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.
If any of you have been reading my posts, you should know I am enamored by Zadie Smith. She is intelligent, and humorous. There is also her perspective, or her perspectives, about class and identity. That she finds herself stupid about so many things sounds like me. She also teaches - and I suspect she does it very well, she is doing this while on what is essentially a book tour. I spent two hours yesterday with her voice in my ear, listening to her deflate oligarchs, the bondage of slavery, identities, frauds, and writing. In the end, she is a person of good sense.
For Americans, she has lived and taught here. What she has to say about America deserves our attention.
Zadie Smith is good company, whether in these videos or through her prose.
Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Zadie Smith
Even writers and the would-be writer should listen to this. America seen by foreigners. I dispute that Americans do not see an African-American middle class, but that might be of where I live, and lived. Generally, both sides of the color line are pretty much ignorant of the other side. I learned that in prison.
Ian McEwan about his new book, and our current culture:
Did not really turn out that way. I have a pile of papers to go through in the morning. The first problem came when the PO called and let me know he was coming up. In a way, that lit a fire under me, who had actually slept in. I ran out to get new windshield wipers for a friend. Back here, I got the bedroom into shape.
The PO showed up. He let me know that with the budget cuts/government shutdown, I might have to start paying for my polygraph exams. Well, that might put that silliness into a new perspective. I found he fished; I had always thought him a hunter. The usual silly questions about pathological issues that do not exist. He arrived around 1 pm and left a half hour later.
While waiting for him to show up, I started on my email. Then I started putting together this post.
More rejections for "No Ordinary Word";
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I fear that I have avoided The Walrus, even before my current (supposed) embargo on politics, but I do read the newsletter sent and see what is being published. When I saw the link to The Case for Reading Quebec’s Most Reclusive Author, I clicked.
Over fifty years ago,
a young Québécois writer was staring at a small pile of rejection
letters. His clutch of manuscripts had been turned down by all of the
province’s publishing houses. They deemed his writing immature,
illegible, and too enamoured with breaking convention. So the
twenty-four-year-old tried a Hail Mary: he sent a manuscript to
Gallimard, the goliath of Parisian publishing responsible for the
careers of many of French literature’s great twentieth-century figures.
The gamble paid off. Gallimard would publish Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés in 1966, as well as three more titles in quick succession
***
By the time Ducharme died on August 21, nine days after his
seventy-sixth birthday, he was a myth. His nine novels, five plays, two
screenplays, and songwriting collaborations are part of Quebec’s
cultural psyche. Ducharme has earned “a place apart from the rest of
Québécois letters, on account of his work, on account of the mystery
that surrounded his life,” wrote La Presse book critic Josée
Lapointe, after Ducharme’s death. For the rest of Canada, he is still
very much a secret. His English Wikipedia page is exceedingly brief, all
of six sentences. His French one is longer, yet nowhere near the length
of his English Canadian counterparts, such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai
Richler, and Alice Munro. Yet as the winner of three Governor General’s
Literary Awards, a finalist for France’s Prix Goncourt, and an officer
of the Order of Canada since 2000, Ducharme is a French Canadian
institution, widely taught in the province’s college and university
curriculums.
***
It would be hard to
overstate Ducharme’s revolutionary effect on Quebec writing. According
to Annabelle Moreau, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Lettres québécoises,
Ducharme “created a literature for the province centered around our use
of the language, which by extension grew into our sense of culture and
national identity.”
From the article, I get the reasons for reading him; I suggest you read that argument.
What I took away from the article were other things: the transitory nature of literary fame; the obscurity imposed by our education of other cultures, other writers; and, finally, and far from least for me, that regionalism need not be the pejorative it is always taken to be.
We all live in a place. What we write about has its roots in our places. Why aren't Joyce, or Proust, or Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann, or Alasdair Gray, or Zadie Smith, or Charles Dickens, or José Saramago, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Mishima, or Amos Oz, or Orhan Pamuk, or John Steinbeck, or Chinua Achebe, or Naguib Mahfouz, or Milan Kundera not a regional writer?
The region we need worry more about is the limits we put on our imaginations - curbing our imaginations is the truly dangerous regionalism.
I have had George Saunders and Zadie Smith Talk with Deborah Treisman (The New Yorker) playing in the background. Two brilliant people, two great writers; plenty to learn about the process of writing, and about books. Yes, I have a crush on Zadie Smith, but the root of that crush is her writing and her thoughts on writing.
On the opposite end of my literary faves is Thomas Pynchon. He fascinates me because I am not as enamored of him as seems to be the norm for American critics. Richard Beck's Thomas Pynchon Is Angry (The Yale Review) uses the phrase "stoner humor" that might explain my finding Pynchon tiresome. I was never a stoner, never appreciated stoner humor for all the Cheech and Chong movies I've seen. However, Mr. Beck finally has me understanding how Pynchon is relevant to my own ideas.
The one thing
everyone knows about Thomas Pynchon’s novels is that they are paranoid.
We’ll get to that later. The other thing everyone knows about them is
that they are overstuffed. Packed with a manic variety of subplots,
original song lyrics, scientific arcana (both real and invented),
pop-cultural detritus, zany character names, and stoner jokes, Pynchon’s
books often feel as if they are on the verge of exploding under the
pressure of their own contents.
Yet if any one Pynchon novel can seem chaotic and ramshackle,
Pynchon’s body of work is among the most unified in postwar American
fiction: all of his novels deal with Americans’ inability or
unwillingness to understand the historical forces that built and
continue to shape the world they inhabit. This has been Pynchon’s great
subject from the beginning....
Thinking over the Pynchon novel's I have read - Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Against The Day - this does make sense.
