Orthodox Christian Articles I Thought Worth Sharing

Fr. John Chryssavgis cautions against confusing intelligence with spiritual understanding at Clergy-Laity Congress AI panel( Huffington Ecumenical Institute) has much that is ignored by AI critics and fans.

Part of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s “AI Red Lines in Orthodox Theology” project, supported by a grant from the Future of Life Institute, the panel identified five Orthodox “red lines” for AI: that it must never replace human responsibility, never replace human presence, never be confused with the nous, never reduce the human person to data, and never allow capability to outpace wisdom.

Fr. John opened his remarks by tracing the anxieties surrounding AI to older stories about the limits of human freedom, pointing to the myth of Prometheus and the Book of Genesis. 

“The principal lesson gleaned from such texts is that we are not God,” Fr. John said. “Yet, most of us live as if we are God.”

He described a spiritual dimension to modern technology, calling algorithmic innovation a form of idolatry and cautioning that the companies developing AI are driven by profit rather than the wellbeing of those who use their products.

Fr. John connected this reality to a broader anthropocentrism.

“In contrast to the divine mandate in Genesis for us “to serve and preserve” creation,” he said, “we are developing AI with the assumption that its sole objective is to serve and preserve us.”
“We need to re-learn what it means to be a part—unique and indispensable, but one part—of creation. Otherwise, we will treat the world—both other human beings and the rest of creation—purely as raw material for consumption and exploitation,” Fr. John continued.

Fr. John also warned that AI may usher in newer, faster methods of injustice and discrimination.

“Algorithms—especially those that determine employment, housing, and healthcare—tend to replicate or reinforce already existing and deeply embedded societal biases,” he said. “AI is unlike previous technological revolutions—like the printing press or the television—because it can actually decide whom to help or heal, whom to overlook or hurt.”

Turning to the distinction between intelligence and nous, Fr. John invoked the patristic separation of “intelligence” (dianoia or mathematical thinking) from “intuition” (noesis or spiritual understanding). Artificial intelligence, he said, does not have a complex inner worlds, inner motivations, or an emotional landscape, and thus questions about meaning or hope will never be resolved through it.

Fr. John also offered a measured critique of the recent papal encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. He observed that its title refers to human greatness rather than the glory of God, and noted that the piece opens with the story of the Tower of Babel rather than with the story of God’s covenant with Noah to preserve creation.

On approaching our creation “in the image of God,” Fr. John argued for balance. Genesis states that humanity is formed in God’s image, he said, but the same text also describes humanity as fashioned “from the dust of the earth,” sharing its day of creation with every other living creature. 

Forgetting we are “inseparably interconnected with nature,” Fr. John said, leads to a distorted sense of human exceptionalism that is, at best, a “half-truth.” 

The Unity of God’s Church and the Orthodox Church (Orthodox Christian Laity)

The recognition of those churches and communities’ ecclesial nature outside of the Orthodox Church’s canonical boundaries compels the Church to be in an unceasing dialogue and collaboration with them, allowing the Holy Spirit to move all into complete unity with Christ. However, recognizing the ecclesial nature of other nonorthodox Christian churches and communions does not sanction, at least for the Orthodox Church, the practice of intercommunion. The Church’s reluctance to be in sacramental communion with other Christian churches—despite the affirmation that they are imperfectly and incompletely members of the One Church of God—should not be perceived as a sign of arrogance, and neither should it be a source of Orthodox triumphalism or self-sufficiency. It does not allow the churches to become complacent with present relative unity and collaboration. It is a painful reminder to all that the unity of God’s Church requires the fullness of the Apostolic faith, life, and witness. Toward this realization, the churches are called to intensify their prayers so “that all Christians may work together so that the day may soon come when the Lord will fulfill the hope of the Orthodox churches, and there will be ‘one flock and one shepherd’ (Jn. 10:16).

Statement on the Occasion of the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America (Orthodox Christian Laity)

It is in this spirit that we call the faithful of the Orthodox Church in America—and, through their witness, this nation—to repentance: repentance for injustices past and present; for the idols of wealth, comfort, and power that seduce every generation; for the divisions and enmities that tear at the fabric of common life; and for the ways in which we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. A true commemoration of a nation’s founding is not mere self-congratulation; it is a moment of sober examination, of honest confession, and of renewed dependence upon God.

The Church does not speak this word from a posture of superiority. We acknowledge our own failures—in charity, in unity, and in the fullness of our witness to the Gospel. We, too, stand in need of God’s mercy. But it is precisely because the Church has known the healing power of repentance that she cannot withhold this word from the world she is called to serve.

I think therein is an answer to those who can see only America's wrongs and those who pride themselves on being anti-woke. Acknowledging failures must be followed by the repair of damage done. Ignoring our failures is hubris.

Charmolýpē (“Joyful Sorrow”) as the Antidote to Triumphalism (Public Orthodoxy)

 

There is a Byzantine word that guards this mystery from being turned into propaganda: charmolýpē “joyful sorrow.” The word sounds paradoxical because it is a paradox, not of logic but of spiritual truth. It does not describe alternating moods, as if joy and sorrow take turns. Rather, it names a single, integrated experience: joy that has not forgotten the Cross, and sorrow that has not lost the rose scent of the Kingdom. Charmolýpē is not a decorative nuance of Orthodox piety; it is a discipline of the heart. It teaches us how to celebrate without arrogance, how to hope without cruelty, how to speak of victory without becoming triumphalist.

Triumphalism is a subtle temptation precisely because it borrows the vocabulary of faith. It speaks easily of “victory,” “chosen people,” “truth,” “enemies,” “purity,” “greatness.” It appears in religion, ethnicity, politics, even in the Church’s own self-understanding. Its danger lies in replacing the Gospel’s disarming power with a familiar one: the power to dominate, to humiliate, to rank human beings. It imagines that God’s truth must appear as our superiority, that blessing must look like strength. In such a climate, the Cross becomes embarrassing—a means to something more “successful.” Resurrection is reduced to a trophy, and Christ becomes to a tool.

