I have been spending too much time doing research, trying to catch up with 30 years in a couple of weeks, but going down rocking. Reading and writing until my eyeballs feel like pinpricks and my brain is swirling. I started doing this thing of sleeping for a few hours and then getting back up to work.
Starting the day with new stuff from Ray Wylie Hubbard:
There has not been much to report. I did the group thing last Friday. The notes are around here somewhere. I think I will add them separately.
CC was found and she is alive.
I made it to church Sunday. The standing wore me out and I did not accomplish much else on Sunday. About the only other places I have been have been Payless or Walmart or the convenience store. I just came back from the convenience store.
Oh, I did laundry one day. Thursday or Friday. I talked to the niece when I did. Yes, it was Friday.
Another thing from last Friday: the phrase "all this useless beauty" got stuck in my head. It came to me as part of a song; one I could not remember. Then I tracked it down a few days later.
I have been keeping to Coke Zero or to one 2-liter of RC Cola.
Although I did get to spend time with Esoterica.
We had heavy rains last night, after I called it a day.
I have decided that the Georgia Supreme Court writes tiresome opinions. It must be an institutional thing, since the same style persisted over 30 years,
The law is not a profession; it is an obsession, more like a disease of the brain.
Rock on.
I started this post days ago, meaning to write around these things.
Undiscovered Country: The 100th Anniversary of Virgina Woolf’s “On Being Ill” (Literary Hub)
There was something atavistic about the skunks, their ancestors living under my house generation after generation. I felt watching them Woolf’s deeper, darker explanation for why, while indifferent, nature soothes the afflicted. “Inside the transcendent communion with nature,” she wrote, “resides the most disquieting fact of existence—the awareness of an unfeeling universe, unconcerned with our fate.” This indifference calmed and conciliated compared with the weight of my loved one’s concern.
This sounds more like me up to 2010:
Woolf understood that those in pain are susceptible to illusion. “This monster,” she writes, “the body, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of wings into the rapture of transcendentalism.” It is assumed by believers that religion comes down from above, but if God exists, human bodies made him. The idea of the supernatural felt disrespectful to the stark reality of a damaged body like mine.
***
Woolf called illness, “the great confessional,” a rare space where “truths are blurted out.” But I had found her truths existential, and almost impossible to bear: “…how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads…”
The odd thing since I got home is that with my body falling apart I have not succumbed to the weariness and then the depression as I used to . I have learned to work around the problems and the pain. More importantly, I have medical insurance and a willingness to use that I did not have once upon a time. It is also good that I have done much to eliminate the stress, have learned to pace myself, and do not have a life where I have to keep throwing myself against a wall just to survive. On the other hand, the bureaucracy that has undertaken supervising my life does not understand that I have time only for writing, that is my job before I kick the bucket, my poor PO seems to think I am an isolated misanthrope when I feel like nothing of the kind.
Heavy Metal: A magazine in transition (The Comics Journal)
When I was young, I was quite the reader of Heavy Metal. It seems to me now that that stopped in my thirties. Perhaps because the magazine became harder to find; perhaps because it no longer amazed me; perhaps because I turned to things that would make me money. Will it survive? Will its survival matter? Have our times gotten too shriveled with conservatism.
Anatomy of a Galileo Forgery (JSTOR Daily) forgeries are so much fun, yet this one on this day when lethargy has begun to overtake me again, I am troubled with the thought of history being undermined.
Both of De Caro’s copies of the Sidereus had a title page blemish that turned out to match perfectly a legitimate 1964 facsimile copy of the book. In that facsimile edition, a photo retoucher had failed to correct a paper blemish that the camera read as an ink dot … and here it was again four decades later, pointing to one of the sources of the De Caro fakes.
Detailing a trail of shady library exchanges; forgeries used to replace stolen originals; originals with added forged details to increase their value; and multiple forged copies (De Caro claimed he made five copies of Sidereus Nuncius), Wilding argues that the SNML “is merely the most sophisticated example we have so far detected in a long run of forgeries, whose primary aim was to stand in as surrogates for stolen copies.” Eager to disabuse people of rooting for clever forgers and the schadenfreude of seeing experts conned, Wilding writes, “these books are the product of organized crime” undermining history and the institutions that make history possible.
But is not history always undermining itself?
We found out today that Donald J. Trump has not even made an agreement to end his “excursion” into Iran, but only an agreement to make an agreement. How many will tout him as a genius? That he is the greatest dealmaker in history? Plenty.
US Army Major: Trump lost the Iran war and if he’s not held accountable he will start a new war!
