A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Some reading from last week until today as I try cleaning out my email and tabs.
Not an actress I paid much attention to for all of having watched On The Waterfront and North by Northwest multiple times:Eva Marie Saint’s stolen glances (Engelsberg ideas). R.I.P.
Amy Winehouse is someone I noticed but did not fall over while she was alive. I saw her on Jool Holland's show and was amazed by her voice and her hair (as in was it all hers?) Since her death, she seems another talent who could not take the attention and judgment of the more malicious. Amy Winehouse: the lost interview — ‘If I die tomorrow then cool’ from The Sunday Times brought back all those feelings and opinions.
The EI Podcast / Reinventing Disraeli may be for specific interests, but give it a shot. Disraeli was an interesting character in his time and the podcast gets to that.
A book review, one that disappoints me since I have read a little of John Boyne and found him readable, but this review seems like he had a good diea and lost the thread: The Weight of Angels by John Boyne review – what if Oscar Wilde had lived?(The Guardian). I can imagine several paths Wilde might have taken if he had lived, but anondyne is not what comes to mind.
It is unpopular to like Andrew Jackson. That Trump adores him only adds to the problem. Yet, there is something admirable in such a madman who does not deny his madness. That he threatened to hang John Calhoun balances many of his sins for me. He stood for a Western egalitarianism. Yes, that excluded anyone who was not white. He was and is not alone in this thinking. But remove the bigotry and there is a democratic spirit that broadened America. Dispense with the man; keep what was good for our use. Searching for Andrew Jackson (Fall 2026, Volume 71, Issue 4) n:134246
Well, a less rocky start to my day than has been the rule this week. I accomplished what I meant to do on Monday; so now I caught up myself to two days ago.
Not a thing done for Stew apart from having it too much on my mind. No, I decided to expand on one of my planned submissions. I was in the middle of that when the PO made a visit. Actually, I got two for the price of one. The old one showed up again. I think this is the third straight time for a fellow who had to take on new work. The new one made a remark about me having been a bit of a smart ass, so is the pairing because they think the older one intimidates me? After all that was his MO.
I did get clarification that they do have my mental health records. It turns out what they are looking for is whether I remain suicidal. The new guy says he reads the blog, I thought it was clear I was long past suicidal. And that makes me wonder if I am being understood. I had to explain that they were 17 years late worrying about me and suicide, that not being good at killing myself was taken as a sign to give it up. I guess I am also curious if they ever wondered why I didn't try to off myself in prison. Muncie can be grim, Indiana dull, but I would think if I had continued with suicidal thoughts it would be done at Fort Dix FCI.
And we had a discussion about masturbation. They seemed incredulous that I saw no point in even attempting. I felt afterward I had disappointed someone's prurient interest. Perhaps I should give it a try for the PO's benefit? Too much work.
I did get a compliment from the new guy on my writing.
Got them on the road to a hopefully more reqarding experience and finished revising the story.
I talked to KH and am still waiting for his verdict on Stew's second and third chapters. That took me up to the time I needed to take CC to her probation meeting.
Usually treated as mysterious or somehow authentically arising from the grass roots, what came to be known as “the manosphere” was to a large degree a racket run on Internet platforms that let lies, hate, and manipulation proliferate because they were profitable. It has become a miasma that engulfs everyone from the titans of Silicon Valley to teenage boys recruited for the right by those titans’ platforms. The manosphere is a shared set of references and perspectives that began on the Internet and ended up as real-life consequences shaped by the beliefs and values slurped up online. The much-discussed crisis of masculinity is in no small part a product of the exploitation of masculinity as identity politics and marketing schemes (and the most harmful identity politics in the United States have been all along the nexus of whiteness and maleness). Its many facets are often treated separately, but they are all connected.
It’s understandable, in a somewhat self-interested way, why a president would want to lower domestic energy prices before an election (though the president’s diesel deal, even if it goes through, is unlikely to have much effect on prices because the total volume being traded is about one day’s worth of American diesel consumption). But denying an aggressor the resources it needs to keep fighting is also important. Why would the United States provide Russia with an economic lifeline while simultaneously expecting Ukraine to follow American instructions about where, when, and how to fight its war of self-defense?
***
One more time for those in the back: The United States has extraordinary capabilities to strike targets almost anywhere, but destroying a target and achieving a strategic objective are not the same thing. Iran has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to retaliate through missiles, drones, regional partners, cyber operations, and attacks against maritime commerce.
Military commanders are taught to examine the second- and third-order effects of their decisions before executing any action. Political leaders should be expected to do the same, especially when the consequences could include more American casualties, an expanding regional conflict, continued damage to the global economy, and a weakened American position in other parts of the world against more formidable threats.
***
Deterrence requires military capability and credible diplomatic engagements. It also requires strong alliances that convince potential aggressors the costs of an attack will outweigh any possible gains. That applies across the globe: the Middle East, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific region. When American officials undermine trust with allies, they risk weakening an essential component of our national security: trust.
