WTF Politics

 Since no one comments, I assume the hits are also runs. Meaning you are looking without reading. Therefore, I have decided to spend less time exploring our politics.

The push to reduce the Supreme Court’s power (SCOTUSblog ) has some good ideas, some stupid ones, and not a sense of a comprehensive reform of comprehensive problems.

How much tuition does an Indiana voucher cover at Indianapolis private schools? (Chalkbeat ) - not enough to keep it from looking like a scam.

In 2016-17, the state reported that almost half of all voucher students had their full tuition and fee amounts covered by the voucher. By 2024-25, that figure had dropped to 28%.

Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses 

 The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. The report predicted then that U.S. forces were about a month away from running out of THAAD interceptors. An April report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that “diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk.” A follow-up report the next month warned that it would “take three or more years from today to return to prewar inventory levels” of Patriot and THAAD missiles.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesperson, said that “Patriot systems have been weakened to such an extent that Iranian missiles and drones are reaching their targets without being intercepted.” He said that during a flurry of attacks from July 8 to July 22, Iran struck numerous air defense and radar installations, including six “Patriot air-defense radars.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on the claims by the U.S. official or Mohebbi.

I thought we had destroyed their military months ago. That's what Trump has been telling us, right? 

 I went to Walmart today and spoke with the bus driver. He is certain Fauci's diaries convict Facuci of all sorts of evil-doing.

Fauci Diaries Expose Depths of Katie and Stephen Miller’s Hypocrisy (The New Republic )

Indiana state agencies turning to AI for behind-the-scenes work (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

Agencies using or planning to use AI submit a readiness assessment, which officials then review for the tool’s “objectives, efficacy, and risks.” Once approved, the agency can proceed but must provide followups either annually or after substantial changes to the AI tool or its use.

Many of those approved proposals sought to aid workflows. Several agencies planned to use AI voiceovers for videos and presentations or for parsing and analyzing data. 

But others outlined more extensive use. The attorney general’s office received approval for a Thomson Reuters-owned tool that “provides attorneys with AI-powered legal research tools to generate answers to complex legal questions, draft initial documents, summarize case law, and identify relevant statutes.”

The New Old Middle East (Foreign Affairs)

The United States and Israel cannot bomb their way to a better region. A truly changed Middle East, one that could be the basis for a more stable regional order, would be defined by stronger central governments in Arab states such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Today, those places are plagued by civil war or domestic unrest, and the region will remain volatile as long as those governments are not able to police their borders and prevent nonstate actors in their territories from pursuing their own foreign and military policies. Weak states, after all, cannot make durable peace.

A transformed Middle East would also see an end to the efforts of regional and outside powers, most notably but not exclusively Iran, to encourage or fund militias. It would include a diplomatic process, broadly supported internationally and accepted regionally, focused on working toward a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would ensure Israel’s security and the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. And it might involve genuine regime change in Iran, carried out by the Iranians themselves and resulting in a government that respects its neighbors’ sovereignty and drops the ideological crusade against Israel.

But Trump and people I have met here far from the nearest gears of power think big explosions and a big display of force should be enough to bend the Iranians to our will. I cannot help but think of this old song I first heard from Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes:

 

Commerce Dept. quietly announces 7 new equity stakes in private companies  (The Hill)

The announcement comes nearly a year after President Trump announced the federal government would take a 10 percent stake in Intel, one of the nation’s largest chip manufacturers, for roughly $11 billion in federal subsidies the company received.

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The practice has drawn criticism from Trump’s Republican base. Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who drafted the foundation of the CHIPS and Science Act, said at the time the law never intended to let the federal government take a major stake in Intel or any other major company.

 The real WTF moment of the day.

 

 

 

 

Finally! My Photos From My Trips To Mauer Law School

Where I had luncy - my first schwarma

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Indiana Writing Resources 2026 - Proof 2026!

 I have noted some of these before, I think. Like Bookmark Indy – Where Pen Meets Place and Indiana Humanities. Not that they are not worth repeating!

But some new stuff is here, too:

Indiana Authors Awards - the nominees are here.

Line Break: The Power of Practicing Craft - which new, but also for poets.

Proof: A Midwest Lit Fest - I went last year, intend to go this year; I think it is a grand festival.

There's Only One Sin in Hollywood - Indiana Authors Awards - reviews a new book from an Indiana writer.

