I came home Wednesday chilled to the bone. I went down early, but I did get some work done on "The Dead and the Dying." I had to wait for the bus after going to the sheriff's, and I did it outside. The #12 did not come down Hoyt. That was the beginning of a lesson in patience. When I got back to the station, I got the rest of it. It is true I need to find a men's room, and none of the restaurants were open on Walnut, except for Casa Del Sol. I ordered a burrito when I should have ordered a full dinner. I got done before the bus left, but I could get to the station before it got on the road. I had brought Carlos Fuentes along to the sheriff, so this time I went into the station and did some reading. I would have done better to have read at the courthouse instead of trying to get back early. I got home around 5:30. All told, it was more than 3 hours to get home.
This morning I was up early. I read, finished the work I started last night, dealt with the computer, and made food. I mixed tilapia with lentils. It was rather good.
I made one trip to McClure's. Otherwise, I have been nowhere.
I should have made calls, but I did not.
I also wrote a play, around 10 minutes long, tonight. I wanted it done before KH showed up.
Another thing done: reinstalling Firefox. Gmail still is a problem with Firefox, but the major problem may have been a couple of extensions.
Notes made during the day follow:
Indiana Supreme Court rules in favor of Ball State University in COVID class action case
The 5-0 decision made three key findings:
- The law passed by the Indiana General Assembly in 2021 barring class action COVID-19 suits doesn’t violate constitutional separation of powers.
- The student doesn’t have the right to sue on behalf of others.
- The law doesn’t unconstitutionally impair the student because he can still pursue individual claims against Ball State.
My sister complained about eggs earlier this year; blamed the price increase on Biden. It looks like it was just greed, that vice to which capitalism is yoked.
Jury finds Senate candidate’s family-owned company price gouged eggs
Rose Acre Farms Inc. — previously chaired by John Rust, who is running to succeed U.S. Sen. Mike Braun — Cal-Maine Foods Inc. and two egg-industry groups will have to pay damages to General Mills Inc., a Kraft Heinz Co. unit, Kellogg Co. and Nestle SA. The same jury will determine the damages to be awarded in a trial scheduled to begin on Nov. 29, as reported by Bloomberg.
Rust said he couldn’t comment on the case because it is still under adjudication. Rose Acres also said it couldn’t comment for the same reason.
Rust is challenging U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, a Columbia City Republican, who has the backing of the Indiana Republican Party, a commanding lead and Braun’s endorsement.
Casey’s latest ‘greedflation’ report zeroes in on price increases for Thanksgiving staples
I stuck my nose in a few places. riddlebird is open for submissions, so I look a look at few of their stories, such as “Authentic Chinese Dinner” by Vivian Chou and Office of Lost Time by Bobby Rollins, but do not think it is the place to submit "Running Away From The Dead and The Dying". Another publication checked out was Propagule. There I skimmed it Summer 2023 issue, where I found much that was interesting and nothing that made it seem compatible for any of my stories.
Looked at Helen Shaw Collection — next year, I will go fishing.
I do not know where I heard the name Nell Zink. About having read her, I am pretty sure I have not until today. Granta let down its paywall and I took advantage of the situation to read Living with Germanness. I found it a hoot.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the rather capacious American definition of autism were eventually expanded to include people of German ancestry. Recall that something like 40 percent of Americans are living with Germanness. Far fewer self-identify, but don’t forget the world wars; two of my American friends had ‘Irish’ grandmothers who proved, when death gave access to their paperwork, to have been German. It could be helpful, next time you’re confronted with a tightly wound geek who hits the ceiling because you touched his car, to consider that he might be on the German-American spectrum. Recently, a German couple sicced their dogs on me for trespassing, and the tetchy, excited way they released the hounds was like a balm to my homesickness. The only thing missing to make the effect complete was a gun.
German lacks a term for one-night stands because einmal ist keinmal (‘once means never’). How can there be stigma and shame about a non-event? I was slut-shamed here exactly once, forty years ago, by a woman probably born circa 1905. When a German friend (misguidedly, in my view) fucked her next-door neighbor on the living-room couch, her husband’s remark was that it weakened his bargaining position in their property line dispute. When I (stupidly, at a big party full of journalism students) outed myself to a lover’s wife, she took me aside to caution me against flattering myself that he would leave her. I was one, she reminded me, of many.
Programmatically monogamous Americans tear themselves into little pieces trying to remain consistent in thought, word and deed, their steadfast loyalty torturing all involved into agonies of fetishism and farcical attempts to rekindle the ashes. Meanwhile, who cares? One can so easily learn not to care. One can regard fidelity as a neurosis. I’ve heard it called sexuelle Abhängigkeit (‘sexual dependence’). One can accept personal integrity as a dubiously Neoplatonic impossibility.
