Out of the Past (Mostly) Hodgepodge!

Here I collected a few things I meant to add over the past year. Its original date is October 2, 2023. Having gotten no further, I think the time has come to clean house.  

When I was younger, I tied flies. I will not say that I was good at it, but I did like it. This was something I got away from in college, and then never came back to. I am not sure my eyes are up to the task now. Then, too, without a car, I really have nowhere to go fishing. All the same, I wish I had, it would have been a better use of my time. I checked out the fly-fishing and fly-tying magazines when I got home. Fly Tyer is still around and just as beautiful as it ever was.

Astronomy is another interest from my childhood that I do nothing with today. Indiana weather being what it is and my aforementioned lack of transportation. However, Sky & Telescope is also still around.

PCWorld was not my favorite computer magazine thirty-years ago, that was PC Magazine, but I did not bookmark that magazine. However, that website looks pathetic, and is low on software reviews. Not that PC World is that much better. I guess that says something about the decline of the business.

NetGalley is a book reviewing site that meant to do more with and still have not. I have no idea where my time goes. (Yeah, I do - I am sleeping too much!)

The Official Blog of the American Philosophical Association, Philosophy Now and European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (Again and again, I sleep too much.)

Black Lawrence Press's Open Reading Periods (Oops on my part).

Summer Reading Period: June 1 - June 30

Fall Reading Period: November 1 - November 30

SCHEDULE | Rockabilly Radio - I got RealPlayer and stopped listening. I have downloaded way too much from YouTube!

The Speculative Literature Foundation's The Older Writers Grant. (I applied once, and was turned down. The next open period is MAY 1, 2025 – MAY 31, 2025. The grant is $1,000.00

I am not sure why I bookmarked Analysis of Bharati Mukherjee’s Stories. The opening paragraph gives me no clue, either:

Bharati Mukherjee (July 27, 1940 – January 28, 2017) has herself become one of the literary voices whose skillful depictions of the contemporary non-European immigrant experience in the United States she credits with “subverting the very notion of what the American novel is and of what American culture is.” In Canada she kept her “Indianness” smugly intact despite—or because of—a painful awareness of her displacement in the West. She consciously regarded other immigrants, as she notes in the introduction to Darkness, as “lost souls, put upon and pathetic,” in contrast to the more ironically sophisticated postcolonials with whom she identified: people “who knew all too well who and what they were, and what foul fate had befallen them,” and who therefore escaped the emotional turmoil of divided loyalties or assimilationist incongruities.

I found the Literary Theory and Criticism site when I came to Muncie. However, I do not think I visited the site this past year. It may be due to there being only one post this year.

Beckett on the Richter Scale (2021) is a review for which I am, again, uncertain why it was bookmarked. Skimming, these paragraphs might have been the reason for my interest:

“I go on,” the narrator says, picking himself up between inevitable falls; the “I can’t” hovering unstated. It is not yet “necessary to slither.” But this is twenty-first-century American writing, and although we’ve been going on for a while, not many can or do go on in this way. Adorno perceived Beckett’s style as a response to a totalitarian “surplus of reality” that threatened to kill off any possible subjectivity. This left no choice for Beckett but to push “the artfulness of anti-art to the point of the manifest annihilation of reality.” But here we are, more than half a century into the end of history and Adorno’s “disaster triumphant,” and most literature remains trapped in a tightening loop of older realisms. Worse, “reality” impinges ever more on the work: judgments come in the form of up or down votes on the virtues or essential qualities of author figures.

To write, under these conditions, with the unsparing intensity of minimal, late modernism, yet knowing already how that turned out, requires total, practically hermetic commitment to a form and voice that has never been outmoded or transcended, but instead celebrated as “difficult”—all the better for it to be bypassed and then ignored. Beckett remains one of the few writers whose cadences fall close to the desperate unconscious rhythms of our own fracturing lives. As forbiddingly modern as he was more than half a century ago, his work is still anathema to a publishing industry that continues to mistake an unending supply of juvenilia, first novels, and magical realisms for a fountain of youth.

***

Dara’s outsiderness, if not powerlessness, has been preserved or cultivated since the appearance of their first novel, The Lost Scrapbook (1995). That novel rose from the depths thanks to winning a prize from the Fiction Collective Two, judged that year by William T. Vollmann. FC2—the collective started by director Noah Baumbach’s father, Jonathan, along with Curtis White, Mark Leyner, and other theorists and practitioners of gonzo avant-garde fiction that would later expand to include the experimental prose writers of the Dalkey Archive Press—published it under its imprint. Scrapbook deployed a narrative cheat code, switching from one voice to another, one situation to another without warning, breaking off and breaking down the various stories of the vanished inhabitants of a midwestern town destroyed by what gradually reveals itself as a Delillo-esque toxic industrial event. Other novelists, notably Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer and the U.S.A. trilogy, have tried before to capture collectivity in this manner. But by the time Scrapbook arrived, the creation of a succession of truncated characters towards whom the reader forms the briefest of attachments—indeed, of whom the reader is meant to ask “Wait, what happened to them! Where did they go!”—seemed to have been tossed onto the scrapheap of novelistic techniques. That is, until another very large multi-character novel appeared the following year. That one was called Infinite Jest.

Study finds major obstacles hindering widespread use of solar panels at home — and it's not just about the cost is current. I do not see that the major obstacles are insurmountable.

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