***
Beijing is observing how American forces respond to Iranian missiles and drones, how rapidly precision weapons are expended, how effectively allied defenses operate, and how long industry takes to replace sophisticated munitions. Chinese military planners can also assess the difficulty of maintaining forces across several regions simultaneously. It would be surprising if the People’s Liberation Army weren’t already incorporating these observations into assessments of a potential confrontation with the United States. China continues modernizing its conventional forces, expanding its nuclear arsenal, and developing capabilities designed to complicate American operations in the Western Pacific.
Why are the blues the lingua franca of guitarists everywhere? Why is the 1959 sunburst Les Paul one of the most coveted axes in the universe?
The answer to both questions has a lot to do with guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Though he is often overshadowed by Eric Clapton, Peter Green and other electric blues guitarists who emerged in the mid-1960s, Bloomfield set the pace for the disruptive fervor of that period’s youth revolution with his deep-fried mix of Chicago blues and freak-out frenzy.
The steely urgency of his guitar solos energized the music of groundbreaking artists, including Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Janis Joplin, Al Kooper and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan himself once called Bloomfield “the best guitar player I ever heard.” Many would agree.
At its best, adaptation is the artistic world in conversation with itself. Its creators are in dialogue across mediums, recognizing quality and being inspired to represent it in their art form. Even so, there will always be some anxiety around a beloved story making the jump into the mainstream, but there can also be joy in finally sharing in the thrill of collective experience with a wider audience. Future adaptations may fall short, but they can still enrich the story in the process by sending you back to the novel, and through comparison highlight all the things you didn’t realize you cherished until you were faced with their absence.
Other names remain throughout the state. Cities like Shipshewana and Kewanna are named after Potawatomi chiefs. In Indianapolis, the White River’s name comes from a translation of the Miami word “waapikaminki,” which means “on the white water.” The Monon Trail is named after the Monon Railroad, which derived its name from the Potawatomi word meaning “swift running.”
But for Miami tribal historic preservation officer George Strack, naming places for Native Americans isn’t the same as respecting them.
Strack is a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, descendents of the Native Americans that were forced out of the state. The Miami Tribe owns 45 acres of land outside Fort Wayne where members can reconnect with their history, language and culture.
“It was really hard to grow up with that identity. There were times that people would make fun of that and do the ‘woo woo woo’ sound with their hand over their mouths. It really affected me, you know. And I think it affected all of us from a Native background.”
As we mark the United States’ 250th anniversary, very few Native Americans live in Indiana, which actually translates to “Land of the Indians.”
The Pokagon Band was named after its leader, Chief Leopold Pokagon. Pokagon convinced the U.S. to allow them to stay in southwestern Michigan, a portion of their homeland. According to the band, they earned the right to remain there in part because they had demonstrated a strong attachment to Catholicism.
After decades of trying to get their federal recognition restored by the Congress, they finally succeeded in 1994. In 2016, the band received 166 acres of their land in South Bend back, which they used to create 44 homes for their members and a casino.
The Miami Tribe are the descendants of the Miami that were removed to Kansas. After a few decades there, the Miami were moved to Oklahoma in the 1870s.
100 Greatest Drummers of All Time - some thought provocation here, as with any list. I would shuffle the top three. Ringo and Charlie Watts may have more influence over more drummers. Well, not the flashy ones.
I finished the research project yesterday after losing myself to obsessive behavior these past 2 days.
But I got the whole text down to the 30 pages the law review has as its limit. I cut and cut and then I screwed sentences until they screamed. Or maybe that was me. I did not go to church yesterday or Saturday, Which is not good. The church has kept my depression very much under control. I do not like this obsessive behavior that this article has been for me. It has swallowed most of my time since April, certainly since May.
I am tired of Indiana's racist history. Finding bad scholarship that has steered Indiana constitutional law for about half of my life surprised me and all I can feel is appalled. A lawyer is supposed to disclose any precedent that contradicts their position. What I found in Indiana Supreme Court decisions were statements supported by cases that do not say anything like the statements for which they were supposed to be authority. And not once but several times in the same opinion. A law review journal from the Fifties by a man who became a respected legal scholar contained false statements - comments on text that are not what the ext says. If I had done the same when I was a lawyer and done the same, I would have been punished for unethical behavior. I would not be a government official with a good salary.
No one keeps track of what is going on within the Indiana Supreme Court's opinions. The Indiana Lawyer barely tracks the news about the court: Indiana Supreme Court. Google Scholar does not show any criticism of particular opinions: "indiana supreme court". We stats, the early review of what has been decided, laudatory reminisces of retiring justices, but no critical readings. Well, I have one on my computer.
Burnt out and unable to shut off my brain, insomnia came to visit last night and early into the morning. I think I fell asleep around 3 AM. I missed Liturgy this morning.
