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.
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
I have been spending too much time doing research, trying to catch up with 30 years in a couple of weeks, but going down rocking. Reading and writing until my eyeballs feel like pinpricks and my brain is swirling. I started doing this thing of sleeping for a few hours and then getting back up to work.
Starting the day with new stuff from Ray Wylie Hubbard:
There has not been much to report. I did the group thing last Friday. The notes are around here somewhere. I think I will add them separately.
CC was found and she is alive.
I made it to church Sunday. The standing wore me out and I did not accomplish much else on Sunday. About the only other places I have been have been Payless or Walmart or the convenience store. I just came back from the convenience store.
Oh, I did laundry one day. Thursday or Friday. I talked to the niece when I did. Yes, it was Friday.
Another thing from last Friday: the phrase "all this useless beauty" got stuck in my head. It came to me as part of a song; one I could not remember. Then I tracked it down a few days later.
I have been keeping to Coke Zero or to one 2-liter of RC Cola.
We had heavy rains last night, after I called it a day.
I have decided that the Georgia Supreme Court writes tiresome opinions. It must be an institutional thing, since the same style persisted over 30 years,
The law is not a profession; it is an obsession, more like a disease of the brain.
Rock on.
I started this post days ago, meaning to write around these things.
There was something atavistic about the skunks, their ancestors living under my house generation after generation. I felt watching them Woolf’s deeper, darker explanation for why, while indifferent, nature soothes the afflicted. “Inside the transcendent communion with nature,” she wrote, “resides the most disquieting fact of existence—the awareness of an unfeeling universe, unconcerned with our fate.” This indifference calmed and conciliated compared with the weight of my loved one’s concern.
This sounds more like me up to 2010:
Woolf understood that those in pain are susceptible to illusion. “This monster,” she writes, “the body, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of wings into the rapture of transcendentalism.” It is assumed by believers that religion comes down from above, but if God exists, human bodies made him. The idea of the supernatural felt disrespectful to the stark reality of a damaged body like mine.
***
Woolf called illness, “the great confessional,” a rare space where “truths are blurted out.” But I had found her truths existential, and almost impossible to bear: “…how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads…”
The odd thing since I got home is that with my body falling apart I have not succumbed to the weariness and then the depression as I used to . I have learned to work around the problems and the pain. More importantly, I have medical insurance and a willingness to use that I did not have once upon a time. It is also good that I have done much to eliminate the stress, have learned to pace myself, and do not have a life where I have to keep throwing myself against a wall just to survive. On the other hand, the bureaucracy that has undertaken supervising my life does not understand that I have time only for writing, that is my job before I kick the bucket, my poor PO seems to think I am an isolated misanthrope when I feel like nothing of the kind.
When I was young, I was quite the reader of Heavy Metal. It seems to me now that that stopped in my thirties. Perhaps because the magazine became harder to find; perhaps because it no longer amazed me; perhaps because I turned to things that would make me money. Will it survive? Will its survival matter? Have our times gotten too shriveled with conservatism.
Anatomy of a Galileo Forgery(JSTOR Daily) forgeries are so much fun, yet this one on this day when lethargy has begun to overtake me again, I am troubled with the thought of history being undermined.
Both of De Caro’s copies of the Sidereus had a title page blemish that turned out to match perfectly a legitimate 1964 facsimile copy of the book. In that facsimile edition, a photo retoucher had failed to correct a paper blemish that the camera read as an ink dot … and here it was again four decades later, pointing to one of the sources of the De Caro fakes.
Detailing a trail of shady library exchanges; forgeries used to replace stolen originals; originals with added forged details to increase their value; and multiple forged copies (De Caro claimed he made five copies of Sidereus Nuncius), Wilding argues that the SNML “is merely the most sophisticated example we have so far detected in a long run of forgeries, whose primary aim was to stand in as surrogates for stolen copies.” Eager to disabuse people of rooting for clever forgers and the schadenfreude of seeing experts conned, Wilding writes, “these books are the product of organized crime” undermining history and the institutions that make history possible.
But is not history always undermining itself?
We found out today that Donald J. Trump has not even made an agreement to end his “excursion” into Iran, but only an agreement to make an agreement. How many will tout him as a genius? That he is the greatest dealmaker in history? Plenty.
