Surrealist Indiana Pillow - Just A Naked Muncie Luncheon

I woke Sunday with my sinuses inflamed. Walking from bed to door was fraught, but I did not fall. I was well enough to go to church in Indianapolis. Today, we went to St. Nicholas, a Serbian Orthodox Church. This will be the parent church of the St. Barnabas of Indiana church being started here. We did not stay, which surprised me. I thought we were to talk with the priest opening the church here. It was a good Orthodox liturgy.

Not as large as St. George, but it appears to be in the process of moving. Who knew we had a Serbian presence in Indianapolis since 1950? If you are in Indianapolis, or close by, I suggest you give them a look.

Back here, I piddled. There was some reading. I finished with the last season of Peaky Blinders. Dishes were washed. I started cooking in the slow cooker for tomorrow. I wrote an email to Charlie G. He is down to 41 days before his release. Where did the time go?

I finished this post. Here are my notes on my reading.

Surrealism tempts me, therefore I read  Surrealism — a monstrous creation (Englesberg Ideas) by Alexander Lee.  Which includes the following:

What is perhaps most striking about Ernst’s L’ange du foyer is how contemporary it still feels. It illustrates exactly why this exhibition should, by rights, be so very timely. Now, the limits of rationality are more painfully apparent that at any point since the last gasps of Surrealism were heard. Once again, the spectre of a world war haunts us. Authoritarianism is on the rise; social constraints are tightening; and economic inequalities are painfully apparent. Even if this year did not mark the centenary of Breton’s first Manifesto, this would be the perfect moment to revisit Surrealism.

But what if life itself has become surreal - where nightmare and reality walk hand-in-hand. 

The Guardian has a brief interview, Haruki Murakami: ‘My books have been criticised so much over the years, I don’t pay much attention’, that I found a little light on substance.

DB Cooper is one of those mysteries from my childhood, and I am always willing to check out any solutions. After 50 years of mystery, siblings claim hijacker DB Cooper was their father (The Guardian) may be the one.

‘I’m writing a memoir. It’s a pack of lies’: John Banville on a lifetime in books, bereavement, and the Irish love of words (The Guardian) has more depth, but it is longer. I read Banville's The Sea while in prison. A beautiful writer.

Lincoln Michel has Four Translated Novels I Enjoyed This Year on his Counter Craft substack. They all sound like a hoot - nothing sounds dry and dreary, and nothing hints at them being the literary/cultural equivalent of cod liver oil.

Michel pointed me to The Speculative Shelf. This site reviews speculative fiction.

The time of the year for book lists has started. From History Today: Books of the Year 2024: Part 1

Also from the same magazine: Who was Thorkell the Tall? (after catching up on Netflix's The Last Kingdom, how could I resist?), and     ‘The Tafts’ by George W. Liebmann review (the sub-headline asks a good question of why the Tafts are ignored as an American political dynasty. I have two theories; 1) they are from Ohio; and 2) the Tafts lack the eccentricity of the Adamses or the rapscallion charm of the Kennedys.) 

Another Substack for history buffs: Unruly Figures! Which led me to The Horrific Story Of The Lake Nyos Disaster, The Limnic Eruption That Devastated Cameroon (Which I do not recall, but I was deep into other things - like passing my law school classes - in 1986. Creepy.), and Letting the World Scream (which discusses a subject close to my cynical heart: "...that the U.S. has a long history of ignoring international rules it sees as unfavorable, even when the U.S. was instrumental in creating those measures in the first place.)

Another rejection:

Thank you for your submission, "Problem Solving." While we were glad to have the chance to read your work, we do not have a place for it at this time.

We wish you all the best with your writing.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Solstice:  A Magazine of Diverse Voices

 Two pieces from The Los Angeles Review of Books seem worth passing along.

 Rob Latham's review Back to the New Wave Future should interest those with a real interest in science fiction.

