Starting A New Week - Writing, Literary Stuff, Rejections, Bookers, Colson Whitehead, Otters.

Lollygagging around the apartment this morning. I have gotten caught up with Orphan Black. Now, that is an excellent thriller. I went down to the convenience store. Not sure if I want to go out again.

Yesterday's trip to Walmart was partially successful. I had to leave some items there because I ran out of time to catch the bus. 

Working on the blog last night and today are the closest I came to any writing.

Bad insomnia last night. Discomfort continues from the surgery. I really want to take it easy, to do this recovery right.

Items related to writing follow.

 How To Write the Perfect Cover Letter Even Tho Nobody Cares (+ formatting and submission methods)

 (3) The Do’s and Don’ts of Cover Letters

 Writing Queernormative Worlds: World Building Workshop - C. M. Rosens

‘It Was A Matter Of Lust’ and other poems - Literary Yard

The Booker Prize 2026 not likely to read them any more than I get any other books read.

Should the Booker Prize Be Quirkier? (Thornfield Hall)

Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man should be a laugh for Musk and the racist trolls who were so worried about a feminist Odyssey because Nolan used Wilson's translation. 

ROFLMAO: Nolan's 'The Odyssey' ruined a poem I never bothered to read

 What I Learned from a Close Read of All of Colson Whitehead’s Work (Literary Hub) an overview of one of America's best writers.

Oops, I thought I had withdrawn this one:

Thank you for submitting "Going For The Kid" to Tome and Space. Unfortunately, we have decided not to accept it for our publication.

We appreciate the time and effort taken to share it with us.

Sincerely,

The Tome and Space Editors

And a rejection for “After Making Landfall”, but for an older version:

Thank you for sending a submission for the upcoming issue of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Although we feel your work has many positives, after much deliberation, we decided it was not a good fit for us at this time. 

We receive many incredible stories, poems, non-fiction, and images, and we are forced to select only a handful of pieces. Know that though your work will not be in this next issue, our staff welcomes your submissions and truly hopes to continue receiving material from you. Should you wish to send us another submission, please wait until the next submission period opens.

We do accept—and encourage—simultaneous submissions. You can find listings for where to send submissions at the following:

http://newpages.com/

https://www.chillsubs.com/lists

http://www.everywritersresource.com/literarymagazines/.

Http://www.duotrope.com is perhaps the best source but charges a fee. There is a free trial, however.

If you have any questions regarding your submission or any other publishing matter, please feel free to contact the editor via our website.

Thank you for your support of literary and art publications in general and especially of SBLAAM.

And completely off topic: Bay Area wildlife mystery leaves researchers 'somewhat horrified'.

sch

Recuperating, Not Spry

 Healing but not doing much more.

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

Got a rejection. 

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


All our best,

A Public Space 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding  (Reactor) 

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

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

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

How America’s newspapers lost their voice 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rest Is History (Lapham’s Quarterly )

Who Cares? (Sheila Kennedy)

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

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

How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (Engelsberg ideas)

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon (The New Republic)

What Do You Have to Hide? - by Jared Henderson

WNAP-FM | Listen Online - myTuner Radio

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

sch

 

 

Goofing

 Sorry to do this since The New Yorker is mostly behind a paywall, but it has consumed my reading lately.

Colson Whitehead’s Big Score - more than Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Lethem, or even Michael Chabon, I think Whitehead is the guy to read and think on what he is doing. Even if he hails from New York.

Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers

On Ogygia, Calypso makes Odysseus an extraordinary offer: if he will stay with her, she will grant him immortality and eternal youth. He refuses, choosing to return to his aging wife and to the certainty of death. If Socrates is the intellectual hero of the ancient world, and Jesus the spiritual hero, Odysseus—hardened, brutal, grief-struck, determined to reclaim his home—is the human hero, the whole man. He accepts death, and that’s one reason he remains essential to us. Nolan faces the challenge of creating a hero for the multiplexes who is ruthless and at times cruel. The audience faces the even greater challenge of accepting a man far more complicated than any superhero of recent years. What’s called for in successfully adapting the Odyssey is a great director and—how else can one put it?—a movie audience capable of courage. 