And I’ll mention one point in particular that seems not to be getting the attention it deserves. The memorandum of understanding to be signed Friday reportedly says that Iran will not impose tolls in the strait of Hormuz for the next sixty days. This is presumably the basis of Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll-free.” But the government of Iran says that the strait will operate in the longer run “under Iranian arrangements.” This seems likely to be true, since Iran has established the principle that it can close the strait, has paid no price, hasn’t repudiated a right to do so in the future, and will be more interested and able to enforce its will in the months and years to come than we’ll be able to stop them.
***
Could the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing? Could it provide a spur for us to arrest and reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence? Indeed, the American people don’t seem to have been too impressed by Trump’s White House cage circus. Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?
Why It Matters(Sheila Kennedy) should leave depressed about the people but I think there are more who want to be better human beings, who think Trump and his ilk are not better human beings. Meanwhile, we live with their stupidity.
Gerrymandering in Indiana is worse than 95% of the U.S., new report says (wthr.com). The Indiana Supreme Court wrote in its last abortion case that if the people of Indiana have control of the legislature and can amend the constitution. Quaint legal fiction or a delusion, I leave to you, dear reader. I think it is BS. Indiana is in the hands of one political party that will not let the people decide for themselves.
Over time, a dominant party tends to fill watchdog roles — attorneys
general, inspectors general, ethics boards, judicial appointments — with
loyalists. These watchdogs may not be corrupt themselves, but they tend
to become less aggressive when it comes to investigating the ruling
party.
Long tenure also gives a party time to build patronage. Government
jobs, contracts, licenses, and permits flow disproportionately to allies
and donors. What begins as political favoritism can gradually morph
into corruption (Illinois and New Jersey are classic examples of states
where decades of machine politics have created cultures where
“transactional behavior” is just “how things work”).
In competitive states, scandals can be exploited by the opposition
party, but in states where the opposition is permanently weak, the
dominant party doesn’t have much incentive to police itself. The
discipline imposed by an external threat is missing.
This year, for the first time in a long time, Indiana Democrats are
running candidates in most of the districts thought to be “safe” for
Republicans, and the new Lincoln Party is also attempting to upend the
GOP’s lock on Hoosier governance. Perhaps the state is on the cusp of a
revived competitiveness–and a more competent and less corrupt
governance.
Reading American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present (Literary Hub) is a good antidote to my thinking that Trump is a giant hairball in our national history, it is time for us to just shut up and get off stage. He is that hairball. Diving back into legal history keeps reinforcing the idea that if you think there has been no systemic racism in this country then you need to look up the word thinking in the dictionary. It has been here, it lingers behind the mean-spirited cowardly parasites who think birth gives them status. What is also to be seen is how we have tried to follow our better angels. I thought in the following to see a glimpse for a better future.
Such is the problem of patriotism: a higher law that is really a lower law, because it substitutes a theory about America for the reality. It esteems the state above the person, the shell above the contents, in the hope that what is good for one will be good for the other. It has never worked that way. Where patriotism has meant exceptionalism—the belief that America was born to lead—it has wreaked havoc on the cause of democracy and fair dealing, at home and abroad.
America’s descent, on its 250th anniversary, to the demagoguery of an unapologetic nationalist is not the aberration many want it to be. It is the consummation of forces that have been latent from the start: a rumbling warfare between a political theory of equality and a more visceral urge for mastery. And while “America First” may represent a particularly abrasive form of the phenomenon, it cannot be isolated from a tradition that has long confused the strength of America with the substance of democracy. When the answer to Donald Trump is a renewed and refined patriotism, drawing on the example of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that claimed nearly a million lives, it is clear that we need to go deeper.
***
My conviction, as a true believer in what the journalist Randolph Bourne called the “American promise,” is that America needs to shed the conceit of exceptionalism to fulfill its democratic mandate. We must lose the myth of preeminence to see the world as it is. From foreign policy to health care, education to the environment, questions of freedom and justice have been lost in the mists of national pride: the still-religious intuition that we have already arrived. The paradox, as Bourne defined it during the nationalist frenzy of World War I, is that America will have to become less patriotic before it can recover what is true and beautiful in its creed.
There are so many areas in which America excels Europe, thought Bourne, but in patriotism we follow and regress. As the irrepressible Emma Goldman lectured a jury, as she defended herself against charges of conspiring against conscription, there are more kinds of patriotism than carnivals of self-regard.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” she told a court in 1917, “we respect your patriotism. We would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for one cannot believe that love of one’s country must needs consist in blindness to its social faults, to deafness to its social discords, of inarticulation to its social wrongs.”
