The readings from Sunday, after CC left:
The Outsize Influence of Wales on Fantasy, Music, and Movies by Anna Fiteni (Literary Hub)
For Want of a Toilet by Victoria Brun won first prize at the New Myths contest; I think it is a great story, but I'd also have given her first place just for the title.
Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky by Yan Lianke, translated by Jeremy Tiang (Paris Review)
What did Pasolini know? Fifty years after his brutal murder, the director’s vision of fascism is more urgent than ever by Olivia Laing (The Guardian) - I know the director, never seen any of his films, but curiosity did not let me down.
The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie – a haunting coda to a groundbreaking career (The Guardian) - a short collection, but more importantly, why he should be read:
Well, Rushdie isn’t a dead man. He’s still writing. The Eleventh Hour, a collection of five stories, seems intended as a kind of coda to his career. The stories are death-haunted. One of them is called Late; it’s an afterlife fantasy in which a Cambridge fellow, whose career has resembled both EM Forster’s (writing a great novel about India) and Alan Turing’s (helping to crack the Enigma code), dies and haunts a young Indian student named Rosa; what links them may be the buried crimes of empire. The Musician of Kahani replays Rushdie’s greatest hits: it is about a child born at midnight (“the approved hour for miraculous births in our part of the world”) who, aged four, abruptly becomes a gifted pianist (like the rock star Ormus Cama in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, playing air guitar in his cradle).
***
The Last Literary Lion of New York, Gay Talese (Metropolitan Review) - another item brought here by my curiosity, since I have never read a bit of Gay Talese; I know him by reputation alone.Rushdie has been one of the deep sources of contemporary fiction. His fingerprints are all over the 21st-century Big Inventive Novel, with its sentient raindrops (Elif Shafak), its melodramatic families (Kiran Desai), its metamorphoses of race (Mohsin Hamid) and history (Marlon James). His influence has not been without its downsides. Rushdie has licensed lesser writers to be sentimental about their own powers of invention. He has given permission for characters to be flattened into comic stickers. And he has presided over a vast boom in telling rather than showing. The events of his own recent novels, such as The Golden House (2017) and Quichotte (2019), have been relentlessly told, rather than dramatised, and the virus of telling – this and then this and then this! – has noticeably infected the contemporary novel. But Rushdie was a pathbreaker. The exuberance and linguistic force of Midnight’s Children is still, after 44 years, a joy to encounter on the page. Another writer might have been fatally discouraged by what Rushdie has gone through. But Rushdie was not. He wrote the books. And the books, many of them, have greatly mattered.
It is the rarest of gifts to have lived long enough to survey both a life and a century in its greatest breadth; even rarer still to be both an active participant and shaper of the currents, to have walked alongside the titans of the age and brought them, somehow, to fuller life. This is the shorthand for understanding Gay Talese, and it’s nearly correct: Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, in two immortalized magazine profiles, will be bound to this boy from Ocean City, New Jersey, forevermore. But Talese will be the first to tell you that “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is not his greatest work, nor the one he is most proud of. For a man who has dwelt, in one form or another, in a magnificent Manhattan townhouse since the 1950s — though it was not so splendid when he moved in as a mere twentysomething tenant, before it acquired its opulent grandeur over decades of his loving attention and escalating magazine fees — he has always been most at home with the men and women in the shadows, the ironworkers and sex workers and mobsters, not to mention the city’s scruffy alley cats.Today, Talese is 93 and the very last of his kind: the dashing literary lion, the writer-celebrity, the pulsing center of a high culture that has, to our detriment, grown frailer. Among his contemporaries were Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill; some he counted as close friends and others, as he’ll readily tell you, could irk him. To state that Talese is not an ordinary nonagenarian is like declaring that the New York Yankees, his favorite ballclub, are not a mere athletic franchise; we at The Metropolitan Review strain not to be so obvious. But sometimes, that’s where the truth lies.
The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus review – a cult writer tries something new (The Guardian) - I mentioned this book and author recently and am too lazy to link to that post. If I understand the review correctly, the try did not reach the goal.
11/3:
I spent Monday morning and most of the afternoon working on "One Dead Blonde" Then I went to the dentist.
John Irving returns to The Cider House Rules in his 16th novel, Queen Esther (The Globe and Mail) - another great writer back with a new book. It sounds like vintage Irving.
"Agnes" went to The Forge
And a rejection:
Thank you for sharing your work with us. We often have to turn down well-crafted writing, and while "Going For The Kid" isn't quite right for our current needs, we appreciate the time and effort which goes into every submission we consider. Thank you for sending your work.
We're all writers too at Sequestrum and appreciate how hard this process can be. So we want to say thanks for trusting us with your work. As a token of respect, feel free to take advantage of 75% off our usual subscription price. That's not something we advertise, but it's something we try and offer writers when possible. As a potential contributor, subscribing means more than just access to great literature: It's the best way to get an idea of our current editorial focus; as an added bonus, subscribers can make free general submissions (limit one pending at a time). Please feel no obligation. If Sequestrum is a home for literature you enjoy, we'd love to have you.
