Obsessing Under an Autumnal Blue Sky

I finished the research project yesterday after losing myself to obsessive behavior these past 2 days. 

But I got the whole text down to the 30 pages the law review has as its limit. I cut and cut and then I screwed sentences until they screamed. Or maybe that was me. I did not go to church yesterday or Saturday, Which is not good. The church has kept my depression very much under control. I do not like this obsessive behavior that this article has been for me. It has swallowed most of my time since April, certainly since May. 

I am tired of Indiana's racist history. Finding bad scholarship that has steered Indiana constitutional law for about half of my life surprised me and all I can feel is appalled. A lawyer is supposed to disclose any precedent that contradicts their position. What I found in Indiana Supreme Court decisions were statements supported by cases that do not say anything like the statements for which they were supposed to be authority. And not once but several times in the same opinion. A law review journal from the Fifties by a man who became a respected legal scholar contained false statements - comments on text that are not what the ext says. If I had done the same when I was a lawyer and done the same, I would have been punished for unethical behavior. I would not be a government official with a good salary. 

No one keeps track of what is going on within the Indiana Supreme Court's opinions. The Indiana Lawyer barely tracks the news about the court: Indiana Supreme Court. Google Scholar does not show any criticism of particular opinions: "indiana supreme court". We stats, the early review of what has been decided, laudatory reminisces  of retiring justices, but no critical readings. Well, I have one on my computer.

Speaking of news from the Indiana Supreme Court:  High court weighs help for involuntarily committed. 

Burnt out and unable to shut off my brain, insomnia came to visit last night and early into the morning. I think I fell asleep around 3 AM. I missed Liturgy this morning.

I have been going for about 2 hours now. Without breakfast. I probably should do more about eating regularly. And finish the dishes and the laundry. I think I will go to a movie. All the things I have been neglecting. Get out of this apartment.

Anyway, I am done writing any time this week. Blog posts and email, nothing more. 

 The Roots of the Novel Are Parody, Pastiche, and Play - Lincoln Michel (Countercraft)

I’m not surprised that Don Quixote is hilarious and deranged. I’ve often found that the dusty classics that are supposed to be dreary chores to read are, in fact, far funnier and stranger than their reputations would suggest. However, I was surprised by how modern the novel feels. It is filled with metafictional conceits and techniques I associate with the postmodernists2 of the mid-to-late 20th century and various post-postmodernist works of today. Cervantes makes up fake ballads, interjects to complain about his protagonist, and has characters (in the second volume) who have read the book they’re inside. Even the premise of the book—an insane man goes on failed adventures while imagining he is a knight—feels like an extended bit novel I associate with postmodernists, Oulipians, and other more contemporary literary trends.

Yep, Don Quixote is a hoot. Anyone who doesn't laugh once while reading it has to be a literature professor. 

Decolonizing the Dead ( Los Angeles Review of Books ) is a review of the new China Miéville novel. He is in my mind as someone I should read. That is the other thing I need to do is get away from the computer and read some of these books piling up here.

The Rouse is decidedly weird fiction: it is, after all, about raising the dead, and whatever it is that haunts the dead themselves. It has a classic Lovecraftian sense of wanting to evoke the cosmic dread of that august project, which pushes at the limits of language and form. Throughout the book, there are linguistic breakdowns, gaps, absences, broken sentences, poetic glitchings, all to hint at the sublime collapse of language, meaning, consciousness, and even “life” itself when confronted with what lies beyond human limits. It’s at times a challenging, experimental read. But it is also propelled forward by a sense of apocalyptic dread, that something bad is coming, something worse than death—a kind of pulpy end-of-worldism that shares quite a bit with that Game of Thrones shorthand tag for an undead apocalypse: Winter is coming. The Rouse constantly quotes M. R. James’s eerie, haunting question from his classic weird tale “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”—“Who is this who is coming?”—and tries to answer it. Pulp horror and a dose of avant-garde aesthetics: that is quintessential weirdness.