Our time offers many examples of this drift, especially in heated political cultures where leaders are clothed in messianic language: savior, healer, anointed, the one who alone can fix what is broken. In the United States, this temptation has become particularly visible in the way the President has been portrayed by some supporters in quasi-messianic terms, and at times has spoken in ways that reinforce such a narrative. The point is not to score partisan arguments, but to name a theological distortion: the substitution of Christ with a political image of redemption, where salvation is reduced to the triumph of power and healing to the defeat of enemies. When Christian language is recruited to sanctify domination, the Church is no longer teaching the nations; she is being taught by them.

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 Charmolýpē lives precisely here. Even in resurrection, Christ is humble. Even in glory, He remains the One who poured Himself out. The wounds do not disappear as if they were mistakes. They remain, not as raw pain, but as radiant memory, a witness that love has a cost, and that the cost was freely embraced. This is why Christian joy cannot become arrogant. If the Risen Christ carries wounds into eternity, then the Church has no permission to preach victory as the humiliation of others, or to present God’s Kingdom as a celebration of our strength. To proclaim Pascha truthfully is to proclaim a victory that looks, at first glance, like weakness: a candle flame flickering in the dark.

Relational Authority in the Orthodox Church: The Role of the Laity Within Official Ecclesial Structures (Orthodox Christian Laity)

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Sunday With Floodwaters Receding

 Sunday has been spent submitting stories, going through the email, napping, cleaning, dinner, and setting up future posts.

Such a wild and dangerous life I live. 

The Hillbilly Hellcats persist:  

Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold | The Independent

I found the racism of my black Irish childhood embarrassing. Now it has given way to fear – The Irish Times is it a curse of humanity to hate one another?

A giant replica of a kitchen cabinet is unveiled in Indiana | AP News

Hoosier Myths and Legends - Episode 7.2: Haunted Ripley County, Indiana

Thucydides’ account of war is as timely as it is misunderstood | Aeon Essays  

How Imperial Japan turned to the sardine to help build a war machine 

 

Submissions:

“Agnes” went to trampset,  Copper Nickel. The Georgia Review and Chestnut Review

 Rat Bag Lit received “Lessons Learned From A Green Meadow”.

Thankfully, no more rain of any appreciable quantity.

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Movies and Theater, Muncie & Anderson; Books Worth Noting; Kit Marlowe Dies, Again

Ball State's Emens Theater calendar: Upcoming Events at Emens Auditorium.

 Anderson's Paramount Theater is showing movies again! A wondrous place to see movies. I wish more of the films rose to the ocassion.

Movies, movies, movies! Anderson's Paramount Theatre offers slate of free famous films (heraldbulletin.com)

I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP? 

Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?

 

 Books: The Curse of Queen Kelly (Film Comment)

 Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.

‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern  (The Guardian) 

I have a fondness for Llosa & Irvine Welsh & Téa Obreh & Kit Marlowe: 

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa review – Nobel laureate’s final novel is a love letter to Peru (The Guardian)

When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.

Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph  (The Guardian)

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is at times quite astonishing.  

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher review – a masterpiece of criticism (The Guardian)

In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.

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Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding.

Téa Obreht on Writing a Layered, Intertextual Tale of the American West (Literary Hub) - a delightful writer.

From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was  faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:

 

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King Arthur & Odysseus & Albert Camus

 I have been a King Arthur fan since reading T.H. White in high school. I even read Le Morte d'Arthur back then.

The Case for King Arthur (History Today )

None of this excludes the possibility that the later legend might have been based on a fictional character – that remains a strong argument – but the evidence demonstrates that there are several possibilities for a historical Arthur which can withstand the rigours of contemporary source-criticism. Asserting that Arthur was certainly a myth is, therefore, no longer credible.

It is not true that I bend my ear every time Joyce Carol Oates speaks, but maybe it comes close?

Joyce Carol Oates Defends 'The Odyssey' After Translator's Viral Slam 

In general, Oates said she liked Nolan’s film: “[I] highly recommend both Nolan’s film and the 1997 miniseries co-produced by Francis Coppola. The adaptations are notably different: one American, with the brooding middle-aged-boy-hero Matt Damon; the other very Mediterranean, with charismatic Armand Assante who more naturally inhabits the role … no reason why Nolan, or anyone else, should not re-imagine/re-envision a classical hero through the prism of his own invention.”  

 I have eaten dinner, a big bowl of soup, have finished watching Tulsa King and Strange New Worlds. The former works, if you forget the sociopathy of mobsters exposed by The Sopranos. The Trek show has grown on me, as has Anson Mount. The real Trekkers I guess are not happy with its experimentation. That I find its most interesting aspect.

The Absurdity of Albert Camus (History Today)

The key, Camus believed, was to differentiate between rebellion and revolution. As he saw it, revolutions sought to protect freedom and humanity against injustice by creating a perfect social order – in other words, by putting an end to history. The problem is that in trying (and failing) to create an ideal society, revolutions end up crushing the freedom and humanity they purport to be defending. This was especially true of the French Revolution, but no ‘revolutionary’ regime was any better – or worse – than any other. In this respect, Camus believed, the Soviet Union was indistinguishable from Nazi Germany.

Rebellion, by contrast, should respond to injustice by emphasising a shared humanity and by clinging doggedly to the value of human life. It required not just individual commitment, but solidarity with others. As Camus pointed out in Neither Victims, nor Executioners (1946), it should not aim to end history, but to ‘fight within History, to preserve from History that part of man which is not its proper province’.

Camus gave vivid expression to this in The Plague (1947). Set in Oran, in Algeria, during an outbreak of the plague in the 1940s, the novel has been widely recognised as an allegory of the German occupation of France and is, in many ways, a blueprint for his concept of rebellion. As Ronald Aronson has argued, it ‘conveys the unheroic determination to do what must be done in the face of a total threat’. Although the journalist Rambert, for example, initially tries to flee, he eventually resolves to stay and – realising that the plague can only be combatted through solidarity – accepts the risks that entails.

 

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Indiana Politics & Government

 The more time I spend in the Nineteenth Century, the more I am convinced that Indiana needs to change how it is governed.

It is past time that we had the recall. That belongs to the Progressive Era and still has not arrived in 2026.

It is time that we had access to the referendum so that we could bypass the oligarchy that is the General Assembly.

