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 I have had enough of today. I was up early, and I have been working on Dad's trust. 

The email remains - under 10 to respond to.

I got this rejection for "When Thomas Kemp Went Missing":

Thank you so much for sending us your endeavors. It's unique reflection of the underside will not be revealed at this time, but please keep us in mind for creative work in the future!

Regards,

The editor of Underside Stories

History news thanks to Unruly Figures.

Divers Discover 2,500-Year-Old Shipwreck and anchors Off the Coast of Sicily

“This discovery represents an extraordinary contribution to the knowledge of the maritime history of Sicily and the Mediterranean and highlights once again the central role of the Island in the traffic and cultural exchanges of antiquity,” said Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, Sicily’s regional councilor for cultural heritage and Sicilian identity, in a statement on the shipwreck. “The wreck, dating back to a crucial period for the transition between archaic and classical Greece, is a precious piece of the submerged Sicilian cultural heritage.”

The Enduring Mystery of a Plane That Vanished in the Icy Canadian Wilderness With 44 People On Board I detest flying; this does not encourage me.

The Age of Wonder Meets the Age of Information

The echoes between the curiosity cabinets of yore and our own media-steeped world offer opportunities for teaching digital and visual literacy, critical analysis, and historical thinking in the college classroom. As a historian of science who has taught about the history of collecting, I encourage my students to try to imagine themselves in the shoes of museumgoers and naturalists past. Images of historical artifacts from these cabinets as well as depictions of the collections themselves—all available to students through Artstor on JSTOR and similar resources—provide a tangible gateway to experience remote worldviews and mores. Such images can especially help STEM students see the value in humanistic questions, not least because curiosity cabinets were some of the original interdisciplinary spaces.

*** 

As an antidote to the divided attention that shapes student life, close observation of images can force students to slow down in an age of rapid information consumption. As a follow-up activity, the class digs into printed illustrations of wonder chambers in small groups. Each group receives a separate image to analyze. First, they spend five to ten minutes simply looking at the scene before them—identifying objects, pondering the collection’s organization, and noticing more the longer they look. Once that time is up, they take another ten minutes to discuss which three objects from the scene they would nominate to feature in an exhibition for their peers about the history of early museums.

Reading this, I thought how little mentorship we give to kids using the internet. Before, at least for me, there was someone to explain what was real and what was not. On the other hand, considering how many people voted for Trump, there is little critical thinking to be found in adult Americans.

Speaking of Our Fearless Leader, he has stepped into being an architect and artistic critic: Trump’s Culture Wars Come to Architecture. I am not much a fan of modernist architecture. However, the essay's author, Anthony Paletta, makes some good points I want to remember.

One is political:

It is also wrong to pretend that the reaction against modern and contemporary architecture is distinctive of Trump supporters, or to treat this as a manifestation of white supremacy instead of a broader, if complex, question of taste. On the left, for example, Nathan Robinson and Brianna Rennix’s Current Affairs piece from 2017, “Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture,” has been repeatedly cited in recent weeks, and Matt Ford at The New Republic weighed in with “The Non-Fascist Case for Traditional Architecture.” There have also been a number of accounts sympathetic to the order from Trump-skeptical conservative figures. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat’s argument that construction might best inspire a range of the public if it varied in character by administration likely isn’t wrong.

And historical:

Still, if there is a problem with contemporary building, it is not—as the Trump administration suggests—government elitism all the way down. The politically divisive debate over popular versus elite taste obscures other reasons why we don’t see more traditional construction, and that is a gap we should not leave for vengeful antimodernists to fill. Their account often amounts to the fairytale that austere academic elites took all of our nice buildings away, which we could have back if only we tipped them all out of the castle. In fact, the sway of fervent modernists over this domain has unquestionably declined, and these people aren’t usually the ones commissioning buildings anyway. The primary drivers of the decline of classical construction have been, instead, the economy of modern building methods and the adoption of standardized building materials, as well as a steep increase in labor costs in the last century.

And the ever-delicious irony that the elitists on the Right are complaining about what they endorse:

Indeed, civic construction trends have tended to follow those in the rest of society, which over the long midcentury ascendance of modernism were being set not by government and academic authorities but often by big business, tract homebuilding, and the like. Most unsatisfactory government commissions look like anonymous office buildings, not like avant-garde efforts designed to shock. If some right-wing populists are coming around to dislike these things, then all the better for an understanding of what has actually been going on, but their stock villains—left-leaning elitists—have not generally been updated with any accuracy. Deconstuctivist king Peter Eisenman, for his part, has declared that “most of my clients are Republicans, most of them are right-leaning,” and Sean Hannity lived in a Richard Neutra house. Former Civic Arts Society Board member and current Research Fellow Catesby Leigh did note, in a City Journal piece prefiguring much of the language of the executive order, that several of the order’s targets “cater to quintessentially private sensibilities that regard architecture in subjective, emotivist terms.”