“Our patriotism,” she continued, “is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” Goldman loved the American people, and the “great possibilities” of a free society, but she hated the “cant” of an Americanism that trampled on freedom and expected to be thanked for it: the misconceived idealism that deemed a flag more precious than a person. Patriotism, Goldman argued in an earlier essay, had become a “Moloch” and a “menace to liberty,” a value that cheerfully “abrogates the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” When a court could sentence a man to ninety days in prison for quoting the nation’s founding document, in a manner supposedly subversive of the war, the crisis was complete.
LaCroix concluded with the observation that, at the time of that
speech, the young Lincoln “did not know what was coming.” He had no
inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, but
what he could do at that time of his life was offer his listeners a set
of ideas that would attach them to civic life rather than alienating
them from it.
There was much more. The full video of her address is available on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/1199018583#t=1h18m28s. It
starts at the 1 hour 18 minute mark, and I strongly encourage you to
click through and watch the entire speech, which was far more powerful
than my efforts to describe it.
I had not heard the phrase “the mobocratic spirit,” but it is a perfect description of MAGA.
What Lincoln understood and emphasized was the central element of
true Americanism, which is allegiance to a specific approach to human
governance. It is that allegiance that separates citizens of the United
States from the “blood and soil” beliefs that underlie fascist regimes
and motivate Trump’s MAGA base. In a recent speech, Georgia Senator John
Ossoff recently reaffirmed Lincoln’s understanding of what makes one an
American, insisting that “Our national greatness flows not through our
blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race.
We’re a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions.
And that is what makes us exceptional.”
I finished with "Stranger Things" and "The Sandman" on Netflix. Winona Ryder has now graduated to mother roles and seems so far from Heathers, but damn she has got a way with an axe. "The Sandman" left me as cold as the graphic novels did until Shakespeare showed up. There is a dreaming, indeed.
Over on YouTube the algorithm turned up a Cary Grant movie I had never heard of This Is the Night . That it had Thelma Todd was what attracted my attention. I knew about her death but could never recall her from any movie. Attractive, funny, and, yeah, I can see why her death was a shocker. But it was another actress who caught my attention -Lili Damita - the rather notorious first wife of Erroll Flynn. I had never heard anything of her acting, so her being a charming fireball was a surprise. However, the fascinating thing about the movie was the opening; never seen one like it, call it jazz on film.
I was less impressed by The Brasher Dubloon; the novel is not my favorite Raymond Chandler novel, I like even Playback better; the movie is uneven, reminding me of better actors in the role such as Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum, but it beats Altman's The Long Goodbye.
This is the kind of movie that needs to be remade - good enough and could be better.
The same with this one, that never seems to come to life, and I understand why I have not seen it in too many decades to admit.
Thank you for submitting your piece "Agnes" to Thin Air online.
Our editorial staff has given it careful consideration and
unfortunately must pass at this time. Although we are not accepting your
work, our team was excited to have the chance to read and consider it.
We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Kruger, Web Editor
And this was not much of a surprise:
Thank you
for submitting "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984." We
regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest
in The Paris Review.
I need to make some calls. I thought of calling KH last night when I got thinking of the distance between old songs and today. For some reason, I got to going through Hank Willaims Jr. songs just before bedtime last night. He's not a soul singer like Waylon, but I like what he's doing now with country blues. That got me thinking about late style. He got pressed into the service of a country music that had little to offer him, he moved over to a more rocking, outlaw style, then got popular and somewhat stupid about politics, and with the country blues he is putting out music that has feeling.
Speaking of Waylon, this just came across the speakers from an old live song, something I used to think was corny and now sounds like a better view of America than is coming to me today.
The sheriff called the other day, wanting to do an interview as the DOC has implemented some new rules. I have no idea what the rules are. So, tomorrow I go out there, taking a break from work to satisfy some bureaucratic fears about my existence. Your tax dollars at work.
The writer's group meets today, and I intend to be there. Also, I need to hit a grocery. And deposit my Indiana tax refund. I probably should take time for my mail rather than my email.
I am supposed to be working on "Agnes" - maybe I can get to it this afternoon. It will let me get a grip on this research project to not be working on it all day today.
