What was yesterday?
I got up around 6:30, but nothing much was done until I left to see CC. I did not do my laundry, or go to the post office, or go to the Farmer's Market, or to the Washington Street Fair. A long post on Newt Gingrich's defense of Trump was knocked off. I read James Earl Jones was movie royalty, a magisterial star who inspired both love and respect. I first noticed him in The Great White Hope.
I did not look under the sink, yet.
I left for CC around 3:30. We hung out at her rummage sale, then she brought me back here. We left her place around 4:30, and I got back here after 7. In between, we hit Dollar General (cleaning supplies for me, and whatever is under the sink), a food bank, the Washington Street Fair, and dinner at Twin Archers. We both ate too much. She about fell asleep when we got back here. Which is why we put off cleaning until I came back from church on Sunday.
I also ate too much and was asleep by 8 pm. I set the alarm for 3:30.
I intended to do what I left undone from Saturday. Mostly, that was submitting stories. "Problem Solving" went to The Rumpus, West Branch, and The MacGuffin. I found out I sent "No Ordinary Word" to AGNI, but put it under Poetry! I read Cat People by Benjamin Johnson, and found it amusing.8:50, I went to church. I came home around 1 PM, and I napped. I called CC; she was to call me back.
I did not look under the sink, still.
For about the past hour, I read reviews from the Times Literary Supplement:
- The narrative of true myth: A history of ancient history-making by Mary Beard
- Twain and the vernacular: The vividness of dialect by Craig Raine
- Staying power: The rise and fall of literary reputations by Irina Dumitrescu
- Big in pictures too: More than ninety of Somerset Maugham’s works were adapted for the screen by Keith Hopper
- The odd couple Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler’s unfilmable film noir by Graham Daseler
From History Today:
cc has not returned my call. Time to get the laundry done. I got back here 4 hours ago and not much accomplished.
It is 6:09 - got my clothes for tomorrow and have dined. I never had andouille sausage, and I am now sweating from its spiciness.
I did not look under the sink, still.
Back to the TLS for Another country; American writers at a dark period in the history of masculinity by Kevin Brazil (not exactly what I thought it would be, not a contemporary view of toxic masculinity but it goes back to the Seventies and before with the rise of feminism and Gay Power); and ‘Fumigations, Females, Flies’; The story of an ex-convict's reintegration into a more feminist world by Colm McKenna (I remember Paul S wondering what it would be like returning to the world post-#METOO, so I was curious to see someone working on a similar problem).
Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies follows the ex-convict Inés’s reintegration into society following a fifteen-year stint in prison for killing her husband’s lover. Keen to make a new life for herself, she and her fellow former inmate Manca establish “FFF” (Fumigations, Females, Flies), an ethical pest-control company that doubles up as a detective agency offering help to women in distress.
On her release Inés is struck by the contrast between the world she encounters and the one she left behind. While she was in prison technology increasingly encroached on the social sphere, and she struggles to acclimatize to social media and its “intolerance to non-immediacy”. These qualms are hackneyed, but there is also a more interesting element to Inés’s reintegration: she has re-emerged into a world in which feminism has made great strides. Time of the Flies tracks how she relearns what it means to be a woman in the modern age and develops a new sense of identity.
Looks like Argentinian women have problems corresponding to men released from federal prison. How people commune with their phones I find amusing and troubling and boring in various degrees - depending on my mood. I read the newspapers, listen to NPR, and find myself with Inés's questions. Not quite Orange Is The New Black, but perhaps more realistic?
Yet Piñeiro, who campaigned for the legalization of abortion in Argentina, is aware that the project of feminism is far from completed. One afternoon a client tries to enlist FFF’s help to murder her husband’s lover. Confronted with a near-carbon copy of the situation that landed her in jail, Inés suddenly finds herself questioning the extent of the world’s progress.
I close out with Mary Beard's Fossilized phrases. I must live in the land of fossilized phrases. "It's raining cats and dogs" is common (so are far ruder complaints about rain). Maybe I am even more of a fossil than I have thought.
I did not look under the sink, still.
Onto submitting stories.
- Long Day Press: "Road Tripping"
- Exposition Review, Glassworks, Bellingham Review, Pangyrus and LIT magazine: "Problem Solving".
"Problem Solving" rejected:
Thank you for the chance to review your work. Unfortunately these submissions weren't right for us at the moment, but we're grateful to you for sharing them with us. We hope that you'll keep us in mind in the future.
Best wishes,
That took 5 days. That does make my head spin and is a knock in the head, quite frankly.
Now to the email!
Los Angeles Review of Books newsletter arrived.
Give a Middle Way a Chance wherein Eamon McGrath reviews Ralph Hubbell’s new translation of Oğuz Atay’s story collection, “Waiting for the Fear,” might be worth reading if you are wanting to find another way to write.
IN THE TITLE tale of Waiting for the Fear, a collection of stories by Turkish author Oğuz Atay (1934–77) newly translated by Ralph Hubbell and published by NYRB Classics, the narrator considers burning his own house down. But he is preempted by a widening hole in the earth—an abandoned foundation pit in his neighbor’s yard—that destroys his house instead, crushing all his belongings beneath the rubble. Much like a fire or a sinkhole, Atay himself was an unforgiving force of nature. Rejecting both the nostalgic allure of the past and the vacuous imitation of the present, his writing sought to transform the literary conventions of his era.