Consider Why The Odyssey has caused so much controversy. Why complain about a transgender actor or a black one? Who would they have cast? How would they have written the movie or directed it? The director made a choice. The writer made choices. The actors were selected to fit these choices. No one wants to complain about not casting Greeks? Why not complain about not casting real Cyclopes? Why not complain about using English and not Dorian Greek? Purity ultimately kills. Authenticity destroys creativity. Get over yourselves, start creating your own movies, and stop whining about how others do not create to your demands but to their own vision. That seems to be what we are lacking at this time in history: vision.

László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails. Another writer who fascinates me in how he writes and what he writes about. I did a long post earlier today about the Supergirl reviews. This seems to fit in with my obsessions, see what I wrote above about The Odyssey, too. I wonder if technology - especially social media - has made us smaller. Are our imaginations limited by timidity?

So, each novel has emerged from this obsession with perfecting your own prose. Your characters are also obsessives. They are men who seek sacred encounters with rare and beautiful objects: a manuscript, a garden, a whale skeleton, the music of Bach, the books in the New York Public Library, the Acropolis. Almost no one understands or sympathizes with these men. Often, they are destroyed. Some are mutilated. Some die once they realize that, as one character says, “The higher realm had disappeared from the human world.” What is the cost of being obsessed with beauty in the human world, a world of barbarism, where nothing is sacred?

Everything that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation to it, for it to hold our souls.

In my own books, this began to be one of the most important themes for me. I placed this dilemma onto my characters, so that I could tell the story of how they were doing in this question, and how they ended up failing. There is a single personal characteristic to my books: I place my own failures onto this or that character appearing in my novels, so that he is the one to suffer, because I don’t want to suffer anymore.

Are we at an especially low point in our relationship to beauty and an especially high point in our suffering?

There were several ages in human history, and now I’m only speaking of European civilization. From the European cultural point of view there was, here in the Mediterranean, a pragmatic culture which regarded the divine presence as self-evident. To perform a sacrifice in front of a temple so as to influence a god or goddess was not seen as any kind of problem. This kind of relationship made the lives of people living in ancient times unproblematic in terms of the dichotomy between the transcendent and the space of reality. Then, in European culture, Christianity appeared, a religion which made an astonishing discovery, namely, that the primary cause for everything—humans, animals, nature, fertility, the inanimate world, the universe, the cosmos—could be concentrated into one single point. This made everyone calm down, and immediately step into a space where there was no longer any border between the divine and the human real. With regards to human nature, the main question became how this recognition could be distributed throughout a given society, whether in Europe or in the Near East.

Of course, it was never ideal, and it didn’t mean that, as in a fairy tale, everyone could step into some kind of unproblematic relationship with the divine whenever they wanted. God provided a surface for the instance of beauty. This surface was the outward appearance of something, its given form. It was, to express it in very general terms, an entity that could be designated. And then the Renaissance came along, which was also strongly pragmatic, and there were many more possibilities for a so-called educated person, stepping away slightly from the mystical or transcendent relation, to reach a purely human beauty, a beauty created by human means. After the Baroque is when the problems continuously begin to occur. A world divested not of God but of the divine, this was certainly problematic for humankind. You could enjoy it, because the world exists even without God, and we human beings are capable of building whatever we want. Because, well, where are we now?

We’re in a disenchanted technical civilization.

Yet this current technical civilization is astonishingly genial, even with all of its enormous problems, because it appears to be almost unlimited. And since the human being is dangerous, therefore the technical civilization that he has created is also dangerous. But the relation to this border has fundamentally changed. Ever since the Enlightenment, let’s say, the modern human being does not require this relation to the border. Michelangelo is a fridge magnet now. He is a photograph I take as I stand in front of a statue by him. But he is still good. Other things are still good. The “Mona Lisa” is good, that magnificent temple so close to where we’re sitting is good. Everything is good; the main thing is that I can’t experience it.