And that is pretty much life as it is here in Muncie. The sun is up now, two hours after I came back from the convenience store and started cleaning up this post. I suspect a few more will come out that will be more political,
And it could be time for breakfast.
Maybe I did get to you, I do know I got where I am going.
I spent yesterday's morning in Indianapolis. First, still trying to find the computer K wanted. No such luck. What I did learn was not to trust Staples' inventorying software. Online, Plainfield was shown as having the computer. Plainfield said that their computer showed North Keystone had three. I went to North Keystone, they had none. When I called Plainfield, the fellow who went to see their actual stock could not find one. I gave up. K was going to work off money lent her by typing up the “Chasing Ashes” manuscript. Someone else will do it for me.
Then I spent hours at the McKinney Law School law library. Too fat, too hot, it was a struggle that it ought not have been. Memory kept losing instructions on how to use their scanner. It was also not helpful in finding the Indiana Reports. I did not finish the job, either. Which worked out to my benefit. There was a massive thunderstorm that hit as I was leaving and accompanied me all the way home. Indianapolis streets were flooding. When I got back here, I found out the biggest selection did not get sent from the scanner.
I thought I would go back today, but I was too tired at 5 AM. I stayed that way for most of the day. I did manage a quit trip to Anderson and having two Spanish dogs from Gene's Root Beer. They were delicious.
I got the car back to Enterprise on time - 1 PM. Then I made my way back here. A siesta seemed like a good idea. Not ready for the heat; I need to get my inhalers. Two more hard rains came in the afternoon.
I think I heard frogs croaking this morning after the rains, and then again a little while ago. It might be something else. Not any bird song I recognized, so frogs seem likely, if bizarre.
Thank you for sending us your work. This particular submission wasn't chosen for publication, but we are grateful for your interest in our journal. We wouldn't be able to continue without writers like you.
Great luck with your writing, among all other things.
New editions of Georges Simenon's non-Maigret novels are coming out: The Crimes Georges Simenon Declined to Investigate. I admire the Maigret stories but find his non-Maigret novels fascinating. I did not even know of them until I was in my fifties. Do not wait so long to read them.
At the center of the recognition is Muncie Community Schools’ dramatic improvement
in early grade reading. During the 2024-2025 school year, districtwide
reading proficiency climbed from 69.8 percent to 79.2 percent, a
9.4-percentage-point increase that outpaced statewide gains. Grissom
Elementary posted one of the most significant improvements in Indiana,
increasing its third-grade reading proficiency rate from 46.6 percent to
79 percent in a single year.
StriveTogether leaders described Muncie as an example of how
place-based partnerships can drive long-term systems change when
communities align around shared data, coordinated strategies and
collective accountability. The national organization’s annual report
noted that more than 70 organizations and 200 individuals participate in
Cradle to Career Muncie’s work through The Opportunity Blueprint: 2030, a strategic plan shaped by more than 150 local voices.
Local leaders say the progress reflects years of intentional collaboration.
Massie lost in Kentucky. Trump now owns the Republicans. Considering what happens when Trump[ owns anything, this should be the end of the Republican Party.
A little-known nonprofit created by
Indiana lawmakers more than four decades ago could become a major lender
for student loan borrowers.
The Indiana Secondary Market for
Education Loans — which operates under the name INvestEd — issues
private student loans at interest rates starting at 4.26% to 8.51% — far
below the maximum 17.99% interest rate charged by some of its
for-profit competitors.
The nonprofit’s motto is simple: The best student loan is no loan at all.
But leaders at INvestEd anticipate a
surge in demand for private loans once tighter federal student loan
restrictions and borrowing limits take effect July 1.
I never heard of this, but then after 1987 I had no interest in the subject.
I have seen Springsteen twice in Indianapolis and I saw Mellancamp only once. I would have liked to have seen Mellancamp more, but never was lucky to do so.
The disappointment in not reaching our national ideals is, to baby boomers, a promise unmet, a dream that, though not currently coming true, is nonetheless not a lie. Still, Springsteen builds. He does so, in the figurative sense through his music, through the conscious construction of his backup band as a community, and through the connection with his fans. But I also mean that Springsteen has a commitment to building and to physical buildings. The people of Springsteen’s generation believed in building. They believed in structures. Their landscape is one of edifices, their monuments were of the concrete and steel variety, not the conceptual or the electronic. This is why Springsteen has sung about: towers, churches, jails, tunnels, skylines, reservoirs, bridges, trestles, risings, mansions (of glory, of fear, on the hill), sidewalks, roads, streets, avenues, boulevards, girders, promenades, railroad tracks, rafters, and in at least three different songs, refineries. If Springsteen’s catalog were an infrastructure bill it would bring down unemployment to the Fed’s target of 2 percent. This is a performer who has mentioned “highways” more often in song lyrics (406 times according to SpringsteenLyrics.com) than there are highways in New Jersey (117 active state highways according to Wikipedia).