'Middleman': Former Indiana ag director backs removal of LG's leadership duties (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Beckwith makes me like this idea. The thing is, it also makes practical sense. Indiana's governor/lieutenant governor relationship has not been closely looked at, at least by me. Indiana's governor has no great political power; his veto can be overturned by a simple majority. And it appears that it used to go to whoever came in second in the gubernatorial election. That changed in the Sixties; only the Lieutenant Governor still has great responsibilities. 

“We believe it is critical that the Indiana director of agriculture be elevated to a cabinet-level position with a direct line to the governor — a full secretary of agriculture, if you will — to ensure that agriculture, as a foundation of our state’s economy, has an advocate at the highest reaches of state government,” said Alan Dunn, president of the Indiana Corn Growers Association.

Dunn said the Indiana Corn Marketing Council supported the research of an emerging startup into a corn-based acrylic acid, which is used in adhesives, coatings, paints and more. Despite that Hoosier involvement, Illinois won the pilot production plant.

“While (the council) can invest in research and promotion of new uses of corn, what it can’t do is provide economic development incentives for locating production facilities,” Dunn said. “… This is an example where collaboration at the cabinet level of leadership may have been able to keep this opportunity in Indiana.”

***

Rep. J.D. Prescott, R-Union City, said the change would present a “demotion” for the industry.

“Right now, our secretary of agriculture is … our No. 2 elected official in the state of Indiana,” he said. “I would actually view that as demotion, moving into a secretary position.” 

Perhaps a more technocratic than a political approach would be helpful. Especially since Beckwith's bigoties do motivate him so.

 No Surprise: Most of us get our news from scrolling on our phones (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Indiana’s newest statewide nonprofit newsroom, Free Press Indiana News (FPI News), debuted in June and first launched entirely on social media, because they know younger audiences get their news primarily from their social feeds. At the start of reporting each story, the newsroom staff discusses how best to tell stories on social channels and their website.

“Our Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, Bluesky and Substack accounts launched June 15, while our website launched July 15,” said Lindsey Erdody, FPI News editor-in-chief. “We’ve already seen great traction with our Facebook and Instagram accounts in particular.”

In a little more than a month, FPI News has gained close to 4,000 followers each on Facebook and Instagram. FPI News is owned by Free Press Indiana, the same parent company of Mirror Indy.

“Reaching younger audiences has been a conundrum for as long as I can remember,” said Oseye Boyd, editor-n-chief of Mirror Indy. “I don’t know that anyone has it figured out, but we are intentional about working to serve this demographic.”

From a comment made during one of the Friday sessions, the leader gets his news from TikTok. That makes me  suspicious of his knowledge. Not many in the group have online access. What do they do for news?

I do like it when Todd Rokita gets reminded that he has to obey the law: Indiana attorney general loses appeal in Haitian trafficking investigation (Indiana Capital Chronicle); Indiana's attorney general is not the head of Indiana's prosecutors. Our forefathers spread power around. 

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita can’t compel an Evansville manufacturer and migrant support group to cooperate with a human trafficking investigation in the absence of a specific allegation, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled Monday.

The three-judge panel’s opinion affirms an earlier ruling from the Vanderburgh Superior Court denying Rokita’s petition to enforce civil investigative demands against Berry Global Group and the Haitian Center of Evansville in a 2024 trafficking investigation.

Judge Nancy H. Vaidik, who authored the opinion, found the attorney general’s demands were “unauthorized, invalid and unenforceable” due to a lack of particularized evidence.

“The record makes clear that the Attorney General is at most trawling for evidence of wrongdoing — looking for information that might eventually trigger an investigation, based on his alleged concern that someone, somewhere might be involved in labor trafficking,” she wrote.

Rokita has a problem differentiating between reality and what politically motivated blather comes out of his mouth:

Instead, the attorney general’s office claimed it had reasonable cause because Berry Global “is a large, sophisticated employer that actively recruits refugees and migrants and works with various migrant resettlement nonprofits” and support groups like the Haitian Center, according to the opinion.

Asked in trial court, state attorneys could not identify a suspect or act of human trafficking either, according to the opinion.

The court held that allowing Rokita to enforce CIDs in the absence of a specific suspect or allegation would violate First and Fourth Amendment protections and burden business.

Indiana law “authorizes the issuance of a CID only if an ‘investigation’ is being conducted,” Vaidik wrote in her opinion Monday.

“For an investigation to exist, there must be a factual predicate — an articulable reason to suspect that particular wrongdoing may be afoot. A mere hunch will not suffice. Here, the Attorney General has not shown that he has information of any sort, he is searching for something to investigate. Therefore, the CIDs issued to Berry Global and the Haitian Center were unauthorized, invalid and unenforceable.” 

Voter subpoenas denied in recount of narrow Indiana Senate Republican primary (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Republican member Paul Mullin supported her motion to question 11 voters who disclosed in social media posts or to news reporters that they had cast Republican primary ballots in Senate District 23 to support Deery despite being Democrats or self-identified “progressives.”

Morales saw his reelection bid fail last month at the state Republican convention after losing the support of top state party leaders. That included U.S. Jim Banks, whose political organizations spent millions of dollars to support Copenhaver and other primary challengers to Republican senators who opposed redistricting.

Morales said in voting against the subpoena request that it wasn’t proper to question voters after they had cast ballots.

“This is the right thing to do, to make sure that we reject the motion to subpoena any voters because I don’t believe that’s the right thing to do,” Morales said. “I believe everybody has the right to go and vote, but they need to do it the right way. And the right way, again, is I encourage the General Assembly next session to close our primaries so we can avoid all of this.”

Every so often the wrong person, for the wrong reasons, does the right thing. Depose voters and ask them who they vote for? Not the business of any politician. Morales is a bum, what we get from the political inbreeding in Indiana's Republican Party.

 Indiana inspector general discontinues publication of investigative reports (Indiana Capital Chronicle) 

Former Gov. Mitch Daniels created the Office of Inspector Genera in 2005 to investigate allegations of waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement and wrongdoing in state government.

Investigative reports, which generally do not include the names of uncharged persons, are publicly available online dating back to the office’s founding — except for the years 2006 and 2026.

The OIG released nine investigative reports last year summarizing investigations into contingency fee contracts, falsified case management entries, improper gifts, falsified time sheets and other allegations.

This year: None.

The OIG issued two news releases when criminal charges were filed against a former case manager from the Department of Child Services and an employee from the Indiana Veterans’ Home.

Court records and State Ethics Commission reports remain public record, offering at least partial access to information the OIG used to release.

But if criminal or ethics charges aren’t warranted the public won’t know of key allegations or findings. For instance, in 2023, a report showed that the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration lost dozens of laptops, worth thousands in the chaos of setting up and winding down a statewide vaccination hotline during the height of the pandemic.

This sounds too much like Trump firing inspector generals at the federal level. It is the people's government, not Governor Braun's and not any political party's.

Speaking of Trump, this sounds like it has more to do with Trump's agenda than what Indiana needs: Braun directs state to revisit coal power plant closures (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

Gov. Mike Braun directed his energy and natural resources secretary to revisit settlements that closed or sought to close coal power plants in Indiana.

Settlements identified in a Friday executive order include those that would close a plant before 50 years of service — described as the average age of retirement for electric generation units in Indiana — or where there was no allegation or finding of wrongdoing. 

The secretary should also revisit agreements between plant operators and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, justice department or environmental groups where the State of Indiana was not a party, the order said. 

“These consent decrees and settlement agreements should be re-evaluated in light of the current and future need for energy to power existing demand as well as future economic development in Indiana,” the order stated.

The order noted a projected 7 gigawatts-plus of Indiana coal electricity generation retiring or transitioning to another source across the next 12 years, as well as an assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation determining Indiana may not have the electricity resources to keep pace with upcoming demand.

Braun aligned the need to revisit these closures alongside recent federal backing for coal plants in the state. 

Ball State has the Digital Civil Rights Museum for Indiana. You should check it out.

And what is it Li am learning about nineteenth-century Indiana? That we feared the blacks, that we kept them down, that systemic racism is a real thing.

My evidence? Read the following:

Cory v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327 (Ind. 1874)

State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389 (Ind. 1871)

School Desegregation (Encyclopedia of Indianapolis)

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Recuperating, Not Spry

 Healing but not doing much more.

I made it to group on Friday. My legs got wobbly. I took the bus there and back, as little walking as possible. I stayed put for the rest of the day. Did some reading, watched shows on Netflix. Right now I cannot recall what it was! Thusday Murder Club. 

Got a rejection. 

Thank you for sharing "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984" with A Public Space. We regret that we are unable to use this piece for the magazine, but appreciate the opportunity to consider it.


All our best,

A Public Space 

I keep having these intense moments of insomnia. Those I have used to work on my research project. 

CC called again on Friday. I spoke with KH, too. Joel C called with compliments for “Ahab in the Moonlight”. That is now published. I need to get a link here to it. 

Saturday, I went to Payless and the convenience store twice. A little more walking, a little more of my research project.

I started watching Orphan Black on Netflix. I like it. Oh, I started Bugonia and just could not take its deepness or weirdness. Looks good, though.

I decided against church. Not enough energy, pain is more a low-level discomfort. 

 One thing decided: a different working schedule. I need to get some books read.

Things read over the past few days that I want to share:

The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey (Reactor) 

The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding  (Reactor) 

Zardoz: …What the F*ck Did I Just Watch?  (Reactor) 

You Must Remember This’s Karina Longworth on ‘The Bisexuals’ 

Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer has some regrets (AP News)

How America’s newspapers lost their voice 

Pennsylvania roads are being coated in radioactive wastewater − here’s why 

From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star | Fiction in translation (The Guardian)

No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks by a formerly “handsome young man”, who declares his incompatibility with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”

The relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun | Fiction | (The Guardian) 

Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty entertainment, a break from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced first-hand, which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson review – a brilliantly eccentric history of the movies | Film books (The Guardian)

 Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.

The Rest Is History (Lapham’s Quarterly )

Who Cares? (Sheila Kennedy)

The American Prospect, among others, has reported on the crisis in what we call “Care work.”

As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick, disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.

How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (Engelsberg ideas)

5th Circuit ‘answers the call’ from Clarence Thomas on gun law

4 little-known Google Calendar tricks I use to plan my workweek - and save time (ZDNET)

The Problem With Middle-Class Socialism (The New Republic)

Secret Service Agent Put on Leave for Alleged Leaks About JD Vance (The New Republic)

Trump Prepares to Attack Eighth Country of His Second Term (The New Republic)

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon (The New Republic)

What Do You Have to Hide? - by Jared Henderson

WNAP-FM | Listen Online - myTuner Radio

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton

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Saturday Morning - Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick!

 Up early and questioning what I am about to do now that I've gone through the morning's readings.

Last night, very early this morning, I found accidentally a site having Indiana case law dating back to the 1800s. What I have been trying to get at with my trips to Indianapolis was right there. I got the cases I needed to be downloaded, so not going out of town on Monday. But I am still sleepy.

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard (The Guardian)

Of course, Nolan isn’t just trying to replicate the Odyssey, and I’m not expecting him to. This is not – OK, not entirely – the chagrin of a Homerist missing her favourite scenes (no matter how I felt when I found out that Homer’s delightfully brash princess, Nausicaa, Odysseus’s key in getting back to Ithaca, had been chopped). What I’m pointing out is what is lost, or changed, in a Nolan–Hollywood–Homer crossover, and why that matters. As Nolan himself has said: “I was intrigued by the idea of a Hollywood studio taking on the biggest of stories.” So this is about uncovering what, in Nolan’s movie, looks like the Odyssey, and what is a product of his own choices. I’m here to think through what an epic hero and his world looks like to Nolan, and to Hollywood. And that is a really telling ride.

***

In the gap between the sung verses of Homer and Matt Damon declaiming to an Imax camera, what this Odyssey offers us, by way of a hero and the grandiloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall. Make of that, in the current climate, what you will.

Emily Hauser is an ancient historian, broadcaster and Times bestselling author of Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out of It.

Keith Richards on New Music, Old Friendships & the Future of the Rolling Stones | Billboard Cover

 

Did Homer dream of androids? (Engelsberg ideas)

Another Homeric use of automatos is even more striking. In Iliad 18 we are told that Hephaestus, the god of sweat and technic, made 20 devices which can glide through the halls of Olympus ‘all on their own’. This is the passage that Aristotle cites in his Politics. ‘The tripods of Hephaestus’, he says, ‘see what to do in advance’ and then ‘perform their own work.’ What Aristotle means by this – and Homer, too – is that Hephaestus’ tripods can navigate the whole of Zeus’ palace, bearing to the gods whatever they may happen to desire, wherever they happen to be.

It is not just the gates of heaven, then, which are both sensitive and active. The Olympians’ tripods can drive through the corridors of heaven: Homer tells us that they ‘roll to the halls where the gods convene’ and then return, ‘all on their own’, to Hephaestus’ splendid forge. They certainly would be, as Homer calls them, ‘a marvel to behold’.

In light of all this it is not meaningless to ask: was Homer’s heaven the birthplace of AI? Machines that can drive through a vast mountaintop complex would now be called, if only conversationally, intelligent.

***

Since Descartes, to simplify a long and subtle history, ‘machine’ and ‘intelligence’ have functioned as counter-concepts. In antiquity, on the contrary, the predecessors of our word ‘machine’ and the concept of ‘intelligence’ were very closely linked. There is no machine after all that is not a materialisation of mēchanē, or cunning. The function of any machine is to realise some desire of its originating intelligence.

An unintelligent machine may well function as a mere tool of that intelligence or cunning – roughly, what Hesiod seems to call mēchanē. But if all natural powers are originally purposive, as the ancients felt and believed – then intelligence, too, is purposive. To construct an intelligent machine is therefore to construct a radically purposive machine.

This means that a truly intelligent machine cannot and will not be exhaustively instrumentalised by its creators. If an unintelligent machine can function as a pure tool of its designer, an intelligent machine is, by definition, no longer just a tool. A smart device has device – like the Cyclops. And, for that matter, like Pandora.

An intelligent machine is one that has its own mēchanē, its own cunning. As such, it has its own imperatives and objectives, its own drives. Intelligence possesses some inner purposiveness, some tendency that humans do not fully comprehend in themselves. Did Homer really know why he dreamt of androids in the eighth century BC? And do we really know now?

 

‘A revolutionary act to watch it’: the film India’s censors do not want you to see (The Guardian)

 Trehan describes the ordeal of trying to get Satluj released as “dystopian” and decries “undemocratic censorship” and alleged political interference under the Narendra Modi government re-shaping India’s film industries. He claims Indian cinema has been widely co-opted as a propaganda arm for the government’s rightwing, religious nationalist agenda, where there is “only room for one kind of story to be told”, particularly in mainstream Hindi films.

“It is clear to me that there is no creative freedom in India today,” says Trehan. “When you see the level of censorship happening, films getting blocked by the film board and banned from release, it makes you question: does democracy exist in this country any more?”

Even today, discussions of Punjab’s separatist movement – which raged in the 1980s and 1990s, fighting for an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan, before it was crushed by the state – remain highly sensitive for the Modi government.

 

  The Common-Law mind and the renewal of America (Engelsberg ideas)

The history of the Anglo-American Common Law is a history of renewal, restoration and reinvigoration that is grounded in practicalities and tangibility. It does not try to answer ‘what is Justice?’ deductively. It searches for justice inductively, case by case, precedent by precedent, and roots itself constitutionally in the community’s capacity for self-government. Not without an endearing sense of grandiosity, Winston Churchill was still right when he said in his sweeping history of the English-speaking world that the claims and disputes across its vast stretches obtain according to the Common Law, at least in theory, and not uniformly. Lincoln the lawyer was dealing in the same terms and, naturally, he had a ‘Common-Law mind’. His life on the judicial circuit showed he understood that the real gem of the Common Law was redress and remedy, not revolution. In its deepest working sense, even the most ordinary, granular case could distil the most fundamental political question there is: what sort of government do we want? Better yet, what sort of government does our history of cases and precedents point us toward?

***

It is by asking and answering such questions that America rediscovers and regenerates itself. Lincoln saw and understood this, which lent him both wisdom and his remarkable belief in the American constitution. America at 250 should remind us of its capacity for self-rediscovery and its durability because of the instincts of the Common Law deeply woven into its DNA. It should remind us, as Lincoln the Common Law lawyer understood, that American democracy is a renewable charter.

 Mark Kermode reviews The Odyssey

 Group paddles 50 miles on White River to boost conservation efforts

Indiana Aligns with Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Missouri as Indianapolis Revives the White River into America’s Emerging River City, Unlocking Kayaking, Waterfront Tourism, Wildlife Conservation, Cultural Attractions, and New Travel Experiences Across the Midwest (Travel And Tour World )

Burt Reynolds & Tarantino

 Tarantino does more talking:

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Notes For A Friday: Ethics, Mary Beard, Odysseus, Rejections. Morons In Government

I did group, almost falling asleep at the end. I came home and did a nap. Something like 4 hours. When I woke, I was a little disoriented about time and date. The sky outside was as dull and gray as it had been this morning.

 What I thought would be a small diversion became this post. It has been at least 4 hours since I started. Now, I have run through my emails and have nothing more to say about the outside world. Or life. Or whatever you find here.

I regret to notify you that it has been decided that "Agnes" will not be published in Flying Island Journal at this time. On behalf of the journal's editorial team, I wish you the best of luck with your writing endeavors.

Sincerely,

Hiromi Yoshida

--

Hiromi Yoshida, MA, MLS, SpLIS

Poetry Editor

Flying Island Journal

hyoshidajj06@gmail.com

And:

Thank you for allowing us to consider "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" for Midwest Review. We are sorry to report it was not selected for publication. 

We are honored you thought of us as a home for your work. 

Sincerely,

The Editors, Midwest Review

‘The Odyssey’ Review - by Sonny Bunch ( The Bulwark )

The Odyssey is more fractious, more fissured. It is, first, two hours of abuse and defeats and arguments and disappointments and the occasional bit of grubby cleverness, followed by an hour of glorious vengeance. (So glorious, in fact, that people in my audience were clapping at the mere plucking of a bow and the beautiful twang of its reverberations.) Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, is a man who changed the world, albeit one who had some regrets after the fact: Change is momentous, change is dangerous. When you shatter norms and fail to respect what has come before, you risk calamitous darkness. 

Nukes, Data Centers, A VAT in our future: Race and Gender-Based Contract Practice Ends | Indiana Week in Review | July 17, 2026.

