness preserving duties for meats and cheeses, but could line cake and cookie boxes, serve as a practical wrap for sandwiches, and sticky confections like popcorn balls and caramels.
Half of Waking Hours Are Now Devoted to Entertainment from Ted Gioia touches on a point I have been considering for some time – why do we need entertainment. It is a collection of assorted articles including the loss of earning for artists and changes at the Wall Street Journal, and as always with Gioia, worth reading.
And the war against disinformation goes on and on along many fronts, Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen.
Border walls and deportations: Biden’s migrant plans prompt outrage. Well, action is needed. What seems unasked is, what do we do about Venezuela? Oh, another question: why do the Republicans think a government shutdown will help the border?
Meanwhile, hell has broken out in Israel: Israel says civilians and soldiers held hostage in Gaza after major Palestinian attack – live.
More reading of The Guardian:
‘An end of American democracy’: Heather Cox Richardson on Trump’s historic threat:
Richardson, 60, a history professor at Boston College, has been described by the New York Times as “the breakout star” of the newsletter platform Substack, where her Letters from an American has more than a million subscribers. She has 1.7 million followers on Facebook while her bio on X, formerly known as Twitter, says: “Historian. Author. Professor. Budding Curmudgeon. I study the contrast between image and reality in America, especially in politics.”
Readers welcome Richardson’s ability, like Ken Burns, Rachel Maddow and Jon Meacham, to make sense of Trump-era chaos by assuring us we have been here before and survived. She is the cohost of Now & Then, a Vox Media podcast, and author of award-winning books about the civil war, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the American west.
Now she offers Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, a thoughtful study of how the world’s wealthiest democracy came to teeter on the precipice of authoritarianism with an assist from Donald Trump. She seems relieved it’s done.
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“They want to get rid of business regulation, they want to get rid of a basic social safety net and send all that back to the churches, they want to get rid of infrastructure projects that FDR is engaging in because they think it costs too much in tax dollars and it should be private investment. They don’t really talk about civil rights because because FDR is really just flirting with the idea of equality in the New Deal programmes but they do say they want home rule and states’ rights, which is code for “We don’t want civil rights.’”
These four principles would become a blueprint for Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, language sometimes mapping directly. In the early 1970s, Richardson contends, Republicans began to pursue anti-democratic strategies such as gerrymandering and shifting the judiciary rightwards. They also spent decades waging an “information war”.
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Despite 91 criminal charges, Trump dominates the Republican primary. Polls show him neck-and-neck with Biden. It is looking like a close-run thing. What would a second Trump term mean for America?
“An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.
And still it seems too many Americans want what Trump is selling. Why? I have no idea. Do they? I would like to hear how they imagine America is improved as a dictatorship.
Memory review – survivors grapple with an unstable past in a delicate, painful duet has given me something to think about, since I am doing some writing on this subject.
Mexican film-maker Michel Franco, famed for his icily contrived, pitilessly controlled dramas, often shown in static tableau scenes, has made another of his complex, painful and densely achieved movies; at Venice it won its leading man, Peter Sarsgaard, the Volpi cup for best actor. It is about abuse, violence, recovery and the redemptive power of sexual intimacy, but also about just what its title proclaims: memory, and how this accumulates over a lifetime to form an identity. Yet memory is unreliable building material; memory is the uncertain support underneath us, but solid as a crushing burden above us, a destructive gravitational force that could annihilate us entirely. And apart from anything else, memory is not necessarily the truth, so attempts to deny it are not necessarily dishonest or delusional.
Sly Stone lives! ‘I never lived a life I didn’t want to live’: Sly Stone on addiction, ageing and changing music for ever.
Of course, in a sense, Stone was ever-present in pop music throughout his lost years, albeit at one remove. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out that Prince had modelled the Revolution on Sly and the Family Stone – a multiracial lineup, music that existed on the cusp of soul and rock – and when hip-hop and sampling arrived, his influence was more obvious still. One website lists nearly 1,000 tracks that sampled his work (Stone says his favourite was Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, and that he also liked Arrested Development’s People Everyday). You could see why people wanted a full-blown comeback, but it never happened, and now it never will, his newfound sobriety notwithstanding. His health issues, he says, “haven’t stopped me from hearing music, but they have stopped me from making it”. Then he adds something else. I don’t know if it’s intended as such – it’s just a line in an email – but it seems rather sad and wistful: “I can hear music in my mind.”
Rock Hudson, I think my mother had a crush on him. That she died in 1986, left her illusions intact. Now there is a documentary about him, which is reviewed under The double life of Rock Hudson: ‘Let’s be frank, he was a horndog!’ Which is, frankly, a review disserved by its headline. I have not been able to see him as a good actor (sorry, it should have been Gary Cooper in Giant.), but this review has me wondering.
Ah, for those days of two centuries ago when America was good and decent and God-fearing and there was no illicit sex: There Once Was a Dildo in Nantucket. Well, there weren't getting abortions were they?
Trying to be fair, Illinois Democrats drew new maps. The changes pushed the GOP to the right from The Washington Post. I listened to Bill Maher last night. Sometimes he annoys me by being too precious, too noisy. Last night, I liked how he attacked the rigid ideologies of both parties (although I doubt the Democrats prove to be as rigid as the Republicans, being the Democrats). We were so set against the Communists. What do we have now but a political party putting a premium on ideological conformity as hidebound as the Communists?
Solnit: I was thinking of it in a more metaphysical way. As in, expectations about what you were allowed to do and who you were supposed to be and what writing could be.
Atwood: Well, I think all that just came from ignorance. I wasn’t aware of what I was supposed to be and what the expectations were, so I didn’t really feel burdened by them. I had a mother who was a tomboy and didn’t do any of that stuff that I hear from other people about what the older generation did to them. “Girls can’t do this. Girls don’t do that.” I just didn’t hear it. So I wasn’t that aware of it. As for writing, the landscape was so devoid of anybody who was visibly a writer when I was a teenager, that there just were no expectations. That’s lucky in a way. It means you make it up yourself.
I have some more submissions to make, too. Or, rather, track down a few places for submissions. I plan on another hour here, then I want to more reading.
Laundry tomorrow. My beans and chicken turned out all right – other than have a crock pot full.
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