Tusday Grab Bag Grace Slick, Indiana Laws, Movies, Krasznahorkai Interview, Chabon

I decided work is a test of my patience and charity and will not go looking for another gig, yet.

 

After lunch, I had a loss of energy and did not really get moving again until around 4. Since then, I have been writing and customizing the Zen browser and doing a little reading.  

Such has been my day, so far.

Since I am reading Gore Vidal's The Golden Age, which has a conspiracy theory regarding Pearl Harbor running through (or more like a too-large undigested meal), I took a peek at Andrew Lawler's Tracing America’s Obsession With Conspiracy Theories Back to Its Founding. I would have taken Pearl Harbor as the original conspiracy theory, but Mr. Lawler corrects me on that point.

I saw the movie Wonder Boys long before I read the novel, long even before I heard the name Michael Chabon. Then, while in prison, I read The Yiddish Policeman's Union, The Amazing Kavalier & Klay, and The Wonder Boys. I think Michael Chabon is a wonder. So, I also took a peek at Ed Simon's In Praise of Wonder Boys (Both the Book AND the Movie) (LitHub) 

In Chabon’s novel (but not the movie), Tripp speaks of the “Midnight disease,” a type of possession which makes it so that the writer can be nothing other than herself. “The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia,” explains Tripp, “at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person laying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance…while all around him the neighbors sleep soundly.”

This malady, if it’s fair to call it that, is a type of hyper-attention, an inability to process reality but through narrative. Writing not for fame, accolades, or God-knows money, but simply because it’s that which constitutes you, which defines you. Tripp’s never-ending writing is less like working on an assembly line and more like being a butterfly weaving her silk (to borrow a metaphor from Marx), for the later such labor is intrinsic to her very definition. Grady Tripp can’t not be a writer. There are those who write for whom this isn’t the case—great and brilliant writers even. And the converse as well. But the midnight disease is different; it’s ethereal, numinous, cracked, strange, and transcendent. Mysterious.

Working on having this problem.

While in prison, Pete T gave me a book by László Krasznahorkai - one of the Central European writers who trashed much of what I thought I knew about novels. Now, The Yale Review has an interview of László Krasznahorkai by Hari Kunzru. 

HK You have written a lot, particularly in Seiobo There Below, about art. What is art’s role in the future—in imagining it, bringing it into being? Is there anything salvific or redemptive about art?

LZ Art is humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate. Beauty exists. It lies beyond a boundary where we must constantly halt; we cannot go further to grasp or touch beauty—we can only gaze at it from this boundary and acknowledge that, yes, there is truly something out there in the distance. Beauty is a construction, a complex creation of hope and higher order.

Joy Reid is on Substack, if not MSNBC: Joy's House 

I think we forgot how intelligent Grace Slick could be: Grace Slick on sex, drugs and Jefferson Airplane: ‘I was sober in the 80s. That was a mistake'. I also got one big laugh out of her interview.

And here lies a recap of key bills that failed to make it to the finish line. This one bugged me:

Low-income birth control

An attempt to expand access to birth control for poor Hoosiers failed after a battle over the definition of birth control.

House Bill 1169 started as a simple attempt to establish a fund to provide free birth control to Indiana residents who are eligible for Medicaid. Roughly half of all the births in the state have been paid for by Medicaid since 2017.

But a Republican amendment in committee removed IUDs and condoms from the definition of birth control and added information on “fertility awareness based methods” like menstrual cycle tracking, also known as the rhythm method.

The bill passed the House Public Health Committee but didn’t receive a hearing in the Ways and Means Committee, which focused on financial ramifications of a bill. It is unlikely the language will return given the state’s tight budget situation. 

Into movies? Like the law? Give Law, Lies, and Hollywood: Stanley Fish’s Cinematic Jurisprudence (LARB) a try.

 Still—for all Fish’s distrust of law, for all his cantankerous contrarianism—law seems to remain for him an obscure object of desire. In his discussion of A Man for All Seasons (1966), he describes law as a necessary “system of mutual, reciprocal protections that can do its salutary work even [quoting Kant] if what it administers is ‘a nation of devils.’” It is “the space in which the project of civilization—the project of creating a politics that shelters everyone, so long as everyone plays by the rules—can flourish.” Shelters everyone? Unlikely, but one can hope. And that is, after all, what laws are: forms of hope. While Fish may lambaste the narrow-minded liberalism of the rationalist lawyer Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) in Inherit the Wind, he nevertheless cannot help but love him as “a humanist, someone who believes that whatever divinity there is resides in man’s (and woman’s) efforts to build communities of sharing and compassion in the wilderness that is the world.” Law shackles us together in the wilderness, for better or worse. “The rule of law and the beacon of justice are at once strong and precariously fragile,” writes Fish. Despite all the wrong they do, it may be worth protecting them.

I ran across Semafor. It bills itself as "Transparent news, distilled views, and global perspectives." Give it a look, see what you think.  

I still need to look at one of my story's tonight, but here are some place that I meant to check out tonight, and have not yet gotten to:

 Gradaran Literary Magazine

Culterate  

And my physical therapy needs attended to.

One more post, then I will get onto other things. Like running down to the convenience store. I have not been outside in 7 hours.

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