I have been going for about 2 hours now. Without breakfast. I probably should do more about eating regularly. And finish the dishes and the laundry. I think I will go to a movie. All the things I have been neglecting. Get out of this apartment.
Anyway, I am done writing any time this week. Blog posts and email, nothing more.
I’m not surprised that Don Quixote is hilarious and deranged. I’ve often found that the dusty classics that are supposed to be dreary chores to read are, in fact, far funnier and stranger than their reputations would suggest. However, I was surprised by how modern the novel feels. It is filled with metafictional conceits and techniques I associate with the postmodernists2 of the mid-to-late 20th century and various post-postmodernist works of today. Cervantes makes up fake ballads, interjects to complain about his protagonist, and has characters (in the second volume) who have read the book they’re inside. Even the premise of the book—an insane man goes on failed adventures while imagining he is a knight—feels like an extended bit novel I associate with postmodernists, Oulipians, and other more contemporary literary trends.
Yep, Don Quixote is a hoot. Anyone who doesn't laugh once while reading it has to be a literature professor.
Decolonizing the Dead ( Los Angeles Review of Books ) is a review of the new China Miéville novel. He is in my mind as someone I should read. That is the other thing I need to do is get away from the computer and read some of these books piling up here.
The Rouse is decidedly weird fiction: it is, after all, about raising the dead, and whatever it is that haunts the dead themselves. It has a classic Lovecraftian sense of wanting to evoke the cosmic dread of that august project, which pushes at the limits of language and form. Throughout the book, there are linguistic breakdowns, gaps, absences, broken sentences, poetic glitchings, all to hint at the sublime collapse of language, meaning, consciousness, and even “life” itself when confronted with what lies beyond human limits. It’s at times a challenging, experimental read. But it is also propelled forward by a sense of apocalyptic dread, that something bad is coming, something worse than death—a kind of pulpy end-of-worldism that shares quite a bit with that Game of Thrones shorthand tag for an undead apocalypse: Winter is coming. The Rouse constantly quotes M. R. James’s eerie, haunting question from his classic weird tale “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”—“Who is this who is coming?”—and tries to answer it. Pulp horror and a dose of avant-garde aesthetics: that is quintessential weirdness.
At the same time, The Rouse is also fused with the Cold War spy novel. The book is about a top secret security agency called the “R Unit” in the British secret services, which is there to contain and explore the possible exploitation of supernatural energies. The R Unit explores REs—revenance events—and engages, we might say, with the roused dead. One of the book’s alternating narrative timelines focuses on a grieving mother trying to understand the early death of her military son Ewan in the 1990s, as she bumps up against the edges of a vast conspiracy, while a second thread follows one of the principal assets of the R Unit, a soldier called Allardyce, who joins the group just as Britain is starting to lose its empire in the 1950s. It is a book full of clandestine military networks, strange laboratories, black ops in far-flung places, and exhausted agents, crossed, double-crossed and triple-crossed in the field. It has the global reach of the Jason Bourne franchise, protagonists shedding identities and moving off-grid in ceaseless motion, popping up in unlikely locales. There are a lot of clandestine meetings at exotic dead drops where characters mutter enigmatic clues at each other.
I have no real experience of the COVID lockdown. I was in prison and what you experienced during the pandemic is very much what I experienced starting in 2010. So, pandemic stories interest me. Such as The Impression of Living in a Ruin (Los Angeles Review of Books).
For many of these characters, the repetition and solitude of work have formed a kind of hopeless prison. The protagonist of “The Nightwatchman” patrols the halls of another unfinished space, in this case an apartment complex still under construction on the outskirts of the city, where he has been forced to move because his fiancée left him. The surrounding area is desolate, roads are deteriorating, and garbage dumps are overflowing due to the influx of new residents; it’s a soulless area where “nobody would ever walk” due to the lack of commercial properties. The emptiness in every aspect of the night watchman’s life leads to increasing dread:
So many late nights spent walking along dark passageways with his flashlight, attempting to catch any danger in the beam, had convinced him of the need for some kind of weapon as protection, even though nothing had ever happened. That word again: NOTHING. Nothingness was an existential concept.
In “The Animal Collector,” a street sweeper tries to fill the void he perceives in his life by adopting a menagerie of injured wildlife and household pets. His treatment of these animals quickly takes precedence over the wishes of those few people in his life who genuinely care about him, such as his partner of seven years, who tries to point out the selfishness of what he is doing. But, as the story’s narrator notes, “people tended to believe their motives to be quite different from what they really were.”
Is the price of stability necessarily the loss of freedom? The question plays out daily in our political reality, its fictional possibilities providing inspiration for writers from Plato’s time onwards. The “upbeat-downbeat” ending Mandel chooses for her novel is not new in science fiction; indeed, it bears comparison to her own earlier take on the post-catastrophe novel, the 2014 blockbuster Station Eleven. What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel’s imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched. In Exit Party, her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights.