One goal I want for my writing is to avoid nostalgia. That is just too Hoosier. I am not sure that I am writing stories people want to read, or maybe it is the problem is in how I am writing my stories.
I did not look under the sink, still.
Prison gave me a chance to read Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton stories. The Guardian reviewed her new book which interlocks Lucy Barton and Oliver Kitteridge, Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout review – when Olive Kitteridge met Lucy Barton.
Counter Craft (Lincoln Michel) reviews three foreign novels under Three Kafkaesque Novels from Around the World. I need more time spent reading and less napping.
I like reading history. Also, I like to think of myself as medium-literate. Reading The Rise of Post-Literate History by Matthew Walther (Compact) scares me. He writes in response to Tucker Carlson's interview of the podcaster Darryl Cooper.
Is the disappearance of public literary culture the worst possible fate for historians? Perhaps not. In the Oxford of Gibbon’s youth, the dons were “decent easy men…. Their days were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied, to a long slumber.” But what if the slumber now awaits history itself? Far more than his errors and distortions, which (for now anyway) are easily corrected, it is the glimpse Cooper affords us of this future that we should find disturbing: one in which history as we know it will sooner or later cease to exist; it will first go unread, then it will cease to be written, before, finally, disappearing altogether.
If we do not know our history - good and bad - then we cannot grow as a culture or a species.
I did not look under the sink, still.
Mark Edmundson's America’s Cloven Fiction: The crude division of people into conservatives and progressives (Hedgehog Review) deserves a full reading.
We all know now that in America there are two types of people. There are conservatives and there are progressives. There are Reds and there are Blues. Each group looks at the other with skepticism at best, at worst with contempt that can slide into hatred.
This crude division of people into one camp or another is mistaken. Adapting a term from William Blake, I call it a cloven fiction. People are much more complex than our current cultural template—based on either-or-thinking—can allow us to see. This cloven fiction—liberal or conservative, left or right—has deeply harmful effects on us all.
The current mythology goes this way. Conservatives devote themselves to flag and family, tradition and faith. They are patriotic and willing to go to war for America or send their children. They believe that America is the greatest nation in the history of the world. We are exceptional in many, many admirable ways. Conservatives are devoted to family: They will do anything for the people they love. And of course there is faith. Conservatives tend to be religious. They worship God and do so at church. Conservatives also value tradition: they are guided by the past in most everything they do. Everyone knows that, right?
Then there are progressives. There’s a mythology about them as well. They tend to view America skeptically. We’re not a city on a hill, just a nation among nations, and one that has committed some serious crimes on the way to the power and wealth we now hold. Progressives don’t disdain family exactly, but their chief allegiance is often to humanity, the family of man. They may not be atheists, but their lives usually do not revolve around religion. They are skeptical about individualism and the hunger for individual freedom. They find their most authentic identity in groups. Their respect for tradition is limited. Let’s start from scratch! Let’s begin all over again and do it the right way (the fair way!) this time. Or so the mythology goes.
The fact is that, at least as I observe matters, these two types virtually never exist in their pure form. They are fictions, and destructive fictions at that.
Are you just one thing? Then why think I am, or that person over there is just one thing?
My concern is that many people now don’t feel free to put an identity together from the aspects of culture that appeal to them most—and create a story that explains and justifies their identities. They seem compelled to buy a whole menu. When it’s their turn to order, they look at the progressive menu or the conservative, and feel forced to say, I’ll have all of one or all of the other.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, our wisest writer, imagined people who have taken the best from both worlds, and fused them together in a functioning whole. “Nature,” he says, does not give its approbation “to the rock which resists the wave from age to age, nor to the wave which lashes incessantly the rock.” The superior form “is with the oak which stands with its hundred arms against the storms of a century, and grows every year like a sapling; or the river which ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age to age; or, greatest of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so that when you remember what he was, and see what he is, you say, what strides! What a disparity is here!” Emerson celebrates growth and stability. He’s all for tradition and innovation. Each side of the equation, progressive and conservative is, Emerson says, “a good half but an impossible whole.” Both have to combine to create a flourishing individual.
I would extend Emerson. In virtually all of us, apart from a few politicians and journalists who squawk from morning to late night on social media and TV, we all combine both sides of the equation. By affirming one side and suppressing the other, we make ourselves into half men and half women. We are only a moiety of what we could be. I commonly see people who, say, love their churches, are committed to tradition, yet are highly critical of American policy and are virtually socialist in their economic views. I see people who affirm every progressive social position: reparations, trans rights, opening the borders. Yet they live in traditional families and love them. Get them going about their ancestors and they won’t stop.
Maybe I am wrong, but I think either/or is the default for those without imagination; that one size fits all means it fits nothing. Perhaps people are smaller in their ambition and their imaginations than I think. Perhaps, I am back to being delusional. But think about what all you could be and are and want to be, and imagine.
I did not look under the sink, still.
Even the Canadians know Trump is not good for us:
I have had this Michael Keaton and Robert Downey, Jr. movie on in the background (I am 46 minutes into a 1:23 movie), and do not understand why I have never heard of it. That I will not get to the end tonight ought to mean I do not link to it - maybe the ending sucks - it is low-key, depending on the actors to carry a story about a playwright in New York and a critic.
I never heard from CC. She has my cleaning supplies. So, I still have not seen what is under the kitchen sink. Good news: the rat has not been heard from in 48 hours.sch 9:47 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment