Sentenced 13 Years Ago

 Today, Thirteen years ago, I was sentenced to 151 months in federal prison. I am still not sure what profit there was to the country in giving me 91 months over the minimum of 60 months. It did give me a reason to keep writing, and the opportunity to do so. It may be you readers of mine will find that a good thing, or a bad thing. The judge told me my sentence would deter me and others. I thought myself quite sobered and deterred by what I had done to myself by not carrying out my plans of suicide; since then I do not think anyone else was deterred by my sentence – unless you have closely read these notes. That day, I did not care about its length. I had a certainty that my COPD would finish me off before I came back to Indiana. So much for the best laid plans of mice and men.

In light of my personal history, this headline coming through today raises all sort of questions and amusement: Muncie Marine convicted in Jan. 6 Capitol riot placed on probation. Deterrence is a word that sounds good to politicians and the public.

When in prison I decided if I was going to keep writing, I had 40 years of writing to catch up on. I set myself a course of reading. A name that came up, one that I had heard from reading Gore Vidal, was Italo Calvino. I did manage to read one short story. I forget the title; that does not matter. It made sense of all the praise. Would that I had read him when I was younger, when I ahd the chance to be a better, more broad-based writer. Therefore, please read The Guardian's A brief survey of the short story: Italo Calvino.

In a lecture delivered in New York in the spring of 1983, Italo Calvino remarked that "most of the books I have written and those I intend to write originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind: when I have convinced myself that such a book is completely beyond my capacities of temperament or skill, I sit down and start writing it".

Like much of Calvino's work, the statement is at once ironic and quite serious, and is justified entirely by his extraordinary bibliography....

I woke 90 minutes ago, scarfed down two Pop-Tarts (probably bad for me), and went straight to “Road Tripping”. I will run it through the spell/grammar checker after I type up this post. I do that through Google Docs, LibreOffice seems to strain at a 125-page document (a bit over 38,000 words). In my mind, it is done and is worth showing to the world. Which may say something about the  state of my mind! Firefox, or Firefox and my monitoring software, do not like Google apps. I am working in Firefox right now. I will boot Chrome later.

Another writer I got tot read in prison was Mario Vargas Llosa. Reading The Guardian's Mario Vargas Llosa says latest novel will be his last. This news feel like the passing of an era. Like Keith Richards saying he will no longer play guitar.

Peru’s best-known living writer, the Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, has announced that his seven-decade literary career is coming to an end and that his latest novel will be his last.

In a postscript to the new book, Le dedico mi silencio (I Give You My Silence), the 87-year-old novelist writes: “I think I’ve finished this book. I’d now like to write an essay on [Jean-Paul] Sartre, who was my teacher as a young man. It will be the last thing I write.”

Le dedico mi silencio has been described as a love letter to Peru and to música criolla, the country’s distinctive blend of European waltzes with Afro-Peruvian and Andean influences.

Find him, read. Especially, if you are from our Midwest thinking you are too far off the literary paths to write anything worthwhile. Yes, that was my viewpoint 40 years ago. Whether I am writing anything worthwhile remains an open question. (Which reminds me, do buy my stage adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death; the link is to the left of your screen. If you want a freebie example, there are also links to Passerby and Death and a Kiss!)

More of my morning's reading from The Guardian (book reviews):

Determined: Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky review – the hard science of decisions 

Into this bewildering terrain steps the celebrated behavioural scientist Robert Sapolsky, who sets out in Determined to banish free will once and for all – and to show that confronting its nonexistence needn’t condemn us to amorality or despair. It’s only one aspect of the book’s strangeness that he does this in a style that often calls to mind a hugely knowledgable yet stoned west coast slacker....

***

Along the way, he makes impassioned arguments against such ideas as “grit”, which seem to suggest that those raised in situations that tax their willpower could just choose to develop more of it. Yes, there are people who “overcame bad luck with spectacular tenacity and grit” – but their capacity for tenacity and grit was bestowed by luck, too. Everything is luck, including whether or not you have the right character traits for dealing with bad luck. In the words of the free-will sceptic Galen Strawson, “luck swallows everything”.