In conjuring the magic of a great movie capable of making one believe anything is possible for our heroes, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood will similarly imbue readers with hope on every page that the main characters can best the forces working against them. Readers will watch Aaron torn between institution and authenticity, and as the stakes mount and the consequences compound, Aaron must answer a question that I invite readers to consider themselves: If there is only one sin in Hollywood, but that sin promises freedom, is it worth the risk of damnation?   

Not Indiana related but still might be of interest: What Editors Want: The Ultimate Guide for Writers Submitting to Literary Magazines 

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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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Bad News and Other Stuff

 The writer's group did not meet.

I got word from the doctor that they moved my surgery and I need to be there at 5:30 Am. Not a problem if I had my own transportation. My sister was to take me, so I called her. The number I have is an old one and the right one was lost when my last phone died. Emails were sent without a reply. Grasping at straws right now.

I spent most of yesterday working on submissions, and not in the way I intended.

“The First Day of Feeling Free” - Strange Pilgrims - is actually a chapter from “Chasing Ashes”. I spent several working it around into more of a standalone piece. LibreOffice has taken to shutting down and I do not know why.

“The Unintended Consequences of Art” - The Submission Pit - was meant to go elsewhere only it had been previously submitted and the site would not let me use the same title. Witless, I decided to send it to this site with a change of the name of the aliens instead of changing the title.

A little less mopey. A nap in the evening. Email worked on. Some side reading, even if not of what I should be reading. I started a new short story just to get a paragraph out of my head. Not much of a day. 

 Being a Novelist Only Costs Romantic Compromises and Debilitating Debt (Electric Literature ) is a story I want to recommend.

I read Lolita in prison. Nabokov's writing was the best thing. Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes's The Spurious Perversity of Lolita (Book XI) does put some of the novel's problems in perspective.

In his essay, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Nabokov argues that, “if one begins with a ready made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.”  By the way, however, this doesn’t mean that anyone, including Nabokov, believes that the reader should be giving H.H. the benefit of the doubt or a charitable reading; the foreword to the novel is framed as an editorial note by a fictional psychologist, Dr. John Ray, Jr. who calls H.H. “horrible,” “abject,” and a “shining example of moral leprosy.”  So, no one goes into Lolita thinking he’s the good guy––or at least they shouldn’t.  

Professor Dwyer reconstructs her students’ claim that “by assigning Lolita I am perpetuating trauma and may even be perpetuating rape culture.” And retorts “this last suggestion runs so counter to my own beliefs about what literature does.”  Because there’s an important distinction to be made, which nowadays seems to have become forgotten when it comes to works of literature: representation does not equal romanticization.  

Nabokov goes on to say: “Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.”  The tedious and benighted nature of this procession strikes a clear resonance with his own text.  I had a wonderful literature professor who told us never to read the back of the novels we were reading in her class....

***

And another thing, Lolita is more about America, postwar America—it’s temporal setting—and present-day America than anything else.  Hand-in-hand with H.H. being the quintessentially unreliable narrator is the novel’s quintessentially Americanness presented in its tropes: the road trip he takes with Dolores, the life in suburbia in which he first encounters her, the U.S. popular culture allusions strewn throughout the novel, the fact that it begins with an extensive allusion to Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”  Just as we ought to be suspicious of H.H.’s nomial transfiguration of Dolores into Lolita, erasing the pain and replacing it with imposed seductive obsessions, so should we throw a scrutinizing eye on the narratives the U.S. was/is weaving about itself.  

And this warning is more relevant than ever.  As Professor Breen points out, we are living in a world where young girls are, and have been since before Nabokov’s novel, serially commodified.  The darkest side of this perverse cultural valuation has been presented to us in its most bare-face cruelty in the release of the Epstein files.  How Nabokov’s gripping, seductive prose hides within it profound violence teaches us to be disgusted with that behavior and that deliberate erasure, which stands in stark contrast to the way that the glorification of the modeling and beauty industries that incessantly and insidiously hide, suppress, and normalize the abuse and exploitation of the young and vulnerable.  In the past five years, there has been a meteoric rise of young women commodifying their own bodies on platforms like OnlyFans.  While it is not a larger institution, like in modeling, these platforms operate on a false sense of empowerment.  While they purport to empower women by allowing them to take agency over their sexuality and monetize it on their own terms, the nature of this digital sexwork platform differs little from ages-long the capitalistic and patriarchal exploitation of young women.  The narrative of self-empowerment that OnlyFans promotes can be much likened to the narrative that Humbert Humbert weaves of Dolores’ seduction of him: false, and created by the person in power who benefits from the vulnerable’s participation—which is never the vulnerable party herself.  