Remembering Grazia Deledda, the Sardinian Nobel Prize-Winner We Should All Be Reading (Literary Hub) may not explain why most people should be reading this writer as much as being another example of a renowned writer gone missing. However, for someone from a fly-over place, it does seem pertinent to those who think there are from a place not worthy of a literature.
In writing about the life of Deledda in Nuoro, Sardinian literary critic and author Giulio Angioni referred to the conjoined role of history and memoir in her stories, her “sort of sardography.” That “sardography,” Sardinia seen through the stories of Sardinians, was the splendor awaiting discovery by outsiders like ourselves, in so many forms.
“To discover a prolific, but forgotten novelist is like stumbling upon a new species,” social critic Todd Gitlin wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1998. After his wife discovered a novel by Grazia Deledda on a lonely pile in the corner of a bookstore in New England, he searched for the rest of her works, only finding them in small and university presses. He declared it was long overdue for a “literary resurrection” of the once famous writer with the “emotional power” of her novels. In the end, he only found five of her thirty-three novels.
Gunn on Hal Jordan Being Disrespected by Apparently Being Killed Off: "Hal's the star of TV series & he's in all the episodes so far. It's more live action screen time than all the live action screen time he's had combined throughout history. Kyle is amazing in the role. We more than respect him. We love him, despite his imperfections. Us knowing the time of his death, if that's exactly what that is, is absolutely not the same thing as killing him off right away. Hal is a big reason why the show is so popular with fans & non fans alike; sorry if you don't like it."
Amen. Thanks for putting the fanboys in their place. This class has made comic book movies disreputable and dismayingly dull. Comics are not movies. They need not operate under the restrictions of the comic code authority. They are as dull and as unimaginative and sterile as they are noisy. No wonder the culture is so screwed up.
I came to this question by way of the class the government requires of me. We were talking about cover versions one day. The instructor is a musician on the side; he has been a guitar player for 20 years. I mentioned Ike & Tina's version was a better version than The Beatles. He gave no indication of having heard their version. He agreed Tina's vocals had to add something to the song, but denied better musicianship. Now, I grew up with Playboy seeming to always name Paul McCartney the best bass player every year they did the best musicians of the year. I think John Lennon was a great rhythm player. George is a good guitarist and I have seen him in a video clip and admit he was outclassed the more the Sixties went on. I have heard drummers denigrate Ringo in favor of Keith Moon or John Bonham, and I disagree. Ringo does what a great drummer is supposed to do—keep the band together.
I decided the question could be answered by looking at which of the four were asked to play on other's records.
Almost no one asked Paul to play bass on their records, Harrison got bored with the music business, I think Lennon collaborating with Elton John and David Bowie needs attention, but The Beatle who people wanted playing on their records was Ringo.
Excessive heat and an ear infection could be my excuses. They were real, debilitating, inhibiting a range of actions. I had an incident last Sunday that still bothers me where I almost fainted. It left me light-headed and shaken through Monday.
But the truth is, I got caught up in an obsession. I worked on my research project until I wanted to write nothing more. I blistered my eyes with articles and editing my own work. Why is it that creating footnotes and translating information is both more tiring and less than writing fiction? Fiction feels like painting with sweeping brush strokes and then filling them with details. Writing this article is more like taking tiles to make a mosaic - finding a piece and then aligning it to fit other pieces.
What I had at the end of the week were notes for a supervised release post and nothing more.
I do not seem to recall when the heat advisory started this week. Certainly on Wednesday, but maybe Tuesday.
When Tuesday came, I made enough progress that I decided to treat myself to (finally) seeing The Odyssey. Paying my light bill only strengthened my resolve to see the movie. Using someone else's air conditioning seemed like a very good idea.
Nolan wrote and directed a great movie. Not a perfect movie, though. The criticisms about Calypso are spot on - never have I seen Charlize Theron reduced to a cipher; worse, a sexless, charmless cipher. Yes, there is no sex as in the poem; also, there is not much of the erotic. Yes, Pattinson excels as the villain. What has gone unmentioned, or unseen by me, has been anything complimenting the scenes of Odysseus and Penelope. To them is one the scene of passion. Anne Hathaway is a Penelope that matches the wits of her Odysseus. For all of Elon Musk and the online wankers complaining of Lupita Nyong'o's casting, I have been unable to imagine another actress in the parts she plays. Yes, she has few lines as Helen, but what she does have is devasting. More importantly, as Helen, is her face. No, she has power in her roles that I cannot imagine another pulling off with words, let alone her silence. My biggest surprise was Matt Damon. In my memory are Kirk Douglas and Armand Assante, both more in my mind the adventuring, wily Odsysseus of my imagination. Damon portrays a king with responsibilities to his men; who uses his wits in service to his responsibilities rather than for mere glory. Lastly, the scenes with Circe and Osysseus understate their power and importance.
I suspect it will win Best Cinematography just for the madness of filming directly on Imax cameras. The only competition should be the next installment of Dune.
It should win Best Adapted Screenplay, depending again on the forthcoming Dune.
Nolan should get Best Director for holding its scope together. I prefer Olive Wilde for The Invite; she did more with less, but that will probably be why she will not be in the running. Denis Villeneuve will then be the one to watch for.
And it will be the Best Picture winner.
Wednesday, I made the writer's group. That went well. I think I also made a trip to Walmart.
Thursday back to research and putting together that manuscript and enduring the heat and humidity. I think I finished watching Graveyard on Netflix. It is a Turkish police show that has finished its second season. It is a sort of Turkish Law and Order: SVU. Although I think that lessens Graveyard. It has none of the righteous melodrama of SVU. The social critique of Graveyard actually hits harder by being less overt. A scene between two fathers with one talking about bringing up his son in a world with online hate towards women stays in my mind. Oddly, it also brought to mind The Closer/Major Crimes for all it lacks in the humor of those shows. It is also a workplace drama where private lives often intrude. Last, but not least, its production values and direction are better than what we get on our cop shows.
Friday was the group and shopping at Payless. Nothing much else was accomplished that day besides small work done on the project. I started the second season of Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen. This I finished on Saturday. I am not sure what Ritchie is doing with this; it feels different from what he has done before. He has not been one for paying attention to monsters.
Saturday, I indulged in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I have seen some headlines criticizing this season. I have not taken the time to listen to them. It seems to me the show has not the usual sanctimony of Star Trek. It also seems to be establishing the future in small ways. Not so much in terms of plot but in character. Back to the project, putting off a trip to Payless of milk and disilled water. The things I had not enough hands for on Friday.
Sunday was church. A wonderful time, a settling of the spirit. I had thought I had polished off one section only to realize as I was closing the door to leave that I had not. No, that came after church.
Today, it was up early, computer troubles, dealing with the ear infection, and finishing this post. I have a table to put together and a kitchen to clean. So this is the end of this report. What follows are the things collected during the past week that were supposed to have been published before today.
Thank you for sending us "A Heart’s Judgment Judged."
This
particular piece did not work for us, but we were impressed by your
writing. We hope that you will send us something else. Our submission
schedule can be found on our website at http://americanshortfiction.org/submityourwork/.
We are freeing this story from the rat cage today. We hope it finds a
better fit (and pay!) elsewhere. Rejections suck, we get it. But, hey,
you are doing the thing! You should celebrate that you are sending your
work out into the world.
We're sorry to say that Lesson Learned On A Green Meadow is not quite right for us at this time.
If this was a quick reply, please don't be discouraged. Though rats are
considered nibblers, we devour our reading and are always hungry for
more! And what do we know? We're rats!
We hope you'll consider trying us again. You're welcome to submit again during any of our open calls.
Thank
you for submitting your work to MudRoom for review. We are grateful for
the opportunity to engage with your writing and thinking.
Unfortunately, we do not have a place for this piece in our upcoming
issue. We hope it finds a loving home.
Like everyone else, I first met Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He was also the reason to watch Times Square, Congo and Earth Two. He almost salvaged The Three Musketeers. Here are the items I collected for this post from last week.
I mean to do some writing today. And I need to go to the grocery again. Which proves me a bit of a shit since I passed on the writer's group. I got into watching Orphan Black, but truly, I did not feel like having that much human interaction today.
Thinking and reading while watching.
I read Ray Davies' X-Ray while in prison; of the rock star memoirs, I think it is the best I have read. Definitely a Ray Davies production, far stranger and probably deeper than even Dylan's memoir. But I must not have caught the reference to The Beatles mentioned in Dave Davies on the Kinks’ Beatles rivalry (GuitarPlayer)
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.
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.
Keith Richards on New Music, Old Friendships & the Future of the Rolling Stones | Billboard Cover
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?
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 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.
About all I can do is think. Today was another one of those days of fogginess. I do not know whether it is because of the hernias or not taking my meds as I should. I tried napping and never really fell asleep, only wasted time. I got up after 8 pm and decided to order a sandwich and work on this blog. I have not stepped out of the apartment building since this morning. Not that I feel anything lost, other than time.
Before the portions quoted below, there as a discussion about French grammar and I wonder if that does not make a difference between their novels and ours. English is far less formal than French. Think about it.
