Two Days of Watching FUBAR, and a day of FUBAR, Proust, Sociopaths, and Rejections

Three good days I had at the start of this week. Tuesday night ought to have been an omen - I did not do much other than watch The Good Cop, then FUBAR, while reading some of my emails. I talked to Joel C early this week, then K and DM, and, finally, KH, but no phone calls were made since. Oh, John called that CC is sick, but determined to stop her addiction. I am waiting.

I got annoyed at work yesterday. Too much backbiting with some of the crew. I finished FUBAR last night. I liked it - a workplace/dysfunctional family comedy wrapped in a spy show. Think True Lies without some of the more creepy details - American humor, not translated French. It is good at what it does. 

I stayed home. I wasn't feeling well at 4 am or even 8. Shivering and sweaty and thinking on the kitchen's backbiting, I took a sick day. 

I feel a little cranky still, as I start this post. 

I read Ted Gioia's Mainstream Is Now Fringe, and Fringe Is Mainstream:

Yes, 2024 was tumultuous for participants in the culture business. But 2025 will look like total anarchy.

The rules have changed—and that means the rulers must also change. I’m not sure who will end up on top, but it won’t be the familiar names from the past.

Before that, I read Kate Aronoff's Pelosi Won. The Democratic Party Lost. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would not be my choice for President, but she has got talent that the Democrats should be using. Which is why I agree with the following from the article:

For the rest of us, these elections are just a sad reflection on how committed the party’s top brass are to maintaining their cozy patronage system. If the Democrats have a future, its inspiration will come from outside the bounds of its own fiefdoms and sclerotic internal processes. It will come, for example, from unions that cultivate leaders who can genuinely speak to working-class voters. It will come from social movements that build momentum for populist ideas that haven’t been poll-tested into bland, business-friendly mush. At the very least, those things can outlive Pelosi and the old guard. Ideally, it can build an electoral force that aspires to more than meaningless loyalties and bigger checks from donors.

Another article from The New Republic, Bidenomics Was Wildly Successful, addresses the great mystery of the 2024 election: why people hate Biden's economy even though it was a success.

“It’s very clear,” Baker said, that these government investments have kept the economy humming. Today’s economy is remarkably strong. GDP has risen 12.6 percent over Biden’s tenure, far outpacing both predictions made even before Covid became a household name and growth in other advanced countries. Income and wage growth has managed to stay ahead of inflation, allowing Americans to keep their financial heads above water. That has not been the case in other developed countries. The unemployment rate is still a low 4.2 percent. The strong economic performance, Boushey argues, “really does validate a middle-out and bottom-up economics approach.”

 Last night, I read Fyodor fever: how Dostoevsky became a social media sensation (The Guardian). Good going, Fyodor.

Thank you so much for allowing us the chance to read "Thomas Kemp Went Missing." 

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite fit our current needs, and we're going to need to pass on it. We wish you the very best of luck in placing your story elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Jose Cruz and Josh Strnad

Editors, SPOOKY Magazine

And another:

Thank you very much for submitting "Only The Dead and The Dying" to Dzanc Books' Short Story Collection Competition. We received a record number of entries this year, and had a deeply difficult time choosing a first-place collection.  Unfortunately, your work was not selected as our winning title; however, we truly appreciate your interest and your patience, and we hope you'll consider us for future works.

The winning collection and list of finalists will be published early next week.

Sincerely,

Michelle Dotter

Dzanc Books 

I thank them both for their time and patience with my work. 

I took a nap around 10 AM. Edge crashed, and I was shivering again. I managed to finish running The Good Cop, and reading the History Today's review of ‘Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I wonder what the Orthodox Church will make of this history - or American Christian Nationalists.

The sixties may not have swung for Catholics, but MacCulloch’s conclusions breathe the optimism of that decade. Ever more people will follow their authentic desires in future, with the blessing of Jesus, a ‘playful’ teacher innocent of the repression founded on his name. This oddly frictionless view of future sex expresses a liberal Anglican hope that such lingering prejudices as homophobia are peculiarly Christian forms of bigotry, which will fade when the churches complete their enlightenment. It is the last and certainly the nicest of the faith commitments charted in this compelling book.

Now, all I am doing is aching in my forearms.