Meanwhile, I need to move laundry from washer to dryer.
From The Times Literary Supplement, I learned Echo & the Bunnymen were a cult band: In dead men’s suits.
Echo and the Bunnymen, the band Sergeant formed in 1978 at Liverpool’s Punk Ground Zero (Eric’s on Mathew Street, across the road from the former Cavern Club), combined the angular racket of their near-contemporaries Gang of Four and the Fall with something older and grander – the ominous drone of Led Zeppelin, the baroque majesty of the Doors – all channelled through the Beatles-haunted landscape of their home city.
And I thought there were only a one-hit wonder.
I still have not cracked Hilary Mantel's last historical novel, which embarrasses me. Instead, I read Those damned sentences: The humour and compassion of Hilary Mantel by Alex Clark in The Times Literary Supplement. Just as well, this paragraph perked up feelings about my own writing:
... Reading A Memoir of My Former Self, a collection of Mantel’s nonfiction pieces written from the late 1980s onwards, and including her previously unpublished Reith Lectures of 2017, one feels increasingly that “simple rotation” was her vital and perhaps primary impulse – not merely for the solution of problems, but for the intellectual and creative dividends that a different perspective might provide. In other words: logistical, pragmatic, but also an article of something approaching faith (horse-becalming being low on her agenda).
I think my latest rewrite of one of my "The Dead and The Dying" stories feels like I have done a very good job. It is far from the original, except for the deaths that lie at the heart of the story. I did not mean to write from the perspective of my antagonist, but when I did I felt I was onto something. What had started out as a story filling in a bit of time in an Indiana city became that and an answer for a person's disappearance from the scene. When I reconceived how I would use one story, threading it between the other stories, I had taken a step away from what I meant as a social history. It also created a problem for one story, for it occurred after the thread story; now I needed to cut out the part of the story happening after 2007. This change tightened the story, put more of a focus on the protagonist, and put the events in the city into the background. Now, let us see what the world thinks of "Running from The Dead and The Dying".
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War is little known, and it is interesting to see in the TLS No turning back: Why the Whites and the Allies failed to defeat the Bolsheviks.
From LitHub, TBI. I think Whitehead is one of the most intriguing writers in America, but this essay gave me a whole new perspective on him.
Whitehead’s play with genre is so well-known and so self-conscious that he has even joked about it publicly in the pages of the New York Times. Before the release of his zombie novel, Zone One, Whitehead published an essay titled “Picking a Genre,” in which he describes his artistic process. “If you’re anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle….To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when I’m overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!” What follows is a list of targets on that dartboard, both a catalogue and a sendup of the genres that characterize contemporary American fiction, ranging from the “Encyclopedic” novel for the “postmodern, or postmodern-curious,” to the “Ethnic Bildungsroman,” “Little Known Historical Fact,” and “Southern Novel of Black Misery.” Here Whitehead is satirizing not only his own career but also the phenomenon that critics such as Andrew Hoberek, Theodore Martin, and Jeremy Rosen have called the contemporary “genre turn”: that is, the spate of literary novelists in recent years who have drawn on the “frameworks” of mass-market genres. By now, the set of these “literary genre writers” is familiar—Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—as is the array of those genres themselves: detective, dystopian, fantasy, Western, and postapocalyptic fiction. One of the central aims of Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, however, is to document the process by which historical fiction, despite its mass-market popularity and its “déclassé” status for much of the twentieth century, has been left off that list. After all, every one of the writers just mentioned has published a historical novel, and in some cases several.
While Whitehead’s own oeuvre represents a veritable catalogue of genres, it also chronicles nearly two hundred years of American history. If we rearrange his novels not by publication date but loosely by their historical settings, we end up following Whitehead from the slave narrative and folklore of the nineteenth century (The Underground Railroad and John Henry Days) to the hard-boiled civil rights noir and ethnic bildungsroman of the mid- and late twentieth century (The Intuitionist, Harlem Shuffle, The Nickel Boys, and Sag Harbor). From this vantage, it seems clear that Whitehead is not only a writer of genre fiction, but a prolific writer of one genre in particular: historical fiction. Yet this is somehow not what critics mean when they say that these literary novelists have “turned to genre.” Writing historical fiction is not what makes them “genre writers,” but rather what makes their work “literary” in the first place.
And lest we forget: There Are Only Two Options Left In Ukraine.
“Any peace document that the Russians can sign is worthless,” she says, “because they will not implement it, they will not abide by it. I want [Western readers] to know that Russia will use excuses just to restore themselves and attack again.”
Going to work on something else for a while.
The best rock song to come out of Belgium:
And probably whey there were never anymore.
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