Nor did I pay any attention to Pynchon's take on nostalgia being the same as mine - a variety of self-delusion:
This reverie, this “fantasy of old-time Milwaukee,” continues for quite a
bit longer. The first time I read it, I thought that Pynchon was
dragging on, that he had piled detail upon detail until the larger
picture collapsed under the weight of its constituent parts. The second
time I read it, I came to believe that it’s McTaggart’s longing that is
excessive, not Pynchon’s rendering of it. Remember what Pynchon wrote in
V.—that people situated at the bottom of history’s folds
console themselves with “a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what
they were.” That’s what McTaggart is doing here. The rosy urban
landscape McTaggart paints for himself in no way corresponds to the
Milwaukee that would actually be waiting for him back home, a city at
the economic nadir of the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce,
organized crime is running amok, and terror bombings are a regular
occurrence. Life in the U.S. may not be as grim as it is in Hungary, but
it is still pretty miserable. McTaggart’s nostalgia is not just
misplaced; he is lying to himself.
And complete agreement with America's dislike of history; albeit, I acquired this idea from Gore Vidal.
Pynchon isn’t just writing
about McTaggart here. Though his novels are filled with fantastical
hijinks and science-fictional elements, Pynchon is genuinely a writer of
historical fiction, one who has spent his life investigating how
certain historical moments came to be. What gives this project a
political valence is the fact that many Americans are—and always have
been—committed to remaining ignorant of the way their country’s wealth,
culture, and geopolitical strength were, and are, founded on violence
carried out in defense of capital accumulation and white supremacy.
Pynchon has previously written characters who could be duped or
bewildered by history without losing their author’s sympathies (Slothrop
in Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind), but in his depiction of
the blank stupidity that one finds just behind the screen of Hicks
McTaggart’s energetic charm, one detects a writer who has finally lost
patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious
consequences of their own country’s actions.
A stray thought, sparked by the following paragraph, concerned Dashiell Hammett:
When he says to Boynt Crosstown, his boss back at the PI offices, that
he can’t believe the feds would bring up the old days like that,
Crosstown’s response is scathing. “Of course they’re trying to turn
you,” he says. “Back to what you never stopped being. . . . You think
you’re reformed now. Not just a normal tough guy but a saintly one. . . .
But he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla
always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to.”
Talking to a mobster-turned-anarchist-bombmaker in the course of an
investigation, McTaggart says he wouldn’t be interested in going to
Italy, due to its being “a Fascist dictatorship.” “What makes you
private dicks any different?” the bombmaker replies. “Study your
history, gabadost,
you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as
Mussolini’s boys.” Even in Europe, McTaggart can’t find anyone who will
lend him a sympathetic ear. “Have you ever really looked at your
employment history?” an Interpol agent asks him. “One high-risk
orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s
greed or fear?”
The Pinkerton Detective Agency employed Hammett. They made big bucks breaking strikes; whether Hammett was a strikebreaker seems to be unclear. However, it is not unclear that Hammett's Red Harvest shows the after effects of strikebreaking and the costs of being ignorant about history. History is a record of humanity's character.
I still have a problem with the big slabs of books rampaging off into the wilds, the stoner humor mentioned above. That bias when combined with a fleeting comparison with Theodore Dreiser and the stoner humor comment made me spend a few seconds considering what Dreiser might have done if he smoked a few spliffs.
(Regarding Dreiser, I found these items: Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site and The mystery of Theodore Dreiser by Joseph Epstein, which opens with this:
I begin by borrowing a line from Theodore Dreiser, the master himself, before setting out to consider the first of many issues that Dreiser’s extraordinary career poses—that of the relationship of style to art. It was his friend and early champion H. L. Mencken who once remarked that Dreiser had “an incurable antipathy to the mot juste” but that ain’t the half of it. Theodore Dreiser also had an aluminum ear (one down from tin), an unfailing penchant for the purple, an oafish wit, and the literary tact and lightness of touch of a rhinoceros. Who but Dreiser, in Sister Carrie, could cap a brief description of workers returning home on a winter’s night in Chicago by saying that the crowd was “a spectacle of warm-blooded humanity”? Only Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, had the innate klutziness to write, “The death house of this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensibility and stupidity for which no one was primarily responsible.” No one except Dreiser, in The “Genius,” could roll off this squib of dialogue: “‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ laughed Suzanne.” For the gracious descriptive touch, there is this from The Bulwark: “Most of them were becomingly gowned in long frocks of every hue.” By now readers who have not read Dreiser and for whom style in literature is decisive are likely to join in the sentiment of Eugene Witla, the autobiographical hero of The “Genius”: “‘Nothing doing,’ he exclaimed, in the slang of the day.” But I would caution them, before giving up on Dreiser, with a line of snappy dialogue from Jennie Gerhardt: “‘Aw, you hush up,’ was her displeased rejoinder.”
But then it is a good deal easier to make fun of Theodore Dreiser’s prose style than it is to account for his genius. A genius he was, of that there ought not to be any serious doubt. He may not always have been able to write a careful sentence or a well-shaped paragraph, but this did not stand in the way of his turning out powerful novels. To put my cards on the table early in the game, let me say that Theodore Dreiser, in my opinion, is America’s greatest novelist. Herman Melville may have written the greatest single American novel, Henry James plumped deeper into the subtleties of human motivation, Mark Twain written more lyrically about this country, but Theodore Dreiser, that clod, bumbler, yokel, creep, wrote the novels that tell more in the way of elemental truth about American life and character, and tell it in a consistently persuasive and powerful manner, than those of any other American writer before or since his time.
***
The best students react well to the novels of Dreiser.
They sense that there are big things going on in his pages. And even the
very best students have the advantage that, at eighteen, they have very
little sense of prose style, and hence no snobbery about it. I am not
arguing for the superior wisdom of the young, but rather that the
shallow sophistication of the not-so-young can present its own
obstacles. Saul Bellow, who has long written and spoken admiringly of
Dreiser’s novels, puts the point best: “I often think the criticism of
Dreiser as a stylist at times betrays a resistance to the feelings he
causes readers to suffer. If they say he can’t write, they need not
experience these feelings.”
