The Pilgrim Dead At 88; How This Was Never A Country For White Men Only; Are We Ruled By AI; Monday in Muncie

I ended Sunday reading about American history: The Spirit of '76: A Jewish Perspective on the American Revolution is Michael Hoberman review of Adam Jortner's A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (MARGINALIA REVIEW of BOOKS)

What the patriot Jews did by participating in the war effort and then, once it was over, invoking that participation as a basis for their rights and citizenship, was unprecedented. It helped to shape legislation, contributed meaningfully to the formal disestablishment of religion in the new nation, and served as a model, or at least as a point of inspiration, for Jewish action throughout the modern world—in France in the 1780s and 1790s, in England shortly afterward, and, for that matter, in the corners of the New World that hadn’t rebelled against George III or the other imperial states of Europe. As the primitive strain of thought embodied by “replacement theory” threatens to shape the national discourse and “immigrants” are once again targeted for persecution, books like A Promised Land remind us that the culturally hermetic world that ideologues wish to “take back” never existed in the first place. 

And Roman history: When Did the Roman Empire Fall? by Anatoly Grablevsky. He has an interesting argument about a battle, one I never heard of before, being the true fall of Rome.

This morning, I had an hour to kill. I needed the time because the warmed-over pizza from last night did not sit well through the night and even when I woke.

I still have not read enough Roddy Doyle, but I am including The Guardian's review The Women Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle review – his best yet as a reminder and with the hope you track him down,

In one sense, The Women Behind the Door is a gloomy book: it shows how Paula, and Nicola, and all of us, can act against our own better judgment. It reminds us how, as Graham Greene put it in The Quiet American: “We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we can’t get out.” But it’s full of energy and life, it completes a trilogy to read and reread, and it shows us finally, joyously, how, whatever life throws at Paula Spencer, “she’ll manage. She always has.”

Kris Kristofferson, Country Music Legend and ‘A Star Is Born’ Leading Man, Dies at 88

I knew him first as an actor, then I heard these songs of his from the Isle of Wight concert:

Well, what is to say, but he was an original.

As if I did not have enough in my head to play with, I read A Stirring, Surreal Portrait of AI-Empowered Authoritarianism

With its multi-perspective, single-sentence chapters in which family mirth and strife are intertwined and the world is shared with game-playing robots, Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s latest novel American Abductions searches for, as one character puts it, “semantic rules that will connect realism to surrealism.” And while impatient readers may find its form somewhat confounding, it achieves what the author set out to do, conjuring very real political meaning from an obscure onslaught of culturally-charged, meme-laden text.

***

In American Abductions, Cárdenas warns that we’ve already accepted authoritarianism and AI into our lives and that their impacts will become increasingly glaring and horrific. But there may still be a way out of the trap, for “boundaries between the individual human psyche and the rest of the cosmos are ultimately arbitrary and can be transcended.” In the end, the book argues, it is by transcending these boundaries that we escape the binary of us vs. them, self vs. Other.  And while solutions like art and family may be inextricable from the systems and technologies that threaten their very existence, they’re also the very means of our salvation. 

On an Albert King kick today:

I got off work about 12:50. Too late for the #2 bus, so I went over to 8th Street to catch the #12. Well, I did not get that bus until after 1:30. I think there was one missed. My memory is a bit fuzzy right now. I went to Old National to get my rent money and to take out most of my balance. The balance went to my new bank. Then I walked over to the Social Security office to give the government my new bank information for my direct deposit. I missed the #6 north, so I walked back to the station. It was going on 2:30. Getting too close for the school kids, the driver said I would not be home until 4:30. Too late for my taste. I came back to the apartment and fixed spaghetti. Then I walked downtown, hoping to catch the #6 bus at 4 pm. Missed that one, too. Instead, I got the 4:30, paid the rent, and caught the same bus back downtown. I got home around 5. Which was 2 hours ago.

After showering, I walked down to the convenience store for RC Cola. When I got back, I did a little reading, of which I am sharing Why Rachel Kushner Writes Characters Without Morals. What I read of her makes me think this is a writer to read. I like her take on the wrong kind of nostalgia. I learned a new word, also: yesterbaiters.

RK: Maybe that’s why the aesthetics seem schizo to me. They’re schizo as a thing—that’s the name for the look. My uncle Joel Kovel was one of the speakers at the original Schizo-Culture conference in 1975. Having previously been a psychiatrist, he turned to anti-psychiatry and was on a panel of that name chaired by Félix Guattari, who apparently declared he was abolishing the panel, as its chair, but Joel gave his paper anyhow. When Semiotext(e) had an anniversary of the Schizo-Culture conference, they did this up at Columbia, where it was originally held. My aunt DeeDee Halleck went. She’s eighty-four and a media activist. She’s not into nostalgia and instead focused on the present and the future, on what’s relevant and radical now. And she said, “This is sad. These kids should be making a new world. They should be doing the new iteration of whatever Schizo-Culture was in its moment, and instead, they’re doing this kind of moribund nostalgia thing.”

WM: My friend Kembra Pfahler calls people doing that yesterbaiters.

RK: That’s good. The people who want to let you know you missed their moment, their heyday, are themselves missing the point. Each era must be taken on its own terms; it’s for young people to decide what is new (even if they want to wear big pants and a trucker hat). I don’t know Kembra, but I used to be friends with somebody who was in her band—an interesting woman who unfortunately seems to have become a pagan neofascist or has sort of disappeared.

Two pieces from Ted Gioia, who I think is consistently on-point:

• How Did Pop Culture Get So Gloomy?
  
• How Do You Celebrate Truman Capote's 100th Birthday?
  

I never read Capote until I went to prison. There I read his short stories. They are as good as Mr. Gioia describes. Growing up when I did, Capote was the squeaky-voiced clown on talk shows and Murder by Death. I like having my opinion of the stories validated because I worried it was from shock at finding he could not only write but write well.

I had another rejection:

Thank you for sending us "Problem Solving." Although we must decline your submission at this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it. 

We hope you are well and wish you and your work all the best. Please try us with another story. 

Sincerely,

-Pangyrus Literary Magazine

And "Problem Solving" was also rejected here:

We're very thankful that you chose to submit your work to The Cincinnati Review's contest, the Robert and Adele Schiff Awards. We’re sorry to say that your work wasn’t chosen as a winner, but we appreciate you sending it our way.

Congratulations to the winners:

Leila Farjami for the poem “Bombs and Stars” (chosen by Erica Dawson)

Erika Gallion for the essay “Paradise Is Ours” (chosen by Kristen Iversen)

Patrick J. Zhou for the story “Pigboy and His Artificial Jesus” (chosen by Michael Griffith)

We also want to recognize all the honorable mentions:

Marguerite Alley

an chang joon

Sébastien Luc Butler

JR Fenn

W.J. Herbert

Linden Hibbert

Peter Kessler

Phuong Anh Le

Charlene Logan

Tori Malcangio

Madeline McFarland

Anna Mebel

Suphil Lee Park

Adam Peterson

Liz Schroeder

Alec Tiger

Charlotte Turnbull

Craig Van Rooyen

Serrina Zou

We'll feature some words from the judges on our website later this week when we make the wider announcement.

We also want to remind you that you'll receive a year's subscription to the magazine, which will include our next issue, due out in November, and the contest prize issue available next May.

Thanks again, and best wishes from us all,

Lisa Ampleman

Managing Editor

The Cincinnati Review 

I have a headache, and it is after 7 pm. I will try to revise my current story, and call it a night around 8.

I talked to CC and KH today. The latter's house in Tampa is ruined. CC was to call me, but she has not.

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