Friday: Work, Group, Laundry
Saturday: John Gierach Died; Harlan Ellison Published; Law in Sienna
From Hatch Magazine: Beloved author John Gierach passes away at 78; Gierach was one of fly fishing's most iconic voices.
Iconic storyteller and self-described trout bum John Gierach died on Thursday, Oct. 3, after suffering a massive heart attack. His passing was first reported in a Facebook post by Gierach’s long-time friend, AK Best.
Over the course of his writing career, Gierach authored more than 20 books and countless magazine articles and columns for publications ranging from TROUT Magazine to Sports Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He is known for his conversational, and honest writing style that speaks to millions of fly fishers the world over. His works include “Even Brook Trout Get the Blues,” “Another Lousy Day in Paradise,” and “Standing in a River Waving a Stick.” He was honored by the then-U.S. Federation of Fly Fishers in 1994 with its prestigious Roderick Haig-Brown Award, and in 2015, he was inducted into the Catskills Fly Fishing Hall of Fame.
My last prison bunkie gave me several of Gierach's books. I loved them. If you like good writing, humor, fishing, fly-fishing, or any combination of the four then find his books.
What the Supreme Court Can Learn From a 14th-Century Italian City-State by Liesl Schillinger. A long piece on the history of Sienna. I doubt our conservatives on the United States Supreme Court think they need to learn anything.
Harlan Ellison Gets a Little Help from His Friends; ‘The Last Dangerous Visions,’ reviewed by Bill Ryan.
On a fundamental level, The Last Dangerous Visions is only an approximation of what Harlan Ellison would have released had he been able to complete the project. But like Orson Welles’s last film, The Other Side of the Wind, the editing of which was completed decades after the director’s death, an honest, good-faith approximation is all we’re going to get. And for that, I am very grateful to J. Michael Straczynski, who did the hard work and put out a good book.
Ellison was a genius, a great short story writer, so check him out.
Indianapolis Monthly's Arts & Culture page.
Pretty sure the only place I went yesterday was to the convenience store for soda and smokes.
Sunday: Church, Nap, Time Loves A Hero, Book Reviews and American Myths, AI
I finished editing "Unintended Consequences" before heading down to Fishers for church. Beautiful time of my week.
Back here, I did a little with my email, but when I crashed, I decided to give my back a rest. I got back up at 4 pm. A little more than 90 minutes napping. Then I attacked my email before starting supper.
From the Times Literary Supplement: A question of attribution Expanding the canon of ‘industrious’ Thomas Kyd
From The Los Angeles Review of Books:
The Weight of Estrangement (Grace Linden reviews Deborah Levy’s “The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies.”) I have read one of Deborah Levy's short stories, and that was about a decade ago. That I count as a failure, which I try to alleviate by reading her reviews and interviews.
“I FELL IN LOVE with her before I read any of her books,” Deborah Levy writes in an essay obliquely dedicated to Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the French author better known as Colette. It was 1973. Levy, then a teenager, had come across a photograph of Colette, though she no longer can recollect how. Without knowing of the love affairs, transgressive publications, or eccentricity, Levy “intuited” that Colette had led “an experimental life,” and this photograph served as a manifesto of sorts for the adolescent. “What is the point of having any other sort of life, I thought to myself,” Levy writes, marooned as she was in the suburbs outside of London where everyone appeared to be the same, down to the names they selected for their pets. As the opening to Levy’s latest book The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies (2024), a collection of 35 observations, the short text announces what is to come, both for the publication and for her life. Not quite an autobiography or cultural critique, The Position of Spoons instead considers the various people, ideas, places—in short, the stuff of the world—that made Levy, well, Levy.
Back Seat Witness-Bearing is an interview with a true crime writer; a murder of a Bard College graduate that appears to have old money and sexism underlying its story; too complicated for a synopsis; a piece that I did not mean to read, its title tickled my curiosity, and I read it through to the end; I suggest you do the same.
...We need to be talking more about why Carolyn died. I mean, we knew right away who did it. There’s no mystery there. I obviously feel invested in this story, and I care what people say about it, so I don’t want to embarrass myself in public. I have seen people say online and other places that, because there’s no mystery, it didn’t need to be a story. But I think there’s a deeper mystery. I think people really want to understand why something like this could happen—and when the killer is saying he doesn’t even know why, you feel a little frustrated and start looking for answers, right?
Why is the hardest question to ask. We may find an answer that unsettles all of our preconceptions about the world and ourselves. Not asking lets superstition and ignorance reign.
American Mythology wherein Tom Zoellner reviews “A Great Disorder” by Richard Slotkin was the essay I wanted to read - I am working on "Chasing Ashes", even if only in my head.