What are these feelings? I should say that any
comprehensive list of them would include humiliation and fear of
failure, the craving for respectability, every kind of longing, and the
desolation that accompanies an unutterable loneliness in the face of a
(probably) uncaring universe. In teaching Dreiser I have always wanted
to begin—perhaps some day I shall begin—by saying, “What you must
understand about Theodore Dreiser is that he was born poor and homely
and raised in ignorance and filled with desire. Write that down and
remember it. Now get out of here and go home and read the book again.”
I cannot say I ever approached Dreiser with joy, but in those two paragraphs I think is what makes Dreiser worth reading. Power. You go along with him, grumbling and even resisting a little, until you realize that he has grabbed hold of you, and you cannot go along with him to the end.)
Giorgio de Chirico is famous as a visual artist, but less well known is his prolific career as a writer. Considered the godfather of surrealism, his trajectory as an artist proved lastingly controversial.
It is hard to overstate the influence of his early artistic phase—of so-called metaphysical aesthetics—upon 20th-century modernism. In the early 20th century, we read again and again that the two pillars of modernism were on the one hand Picasso and on the other de Chirico. De Chirico was taken up and lionized and became in many ways the touchstone for surrealist paintings. The paintings of Magritte and Dalí, with which we’re so familiar, were essentially unthinkable without de Chirico’s figurative cityscapes, particularly deserted cityscapes, of which MoMA is the biggest owner in the world.
But other than the following section, I found little that struck my fancy:
SH: To respond super quickly to
de Chirico’s bilious and cantankerous bits, I want to mention that one
thing that is quite strikingly different between the two novels is the
structure of these screeds.
I’m so glad you mentioned the Memoirs because this gets at
another way he plays with form. In both novels de Chirico ends up making
what I find to be a documentary move. The documentary practice of
taking research materials or tangible language from elsewhere and
putting it into a creative text is super vibrant in poetry currently and
a pretty radical thing to do at the time. People often locate its roots
in 1930s leftist movements, with writers like Muriel Rukeyser and
Charles Reznikoff.
There’s a single moment like this in Hebdomeros where he drops in language from political posters. In Mr. Dudron,
he weaves his own writing with extensive quoting from an existing
19th-century tract on painting. The structure of the novel incorporates
this kind of external material, and I started noticing how when he does
this in Dudron the formal move is happening in the same moment
that he’s talking about material in visual art. He uses the documentary
move to highlight, in a different form, what he is critiquing about the
lack of materiality in painting. In both cases I think maybe he wants to
underscore the physical and tangible.
Some of the stuff he’s mad about is definitely bonkers, but some of
it is quite moving and convincing—like that people have moved away from
working with their hands and they’re not making their tools with their
hands and so they’ve lost a relationship with the materiality of that
which they make.
This feels echoed in the double voice you mention. He has this
interlocutor named Isabella Far which is also the name of his second
wife, or the name that he gave her, and he makes her a character in this
novel and he calls her “she of the philosophical spirit.” She’s the
greatest thinker about art and he places his own screeds in her mouth.
Dudron, who’s the autobiographical character is sitting around when
she walks in. He asks her questions, and she lectures him. Then, in real
life, in his 1945 essay collection Commedia dell’arte moderna,
he publishes some of these very same essays that are quoted in the
novel under her name, even though we now know that he wrote them.
YMMV.
I have not read enough of Thomas Mann, and Doctor Faustus is one of those i have not read. Ignorance of the novel does not mean I lack curiosity. Which is why why I spent time this afternoon with Jeffrey Meyers and his Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus’. The opening whetted my interest.
It’s unusual for an author to create a great novel and then, fearing
readers would not understand it, to write another book that explains
it. Thomas Mann’s The Genesis of a Novel (1949) describes how he composed Doctor Faustus (1947) and provides valuable insights into that difficult book. After working on Joseph and His Brothers for
16 years, the 69-year-old author finally completed that tetralogy in
January 1944. He first thought of finishing his early satiric novel Confessions of Felix Krull (1922), but decided to take up the challenge of writing the far more ambitious Faust novel.
***
The musical, military, pathological and political themes
magnificently merge at the end of the novel as the four stages of
Adrian’s disease—migraines, infection, remission and collapse—tragically
fuse with Germany’s predisposition to Reformation-inspired demonology,
deliberate choice of Nazism, decade of military conquest and apocalyptic
destruction.
Jeffrey Meyers published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern, 2014).
"Thomas Kemp" received another rejection:
Thank you for submitting your story to Electric Spec. Unfortunately,
your story does not meet our needs at this time. Yours is one of many
high-quality submissions we received, and we encourage you to try us
again if you have another story that you think would be a good fit.
Yesterday, I made it to the group session and to the bank to set up an investment and had CC over for her dinner.
The group was another chat fest of a weekly check in. However, I was given a questionnaire. I will not repeat the questions here; there are both embarrassing and not for immature eyes. Suffice it to say, they're not bearing on me and my past, and that leaves me thinking someone, somewhere, is exercising their perversions on others. CC read some of them and found them silly - a slightly edited response.
She finished off the quiche Lorraine that I had bought on Thursday, and read more of “One Dead Blonde”. I had her home around 7 pm.
I came back, tried to some more work on the prison journal, and wound up watching Ava on Tubi.
I got this in my email, a purported response from Senator Young to an email sent about the federal shutdown:
Thank you for contacting me on October 21, 2025. I appreciate hearing from you.
Constituent correspondence allows me to hear directly from you and helps me better represent the various views and priorities of millions of Hoosiers. As I have done during my time in the Senate, I will continue to advance policies that address our fiscal challenges, incentivize private investment in innovation, streamline inefficiencies, and promote our national security, while simultaneously making government more responsive to the American people. From border security to threats from China on multiple fronts to our ballooning national debt, many pressing challenges face our nation. I look forward to working with my Senate colleagues in the 119th Congress to tackle these issues, advance American interests, and advocate for Hoosier priorities.
For more information about my legislative priorities, I encourage you to visit my website: young.senate.gov/priorities. Additionally, to stay up-to-date on the work I am doing on behalf of Hoosiers, please sign up for my weekly newsletter: young.senate.gov/newsletter.