If we were to ask—how many people are on the planet now, maybe eight billion?—if we were to ask five billion tourists if they knew something about the Acropolis, I think everybody in this room would be very sad. The answer would be, Yes, I saw the Acropolis, it was very beautiful, but let’s say that the sun was shining a lot that day, and I hardly saw anything of the Acropolis, because I didn’t bring my sunglasses. We can call this deterioration, but we could also describe it as something else: that the demands of the modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern person have changed. This person demands a life in which pleasure is granted the primary role. This is a very comfortable attitude for such a creature as man.

It can be imagined that this is not a negative process. The important thing is the beauty that Michelangelo created, or the beauty that was constructed by the genius or geniuses who made the Acropolis. But it is likely that there will be ever fewer of us who feel this way. Our relationship to the past has radically changed. A good half of it is misunderstood. Culture today, during this flowering of European populism, is nothing more than a kind of ridiculous right-wing or extreme-right-wing ideology of tradition, in which culture is noble, and makes me noble, and anyone unwilling to accept this becomes my enemy. A kind of emotional relation comes into being, but it is an absolutely negative emotional relation.

I’m very happy that I’m as old as I am, because I truly feel sorry for the ones who are young. I can lament a cultural age. Perhaps this isn’t even an age in that sense of the term, not in the sense that the Baroque or the Roman or the ancient Greek culture represented an age but, rather, the entire occurrence of human civilization to date represents one single epoch, and that is over. If it is really over, I’m very happy to lament over it.

*** 

 To me, this is unacceptable. The first movement of despair, when a person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background whatsoever. When a human being loses his sense of identity, there will be a need for so-called national identity and similarly idiotic ideas. Traditionalism, or clinging to it, is already a political category. Let it remain so, or, better yet, let it not play any role in the political sphere whatsoever, if only because it can only lead to enormous problems.

***

It is clear what rebellion in relation to the part means. In an unbearable situation, it becomes impossible to further withstand a certain state of affairs. Here we are speaking of some concrete matter, a given oppression, layoffs in a factory, a bad pension system, and so on. However, rebellion that relates to the whole gives birth to despair. Human existence senses that something impedes it from subsisting. This is like when a person is in complete darkness, and they see nothing, and they are afraid, they tremble, and they flail around. You must imagine an enormous darkness, where a person is searching for some kind of light, because this person is simply attempting to rebel against the darkness by trying to remedy their own state of despair, and this is the rebellion of the person’s whole mind, namely, it is when a person can no longer withstand their own self, and considers not only human life in a given situation to be unacceptable but also the entire world, the entirety of human civilization, the human condition, and attempts to somehow box themselves out of it. I do not wish any of you to experience this. I do not wish it for you, or for myself.  

I have not seen Doonesbury for maybe 30 years, maybe more, but it got its hooks in me when I was only 18. Now, there is a biography of TRudeau and a review of the biography from  Los Angeles Review of Books, The Deadline Dickens.

Weekly Readings #229 (06/22/26-06/28/26) - by John Pistelli is another provocation, I am never sure if I understand Pistelli's ideas and then I am not sure how to apply, but I still like butting my head against it all.

(3) 52 An Interview with Robert J. Sawyer & The Peking Man  

And that is how I goofed Sunday evening away. 

sch 6/28 

Orhan Pamuk Speaks - What I Found on YouTube

 I read Pamuk after I turned 50. What has attracted me to his novels is his writing about places and times. 

He sees the Turk as European and Middle Eastern. He sees Turkey as both modern and historical; a place trying to find its place as a former empire, a former Great Power, and a modern state of importance. 

 So what? It has to do with me being in the Midwest. The East Coast has its economic, cultural, and political power. The South lies across the Ohio River with its scars of slavery and the Civil War. The West's romance is hours to the west.

Let me put that another way. 

Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon, Gore Vidal, Joseph Heller, Dennis Lehane, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Stephen King are to the east of me.

William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Conner, Jessamyn West, Walker Percy, John Kennedy O'Toole, Jonathan Franzen (being from Missouri) and William Styron are to the south. 

Turning west I find John Steinbeck, Larry McMurty, Craig Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, A.B. Guthrie, Mark Twain (who also suddenly seems the most cosmopolitan of American writers - he could be southern, he spent time fitting into the east, and, if I could fit a slave state into the Midwest, and Midwestern), Raymond Chandler, Annie Proulx, Dashiel Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.

Those belonging to my Midwest: Kurth Vonnegut, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Nelson Algren, Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, and Michael Martone.

Put another way: the Midwest supplied the men who destroyed the Slave Power, then built the factories that supplied the country and the world, and then lost the peace to the South and saw their factories shuttered. It is an empire that lost its power and holds onto former eminence while wandering in the desert searching for its future.

Yes, I think Pamuk might have something to teach us. 

He is also an engaging human being with a lively intelligence.

Orhan Pamuk in Conversation with Merve Emre 

A Dialogue on Facts Fiction History: Umberto Eco - Orhan Pamuk (Full Version)

Orhan Pamuk - VO (4) - William Marx (2022-2023)

Big Think Interview With Orhan Pamuk | Big Think

Why he made a nveol into a museum

 

Finally, what I had collected into a YouTube Playlist

My other Orhan Pamuk posts are here. 

 

sch 5/18 

Writers: Colson Whitehead

I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Mysteries, Crimes, Interpretations - Happy Labor Day!

 Last night, I ran across the Edward Petherbridge version of Lord Peter Wimsey TV shows. They have been in the background this morning, too.

The shows led me to 'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?' Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog

Martin Edwards is a crime novelist who has received the CWA Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in UK crime writing, as well as lifetime achievement awards for his short fiction, crime writing, and scholarship...

I cannot say that I read it in depth, but what I did led me to be a follower and to recommend it to you.

Last night, I also found another good reason for having subscribed to Peacock: New Tricks. We had Cold Case, with its crusading, stiff-lipped investigator solving closed cases when the British had New Tricks. Older cops are led by a younger female. I always thought this was one English show that would do well adapted here (The Closer and Major Crimes came the closest with its humor and unit interactions.)

The news from General strike brings Israel to a halt, pressuring Netanyahu on hostages needs this comment: the Israelis protest Netanyahu's Gaza incursion while Americans are called anti-Israeli for the same criticism.

Electric Literature published an extract from MISINTERPRETATION by Ledia Xhoga under Intimacy of Interpretation. I never thought about what goes on with interpretation. Bridging gaps, making disparate parts understandable to one another. This seems to me what I am supposed to be doing with my writing - here and with my fiction. I seem to be failing on both fronts.

It seems there is now a filmed version of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys: ‘Nickel Boys’ Review: RaMell Ross Breaks Free of Reform-School Tropes, but Loses the Plot in the Process

Out of smokes and RC Cola, the pork is in the slow cooker. I will take a break and walk down to the convenience store.

sch 11:11 AM

Best Books of The 21st Century

 Since I am cheap, I have been avoiding The New York Times. The NYT recently published a list of the best books, so far, of this century. This I have not read, but the email has sent me two people who have read the list. 

Ted Gioia wrote The Best Books of the 21st Century. Mr. Gioia is someone who I have come to respect. He gives the top ten. 

(10) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
(9) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(8) Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
(7) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
(6) 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
(5) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
(4) The Known World by Edward P. Jones
(3) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
(2) The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
(1) My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrant

I have not read the Bolano. Jones, or the Wilkerson novel. While I admit to an anti-Franzen bias, that is a pretty good top ten. I like seeing Colson Whitehead there. 

More importantly, he goes on to write about My Brilliant Friend. I cannot recall when I read Ferrante - it was while I was in prison, let us say within the 10 years. Gioia points out what struck me most about the Neapolitan novels, a view into a different world than I see in American novels:

The image of success is almost more important than any financial measures of its magnitude. We have now left the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story far behind. Instead we merely exchange today’s rags for tomorrow’s more expensive looking rags.

This sense of a constraining destiny is especially evident in the novel’s secondary characters—and these play a prominent role in the book. Ferrante even provides a guide to the nine different families involved in her tale, as well as other parties who help propel the narrative forward. The conflicts and rivalries will dominate the book, and though many of these friends and neighbors have dreams and ambitions, their freedom to act is limited at every hand.

Most people I know have given up on sticking-to-itness. I know I did, that was part of my depression - finding out that no matter how hard I worked during my fifties, I was not going to get where I wanted to go. Most people I know feel they are stuck. No, some did not attempt to further their education. Substance abuse got in the way of others. Some found success did not matter as much as attending the right schools. Many believed that corporate America would return with the jobs our parents had. Ferrante's world had none of our American examples; her go-getters resemble the people I have known.

Lincoln Michel plunged into a more detailed criticism of the list with his Three Thoughts on the NYT Top 100: Missing Millennials, Fading Autofiction, the Genre-Bending Era. Here are the issues he raises.

The biases toward American novels (and political and historical nonfiction) and against translated literature, poetry, story collections, graphic novels, and essay collections is notable but also expected. Americans simply don’t read much poetry or translated literature. Similarly, the bias toward big press books instead of indie press books. One thing I spent yesterday discussing with another writer that was surprising—at least to me—is the lack of younger writers. The list is heavily weighted toward writers over 65. There is not a single author under 40. Unless I missed someone, there are only two millennials on the entire list: Fernanda Melchor and Torrey Peters. If you move the cutoff to 1980 births, Justin Torres would also count. Still, only 2-3 titles out of 100 for the generation most of this century? There are no zoomers and even Gen X is underrepresented. This is a list of boomer authors, largely. (Generations are fake of course, but an easy shorthand.)

Being 64, I suppose that I should not mind this, but I do. KH and I were talking recently about bands/singers that should give up performing. They are not giving room for new talent, for new styles. I feel the same way about writing.

I think one can make an easy argument that the biggest trend in the literary fiction world has been, in fact, genre fiction. Or rather “genre-bending” work that bridges literary fiction style and themes with genre fiction tropes and concepts. Like autofiction, this is a fraught term. Both are labels people can claim are hardly new at all. There have always been books that blurred literary style and genre tropes, and however you define autofiction there are precedents stretching back centuries. But labels can be useful for thinking about larger trends in culture. And anyway, what’s the point of a literary newsletter but to dissect such hobbyhorses?

This trend I figured out in prison when I decided to start writing again and began reading as widely as I could. I find it silly not to look back at the 19th Century and see that many great novels did not fit into any genre. I have come up with answers to my question of why literature disdained genre: 1) the apprenticeship of American writers in journalism (although Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a crime novel); and 2) publishers paid attention to marketing experts.

Check out the original essays, please. 

sch 7/13

Too Much to Say, Too Little Time

 The weekend is shot thanks to an ear infection, or something like that.

Yesterday, when I walked there was a acanting to the right. Today, the room spun and I headed back to bed.

I did accomplish talking to K and DM tonight.

There was much to catch up on. I have not added to the supervised release notes since Wednesday.

Thursday there was a visit from my PO. He came both to work and apparently to the room. I used "apparently" since his card was stuck in my room door when I returned. Maybe he forgot I worked for a living? He was his usual lugubrious self with his usual irrelevant questions. Have I been around minors is irrelevant since I never spent any time around them since I was a minor myself. He never follows up his questions about why or why not. I have long assumed they were merely perfunctory on his part; perhaps he hopes to catch me in a lie when the time comes for my polygraph. This time I explained the answers were not going to change, this was how I was living my life. I treat his existence as just as perfunctory. He announced he would be sending me an email seeking income information in case I needed help with the therapist he would be sending to me. Against my better judgment, I asked a question and got the answer expected. When asked about the therapeutic purpose of this new therapy, he said it was in the order and it would help me reintegrate into society. This was in the order a year or so ago, I have been on supervised release for over 2 years, so I am left thinking the probation department does not move very quickly, has no great concerns for my own abilities to reintegrate myself, and they are rather irrelevant to my reintegration. I have kept this record up of my doings while on supervised release so that you, dear reader, can make your own judgments on my danger to the republic. What I have sought to do is something positive with the time left me; the court order is only interested in keeping me away from behaviors that got me in trouble. The first presumes the second and also makes it a subsidiary. I did ask another question, since the PO did not deign to answer my email, about him sending the polygraph results to my counselor. He has not, nor did he appear likely to do so.

