Sunday 1.0

 I went to church for liturgy, then went to Anderson. More about the Anderson trip later. I got back here for vespers. Then I came home, got through some of my email. Now, I want to call it a day.

What was the fastest growing Indiana county last year? (Indianapolis Star) (It is still not Madison County!)

Families are being paid $5,000 to move to small towns in states like Indiana and escape a cost of living crisis in big cities - NewsBreak

Universality by Natasha Brown review – clever satire of identity politics | Fiction | (The Guardian)

This Is What Democracy Looks Like!  (Los Angeles Review of Books)

As Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele has observed, fascism suggests an “ideology,” and thus “authoritarianism”—a “practice”—may more accurately describe the brutal, stupid, often ideologically confusing GOP-Trumpist program, or Trump himself. If you’ve been playing along, you’ve assembled your own list of polite descriptors, weak-tea synonyms, euphemisms, or placeholders: autocrat, strongman, demagogue, nationalist, ultranationalist, white Christian nationalist, far-rightist, authoritarian. A horse out of the barn by any other name!

Rereading “Sula” After the Fall of Roe (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Today, Sula faces bans in states such as Nevada, Florida, and Iowa. Today, the definition of “outlaw,” especially for Black women, is quickly changing. And today, just having a uterus, not even seeking an abortion, can render a person a potential outlaw. In 2023, Amari Marsh, a college junior in South Carolina, spent 22 days in prison after miscarrying in her bathroom. When she was accused of going to a Planned Parenthood to obtain a medication abortion, she not only denied it, but also framed herself as a law-abiding citizen: “I’ve never been in trouble. I’ve never been pulled over. I’ve never been arrested,” Marsh said. “I never even got written up in school.” Brittany Watts, another young Black woman, was also criminally charged for miscarrying in her bathroom and trying to flush the remains down the toilet. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession (2023), attributed Watts’s arrest to the haziness of today’s norms, post-Dobbs. In her words, “There’s no how-to guide about what you should do if you experience a miscarriage at home. So it’s also, I think, unusual for prosecutors to be holding Brittany Watts to a standard that wasn’t written down anywhere when she made the choices she did.” Ziegler said there is little precedent for abuse-of-corpse charges being applied in a miscarriage case: “If you think about abuse of a corpse, you’re thinking of people mistreating remains for medical experimentation, or you’re thinking of people, after a homicide, dismembering bodies to hide the crime. This almost never would be a charge you would see applied in a miscarriage case.” In other words, our current lack of clarity around abortion and around what constitutes “outlaw” behavior once again renders women “illegal from birth,” always vulnerable to punishment.

***

Rereading Sula today, in contrast to the other times I have read it, was a confining experience. It felt like watching Hillary Clinton run for president in 2016 and Kamala Harris campaign last year: a fleeting moment of possibility. Watching Sula behave as she does is reminiscent of growing up in a world characterized by the possibilities Roe v. Wade presented, before being shown that—of course—those rights are only temporary. 

I read as much as I could of Toni Morrison while in prison - she was a Nobel Prize winner from Ohio! Sula was one of the novels I read. An eye-opener for this old man.

If you have read Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars, then The Life of Donald Trump by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (aka Tom Holland) is a hoot.

Imagine if Mick Herron rewrote Taggart — meet the new star of tartan noir (Sunday Times)

Fannybaws pops up in both of his funny and original crime novels, Squeaky Clean and Paperboy. They feature Ali McCoist, an ill-starred, semi-corrupt, semi-incompetent police detective who bumps up against Glasgow’s worst gangsters. The books are a terrific mix of twisting police procedural, pitch-black comedy, slapstick, puns and over-the-top violence. And, of course, the dialogue is delivered in Glasgow’s finest street slang. Think Mick Herron meets Taggart.

Squeaky Clean was one of this newspaper’s Top Ten crime thrillers of 2023 and won the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime novel. The equally good sequel, Squeaky Clean was one of this newspaper’s Top Ten crime thrillers of 2023 and won the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime novel. The equally good sequel Paperboy, comes out next week, and a third is on its way.

Morgan's Raid:

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