A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
I set the alarm for 6 am today. I was up at 5:13. So are the robins.
Last evening I did take out the bike. It went better than expected, but I remain less than confident about taking it out on a busy street. Also, I did walk it up a small hill. A humbling experience, this learning to ride, again.
There was an email from Wes and an answer sent. The same for Charlie G.
I spent a little bit more time last night - until I got almost senseless and blurry-eyed - looking for more publishers.
"True Love Ways Gone Astray" went over to Small Print Magazine, after some fiddling with the opening.
The Guardian book reviews arrived, and I read:
The Diary of Virginia Woolf review – a book for the ages - prison brought me also to Virginia Woolf; nothing to be scared of here, in my opinion, and much to learn. Although, I should point out I.started with A Common Reader and of her novels got my hands only on To The Lighthouse.
I gave up on trying to get my pay stubs. I thought I understood what was to be done and I go around and around on the website. I sent my PO an email about the problem.
As for submitting my stories, I gave up on Bewildering Stories. Too complicated formatting for my tastes. I tinkered with "Best of Intentions" before sending it off to Drunk Monkey.
The rains came and now we have sun. Probably not enough rain, but better than a sharp stick in the eye.
10:40
Great news in the email from Of Rust and Glass, and "Exemplary Employee":
Good morning! If you would be willing to work on some edits with
us, we enjoyed this story and would love to include it in the
speculative anthology.
YouTube keeps turning up interviews and I keep listening. Although, I have read only The Sea, and few reviews, I find him a pleasant, intelligent, amusing interviewee. He seems very generous in talking about books and writing, and I think we can learn from him. Give him a chance, regardless of the length of many of these videos.
This is a bit dated, but also includes Banville's agent with insights into an agent's work and the publishing business:
This has two parts:
Arts Lives - John Banville Part 2
That he also writes crime fiction seems a big topic in all the more recent interviews; that is true here, as well as his views on language and writing in general:.
Shop talking with him:
John Banville | The Singularities
An Evening with Authors John Banville and Richard Ford - I wish the volume was more robust; I may have read a bit more of Ford. Interesting that as writers they do not segregate by sex or race or etc.
Newsnight (2007) - The State of the Novel - Martin Amis and John Banville:
This might seem dated, but there is much here that I think remains practical from two very good novelists. Amis is another writer I might have read two novels instead of my having read Banville's one.
KH keeps telling me this as the rejections come. I know this. Why KH keeps repeating this is more of an explanation to himself of why those stories of mine he likes are not getting picked up by editors.
Well, here is another example, I read one Richard Ford novel in prison and I heard him on NPR's Fresh Air. He has a new novel out, and the reviews have varied. For those posts, follow this link.
He is a character of some grandeur, intimately surveyed, in terms of family and love and loss, so that we return to him as if to an intimacy foregone or put on hold. Be Mine is about Bascombe tending to the needs of his son, Paul, who has a deadly motor neurone disease, ALS, that impacts everything until nothing is left but a mute feeling of pain.
If this sounds like the worst possible subject matter for a middle-sized novel by an old master, it is not. Be Mine is as realised and impassioned, as full not only of sorrow but of buoyant wit and sparkle, as anything Ford has written: a comprehensive image not simply of life in extremis but of the jokes and wryness, the mutual mockery in the face of love, that this weird father/son conjunction provides.
Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.
###
Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
The work is the death mask of its conception.
I know more about Henry Miller than I have read (about nil), but I am going to include him because of what I know about him. After reading, I wound up quoting almost all of them!
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
The article also includes Miller's writing schedule. It reads as very sensible.
Ask a reading friend or two to look at your book before you give it to anyone in the publishing business.
You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that
comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote
the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were
smuggled into the hat. . This friend should not be someone with whom you
have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
And I am learning this one:
Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.)
But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a
slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
I have not warmed to Jonathon Franzen, and I have tried (I think). I recognize he is very, very good, while he leaves me a bit less than enthralled with his characters. I read the list and my firs thought is, Ouch. Hits on all 10. The pain increased as I went down:
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
You see more sitting still than chasing after.
It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who
write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile
language in the world. Respect it.
Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
Don't just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of
other people. Nothing that happens to a writer—however happy, however
tragic—is ever wasted.
2Free up your creativity:Liberate
it from your expectations and experience. When you have an idea, don’t
assume it’s a novel or story, just because that’s your usual medium. It
might be a play, poem, song, or movie. Who knows, it might be best
expressed as garden design. Or maybe you should knit it? 3.If the rhythm of your prose is broken, read poetry. 4.Cut every page of dialogue by one-third. 5. If a phrase troubles you, strike it out, and
if there seems no alternative, try simple omission. If you are dubious
about it in your manuscript, you’ll shrink from it in the printed book.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing
on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It
also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of
unconscious association with the material.
###
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think
you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you
can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave
trouble is because it didn't belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
I have only read one of Annie Proulx's novels (Accordion Crimes, a strange and brutal novel), and one short story, no, not "Brokeback Mountian", but one that I thought lifted an idea from Independent People, and made it even more horrific). Herr rules appeared in The Guardian and were reprinted in “Five rules for writing fiction”: Annie Proulx. She proposes taking one's time, and
5 Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.