The people who built our country, according to Springsteen, are to be praised for their industry rather than decried as despoilers or thieves of stolen land. Springsteen himself is a sometimes disappointed but never cynical citizen of an America that builds. He is a steady purveyor of a message that might not always be uplifting, but is always, sometimes literally, constructive. He is an artist whose function is not to convince you to tear it all down, but to craft the case that there is a reason to believe.
Scott Ramsey moved to Anderson; I met him in Tenth Grade. He introduced me to Springsteen by way of Born to Run. You would think that Springsteen would have been more popular in Indiana, but he was not. The first concert I saw was during The River Tour.
Indianapolis was the only show of the tour not to sell out. Rush sold
out a month later. Springsteen turned up the lights at the end and
played on, and people danced in their seats. Based on bootlegs I heard,
I'm of the opinion that he never gave Indy one of his better shows but
gave us shows deserving of the audience. He lost me when he ditched the E
Street Band (as Seger did when he moved away from The Silver Bullet
Band).
Mellencamp grew up modestly but comfortably in the idyllic town of
Seymour, Indiana, the son of a mother who was an artist and nascent
beauty queen, and a father who worked a white-collar job with a local
electrical contracting firm. Like much of his heartland rock cohort,
Mellencamp wrote from his life—the people and places of his formative
years burrowing into his lyrics as an adult. Though Mellencamp had a
comfortable upbringing, he saw the hardship endured by his extended
family and rural neighbors, the farmers and other laborers. If Bruce
Springsteen’s greatest gift was mythologizing the existential open
graves swallowing up blue-collar workers, Mellencamp’s was his piercing
ability to at once celebrate and dismantle agrarian fantasy.
I agree with the piece about Mellencamp up to a point. It may be a bias of mine that the following song from the John Cougar album set out what he was really about and remains. But then it was a favorite of me and my friends as soon as we heard it. This was the Indiana we knew.
What really changed was his sound. “Great Midwest” is like many of the songs on his first album that I would like to hear played in his later style.
When I was in New Jersey, it was rare to hear anything of his music past “Hurts So Good,” and that was sad. He has continued to push himself in a way that I do not think that Springsteen has. It may be Bruce is a little more affable than John.
The title sums up my day. Lioturgy, reading my email and writing a few blog posts, a nap for two hours around 6 PM thinking I would just call it day, a trip to the convenience store for Coke Zero, and a drive through Muncie. All was quiet in town. We have gotten too old for being out at 10 PM.
Few albums have been so appropriately named as Aerosmith's 1976 classic Rocks. Despite hard drug use escalating among bandmembers, Aerosmith produced a superb follow-up to their masterwork Toys in the Attic, nearly topping it in the process. Many Aero fans will point to Toys as the band's quintessential album (it contained two radio/concert standards after all, "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion"), but out of all their albums, Rocks did the best job of capturing Aerosmith at their most raw and rocking....
I saw Aerosmith once in concert (they used to be a staple in Indianapolis), but never bought any of their albums. TJ was quite the fan, though. What they did after regrouping pretty much sucks.
Pitchfork reviewed Fanny's Fanny Hill. This was a band that I had of over the years, never heard, never saw an album, but found in my sixties on YouTube. They were a great band.
But of course, all of it is true: Fanny deserve to be celebrated because
they did what no other women had done before them; they deserve to be
celebrated because they made great music; they made great music that’s
inseparable from their experience as outsiders, as subjects of
harassment and underestimation, as artists dreaming of something better.
Even if just briefly, they made that dream real—it led them to their
“sorority” in the Hollywood Hills and the album that bears its name: a
radical act of sisterhood and creative freedom smuggled inside a classic
rock’n’roll dream.
The review does not mention this song, a cover of my favorite Cream song, and it is so impressive catching something that was not in the original.
The review does mention this song:
I also created a playlist for J and T2, Big Voiced Brit Singers For Your Listening Pleasure:
