Stuff Is Taking Over!

Work and back home because my sister was bringing me stuff from my late cousin. She stayed to eat - pork loan stewed with diced tomatoes. I now have so much more stuff. Two tables and a bed need put together. I have no idea where I am going to find the time to get it all sorted out.

CC came by to see the mess. I also fed her. Her leg looks like it has been bitten by a spider, not good. Of course, she will not go see a doctor. I see now how much I annoyed people when I also refused to see a doctor.

I finally got Joel C and her to speak on the phone.l She does not believe I talked so much about her while at Fort Dix.

Just a few more items and I will close out here. Other blog posts to write, now that I have gotten my second wind. I wanted to see a band downtown and was just too tired. Then CC and I got talking - religion, our past, and what is going on in her life. Then her leg began spasming. I will write while she rests.

I ordered Djuna Ryder's Ryder before I read Eliza Browning's Parables and the Picaresque: On Djuna Barnes’s “Ryder”. I had read Ryder's Nightwood after I got back to Muncie.

This I ran across days ago, CLASSICS AND CHRISTIANS IN THE 12TH CENTURY by Jamie Collings on the Antigone website. I think I see now why Christopher Marlowe translated Ovid.

Another one of those book reviews that kind of wander into and come out going that showed me something I did not know before: The Book of Ayn Trolls Us All: Lexi Freiman’s novel about a canceled writer skewers pieties left and right

The Book of Ayn is not a novel that satirizes the Annas and Ayns of the world in order to sketch out a more compelling left-wing vision. Nor is the novel merely a satire. Freiman’s debut, Inappropriation, an irreverent take on identity politics in the package of a coming-of-age novel, proved her dexterity at picking apart sacrosanct stances while also plumbing the depths of the desire to belong. The Book of Ayn accrues similar layers: Anna’s tailspin becomes an epic hero’s journey through New York, Los Angeles, and Lesvos; a Künstlerroman of a novelist in a midlife crisis; a picaresque quest for meaning.

Freiman smartly sidesteps politics and polemics—mercifully, the novel never mentions Trump. She makes The Book of Ayn instead a novel saturated with avoided grief, wherein Anna must grapple with her record of “yoking myself to bad ideas since I was three years old”—the age when her baby brother died and she responded by smearing her own poop on her parents’ bedroom walls. Freiman presents a case against “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” examining what Anna’s refusal to conform to narrative expectations in life and in art has cost her, and how she might find a path forward. In this, The Book of Ayn is both more and less transgressive than its title makes it seem; Anna’s provocative posturing serves as armor against pain.

If I were younger, this would be the kind of thing I would like to have written. 

Now, having dealt with three crashes in the last 45 minutes - it may have been leaving Grammarly open - I can send this to be published.

sch 7/11