Well, the PO visited on Monday. He had a trainee with him, so it was back to the usual irrelevant questions. Well, irrelevant to my mind – one day I shall ask him what he means by inappropriate thoughts. I knew a woman once who asked me to tie her up. Is remembering that an inappropriate thought. Actually, there may have been more than one. There was one who asked me to leave a welt on her behind. Is that memory an inappropriate thought? I think he has not learned that what he thinks I think about is not, never was, all that interesting to me. Kevin Frone said I seemed to have known some colorful people, and he may have been right. I fear what might have happened to my PO if he had met the women I knew. Any of them.
I had come back from BSU shortly before his arrival. Frankly, I was tired and turned in soon enough. The same thing happened tonight – three hours on the computer and my eyes were worn out.
I am so far behind on the email that I am not sure if I can catch up. Perhaps I should just do a mass delete. One thing learned is that I cannot do everything, I cannot read everything. That way lies madness.
I did get a few small posts for this blog. Items that are about 2 months old now.
I did catch the bus home. The knee ached just a bit too much for a 30-minute walk. A stop at the Village Pantry and I came home.
I wrote up an idea that I have had for a few weeks. Politics raising its ugly head, but I will publish even if I think it will go completely unnoticed. Then I wrote up these notes.
Tomorrow, I pay rent and remind them the furnace and the oven still need work. I should hit Dollar General for a couple of items. Do I eat in or out? Regardless, I need to make my way to BSU and get online. I hope the knee is better; I expect to be walking home.
I get done with the law stuff, and what do I start reading? Law review articles I downloaded from Google Scholar. Definitely the sign of a sick mind.
It is 8:13 pm. I am done, except for reading a bit of Naguib Mahfouz.
Sch 4/30
Wednesday - work got me out the door at 5:40 AM, the bus brought me back at 1:39 PM. I changed clothes, hit the bank, and delivered my rent. Over to Dollar General for tortillas and bread and a sauce pan.
The bus got me home around 3:22, when I cooked up some spaghetti. The knee is not as much a porch a problem as it has been, which is good because I did not get to BSU until around 4:45.
Some diversionary reading I will note. I like Elisabeth Moss, but this review does not leave me wanting to get Hulu: The Veil review – Elisabeth Moss muddles through creaky spy series. A gift that keeps giving (noxiousness): Five skeletons found under Wolf’s Lair home of Hermann Göring in Poland.
Now to check the email.
The polygraph guy now wants to do the polygraph on Sunday. Good thing Pascaha liturgy starts the night before. All I need is a way to get there. Waiting on an email now from MW.
I am deleting the politcal stuff. No time right now to hear how dredful this year is. Putting off literary stuff until the weekend.
What I am taking the time to read follows.
A New Anarchism: Arthur Ivan Bravo reviews Catherine Malabou's Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy
In Stop Thief!, Malabou devotes the entire volume to the subject of anarchy/anarchism, in furtherance of its cause. But beyond this, her more specific intentions are to properly articulate and define anarchism and to explore how it has figured in the work of various notable philosophers. This is to reconcile a historical, traditional discrepancy between anarchism’s philosophical and political iterations, and to provide anarchism with its very own – and deserved – body and/or literature of theory. In attempting this, perhaps anarchism can start to be taken seriously as a viable, realistic alternative.
Malabou begins Stop Thief! by commenting on the state of anarchy or anarchism today, decrying assumptions held about it: that it is not realistically possible, and therefore, not worthy of serious attention. These assumptions abound even as distortions of anarchy/anarchism drive major forces in our world, such as those of what is called ‘anarcho-capitalism,’ the results of which range from the rise of political authoritarianism and government violence, to the “uberization of life,” to the workings of cryptocurrency transactions, and economic deregulation. Her brief survey is indeed convincing, as well as frustrating for anyone invested in anarchism. She states that differentiating genuine anarchism, what it means, and can mean, from existing forces in motion such as the aforementioned anarcho-capitalism, is a necessary task. But how did it come to this in the first place?
An Orthodox Christian, one who has read the Desert Fathers, I found what I expected in Demons and Western Psychology: The Unbounded Potential of The Monastic Mind.
Drawing on this corpus, Graiver outlines the features of what she calls “demonological psychology:” the conceptual system that structured how monks imagined selfhood and mental activity. Especially since David Brakke’s acclaimed Demons and the Making of the Monk, scholars have recognized the important role that demons played in monastic self-formation. Graiver focuses in particular on the ascetic imperatives of self-control and undistracted prayer, and the challenges that accompanied monks’ efforts to train their minds to remain attentive to God. As she demonstrates, demons played a major role in monastic mental training as instigators of distractions that caused the monk’s mind to wander, obsess over particular thoughts, or even go insane.
To her archive of monastic literature Graiver adds two other interlocutors, which she interweaves masterfully throughout the book: ancient philosophy and modern cognitive psychology. The former provides the intellectual backdrop against which demonological psychology developed, as Graiver traces conceptions of the self and its transformation from their Platonic and Stoic origins to their adoption and adaptation by ascetic Christian thinkers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Evagrius of Pontus. While Graiver is not exactly breaking new ground here, she does succeed in artfully drawing together threads explored disparately by other scholars in a way that is coherent, concise, and engaging, no mean feat given the historical and disciplinary breadth she is covering.
