Working and Not

It is Tuesday morning, and I should be getting ready for work. We only did 4 hours yesterday. Then I came home after stopping at the convenience store for Coke. I have not caught up on these notes for two days.

I got through my email, canceled my colonoscopy appointment for Friday, texted MW, took a break when my eyes started to ache, fixed a turkey soup for lunch, watched some of Sean Bean's Sharpe series on YouTube, and read some things online. I dropped off around 7 and woke at 9. I had planned to stay asleep until 2 am. Nope, I now have insomnia. That lasted 3 hours. I did the BMV driving exam. I need to read the questions better and do some studying. 

Up at 4 AM, more emails read. I have decided to take the BMV exam tomorrow. I need to find my birth certificate. 

Some notes from my reading.

I wonder if Justina Elias's Undoing the Fairy Tale of Alice Munro (The Walrus) is not just about Alice Munro, but also about Canada - and us.

In July, after almost a decade, I left my job at Munro’s Books. Alice Munro, a fairy-tale figure in a store window, has made way for Andrea Robin Skinner, a woman whose words have touched my life more deeply than her mother’s—for hers are words that invite others to share theirs. Among these are my own mother, who recently told me how she was abused by a teacher in her girlhood: a story whose ripple effects I always sensed but could never name. I tell myself such moments prove, as Skinner wrote to me, that “the truth allows a direction, movement, to happen.” But no one truth alone will guide us. All we have are stories: stories we can shape and share, stories we can sharpen, stories we can use—to borrow Skinner’s words again—to “examine our own lives with an eye to bringing dignity and love into each day, which sometimes flies in the face of what is considered ‘nice.’”

These are our stories to tell.

Some stories do not have an equally just right to be heard; not when equality results in censorship of the one with lesser power. There is also a moral in the essay about our own Middle Western niceness, which results in sweeping the uncomfortable under a rug. 

As I mentioned over the weekend, I keep submitting my stories.

Problem Solving to Ploughshares

The Unintended Consequences of Art to Apex Magazine

"Love Stinks" to The Masters Review 2024 Novel Excerpt Contest

And a rejection:

Thank you for submitting "Problem Solving" to The Los Angeles Review. We have read your work with interest but unfortunately it does not meet our editorial needs. We wish you luck in placing it elsewhere.

Best,

Fiction editors

The Los Angeles Review

I read Bulgakov in prison and loved it - if you want to start reading the Russians, start with him. So, I read Manuscripts Don’t Burn, a review of the new film version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” by Raymond De Luca (LARB):

Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita offers a similar fulfillment. The story has resurfaced again, this time as a controversial challenge to Putin’s orthodoxies and mistruths. It has accordingly sent the regime’s loyalists into a tailspin of recrimination and bluster. Lurking beneath their attacks on Lockshin’s film is an embittered, even embarrassed, self-awareness that Putin’s Russia has been built upon a mountain of lies. The state teeters atop a house of cards, not unlike the disappearing playing cards in The Master and Margarita. Even if Bulgakov’s belief that manuscripts don’t burn feels somewhat old-fashioned, it offers a glimmer of hope that moral clarity will outshine Putin’s gaslighting. As one character in The Master and Margarita exclaims, playing the role of a prosecutor: “[T]he tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes—never!”

I spent most of my time this morning reading Forest Full of Fascists by  Julian Zabalbeascoa (Electric Lit). It was worth the time.

 

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