Tuesday: Counselor, Milan Kundera, Self-Check Outs, Alasdair Gray, One More Rejection.

I woke up early this morning - almost an hour before the alarm. The cat spent the night inside - a bad thing? He had me walk down to McClure's at 4:30 to get him cat food. I got a package of Pop-Tarts and a bottle of RC Cola. 

I spent a little time working on "Love Stinks" before catching the bus to work.

After work, I caught the bus to the westside Payless - cat food, beans, peppers, Coke Zero, hummus, and pineapple chunks. I dumped the pineapple after purchase while packing my bag. There went $5. I did not have a meltdown. 

Back downtown to catch the #1 out to my counselor. The bus was late; the session went well.

I got back here around 4:30, ate dinner, worked on email, and putting my notes together for this and anotehr post.

 My ex-wife loved self-checkout because she did not like dealing with people, my oldest sister had a little meltdown at the Muncie Aldi's from frustration with its self-checkout that was not user-friendly, and I have always thought it was meant to save the employers' money. Now The Chicago Tribune reports on the problems, Love it or hate it, self-checkout is here to stay. But it’s going through a reckoning:

NEW YORK — The promise of self-checkout was alluring: Customers could avoid long lines by scanning and bagging their own items, workers could be freed of doing those monotonous tasks themselves and retailers could save on labor costs.

All that has happened since the rollout of self-checkout but so has this: Customers griping about clunky technology that spits out mysterious error codes, workers having to stand around and monitor both humans and machines, and retailers contending with theft.

“Going to the grocery store used to be simple, and now it’s frustrating,” said Cindy Whittington, 66, of Fairfax, Virginia. “You’re paying more. You’re working harder to pay for merchandise at their store. And it’s become an ordeal to check out. I should get a 5% discount.”

From another direction - left field? - Head of the Egopantis: Shirley, Massachusetts.

‘He reflected the laughable complexity of the world’: Milan Kundera remembered by Florence Noiville

Milan Kundera would often repeat to me that life is “a conspiracy of coincidences”. In his case, fate had seen him born on 1 April, and he was convinced that this had had “a profound metaphysical influence” on him. Indeed, one only has to look at his oeuvre: from his first novel, The Joke, to his last, The Festival of Insignificance, all of his books feature the jocular, the lighthearted. Which doesn’t stop them from combining mischievousness with great depth and great lucidity – not to mention melancholy, the renowned Czech lítost

I want to see Poor Things, I have an Alasdair Gray novel here to read, and here I am posting on this blog. Albeit, this post lets me play fanboy for Gray. From The Woefully Neglected (and Partially Unfilmable) Creations of Alasdair Gray:

His postmodern, satirical, fabulist, and class-conscious fiction helped launch a Scottish renaissance in literature and art, and he received numerous awards for his novels, including the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. His first novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is considered a cult classic and was named by the Guardian as “one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction.” And yet, like the boy’s star in the story, Gray seems like a secret miracle, a furtive totem kept hidden by those lucky enough to find it, and any amount of exposure of this talisman to those in charge will risk having it taken away so that we can focus on the banal conventional education of bloodless fiction.

Now, with the release of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, an adaptation of Gray’s 1992 novel starring Emma Stone, Willem Defoe, Ramy Youssef, and Mark Ruffalo, comes the hope that the critical acclaim of the film (and its inevitable run at the Oscars next year) will revive interest in Gray’s work. This would be a wonderful result of someone with Lanthimos’s skill and influence bringing a sadly neglected author into the limelight.

My only concern, though, is that any cinematic version of Gray’s inimitable tales necessarily omits some of Gray’s most innovative techniques, which do more than simply adorn his narratives with postmodern festoons, but add realist weight to his sometimes bizarre stories and also provide comparative context to our own world, so that we can see how the absurd, grotesque, and downright filthy stuff that happens in Gray’s diegeses relate—are, in fact, meant to directly compare—to our own reality.

The Sewanee Review rejected "Beyond The Dead and The Dying":

Thank you for your recent submission to the Sewanee Review. Unfortunately, your manuscript doesn't suit the present needs of the magazine. We hope you'll find a place for it at another publication, and that you continue to keep us in mind as a destination for future submissions.

Sincerely,

The Editors 

Another that I revised after this submission. This makes me feel the revision was time well-spent rather than any sense of dejection. 

I managed a brief skirmish with "Love Stinks" this morning. I am now going to spend as much time as I can for the rest of the night typing that story.

sch 7:27 PM