 

Donald Trump claims election insecurity; Markwayne Mullin warns states to cooperate - and so we all join the madness?

Trump's remarks on election security: What to know is that there is no meat on this bone.

John Ware: troubling light on The Troubles (The Article)

Neither Confirm Nor Deny is a book written by a journalist who, with his colleague Geoff Seed, took personal risks and now presents a rigorously researched and balanced account of what happened in Northern Ireland.  It is not a book that makes you want to go into the garden and hoist a Union Jack — nor, come to that, an Irish Tricolour.   Ware explains – in almost too much detail — how undercover security work during serious conflict can, unimpeded by the law, take an ethical nose-dive.  It is to be hoped that this book will make such events, and the moral judgements behind them, much less likely in the future. 

‘At times I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew’: Christopher Nolan on sweeping the Oscars, making The Odyssey – and getting a puppy (The Guardian).

Bitten by Willie Nile - again!

 The Odyssey review – Nolan goes god-tier with breathtaking epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis (The Guardian)

The result is a gigantic, shimmering mirage, a mysterious three-hour vision of crazy episodes that does not yield up wisdom or contentment, but only a grim resolution to continue with the fight, to make sense of ruined lives, to re-enter the scorched battlefield of loss. 

 I've seen only one John Waters movie, Hairspray, but maybe I should have seen more. He was just not on my or my friends' radar. Still, I knew who he was. ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage (The Guardian) is a good reminder.

Nor should the comedy in either film disguise their underlying seriousness. Hairspray may treat the Civil Rights era with a deft touch but its indignation is palpable. Both movies celebrate resistance in the face of racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these movies have to say about the US in 2026? “I think they say that anger can be good, but the way you change things is through humour.” Is there anything he wouldn’t joke about? “I’m certainly not going to go into Israel and that whole situation. It’d be a lose-lose for me to even try. But I’ve always walked the edge of what you can’t make fun of. In all my movies, I make fun of things I like, not things I hate. That’s why I’ve been getting away with this for 60 years.” 

The Day She Returns review – another Hong Sang-soo round of slow, reflective boozing really hits the spot  (The Guardian) has some interesting writing advice:

...The film withholds overt meaning like a short story … and is quietly engrossing.

Our Hero, Balthazar review – a darkly comic satire of incel culture and gun violence | Movies (The Guardian) hits on a subject I have no understanding of and has me pondering this paragraph:

Deathdealer_16 turns out to be Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a Texan living in a trailer with his grandma, none too pleased to see Balthazar. But the two strike up a friendship, with Balthazar besotted by the shooting range, and Solomon eager to prove to the New Yorker there’s more to him than incel futility. Hitting a homoerotic pitch (“You wait to see the rest of what I’m packing,” says Solomon after revealing his glove box pistol), the film is at its strongest outlining this queasy interdependence. It’s a buddy-movie travesty of the mutual incomprehension and fascination between liberal and red-state America, suggesting that resignation to and glorification of gun violence aren’t so far apart. 

It seems to me we are now a nation of the infantilized. I thought that was the goal of prison. Have the powers that be learned their lessons from the pirson-industrial complex and applied them to the nation at large? 

Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad? (The New Atlantis)

For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age? 

***

Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of debate. For Han, they are not signs that the new order is breaking down. They are signs of its success. We are free — and the result is not liberation but exhaustion. 

***

What Han would later diagnose as burnout is not just a condition of exhaustion; it is a condition of perception. Moods are how we feel the world, even before we think about it. They are less like emotions than the background conditions of our experience, like slow-moving weather patterns that give times and places their character. They cannot be examined like objects from the outside — we are always already within them — but they can be named and described. In Heidegger, Han found a way to notice them. And it made him weather-wise, alert to the world at a time when the weather was changing.

The Berlin Wall came down during Han’s years as a student, marking the end of the Cold War. For most in the West, the mood was jubilant. Liberal democracy and the free market had triumphed, and the specter of totalitarianism seemed to recede into history. The future, many assumed, belonged to societies that were more market-driven — and therefore more free. Han, however, had seen enough to question that story of progress. Growing up under the extreme pressures of Korean capitalism, he knew that domination could take many forms. South Korea had not followed the Big Brother model of the North, yet its people labored with an intensity that suggested another kind of domination — one rooted not in surveillance or prohibition but in competition, achievement, and the inner compulsion to perform.

If the twentieth century had feared domination by the state, the twenty-first would reveal another possibility: domination by freedom.

***

By now, we understand the basic mechanics of the profit model. While complex in one sense, its logic is painfully simple: keep users using; sell their attention to advertisers. In the early 2010s, news about predictive algorithms came as a shock. It seemed uncanny that an advertising algorithm could detect a woman’s pregnancy before anyone else knew about it. But the headlines have long since moved on. What once seemed unsettling has faded into the din of daily life, normalized under the regime Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”

When Zuboff began writing about it in 2015, the public imagination often returned to a familiar nightmare: Orwell’s Big Brother, the all-seeing avatar of the surveillance state. Zuboff argued that the comparison was misleading. Today’s most powerful surveillance systems are not instruments of the state, nor do they rule by repression. They are transnational, driven by a market logic that shapes behavior without appearing to command it — what she called “Big Other,” a diffuse computational order that monitors and modifies human action at scale.

***

Han’s new book, The Tonality of Thought, approaches freedom in a different mood. Consisting of three public lectures, the book returns to themes that have run through his work for more than two decades. Han is not searching for a stronger self, but for a way beyond the self — another way of inhabiting the world, combining German Romantic ideals with Eastern thought. “If I may compare my thinking with a fruit,” he writes, “then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”

***

In this clearing, Han’s thinking lets Western concepts take root differently. Among them is eros — a term that, in Greek thought, signifies much more than desire in the everyday sense. It is the soul’s movement beyond itself, toward a beauty that transcends possession. Eros reorients the reflex of self-enclosure, the habit of drawing the world inward and rendering it usable. The soul, instead of grasping, is laid hold of.

Against a Zen backdrop, this can seem difficult to place: the Western longing for beauty seems to unsettle the stillness of Buddhist detachment. Han’s books, inhabiting that tension, do not systematically resolve it. Instead, they bear its fruit in a mood that attunes us to the world. What matters for Han is that both movements, in their different ways, loosen the grip of a possessive inwardness. The question is no longer how to possess the self, but how to move beyond it.

