Sunday, Monday - Writing, Apartment Hunting, Politics

 Sunday was church and finishing off my Commerce Clause notes. The notes are on here, but they will probably have no interest except to lawyers.

I am so glad to done with the notes. Reading my own writing was a PITA. It left me too tired for anything else.

Well, any other writing, that is.  

Political stuff  

American fascism has landed fully by Steve Schmidt (Sunday)

Trump wants people scared-instead Chicago and DC punched him in the face! (Dean Obeidallah) (Monday)

Trump thought the people of Chicago—and Washington, D.C. where he already sent the troops—were going to cower in fear. But that’s because Trump doesn’t know what it means to be an American. Period.

Trump must have been shocked to see massive protests in both cities on Saturday as the people made it clear they will not bow down to Trump. In fact, they punched Trump in the face!

In Washington, D.C., we saw a glorious display of people showing Trump that Americans are ready to fight for freedom. As the Associated Press put it: “Thousands of protesters marched across Washington, D.C., on Saturday in one of the largest demonstrations against President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of policing in the nation’s capital.” Below You can see a video of a small part of the protest...

 

Are Americans Being Conditioned to Accept Delayed Elections? (Literary Hub). WTF, we went through the Civil War and World War Two, and Vietnam (Korea?) without having to delay any elections.

The danger isn’t just these specific moves. It’s the trajectory they create. The more Americans hear phrases like “civil unrest” and “domestic conflict,” the more plausible it sounds to suggest elections should be delayed “for safety.” History shows how this works. In Turkey, a state of emergency after a coup attempt stretched into years, consolidating power at the top. In Russia, unrest has been a convenient excuse to tighten control over opposition. Even here at home, fear after 9/11 opened the door to surveillance powers most Americans never would have accepted earlier. Fear reshapes what people are willing to tolerate.

Yes, the Constitution fixes the timing of elections. But words on paper only work if leaders respect them and citizens demand they be upheld. If an administration argues that unrest makes elections unsafe, the courts might eventually push back—but the disruption alone could erode confidence in the process. That’s how democratic norms crumble: not with a declaration, but with doubt, confusion, and fatigue.

This is why normalization is so dangerous. If troops in our capital feel ordinary, then so do other abuses. If the independence of the Federal Reserve can be undermined without outrage, the next breach is easier to justify. What’s shocking today feels routine tomorrow, and by then the guardrails are already gone.

Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi review – love, war and betrayal (The Guardian). I quoted from an interview with Ms. Ypi, so I thought I needed to make a note of this. Would that I had time to read - my eyes tired out from being on this computer screen for too long.

And so, in Indignity, Ypi sets off to find out exactly who her grandmother was. It is, she writes, partly out of a sense of duty, to defend her family member from the trolls – a kind of 21st-century version of EP Thompson’s famous call for history to rescue the dead from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. But partly, Ypi admits, it is because she finds the photo unsettling. How to reconcile her beloved, compassionate grandmother with this glamorous young woman living it up in Mussolini’s Italy?

From a new Thomas Pynchon novel to a memoir by Margaret Atwood: the biggest books of the autumn (The Guardian) - a book list for anyone needing one.

 ‘Central Europe’ by Luka Ivan Jukic review. Having read Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka, this appeared to be interesting.

Did the region’s lost diversity and Germanophone high culture amount to a civilisation? Perhaps it is better to say that between 1815 and 1914, the Habsburg monarchy mostly managed to keep a lid on irreconcilable social, political, and cultural forces without offering a satisfactory arrangement that would bridge the deepest rifts between them. This is particularly evident when surveying the competing nationalist movements. True, before the First World War few among them could imagine a future outside of the multiethnic empires that ruled them or countenance the wholesale removal of rival groups. But even their sagest leaders espoused solutions that were liable, if implemented, to undermine the whole central European ‘community of fate’. The liberal German nationalist Friedrich Naumann’s 1915 proposal for democratic economic-political union in Mitteleuropa aroused sympathy from the liberal Hungarian nationalist Oszkár Jászi but only indignation in liberal Czech nationalist Tomáš Masaryk, later the first president of Czechoslovakia, who saw in it a blueprint for German domination. Central Europe appears then, as Jukic writes in another memorable formulation, as ‘a novel historical situation whose existence was tied to specific circumstances whose disappearance it did not survive’.

The precarity of that situation seems to have been lost on the region’s communist-era literati who yearned to escape Leninist one-party states and ‘return’ to a central Europe from which their societies had been ‘kidnapped’ – as the Czech novelist Milan Kundera put it in the early 1980s. To those who hailed their deliverance from captivity in 1989 and after Jukic retorts: ‘What emerged from the ruins of communist Eastern Europe was not a suppressed cosmopolitan Central Europe, but a series of nation-states forged in the upheavals of the twentieth century that had destroyed that very same Central European world.’ Glaring differences between the past and a present shaped by Western international institutions and a preoccupation with Russia have not dampened enthusiasm for the ‘idea of Central Europe’. 

 Wow, one of my favorite actors died: Graham Greene Dead: 'Dances With Wolves' & 'Wind River' Actor

Rejection:

Thank you so much for considering your story, Lessons Learned from a Green Meadow, for inclusion in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.

Thank you also for your patience. This was a very long initial reading period as we received several hundred submissions this year.

Unfortunately, your story was not selected on this occasion to move onto the next stage, and although I understand your disappointment I hope this does not deter you from submitting to us again in the future.

Sincere best wishes for your continued writing,

Neil B – HFQ sub-editor.

Monday morning:

Connecting the Dots: Adam Sobsey talks with Nell Zink and explores her new novel “Sister Europe.”  (LARB) - has to be read, and you might decide you will want to read it.

Monday was busy and wore me out. Middletown Properties called last week with the news that they had shredded the cashier's check with which I paid my rent. This morning, I overslept and went off to the bank to find out what I needed to do. This was about 9. I talked to the same cashier as I did last week when I cashed from check from Kokomo. He is not a good communicator. Then I made it to Middletown Properties at 10, and got the customer's copy. Back to the bank, where I found out the 90 days the cashier had been nattering about was not when they could cut a new check, but when I needed to put in for a lost check. I walked from the bank home.

I had two appointments to look at apartments. The first was at 1 PM. Of course, I miss the bus and have to walk. No problem. I think I am only a minute late, except I am at the wrong address because I misplace Queen Street. That place was too small.

The next appointment was at 3 pm. I decided to run over to Ball State's Bracken Library to get something to read and kill time. I wanted Alasdair Gray, and had no luck finding any. Instead, I got an Edna O'Brien collection. Back to wait for the appointment on the bus. I read the first chapter and think it was brilliant.

I looked at the apartment and walked back to the apartment. By the time I got here, I was tired. The afternoon was a nap and lethargic. After a shower restored me enough to submit, "No Ordinary Word".

I did get to read Essence is fluttering (Aeon) and also this: 

 The Draft of Time: A reading from Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Marcus (Lapham's Quarterly)

What is gone is gone always. Or so we tell ourselves, melancholy materialists who have seen the disappearance of so many things we loved: people, objects, eras, ideas. Waldo, of course, was less certain about these matters. It was in “Nominalist and Realist” that he seemed to deny the reality of death itself. “Nothing is dead,” he insisted. “Men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.” 

 

 And I finished up this post.

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