Please be assured I will keep your thoughts in mind should legislation on this issue come before the full Senate for consideration.
Again, thank you for contacting me. It is an honor to represent you in the United States Senate.
This is a movie whose absurdities need to be indulged, and there’s a great deal of slightly baffling business about the manuscript of Eileen’s forthcoming dazzling magnum opus whose title and contents aren’t specified. It unfolds in a counter-historical context of ethnic diversity, though unlike TV’s Bridgerton the fact of racial difference and racial prejudice is explicitly remarked on. Hedda discloses a crazy world of hedonism and gossip; more Hopper than Gabler.
Maher in the morning - sense, even if he is still a little smarmy. I do not think the video is still available.
No Ordinary Word rejected:
Unfortunately, your submission to shortstory.substack.com was
not picked as the July winner. That being said, please feel free to
submit for the coming months as submissions are rolling throughout
the year.
Remember, a rejection this month doesn't mean a rejection in future months.
Thanks,
Mike
As I said, a word of warning and a call to action from Uncle Lou, which goes well with Brian Howey's commentary above:
I made it out to the apartment, only to get my Coke Zero out of the car. I think I will do something crazy - going to see a movie tonight, a late show of Blue Moon. If I can stay awake that long! Right now, my resolve is fading fast, along with my eyes. But I will go see Good Fortune tomorrow, after church.
I fixed a pork loin, of which I am both impressed and underwhelmed. Maybe it was baked a little too long; maybe I was hoping for more from the apple cider.
The batch of prison journal entries that I have been working on and off for the past few weeks has been finished. They will be published here next month.
I also did some research on the Versailles lynching; that will be published at the end of next month.
And that has been Friday and Saturday. I am trying to avoid the political stuff - I want to get into my fiction, and all that Donald J. Trump does for me is make me wonder if this country is as childish and malicious and destructive as he is.
I read two of Martin Amis's novels, but I know he had the reputation as a bad boy of English writers. Seeing him paired with Elmore Leonard lit the fuse of my curiosity mixed with fear. It is a little shocking to hear Amis's respect for Leonard. A very good discussion of writing that raised my opinion of Amis.
Why Martin Amis Hated David Foster Wallace & Thomas Pynchon - Write Conscious
I think I have made it clear here what I think of David Foster Wallace, but if I heard the presenter correctly, he ranks Wallace a better writer than Amis. He also gets down Zadie Smith, who I adore.
One pedagogical tactic that desperate teachers might employ is to direct the attention of their students to the novels of Ross Macdonald, for there are few better, more concrete examples of a writer who went quietly and artfully about the business of showing his readers the souls of his characters. Even more artfully, Macdonald kept authorial comment to a minimum while allowing the characters in his novels to strip themselves—or one another—bare with the words they hurled or simply let drop inattentively.
***
Show the location, show the
location, the huddled students are told. Well, how’s this for showing?
‘We trekked to the far side of a big central room.’ Then there is Mrs
Biemeyer’s explanation for her delay in noticing the absence of the
painting: ‘I don’t come into this room every day.’ Just in case Archer
hasn’t grasped the wealth of the people who are going to hire him,
Biemeyer laments that ‘There ought to be some place in a
four-hundred-thousand-dollar building where a man can sit down in
peace.’ This in 1976, when that sum bought a lot more house than it does
today. And notice that Biemeyer refers to his own home as a ‘building’.
Write Conscious again with Harold Bloom on Gravity's Rainbow
I remain a Pynchon skeptic, but I will let you make up your own mind. It may be that I do not get his sense of humor.
The theme that ties all essays in this book together is creativity and the act of keeping a healthy fountain of ideas flowing. Bradbury shares his wisdom on this topic not by preaching to aspiring writers about what they should be doing but by explaining what he did. He explains that he started writing a thousand words a day every day at the age of twelve. My personal daily goal as a writer is also a thousand words per day, although I didn’t start when I was twelve, and I often don’t hit my goal, especially when a project moves into editing, publishing, and marketing.
Jhumpa Lahiri's “Jubilee” is available for free (well, free as of 6/30/2025) from The New Yorker.
A wooden ruler with the etched faces of Henry VIII’s six wives running down the middle; ticket stubs from Hampton Court and the Chamber of Horrors, where we walked ahead of our mothers, hand in hand; a few wrappers of Dairy Milk. I still see clearly the brochure from Madame Tussaud’s, a green nameplate on the cover with white lettering. We shuddered at the likeness of one particularly sinister man standing in an olive-colored three-piece suit with old brown pharmaceutical bottles behind him. We’d seen him in the chamber dedicated to those who poisoned and stabbed and slashed. Later, flipping through the brochure, sitting side by side, we braced ourselves for his effigy; how we dreaded turning to that page. A Mavis Gallant story I discovered only recently likens the compulsion to save tickets and programs to a type of narcissism: that’s how a mother interprets a daughter’s need to hold on to memorabilia. But was that not what Gallant had done in some of her stories, and taught me to do? Intertwining invention with preserved bits and scraps of life? Already that spring, about to turn ten in the city of my birth, I was attempting to leave some trace, struggling to glimpse myself on a murky surface.
Although O’Connor—in the spirit of Chekhov’s famous dictum about the onstage gun needing to go off—has prepared us for the appearance of the Misfit, in a more profound sense she has radically rewritten the rules that seemed to have governed her tale. The effect is dizzying, and intensifies when it becomes obvious that the family can only be murdered by the Misfit and his men.
***
...Her darkly funny, violent world continues to exert tremendous appeal—and fascination—not least because of its collision of incongruous elements: the low and the transcendent, the comic and the speculative, the grotesque and the divine. In her meticulously crafted fiction, these opposites resolve via the unlikely transmutations and orderings of the creative act. For within her peculiarly personalized spiritual orthodoxy, ultimately nothing is incongruous; all is one. As she wrote, quoting the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Everything that rises must converge.”