Determined is a bravura performance, well worth reading for the pleasure of Sapolsky’s deeply informed company. What’s less clear is whether this inventory of the causes of human behaviour should change anyone’s position on free will. After all, most free-will deniers make their case on a priori grounds, meaning that their arguments aren’t dependent on specific scientific findings. If the entire present state of the world was caused by the entire state of the world just before that, and the world back then was caused by the state of the world before that, and so on, then the details of exactly what’s causing what don’t seem to matter.

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Later in the book, when he turns to the question of how we should live in the absence of free will, Sapolsky’s humane worldview comes to the fore. Some argue that realising we lack freedom may turn us into moral monsters. But he makes a moving case that, really, it’s a reason to live with profound forgiveness and understanding – for seeing “the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done”. It is the ultimate philosophical grounding for the idea that “there but for the grace of God go I”. A familiar paradox lurks here, as with any discussion of how we ought to respond to the absence of free will: if there’s no free will, surely we’re just going to respond however we respond? But this doesn’t mean Sapolsky’s absorbing and compassionate book won’t change how people think, or how they behave towards one another. It just means they won’t have freely chosen to make that change.

I remain unconvinced.

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench review – national treasures sounds delightful:

The narrative takes the form of a series of informal and intimate conversations between her and fellow actor Brendan O’Hea. Tips on how to speak iambic pentameter, memories of the great actors and directors she’s worked with over the years, and musings on the inner lives of Shakespeare’s numerous heroines are interspersed with industry gossip, reflections on triumph and disaster, and personal meditations on love and loss (she met her late husband, actor Michael Williams, while at the RSC). Mischievous and convivial, Dench delights in sending up O’Hea whenever his questions become too probing or pretentious. After hearing of her two tilts at Lady Macbeth, O’Hea remarks “You adore this play, don’t you?” “Love it,” she replies. “Beautifully constructed, terrific story, great part, short, no interval, pub. Heaven.”

 ***

In less assured hands a book such as this could seem cloyingly self-reverential – dare one say “luvvie”? – but it’s a mark of Dench’s impish genius and O’Hea’s deftness that it genuinely feels like you’re sitting at her kitchen table with her. It’s companionable and compelling – if you love Judi Dench or Shakespeare (and most of us do), look no further.

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke review – an upper-class monster sounds worth finding - if I had the time for more books!

In her foreword – rather disapprovingly you feel – Moshfegh describes him as “not really a character in any usual sense” because he lacks “the lowest level of agency and self-definition”. We can see clearly how this condition was baked in by his early experience, the product of a methodical process. Perhaps we can’t forgive him for the revenge he takes on that upbringing; perhaps we can. But that we can understand him at all we owe to Brooke’s immoderate talents. Sometimes her subject matter is as genuinely hard to swallow as the food congealing on a seven-year-old boy’s plate – “large pieces of fat, with several veins peeping through” – but the book’s success is its readability in the face of that.

Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse: ‘It took years before I dared to write again’ 

Fosse’s plays seem calculated to discomfit such theatregoers, pushing deep into enigmatic meaning and plotlessness (he notes witheringly that his work has been called “post-dramatic”). His characters sometimes have names but are more often called “The One” and “The Other”, or “The Woman”, “The Boy”, “The Older Man”. There is humour but the dominant moods tend towards dread, claustrophobia and sexual jealousy, his characters often struggling to connect. Playwriting allowed Fosse to employ silence in a way he couldn’t in prose. “I could use the word ‘pause’ a lot, and ‘he or she breaks off’, and somehow make the silence speak and establish a second silent language behind the spoken language.” Whenever he gets this feeling now, he says, he knows he’s writing well.

