Group Therapy! Demonstrating in Muncie! Oh, My!

 I survived another week of work. It caught up with me after group therapy and grocery shopping.

Group therapy got interesting for a few minutes. Men exposing their feelings towards women. That women are ruled by their emotion. There was even a mention of the moon. It was interesting to watch the three or four who got vociferous on the subject. The noisiest of the noisy is the youngest, recently released from prison, and the one that made the point that men were logical and women not. I made a point of his lack of experience with women. The one gay man in our group was quite repulsed by the whole discussion. 

I have thought of that conversation today while listening to J.M. Coetzee. If you go back and look at the old movies from when men were men, etc etc, there is a sense that men are not emotional. I think we have not watched these movies close enough. It seems to me that men are not emotional, but that they are in the midst of enterprises - such as war - where losing control of their emotions imperils the enterprise and other persons (see The Plainsman, where Gary Cooper went out to danger regardless of his own feelings). If women are portrayed as emotional (see Jean Arthur in The Plainsman trying to persuade Gary Cooper from not going out to danger), then it is because that is the only means of persuasion left them by society. Examples exist even in Golden Age Hollywood of women not being subsumed by their emotions: Mae West, and Barbara Stanwyck (I am thinking very much of The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire).

If the idea of women as being mindless (which goes back to Plato, btw) obtained a more general consensus, I would lay the blame on the Fifties, especially its family sitcoms, for propagandizing the idea of father knows best.

It is always easier to present a simplistic division into black and white than it is to respond to one another as equally complex in our humanity.

Some readings from yesterday:

Renaissance Florence’s Missing Bronzes (History Today)

‘Miracles and Wonder’ by Elaine Pagels review (History Today)

Muncie Mall In Muncie, IN Still Open In 2025, But It's A Different Place (BestAttractions) (which reminds me how long it has been since I have been out that way)

Today, I made it to the "No King Day" demonstration, downtown Muncie. I thought there was a good turn out - maybe 200 people. A lot of people honking their support. Only three vehicles trolled the demonstration with vehicles flying Trump flags. As I told KH, this evening on the phone, now if all these people showing their distaste for Trump will only vote.

Anti-Trump 'No Kings' protesters hold rally on downtown Muncie bridge (Muncie Star Press)

Some estimated the crowd at the protest at more than 350 people.

There appeared to be no pro-Trump group holding its own demonstration at the bridge. However, one man repeatedly drove past the anti-Trump protesters with a banner emerging from his car that read, "Don't blame me — I voted for Trump."

"Traitor!" one protester yelled each time he saw that motorist.

I guessed at 200, but still, I say good for Muncie. 

KH called back about "Theresa Pressley". He is having problems with it.

Most of the day was spent working on the blog. Two trips to the convenience store, and I closed out the night with a call to my niece. Nice catching up.

Some reading from today:

I Can Read You Like a Book: On Northanger Abbey by B. D. McClay (Paris Review)

The process of getting to know another person, whether romantically or for some other reason, consists of small tests. These tests are not deliberate trials—ideally, at least. They’re just little moments in which you think to yourself “Speed up” or “Slow down.” Such tests can be arbitrary (as with email signatures) or imbued with wisdom (tipping well being, among Americans, the universally recognized sign of a good heart). Under the guidance of folk wisdom and our own instincts, we try our best to make judgments about who people are before we know who they are, because once we know, it’s too late for that knowledge to do we any good.

The Grant Catton Blog reviews short stories from The New Yorker. I picked on New Yorker Fiction Review #313: "The Frenzy" by Joyce Carol Oates. He starts with the same statement as I do (or close to mine) about JCO:

Every time I read a short story by Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker I ask myself: "Why am I not reading JCO all the damn time??" She is so good she makes me want to start writing fiction again. Anyone who is looking to write fiction needs to stop what they're reading and read anything by this woman. I'm serious. 

*** 

The short story at hand -- "The Frenzy" -- about a middle-aged man and his 19-year-old mistress who take a hasty, tense, winter road trip to coastal New Jersey, is not a "great" short story. It does not have grand, wide-ranging implications. It will not be passed around the internet, nor will it probably even be referenced among Joyce Carol Oates's best stories. It is, however, really good short story, rich with multiple layers of meaning to be interpreted, and a demonstration of Oates's supernatural gift for creating characters and putting them in awkward life situations that -- although sometimes even mundane-seeming -- always manage to surprise. 

As for other demonstrations:

Demonstrators rally against Trump at 'No Kings' protests (AP News)

Mark Ruffalo calls 'No Kings' protesters Avengers in anti-Trump speech (EW)

Oh, yeah, another rejection for "Problem Solving":

Thank you for sending "Problem Solving" to the Southeast Review. While we haven't chosen the story for publication, we are grateful for the opportunity to have read and considered it. We wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere. 

Sincerely,

The Editors

Southeast Review

http://www.southeastreview.org

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