We Can Reject Trump’s Orgy of Decline
And I’ll mention one point in particular that seems not to be getting the attention it deserves. The memorandum of understanding to be signed Friday reportedly says that Iran will not impose tolls in the strait of Hormuz for the next sixty days. This is presumably the basis of Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll-free.” But the government of Iran says that the strait will operate in the longer run “under Iranian arrangements.” This seems likely to be true, since Iran has established the principle that it can close the strait, has paid no price, hasn’t repudiated a right to do so in the future, and will be more interested and able to enforce its will in the months and years to come than we’ll be able to stop them.
***
Could the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing? Could it provide a spur for us to arrest and reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence? Indeed, the American people don’t seem to have been too impressed by Trump’s White House cage circus. Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?
Why It Matters (Sheila Kennedy) should leave depressed about the people but I think there are more who want to be better human beings, who think Trump and his ilk are not better human beings. Meanwhile, we live with their stupidity.
Gerrymandering in Indiana is worse than 95% of the U.S., new report says (wthr.com). The Indiana Supreme Court wrote in its last abortion case that if the people of Indiana have control of the legislature and can amend the constitution. Quaint legal fiction or a delusion, I leave to you, dear reader. I think it is BS. Indiana is in the hands of one political party that will not let the people decide for themselves.
The Results Of One-Party Rule (Sheila Kennedy):
Over time, a dominant party tends to fill watchdog roles — attorneys general, inspectors general, ethics boards, judicial appointments — with loyalists. These watchdogs may not be corrupt themselves, but they tend to become less aggressive when it comes to investigating the ruling party.
Long tenure also gives a party time to build patronage. Government jobs, contracts, licenses, and permits flow disproportionately to allies and donors. What begins as political favoritism can gradually morph into corruption (Illinois and New Jersey are classic examples of states where decades of machine politics have created cultures where “transactional behavior” is just “how things work”).
In competitive states, scandals can be exploited by the opposition party, but in states where the opposition is permanently weak, the dominant party doesn’t have much incentive to police itself. The discipline imposed by an external threat is missing.
This year, for the first time in a long time, Indiana Democrats are running candidates in most of the districts thought to be “safe” for Republicans, and the new Lincoln Party is also attempting to upend the GOP’s lock on Hoosier governance. Perhaps the state is on the cusp of a revived competitiveness–and a more competent and less corrupt governance.
How the Rest of the World Sees America (Through the Eyes of Its Writers) ( Literary Hub ) - a reading list. About time we start thinking what others think of us, take it seriously, and mend our ways. American exceptionalism needs a dose of humility.
Reading American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present (Literary Hub) is a good antidote to my thinking that Trump is a giant hairball in our national history, it is time for us to just shut up and get off stage. He is that hairball. Diving back into legal history keeps reinforcing the idea that if you think there has been no systemic racism in this country then you need to look up the word thinking in the dictionary. It has been here, it lingers behind the mean-spirited cowardly parasites who think birth gives them status. What is also to be seen is how we have tried to follow our better angels. I thought in the following to see a glimpse for a better future.
Such is the problem of patriotism: a higher law that is really a lower law, because it substitutes a theory about America for the reality. It esteems the state above the person, the shell above the contents, in the hope that what is good for one will be good for the other. It has never worked that way. Where patriotism has meant exceptionalism—the belief that America was born to lead—it has wreaked havoc on the cause of democracy and fair dealing, at home and abroad.
America’s descent, on its 250th anniversary, to the demagoguery of an unapologetic nationalist is not the aberration many want it to be. It is the consummation of forces that have been latent from the start: a rumbling warfare between a political theory of equality and a more visceral urge for mastery. And while “America First” may represent a particularly abrasive form of the phenomenon, it cannot be isolated from a tradition that has long confused the strength of America with the substance of democracy. When the answer to Donald Trump is a renewed and refined patriotism, drawing on the example of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that claimed nearly a million lives, it is clear that we need to go deeper.
***
My conviction, as a true believer in what the journalist Randolph Bourne called the “American promise,” is that America needs to shed the conceit of exceptionalism to fulfill its democratic mandate. We must lose the myth of preeminence to see the world as it is. From foreign policy to health care, education to the environment, questions of freedom and justice have been lost in the mists of national pride: the still-religious intuition that we have already arrived. The paradox, as Bourne defined it during the nationalist frenzy of World War I, is that America will have to become less patriotic before it can recover what is true and beautiful in its creed.
There are so many areas in which America excels Europe, thought Bourne, but in patriotism we follow and regress. As the irrepressible Emma Goldman lectured a jury, as she defended herself against charges of conspiring against conscription, there are more kinds of patriotism than carnivals of self-regard.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” she told a court in 1917, “we respect your patriotism. We would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for one cannot believe that love of one’s country must needs consist in blindness to its social faults, to deafness to its social discords, of inarticulation to its social wrongs.”