***

Shortly afterwards, in 2012, Fosse collapsed. He was drinking so much that he had stopped eating. Alcohol had helped him perform the role of theatre star. “I’m a shy and in a way very private person, and the theatre is the opposite. So I was the wrong person for the job.” He doesn’t have regrets – “It’s nice to drink whisky with Simon Stephens,” he says, laughing – but when he left hospital he never drank again, and claims not to miss it. “I think basically writing resembles drinking to me. When you drink you become someone a bit different, and you get rid of your normal self. And to me writing … it’s not to express myself, it’s to get rid of myself.”

Drama hasn’t been as simple to kick. After a few years during which, alongside prose, he only translated plays (including the Norwegian version of Simon Stephens’s stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), he has returned, in a smaller way, to writing them. In fact his latest novella, A Shining, is a prose version of a new play, In the Black Forest, which had its theatrical premiere in Oslo in September. This brief, haunting work isn’t the best place to start with Fosse, though. In his case, which is rare, the Nobel has been awarded to someone who has very recently published their masterpiece. Septology, an 825-page novel written in a single sentence, may sound like a daunting entry point, but Fosse’s mastery of rhythm (superbly recreated in English by translator Damion Searls) is so total, the compassionate attention he pays to his characters so affecting, that the book quickly immerses the reader in its flow. It is a unique literary experience.

***

Fosse fuses domestic realism – making food, getting ready for bed, looking after a dog – and the mystical. There are two Asles in Septology, doppelgängers between whom Fosse shares out details from his own life. The Asle who narrates the novel marries a Catholic, converts and, eventually, quits drinking. The other is an alcoholic; early on he’s found collapsed in a snowy street. One Asle has no children, while the other has had three with two different women. Fosse, meanwhile, has had six with three wives. His oldest children are grown, while his youngest is yet to start school.

***

Despite these shared traits (Asle also has his creator’s grey hair in a ponytail, bald spot “still visible through the strands of hair”, and a penchant for scarves), Fosse isn’t interested in autofiction, which he once experimented with “before that even became a concept”. His ambition with Scenes from a Childhood “was to write exactly as it was. But I didn’t manage it. It started to take its own way, to be something else.” Was that frustrating? “I simply had to accept it,” he shrugs. “I could write down a kind of resumé of what happened but that isn’t literature. As soon as it gets a kind of literary quality it has transformed into something else. And I guess that’s close to what literature is all about. What you write, it needs to – it’s a cliche perhaps – but it needs to be bigger than life.”

Are Nobel Literature winners required to be obscure, or is it just American ignorance. Well, I prefer not to be ignorant, and the more I read of Fosse, the more intriguing he becomes. While reading this interview, I wondered what is going with Ball State Theater this season. Well, they are putting on Prom. I will plan on going, about time.

Since Firefox crashed 3 times in an hour, I closed out Crap from the Past, and watched the end of Philomena. Dench does a wonderful job. Teared me up, actually.

I moved onto last Thursday's Times Literary Supplement.

J.G. Ballard is a writer I knew of from movies; he remains unread for all he attracts me. The TLS published The crime of being alive The visionary brilliance of an author who believed in nothing:

The boldness of his sentences suggests someone fixed in their certainties, but the most striking aspect of Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007 – 119 examples of his literary ephemera filed into sections such as “Statements”, “Commentaries”, “Features”, “Reviews”, “Forum Discussions” and “Memoir” – is that he was in two minds about most things. His imaginative strength was built on ambivalence: “I believe in my own obsessions”, he wrote in a list for Interzone in 1984 called “What I believe” – a list that includes the declaration “I believe in nothing”. The things that obsessed Ballard, such as gated communities, the Heathrow Hilton, car crashes, runways, multistorey carparks, hypermarkets and flyovers, also appalled him. He wanted science fiction recognized as the most significant writing of the twentieth century, but also wanted it to remain what he called “invisible literature”; the task of SF was to look forwards, he said, but he also said that tomorrow has become today, in which case SF was dead. He believed in the unconscious as a “narrative stage”, but not in the rehearsals of psychoanalytic therapy that, by looking back to the roots of character and behaviour, ignored the psychological impact of the current mass-mediated life. (This was also his argument against the realist novel.)

Ballard liked the new “spoiled” French Riviera, he enthused in the Mail on Sunday in 1995, and would have lived there “if I could afford it”, which he probably could have done by then (the film of Empire of the Sun, written in 1984, came out in 1987); but his wealth made no difference to his modest lifestyle. He lived for fifty years in a semi-detached house in Shepperton (“a suburb of Heathrow airport”), where he set up his cottage industry and slept on a camp bed, as though still in a camp. While he claimed to have enjoyed the war and to have been unaffected by the sight of men killed in front of him, his interest in the future was clearly rooted in the traumas of the past.

His ambivalence extended to himself. Ballard disliked what he called the “career novelist” but this, nevertheless, is what he was; he also disliked the “Great Name” school of literature, but “Ballardian”, an adjective for his style of dystopian modernity, is now in the dictionary. A “sure sign of the second-rate”, Ballard said of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis in his contribution to the essay collection The Test of Time: What makes a classic a classic? (1999), is when “writers are more famous than their books”; and he must have hoped, as his own fame increased and his books became cult, that this wouldn’t prove true of him. He regretted, in a piece for the Guardian in 2007, that the surrealists died – as he too was then dying – “loaded with honours, prizes and, worst of all, respectability”. The Americans may have crowned Don DeLillo, his closest US counterpart, as their greatest living writer, but for the British, as Ballard put it in a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Fates Worse Than Death (1991), “success usually comes with a live round still in its chamber”.

Meanwhile, the last Literary Review has Shoot-out in Great Ormond Street (1988), a review of Running Wild by J G Ballard:

There are brilliant high points in Running Wild, not the least of which is the shoot-out in the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital when Marion is retrieved by ‘two small figures in white gowns and face-masks,’ who murder with the unreasoning deliberation of psychopaths. And when Richard Greville comes to reconstruct the massacre detail by detail, accounting for each child’s part in the tyrannicide, and demonstrates the meticulous planning which has gone into the killings, so that not a single adult is left alive on Pangbourne Estate – a theory rejected by the police – one is back with the solitary figure characteristic of all Ballard’s books, whose vision supports a universe.

Ballard has always taken uncompromising risks, and his psychological exploration of murder conducted by children is every bit as terrifying as the mental landscapes of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. No one has been prepared to go so far and push the frontiers of consciousness to their limits. Whatever Ballard creates is stamped with his individual genius; no one writes as well, and in fifty years when most of his straitjacketed contemporaries will have been consigned to oblivion, a new generation will be reading Ballard as the novelist of the immediate present.

 At The Literary Review, I had to read Author in Love for one reason, Vivien Leigh.

Her own beauty and sexual attractiveness are undeniable. Rex Harrison was deeply in love with her though they never so much as held hands. Even Somerset Maugham, not noted for his susceptibility to feminine charms, was enchanted by her. Watching them together, Garson Kanin wrote: ‘As for WSM, I have never seen this side of him – the gallant, courtly gentleman. The man on the make. Every warm instinctive exchange passes between them’. Churchill loved her films as, it seems, did Hitler. Despite the admiration of the war leaders, her talents as an actress are now less obvious than her beauty. Most of the films she appeared in were pretty poor and her performance suffered from the almost compulsory refinement of the period so that James Agate could say of her Lady Hamilton that it ‘reeks of Muswell Hill at its most respectable’.

Kenneth Tynan – who changed his mind after he had met her – gave her some memorably bad notices over the years, calling her Lady Macbeth ‘more niminy-piminy than thundery-blundery, more viper than anaconda’. As for Olivier, when Anthony Holden saw him watching one of her old films on television a couple of years ago, the tears were rolling down his checks as he said: ‘This, this was love. This was the real thing’. It is to Vickers’s credit that he is prepared to acknowledge it. Having fallen for Vivien Leigh himself, he has told her story as well as it is ever likely to be told.

