Well, Saturday got worse. From 9:30 to 11, I had to crash. I think the problem is an ear infection - something low-level. Nauseous and off-balance. None of that explains how cramped my body feels or how I cannot keep my thoughts straight. Solid food helps a little. The heat and humidity enervate me as I try to catch on what I did not do this morning and know I am still falling further behind.
Things I have managed to do follow.
The English do things differently, but it is the same story for law courts and for the press, Chortle chortle, scribble scribble: inside the Old Bailey with Britain’s last court reporters.
When Toyn and Wilford bought out Central in 1999 and rebranded as Court News, years of resentment at this arrangement were channelled into a counterattack. They stopped sharing their notes and hustled out the other agencies. For a few years, as the only remaining specialist court agency, they made good money, employing at least five reporters and two photographers. But business dried up as local and regional papers began to fall away (more than 320 closed between 2009 and 2019, according to the Charitable Journalism Project). Now, in the press room it’s mostly just Toyn and Wilford. Their three junior reporters rove around the other London courts, and they share the space with a reporter from the general news agency PA, a BBC producer and the occasional national journalist. For a few major trials, journalists will descend en masse. But day to day, it’s a quiet place.
As we walked between the courts, Toyn ran into one of his favourite criminal barristers – an ebullient, passionate character, one of the old school – who was on a break from a gang murder trial. On seeing Toyn, the barrister ran back into court and re-emerged with a taped-up box, marked “Evidence”, which contained a 2ft-long knife that looked so unreal in its design – blood-red, with baroque, curling, lethal edges – that it resembled a theatrical prop more than a murder weapon. The barrister was desperate to impress on us quite how bad the epidemic of knife crime was in London, and despaired at the media’s lack of interest. “People don’t want to talk about this,” the barrister said gloomily. “It doesn’t sell.”
It was a tragedy, said Toyn, as we walked away. The press wanted stories that would appeal to their readers and advertisers, which did not include stories of stabbings too common to be considered newsworthy. As a matter of journalistic duty, Toyn and Wilford would cover the opening or verdict in a gang murder and post the story on their website and social media. But few readers would click. To Toyn, the tragedy was one of civic ignorance. The general population, he said, had no idea what went on in these courts, and therefore no idea what was actually going on in society.
***
For now, Court News has a YouTube channel (623 subscribers), a decent following on X (72,000), a Substack newsletter and two podcasts. One, Fresh From the Old Bailey, is made with a freelance producer, Gavin Haynes, who winkles the best stories of the week out of the team. The podcast hadn’t quite become the hit they had hoped for – especially frustrating given the success of the Daily Mail’s podcast The Trial, which follows high-profile cases such as Lucy Letby, Constance Marten and the plot to kidnap Holly Willoughby.
Pitchfork reviews the new Sturgill Simpson album Passage du Desir.
If his lyrics address various strains of alienation, the music on Passage du Desir engages with all sorts of sounds and styles and scenes. He may be the only major Nashville artist who has Can and Amon Düül in his collection, who hears in ’70s country a kind of avant-garde impulse. Sturgill is at his most cosmic on “Jupiter’s Faerie,” which raises a glass to an old friend who died before they could make amends. The story is bound to Earth, but the music imagines an afterlife in the vacuum of space: a peaceful vision of heaven, at least for seven and a half minutes. On closer “One for the Road,” he indulges some of his shredding but without the aggression and ostentation of SOUND & FURY. That’s fitting for what sounds like a breakup song, especially one where he tries to remain stoic in the face of the pain he’s causing and feeling.
I thought he sounded like a genius when I first heard him in prison. Seems he still has it.
From Thoreau and Me by Sparrow:
As I stood by the Esopus today, two black fighter planes, one after the other, flew low overhead, startling me with their roars. So powerful is the US military that one feels its might even in remote Phoenicia.
Life is complex. Thoreau lived alone in the woods, but his mother and sisters did his laundry. I live “below the radar,” but still benefit from US imperialism. I have lots of free time because other people are doing real work, unremitting toil for slave wages.
Life is complicated, we get distracted from the better things, noise obscures the voices of our better angels.
Goodbye, good luck, Kinky Friedman:
I went back to The Critic for Three novelists pushing the bloat out. I think there is a separate post in there. Certainly has me wondering about what I am doing.
