Something Happened

 Too little done yesterday, but when you've got a mountain of stuff to do there is enough done.

I did get to the sheriff. That got me back here after 4 pm.

I ate dinner - lamb breast - and walked down to McClure's for Coke Zero. 

No sense trying to find a doctor that late in the day. A bit more music downloaded, then around 4 pm I started working on my pretrial detention journal.

The cat got fed; he keeps eating like he is, and he will be huge.

Cool Beans rejected "Rational Actor", which is not a great shock; it is meant to be a presentation by a neoliberal type.

Thank you for your recent submission to Cool Beans Lit. Although we must decline your submission at this time, we sincerely appreciate your interest in our publication. We feel honored to have had the chance to consider your work.

In the future, if you would like to submit additional pieces to us in other reading periods, we strongly encourage you to do so. Your work could be the perfect fit for our editorial focus at that time. You should review the current list of "Calls for Submissions" at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (clmp.org), an organization which steadfastly supports the entire writing and art community. There is also a huge host of magazine listings available on NewPages, Duotrope and Poets & Writers that have open calls for submission and writing/art contests.

Thank you again. We wish you the very best of luck!

Warmly,

JL Stagner

Cool Beans Lit

That is a nice rejection.

No word on my novella. Nothing more from Stephanie about "The Dead and the Dying".

I may have posted this piece from The Los Angeles Review of Books, this was one of my favorite books, when younger and I will do not mind repeating myself.

What Happened: A Look at Joseph Heller’s Forgotten Novel 

THE MOST CRIMINALLY OVERLOOKED great novel of the past half century is a book called Something Happened, which this year celebrates the 40th anniversary of its publication. Joseph Heller spent more than a decade writing the novel and was so convinced of its genius that he stashed manuscripts all over Manhattan, ensuring that Something Happened would survive in the event his apartment burned down. When he finally brought the completed draft to his agent, he forced his daughter to accompany him on the trip — so she could deliver the pages in case he suffered a coronary or got hit by a bus. In 1974, 13 years after Catch-22 began its gradual ascent into the rarefied realm of idiom, Something Happened was released to a collective cultural shrug, delivering the book its first firm nudge down the slippery slope that bottoms at obscurity. Today, the novel is perhaps best remembered for Kurt Vonnegut’s artfully impartial appraisal in The New York Times Book Review, which described it as “one of the unhappiest books ever written.” Vonnegut wasn’t entirely wrong.

Something Happened is, by design, a punishingly bleak novel. It’s dense and overlong, sometimes sadistically so, and it offers a minimum in the way of resolution or plot. If the novel’s worldview were a color, the human eye would likely fail to perceive its darkness. What is surprising, though, is how by virtue of that same bleakness, Something Happened becomes one of the most pleasurable, engrossing, and in retrospect moving American novels ever written. If you’ve read Something Happened, and you get why others haven’t, then you make it your little mission to convince people that they should.

I re-read it in prison (the prison library had all of Heller's novels), and it is still an amazing book. It may be having read it before, and being older, then the bleakness seemed less shocking than in 1978. It is a even better than Catch-22.
 

The Guardian interviewed Salman Rushdie: The good guys don’t always win’: Salman Rushdie on peace, Barbie and what freedom cost him

And Indiana turns up in A violent murder, a child on death row. Which left me wondering what did become of Paula Cooper. Paula Cooper, once youngest Indiana Death Row inmate, found dead. One of those things that happened while I was gone.

 It's unclear how Cooper was spending her time since she was released. Rhonda Labroi, her sister, declined to comment about Cooper's death Tuesday.

"It's just amazing that after all those years of incarceration that she would be released and then something like this would happen," said Relphorde, who added that Cooper was remorseful about the killing. "She was willing to pay her debt to society."

Going off in a different direction: All Great Works of Literature Either Dissolve a Genre or Invent One: A Reading List

Let's go with Willie Nile this morning:

 

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