It gradually became clear to me that there were in fact two independent, if occasionally overlapping, New Waves: one British, centered on the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock (1964–74), and the other American, which, though more decentralized, found its most voluble expression in a pair of hefty all-original anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison: Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). And now, over half a century later, we have a serendipitous opportunity to reassess these two traditions in publications that appeared within mere days of one another: a fresh issue of New Worlds celebrating the 60th anniversary of Moorcock’s accession to the journal’s editorship, and the long-delayed publication of the third volume in Ellison’s anthology series, The Last Dangerous Visions. It’s a case of back to the future with a vengeance, as these erstwhile enfants terribles have morphed into vehicles of nostalgic reverie.

That description is not entirely fair to either publication, both of which seek to recapture at least some of the febrile energy of bygone apocalypses. The key difference is that Moorcock’s New Worlds does not merely embrace but also critiques the perils of a melancholy wistfulness, while Last Dangerous Visions, in its blatant earnestness, trips and falls into a pit of banality. As a result, the former emerges as a provocative reinvention of a legendary past while the latter seems an exhausted last gasp across a belated finish line.

***

Yet what are we to make of frequent laments about the imminent death of SF, the steady graying and waning of its readership? When we dig down into these eulogies, we generally encounter a concern about the status of work specifically marketed as science fiction—i.e., shelved in separate sections of libraries and bookstores, consumed by avid nerds who largely seek more of the same. But this is precisely the situation most New Wave writers were rebelling against: the ghettoization of the field as merely a publishing niche, rather than as a mode of seeing and critiquing the world. Perhaps the term “speculative fiction,” much bruited at the time as an alternative moniker, is better at capturing the range of work the New Wave helped usher in; after all, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Junot Díaz, among other major writers, have spoken eloquently of the inspiration they channeled from 1960s and ’70s talents such as Moorcock, Philip K. Dick, and Samuel R. Delany, even as these latter-day talents have resisted being pigeonholed into a marketing category. At the same time, those three New Wave authors—along with Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and a few others (including, yes, Harlan Ellison)—have emerged as significant figures of the counterculture era, regardless of genre.

Mitchell Abidor's review of Edwin Frank’s “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel” is a slightly different kettle of fish.

The 20th-century novel, Frank convincingly asserts, begins its life in the middle of the 19th century. This, then, is a history of literature’s long 20th century, a counterpart to Giovanni Arrighi’s history of capitalism, which situated the beginning of the 20th century in 1870. Frank goes back slightly farther, to 1864 and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. The solitary creature in his hole, at odds with society, who would appear frequently in fiction over the following century—characters such as Meursault in The Stranger (1942) and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, among many others—all sprout from the Underground Man.

But Frank sees far more in Notes from Underground than the source of the alienated loner. Dostoevsky’s structure, with the protagonist’s thoughts and ideas dominating the first half of the book and his self-abasing recounting of a gathering with workmates the second, signals the beginning of the fracturing of narrative that will feature so prominently in the century that follows. For Frank, all of this flows from the “collapse of the old balanced order” that dominated literature until then. Unlike writers of the 19th century, those of the 20th “exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the nineteenth-century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as a fiction.” It is precisely the acceptance of this loss of balance that will be the motive force of the great 20th-century writers.

I only managed to read William S. Burroughs' The Naked Lunch after about 20 odd years and four attempts. Nor can I call myself a fan of The Beats. However, today, The Paris Review released William S. Burroughs, The Art of Fiction No. 36 (1965). I had to take a look. A lot of talk about drugs and addiction, some about writing:

INTERVIEWER

What will happen to the straight plot in fiction?  

BURROUGHS

Plot has always had the definite function of stage direction, of getting the characters from here to there, and that will continue, but the new techniques such as cut-up will involve much more of the total capacity of the observer. It enriches the whole aesthetic experience, extends it.  

***

INTERVIEWER

 In view of all this, what will happen to fiction in the next twenty-five years?  

BURROUGHS

In the first place, I think there’s going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are already studying the creative process, and I think the whole line between art and science will break down and that scientists, I hope, will become more creative and writers more scientific. And I see no reason why the artistic world can’t absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can’t we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? Already some of the very beautiful color photography appears in whiskey ads, I notice. Science will also discover for us how association blocks actually form.   

I wonder what CC would make of Burroughs. No word from her, and I have not felt any compulsion to check her out. 

I have decided against more submissions this week. That empties the email.

 A bit of humor for today, but not from today:

Song for the weekend:

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