It is 1:31 pm
I read S.B. Caves Building and Maintaining Tension in a Thriller Novel from Writer's Digest. I added to my post on writing that will come out 7/27. That was a half hour. I need to get up out of this chair. Start on the kitchen maybe.
2:10 pm
I managed to get myself down the bus stop around 2:40. Joints screaming. I went up to Walgreens and came back with Ben-Gay and soda and cigs. I have spent the last hour smelling of camphor. I managed to empty one bag in the kitchen, and one box. I took a short break and sent out emails that I would not be going to church tomorrow. Standing up was as much a problem as walking.
Working to a recent Brian Setzer album:
I skimmed ‘A history of contact’: Princeton geneticists are rewriting the narrative of Neanderthals and other ancient humans, having read something similar. Actually, I think it was the same article.
With IBDmix, Akey’s team identified a first wave of contact about 200-250,000 years ago, another wave 100-120,000 years ago, and the largest one about 50-60,000 years ago.
That contrasts sharply with previous genetic data. “To date, most genetic data suggests that modern humans evolved in Africa 250,000 years ago, stayed put for the next 200,000 years, and then decided to disperse out of Africa 50,000 years ago and go on to people the rest of the world,” said Akey.
“Our models show that there wasn’t a long period of stasis, but that shortly after modern humans arose, we’ve been migrating out of Africa and coming back to Africa, too,” he said. “To me, this story is about dispersal, that modern humans have been moving around and encountering Neanderthals and Denisovans much more than we previously recognized.”
That vision of humanity on the move coincides with the archaeological and paleoanthropological research suggesting cultural and tool exchange between the hominin groups.
Not so keen on Setzer doing ballads.
4:37
I have one more box in the kitchen, and a sink full of dishes needing to be washed. Covered in sweat, I took a break.
My cousin Paul wanted to be an architect. When I got back here, I sent him anything coming through my email having to do with architecture. I would have sent him Witold Rybczynski's As You Were: The Case for Rebuilding from The Hedgehog Review, I guess architects are not keen to restore. Call me clueless about modernism, but I agree with the pre-modern architect quoted below:
Such “improvements” fly in the face of modern conservation theory, yet for many visitors the ghoulish chimeras perfectly encapsulate the spirit of medieval architecture, which was Viollet-le-Duc’s intention. He famously pronounced that “to restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time.” This somewhat cryptic statement underlines the paradox of historic preservation. “Completeness” is not, and has never been, a natural condition of architecture. Buildings, unlike paintings and sculptures, are always in flux: The weather takes its toll, stones and bricks are repointed, roof slates replaced, and wood repainted. Practical considerations intervene, functions change, new needs arise, buildings are enlarged. Technical features require updating: more efficient heating and cooling systems, better lighting, and safer elevators. A building—any building—always represents something new as well as something old. Thus, old buildings are not The Past. They are partial and imperfect reminders of days gone by—but all the more valuable for that.
I doubt any of you will make it to New York any time soon, but read the movie synopses. You might see a little further, a little broader than you did before. They gave me food for thought, even if I lack the skill to do much with them. Film Comment Live: The Rebel’s Cinema—Frantz Fanon on Screen.
A few days late for Indiana's unemployment rate is increasing, expert explains fluctuations.
Patty Hearst held the burst of Roland's Thompson gun and bought it. She also pops up in Ed Simon's American Captivity: The captivity narrative as creation myth.
Such a warning became even more urgent as cases of willing adoption raised the disturbing possibility that there might be something attractive about organizing a society on a basis so antithetical to that of Anglo-Protestantism. Love and fear had long dominated the cultural vertigo felt by English settlers and other white Americans when they attempted to understand and imagine the indigenous people whose land they occupied. The fear comes through in all of the gothic depictions of Indians as inchoate manifestations of nature: formless, undifferentiated mobs howling at the edge of the wilderness. Such dehumanizing characterizations are accompanied by the (not necessarily contradictory) enthusiasm for a constructed fantasy of native life. The United States is, after all, the country that implemented a policy of ethnic cleansing against Native Americans while simultaneously appropriating the idea of Indianness. Consider the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, the Apache helicopter, and the Tomahawk missile, the Jeep Cherokee and the Dodge Dakota. Thomas Jefferson could write in the Declaration of Independence about the “merciless Indian Savages,” while the Sons of Liberty who helped spark the American Revolution unabashedly dressed up as Mohawks. In America, there is a shameful tradition of loving the symbolic Indian while hating the actual Indian.