To fulfill a discounted subscription, use the coupon code "LitWriter" on any checkout page (https://www.sequestrum.org/checkout). For more subscription options, visit our "subscribe" page.
Thanks again for sharing your work, and best of luck.
Sincerely,
Working-class voters think Dems are 'woke' and 'weak,' new research finds (POLITICO)
America’s Founding Fathers Had No Faith in Democracy, Joseph J. Ellis (Literary Hub) - a reminder of how we can fool ourselves into doing better than was planned for us and how we can also sow our own ruin.
If we move to a higher altitude, we will be witnessing the first chapter in a long-standing American story. Let’s call it the backlash pattern. Briefly put, every step forward toward racial equality generates a backlash from a significant portion of the white population. What Martin Luther King called “the arc of the moral universe” is really an undulating up-down syndrome. It is an inherently paradoxical pattern, since racism surges only after some semblance of racial equality becomes foreseeable.
We should recognize the pattern when it first appears during the American founding, because we are currently living through its most recent manifestation in the movement to “Make America Great Again.” And we should expect to see it again in or about 2045, when demographers predict that the white population of the United States will become a statistical minority.
This Screenwriting Software Is Way More Powerful Than You Remember (No Film School) - still thinking of working on one.
For writers: Publishing ... and Other Forms of Insanity: Top 5 Sites for Science Fiction Writers and Publishing ... and Other Forms of Insanity: Paying Markets
Back from the dentist less one tooth at 3:36.
"Going For The Kid" went to Gemini Magazine.
And a rejection for "Agnes":
Thank you for sending us your work. After careful consideration, we've decided it isn’t quite right for us. Sorry that we have to pass.
Sincerely,
Pine Hills Review editors
The Lost Ending of “Gaslight” That You Didn’t Know You Needed - Public Books
I spent Monday evening recuperating from the dentist visit. I swear the tooth was mostly root. Three tools were needed to get the thing out. I was sound asleep around 5 or 6 pm, but I did wake up around midnight. I listened to Colbert on YouTube, went through some bookmarks, finished by starting on converting Chapter 3 of "One Dead Blonde" to text.
11/4
I went to the doctor this morning. Before that, I spent my time on "One Dead Blonde". The reading from the morning.
Hello,
Thank you for your submission to Bog Matter Magazine, Issue 02. Unfortunately, we've decided not to accept your piece for publication, but we wish you the best of luck on your writing and publishing endeavors.
Keep an eye out for our next open submission period for Issue 03 early next year. We hope to consider your work again in the future.
All the best,Stephanie Lane Gage
Head Publisher — Martian Press ✦
Thank you for sending us "No Ordinary Word". We appreciate the chance to read it. Unfortunately, the piece is not for us.
Thanks again. Best of luck with this.
Sincerely,
Five Points
After the doctor, I went grocery shopping. I returned to "One Dead Blonde" when I got back here. I had talked to KH earlier in the day and told him I had set a deadline for myself of finishing with revising the novel by tonight. I met my deadline. Then I went to fixing dinner. CC called, I went to pick her up. She shared dinner and is now sound asleep on under blankets on the floor.
Late night reading follows.
I had hoped Our Fascination with People Who Vanish might explain why I had run through a string of videos on YouTube about missing persons. It did not explain why this is an interest, but it is a good essay on the effect disappearances have on us.
The Trauma Behind the "Good Old Days": Christina Henry on the Dark Trap of Nostalgia in Fiction gives two examples of the dangers of nostalgia. I would add a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, only I cannot recall its names. Too bad for me, not adding anything to my ideas.
Some political stuff I have not avoided.
Civil Resistance (Sheila Kennedy) - some glimmers of hope.
Congress has been dodging responsibility for tariffs for decades – now the Supreme Court will decide how far presidents can go alone (The Conversation) - it is always good for the vanity to see someone else pointing out how Congress has been backsliding on its duties for a long time.
Congress didn’t exactly lose its tariff power; it gave it away.
The Constitution assigns “Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” to Congress, not the White House. Historically, Congress set tariff lines in law – consider the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The pivot began with the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act of 1934, which let presidents adjust rates within limits via executive agreements. In the 1960s and ’70s, Congress passed laws expanding the president’s authority over trade, granting new powers to restrict or adjust imports without a separate congressional vote if certain conditions are met.
In my view, two key incentives drove the drift: blame avoidance and gridlock. Tariffs are redistributive by design: They benefit some sectors and regions while imposing costs on others. Casting a vote that helps steelworkers in one state but raises prices for builders in another is politically risky. Delegating to the White House allowed lawmakers to sidestep the fallout when prices rise or when jobs shift.
And as polarization intensified, the bargaining that once produced workable compromises became increasingly complex. Broad emergency statutes and open-ended delegations became the path of least resistance – fast, unilateral and insulated from negotiation. Over time, exceptions became the norm, and courts were tasked with resolving the gray areas.
That’s a poor way to run economic policy.
Let us hope we survive tomorrow when the Supreme Court takes up this issue.
There are some other things read today that will go into another post.
Song for the day: Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow
sch
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment