Too Much to Say, Too Little Time

 The weekend is shot thanks to an ear infection, or something like that.

Yesterday, when I walked there was a acanting to the right. Today, the room spun and I headed back to bed.

I did accomplish talking to K and DM tonight.

There was much to catch up on. I have not added to the supervised release notes since Wednesday.

Thursday there was a visit from my PO. He came both to work and apparently to the room. I used "apparently" since his card was stuck in my room door when I returned. Maybe he forgot I worked for a living? He was his usual lugubrious self with his usual irrelevant questions. Have I been around minors is irrelevant since I never spent any time around them since I was a minor myself. He never follows up his questions about why or why not. I have long assumed they were merely perfunctory on his part; perhaps he hopes to catch me in a lie when the time comes for my polygraph. This time I explained the answers were not going to change, this was how I was living my life. I treat his existence as just as perfunctory. He announced he would be sending me an email seeking income information in case I needed help with the therapist he would be sending to me. Against my better judgment, I asked a question and got the answer expected. When asked about the therapeutic purpose of this new therapy, he said it was in the order and it would help me reintegrate into society. This was in the order a year or so ago, I have been on supervised release for over 2 years, so I am left thinking the probation department does not move very quickly, has no great concerns for my own abilities to reintegrate myself, and they are rather irrelevant to my reintegration. I have kept this record up of my doings while on supervised release so that you, dear reader, can make your own judgments on my danger to the republic. What I have sought to do is something positive with the time left me; the court order is only interested in keeping me away from behaviors that got me in trouble. The first presumes the second and also makes it a subsidiary. I did ask another question, since the PO did not deign to answer my email, about him sending the polygraph results to my counselor. He has not, nor did he appear likely to do so.

I cannot recall what I did later on Thursday. I think I went to the grocery. Payless on the west side, yes. I got more tilapia and chipotle peppers.

Friday, I went nowhere. I did catch hell from the owners about the cat. He ran in the apartment. They want no pets. I do not want any pets. No pets, no girlfriends, no more emotional attachments. Since Joni died, I do not think I bear any more losses. I understand why my father wanted no pets - they would die. Right now, he sleeps on my spare chair, a very housebroken, very calm cat. He will need to go out soon.

I remember being chilled on Thursday night. I did get a little writing done Friday night - under 1000 words. Even less yesterday.

I did put a dent in the email. Also, cleaned up "The Dead and The Dying" by putting in a Table of Contents.

I do not have time to write what I have read, so I am going to make a list here:

• Longstreet: the Confederate general who switched sides on race (Where I learned much I did not know before, and which may also show reason and ideals may not trump racism and pride)
• Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover review – the making of a master
• How Patrick Stewart went from the Bard to where no man has gone before 
• An Antisemitism Studies Primer by Shane Burley
• The Surprising Origins of Experimental Science: A Conversation with Peter Harrison, Part Two

A weird novel of an old actress and murder, with echoes of Sontag 

 Late
Michael Fitzgerald
Transit Lounge, $32.99
Helen Elliott

Michael Fitzgerald’s third novel, Late, owes much to a seductive monster who looked like Cruella de Vil and called herself Susan Sontag. In her influential essay from 1964, Notes on Camp, Sontag writes: “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

Sontag defines camp as a sensibility, an artifice that makes theatre of everything. Notes On Camp opened up fresh ways of understanding across all the arts and in the performance of life itself. Late, set in the late 1980s, an internal narrative of a woman living in an apartment with a harbour view, measures up to Sontag’s useful observations.

***

Fitzgerald, an admirer of Joyce – generally a cause of trembling in a reader – plots the vagaries of an old and uncontained mind, unable to process with any clarity. Writing like this is also an exercise in personal taste and is here done with an archness that is all within the scope of camp rather than in the elastic genius of Joyce. Sontag’s idea about seriousness and frivolity working constantly within the same frame can be exasperating. An extravagance of learning is in every line, but this excess can defeat access to the text.

And there is this: Zelda Zonk in all her disguises, in all her ramblings, never touches us. Tragedy is always outside camp’s remit. Fans, collectors, specialists of camp could love this frankly weird novel. As frankly weird as Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, both defined by camp, both much admired and both now un-read except by scholarly specialists. Like them, Late will have a coterie of admirers.

