Morals, rejections, the Declaration, Mike Bloomfield, Saturday

 No laundry. One trip to the convenience store. Posts written. Such was this Saturday. However, I might put much in order - finally.

"Road Tripping" rejected:

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to Conium Press. After careful consideration, we will not be publishing "Road Tripping."

Conium is a small press that only publishes one (sometimes two) books per year. Competition was very fierce this reading period; we received the more submissions than ever before! Even though we're passing this time around, we hope you'll submit again in the future.

We except to re-open the queue again in late 2025 or early 2026. If you'd like to stay informed about upcoming submission opportunities through Conium, you can sign up for our e-mail list: http://tinyurl.com/okuv8cv

Thanks again for submitting. We hope "Road Tripping" finds a good home with another publisher.

Sincerely,

The Georgia Review’s Summer 2025 issue is now available. Woven Tale Press VOl. XIII #2 is also out.

Boccaccio: A Biography by Marco Santagata (Translated from Italian by Emlyn Eisenach) - review by Alexander Lee (Literary Review) - a bit of fun; a couple of minutes diversion.

The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It by Alec Ryrie - review by Giles Fraser leaves one - should leave one - with concerns about our future, and "our" meaning humanity's future. It seems a day for such gloomy thinking on morals, or is it the zeitgeist?

Ryrie’s compelling book ends with the culture wars of the present. The moral certainties of the age of Hitler were fundamentally rooted in what we were against; there was no positive moral vision of what we were for. At its worst, it fostered an environment of denouncing rather than encouraging. Here, cancel culture feels like a continuation, even an intensification, of anti-Hitler ethics. At the same time, far-right politicians – Trump, Orbán, Le Pen, Meloni – have achieved success peddling messages that many regard as out of kilter with the values of the age of Hitler. Ryrie also points to the explosion of interest in Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America as a sign that the age of Hitler-centred morality has passed. ‘The problem with post-Nazi values is not that they are wrong,’ Ryrie writes, ‘but that they are insufficient: thin, grey gruel compared to the taste and richness of our rooted traditions. It is a culture that only knows what it hates.’

Have we given enough thought to what we believe in? Long, long ago, a girl I knew said to me, it was easier to know what you did not want than to know what you wanted. Those words have been proven true every decade of my life. I have always considered myself a counter-puncher - that I have someone throwing punches at me than in throwing punches first; that I work better with competition than when I am freewheeling. It may be the same with cultural morals - it is easier to define ourselves against something and what we think is best for us.

Along with the ideals it expresses, the Declaration of Independence mourns for something people lost in 1776 − and now, too (The Conversation)

Of all the big rock guitarists, Mike Bloomfield has been the hardest to track down. A reputation that made him sound like America's answer to Clapton in 1965; died early from heroin; he had even less commercial success than Jeff Beck. I think I am just old enough to have heard the name and just young enough to have missed him. Today, I spent a good deal of time with him playing in the background. I am not sure if he does not belong to a certain knot of guitarists left behind by the rise of Hendrix, the cachet of English guitarists, and being more guitarists than pop stars - Stephen Stills, Duane Allman, Jorma Kaukonnen, Leslie West. 

Speaking of artistic integrity, did anyone else shoot themselves in their foot as much as Harlan Ellison? From what I have read, he knew the value of his talents. 

sch