I started this yesterday, on Friday. By 9 pm I was too tired to finish. There was not much to report - just tired and tired of my left arm troubling me. I found out my sister made plans for next weekend, so she cannot help me move. She thought I was going to call her if I was not taking the new place. Typical poor communication on my part. Music was downloaded - examples follow. I crashed Chrome several times, and I did not diminish my email inbox by much. I started the pork shoulder in the slow cooker. The damage deposit was paid. Considering that I got home closer to 3 pm that seems a very unproductive day.
What follows are things picked up while I tried to stay awake.
Spry is a literary magazine I like the look of but have not submitted to, yet. I wanted to note it so you can take a look.
Is change coming for Indiana? Is it no longer stuck in 1920 with its alcohol laws? See State Sen. Alting's brewery bill passes Senate, now off to the House for a vote:
Senate Bill 205 proposes to allow small breweries to collaborate with other small breweries to utilize their unused equipment in order to meet demands and explore growth opportunities in the industry.
The bill passed in the Senate with a bipartisan vote of 39 to 9 and is now heading to the House to be considered for a vote.
"The key word in the bill is collaboration," Alting said.
The Blue Masc: The brilliant discontents of Lou Reed reviews the recent Hermes biography and several books on Lou Reed.
Here is some Seventies Lou Reed:
I cannot say what you might learn from Richard Hughes Gibson's The Afterlife of Character: The end is not the end. That is, other than an outline of Don Quixote's career. I found it very amusing.
Please read One by One the Lights Go Out by Vanessa Giraud; a daughter faced with a mother with Alzheimeir's hit me hard with its prose and its emotional accessibility. I kept thinking I am glad not to have had this problem with my parents.
Catching up with Nathan Bransford's blog where two posts got my attention.
Six reasons you’re confusing the reader: wherein I found myself thinking mostly about "The motivations and stakes are unclear" and "You’ve lost sight of what’s actually on the page". The last one because I had not really thought of it and it is an obvious problem for any piece of writing (and it is a problem I have with revising - I see what I think should be there, not what is).
...As writers, it’s nearly impossible to avoid projecting things onto the page that just aren’t there. Really ask yourself: Can I see what is and isn’t on the page?How to nail the last line of the plot description (query critique) - I am a long way from sending out query letters, but that does nto mean I should not try to learn about them. So, note to me (and you):
Here’s a pretty simple formula you can use to stick the landing:
[PROTAGONIST(s)] must [DO X AND/OR Y AND/OR Z] in order to [GOAL/REWARDS] / or else [CONSEQUENCES].
I talked to KH tonight about politics. Neither of us can understand Trump's attraction. I was just reading The Article's Trump and the Tories: a warning when I reached the following which I mentioned to KH:
...The withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran confounded the other partners to the plan, left Iran with no check on upgrading its uranium and destroyed the credibility of those in Iran who had negotiated the deal, to the delight of the IRGC and harder liners who took power as a consequence. We are still paying the price.
The Iran deal should have told the country Donald J. Trump's art of the deal is at the level of a second-grader with crayons.
The Republicans seem so intent on retaining power they have forgotten how to govern. The Liberal Patriot's Building a More Resilient Navy: The value of variety in Navy production points to another deficiency in their strategy:
Maritime power is key to U.S. national security. With two decades of ground wars in the greater Middle East receding from the collective memory, it’s at sea that America will face many—if not most—of its security challenges. China, Russia, Iran, and other actors like Yemen’s Houthis all present threats to American interests. To be prepared to confront them, the U.S. should not put all its eggs into its familiar naval baskets. Variety will help produce the flexible Navy America needs.
I had never heard of the female philosopher Margaret Cavendish until The Millions newsletter came in today with Who Changed Their Lives. The article is an epistolary dialog, which makes excerpts difficult. However, there is an interesting question asked which I will pass along: why is pregnancy not the subject of philosophy? Imagining Nietzsche addressing that question amuses me.
Recently, I have been listening to and downloading a lot of Mink Deville, an old favorite who got away from me. A great soulful voice who is now dead. I first ran across him when I was in my own version of desperate days forty years ago.
Nonfiction predominates the thoughts of Kaulie Lewis Watson's Books I Wish I Wrote: On Writerly Jealousy. Still, she makes me wonder if there are books of which I am jealous. I cannot think so. For most of my life, I have found little profit in being jealous. It got me close to getting myself killed back in the summer of 1978. When she gets to the point where she discusses careers motivated by jealousy, I questioned whether this is why I never had a career and do not believe I will have a career as a writer. Too many I am in awe of, too much joy in discovering what I exiled myself from decades ago, for me to be jealous.
What I would like to do is write something that lifts up people's lives, adds to the joy, and detracts from the ugliness of this world.
450 Years of Juliets: On Women Making Shakespeare is a review.
Women Making Shakespeare, a new anthology from The Arden Shakespeare series edited by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan, illustrates both sides of this paradox. The anthology was designed as a tribute to Ann Thompson, the general editor of the Arden series, who edited the massive Arden volume of all three texts of Hamlet with Neil Taylor, and who throughout her career has broken new ground in feminist criticism of Shakespeare, especially with her 1997 anthology (with Sasha Roberts) Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900. Thompson has also, in her role as general editor of the Arden series, dramatically increased the number of women editors of Shakespeare’s plays. Her work and her influence are worth celebrating because even today’s statistics on the numbers of women editors and commentators of Shakespeare are as damning as the VIDA statistics.
The anthology contains short essays on anything related to women and Shakespeare — as characters, as actresses, as critics and scholars, as educators, as suffragists and feminists, and as readers — over the past 450 years. I would like to pose some questions that plumb the variety the anthology offers: what does reading Shakespeare mean for women? Was Shakespeare proto-feminist or patriarchal? Has anything changed in 450 years?
The discussion about Juliet is also a discussion of the censoring and dumbing down of Shakespeare. The kind of Shakespeare that is used to torture us in high school. I got lucky with a hand-me-down copy of Hamlet with the footnotes explaining all the naughty and rough bits. That was how I found Shakespeare more interesting than what I had been taught. Please do not give up on him. Life, that is Shakespeare, and is why I like how the essay closes:
...But the reason why we still read Shakespeare’s women, is that they are women. Goneril, Juliet, and Katherina are finally not ciphers. Whatever else they may be, they are true women, and they have true voices.
Instead of writing, I am reading interviews of writers like The Man Who Swallowed a Bullet and the Woman Who Wrote About It: A Conversation with Elizabeth Gonzalez James. If I have any writerly jealousy it is in reading of someone who has the time to write and who is acting on their talent. It feels more like a crush than jealousy, but there you have it. Then, too, I find spurs like this one:
Rumpus: Your book is described as a cross of Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel García Márquez, so I’m curious what other writers influence your style and inspiration.
Gonzalez James: I’ve drawn a huge amount of inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders, and I can feel their influence in my work. Probably Marilynne Robinson too. Vonnegut is so funny and fearless, and I think we share a similar sense of the absurd. Saunders is absurd, too, and I love that about his work. In his essays and lectures, he also emphasizes the importance of empathy when writing. When he’s revising, he always asks himself, “How can I love these characters more?” That’s something I try to emulate. And Robinson is such an erudite writer who’s highly influenced by her religious beliefs and her intellectual engagement with these beliefs. I do that a lot, too, not in any conscious way in which to copy her but just because I’m always thinking about religion and God and spirituality and because I think the big questions are the most important ones.
The big news of the day: Trump ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3M in defamation damages trial
Confession: when I was young, I think I had a crush on Angela Davis. I have not read her, but I have listened to her talk and she is one very intelligent woman. She is now eighty; which I know only thanks to Seven Stories Press: Happy Birthday, Angela Davis, an interview.
In what way do you think that the black political biography plays a role within this tradition of American letters?
Well of course the canon of American letters has been contested previously, and if one considers the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example, which, along with literature by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, that has clearly made its way into the canon, one can ask whether the inclusion of oppositional writing has really made a difference. Has the canon itself has been substantively transformed? It seems to me that struggles to contest bodies of literature are similar to the struggles for social change and social transformation. What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.
Since we are talking about canons, it seems to me that your work fits within another tradition—the philosophical canon. If we think of the work of Boethius, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Antonio Gramsci, Primo Levi . . . these are philosophical figures who have reflected upon their prison experiences. Do you see your work contributing to this philosophical tradition of prison writing, and if so, how?
Well, often times prison writing is described as that which is produced in prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci’s prison notebooks provide the most interesting example. It is significant that Gramsci’s prison letters have not received the consideration they deserve. It would be interesting to read Gramsci’s letters alongside those of George Jackson. These are two examples of prison intellectuals who devoted some of their energies to the process of engaging critically with the implications of imprisonment—at a more concrete philosophical level. Personally, I found it rather difficult to think critically about the prison while I was a prisoner. So I suppose I follow in the tradition of some of the thinkers you mention. However, I did publish a piece while I was in jail that could be considered a more indirect examination of issues related to imprisonment. I wrote an article entitled “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”10 which helped me formulate some of the questions that I would later take up in my efforts to theorize the relationship between the institution of the prison and that of slavery. I produced another piece—a paper I wrote for the conference for the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism, associated with the American Philosophical Association—entitled “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” Both pieces were published in TheAngelaY.DavisReader in 1998. IfTheyComeintheMorning, the book on political prisoners I wrote and edited with Bettina Aptheker, is another example of my prison writing. Finally, I also wrote an extended study of fascism which was never published. But it was only after I was released that I felt I had sufficient critical distance to think more deeply about the institution of the prison, drawing from and extending the work of the prison intellectual George Jackson.
We can run from such sharp thinking. Of course, running proves the superiority of the argument and the runner's intellectual cowardice. Read her, and do what is the hardest thing for modern Americans: think.
And for Mr. Trump.
Today: I must start packing and do my laundry and work on "Love Stinks" and Carlos Fuentes should go back to the library.
Tomorrow: Metropolitan Saba, head of the Antiochian church in America, will be at St. George's.
The cat disappeared for two days. He showed up at my door at 5 AM. Wherever he was, they must not have given him enough attention. He has eaten and is taking it easy. I thought he had died, that seems my default position for everything and everyone nowadays. Another confession: I worried about him and will miss him when I move.
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