Small Accomplishments; Waking to Rejection

Sunday was church and a trip to the convenience store in the afternoon. I decided to just dump a lot of emails into trash. I spent the rest of the day working on "Road Tripping" and "The Dead and the Dying". I finished off the night reading a bit of Gore Vidal. It feels like I am close to be on track.

Up on time, only to find this in the email:

Thank you for sending us "Desperate Men Committing Desperate Acts". We appreciate the chance to read your work. Unfortunately, it is not for us at the moment.

Thanks again. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Jose Rodriguez

riverSedge: A Journal of Art and Literature

Maybe comedy is not my thing.

Some reading from yesterday. 

 It Isn’t Left And Right (Sheila Kennedy)

Politics is right and left (which is not always a correct fit, either), but the dispute between those think they have all the answers and those needing less rigid intellectual/spiritual/political rules is existential.

The Fate of the Public Library (Thornfield Hall) 

I have long thought (if the last 30 years is long) that the Republicans were a party of sociopaths; it should have been evident with George W. Bush's administration. Attacking public libraries evidences their sociopathic tendencies. Also, take a look at the Sheila Kennedy piece above.

My cousin, the late Paul Finholt, got me interested in architecture, so I had a look at The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley review – meet the brutalists (The Guardian)

The Englishness of English Art sounds like something a parish-pump little Englander might like to bang on about, but it is in fact the title of an arresting study by the German Jewish émigré Nikolaus Pevsner. “Neither English-born nor English-bred,” as he put it in his foreword, he nevertheless pinned down with startling precision the qualities that characterised English art and architecture: a rather twee preference for cuteness and compromise, for frills and fripperies.

***

The Alienation Effect is a collective biography of the central Europeans who washed up on British shores between the wars. In the decades that followed, Hatherley argues, they exerted a colossal influence on British cultural life. Sometimes the influence manifested itself transparently, as when Thatcher whipped out a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag and said to her party colleagues: “This is what we believe!” At others, it hid in plain sight, as in the iconic moquette used for London Transport, designed by the Czech Jacqueline Groag, or in films such as Get Carter, where brutalist Newcastle deserves joint billing with Michael Caine; it is through the Viennese lens of the cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky that we see this unforgiving landscape. 

I spent some time listening to Scottish history because the presenter is a hoot:

Lemmy does Buddy:

Lots of errands this afternoon. I need an easy, short day of washing pans.

sch