I think of Lahiri as elegiac, Gallant as sharply condensing lives as an observational vignette, and O'Connor as twisted.
sch 6/30
I had not heard of Grace Paley until the last ten years, since I went to prison. I had heard of Zadie Smith. I still have not read Grace Paley, but I have read Zadie Smith (and written about her on this blog).
Paley reminded me of my past but also of my present: living in Greenwich Village, with a poet as a partner, trying to write while bringing up two kids. The startling aspect, to me, was that she included it all. She didn’t put a cordon around a short story and use a special literary voice to create it. In her expert hands a short story is like one of those cavernous shoulder bags you’ll need to carry in the city if your plan is to tote around four or five novels, a feminist treatise, a bunch of diapers, somebody’s lunch, a photocopy of a zoning law to brandish at a community-board meeting, and a large banner that reads “END THE WAR.” Paley is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sort of a writer, with an emphasis on the kitchen sink. The domestic is not banal to her, nor is it bourgeois. It’s perhaps a little perverse to write a story called “The Silence” in homage to one of the chattiest writers on the block, yet for me Paley has always served as a kind of stimulant to honesty. I can get all up in my head when I’m writing. But if I read a bit of Paley just before I open the document I feel some of that wildness and openheartedness enter me. My character Sharon in “The Silence” is a fictional person from a shadowy region of my mind, but Paley cleared the space and built a little platform so that Sharon could step forward and just . . . be. My Sharon is dealing with “the Change,” which seems also to be on Paley’s mind in “My Father.” (“We should probably begin at the beginning, he said. Change. First there is change, which nobody likes—even men. You’d be surprised. You can do little things—putting cream on the corners of your mouth, also the heels of your feet.”) But Sharon is not a participant in what I want to call “menopause discourse.” She doesn’t really have a language for what’s happening to her. She’s just trying to get through it.
When I gave up writing in my early twenties, one part was not having anything to write. What I did not learn until I began telling my Indiana stories to people from the East, until I read Joyce Carol Oates's western New York stories and Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, was that where there are people there are stories to tell. You look around and see what you can see, and then try to recreate the life you see on paper.
No church, but I did get my laundry done. I did crash a little after coming back from the laundry. It remains too hot. When I finish this post, I will be taking another shower.
I found out how come I cannot print - wrong ink cartridge. Letters to print and they will have to wait.
Dishes done and pork chops for dinner.
Posts drafted, but nothing else written.
The bedroom put in order, but my mail remains unread.
A trip to the convenience store before sunset.
Some readings that I did not think needed a full post about:
"Lessons Learned From A Green Meadow," rejected:
Thank you very much for entering the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest for the 2nd quarter 2025 (stories entered between 1 January and 31 March 2025).
We appreciate your talent and hard work to produce this story. However, this one is not quite ready for us yet. Keep writing though, don’t give up. In order to help you, we’ve provided the list below of common reasons that a story needs some work. Definitely consider revising it accordingly and entering it again.
Here are the most common reasons:
Failure to Launch: Your story begins too slowly. There isn’t a lot of room in a short story for long introductions. As much as you might love the introductory scene, if it doesn’t help the story hit the ground running, consider whether you are beginning your tale too soon. Is there a good narrative hook? Have you let the reader know where they are in time and space? Are you introducing your protagonist—or any character—for the reader to follow? And please, don’t send us stories that begin with the character waking up. Most editors hate that trope. Give us interesting action. Make us want to follow your character through the entire manuscript. Make friends with your dynamic verbs. Don’t “was” us to death.
Needs more Science Fiction or Fantasy Elements: This contest publishes only speculative literature. We do not accept mainstream stories. If there is no science fiction or fantasy element introduced early enough for us to recognize, that also helps to bring about the conclusion of the story, this may be the reason why you are receiving this letter. Just because a story takes place in a science fiction or fantasy setting doesn’t make it science fiction or fantasy. If the plot can be moved to any other setting, with any other characters, with no change in the outcome, it’s probably not speculative literature.
Not Sticking the Landing: Your story peters out, or doesn’t end in a way that satisfies what you promised the reader in the beginning. Beginning with one character and ending with another but making no reference to the initial quest at the end, or going off on a tangent that leads the story in a completely different direction confuses and frustrates the reader. You might have submitted an excerpt from a longer work without making it stand on its own. Make sure that you finish your plot.
Playing in some else’s sandbox: You may have decided to write a story using a trope that we have seen far too often. Vampire or werewolf stories, angel stories, secret aliens living among ordinary people, the protagonist suddenly discovering that s/he is immortal, powerful, the Chosen One, the long-lost child of the monarch are all well-worn and tired. Those tropes may even have vocabulary which has become all too familiar in similar stories, and will make yours seem like a poor copy. If you have a new and original take on a typical plot and write it well, send it! We’d love to see it. Or you may have impinged on copyrighted or trademarked worlds. Fan fiction is not allowed, especially in an ongoing property, such as a popular movie, television show, game, or book series. But even if the universe you chose is well out of copyright, you may not have a unique enough take on it.
Reality check: Your plot or character behavior is wildly implausible, so much that it stopped us dead. This doesn’t mean that magic can’t exist. It means that a character in danger of losing his life isn’t going to philosophize about unrelated subjects for sixteen pages. Is the reward for fulfilling the quest ridiculously small or entirely pointless? Characters don’t work against their own self-interest. Even self-sacrifice fulfills some inner need. Look at your plot from the point of view of a stranger. Would a reasonable being act that way?
Too Much Violence: Stories featuring egregious violence, gore, or torture are not suitable for this contest. If it’s not necessary for the plot, then cut it out. Otherwise, revise your story and send it elsewhere. Send us something else that fits our guidelines.
Too Much Sex, Sensuality or Profanity: Our anthologies are meant to be read by young adults on up. If the theme is too adult, or there are “on screen” sex scenes, it’s not for us. If you can tone it down, you may rewrite and try again. Otherwise, there are other markets that will accept it. Some sensuality is fine, even welcome, if it works in the plot. One F-bomb won’t scuttle your story. Long passages of swearing aren’t suitable for this contest.
Children’s story: As above. Our anthologies are meant to be read by young adults on up. If the plot is too simplistic, if the characters are led by the nose to their conclusion, that’s why you’re receiving this back.
Devotional or Political Content: If you have a specific point to make that feels as if you are lecturing the reader, please consider a market that publishes that kind of material. If we are overwhelmed by your agenda, we ask you to tone it down and concentrate on a plot that will please a wide variety of readers.
Please give your story a good look and see if you can revise it to suit the Contest’s guidelines. If that doesn’t work out, please write something else and send it. I am certain you have many ideas you’d like to explore.
The Contest website has so many items to offer you in regards to writing. We are dedicated to helping our contestants improve their writing skills.
Available to you are:
1) A free online workshop that you can do on your own schedule which features New York Times bestselling authors who all want to help you make it in this field.
2) A blog with articles regarding writing, the contest and our quarterly winners.
3) A forum designed to help you with dozens of topics.
4) An award nominated podcast with interviews on professionals and New York Times bestselling authors.
But there is no divine light drawing immigrants to our shores. They are borne here by heartbreak. The heartbreak of a birthplace that cannot be a home. The agony of choosing between likely suffering in one place and guaranteed suffering in another.
A kinder country might re-center the discussion of immigration on that pain. It could even lead to a more humane and logical policy, one that understands that the poor and the desperate, not the wealthy and educated, are most likely to immigrate. It would give people of good faith the space to build their lives. The opportunity to find the lives their homes couldn’t provide.
That wouldn’t erase the core sorrow of the immigrant experience. But it wouldn’t pile needless suffering on top of it, either.
And it would allow immigrants to find a way forward, as my mother did, without finding their path blocked by a masked man with a gun.
Of all my family trees, the only with an immigration story is the Haslers. Even in that story, there is nothing explicit about what my ancestors were leaving - on the implicit sense of a hardscrabble life in Switzerland. That was 1849. My mother's side came here before the Revolution; I assume, prodded by Englishmen. Nowhere do I see any reason for the terror MAGA has towards immigrants.
You can view the issue in three ways: 1. Interactive pdf flipbook 2. Downloadable print version (pdf) 3. Hyperlinked on our website by author Linked here: www.coolbeanslit.com/vol-2-issue-2
And I have whipped the email into shape. It will probably lose that shape by the time I get off work tomorrow.
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.
I got back here a little after noon. There is work I need to do here before I walk over to do my laundry. That I plan on doing at 3, so I have 2 hours.
If we follow Humphreys’s trajectory, the full abdication of our epistemic throne of science would occur only at a later stage. At this point, artificial superintelligences would not only be capable of completing tasks we set for them (a continuation of the hybrid scenario) but would also be capable of setting their own tasks: their own research agenda, data collection, modelling and theories, according to their own independently identified set of theoretical virtues and values – a science all their own.
***
Given the possibility (and, in my view, likelihood) that such AIs would quickly abandon human epistemic baggage, we may choose to follow a Wittgensteinian line of reasoning and think of the automated scenario as the stage at which they would begin to speak and develop an independent and new scientific language. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously (and, true to form, enigmatically) says in Philosophical Investigations (1953): ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.’ Though the statement feels contradictory, Wittgenstein’s point is that the meaning of language is deeply embedded and intertwined with the internal experience of being human. So, too, for science. As the superintelligences begin to set and execute their own research agendas, the work they do would therefore become unintelligible for us because we would lack the internal perspective necessary to understand their science. From our view, their research would be a science created for theoretical-aims-we-know-not-what, with purposes-we-know-not-what, to be interpreted in ways-we-know-not-what.
This might be even scarier than the so-called singularity point - if it is, indeed, a different event - a science conducted by an entity we create whose findings we could not know.
The ‘truth about love’ that emerges is neither purely abstract nor entirely concrete, but rather a recognition that love operates as a transformative force across multiple domains – physical, ethical and intellectual. Diotima’s ladder represents not a rejection of physical love in favour of abstract contemplation, but a developmental account of how erotic energy can be progressively refined and redirected toward increasingly comprehensive objects of desire, culminating in wisdom. Socrates’ methodological concerns and intellectual influences are shown as emerging from beyond the exclusively male Athenian coterie portrayed in the Symposium. By accepting Aspasia’s contribution to Socratic thought and method, we see how philosophical ideas might arise and develop in practice through dialogue across intellectual, gender and social boundaries. We should also recognise that Aspasia’s method of argument and ideas about love, if indeed they underlie those of Diotima, as argued, excitingly position her as a genuinely foundational figure of Western philosophy.
Each of the authors in the collection sits with the griefs of the past and present, with the countless forms those griefs take, in order to highlight how their own fiction helps to construct possibilities for African futures. Sitting with grief does not mean getting lost in it, but recognizing what grief has obscured—and what can be built from that recognition. Nerine Dorman writes that, “much as we can’t disentangle ourselves from the events of the past, if we attempt to erase them, we set ourselves up for repeating the mistakes of our forefathers.” Instead, she says, “we can choose to be nourished by that which is bitter.” In other words: part of sitting with the grief is also claiming joy, recognizing it as an intimate and inextricable part of life amidst devastation.
Many of the authors in the collection hold this tension. Kagunda, for example, foregrounds the vibrant potential of Black imagination. At the same time, she emphasizes the necessity to “completely overthrow systems that have equated our value to our labor” if there is any hope of escaping the “game of responding to the white patriarchal capitalist desire.” Similarly, Bacon looks for hope within dystopia as a form of “subversive activism” that calls readers to “enact and perhaps realize the new dreams and destinies of Mother Africa.”
While some turn to the future for hope, others look to ways the past can be revived. Dilman Dila, for instance, details how Yat Madit, a historical form of African governance, might be used as a model for direct democracies in the future. Xan van Rooyen also mines the past for resistance to contemporary colonial structures, reminding us how queerness has always been a part of African life. They argue that colonial ways of knowing must be completely overthrown to achieve the normalized queerness that African queers deserve: “[O]ne would need to eschew Western hegemony, decolonize current views of queerness within African societies, and consider a postgender future.” Their work compels us to consider: What might it look like for African storytelling to flourish not just beyond colonial griefs, but without reference to them entirely? If Africans did not have to labor to constantly delink from colonial logics in the publication process, reception of their work, and recognitions conferred on them, what kinds of futures could be written?
***
That is, sitting with the grief means contemplating how coloniality requires African authors to define themselves in the first place. Maybe this is part of the reason some authors struggle with the white-assigned label of Afrofuturism, or the strictly defined contours separating Africanfuturism from Africanjujuism. Parceling narrative territory into clearly defined possessions that you either identify with or not is, when it comes down to it, a colonial means of thought. Through this lens, Afro-Centered Futurisms does something enormously important in its tensions and frictions, overlap and dispersal: it avoids the colonial logic that reduces an entire group of people to a flattened identity label, and instead asks readers to understand the complexity of their relations in the world. It compels us to spend time with difficulties that cannot easily be smoothed over, and to see what beauties might emerge from bitterness.
***
That is, sitting with the grief means contemplating how coloniality requires African authors to define themselves in the first place. Maybe this is part of the reason some authors struggle with the white-assigned label of Afrofuturism, or the strictly defined contours separating Africanfuturism from Africanjujuism. Parceling narrative territory into clearly defined possessions that you either identify with or not is, when it comes down to it, a colonial means of thought. Through this lens, Afro-Centered Futurisms does something enormously important in its tensions and frictions, overlap and dispersal: it avoids the colonial logic that reduces an entire group of people to a flattened identity label, and instead asks readers to understand the complexity of their relations in the world. It compels us to spend time with difficulties that cannot easily be smoothed over, and to see what beauties might emerge from bitterness.
THE PUBLICATION OF a new novel by David Szalay is an event for anyone who cares about fiction. He is one of a handful of writers who seem to have been born whole as novelists, arriving equipped with insight, wit, curiosity, and an unmistakable voice. He is Zadie Smith good, Eleanor Catton good. Like them, he won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize for first novels by Commonwealth writers under 35, for London and the South-East (2008). He has not yet, like Catton, won the Booker, but, like Smith, he has been a finalist for it, with All That Man Is (2016); the book’s title is an accurate gauge of Szalay’s ambition.
Anything that pertains to human experience is of interest to Szalay. He is a shape-shifter, persuasively inhabiting the skins of men and women anywhere on the globe. He is also a world-builder, creating an ever-growing cast of characters whose lives intersect in unexpected ways. He is interested in the past and future of Europe, the local effects of a globalizing economy, sex, every kind of work people do to support themselves, the rewards and costs of intimacy, and the mechanics of power.
But the subject that really calls forth the poet in Szalay is male failure. Wherever a man lets down the people who depend on him, refuses to face the truth about his own life, or fails to live up to even his lowest standards, Szalay is there. A precise and relentless anatomist of male fecklessness, violence, opportunism, addiction, self-interest, and vanity, Szalay can be bitingly hilarious on these subjects, but chooses not to be in his most recent novel, Flesh (2025). Composed in a newly lean style that forgoes most of the author’s signature fireworks, Flesh tells the story of Hungarian-born and -raised István, whose life as a character is synonymous with his maleness. The novel’s risks, in plot and style, pay off to mixed degrees, but nevertheless show how serious Szalay is, six books in, about keeping his art alive and growing.
***
Szalay’s chosen instrument as a stylist is the declarative sentence. It is to him what the sledgehammer was to John Henry, or the whisk to Julia Child: a simple tool from which he gets awe-inspiring results. In London and the South-East, he is wincingly funny with it: “One of the buttons of the Pig’s white polyester shirt has come undone and, as he sits, a shape of colourless, hairless flab pours heavily through the gap.” (It is typical of Szalay’s savage tact to observe that the fat makes a shape while declining to specify what that shape is.) He frequently uses his declaratives to give his characters just enough rope to hang themselves. Here is the moment when London’s protagonist, the alcoholic, utterly unskilled Paul Rainey, having been booted with extreme prejudice from the shady sales job he has done badly for years, plans for the future: “He does not want a job, he thinks—pleased with his precise semantic distinction—so much as work.”
1:40 pm
This was St. Thomas Sunday; if you think you know about "Doubting Thomas", then you should read this:The Sunday of Thomas (Public Orthodoxy). Not what I was taught or thought when younger.
Healing intergenerational trauma is at the heart of another article from Public Orthodoxy: The Depth of a Wound.
Colorful Plots and Racial Undertones in Modern Crime Fiction (JSTOR Daily) troubles me for two reasons: relying on Michael Crichton's Rising Sun as an example of racism is like taking coal to Newcastle, and whether bias against the multiracial abides in today's crime fiction. I remember hearing when I was a kid that mixed race children had it rougher - that neither side of the color line wanted them. That was long before Tiger Woods. I wonder if it still stands. I would like to think that those who retain this disdain for the multiracial are the problem.
The Disillusionment Arc in storytelling revolves around a character awakening to an uncomfortable thematic Truth, often at great personal cost. Unlike the Positive Change Arc, the Disillusionment Arc doesn’t always lead to a hopeful resolution. Instead, it challenges the protagonist—and the audience—to confront the stark realities of life. Although dark and difficult, this arc plays a crucial role in human growth, offering a transformation that involves painful yet profound insights. It serves as a bridge between the Positive and Negative Change Arcs, in that characters who face these harsh and disillusioning Truths are left at a crossroads from which they may either integrate the lessons or spiral into bitterness.
