Blue Monday? Well, Another Day On The Way to A Dusty Death For Sure

I needed to go to Social Security and I did not. Frankly, I was tired when I got home from work and my left flared with pain. So what did I do? I went to the convenience store and then slept for two hours.

Then I found out I made a mistake in what I filed in my dad's trust case. That took time to fix it. Then there was more to do with that. I ended my day around 9 PM.

I finished watching Krull on YouTube. Oh, is it flawed, and it is some of the same flaws that I remembered from seeing it in the theater decades ago. It also has the same qualities - the supporting cast gives the movie heft. Somehow, the algorithms turned up Cult Classic '80s Fantasy Being Rebooted By JJ Abrams. I have been complaining for years about reboots of successful movies in favor of those which updating would improve. This could be the test case. 

Mario Vargas Llosa, giant of Latin American literature, dies aged 89  (The Guardian)

Over a career that spanned more than 50 years, Vargas Llosa charted power and corruption in a series of novels including The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat. Living a life that was as colourful as his fiction, Vargas Llosa also launched a failed bid for the Peruvian presidency, nursed a long-running feud with Gabriel García Márquez and triumphed as a Nobel laureate in 2010.

I read Llosa, finally, in prison. He is not Marquez; he is his own thing and maybe easier for Americans to understand. Time comes for everyone, but I think this one ends an era of the big South American Writers.

Rejections continue, while I put submissions on hold.

Thank you for sending your work to ellipsis. Though it was not the right fit for the journal this time, we appreciate the chance to read it.

Best wishes to you and your writing.

Sincerely,

The Editors 

I keep trying to point out how the Ukrainian War is a religious war, and The Subjugation of Faith (Public Orthodoxy) makes that point.

Father Vladimir Budnik from the Kherson region was serving as the rector of a UOC church in the city of Golaya Pristan at the beginning of the full-scale war. According to him, “plainclothes men” began coming to his church as early as April 2022. “They wanted me to stop reading sermons in Ukrainian—they said: ‘Russia is here now, we don’t need all this.’ Then they started demanding sermons about the triune people: a common past, a common history, a common church. I evaded, made excuses that I don’t know Russian well, but they kept pushing more and more. I didn’t know how to get away from them,” the priest recounts.

At some point, Father Vladimir had the feeling that he was about to be arrested—visits from government representatives were becoming more frequent. His fellow priest had already spent two weeks “in the basement”—the occupation authorities accused him of “collaborating with the Kyiv regime.”

Vladimir Budnik was fortunate: he managed to escape the occupation. Once he arrived in Kyiv, he received a text message from an unknown number warning him that they would come for him soon and that he needed to leave urgently. 

***

For example, the number of parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, subsequently incorporated into the ROC, decreased by 1.4 times, while the number of Protestant communities decreased by 3.6 times. The Catholic Church has been almost completely destroyed: out of 15 parishes of the Roman Catholic Church, only one remains; out of 49 parishes of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, none remain. 

Away from politics to Edna O'Brien, ‘You must read my diaries’: unlocking the private life of Edna O’Brien. A writer I wish I had read more of.

In prison, I got to re-read The Great Gatsby, as well as more of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. I had read it in high school. My Aunt Mary Ellen told me it had been her favorite novel, which made her in a small group, considering it was almost out of print when she was in college. It may be the best of Fitzgerald's novels, although I think This Side of Paradise was worth reading. It is now a  hundred years old with a variety of celebrations.

Gatsby @ 100: American Classrooms, American Dreams? (Public Books) makes several interesting points about Gatsby embodying/critiquing the American Dream, and its use in American classrooms.

In his speech at the Center for American Progress in January 2012, Krueger used the chart of the Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) to predict that “the persistence in the advantages and disadvantages of income passed from parents to the children” would “rise by about a quarter for the next generation as a result of the rise in inequality that the US has seen in the last 25 years” (see figure 1). In other words, the trajectories of rich families and poor or working-class families would continue to diverge. “Not since the Roaring Twenties has the share of income going to the very top reached such high levels,” he said. “It is hard to look at these figures and not be concerned that rising inequality is jeopardizing our tradition of equality of opportunity.”

***

Our survey finds that Gatsby is still taught in all kinds of schools, across every demographic. Often it’s as a required text or as a selection from a list of approved titles. In an era of high-stakes testing and diminished reading stamina, when an 11th-grade class might read only two or three books in a year, one of them is likely to be Gatsby. It’s a safe choice. If one were looking for them, the novel offers plenty of pretexts for challenges, but it’s not the sort of book Moms for Liberty is gunning for.

I spent some time putting together a collection of Macbeth scenes from YouTube for KH. I am also going to share them with you. 

And that is where I left off at 6:34 AM when the browser locked up on me. There was one more video to share, but I had to get to work, and a pit stop for supplies at the convenience store.

Work went well, a full day today. That is good for the pay check. I got home at 2:10.  At 4:30, I have my last physical therapy session. Considering how well the last one went, I will it. I am doing the best I can to do the recommended stretching exercises. There is too much to do for me to keep sleeping away my pain.

Between now and then I need to deal with the IRS. Since I forgot to change my address for Social Security, I have no idea what I got from that last year. 

And now for the omitted video:

I really would like to see that.

sch