Thursday, Good Until Lousy; Friday Was Just Strange

 Yesterday, I started reqiring "Agnes". A bit more than a rewrite and also not quite a rewrite; the dailog changed to another character, the reappearance of the cat put to the end, same ending as the last revision but a bit more added. The one editorial feedback I got was brief:

Although there is much about your story that is commendable (e.g. interesting plot, some lovely phrasing) resubmission has been recommended after additional workshopping. According to FIJ Fiction Editor Joan Hawkins, your story "need[s] to be tightened, and in places, motivation needs to be clarified" while it would "benefit from a supportive writers group critique all around." 

Okay, I thought it was tight before and so I had to look at what could be squeezed more. I went into left field to find a squeezer. 

That helped with the motivation, I think. I could have just spelled out the woman had been fighting against death since she was 11, and she thought forcing her daughters upwards the social ladder. Especially since I had all that in every version of this story.

Not sure why it would need a writers group critique all around. I am not even sure if the Muncie writers group is meeting. I went WEdnesday and no one was there. I also got no emial that it was not meeting. Paranoia is creeping in, but I chose to ignore it. I could email the leader if I were not working on the writing as hard as I have been.

I finished today. Well, all but the editing. I am too tired for that right now.

 Yesterday, I went to the sheriff's. The DOC decided I am seriously dangerous, and I am now on the lifetime reporting list. Before it was 25 years, of which I have 20 more years. Pretty sure that was a lifetime sentence as well. Oddly, the officer said something about my PO requesting an update. That seems strange, a little out of what I understand to be his remit.

Whatever I ate the day before caused me no small amount of pain. I also aggravated the hernias. Worn and hurting, I had problems concentrating enough to work on the story. I did some more research for the con law project. Then I just shut down my brain by watching Netflix. 

Another thing I did was change my syntax. It seems when I get away from the straightforward reporting of events, I start doing even stranger things. The tone, the pacing, came to me Wednesday night when I was trying to sleep.

 I did get some reading of the New York Review of Books while I was stuck at the courthouse. Maybe I should go more often.

But this morning I jumped right into the craziness. I missed my bus downtown because I was writing. A similar thing happened this afternoon, where I look at the computer clock and it is an hour or more since I last looked.

Group, Payless, Dumpling House, and it was over 90 minutes getting back here. 

For Juneteenth: Samuel Miller McDonald's Can We Really Claim That Civilization is on the Steady Path of Progress?

The representation of marginalized identities in power, business, or media is often hailed as indisputable proof of progress. But this representation does not yield improvements for most people who share those identities any more than having monarchs and emperors of a certain race or gender has improved conditions for workers and peasants of the same race and gender during history’s millennia of slavery, serfdom, and conscription. Such representation is more often used as a tactic for blocking egalitarian policies than for achieving them.

After all the time I spent in the debates of Indiana's 1850 constitutional convention, the more I am thinking such articles are too realistic for Americans' brains. Well, white Americans.

The scariest thing since my release is me agreeing with Mona Charen. Check out her How to Keep Loving America.

America has demonstrated a capacity for self correction in the past. Suffrage was gradually expanded from white property owners to all white men and then to black men and finally women. Slavery was obliterated by the Civil War. The greed and peculation of the Gilded Age gave way to the progressive era. McCarthy’s reckless bullying was rebuked by Congress. Nixon’s crimes were followed by government reforms.

It’s possible that we have crested as a nation and are now in permanent decline. As Shakespeare said,

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood
leads on to fortune
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

Perhaps we’re past it. But when you consider our strengths and our virtues, giving up on loving this country and working to steer it towards a better future would be a tragic dereliction.

 

Needing something lighter to rundown the time before calling a night, I checked out movie reviews. I must admit I was curious but not so keen about Spielberg's new movie, and the review from The Guardian pretty much sucked the keenness out of me.

Alienated by Disclosure Day? You are not alone

I cannot remember the last time I saw a Spielberg movie at the theater. Looking at this filmography, it was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and before that Catch Me If You Can.

Much more interesting: Effi o Blaenau review – Greek myth retelling Iphigenia in Splott becomes blistering Welsh-language film. Assuming it has subtitles and would play in Muncie, Indiana.

Edward Burns used to make movies that I liked to watch but he has gone under my radar for a long time now. I saw the preview for his latest on YouTube, and today rogertebert.com put out a review, Finnegan’s Foursome:

“Finnegan’s Foursome” is a lot like those Adam Sandler comedies he would make with his buddies that were secretly just paid vacations. The film has little going on other than the Finnegans playing golf and arguing with one another. There are no discernible subplots of any importance, and the petty rivalries between the foursome are just that: petty and easily resolved. Freddy doesn’t just have a chip on his shoulder over his dad’s absence and unbeaten streak; he’s carrying an entire tree log. He’s easily the most unlikeable of the bunch. Burns is usually pretty good at finding the charming lug within the acerbic exterior, but he misses the mark here.

Not with what movies cost nowadays.

Maybe this one, if it comes to Muncie: Maddie’s Secret.

Refreshingly gracious, Early’s management of humanity in “Maddie’s Secret” is the heart of this film. Bolstered by his always-confident panache and showcasing a new dexterity in nimble storytelling and emotional arcs, Early’s debut is exciting: a debutant ball for a new voice in filmmaking, unafraid of kitsch, camp, and unabashed tenderness riding in tandem with humor. It overflows with affection for everyone, but of course Maddie in particular, the film’s love letter to the contemporary woman: an inheritor of patriarchal and misogynist pressures, a self-starter, a mediator between the real and ideal, and a defiantly passionate figure of resilience.

I know the name Dwight Macdonald. He is one of those names lurking in footnotes, or even in the main text, of the times between WWII and the mid-Sixties. So, Geoff Shullenberger's review essay Dwight Macdonald’s American Century (Compact) looked like a way to add some fill to that hole in my education. It helped to want more. Going to college years after the fall of Saigon, I can see why I did not hear more of him then.

The Macdonald essays collected in the new anthology Atrocities of the Mind focus heavily on America’s wars and showcase the consistency of his oppositional posture throughout the period of American ascendancy. Macdonald departed from Partisan Review, the flagship magazine of the anti-Stalinist left and incubator of the New York Intellectuals, after Pearl Harbor, over his fellow editors’ feeling that now “it was their war and their country,” which he didn’t share. He launched his own magazine, Politics, as a venue for what remained of left-wing opposition to the war. Macdonald’s venture helped launch a number of careers, including that of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills and the social critic Paul Goodman, and introduced the writing of Simone Weil to US readers; George Orwell was an admirer and contributor.  

 But I think I do like him: 

What set Macdonald apart from his later New Left antiwar allies—and their successors today—was that his views didn’t proceed from any abstract ideological commitment to “anti-imperialism,” much less to sympathy for the political causes of America’s enemies. Instead, his concern was with “the horror of vast technological power exerted in war-making.” The technological transformation of warfare had brought about a state of “perfect automatism” characterized by an “absolute lack of human consciousness or aims,” culminating in the construction of the nuclear doomsday machine. Rational technoscientific methods had given rise to an entirely irrational, mechanized system that seemed increasingly bent on human destruction. 

I forgot he was the one who coined the phrase Masscult. What the essay does with that is worth clicking on the link and reading for yourself.

 Reading A La Zoug-Zoug Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soye was both fun and uplifting.

And there I will leave you to read a bit from The Atlantic. They will be behind a paywall, so I will leave them out of here.

I got on another Roy Wylie Hubbard kicj this morning, so I will close out with him.

 

 Good night.

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