“Each has a different understanding of who counts as American,” writes Slotkin, “a different reading of American history, and a different vision of what our future ought to be.” His goal in the first part of the book is to describe and unpack “America’s foundational myths to expose the deep structures of thought and belief that underlie today’s culture wars.” In the second part of the book, Slotkin directly applies those collective stories to make sense of the tumultuous last eight years.
***
There’s the Myth of the Founding, in which wise gentlemen—albeit with slaveholders included among them—enshrined a set of moral principles into the documents that established a government dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There are the Myths of the Civil War, which fall into two basic categories: the Southern Lost Cause, which rails against federal interference, especially when it comes to racial matters, and the Liberation Myth, which sees the federal government as the swift sword of racial justice.
There’s the Myth of the Good War, the idea that the United States is a multiethnic platoon out of a Hollywood film, striking a blow for democracy against totalitarianism and ascending into its rightful place at the top of the free world, with an omnipotent military and supercharged technological economy.
And finally, though Slotkin doesn’t group them among the “four myths [that] have historically been the most crucial,” there’s the myth of the New Deal, and the associated myth of the Civil Rights Movement, in which activist government policy rides to the rescue against the depredations of capitalism and racism.
Running contemporary headlines through this five-part interpretative machine yields pragmatic and useful results that will keep working after the narrative ends. Once you accept Slotkin’s premise that myths are hidden scripts for present-day actors (a proposition hard to deny), you begin to see them at work everywhere. While it is usually hyperbolic to claim that a book will change your life, this one may well have a permanent effect on how you consume and think about American political news.
I fear Gore Vidal already did much to puncture many of our American myths for me. That started about 50 years ago when I read Burr. I would say Raintree County undercut many others. Then, too, I came to age at the height of the Vietnam War, witnessed Richard M. Nixon's downfall, the decline of American manufacturing, and then the Soviet Union's extinction. One of the thoughts that came to me when I was sentenced was that there is no American community, only communities. We are too much of a mess; centrifugal force has always kept us together. Perhaps here is why there has never been the great American novel - we are too diverse for one story.
The Guardian's Hidden traces of humanity: what AI images reveal about our world was both more and less than what I expected. If you want to know more AI generating images, it seemed a good primer to me. I still see no use for it in my life.
I have long thought Jimmy Carter was underestimated as a President, Angus Reilly's essay Jimmy Carter, orphan of the American Century makes me less crazy.
Carter’s presidency, often remembered for its crises and struggles, laid the groundwork for the era of American power that would dominate the following decades. Popular memory sees the figure who governed but misses the more consequential shifts hidden behind the individual. The superpower status of the United States in the late-20th century was premised upon the financial and military arsenal that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Motivated by a jingoistic spirit and urgent crises, Carter’s administration waged war on inflation and reoriented American strategy toward the Middle East and the stability of the global economic and energy order.
***
Jimmy Carter should not be commemorated as an unfortunate exception in postwar America, whose legacy is imprinted with his electoral loss in 1980. He was a president whose most consequential actions were reactions to crises beyond his control, yet who ultimately – and in many ways, unwittingly – shaped the globalised world by adapting America’s role to the upheavals of the time. If Carter’s presidency does not offer a legacy to emulate then it should stand as a cautionary tale of the limits of power, reminding us of the importance of humility, even for those who hold the most influence.
I am really late in posting this All three Indiana gubernatorial candidates meet — for the first time — on 2024 debate stage - which tells you how backlogged is my email! This year, I will vote straight D. The only way I can see anyone voting for an Indiana Republican is that they are happy with the state of their lives in this state. If you do not like the state economy, you have no one to blame but your voting for the Republicans.
From The Guardian:
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgård review – a visionary epic
“Hell isn’t the psychosis. Hell is leaving the psychosis,” she observes, awakening from the manic episode she entered in The Morning Star. Scenes from that book are then enacted from her perspective. The result is an exemplary masterclass in what fiction can offer: the expansion of readerly sympathies, bringing a sense that there are potentially endless perspectives available.
Into this is thrown the possibility that there really are incarnated devils wandering the land. Indeed, three members of one of Norway’s notorious black-metal bands are murdered in a lurid act that doesn’t seem humanly possible. Throughout, devils communicate primarily with the already psychotic. There’s a kind of RD Laingian suggestion that psychotics may be more capable of imaginative insight, but also a sense that we could all see like this if we looked differently. By the end, the exhausted policeman with a double life is found earnestly espousing a belief in devils to the vicar.
We've got to keep an eye on this guy.
Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell review – a woman of influence (There is a biography of Pamela Churchill; I wondered who might fit under the headline. I learned a few things, mostly that the woman had a career after marrying Winston's son.)
I went down to the convenience store for soda, showered, ate my gelato, and finished this post. Oh, I spoke with DM for a moment; he was not well.
There are more emails to read, probably more posts to write (well, draft).
My plan is to start on my driver's license tomorrow. That is the week's task.
sch 8:00 PM
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