 The online morons hating The Odyssey movie have also attacked the translator Emily Wilson. From Emily Wilson on Porous Boundaries and the World of Homer (Los Angeles Review of Books), I think she sounds charming, well-intentioned, and competent.

CC and I were supposed to see a movie. Shew was too tired, it was too hot. Not that I really expected her to go along. Since I was waiting for a call from my sister, I stayed home wating for her call.

Reading around this morning, awakening before the alarm:

‘The China Question’ by Ho-fung Hung review (History Today)

Despite its historical focus, The China Question is not written for historians. It is very much a ‘Grand Theory’, supported by rich case studies drawn from a wide-ranging secondary literature. While its ambitiousness is laudable, it also opens up some pitfalls. An attempt to recount 800 years in 260 pages necessarily results in a loss of nuance. One of the more problematic aspects of Hung’s argument is its own replication of a binary view, much like the orientalism he critiques. His suggestion that for eight centuries almost all Western writings on China swung between two equally orientalist poles ends up overlooking the enormous ‘third space’ that has long existed in between. Martino Martini, for instance, wrote two extraordinarily erudite accounts of China’s chronology and geography in addition to his punchier account of the fall of the Ming, painting the empire and its history as connected to, but different from, Europe’s. Where Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault – earlier Jesuit missionaries in China – argued that the Chinese were peace-loving and thus ‘differ greatly from the nations of Europe’, Martini offered more nuance. In his lengthy Chinese history, Sinicae historiae decas prima (1659), he explained that, rather than being timeless and unchanging, Chinese wartime strategies depended on their particular contexts and often involved learning from their enemies. Many of Hung’s case studies contain complex perspectives which he overlooks. Indeed, his decision to see things as either Sinophilic or Sinophobic risks simplifying rather than critically probing the historical record. This is perhaps best captured by a table produced at the end of the book: ‘Eight hundred years of fantasy-fear cycles’, covering different ‘fields’ – from ‘Catholic scholarship’ in the 1240s to ‘Political discourses disguised as scholarship’ from the 1990s to the present – gives a binary overview of the evolution of attitudes towards China, tracking the pendulum swing from Sinophilia to Sinophobia. 

 “The Odyssey” Movie Review (The New Yorker): wanted more Bronze Age barbarity.

Strange Pilgrims (@strangepilgrims): "Albert Camus on life and freedom" 

 Counterbalancing the idiocy of Indiana Republicans (which is for another post):

Indy queer horror film 'Jodi' to premiere at Tibbs Drive-In 

Arts & Culture - Mirror Indy 

Off to Indy today for another visit to the law school library. 

 

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Indiana Poetry Magazine - The Indianapolis Review

 I am too thick-headed and too thick-tongued for poetry. However, this is an Indiana magazine, so I want to point them out.

The Indianapolis Review, established in 2017, is an online quarterly publication featuring poetry, art, and visual poetry. We work to promote artists and writers from our region, but we also showcase work from around the country and the world. We don’t limit ourselves to one particular school or style of poetry or art; we simply want art and poetry that surprises, sings, and makes us think.

We believe that poetry and art often (not always) save us from desolation, misunderstanding, and thinking we are alone in our suffering . We believe that creating and sharing creativity is a gift and service to one’s community and can shift the way we experience our realities. 

And everyone on their masthead is a Hoosier!

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Good Morning: William Kennedy! Spinoza! Kerouac! Abortions! AI Killers! Bridges!

There was a miss on the writer's group yesterday, but it still took two hours out of my life. Only one other showed up and we chatted for about an hour. Then I went to get some Coke Zero at the closest convenience store only to find out I had left my debit card at home. I gave up waiting for the bus because parts were aching. Instead, I walked home; more like limped. There I got the debit card, caught the number three up to The Dollar General and then back to Riverside Avenue. Thereafter, I stayed home.

I stayed home for the rest of the day. Sleeping took out a chunk of my afternoon. Then I was up till around 2 AM working on my research project. Thinking I could make it to Liturgy, I laid down for a while with the alarm set for 5 AM. I am pretty sure the alarm went off, but now I cannot find my phone.

When I woke again, it was off to the convenience store for tobacco and caffeine.

 Then I started on this post and went through browser tabs and email. What follows is the crop for this morning.