 I have been trying to avoid politics, I needed to get back to my work, my writing. I could not avoid reading The World’s Richest Man Wants to Burn It All Down (The Bulwark). The list of what Trump will not do for money keeps getting longer, including toadying to Elon Musk. Has no one else noticed these billionaires got their money by marketing, not building; and they all are sociopaths?

So, I moved onto Marcel Proust. I really need to get back and finish reading Proust. Meanwhile, I made do with Proust Curious 7: “Time Regained”.

HW: But he writes that, so what you're supposed to do is you look inside yourself for these transposed sensations, your own madeleine moments, and then try, quote, ‘to interpret them as symbols of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think, that is, by trying to adduce my sensation from its obscurity and convert it into an intellectual equivalent. And what other means were open to me than the creation of a work of art?’ 

EC: Tell me about it, Marcel.

HW: Having your memory jogged, remembering something from the past might be the key to understanding the foundational laws of the universe. 

EC: Yeah, I mean... It's like pretty intense. 

HW: But he's completely convinced that this is true.

***

HW: I think what's so fascinating here is that he really does suggest that there are two realities, right? There's the reality as we ourselves have felt it, and the reality that we had believed. I'm paraphrasing from what I just read. The reality which we had believed is the one that should be discarded in favour of the inner reality, which is art. So, art is reality, and a properly lived life is literature, and vice versa, right? Like literature is life. Reality is art. It's just this amazing manifesto.

EC: And it's what makes life worth living.

HW: And there's a real danger, right? There's a danger that convention and habit might erase life itself because you stop perceiving these critical moments as critical because they're smoothed over by habit. So habit is actually the big villain in the book. 

There is also Proust Curious 8: Beyond the Recherche in which I found the following:

EC: So she's looking back after a century of past recovery,  memory industry, and thinking about how that, it might actually in some ways be unfair on the dead. That whole passage is incredible. When she says, ‘culture treats the past as a state, treats its mineral wealth, mining it for all its worth. This parasitical relationship with the dead is a profitable industry’....

Which sounds much like America, even Indiana. Hmm, another idea for "Chasing Ashes". 

The New York Times Editorial Board thinks Donald J. Trump may bring the world back from the nuclear brink: The President’s Arsenal. Since I think Trump has a talent, if not a fetish, for defecating on his own doorstep and for ruining whatever he puts his hand to; and everyone else makes note of his talent disruption, what greater disruption, more thorough-going ruination, what bigger dump on our doorstep could Trump do than start a nuclear war?

Edge crashed again, and I decided to spend an hour with the heating pad to my neck. No more chills, but the stiffness in the forearms had marched up to my neck and shoulders. I went to the Jackson Street convenience store for smokes. When I came back, I started on the dishes and dinner. (Or is it lunch, I have only munched on an Italian loaf for food today.)

Back to what I was looking at before the browser crashed.

The Best Speculative Crime Fiction of 2024 (CrimeReads) makes me think I need to get around to reading China Mieville.

Mitch McConnell, the frog-face from Kentucky, chose to lecture Donald J. Trump on foreign policy in the pages of Foreign Affairs, The Price of American Retreat Why Washington Must Reject Isolationism and Embrace Primacy

Even though the competition with China and Russia is a global challenge, Trump will no doubt hear from some that he should prioritize a single theater and downgrade U.S. interests and commitments elsewhere. Most of these voices will argue for focusing on Asia at the expense of interests in Europe or the Middle East. Such thinking is commonplace among both isolationist conservatives who indulge the fantasy of “Fortress America” and progressive liberals who mistake internationalism for an end in itself. The right has retrenched in the face of Russian aggression in Europe, while the left has demonstrated a chronic allergy to deterring Iran and supporting Israel. Neither camp has committed to maintaining the military superiority or sustaining the alliances needed to contest revisionist powers. If the United States continues to retreat, its enemies will be only too happy to fill the void.

Good luck, Mitch. Trump disrespects you. America First, all the way down the drain for Trump.

I admit to wrongdoing last night. Rather than keeping the Advent Fast and doing my dishes so I could cook my dinner, I sent out for Domino's.

No idea how I will spend the rest of the night, but I need to get to work tomorrow.

sch