1. The Freedom to Write Anything Without Judgement
As double edged of a sword as this may be, this has to be the biggest reason why fanfiction or cringe worthy writing needs to continue. Without fear of judgement, writers, at whatever age, can experiment freely and let their creativity and writing style emerge. Even if it’s with characters from a franchise or random OCs they created at school, they’re still writing and letting their brain get used to creating new ideas. Often times, fanfiction can lead to original works since writers realize the characters they love don’t necessarily have to belong to the fandom they’re in but the story can live on its own.
How about some fiction?“Monster Monster” by Jeff Bond (Epiphany Magazine). I am not sure what to make of it, but pretty sure it will be in my head for a while.
It is 8:29, and I need to work on a document. Good night, dear reader.
I almost finished a bit of writing last night. The computer kept crashing, I decided it was time to call it a day.
The writing job, I finished early this morning. Then I cat-napped and binged The Blacklist. The subtext I read now into the show interests me.
"Desperate Men Committing Desperate Acts" received another rejection:
Thank you for sending us your writing. We were pleased with the strong response to our call for submissions, and receiving far more high-quality pieces than we could feature in this issue. We are sorry to say that yours was not selected this time, though we are grateful to have had the opportunity to review your work, and we wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere. We also hope you will consider submitting to Ponder Review again in the future.
To thank you for being one of our submitters, we'd like to offer you a discount on our next issue, so you can get to know us better. Please use this link below.
Perhaps, not so much fun: Faulkner and Plath Go to a Play (The Hedgehog Review). The play was Tennessee Williams' Camino Real; not one that I have read.
It got worse on stage. Gutman, the man in charge of what can only be called an asylum, announces what could happen to even the bravest and most privileged risk takers: “Adventurers suddenly frightened of a dark room. Gamblers unable to choose between odd and even. Con men and pitchmen and plume-hatted cavaliers turned baby-soft…. When I observe this change, I say to myself: ‘Could it happen to ME?’—The answer is ‘YES’ And that’s what curdles my blood.” Camino Real showed William Faulkner and Sylvia Plath that their agony was not theirs alone, and that only art could address that agony.
Back in Willesden, we were pretty stunned too, although perhaps for different reasons. For us, it was the shock of the familiar. She was dressed just like the young activists you saw on the marches – black cowlneck T, black jeans, black boots – and she even looked like our mother: no makeup and the same three-inch dreadlocks. She was so … familiar. We also recognised the musical lineage. That rich alto timbre. It was like listening to the daughter of Joan Armatrading.
***
Chapman’s sheer melodic beauty and committed, generous lyrics are a gift to her listeners. But I feel that her career – which started with this extraordinary album – has also served as a startling and humbling example to artists. She reminds us that an artist can pursue an individual course without being individualistic. That she can speak to many without necessarily speaking to the press. That there is such a thing as privacy, and that every human being has a right to it.
How I Learned About Great Literature from Comic Books (Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker) - another person who first met the classics throughClassics Illustrated comic books! Another source - believe it or not - was Mister Magoo, where I first learned of Cyrano Bergerac.
I respect David Cronenberg, even though I am not much of a horror fan. His The Fly still gives me the willies, as does Videodrome. Pedro Almodóvar is more to my taste, which was formed from seeing too many screwball comedies when I was young. However, Film Comment puts them together inPremortem and Postmortem.
To speak of David Cronenberg and Pedro Almodóvar in the same breath is not as much of a stretch as it might seem. With a morbid theatricality on the one hand and flamboyant histrionics on the other, both have played around with the permutations of the flesh. Almodóvar’s body-horror efforts include reincarnation via live-skin grafting in The Skin I Live In (2011), and Talkto Her (2002), in which two men become obsessed with the comatose women for whom they are caring—a premise as creepy as anything in Cronenberg’s filmography. Even more to the point, both directors are on the far side of 70—or 80 in Cronenberg’s case—and in a retrospective mood. Almodóvar hasn’t staged his own death, but the woefully impaired director played by Antonio Banderas in his Pain and Glory (2019) comes close.
Maundy Thursday is nothing I knew of when growing up in the American Baptist denomination, so I learned much from Bijan Omrani's The revolutionary meaning of Maundy Thursday (Engelsberg Ideas).
To have one’s feet washed by a person of great estate at first makes one contemplate one’s own unworthiness, but also it demands an equal response of service. It also is a challenge to the ideas of power. Christianity sees the highest power vested not in an unrestrained expression of will or vaunting grandeur. Instead, it is seen in a man broken and nailed to the cross, who, a little before, had humbled himself by washing the feet of his followers. The fact that Christianity is still an established part of the British state embeds that idea of humility and service in the heart of it. Even if the king no longer washes the feet of the poor, the fact that one of his royal officials still expresses his dignity not through fine robes or a chain of office, but rather by carrying a towel intended to dry the feet of others, speaks volumes for the Christian message and the way its influence has over many centuries moulded the state for the better.
History always catches my attention; spies have always fascinated me. Therefore, I chose to read Martin Neuding Skoog's Joachim Burwitz, spymaster of the Baltic world (Engelsberg Ideas), and found it delightful in exposing me to a bit of history I never knew.
Down this road lays inhumanity. And we will never get where ANY of us want to go by heading down that road.
We should ALL listen to what Shapiro said in the wake of the arson attack on his home and family. Here it is:
“We don’t know the person’s specific motive yet. But we do know a few truths. First: This type of violence is not OK. This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society. And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another or one particular person or another. It is not OK, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.”
Yes to every word of that.
Okay, I am linking to another political post:It Can Happen Here… (Sheila Kennedy). Are we really going to do this?
According to an email sent out to university students, the vote was unanimous.
“We have consistently, irrespective of the [presidential] administration, consistently aligned our policies and practices with directives from the administration,” Mearns said to IPR News.
Mearns expressed worry that not complying meant the federal government would pull research grant money and federal student aid.
Mearns explained that as a result of terminating any programs the school thinks are now “unlawful,” some employees will be reassigned.
Per IPR News, he also told students that the university would continue “to guide them, and to provide them with the individualized support that each student needs in order to graduate from our university, fully prepared for that fulfilling career and for that meaningful life.”
