An Acceptance, Craig Johnson's Website, Thursday

 I had an almost productive day. What I did not accomplish was calling the Howard Circuit Court and going to Muncie's First Thursday. I was too lazy for that, after going to Walmart and getting through some of my email. I might also have been too keen on watching Longmire.

The election post-mortems have begun. I have some videos from YouTube below, more in my email. The stuff from the email, I might get at tomorrow. John Hulse's idiocracy23 has plenty of post-mortems noted.

Tomorrow will be my last post about the election. I promise.

I do not think I mentioned that T2 wrote me that she is cancer-free.

Speaking of Longmire, I read the novels by Craig Johnson while in prison. I cannot recommend them enough. There is a serious difference in emphasis between the TV show and the novels. I cannot suggest them highly enough. For those who enjoyed Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels will find a similar relationship between Longmire and Standing Bear that existed between Spenser and Hawk. However, there is much more about the local culture than what you might find in Parker. (I think Parker's novels - especially as they went on - are morality plays.) Johnson website is here.

Watch this kid play guitar:

1974 or 1973? She can also sing:

Yesterday, I read Is There a Crisis of Seriousness? by Ted Gioia. In a way Ms. Bowers seems implicated in this essay. Have we given up invention for recycling old ideas? I give Ms. Bowers credit for trying to breathe new life into old forms - she adds her own quality to her work. But once again, Mr. Gioia has claimed room in my brain.

By implication, we live today in a digital age—or the Age of Less-Than-Paper. It doesn’t help that that cutting edge technologies are focused so much on deception—fake images, fake video, fake audio, fake books by fake authors, fake songs by fake musicians, fake news, fake everything.

I do not hear in Ms. Bowers's music any fakery, only homage. I think she feels what she plays.

Mr. Gioia leaves me feeling outside the zeitgeist, and that leaves me feeling good. I got sucked into Yahoo Chat and fakeness, and that led eventually to serious craziness. While I did use Facebook and Twitter for marketing my now-defunct law practice, that was the extent of my involvement. I have no desire to return to either until I have something to market; even less interest exists for Instagram or Ticktock.

Our culture is now obsessed with deception and misdirection—and it’s not just on the movie screen anymore. You see it everywhere, from cosplay conventions to bands wearing masks to the misguided virtual reality mania.

Lifestyles are increasingly about pretending. Your real self stays in hiding, while your fake self gets presented in the most spectacular way on social media and other digital platforms.

But the thing that sticks with me most are these two paragraphs:

Instead of doing something tangible or constructive or even persuasive, instigators work to create a meme—consider, for example, the project of hurling tomato soup at famous paintings, or staging campy protests that look like performance art.

Compare these initiatives to what happened at Selma or Normandy or other centers of brave resistance in an earlier day. If an era is defined by its battlegrounds, we have little to brag about.

When I think of my writing, memes are not in my brain. To me, seriousness is the disruption that follows from economic forces beyond our control, the reality of poor choices in love and work, of pain, and of hope buried under lives with apparent meaninglessness. That is my story of Indiana. I think it may also be the story of America. 

I was listening to this in the background, but then stopped. Fakery harpooned here, too. Yes, common sense is lacking in some Democrats. Fecklessness.

I guess we need to dig up FDR, or LBJ. Where is Paul McNutt buried, Hoosiers?

My friend DM sent me this quote:

"On some great and glorious day the plain-folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H. L. Mencken

I went to the north Walmart for groceries and rat poison. I also found pickled mushrooms, first time in 15 years! Now, I wait for the rat to get hungry and die. 

My good news for the day (the week?):

Samuel, Good short play. Especially prescient after Tuesday's election. I'd like to publish it in the Winter issue of Folk Opera. Please let me know if it's still available.  Pays with one contributor copy.

Best regards, Tom

Tom Driscoll

Managing editor

Shipwreckt Books Publishing Company & Lost Lake Folk Opera magazine 

I hope not too prescient. Yes, I accepted it.

J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster at the NYS Writers Institute in 2012:

Auster died recently; Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature; they read from then soon-to-appear books; and both are worth reading.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for the end of the world:

Before then, I need to walk down for smokes and RC. I wanted to add a paragraph or two to a story before I called it a night. Doing so would have made me feel like I was getting some control back over my work. Instead, I ran out the clock with this post. I can reconcile my conscience by saying I did write something.

sch