A traditional “realistic” novel strives to develop characters with believable physical and psychological detail, but Bessette’s approach might actually be the more lifelike one: while she pursues her narrative with a detective’s intent, the novelist remains more or less visible as the source of the artifice, and she never lets us forget that what we are reading is a text. Put another way, it’s useful to know that Bessette once described her writing as “auto-biographie realiste, non fantaisiste”—“realistic, non-fanciful autobiography”—which makes me think of Gertrude Stein, whose work Bessette read and admired. In his afterword to a later edition of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948), Stein’s short novel about several mysterious incidents that occurred one summer while Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas were living in a country house in eastern France, John Herbert Gill writes: “Like much of Gertrude Stein’s work, the detective novel she produced is a kind of interior monologue, in which past and present, the contents of the writer’s mind as well as the room and the landscape in which she is situated at the moment of writing, are joined … The ‘continuous present’ in which Gertrude Stein’s writing lives erases all distinction between the work itself and the writer as she sets it down.” For Stein—and, because everything she wrote was filtered through her particular consciousness: the first and last person.
***
There’s the sense here, as Alice Oswald says,
that “it’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a
poem has to exist.” Add to this Bessette’s notion that “traditional
prose … even when it has thoughtful and intelligent things to say,
remains a very commercial product.” A Poetic Novel, then, is perhaps one
from which all the excess—words, commerce, false comfort—has been
wrung, because the author (and her reader) is living under duress, in
extremity, at a time when the finitude of life is quite clear. All of
which is not to suggest that a Poetic Novel must be somber and heavy,
because Twenty Minutes of Silence
is nimble, playful, funny, irreverent. I particularly like the
exchanges between Monsieur the Chief Inspector and his Deputy, who
remind me of Chandler’s brutally absurdist cop duos (The Little Sister’s
Fred Beifus and Christy French, for instance). Bessette’s impatience
with the traditional elements of a novel is apparent: it seems she
simply did not write what didn’t interest her. To make a profound book
by stripping it to the bone (to the “I,” the first and last person)—to
write, as a scrawled note in her literary archives declares, “the
biggest novel of the world by the smallest novelist of that world”—that
was her ambition.
This is all for “Chasing Ashes”. I do not know what it will, only that it has to be different.
And, given the stipulation in the flight
forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be
incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book
always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull
of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative
channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is
Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he
writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random
strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages.
Not that I this Aira's talent:
...Aira
combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s
read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen
King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his
flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s
would end the career of most writers.
I just feel like my own stuff is so constituated.
Although I am not put off by Dostoyevsky nowadays, I think that has more to do with having joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, there is something true in Mark Nayler's Dostoevsky is a dreadful writer(The Spectator).
Given Dostoevsky’s reputation as one of the untouchables of literature, I
was surprised at how bad his prose is. It lacks grace and balance.
Instead of taught, stylish sentences, Dostoevsky works in messy,
interminable paragraphs that erode the reader’s goodwill. I’m partly
grateful, though, because his exhausting prose at least forced me to
reflect on the complex relationship between reader and writer.
And this is not how I would not want to be thought of:
My negative reaction to Dostoevsky, as I
recently discovered, places me in distinguished company. Vladimir
Nabokov once described him as “not a great writer, but a rather mediocre
one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of
literary platitudes in between.” Ernest Hemingway had mixed
reactions: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and
make you feel so deeply?” he asked. For Henry James, Dostoevsky’s novels
were “loose baggy monsters” and “fluid
puddings.” James couldn’t finish Crime and Punishment. Reading it, he said, was “like having an illness.”
We too often blame ourselves if
we don’t like or “get” a classic work of literature, thus absolving the
writer of all responsibility. But after battling my way through almost
1,500 pages of Dostoevsky, I’m in no mood to be generous. The fault
is mainly his.
Two rejections came in:
Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall." After careful consideration, we've decided this submission isn't right for AGNI.
Kind regards, The Editors
Visit AGNI Online, featuring selections from our print issues, as well as a trove of new Web-exclusive writing.
To stay connected, sign up for the AGNInewsletter!
And this for a submission from last year:
Thank you
for your submission to Press Pause Press. We did not find "Coming Home" a
fit for Press Pause at this time, but we appreciated the chance to
consider your work, and we wish you the best of luck finding it a home.
After I came home from church, I kept having problems with engery. The air conditioner had my legs cramping. I napped. That did no good. There was still a problem of concentrrating. i got a little bit of work done with Montana, only stopping when I could not keep the fuzziness in my head.
Some other things I got into and want to share:
The restless eye of James McNeill Whistler(Engelsberg ideas ). Whistler fascinates me as an American. That I cannot rightly draw a stick figure makes artists fascinating to me.
A Eulogy (Sheila Kennedy) the distance travelled from decency to MAGA.
Even in an angry and at times despairing speech like “Sources of Danger
to the Republic,” Douglass retained hope for the future, calling on
Americans to secure the democratic promise of the nation. “Strike down
the one-man power everywhere,” he says at the speech’s conclusion; “make
your Government lean to the people, and away from the individual or the
one-man power.” If Americans are willing to do that, through
constitutional reform or other means, “you make sure the permanence,
prosperity, and glory of this great republic.” This is Douglass’ wish
and request to us from 1867. As in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of
July?,” he reminds Americans of the still unfulfilled egalitarian
promise of the Declaration of Independence, and there is no better time
for such a reminder than July Fourth.