That was also from 1988.

More recently from The Literary Review is Across the Great Divide, a review of J M Coetzee's The Pole and Other Stories. Coetzee is another writer prison gave me time for reading. I found him a writer of crisp, steady writing. He impresses by his quietness. Or so he seems to my recollection. The review says:

Novelists seldom grow old gracefully. ‘All writers go off,’ as the late Martin Amis once put it, and while they are hardly unique in that respect, when writers go off the consequences can be dire. A late run of mediocrity has a way of souring a literary legacy, which is one reason why new books by distinguished writers make reviewers nervous. Have they finally gone off? Happily, J M Coetzee seems to be one of the rare exceptions; rather than running out of steam, he has slipped comfortably into a late style. The stories in The Pole reflect on the relationship between ageing and artistry, touching on many of Coetzee’s characteristic preoccupations: self-knowledge and self-deception; suffering and empathy; the rights of the vulnerable. Together they might be said to constitute his portrait of the artist as an old man.

***

These stories are tinged with mourning – for the artist on his or her way out of the world, for the missed opportunities for connection and communication, and ultimately for the waning of the life force that Coetzee, like his alter ego, understands as the common inheritance of non-human species as well as human beings. But they are also touched with a moral intensity which, despite the ruses of fiction, is never quite separable from the voice of the author. Among the fruits of Costello’s wild imagination is a half-serious plan to construct a transparent model slaughterhouse so that the public might be introduced to the shocking reality of animal slaughter: ‘It occurred to me that if there were an abattoir operating in the middle of the city, where everyone could see and smell and hear what goes on inside it, people might change their ways.’ Idealistic, perhaps, but it’s a striking image: a transparent model inviting onlookers to bear witness to the suffering that sustains our common life. You get the feeling that Coetzee would like his fiction to serve a similar purpose.

Music also helped me get through prison, and prison also let me again appreciate music. One show I still make a point of listening to is WXPN's Land of the Lost. Here is the latest show from MixCloud. Eighties music. Listening to this on Friday was one thing left unmentioned in my report.

Going through the email to the newsletter from Counterpunch, which quite often sets my teeth on edge, and I was about to pan Israel’s Kristallnacht by Bruce Neuburger until I reached his conclusion. Justice, equity, must recognize the wrongness of both sides, must address the grievances and wrongs of both sides. 

In conclusion:

1) No acceptable resolution of this crisis, no path to peace, can be achieved, nor should be accepted, unless it is based on achieving the full rightsof Jews and Palestinians.

2) What I am saying should in no way be interpreted that Jews were merely the “puppets” of imperialism. But the dominant wealth and military strength of U.S. imperialism has given it leverage and U.S. imperialism has proven itself capable of the most grotesque brutality and cynical maneuvers to achieve its political aims.  Zionist oppression of Arab peoples since World War II is not the result of the will of Jews, but of a willingness of a section of Jews who embrace a racist ideology to shape the Israeli state to the needs of imperialism. Many Jews opposed this and still do. This number of anti-Zionist Jews is growing, but the overwhelming power lies with the imperialist nations. They must be called to account for their crimes! They and their Netanyahu-ist partners in Israel must be stopped from committing further crimes against the Palestinian people.

3. The struggle for a new, just social order centered on human commonality and cooperation—the not narrow, ugly, brutal sectarian madness of Zionism or a Hamas— is the urgent task for Jews, Palestinians, and all humanity.

NEVER AGAIN TO ANYONE!

I hope Joe Biden is doing what he can to reach these goals.

And here I am 13 years later, at peace, happy, freer than I was 10 2010. I hope my life meets your approval.

I need to move onto other tasks to justify not attending church.

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