My thoughts when reading the monks talk of demons was as a psychological state - the end was the same for the monks, an evil to be confronted.
Whereas in the monastic literature that Graiver explores, unwanted thoughts are ascribed to demons, psychologists today tend to ascribe them to the natural state of an anxious mind prone to dwelling on the very thoughts that it seeks to avoid. How closely can these two explanations be reconciled? Graiver’s suggestion, here and elsewhere in the book, is that cognitive and demonological explanations are sometimes two sides of the same coin. That is to say, it was precisely because monks struggled so mightily to suppress and avoid distracting thoughts that such thoughts could become “obsessive.” Conversely, externalizing troubling thoughts as demons allowed monks to effectively release, dismiss, and move past them.
“You Can Almost Hear the Ghosts”: Valeria Luiselli on Juan Rulfo reminds me how little I know, how much time I have wasted, and leaves me wondering what I might have been able to do. In other words, her description of Juan Rulfo's novel warms my ambition.
i heard St. Vincent while in prison. I liked her, then she was on Fresh Air last week and she bowled me over. Pitchfork reviewed her latest, All Born Screaming.
All Born Screaming, Clark’s self-produced seventh album, goes for a hard reset on the St. Vincent project, not by going back to the harsh, alien textures of, say, 2011’s Strange Mercy, but by flicking the dial from “shock” to “console.” Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints.
It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content. Clark’s records often display warmth and vulnerability in flashes, but All Born Screaming feels thoroughly romantic and highlights bits of beauty amid Clark’s usual lexicon of chaotic, violent imagery. On the dazed dream-pop ballad “The Power’s Out,” she sings about New York as a kind of hell created by its inhabitants; far from a horror story or an indictment, it sounds like a love song.
Check her out:
Notwithstanding the enthusiasm of authors and academics, Goldman has yet to achieve the mainstream acclaim in the US enjoyed by many of his similarly regarded peers. I have long suspected that this is partly because Goldman does not fit easily into our ready-made identity categories. Born in Boston in 1954 to a Guatemalan mother and a Jewish American father, Goldman studied at Hobart College, the University of Michigan, and the New School. In 1979, he left the United States for Guatemala, and he spent most of the 1980s in Central America writing fiction and covering the region’s civil wars as a journalist. Since the end of the 1990s, he has split his time between Mexico City and New York. He teaches one semester a year at Trinity College, where he is the Allan K. Smith Professor of English Language and Literature.Over the past 30 years, Goldman has produced a steady stream of ambitious, experimental works that resemble little else that has been published in the Anglophone world. He is the author of the novels The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), The Ordinary Seaman (1997), The Divine Husband (2004), Say Her Name (2011), and Monkey Boy (2021)—the last of which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2022. He has also published two books of nonfiction: The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (2007) and The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (2014).
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FG: I think in the first books I was subconsciously thinking of a literature that was outside the US tradition because of the way it incorporated Latin American literature, and my own binational persective. I was proud of the way I did that in The Ordinary Seaman, especially, a novel about a crew of castaway Central American merchant seamen stranded at an abandoned pier in Red Hook. And I thought the first books—if you read them together—spoke for themselves. I don’t want to reduce them to any sorts of political agendas, because I think that whatever politics the books have emerged naturally from the writing itself.
I’ve also always had the desire to create a literature that embodied this space I was claiming for myself, which is the United States and Latin America fused as they can only be in a novel, or, in another sense, inside a human’s body, and certainly inside a heart, or in a struggling conscience. Especially Central America, but maybe Latin America more generally, because, of course, Mexico City is where I live, I’m remarried, my wife Jovi and I are raising a pair of daughters, no place has ever been more my home that Mexico City is now. Aura’s death drove me more inward for a trio of books. The emotions, the meanings, the images and stories I was looking for were intimate ones. But that was interesting too, because I found in the inner space another way to explore the same dynamic. There are no overly autobiographical elements to my new book. Private ones, of course. We eat our anxieties, as they say here in Mexico, and that nourishes what we write. But this is the book I was getting ready to write when Aura died. I guess it deals with some of the themes I’ve always dealt with. Its setting was inspired by New Bedford, the great fishing port city of Massachusetts. What drew me to New Bedford at first was its Guatemalan immigrant community, there are thousands of Guatemalans there, most of them highland Maya with no or almost no previous connection to the ocean, to the fishing industry. But for three centuries New Bedford had been a hub for all kinds of immigrants. Now there are other Central Americans there too, Mexicans, Dominicans. The Portuguese are the most dominant immigrant group, and there are Norwegians, Italians, Irish, Vietnamese, French Canadians as well. It’s really a classic border town, only instead of on the Sonoran Desert, it borders on the North Atlantic. So the question right now is, what am I going to do with all this in the new novel? I’m not sure yet. I just know I’m really determined. I’ve been trying to unlock the mystery of what this books wants to be for something like 20 years now.
Think about it. Dare.
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