The Doctor cancelled early on Friday. That should have been a sign.
All I managed with "Love Stinks" was some organizational work. Yes, General Eisenhower, I know that is important, too. It just feels like not enough, that I ought not have wasted my time in the email. Although, I did get a message from Paul S.
Snow is coming:
Special Weather Statement issued January 5 at 2:39PM EST by NWS Indianapolis IN
An area of low pressure moving south of Central Indiana will bring light snow to our area late this evening and overnight. Around 1 inch of accumulation is expected, with isolated higher amounts possible. Snow is expected to end by 1000 AM on Saturday. This light snow may resulting in snow covered and slippery surfaces, resulting in difficult travel. If you plan being out late tonight and early on Saturday, exercise caution.
Since I am spending time with my email, I might as well share what I found.
Upcoming books from The Millions: Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview. Can I find any time for books this year?
A week in the life of an Indianapolis playwright, My Culture Journal: Lou Harry
The Brisbane Times book review arrived.
After the rats in Room 101, what happened to Julia in 1984?
Either way, Newman’s sixth novel makes for refreshing reading among today’s polarised debates about gender, sexuality and identity, and confirms its author as an American Gen X novelist of courage, originality and talent.
Gabrielle Carey’s final book: the life of the writer she adored
Reviewing Richard Ellmann’s great life of Joyce many years ago, Frank Kermode talked of its immaturity; Ellman captured the richness of the comedy. Gabrielle Carey, God bless her, gives us in the end the pretty unmitigated starkness and tragedy of Joyce’s life.
Punk angels and spiders with hands: Welcome to the New Weird
Weird fiction has been around for a long time: think of Kafka or Gogol. In more recent years we’ve had the weirdness of David Mitchell or Haruki Murakami. What makes this fiction new, according to its devotees, is that it has the characteristics of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy or horror) but pushes those genres even further out there.
So stand by for spiders with human baby hands, women with insect heads and boys giving birth to alien beings. And that’s just the beginning. But it’s not enough just to come up with a weird idea: it has to go somewhere significant.
Commonweal's ‘Wild Butchery of Souls’: A contemporary poet aims to capture the terror of World War I by Phil Klay offered up an idea that I amy applicable; at least, worth thinking about.
...He is acutely conscious of how we project ourselves into the past, but also of how the past blends continually, and complexly, into the present, inaccessible and yet constitutive of our very being....
Then it was the Times Literary Supplement's turn, starting with Cherchez la femme: Penguin Classics launches a Crime and Espionage series
The new Crime and Espionage titles offer similar narrative variety. Noir aficionados will enjoy Ross MacDonald’s The Drowning Pool (1950) and Davis Grubb’s The Night of the Hunter (1953), both new to Penguin. Racial prejudice and social injustice inflect Chester Himes’s boisterous Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), reprinted from Penguin Classics (where it appeared in 2011). Dick Lochte’s Sleeping Dog (1985) intertwines the narratives of a precociously intelligent fourteen-year-old, Serendipity Dahlquist, and a washed-up LA ex-cop, Leo Bloodworth, whom she hires to find her missing dog. Unusually for this series, Lochte’s book is a tour de force of ballsy women, starring a randy runaway wife, a lesbian mobster, Serendipity’s grandmother (who plays the matriarch in a sitcom) and Serendipity herself.
Penguin Crime’s spy fiction has always been a hidden strength of the imprint. Beyond John le Carréwere William Haggard’s Whitehall offices, John Welcome’s Mediterranean car chases, John Blackburn’s bioterrorist hazards and Geoffrey Household’s cross-country manhunts. By having “Espionage” in the series title Winder makes this strength explicit. One Ian Fleming novel (From Russia with Love, 1957) is to be included, besides two well-known le Carrés, Call for the Dead (1961) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), with a third coming next year (The Night Manager, 1993). Long out of print, Michael Gilbert’s short-story collection Game Without Rules (1967) features two benign middle-aged bachelors in a Kent village. In fact they are highly trained intelligence operatives who intercept dastardly communist plots and dispatch sleeper agents with the assistance of a charismatic Afghan hound. Anthony Price’s Other Paths to Glory (1974) takes an unusual perspective on the secret services of Britain and France, when a mystery surrounding a First Word War battlefield triggers a spate of assassinations – and threatens to disrupt high-level diplomacy. A Price prequel from the same series, The Labyrinth Makers (1970), will be published as a Green Penguin next summer. All of these are welcome rediscoveries.
Speaking of spies, and also from the TLS, Man with the golden pen: The less than happy life behind the James Bond novels
Shakespeare calls Fleming “the first proper celebrity writer”. The proposition is open to doubt: Lord Byron, Dickens and Hemingway (among others) have better claims to such a meaningless title. Fleming was a minor literary talent who posthumously became a cultural phenomenon. For all the scrupulous diligence of Nicholas Shakespeare’s researches, and the detail he is able to amass and make highly readable, he cannot make Fleming’s life or his writings assume great significance. It is the afterlife of the novelist’s alter ego that matters today. James Secretan. James Bond. What’s in a name? Rather a lot, it seems.
