Nothing To See Here. Seriously. Look Over There....

 Sunday was church, as usual.

Then back here to work on "Theresa Pressley". I have taken to using the voice playback extension to work on the part of "Theresa Pressley" I want to send off to a possible publisher. I will not say that I am now rewriting every paragraph. It is maybe 90% of them. I got through 8 pages today. Two sections. I feel exhausted, and my eyes want to go on vacation.

It does seem better. Smoother. I think I will be done with it by the time we have snow.

Today, has been more of an experiment. I work until I get tired, nap. Repeat.

Two more sections done on "Theresa", and my eyes are tired. Taking a break.

While idly checking out a question on Wikipedia, I found Corn Belt. I wonder if this is not a good alternative to Midwest.

After "Theresa", the big project is getting started on Chasing Ashes. Before Trump swallows us whole.

Prior to getting to work on my novel, I submitted Agnes to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Redivider, and Blue Earth Review. CafeLit is looking for short story collections, so I sent them "The Dead and The Dying."

In between time, I managed to get some items read and some music listened to, and I worked on this post and a couple of others.

I made one trip to the convenience store. Pretty soon, I'll be broke and not able to buy cigarettes or RC Cola. Well, I need to quit for a while.

Time to call it quits - for now.

Sunday reading:

Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon review – the ex-first minister opens up | Autobiography and memoir  (The Guardian). I have an interest in Scottish nationalism; this does not seem to me as serving that cause.

Despite the book’s promise of candour, it seems like Sturgeon is only willing to entertain her readers’ curiosity so far. She writes latterly that “even if I haven’t changed anyone else’s view of me, the process of writing this book has helped me arrive at a more balanced sense of myself”. That may be so, but it doesn’t feel like the whole story.

  Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy (The Guardian). I have read enough about Cavafy without ever seeing a book of is poetry - although I am not one for seeking out poetry - that I am curious about him.

What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigate his place within it. Cavafy, whose admirers and champions included WH Auden, EM Forster, David Hockney and Jackie Onassis, has remained enigmatic since his death at 70 in 1933. Surprisingly, for a poet who never sold a book in his lifetime – and instead circulated broadsheets, pamphlets and sewn notebooks, building his reputation poem by poem – he now has “a global audience he could never have imagined”, thanks to poems such as The City, Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca, which Onassis asked to be read at her funeral.

***

 There is no poet quite like Cavafy. His tone is terse, often ironical; his style plain, prosaic, without metaphor, simile, rhyme or rich vocabulary. He is not for everyone. Thom Gunn, writing to a friend, wondered why Cavafy had never interested him. “Is it because the translations haven’t been very good or because I feel pressures on me to like his work simply because he is homosexual?” Cavafy’s best poems have a toughness and detachment that Gunn would have liked; his worst are mired in the same sentimentality that Gunn worried he was perpetuating in his own work.

‘Animal Farm was my parents’ teamwork’: Orwell’s son on 80 years of the satirical classic (The Guardian)

 Finally, in July 1944, Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg, known for courageously publishing controversial leftwing books, agreed to take it on. Even then, paper shortages and possibly ongoing reluctance to offend Britain’s ally, meant Animal Farm was not published until 17 August 1945. When it finally appeared, my father was surprised at how little fuss there was about his bold satire of Stalinism and dictatorship. But relations with Russia were by then rapidly cooling and, as my father said, people were “fed up with all [this] Russian nonsense”. Animal Farm’s time had come. Since its first publication 80 years ago, it has sold more than 11m copies and never been out of print.

But Animal Farm is more than just a satire of the Russian Revolution. This “fairy story” (as my father called it) is an eternal warning against political leaders who hijack potentially noble movements for their own selfish purposes. My father thought all politicians should be watched hawkishly, confronted truthfully (whatever the price) and kicked out when they put their interests before those of their country.

 11 Indiana Town Names That’ll Make Your GPS Have an Existential Crisis

 A Hollywood star's death still haunts this remote California village. A former friend was enthralled by Natalie Wood; she came to prominence before I got to see many movies, and to me her death remains the most known thing about her.

Monday's readings:

Wildfire Uncovers Lost Biblical Village of Bethsaida on the Sea of Galilee - Arkeonews

A Lock of Braided Human Hair Could Change How We Think About Inca Society and Record-Keeping

Knife and Lost Armor: First-Ever Verified Artifacts from Emperor Nintoku’s 5th-Century Kofun Tomb Revealed - Arkeonews

Understanding the Gaps in Africa's Archaeological Record

The Surprising Durability Of Africa’s Colonial Borders - NOEMA

On Relativism and Postmodernism in Publishing - the second most important thing I have read this day; the other I gave its own post.

Now, both extremes could be considered postmodern in their approach. It seems to me that postmodernism is sort of a reversion to premodernism, in the sense that it emphasizes faith (commitment to the cause), hierarchy (the superiority of the oppressed), and duty to God (ideological dogma).

Song of the day: 

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