“He Breathes, He Writes”: The Voluminous Memory and Deep Empathy of Ironweed Author William Kennedy, the Library of America is promoting its Kennedy anthology with its usual class.

LOA: Ironweed is many readers’ introduction to Kennedy. What do you think explains this novel’s appeal? Why has it been Kennedy’s breakout book?

PG: Bill will say (novelists always say) it’s like naming a favorite child, but he knows that Ironweed is the top of his game, the best he’s ever written. Along with Legs and Billy Phelan in this trilogy, these novels represent a pinnacle.

The term of the day was “bums.” You look past bums. But Bill didn’t look past them. He gives them prominence, and in Ironweed they’re deeply human and interesting and layered and smart and funny. But they’re also broken, and they kind of fix each other—or try to. And the result is beautiful.

Not much happens in the novel; Kennedy is not a plot-driven writer. The characters walk up and down a handful of blocks in Albany, but they’re looking for home, much like salmon returning to their spawning stream. These two destroyed people, on the edge of survival, they’re never going to get their job or their life or their house back, but maybe they’re going to get a cup of soup that day, and maybe they’ll get a place to sleep, and maybe they’ll find friendship, or love. You’re rooting for these people. And it really is Albany. But it’s also any city.

We all want the same simple things. I think empathetic is a good word to describe Bill. These characters are not written with halos over them. They have a lot of flaws and they’ve done a lot of damage. He’s not canonizing them, but he’s giving them their due. They deserve the love they can find. They deserve to live another day. 

 Kennedy is one of the writers I knew of in my twenties and did not get around to reading until my fifties and wish I had read when I was younger.

Listen in: Spinoza, Atheist is a podcast from Princeton University Press. Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have been aware of since I was a teenager and yet who I never got around to reading. He intimidates me and he feels important; unlike Hegel who I think of as overhyped and empty. I listened to the podcast was I working, it seems to cover only a part of Sinoza's career. 

 I have a wary, on-again-off-again relationship with Jack Kerouac. I never succumbed to On The Road as did many people. Once, I thought it showed the limits of my mind and taste. Only to have the same so-what reaction when I read him again in my fifties. I gave up my plan to read his later novels. What I read about his later works has me thinking I am not missing anything. Yet, I continue reading about him. Which led me to Jack Kerouac: The Pseudo-Saint of Mindfulness by Josh Milton-Bell (Liberties). Not that this changed my mind about reading him further, but it has me thinking, instead, there is something to be learned from him.

What is it about Kerouac that still inspires such fervent devotion among impressionable 17-year-olds, nearly seventy years after On the Road’s initial publication? Kerouac lived the experiences that he wrote about, his novels weren’t sterile thought experiments written from the bowels of ivy-thick scholastic towers but muscular records of a life spent tussling on the forest floor. To his disciples, his spontaneous prose radiates wild, kinetic energy, a dizzying musical propulsion of words building on words building on words, the capstone of generative writing, frantic, compulsive hot wanderlust dripping from the walls as the sun rises up over the San Francisco Bay and gleams madly, gladly, while the — and so forth. 

***

Kerouac was pathologically incapable of escaping his desires, of surrendering himself totally to faith. But unlike our wellness industry salesmen, Kerouac actually took his spiritual quest seriously enough to be disturbed by his own failure to rise to it. To some degree he understood these inner contradictions, and desperately wanted to go beyond, to grasp onto true faith and outrun himself. In the second half of The Buddhist Years the reader watches as Kerouac becomes increasingly repulsed by his own inadequacy.  

The essay notes that Kerouac was depressed; some quotes remind me of how I thought when despondent. Then it gave me a reason for my paying attention to Kerouac:

But Kerouac was nothing if not authentic. And this authenticity is no less poignant for being the true expression of a limited man. His continued relevance does not follow from the depth of his spiritual ideals but the poignancy of his sincerity, his evocation of that tormented — sometimes sublime — search for meaning that can come in the absence of true belief. Reading these ragged efforts to will himself into faith, rushing and writhing to ascend beyond, it’s difficult to not feel a profound compassion for him.

He held nothing back from us. Kerouac was unafraid to fail spectacularly, cosmically, infinitely. The inadequacy of his faith may be his greatest legacy.

I worked yesterday on my research project. It came out of the Indiana Supreme Court upholding Indiana's abortion statute. This morning I read Sheila Kennedy's Culture War Consequences, and it puts my work and the work of Indiana's Republicans in perspective:

When it comes to culture-war issues, however, they are simply unable to connect the dots, despite the fact that a number of Indiana businesses predicted–and are now experiencing– problems recruiting employees as a result of the ban.