Top Diplomat Of Ecumenical Patriarchate Delves Into Catholic-Orthodox Relations 

Metropolitan Job of Pisidia is an Orthodox bishop of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He is the Permanent Representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the World Council of Churches and co-President of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic church and the Orthodox church. These significant posts make him a top diplomat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. an Orthodox bishop of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He is the Permanent Representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the World Council of Churches and co-President of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic church and the Orthodox church. These significant posts make him a top diplomat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

After the mushroom cloud: The origin story of the king of monsters by Bryan Karetnyk 

The standard account holds that Tanaka took the idea to the studio top brass, who green-lit the project, hoping to capitalize on the Japanese public’s renewed fear of nuclear weapons and radiation – and the rest, as they say, is history. Godzilla, the monstrous embodiment of nuclear holocaust, an inexorable menace that breathes white-hot radioactivity and lays waste to entire cities, was born of an artistic collaboration between the renowned film-maker Ishirō Honda and the special-effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, going on to become the multibillion-dollar entertainment franchise that it is today. But as we are reminded by Jeffrey Angles and his translations of Shigeru Kayama’s novellas Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again – their first-ever appearances in English – this version of events misses a crucial part of the story. “Although lots of people at Toho Studios contributed to the first Godzilla movie, Kayama was the one who developed Tanaka’s vague idea for a film into more or less what we know today”, writes Angles. “He deserves to be better known as the ‘real father’ of Godzilla.”

I never read The Fear of Flying, but it was a book known when I was a teenager. I think I discounted it as anything interesting until I read a bit more about Jong in prison. There was a copy in the prison library catalog, which copy had gone missing. Reading The prose takes off: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying at 50
by Elaine Showalter makes me think my sister is right about my arrogance.

For me Fear of Flying stands up as an audacious and ambitious first novel with a wide range of reference: epigraphs from Byron, Shakespeare, Colette and Cole Porter; discussions of women writers, and her own wish to be a female Chaucer. It has a terrific opening paragraph: “There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh … I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures”. Isadora Wing is the narrator, and her husband, Bennett, is on the plane, therapeutically holding her hand during take-off. They are all heading to Vienna for the 1971 Psychoanalytic Congress honouring Freud, who had left the city in 1938 amid rising antisemitism. Isadora has been hired by a magazine called Voyeur to write a satirical article about the congress. And initially the novel seems to be a satire on psychoanalysis.

But then it quickly announces its theme: being female in America, where “you grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, whoreoscopes … and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas”. Even if you’re very smart it doesn’t matter, because you are conditioned to choose marriage and motherhood, and to suppress “the longings which marriage stifled … to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head … to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something”.

 While KH finds creative writing limited by MFAs, I am troubled by a literary America fixated on Brooklyn. I do think highly of Colson Whitehead and Jonathon Lethem, but there is more to America. I have hopes of inspiring someone out here in the Midwest to write our own stories. My reading Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem review – death of a neighborhood leaves me thinking Lethem sees some of the same problems, and leaves me wishing I were younger and could write a story like his.

Brooklyn Crime Novel is a fictionalised memoir channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes that jump around in time, a fractured and granular narrative with a plurality of vocal tics. In what is more a sociological inquiry than a forensic one, the author interrogates what happened to the neighbourhood he grew up in, and we overhear the collective splutter of the street. The crimes and misdemeanours investigated become plural too, and uncertain, but a single plaintiff emerges: Brooklyn itself. In a time of staggering gentrification a whole community has become orphaned, a victim of displacement and dispossession.

***

Given his genre-bending proclivities, it’s no surprise that Lethem makes a bold grab at the fashionable mode of autofiction. Adding some deadpan sparkle to a form that can often be flat and drab, he comes up with something truly compelling. Anonymising his characters, giving them nicknames or unattributed pronouns, is perhaps witness protection for old friends. But in refusing to fictionalise his compatriots he gives up his own authority as a “voice” for them, and simply allows a neighbourhood to speak for itself. There’s real sincerity here and I felt engaged to the end, carried along by an honest, melancholy humour. This is a heartfelt testimony of Brooklyn, where the urge for discretion outweighs the temptations of style. “I am in their company,” Lethem says of the locals. “I love them too much to want to say any more.”

My "Dead and Dying" stories were meant to be on the sociological side; they fell flat from that theme. It seems Lethem found a way to do it right.

 I found the museum of americana while seeking publishers; it sounds interesting, even if I have nothing to offer:

the museum of americana is an online literary review dedicated to fiction, poetry, nonfiction, photography, and artwork that examines, revives, or repurposes the old, the dying, the forgotten, or the almost entirely unknown aspects of Americana.

the museum of americana was founded on two core beliefs. The first is that, while certainly not all aspects of Americana ought to be praised or celebrated, there is still great value in holding even that which is embarrassing or difficult up to the light to see what it is made of. The second is that there is much to love and celebrate in historical American culture. It is published out of fascination with the big, weird, wildly contradictory collage that is our nation’s cultural history. the museum will appear three times a year, in the winter, summer, and fall.

From that site, I read Make Peace with the Cake by Olga Zilberbourg. I recommend it.

There was no going back to that kitchen, though, and no predicting what, to Leo, would feel as special, as precious, about his birthday. I couldn’t protect him from the pandemic. I couldn’t stop a dictator from waging war. I couldn’t even stop a man from brandishing a gun at his son’s birthday party. Cake was a safe bet. And a bouncy house.

There should be more. Maybe tomorrow.

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