Some times behind paywalls, the sort of thing I try not to usullay post about.
Journalists still do, every day, hold
power to account. Think of Partygate, Plebgate and Barnard Castlegate.
Think of Jeffrey Epstein. So-called mainstream outlets may have become
smaller players in today’s vast information ecosystem, but, thanks to
journalism’s endless ability to reinvent itself, they have new allies.
Civic-minded, crowd-funded bloggers sit in local council meetings on the
press bench vacated by struggling or defunct local newspapers; digital
activists live-stream protests straight to YouTube; third-sector
organizations such as Greenpeace and Liberty employ journalists to
investigate their own specific areas of public life; for the first time,
a subscriber newsletter, Democracy for Sale, has won the Paul
Foot award for investigative journalism. Some of the best watchdog
reporting today is collaborative, community-funded or conducted by data
miners sitting in their bedrooms (see the work of Bellingcat), or by
digital teams supported by philanthropic donors. If investigations that
stir public opinion to outrage and demands for action are one measure of
success, then the recent television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office (2024) probably had more impact than any news article about the Horizon IT scandal.
Yet the Watergate myth, of which Woodward
and Bernstein are an integral part, has persisted and even grown. This
is both because we need it to be true and because, in certain ways, it
was. Pakula’s film shows that, through a combination of legislators who
remembered their oath to uphold the Constitution, an independent
Department of Justice and FBI, and a courageous newspaper editor and his
reporters, the system worked.
As the name of Barney’s ship suggests, the struggles in Mysore stirred
the American imagination. Hyder Ali’s decisive victory at the Battle of
Pollilur, in September, 1780, in which he routed a column of British
troops, was documented and discussed by the Founding Fathers. Edmund
Jennings Randolph, a Virginia delegate at the Continental Congress, wrote to John Adams,
then posted in Europe, in April, 1781, of how Hyder Ali’s “Army of
80000 Horse” had “totally defeated” its British quarry. John Quincy
Adams, a teen-age student in the Netherlands at the time, wrote
excitedly to his mother, Abigail, about “the check the English have had
in the East Indies,” where they had “lost a great number of men.” In a
letter written in the summer of 1782, James Madison praised Hyder Ali’s
“superiority” over his most implacable foe, Sir Eyre Coote, the British
general tasked with pushing back Mysore’s forces from the East India
Company’s southern Indian stronghold in what is now the major coastal
city of Chennai. Nine days after the British surrendered at Yorktown, in
October, 1781, a group of notables in Trenton, New Jersey, made a
series of triumphant toasts that were accompanied by artillery fire; one
of those toasts hailed the “great and heroic Hyder Ali, raised up by
Providence to avenge the numberless cruelties perpetrated by the English
on his unoffending countrymen, and to check the insolence and reduce
the power of Britain in the East Indies.” (Hyder Ali died, of an
apparent tumor, at the end of 1782, and his son, Tipu Sultan, followed
as his successor.)
John Adams and his colleagues helped broker a
preliminary peace deal with the British in the autumn of 1782, in
Paris—a few months later, Britain would forge a separate set of deals
with Spain and France. But combatants in the subcontinent were unaware
of the initial truce that had been made in the West, and dozens more
battles took place around the world. The last clash of the American
Revolutionary War, some historians suggest, occurred along India’s
Coromandel Coast, in June, 1783; as the British laid siege to a fort in
Cuddalore, then occupied by a joint Franco-Mysorean force, a smaller
French fleet scored a naval victory nearby. The siege was finally lifted
after news of the earlier peace arrived.
What
solidarity Americans had with Mysore proved fleeting after
independence. France withdrew direct aid to Mysore following the 1783
Treaty of Paris, at a moment when Mysore’s forces could have pressed
their advantage. In the years thereafter, Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu, would
likely rue having allied with the wrong European power; the French,
struggling financially and on the verge of their own revolution, could
do little to support his kingdom against the emboldened British. In
1788, Thomas Jefferson, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to France,
wrote of the arrival of a number of diplomats from Tipu’s court, and noted
that he would attend their reception in Versailles, but was unsure what
any of it would achieve. “If their mission has any other object than
that of pomp and ceremony, it is not yet made known,” he wrote in a letter.
As early as 1792, the U.S. sent an American consul to Calcutta, the
East India Company’s main port in Asia—an implicit recognition of the
growing power of the British in India, and a sign of how the U.S. saw
its early trade interests in Asia best served.
This morning when I was first up, I finished up on Montana for my research project and did a little bit more.
Some neo-garage rock from a now-defunct Canadian band:
Got on a Cramps kick. Still The Queen: The Cramps' Poison Ivy Turns 70 ( Rock and Roll Globe); terrible photo of Poison Ivy, good overview of her career, and it is difficult to think she is now mid-seventies.