At the same time, The Rouse is also fused with the Cold War spy novel. The book is about a top secret security agency called the “R Unit” in the British secret services, which is there to contain and explore the possible exploitation of supernatural energies. The R Unit explores REs—revenance events—and engages, we might say, with the roused dead. One of the book’s alternating narrative timelines focuses on a grieving mother trying to understand the early death of her military son Ewan in the 1990s, as she bumps up against the edges of a vast conspiracy, while a second thread follows one of the principal assets of the R Unit, a soldier called Allardyce, who joins the group just as Britain is starting to lose its empire in the 1950s. It is a book full of clandestine military networks, strange laboratories, black ops in far-flung places, and exhausted agents, crossed, double-crossed and triple-crossed in the field. It has the global reach of the Jason Bourne franchise, protagonists shedding identities and moving off-grid in ceaseless motion, popping up in unlikely locales. There are a lot of clandestine meetings at exotic dead drops where characters mutter enigmatic clues at each other.

 I have no real experience of the COVID lockdown. I was in prison and what you experienced during the pandemic is very much what I experienced starting in 2010. So, pandemic stories interest me. Such as The Impression of Living in a Ruin (Los Angeles Review of Books).

For many of these characters, the repetition and solitude of work have formed a kind of hopeless prison. The protagonist of “The Nightwatchman” patrols the halls of another unfinished space, in this case an apartment complex still under construction on the outskirts of the city, where he has been forced to move because his fiancée left him. The surrounding area is desolate, roads are deteriorating, and garbage dumps are overflowing due to the influx of new residents; it’s a soulless area where “nobody would ever walk” due to the lack of commercial properties. The emptiness in every aspect of the night watchman’s life leads to increasing dread:

So many late nights spent walking along dark passageways with his flashlight, attempting to catch any danger in the beam, had convinced him of the need for some kind of weapon as protection, even though nothing had ever happened. That word again: NOTHING. Nothingness was an existential concept.

In “The Animal Collector,” a street sweeper tries to fill the void he perceives in his life by adopting a menagerie of injured wildlife and household pets. His treatment of these animals quickly takes precedence over the wishes of those few people in his life who genuinely care about him, such as his partner of seven years, who tries to point out the selfishness of what he is doing. But, as the story’s narrator notes, “people tended to believe their motives to be quite different from what they really were.”

Another review of a writer I think I should be reading: Exit Party by Emily St John Mandel review – alternate visions of post-crisis America (The Guardian ).

Is the price of stability necessarily the loss of freedom? The question plays out daily in our political reality, its fictional possibilities providing inspiration for writers from Plato’s time onwards. The “upbeat-downbeat” ending Mandel chooses for her novel is not new in science fiction; indeed, it bears comparison to her own earlier take on the post-catastrophe novel, the 2014 blockbuster Station Eleven. What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel’s imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights. 

 A bit of fun: George Bush, murder and nautical infidelity: the Chicks’ 20 greatest songs – ranked! (The Guardian)

On “Derek,” Captain Ahab’s Evil Half Brother  by John Hay is actually enjoyable and educational and may make you wonder how much tinkering Hollywood does on with classics.

Remembering Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian Nobel Prize-Winner We Should All Be Reading (Literary Hub) may not explain why most people should be reading this writer as much as being another example of a renowned writer gone missing. However, for someone from a fly-over place, it does seem pertinent to those who think there are from a place not worthy of a literature.

In writing about the life of Deledda in Nuoro, Sardinian literary critic and author Giulio Angioni referred to the conjoined role of history and memoir in her stories, her “sort of sardography.” That “sardography,” Sardinia seen through the stories of Sardinians, was the splendor awaiting discovery by outsiders like ourselves, in so many forms. 

“To discover a prolific, but forgotten novelist is like stumbling upon a new species,” social critic Todd Gitlin wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1998. After his wife discovered a novel by Grazia Deledda on a lonely pile in the corner of a bookstore in New England, he searched for the rest of her works, only finding them in small and university presses. He declared it was long overdue for a “literary resurrection” of the once famous writer with the “emotional power” of her novels. In the end, he only found five of her thirty-three novels.

Five Classic SF Stories First Published in Playboy (Reactor) is a reminder of Plyaboy as more than a skin mag.

Trying out a new widget from Blogger: 

 

I think it is the first new item in ages for Blogger.

Time and my stomach say enough of clearing out my tabs.

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