***

Han begins from a different premise. Freedom in the digital age is found not in resisting the Other, but where the Other resists us. It is a question of ends: does freedom secure the ego or free us from its grip? One posture is habitually on guard, the other habitually open. For Zuboff, who draws again from Sartre, the danger is plain: “Hell is other people.” For Han, the more radical danger is an “inferno of the same” in which the Other disappears.

A life organized entirely around the self — its projects, its performance, its wants — leaves no room for the kind of relations in which freedom can actually take shape. The word freedom, Han likes to note, shares a root with friend. One is not free alone. Freedom arises from vulnerability. It begins not in mastery but in exposure, where one is no longer fully one’s own.

Which, since John Locke is integral to my research project, makes me think of Locke's idea that true freedom reaches its height in civil society - with other people, ordered liberty.

 AI Is Changing What We Can Do. Who We Become Is Still Our Choice. | The Humanist Review of AI

Let’s step back and ask one of the central questions of ethics: “What kind of people should we want to be?” Ethics, in the classical sense, is about how to live well. And that involves more than producing the right outward acts. It involves becoming the sort of person who can recognize what is right, choose it for the right reasons and respond to the world with the appropriate thoughts and feelings.

How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for yourself. That thought is central to the ethical tradition that reaches back through the European Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant. Central to Kant’s thought was the ideal of people fully in charge of their own lives, reasoning toward the right decisions through a kind of self-government he called autonomy. People who simply do what they are told, even when what they are told to do is right, are not living autonomous lives. Nor is this a uniquely European idea. Confucius taught the virtue of yi, which involves recognizing what is right and acting in harmony with moral principle. Buddhism offers similar lessons. What matters is not just what you do but the intention with which you do it.

Accordingly, philosophers have rightly been suspicious of “moral deference”, in which someone decides what to do based on what another person or institution declares to be right. Moral guides, your priest, your rabbi, your imam, your guru, even a humble philosopher, can help you think things through. They can draw your attention to features of a situation you may have overlooked. But if they are doing their job, they will not simply listen to your quandary and pronounce a course of action without giving reasons. They will want you to do what is right because you understand why it is right, because only acts that arise from your own deliberation are fully yours. If they espouse values you do not recognize, your compliance does not turn their judgment into your own.

I should add that I am not assuming values are matters of mere belief rather than knowledge, or endorsing relativism, the notion that different normative traditions are entitled to their different answers. You can reject moral deference and affirm autonomy while still believing that there is such a thing as moral truth, and even moral expertise. Perhaps many moral questions, perhaps even all of them, have a universally correct answer. It remains the case that, even if LLMs give excellent answers to moral questions, you still should not defer to their conclusions. You should try to understand the reasons they offer, because it remains important that people act on the basis of their own, admittedly imperfect, understanding. That, in my view, is itself one of the universal moral truths.

***

Once we recognize that people, media outlets or spiritual guides may try to shape us in these ways, we can take that into account. We can ask what interests they have in influencing us. We can consult a range of sources with different interests. I know the pastor has an interest in getting me to make a larger offering. I know that Fox News tilts right and The Guardian inclines left. So, I can weigh what they say accordingly.

But the most effective forms of manipulation are invisible. And one problem with applying this strategy to AI is that we often lack any clear picture of the interests, if any, that guide it. That is one place where public education would help. One strength of LLMs, however, is that, unlike the pastor, they are often willing to tell you what they “know” about the forces that shaped them. And researchers have explored the political bent of the major models. There is a lot of evidence that existing LLMs tend to lean somewhat left of political center. It would be unfounded conspiracy-mongering to suggest that some secret center-left cabal is controlling things behind the scenes. Once you consider the shape of politics in the North Atlantic world, where the main LLMs are based, more ordinary explanations present themselves.

***

Political outlooks also differ in ways that reflect evaluative disposition rather than straightforward factual belief. Moral psychologists Graham and Haidt, for example, argue that concern about fairness tends to diminish, and concern about group loyalty to increase, as one moves rightward.^[8] If so, users should know that fine-tuning may favor equality over national loyalty, reflecting the outlook of the cosmopolitan, highly educated people who help shape these systems. Autonomy is strengthened when people can judge advice in light of the perspective that informs it.

***

But notice that an AI guide that did agree to simply choose options would not be much use if you could neither identify the relevant features of your situation nor see what your options were. An LLM cannot tell you anything useful unless you can inform it about your situation. And grasping what matters in your situation is a capacity you can acquire only through practice. There is always something else you might consider. You have to learn what is relevant and how to respond to it.

I would add it is not enough to learn, but to remember and to have faith in what you know in the face of a world that does not care. I knew much. Depression became nihilism as my faith in ethics, in people, in what I was doing with my life dissipated.

Oops, I stopped reading too soon.

Aristotle thought that we develop this capacity through habituation, by practice. For him, the virtues were not rules or isolated good acts but settled dispositions of character, ways of seeing, feeling and responding that are formed over time until they become, in a good sense, second nature. Confucius, in a different key, stressed the role of ritual and custom in shaping good habits of response. Our sensibilities, our capacities for detecting what matters in the human world, do not come ready-made. That thought, largely sidelined for a time in modern moral philosophy, was revived in the twentieth century by thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, who urged that ethics return its attention to character, judgment and human flourishing.

One role of fiction, in fables and parables—in novels and short stories, in film, video and even painting—is to let us imagine complex moral situations and so develop habits of judgment and feeling. Conversational exchanges with an LLM, in which scenarios are built out collaboratively, could certainly engage the imagination in ways that help shape character and sensibility. Still, it is likely to remain true that we develop these capacities mostly by using them in the situations we face, alone and with others. Time online draws us away from those encounters.

I once told a friend of mine that the hardest ethical questions were between two equally bad choices. It seems now that may not have been taken as much comfort. I think that was the last time I saw Paula.