Second round this morning:
Up around 9:15 pm, wondering where is my new phone, and went down to the convenience store for smokes and Coke.
Back here, I started on my email.
A detective series I never heard of Nobody’s Perfect (1969) by Douglas Clark ( In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel) - a series I do not recall and not sure if I missed anything.
Listened to Jo Jo Gunne's So...Where's The Show - an album I picked up more than 40 years ago, lost, and now I am wondering what was the fuss? The band was an offshoot of Spirit, it's good, but nothing really stands out. Not a lyric to make me pause or playing to make me take notice. Why are the vocals not clearer? It is very much an early Seventies sound. It is competent background music.
The All-Music Guide says:
After the erratic and self-consciously weird Jumpin' the Gunne, this
album is a return to form. More than that, actually -- the replacement
of founding guitarist Matt Andes with John Stahely resulted in a
tighter, more focused, and generally more interesting band than ever
before. Jo Jo Gunne was originally formed to be, in Jay Ferguson's
phrase, "a hard-ass rock band," and on So...Where's the Show they
finally were one. Ferguson responded to the harder edge by abandoning
the synthesizer in favor of a jazzy piano sound, an inspired move under
the circumstances. The combination enlivens even the dud songs; "I'm
Your Shoe" starts as a pedestrian slow-grind, but has an incredible
instrumental break in which the whole band rocks hard and fast, then
drops out suddenly to let Ferguson take a wonderful and delicate piano
solo. The element of surprise gets you the first time, the brilliant
playing every time afterward. When the band actually takes on a song
with a half-decent hook all the way through, the results are splendid.
The title cut, "She Said Allright," and "Falling Angel" are all winners,
and there isn't a single track that is actually a dud. If it was
inevitable that Jo Jo Gunne was going to break up, at least they left
one consistently good album behind.
I am looking forward to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Last night, I tried listening to a video on what it gets wrong, and could not finish the video.
Seems to me an intelligent woman gave a smart answer to a dumb question.
Between the content and the comments, I was left thinking what a bunch of wankers. This is no way we are going to understand the mentality, the ethos, of Bronze Age Greeks. Enjoy the spectacle, if it works as a film. And if you think you can do better, then get to work at doing a better version. Lastly, probably every commentator thinks they would be fighting along with Odysseus rather than being a slave; reality would have tipped them towards beign slaves.
In her timely and punchy new book, the philosopher Daisy Dixon explores some of the most controversial artworks ever produced. She’s interested in how an artist’s character can influence their creations, and the harmful effects those creations can have on the world.
She’s not the first. Plato panicked over art’s power to corrupt citizens, while Oscar Wilde celebrated its provocative potential. More recently, Claire Dederer puzzled through the problem of what we ought to do with great art by bad men in her 2023 book Monsters.
Come to Depraved expecting a conventional view of art history and you’ll be disappointed, though. Alongside traditional media from prehistory to the present, including paintings, novels and plays, are more contemporary “art forms” such as video games; there’s also a lengthy tangent on pornography. Some of the stuff is so repulsive it’s hard to read about. There’s talk of live goldfish being pulverised in blenders in the name of performance art, and a film featuring shocking scenes of paedophilia. A video game named Rape Day needs no explanation, but Dixon won’t let you look away
***
What should our response be? Dixon isn’t shy about supplying an answer.
In the past, pieces considered too corrupting for the public gaze were
placed in secret collections. She believes depraved art isn’t something
to be squirrelled away, but confronted “loudly, angrily, beautifully”:
emotions that capture the spirit of this passionate book, which, like
those rewritten labels in museums, is going to delight some, and prompt
eyerolls in others. “The remedy,” writes Dixon, “is better speech. Better art. Better curation.” She makes it sound so simple.
One thing I have learned from my on-going progression through the bowels of the federal government, from the ICE agent who arrested me to my sentencing to my polygraph sessions to my supervised release - is the perversity of the custodians of public safety who are far more sex-obssessed than I have been since I was a teenager. Some times I feel like others are projecting their obsessions onto me and other times I am the focus of their prurient interests. So, no, better curation may not be the solution. I would add better education, less supersititious fear.
I started JoJo Gunne's 99 Days (Live, 1971) - which I do like, they sound like they might have been a damn good live band, a raucous party band. Why they remind me of Mott the Hoople with harmonies is something I need to think about.
The phone has not arrived and I just noticed it was promised by 9 pm!
That changes my plans for the rest of the day. Do I stay here or go to the grocery? I fixed black beans last night and they need chorizo and cilantro. Definitely cilantro.
There were more things read yesterday, but I am putting them into a post that is more literary.
I have also reached a bit of a crisis point as whether to post submissions or work wholly on the project, then go back to submitting on my fiction. I could do both, if I were nto having these problems where I jsut lose energy and coherent thought.
Maybe I was just not in the mood for the stuido album