The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American. Indeed, Kathryn Derounian-Stodola finds that the “Indian captivity narrative functions as the archetype of American culture, or its foundation text, in which the initial contact between Europeans and Native Americans inevitably evolved into conflict and finally colonial conquest.”15 For his part, Slotkin argues that the genre created a “paradigm of personal and collective history that can be discerned as an informing structure throughout…later American narrative literature.”16 Traces of the form can be seen in the true-crime memoirs of someone like Hearst, but the trope is even more intrinsic to American self-understanding. Our literature brims with archetypal accounts of characters descending into the dark core of barbarism and emerging with a primal knowledge that transforms them into new persons. This totemistic myth of Americanness is as common as it is psychically violent. Derounian-Stodola traces the genealogy of the form, from the authentic accounts of authors such as Rowlandson in the seventeenth century through the increasingly propagandistic works of the eighteenth century, then into works of fiction such as Ann Eliza Bleeker’s 1793 epistolary novel The History of Maria Kittle. A host of recent cinematic entertainments that have extended the life of the form include the 1990 film Dances with Wolves, starring Kevin Costner, and the 2003 Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai.
***
At present, American society is undergoing a deep and often contentious reevaluation of its national narratives, deciding whether the stories we tell ourselves—the myths—are really commensurate with who we are or who, ideally, we want to be. In what way does thinking through the implications of captivity bear on this question? Although the notion of giving a voice to the voiceless may seem a cliché, it has particular relevance to the genre because most people who were held captive were unable to express themselves. Furthermore, the vast majority of those taken captive were Native Americans themselves. We should be troubled by the huge library of works never written by native people forcefully taken from their families and their homes. To be sure, some reverse captivity narratives by indigenous writers do exist, including Samson Occom’s A Short Narrative of My Life (1768). Although written as a story of conversion to Christianity, it can be read against the grain as an account of forced assimilation. More radical in its politics, perhaps, was the early Native American activist William Apess’s autobiography, A Son of the Forest, published in 1829. Mostly, though, there is only silence.
Reading this, I thought about the European colonist's fear of going native. I think Maugham hit on this, but it seems the real stand-out is Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. It seems to me a case of a bad conscience. The Native Americans were not the ones using Hotchkiss guns at Wounded Knee.
Thank you WFMU for the soundtrack to this part of my day.
6:14
All the kitchen boxes are unpacked. The sink full of dishes can wait for tomorrow. The humidity remains miserable.
I just did a post for tomorrow on the Republican platform.
The New Republic has a brilliant idea here: Shawn Fain Is the President We Deserve. Yes, Really. Fain is, I believe, a Hoosier. I am sticking with Biden until he gets out - and hope he picks up the pace, gets feisty.
But damn Bill Maher is a hoot running down the alternatives:
Until now I have avoided the controversy around Alice Munro as a mother. I just finished reading Crooked Parallels: On Alice Munro, Andrea Skinner, and My Mother’s Failure to Protect Me. Thinking I was lucky as a child and, regardless of the government's opinion, never was tempted to go down the same path as others. Am I disappointed in Munro? Yes. However, I never met her. I prefer being sympathetic to her daughter, hoping she has a better life.
I sent the first page of "Chasing Ashes" to CRAFT 2024 First Chapters Contest and Gutsy Great Novelist.
Cutleaf 4.13 is out.
Seven Stories Press has Works of Radical Imagination on sale.
I am doing a separate post combining Lincoln Michel's Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Three Thoughts on the NYT Top 100: Missing Millennials, Fading Autofiction, the Genre-Bending Era, and Ted Gioia's The Best Books of the 21st Century.
AGNI has The Writing Lives of Roe v. Wade:
The essays gathered here remind us that Roe v. Wade not only ensured access to abortion but also enabled writers to choose for themselves how, what, and when their creativity—in every sense—would manifest. Roe provided intergenerational safeguards for a private interiority to resist and name a culture of abasement, surveillance technologies, and cruel theater. This authorial imagination and its networks of shared storytelling have been crucial to the coming-of-age of writers and the formation of contemporary U.S. literature.
Off to read a bit more. It is 8:43 PM.
Read Significant Obsessions: Milan Kundera and the weight of influence by Alisha Dietzman. I think it is more balanced than anything else I have read about Kundra since his death. She is an excellent writer herself, and she puts the problems of Kundra in a far different light. She left me feeling much better about my admiration for Kundera.
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