I am not a Saul Bellow fan. He put me off my writing for decades. I felt it was a milieu that had no reality - factual or emotional - for me. Yet, I keep coming back to him. Wondering was I wrong about him. Did I close my mind? I wish I had read Philip Roth first rather. Bellow was older - closer to Mailer, whose fictions leave me cold. But I admire Nelson Algren - also of Chicago and close to Bellow's age. And Vonnegut, Heller, Gore Vidal were of the same generation. There is someone else from the Fifties dancing in the shadows of my mind who leaves me as disinterested in his topics as does Bellow. I cannot get a name to form. Cheever's people have all the sexual tics and social anxieties. Yet, I understand their problems better. Augie March I found a novel worth reading, but Humboldt's Gift preceded it by decades. 

And today I received a link to ‘Ravelstein’ Revisited - by Jonathan Marks (The Bulwark). This fit into the previous entries in this post. It might have also sparked a bit of reflection on my Bellow bias. A recession of sorts. It is a consideration of a Bellow novel for which I have only read disdain, to be polite.

 I DON’T THINK THAT CHICK’S EXPOSURE, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional, of his own defects justify his shameless exposure of a friend. To be sure, Ravelstein and Chick both merit praise from Bellow’s perspective. Bellow, throughout his career, took a special interest in ineffectual intellectuals, most notably Moses Herzog in Bellow’s novel Herzog, whose book-learning and talent for observation does little to make him wise. Herzog is, however, raised above his fellow moderns, who are less foolish than he is in some ways, by his high ambition, rare in a world ruled by economics, natural science, and the quest for the comforts those pursuits provide. Herzog wants to “live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended.” That desire, pursued even to the brink of madness, matters more than the failure of Herzog to gain more than the mystical conclusion that “only the incomprehensible gives any light.”

Chick and Ravelstein, who attempt but fail to understand a world Chick deems “mysterious,” are honorable in the same way Herzog is, a way that is compatible with great foolishness. Perhaps Ravelstein, who understood the quest for human completeness to be nearly always futile, wouldn’t mind being understood as a noble failure. But I doubt that even Chick’s Ravelstein would consider the abandonment of his lifelong convictions and preferences in the face of death to be the kind of failure that is noble.

Yeah, pretty sure I will only read Ravelstein if I am stuck with nothing else to do.

Effing brilliant:  Star Shrapnel by Ata Zargarof 

Book Review: Talking Classics by Mary Beard  

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Rejected, Bourdain, The Most Encouraging Thing I Have Read In Ages.

 Up and working on my other writing chores. Like this post.

A rejection that came in late from  Open: Journal of Arts & Letters for “After Making Landfall”:

Thank you for your submission. We appreciate the time and trouble you took to give us the opportunity to read your work; however, we must respectfully decline to accept it for publication, as it does not satisfy our editorial needs. We will be glad to learn that this work has received prominent placement elsewhere.

Cordially,

James

Submissions Editor

I came late to Bourdain through my friend Randy K. He came to fascinate me - thoughtful without humbug. I read I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain—until I met him with sympathy, thinking how much his sort of wonder and openness and acerbic wit have disappeared from our lives.

The controversy over The Odyssey is on my mind. So is a comment made by the fellow running the group sessions. He disdains Will Ferrell for being political; he said that was why Ferrell's career has gone down hill. Nothing about Ferrell's talent, nothing about Ferrell's age; only that Ferrell's career died because of his politics.

Actors age out, comic actors age out quicker. That is my opinion. Ferrell's style was outrageous to the point of obnoxiousness. He is now of an age where that kind of routine looks sad, even desperate. That made his shelf life even shorter. Barbie showed he has more life as a supporting actor. And if you think comic actors do not age out, then give a thought to the careers of Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd, Paulie Shore, and Bill Murray. Even the Marx Brothers wore down, and who was watching Bob Hope movies in the Sixties? But this thing of letting private opinions negate a performace, where doe sit come from?

I did not expect much from Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold? for all of its provocative headline. Instead, Carlyn Beccia brightened my day, sparked my tepid optimism.

Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?

A coalition of nobodies dragged it back. How they did it is the most important story nobody tells. Because we are standing at the line again — and this time we can measure it.

***

Now, the finding inside the finding — the one that matters most and gets reported least: MAGA Republicans are not more willing than anyone else to personally commit violence.

Read that again. They don’t want to throw the brick. They want someone else to throw the brick for them.

The researchers are careful about what this means, and so should we be: this is a chorus, not an army. But if you’ve been paying attention for the last three thousand years, that should not comfort you, because the chorus is the mechanism. Societies don’t collapse because millions pick up weapons. They collapse because millions approve and normalize cruelty.

***

And the American host, by the 1890s, was compromised at every level. Tammany didn’t hold a single voter at gunpoint — the ward voted for turkeys, knowingly, for decades. Lynchings drew crowds of ordinary citizens; the photographs sold as postcards at pharmacies, which is a sentence I need you to sit with. Race science filled lecture halls with respectable, churchgoing audiences. Standard Oil’s machine ran on thousands of willing clerks, legislators, and middlemen who knew exactly what they were carrying and carried it anyway.

The political scientist Robert Putnam—who spent decades measuring American social cohesion —found that the Gilded Age was the most atomized, low-trust, every-man-for-himself moment in the American record.

And yet, America survived.

***

The actual first movers were, and I cannot stress this enough, nobodies.

Between roughly 1870 and 1920, Americans went on the greatest civic-joining spree in the country’s history — Putnam’s data show more enduring civic organizations founded in those decades than in any comparable period before or since. Unions, granges, fraternal lodges, women’s clubs, settlement houses, mutual aid societies, congregations, the PTA. Millions of people who had every reason to conclude that honesty was for suckers instead went out and found the other cooperators.

They weren’t being noble. They were being practical: alone, each of them was lunch. Together, they were a market where decency broke even.

***

The threshold is real. The arithmetic is real. And the arithmetic has exactly one input you control. Every era’s turnaround began the same way: some unmeasurable number of people, each acting alone, declined to sell — and then made the single most subversive move available to a member of a collapsing civilization.

They found the people who could not be bought.

 Which is something Donald J. Trump and his ilk will not understand: there is a line where money does not matter. Where there is a different calculus of profit. The Iranians stump him because they do not care about making his kind of profit. The No Kings movement shows that people can act without the help of polical parties. It just takes a little faith.

 I have about an hour - two hours gone now since I started working this morning - before I need to get ready for the writer's group. If it is not meeting, then I will beat it back here. Meanwhile, submitting stories!

 

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