I cannot recall what I did later on Thursday. I think I went to the grocery. Payless on the west side, yes. I got more tilapia and chipotle peppers.

Friday, I went nowhere. I did catch hell from the owners about the cat. He ran in the apartment. They want no pets. I do not want any pets. No pets, no girlfriends, no more emotional attachments. Since Joni died, I do not think I bear any more losses. I understand why my father wanted no pets - they would die. Right now, he sleeps on my spare chair, a very housebroken, very calm cat. He will need to go out soon.

I remember being chilled on Thursday night. I did get a little writing done Friday night - under 1000 words. Even less yesterday.

I did put a dent in the email. Also, cleaned up "The Dead and The Dying" by putting in a Table of Contents.

I do not have time to write what I have read, so I am going to make a list here:

• Longstreet: the Confederate general who switched sides on race (Where I learned much I did not know before, and which may also show reason and ideals may not trump racism and pride)
• Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover review – the making of a master
• How Patrick Stewart went from the Bard to where no man has gone before 
• An Antisemitism Studies Primer by Shane Burley
• The Surprising Origins of Experimental Science: A Conversation with Peter Harrison, Part Two

A weird novel of an old actress and murder, with echoes of Sontag 

 Late
Michael Fitzgerald
Transit Lounge, $32.99
Helen Elliott

Michael Fitzgerald’s third novel, Late, owes much to a seductive monster who looked like Cruella de Vil and called herself Susan Sontag. In her influential essay from 1964, Notes on Camp, Sontag writes: “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

Sontag defines camp as a sensibility, an artifice that makes theatre of everything. Notes On Camp opened up fresh ways of understanding across all the arts and in the performance of life itself. Late, set in the late 1980s, an internal narrative of a woman living in an apartment with a harbour view, measures up to Sontag’s useful observations.

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Fitzgerald, an admirer of Joyce – generally a cause of trembling in a reader – plots the vagaries of an old and uncontained mind, unable to process with any clarity. Writing like this is also an exercise in personal taste and is here done with an archness that is all within the scope of camp rather than in the elastic genius of Joyce. Sontag’s idea about seriousness and frivolity working constantly within the same frame can be exasperating. An extravagance of learning is in every line, but this excess can defeat access to the text.

And there is this: Zelda Zonk in all her disguises, in all her ramblings, never touches us. Tragedy is always outside camp’s remit. Fans, collectors, specialists of camp could love this frankly weird novel. As frankly weird as Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett, both defined by camp, both much admired and both now un-read except by scholarly specialists. Like them, Late will have a coterie of admirers.

Top Diplomat Of Ecumenical Patriarchate Delves Into Catholic-Orthodox Relations 

Metropolitan Job of Pisidia is an Orthodox bishop of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He is the Permanent Representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the World Council of Churches and co-President of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic church and the Orthodox church. These significant posts make him a top diplomat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. an Orthodox bishop of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He is the Permanent Representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the World Council of Churches and co-President of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic church and the Orthodox church. These significant posts make him a top diplomat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

After the mushroom cloud: The origin story of the king of monsters by Bryan Karetnyk 

The standard account holds that Tanaka took the idea to the studio top brass, who green-lit the project, hoping to capitalize on the Japanese public’s renewed fear of nuclear weapons and radiation – and the rest, as they say, is history. Godzilla, the monstrous embodiment of nuclear holocaust, an inexorable menace that breathes white-hot radioactivity and lays waste to entire cities, was born of an artistic collaboration between the renowned film-maker Ishirō Honda and the special-effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, going on to become the multibillion-dollar entertainment franchise that it is today. But as we are reminded by Jeffrey Angles and his translations of Shigeru Kayama’s novellas Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again – their first-ever appearances in English – this version of events misses a crucial part of the story. “Although lots of people at Toho Studios contributed to the first Godzilla movie, Kayama was the one who developed Tanaka’s vague idea for a film into more or less what we know today”, writes Angles. “He deserves to be better known as the ‘real father’ of Godzilla.”

