Okay, This Is Sunday, What Happened Saturday?

Friday night,  I finished working on "Love Stinks" fairly early. That was after I talked about KH. It seems we learned about the Constitution in high school. That leaves me thinking the current infatuation with fascism is linked to the poor quality of American schools.

Saturday, I woke early over the objections of my aching back. I needed groceries, which is why I caught the 8:45 bus downtown and the 9:15 bus to Payless. If I have not said this before, let me say it now: riding buses is a good exercise for building up one's patience. At Payless, I ran into a fellow from work who gave me a ride back here. That was a little after 10.

I started lunch, listened to Backwoods on WMBR, and worked my way through email and blog posts. What I intended for my meal was a pork stew. That turned out well.

I remember crashing Chrome trying to download music in the afternoon and early evening. I got back to "Love Stinks" late in the afternoon. My only departure was a trip to McClure's for caffeine. I got RC because I've run the store out of Coke Zero, and it was too bloody cold for a walk down to Dollar General.

My ride to church had family coming in, so no church. That meant writing today. It also meant I could sleep in; which came in handy since I was up like every two hours.

What have I done int he past 3 hours? It doesn't seem like much - read some of my email; two blog posts written; and some articles read from The Guardian.

Yesterday, between browser crashes, I read a paper on the Greek church in America. Its complaint was it resisted English in its services and was more a repository of Greek nationalism. I saw that at Ft. Dix with the Greeks. The Antiochians have English, with a chanter also doing parts in Arabic (Syrian? Not sure if there's a difference, but it is interesting to hear.) So, I read this interview that came via The Orthodox Christian Laity newsletter about the church in Greece. I don't hear the problem noted above being solved. Then there is more - the criticism of same-sex messages (albeit, I want to point out, there is a criticism of taboo) and the problem of Gerontism. Which might be of interest to you, too.

Here is a novel I would like to have written: You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue review – the birth of Mexico:

Throughout the book, Enrigue (and in English his excellent translator, Natasha Wimmer) boldly uses modern language to recreate the past: Moctezuma’s advisers think of the conquistadors as a “pack of clowns”; Tlalpotonqui “had Moctezuma’s back”, and can stay outwardly calm “even if inside he was about to lose his shit”. Parts of the novel play like an Aztec West Wing, taking us deep into the political manoeuvrings of the royal court but blending its particularities with 21st-century psychology. It’s a rich approach that achieves a hallucinatory vividness.

***

Their methods differ, but both writers are doing versions of the same thing: forging a link between the moment in which we read and the moment their work describes. In Enrigue’s case that link is of fundamental importance: he is portraying the encounter in which Cortés fathered his country and, in a brilliant twist, presenting an Oedipal counterfactual. But before that, still hearing T-Rex, Moctezuma gazes into a bowl filled with the blood of sacrificed doves and is presented with an image that takes a long time to form “because it came from very far away. When it was finally sharp and clear, it made no sense to him.” What he sees is Enrigue, at a house on Long Island, writing the novel in which the emperor appears.

Would that I had not wasted my time. 

I still await "Poor things" arriving in Muncie; I intend my next movie to be tomorrow and be Ferrari (it will be my reward for working today on my novel). In the meantime I have items like ‘My films are all problematic children’: director Yorgos Lanthimos on Poor Things, shame and his creative soulmate Emma Stone to keep me occupied. Alasdair Gray needs to be read!

Poor Things was adapted by Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara from a celebrated 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the Scottish writer who won both the Whitbread award and the Guardian Fiction prize for the book, and who was described in the Guardian’s 2019 obituary as “the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art”. In the novel, a rambunctious Victorian pastiche, Gray presents several competing accounts of the life of Bella Baxter. In one version, it is claimed that Dr Godwin Baxter swapped the brain of a drowned woman with that of her unborn foetus, creating a child-like adult with no sense of moral decorum, who embarks on an uninhibited journey of discovery. In another, such claims are dismissed as fantastical tales, reeking “of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth”, wantonly plagiarising “episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg’s Suicide’s Grave, with additional ghouleries from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe”.

This is what a Booker-nominated writer sounds like: Yankee Swap: a short story by the Booker-nominated author Jonathan Escoffery.

There is a winter weather advisory in the west of Indiana. I need to get prepped and make a journey to Dollar General. I have been going back and forth to "Love Stinks" looking for a repetition, the plotting is all screwy thanks to the missing sections.

Back from spending money like a sailor at Dollar General, onto my novel. It may be there will be no movie tomorrow - it is looking grim outside.

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