 I mentioned Mavis Gallant in Having Survived To Friday Night..., and today The Los Angeles Review of Books has Nadia Ghent review of “The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant.”

What The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant allows us to enter is not a museum of midcentury fiction, dead and irrelevant, but a master class in writing, one that is capacious and alive. Hallberg has beautifully arranged the 44 stories geographically and in roughly chronological order, similar to Gallant’s 1981 collection Home Truths, which creates a journey that puts the reader in the place of Gallant herself traveling from North America to Europe, from New World to Old, from the familiar to the unknown. It is a dislocation both physical and existential, where brief moments of illumination sweep across a character’s consciousness before it is plunged back into uncertainty.

Also from LARB is Annie Lou Martin review of Anna Moschovakis’s new novel “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth", The Destabilizing Force of Language. Whoever wrote the headline, I thank you. That is why I read the review and was rewarded with having to think about my own writing.

This paragraph struck me and I could not stop:

Moschovakis’s narrator, an out-of-work Method actress, becomes obsessed with killing her younger roommate, Tala. When Tala disappears, the narrator begins receiving messages from an enigmatic group with a Pynchonesque mystique, a catalyst for her already slippery psychic hold on reality to become precariously tenuous. Shifting surfaces betray a shifting core. As the narrator’s obsession with Tala’s absence deepens, language fractures, and the basic composition of reality undulates.

***

In An Earthquake, as in her other work, Moschovakis is clearly concerned with the way that language itself acts—as a way to construct and disrupt distinctions between self and other, as mimicry, as an object, as a way to establish direction, as a stabilizing and destabilizing force. Her sense of poetics never strays far from the material, from the body itself as an object that acts and is acted upon. Etymology is a teleology that crumbles when pressed; the narrator muses on “junk metaphors” like “go off the deep end,” pulls words apart to extract new meanings (“rehearse” contains the word “hearse,” etc.). Scratch an actor and you find another actor; scratch a word and you find another word.

***

It’s tempting, when reading a novel so clearly written by a poet, to elevate every image to the representational. The physical shifting of the surface of the earth betrays an unstable core, just as the narrator’s unstable sense of self manifests in her shifting facades as an actor. The reader is clued in to a deceptively simple set of conditions: there’s a relationship here between the surface and the core, between what’s said and what’s meant. But to read this novel as a clean metaphor would be reductive, and like any good poet, Moschovakis is concerned with the physicality of language on the level of both image and form. The form itself is unstable, shifting, and becomes increasingly less “stable” as the novel goes on. Each section breaks down, at the end, into a poem, like a sudden running up to the edge of language itself, causing friction, refusing a stable sense of meaning making. It’s a breakdown of structure to the point where even the sentence “disintegrates.” As the novel progresses, the language mimics the process of a mind engaged with an increasingly defamiliarized environment—obsessive, associative, and anxious.

I have not yet separated words from reportage. This I attribute to my years as a lawyer, as much as my reading of Hammett and Vonnegut and Hemingway. I cannot sing because I do not have an ear for melody. Nor am I any kind of poet, not even a poetaster. I need to think more about words creating images.

Language as a disruptive actor intrigues my brain. I like the idea while not sure how to use it.

The Paris Review released James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78. I have not time to read it. I was good and only napped for an hour, cleaned up the bedroom, but I have not had time to read the interview.

The Guardian gave me another writer I probably will not have time to read with Author Tony Tulathimutte: ‘The great millennial theme? Resentment’

“No matter what ideology you turn to, no matter how utopian it is, it does not solve the problem of hypocrites, frauds and charlatans. And that is the topic of most of my satire. It’s not really the ideologies themselves,” he says. I begin to ask him more about his writing on identity politics, but he walks away.

So wealth is what they resent while idolizing billionaires. There is a satire there.

3:41 pm 

Around 5 with the dishes done, and the bedroom tidied, I came back to the computer. I called KH. We chatted for a while about Bollywood movies. Then it was back to work for me. Now, I have had enough. Good night!

Here I go supporting the Donovan of trash:

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