I never read The Fear of Flying, but it was a book known when I was a teenager. I think I discounted it as anything interesting until I read a bit more about Jong in prison. There was a copy in the prison library catalog, which copy had gone missing. Reading The prose takes off: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying at 50
by Elaine Showalter makes me think my sister is right about my arrogance.

For me Fear of Flying stands up as an audacious and ambitious first novel with a wide range of reference: epigraphs from Byron, Shakespeare, Colette and Cole Porter; discussions of women writers, and her own wish to be a female Chaucer. It has a terrific opening paragraph: “There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh … I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures”. Isadora Wing is the narrator, and her husband, Bennett, is on the plane, therapeutically holding her hand during take-off. They are all heading to Vienna for the 1971 Psychoanalytic Congress honouring Freud, who had left the city in 1938 amid rising antisemitism. Isadora has been hired by a magazine called Voyeur to write a satirical article about the congress. And initially the novel seems to be a satire on psychoanalysis.

But then it quickly announces its theme: being female in America, where “you grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, whoreoscopes … and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas”. Even if you’re very smart it doesn’t matter, because you are conditioned to choose marriage and motherhood, and to suppress “the longings which marriage stifled … to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head … to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something”.

 While KH finds creative writing limited by MFAs, I am troubled by a literary America fixated on Brooklyn. I do think highly of Colson Whitehead and Jonathon Lethem, but there is more to America. I have hopes of inspiring someone out here in the Midwest to write our own stories. My reading Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem review – death of a neighborhood leaves me thinking Lethem sees some of the same problems, and leaves me wishing I were younger and could write a story like his.

Brooklyn Crime Novel is a fictionalised memoir channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes that jump around in time, a fractured and granular narrative with a plurality of vocal tics. In what is more a sociological inquiry than a forensic one, the author interrogates what happened to the neighbourhood he grew up in, and we overhear the collective splutter of the street. The crimes and misdemeanours investigated become plural too, and uncertain, but a single plaintiff emerges: Brooklyn itself. In a time of staggering gentrification a whole community has become orphaned, a victim of displacement and dispossession.

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Given his genre-bending proclivities, it’s no surprise that Lethem makes a bold grab at the fashionable mode of autofiction. Adding some deadpan sparkle to a form that can often be flat and drab, he comes up with something truly compelling. Anonymising his characters, giving them nicknames or unattributed pronouns, is perhaps witness protection for old friends. But in refusing to fictionalise his compatriots he gives up his own authority as a “voice” for them, and simply allows a neighbourhood to speak for itself. There’s real sincerity here and I felt engaged to the end, carried along by an honest, melancholy humour. This is a heartfelt testimony of Brooklyn, where the urge for discretion outweighs the temptations of style. “I am in their company,” Lethem says of the locals. “I love them too much to want to say any more.”

My "Dead and Dying" stories were meant to be on the sociological side; they fell flat from that theme. It seems Lethem found a way to do it right.

 I found the museum of americana while seeking publishers; it sounds interesting, even if I have nothing to offer:

the museum of americana is an online literary review dedicated to fiction, poetry, nonfiction, photography, and artwork that examines, revives, or repurposes the old, the dying, the forgotten, or the almost entirely unknown aspects of Americana.

the museum of americana was founded on two core beliefs. The first is that, while certainly not all aspects of Americana ought to be praised or celebrated, there is still great value in holding even that which is embarrassing or difficult up to the light to see what it is made of. The second is that there is much to love and celebrate in historical American culture. It is published out of fascination with the big, weird, wildly contradictory collage that is our nation’s cultural history. the museum will appear three times a year, in the winter, summer, and fall.

From that site, I read Make Peace with the Cake by Olga Zilberbourg. I recommend it.

There was no going back to that kitchen, though, and no predicting what, to Leo, would feel as special, as precious, about his birthday. I couldn’t protect him from the pandemic. I couldn’t stop a dictator from waging war. I couldn’t even stop a man from brandishing a gun at his son’s birthday party. Cake was a safe bet. And a bouncy house.

There should be more. Maybe tomorrow.

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