That connection– between Indiana’s ban and the state’s ability to attract a talented workforce–emerged during a recent, enlightening conversation with some friends.  A former colleague who recently became a grandfather noted that his son and daughter-in-law intended to have another child–but not while they still lived in Indiana. Both are high-tech workers of the sort Indiana desperately needs, and both currently have excellent positions. But they plan to relocate, because–as my colleague’s daughter-in-law explained–she fears what might happen if she has a troubled pregnancy.

Another friend concurred, noting that he had counseled his daughter–a recent elite college graduate–not to return to Indiana. As he explained, although his family would have the means to send her out-of-state for necessary care in normal course, that wouldn’t protect her in the case of an emergency situation.

Is this the plan - to have the educated, the talented remove themselves from Indiana? Think about it.  

 

 Okay, there is a West Newton, Indiana, but no East Newton, or a Newton. Such is Indiana geography.

 Meet the New ICE Queen. Same as the Old ICE Queen. (The Bulwark): Is there any Trump appointee who is competent?

Okay, I’m overstating it. But yesterday, a new report in the Daily Mail1—a hotbed, recently, for scoops from leaky and disgruntled DHS employees—featured anonymous Mullin underlings griping about some remarkable parallels between life under the old boss and under the new boss. For one thing, Mullin is reportedly trying to get his wife Christie on the DHS payroll as a “Special Government Employee”—the same arrangement Noem once used for her boy-toy adviser Corey Lewandowski.

For another, Mullin appears still to be flying around in the same $70 million luxury jet that helped end Noem’s tenure—and using it to spend a good chunk of his working time in his home state of Oklahoma. “He leaves on Thursdays a lot at 11 in the morning and doesn’t fly back until Monday afternoon,” one source complained to the Daily Mail. “He is barely in the building.”

“Mullin seems to think ICE requires less work than a senator, and it shows,” griped another. “Meanwhile, ICE has no direction.”

The Pope WARNS The World About War, AI & Unchecked Power:

 Morality, what a concept.

Feta fries, a hot chicken biscuit and the east side’s favorite rectangular pizza: an illustrated food tour for part of Indianapolis.

Tuesday's song of the day:

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5-17-2026: Anderson to Indianapolis; a Day of Futility

 I finally figured out how to get the images off my camera. It was time to catch up with my travails and troubles of this past Sunday.

Anderson's Applewood - Target is gone.

I stopped for lunch here close by IU

I had the chicken shwarma, and it was good. The Chinese restaurant I went to after my sentencing with CC and Ray S is gone. Perhaps it was an omen of things gone. It was the last time I saw Ray.

Then I got to the IU campus:

 I think I knew there was to be a fair at Military Park across the street from the McKinney Law School. If I knew, I had forgotten. The day being hot and not being able to find a parking spot, so I headed towards the closest parking garage I knew of. It cost me $20.

Walking from the garage to the law school, I passed across the canal. It looks like a bit of Venice dropped in on Indianapolis, or so it is probably hoped.

 When I got to the law library, it was closed. Sweating, tired, and put out with my lost time. The event at the park looked like it would cost money. Between that and my inflamed temper, all I wanted was to get out of the area.

 Some views of the area then:

 

 

I headed east looking for K's 2-in-1. I stopped at Irvington Plaza, or what there was of it. When I was a kid, more than 53 years ago, there was life and business here. 

The building in the background was a bowling alley. I remember going there with my cousin Paul. It had to be 1971 or 1972, when he was at Purdue. I associate The Loggins & Messina song “Your Mama Don't Dance” with the visit, so most likely 1972. The red-roofted building was the Dairy Queen my mother would take us to; she had a milk allergy and it seems to me she could eat at DQ.

In the second photograph, there was a Haag's Drug Store at the corner. Here was where I first saw Vampirella and Creepy comics. There was an S & H Green Stamps store further up the buildings. Mom collected stamps, I recall putting them in the books and a couple of shopping trips there. Haag's and S & H are long gone.

 

All is empty, as decayed as the pavement.

Continuing east searching for an office supply store, I found a Karma store. Once our most wide-ranging record store. This is at Post Road and Washington Street. I recall buying my copies of Mott the Hoople's Mott, Graham Parker's Squeezing Out the Sparks, and Stiffs Live there. All three records are now long, long gone. 

 

Also decayed was Washington Square. Memory says it was to be built after my family moved back to Anderson in 1973. It forced the closing of Eastgate, the mall we most often shopped at when I was a kid and the first enclosed mall in Indianapolis. 

 I did not find the store I looked for, so I went searching for my great-aunt's grave. 

 

 

I falled in that, too.

 

Then I headed north to another Staples. I had some old woman start to sideswipe me. Driving regresses me into a foul-tempered, cranky old man. No luck finding what I searched for, so I came home with my nerves frayed and my temper throbbing.

 

Everything hoped for went unaccomplished. Futility, all was futility. But it was a bright, sunny day.

 

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Muncie & Indianapolis Art News

 Just a bit of FYI for any local readers.

Muncie Public Art Directory 

Muncie Arts and Culture Council's Post 

Muncie Arts and Culture Council  

Muncie Makers Market 

Watercolor classes at Maring-Hunt Library 

Join  MPL and the BSU Art education students for a step by step lesson in watercolor painting.  A fun watercolor workshop in the Maring-Hunt Gardens. At the end you will have a one of a kind watercolor painting to take home! 

Muncie Public Art Directory 

The Harrison Center 

Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi)  

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A Grab Bag: Making Music in Indiana! Hooser Filmmakers! Bob Dylan! Unreliable Narrators! American Short Stories!

I put together this post on February 3, meaning to do more with what I had found on these sites. Work, illness, recuperation kept me from doing more. I added some brief notes today.

Want to write a movie and want to see real scripts. Rian Johnson has posted his at rcjohnso / scripts.

 Why Bob Dylan’s COVID-Era Album Was the Real Nobel Lecture 

“Murder Most Foul” is, first, the story of a killing, which Dylan depicts as an execution, and, then, a catalog of the plangent reverberations for a nation—­as he later sings—­in “slow decay.” Dallas strictly speaking was dark when Kennedy arrived, rainy and gray, and from the outset Dylan embeds the assassination inside prior American cataclysmic cruxes: Native American ethnocide (referencing the Oglala Lakota saying, “a good day to die”) and Pearl Harbor, via Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. But 1941 was also the year Dylan was born, and his song is just as cannily personal as it is historical. His memoir Chronicles recounts his mother’s avid response to a Kennedy campaign visit to Hibbing, Minnesota, six months after Dylan left for Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. “He gave a heroic speech, my mom said, and brought people a lot of hope,” Dylan wrote. “I wish I could have seen him.” Kennedy also figured into one of Dylan’s first public controversies when, on December 13, 1963, he ruffled his Emergency Civil Liberties Committee hosts in New York after they bestowed upon him their annual Tom Paine Award—­for civil rights efforts—­by remarking that “I saw some of myself” in Lee Harvey Oswald. More recently, Dylan included paintings of Oswald and Jack Ruby in his “Revisionist Art” series (2011-­2012), both modeled after reconfigured Life magazine covers. On his twenty-­first-­century albums, “Love And Theft” (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest, Dylan circulated several conspicuously political songs, among them “High Water (For Charley Patton),” “Cry a While,” “Sugar Baby,” “When the Deal Goes Down,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Scarlet Town,” “Tin Angel,” and “Tempest.” During an interview with novelist Jonathan Lethem, he might jest, “You know, everybody makes a big deal about the sixties. The sixties, it’s like the Civil War days. But, I mean, you’re talking to a person who owns the sixties. Did I ever want to acquire the sixties? No. But I own the sixties—­who’s going to argue with me?” Still, on “Murder Most Foul” Dylan thwarts readymade nostalgia, an easy revisiting of the storybook sixties and his golden “spokesman” moment. Instead, mixing and juxtaposing voices, lingos, and tones, he traces the decline of America over the trajectory of his own lifetime through the kaleidoscope of the Kennedy assassination. 

  hoodox Hoosier documentaries that inspire. 

Hoodox is a nonprofit organization on a mission to support and share stories that connect Hoosiers, spark conversations, and inspire positive change in Indiana.

We believe Indiana’s future can be bright, and that amplifying true stories told by and for Hoosiers is one of the most powerful ways to help us get there. 

 The Musical Family Tree - Indiana bands

The Musical Family Tree archive was started in 2004 and serves as a crowd sourced archive of the Indiana music scene with a focus on the late 1970s through the 2010s. The MFT archive contains 1,720 musical artists and 22,311 recordings, almost none of which are found on traditional streaming services. Please explore the archive and contact us at team@musicalfamilytree.org with any questions.  

(Muncie bands - most of whose names I do not recognize, but Faith Band goes unmentioned. Indianapolis bands - too many to look through - but looking through the listing by name, I found my favorite Indy band from the early Eighties: The Future! No entries for Anderson. No Pedlar?)

Can you make a 5-minute film for $5,000?  (Mirror Indy)

Now, Hoodox has created a new opportunity for Indiana filmmakers, in partnership with Indiana Humanities, Free Press Indiana and Heartland Film. LIFT will give five filmmakers $5,000 awards to help them create short nonfiction films “to raise the spirit of Indiana,” Walls said. The films will premiere at the 2026 Indy Shorts International Film Festival in July.

“But a big part of this program is also the mentorship opportunities. We don’t want to just throw out an application and then give five filmmakers $5,000 and hope that it all works out,” Walls said. “We want the entire process, starting with the application, to be an opportunity for filmmakers to learn and grow.”

Adriane Leigh on Why We Are Living in the Age of the Unreliable Narrator (Crime Reads)

Social media encourages us to experience our lives not as they happen, but as they will be presented. Moments are filtered through the lens of potential content. Emotions are evaluated for shareability. Experiences are edited into arcs: struggle → insight → growth. In this environment, the self becomes a story rather than a state. And stories demand consistency.

The problem is that real people are not consistent. We contradict ourselves. We regress. We behave badly for reasons that aren’t flattering. We want things we’re not proud of. But social media trains us to hide these fractures, to smooth them over, to rewrite ourselves in real time.

Over time, this produces a subtle psychological shift. We don’t just lie to others—we start editing our own memory. We remember the version of events that performed best. We forget the parts that didn’t fit the narrative. Like classic unreliable narrators, we come to believe our own omissions.

“A National Art Form”: John Stauffer on Rediscovering the 19th-Century American Short Story, from Poe to Wharton  (Library of America)

LOA: The short story emerged as a distinctive American art form in the nineteenth century. What factors propelled its rise and development?

JS: The nineteenth century was marked by tremendous change and innovation in American writing, and the short story was at the center of that creative and intellectual ferment, fueled by the evolution of new printing technologies, the rapid growth of periodical literature, and rising literacy rates. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), a collection of essays and short stories, became the United States’s first literary bestseller, offering a rebuttal to British critics who had long laughed at the paucity of US cultural achievement. Looking backward at the accomplishment of the American short story in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1962), the celebrated Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor remarked, “Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form.”

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Neglected Notes

 Some items AI have been sitting for so long that I am just going to list them with my apologies:

 Broad Ripple Review - Winter 2026 Issue: What We Carry

Calm Sea and Hard Faring by Yiyun Li (The New Yorker and might be behind a paywall).

It was possible to find out about Jude’s friends, but Lilian refrained. Her own best friend from middle school, upon learning of Jude’s death, six years after Oscar’s, had e-mailed, reminiscing about their school days in Beijing. In the hot months, they would buy ice pops from the dining hall for three fen each. The ice pops, colored with yellow food dye, were, in reality, more gray than yellow, offering only a hint of sweetness, and a few times they’d found remnants of vegetable leaves frozen inside. Once, they pooled their money and bought an ice-cream bar in the shape of a snowman, but before they could take a bite the snowman loosened itself from the stick and fell. It had cost sixty fen—twenty ice pops to while away many lunch breaks! They squatted in the sun and watched the snowman melt. Soon, ants congregated.

Lilian’s friend had made a fortune in real estate; still, nothing would take the astonishing sting off that loss. Lilian was touched and replied that she, too, remembered the snowman. Of her children’s deaths, she could say nothing, so she quoted a few lines of a third-century poem from the Jin dynasty: “Those who have accompanied the funeral procession / Are now ready to return home / The sorrow remains for the family / Others have begun to sing / What’s so exceptional about dying / But to entrust your body to the mountain?”

 Unbound: A Collection of Indiana Stories

Hell’s Belle: A True Crime Dark Comedy about Indiana’s First Serial Killer by Amalia Howard is coming to the Shelton Auditorium Apr 23 – May 3.

 

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Submission, Indy Politics, Rejected

I ran down to Indy, taking a friend and his wife to the airport. On the way back, I went to Payless for groceries. I napped when I got home. 

I got some of my research project done.

The Lascaux Review, Strange Passage, Narrative, Liminal Spaces and Unsolicited Press: “Scenes From An Indiana Factory Town”

 Raleigh Review: “Ahab in the Moonlight”

Ninth Letter: Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 - 1984 

I quit for the day.  I am not feeling well.

2/18

I was just not well today. All I did was get to the writer's group, but I passed on seeing CC. I got through the email, cleaned the kitchen, and not much else.

A rejection:

Thank you for your submission to Chestnut Review. Although we must decline your submission this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it. Please do not interpret this as a judgment of your art as a whole. Individual tastes matter a great deal in decisions like these, and though we have to decline this round, we encourage you to keep writing and creating. The world needs it, and you.

Thank you, Sheila Kennedy, for pointing me to IndyPolitics.

 Three other posts written and scheduled over the next few days were done, and now I am calling it a day.

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Let's Talk About Indianapolis, Muncie, History and the Brighter Lights

 While Trump spends our historical capital like a crackhead on a binge, let's not forget about some better things about this country.

The food in Indianapolis, for instance.

Several Hoosiers named James Beard Award semifinalists  

The James Beard Awards are perhaps the most prestigious awards in the food world. On Wednesday, the James Beard Foundation released the semifinalists for this year’s awards, which included seven different Hoosiers.

Hoosiers in the running for the so-called “Oscar of the food world” include an Indianapolis restaurateur, a pastry chef, and a husband-wife chef duo.

In 2025, only two Indianapolis restaurants were named as semifinalists. These restaurant owners say that’s a testament to Indy’s evolving food scene 

The semifinalists represent different cuisines and come from Indianapolis, Carmel and Clark County in southern Indiana. They say as the area grows, so does its food scene 

Or our arts scene.

Meet the Maker: 2025 DeHaan Artists of Distinction (Axios Indianapolis)

The inspo: Every year, the DeHaan Artist of Distinction awards Hoosier contemporary artists grants of up to $10,000 to pursue aspirational projects.

• The 2025 winners chosen by a panel of visual art professionals were announced last week.
• Their final projects will be shown later this year during a special exhibition at Gallery 924.

Zoom in: Meet the 2025 DeHaan Artist of Distinction winners.

Or the beauty of model railroads, Muncie Edition.

Muncie's 34th Annual Model Train Show Feb. 28 

Delaware County Fairgrounds will host Muncie and Western Train Club's 34th Annual Model Train Show from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Feb. 28. 

The event is "Indiana's largest and longest-running single-day train show," according to a Jan. 9 event flyer.

Some weirdness from Muncie. Funny how I see art work in town saying "Keep Muncie weird".

Delaware County inmate charged over bid to kiss corrections officer 

An investigator who viewed a surveillance video reported Johnson "wrapped his arms around (the officer's) upper body from behind, then grabs her face in an aggressive manner attempting to kiss her."

Close out with a little history lesson from Indianapolis.

Blue Line crews uncover tracks from city’s electric railway  (Mirror Indy)

The first electric streetcar line in Indianapolis was built in 1890 along Illinois Street from Union Station to Fairview Park, a former 246-acre park that is now the site of Butler University. Traveling from one end of the line to the other took about an hour.

Over the years, the railway tracks expanded throughout the city and by 1920, the city’s streetcar system carried about 126 million passengers a year.

***

The first car was built in Germany in 1886 and by the early 1900s, companies throughout the world were competing to build their own cars.

In Indianapolis, companies like Nordyke & Marmon, Duesenberg Automobile and Motors and Lafayette Motors worked to produce luxury cars on the west side.

City railways brought workers to manufacturing plants, like the American Foundry at 565 S. Warman Ave. and the General Motors Stamping Plant at 340 S. White River Parkway W Drive.

As the use of cars grew, fewer people used railways. By 1933, ridership had decreased to 52.9 million passengers a year.

***

In 2014, the Indiana General Assembly passed a mass transit bill that prevents state funds from being used on certain light rail projects. In 2018, some legislators attempted to repeal it in order to make the city more competitive for Amazon’s second national headquarters, but that bill failed.

IU Health closed the People Mover in 2019, citing high costs, and replaced its functions with shuttle buses. Its elevated rails are still visible downtown.

That article led me to this notice of an exhibit at The Indiana Historical Society: The Electric Railway: Indiana’s Interurbans  

Yes, we once had a real public transportation system in Indiana.

 What we have to look forward to in the coming days:

 

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