“Our patriotism,” she continued, “is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” Goldman loved the American people, and the “great possibilities” of a free society, but she hated the “cant” of an Americanism that trampled on freedom and expected to be thanked for it: the misconceived idealism that deemed a flag more precious than a person. Patriotism, Goldman argued in an earlier essay, had become a “Moloch” and a “menace to liberty,” a value that cheerfully “abrogates the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” When a court could sentence a man to ninety days in prison for quoting the nation’s founding document, in a manner supposedly subversive of the war, the crisis was complete.
A Lesson From Lincoln (Sheila Kennedy)
LaCroix concluded with the observation that, at the time of that speech, the young Lincoln “did not know what was coming.” He had no inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, but what he could do at that time of his life was offer his listeners a set of ideas that would attach them to civic life rather than alienating them from it.
There was much more. The full video of her address is available on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/1199018583#t=1h18m28s. It starts at the 1 hour 18 minute mark, and I strongly encourage you to click through and watch the entire speech, which was far more powerful than my efforts to describe it.
I had not heard the phrase “the mobocratic spirit,” but it is a perfect description of MAGA.
What Lincoln understood and emphasized was the central element of true Americanism, which is allegiance to a specific approach to human governance. It is that allegiance that separates citizens of the United States from the “blood and soil” beliefs that underlie fascist regimes and motivate Trump’s MAGA base. In a recent speech, Georgia Senator John Ossoff recently reaffirmed Lincoln’s understanding of what makes one an American, insisting that “Our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race. We’re a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions. And that is what makes us exceptional.”
'If I could have just written love stories I would have preferred that': A 2006 interview with Marjane Satrapi (The Comics Journal )
I finished with "Stranger Things" and "The Sandman" on Netflix. Winona Ryder has now graduated to mother roles and seems so far from Heathers, but damn she has got a way with an axe. "The Sandman" left me as cold as the graphic novels did until Shakespeare showed up. There is a dreaming, indeed.
Over on YouTube the algorithm turned up a Cary Grant movie I had never heard of This Is the Night . That it had Thelma Todd was what attracted my attention. I knew about her death but could never recall her from any movie. Attractive, funny, and, yeah, I can see why her death was a shocker. But it was another actress who caught my attention - Lili Damita - the rather notorious first wife of Erroll Flynn. I had never heard anything of her acting, so her being a charming fireball was a surprise. However, the fascinating thing about the movie was the opening; never seen one like it, call it jazz on film.
I was less impressed by The Brasher Dubloon; the novel is not my favorite Raymond Chandler novel, I like even Playback better; the movie is uneven, reminding me of better actors in the role such as Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum, but it beats Altman's The Long Goodbye.
This is the kind of movie that needs to be remade - good enough and could be better.
The same with this one, that never seems to come to life, and I understand why I have not seen it in too many decades to admit.
Getting Kinksy, why they matter:
Thin Air rejected a story:
Thank you for submitting your piece "Agnes" to Thin Air online. Our editorial staff has given it careful consideration and unfortunately must pass at this time. Although we are not accepting your work, our team was excited to have the chance to read and consider it. We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Kruger, Web Editor
And this was not much of a surprise:
Thank you for submitting "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984." We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in The Paris Review.
Yours sincerely,
The Editors
Doing what I can to keep rocking:
I need to make some calls. I thought of calling KH last night when I got thinking of the distance between old songs and today. For some reason, I got to going through Hank Willaims Jr. songs just before bedtime last night. He's not a soul singer like Waylon, but I like what he's doing now with country blues. That got me thinking about late style. He got pressed into the service of a country music that had little to offer him, he moved over to a more rocking, outlaw style, then got popular and somewhat stupid about politics, and with the country blues he is putting out music that has feeling.
Speaking of Waylon, this just came across the speakers from an old live song, something I used to think was corny and now sounds like a better view of America than is coming to me today.
The sheriff called the other day, wanting to do an interview as the DOC has implemented some new rules. I have no idea what the rules are. So, tomorrow I go out there, taking a break from work to satisfy some bureaucratic fears about my existence. Your tax dollars at work.
The writer's group meets today, and I intend to be there. Also, I need to hit a grocery. And deposit my Indiana tax refund. I probably should take time for my mail rather than my email.
I am supposed to be working on "Agnes" - maybe I can get to it this afternoon. It will let me get a grip on this research project to not be working on it all day today.
And that is pretty much life as it is here in Muncie. The sun is up now, two hours after I came back from the convenience store and started cleaning up this post. I suspect a few more will come out that will be more political,
And it could be time for breakfast.
Maybe I did get to you, I do know I got where I am going.
sch
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