I read all of the Bond books, but one, when I was in high school. When in prison, I re-read Moonraker. It just did not work (although not as bad as the movie version!). What made Bond and keeps him alive are the movies. Once I found Deighton and Adama Hall and LeCarre, there was no reason to read Bond.
It's a Rockabilly World - a documentary I listened to as I worked my way through the email and drafting of this post.
I have been thinking about apartments. It feels like time to move on. I called CC and it turns out that in all the junk she has collected, there is a bed or two.
I also talked to KH last night.
The one thing I feel no guilt about - getting closer to finishing with Carlos Fuentes. Brilliant.
This morning, I slept in more than I intended. I still spent time reading The Rediscovery of Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Wheel of Love” from Thornfield Hall. I got suckered into 10 Famous Singers from Indiana - I did not know half, and I wonder where is Michael Jackson and Mellencamp and Hoagy Carmichael?
I caught the 8:45 bus downtown. The snow came, it is sloppy outside, Then I tripped myself up, sort of. I had breakfast at The Bird Dog Cafe - omelet and bagel - before going to get groceries. Never buy groceries on an empty stomach. Only I forgot the #3 is an hourly run on Saturdays, and after picking one bus and then another, trying to figure out how to get myself back home, I went to the west Payless. Here is another thing about riding buses - it is a puzzle trying to figure out how to get from one point to another. My day brightened when I got a $33 ham for $8. I got back here around noon.
having eaten a little lunch, tarted up the pork stew, and did some reading. I am back here.
I find Jodi Foster both adorable and admirable, and ‘There are different ways of being a woman’: Jodie Foster on beauty, bravery, and raising feminist sons is a great interview from The Guardian.
Also from The Guardian, ‘We are living in the century of fear’: Hisham Matar on why we need books, which includes the following:
Our age fears books. It is worried about ungovernable expression. It often mistakes the author for the authority on her work, when only the work is the true authority on itself. Anyone who has written an honest line knows this. Added to this is that other, much older fear, which power everywhere has often felt towards books: that they risk disrupting the official narrative, make those whom we have decided are fundamentally different from ourselves vivid, present and equal.
This is why the violence of war, of death, occupation and displacement, is invested in what sort of libraries we end up with. War wants to extend its murderous tentacles into our bookshelves: the public and private ones, the physical and those we carry within us.
***
War is horrific for all the reasons that we know it to be, but it is also horrific because it is invested in such corruptions. The opposite of war is not peace – peace is merely its absence; the opposite of war is cooperation. And no work of literature can function without its cooperative parts.
I never was much for malls. Crowds milling about are not my thing; know what you want, get in, get it, get out. However, the closing of Anderson's Mounds mall surprised me when I heard of it while at Fort Dix. CharlieG. and I talked about what could be done to fix malls. He had retail experience, and still had no good ideas. So when I saw The US invented shopping malls, but China is writing their next chapter in yesterday's news ltter from The Conversation, I knew I had to skim it, at least. I can see the ideas, which will not be followed up here:
But the Chinese are making creative use of excess mall space. New users are filling nonretail areas, such as indoor walkways and atriums that now house café tables. Others have become children’s play spaces filled with giant inflatable figures. The Raffles City Mall in Shenzen has a rooftop pet playground, a stage, an art display area and a sun-shaded lawn.
China’s informal economy of food stalls and sidewalk merchants is also filling the void. Although street vending has a long history in China, government officials sought to suppress it in recent years, calling it unsanitary and a throwback to pre-modern times. Now, however, they are encouraging it as a way to reduce growing unemployment, especially among young people, which currently exceeds 20%.
During my trip, I saw small-scale entrepreneurs selling produce, street food and crafts in mall parking lots and around public entrances. The distinction between public and private spaces is being reconfigured as vendors set up stalls in areas that once were open space.
Empty store spaces are also being repurposed. Some have been converted into electric vehicle showrooms, art museums and children’s play centers with dance studios, paddling pools, small skating rinks, gyms and yoga centers. Others have been redesigned as sites for art or cooking classes, or for multiplayer electronic gaming and virtual reality experiences. The Dream Time Mall in Wuhan contains an indoor snow center that offers ski lessons, ice mazes and tubing.
Closing out with Courtney Barnett for your consideration:
Interested in fact based espionage and ungentlemanly officers and spies? Try reading Beyond Enkription. It is an enthralling unadulterated fact based autobiographical spy thriller and a super read as long as you don’t expect John le Carré’s delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots.
ReplyDeleteWhat is interesting is that this book is apparently mandatory reading in some countries’ intelligence agencies' induction programs. Why? Maybe because the book has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. Maybe because Bill Fairclough (the author) deviously dissects unusual topics, for example, by using real situations relating to how much agents are kept in the dark by their spy-masters and (surprisingly) vice versa.
The action is set in 1974 about a real British accountant who worked in Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) in London, Nassau, Miami and Port au Prince. Simultaneously he unwittingly worked for MI6. In later books (when employed by Citicorp and Barclays) he knowingly worked for not only British Intelligence but also the CIA.
It’s a must read for espionage cognoscenti but do read some of the latest news articles in TheBurlingtonFiles website before plunging into Beyond Enkription. You'll soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won't want to exit.