I wish I had enough time left for me. Wasted 40 years to have the nerve to try my hand again at fiction - do not do the same.
I got to be a fan of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels, and I was surprised to see Ian Rankin’s 10 Rules for Writing Fiction. I am afraid I do not know my markets and not getting very lucky, I doubt I can keep getting lucky. Notice his first rule. That rule and the second are really the most common rules; which may make them the essential ones.
Zadie Smith is a writer I got to read in prison, both her fiction and some of her non-fiction, who has impressed me with her intelligence and wit. Zadie Smith's White Teeth: 10 Golden Rules for Writers includes the rules as well as background on the writer. I suggest reading the whole thing. It is short while getting to the point. These 4 hit on things I have done wrong, or need to avoid:
2.) When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3.) Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4.) Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.
5.) Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
I have read a little of Eudora Welty (another great short story writer, btw), know she is quality stuff, still did not expect to get hit upside my head when I read Eudora Welty's Rules for Writing:
“Every good story has mystery—not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement.”
“The
great stories of the world are the ones that seem new to their readers
on and on, always new because they keep their power of revealing
something.”
“Beware of tidiness.”
“Beauty comes from
form, from development of idea, from after-effect. It often comes from
carefulness, lack of confusion, elimination of waste—and yes, those are
the rules.”
I have read only one of Anne Rice's books, that was about 1990, but reading How I Do It: Anne Rice on Writing Technique. I kept thinking, That's a good idea and pointed a hole or two I had dropped into. A smart woman who thought about what she was doing. Here last rule:
If these “rules” or suggestions don’t work for you, by all means
disregard them completely! You’re the boss when it comes to your
writing.
I have not read but maybe one of Anton Chekhov's short stories, I have, instead, read his plays. I do have a collection here, which is like all the books here, gathering dust. All the same, I am copying all of his rules from Anton Chekhov’s six writing principles, but mostly on account of the last one:
Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature
I am including all of Mark Twain's rules, even though they are duplicative of many here, because Hemingway said American writing started with him, and because it is Twain talking here:
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Use the right word, not its second cousin.
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to
work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and
lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are
God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases
to get under the bed, by and by.
Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Damnation (if you will allow the expression), get up & take a
turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is
for girls. . . . There is one thing I can't stand and won't stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality.
Use plain, simple language,
short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it
is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and
flowers and verbosity creep in.
The time to begin writing an article
is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you
begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want
to say.
Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within
three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the
most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was
intended for.
Richard Ford I read a novel and heard him on NPR's Fresh Air, his rules are a bit different and may be more pertinent for that: Richard Ford’s 10 rules for fiction writers. Or impertinent.
I almost forgot of William Faulkner's advice, 20 Pieces of Writing Advice from William Faulkner, which need to be read in full, they are too complex, too long for excerpting here. Just follow the link above.
Ted Gioia does a wide range of interesting things with his Honest Broker on Substack. The latest is Are There Alternating Cycles of Hot and Cool in American Cultural History? (Part 1 of 2). I admit procrastinating on this one, I have been rather tired and narrow-minded this week, and I suggest you do not copy me on this. I have long now - well, about a decade now - thought economics did no pay enough attention to irrational behavior. Like the law, economics presumes people will act in their rational best interests. Turns out smart people were there before me. For this reason alone, read this piece, and you will learn something new.
Thunderstorm warning for other counties. Tornado watch for Delaware County. A little more and more looking to be on its way. No bike riding today.
Earlier today, I posted a link to The Guardian's review of Richard Ford's Be Mine. Cleaning out stuff this afternoon, I ran across LitHub's excerpt of the novel.
6:47
I have dolled up some canned tuna with spaghetti sauce, and it is slow cooking on the grill.
Which time I am using to clear out my Clipping extension. Three posts added here. These are what I wanted to note, but now do not think need a separate post:
From The Commons: Friday Reads: June 2023 (I found the first novel most interesting, but there are plenty that sounds worth reading - if only there was enough time!)
As an aspiring fiction author, I’ve been warned that readers are showing ‘apocalypse fatigue’. As world events blur the lines between realism and what was once the realm of speculative fiction, why aren’t the big issues of our times the ‘next big thing’ in publishing?
I do not see me going anywhere that needs reporting. Nor do I see the time to write anything useful. Maybe continue to clean out my bookmarks.
[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch6/8/2025]
I have two activities here at Fort Dix FCI to keep me sane. My job in landscaping amounts to nothing more than makework. We have approximately 52 men on our roster and 6 shovels, 6 metal rakes, 6 spades, and 2 wheelbarrows. And the rains hit today - so not doing anything there at all. Come, winter, I shall spend more time typing than landscaping. Keeping my sanity feels imperative here and now.
My Bureau of Prisons case manager has no plans on how to reintegrate me into society. That 151 months in prison might have been overkill cannot even be thought by the government officials overseeing my imprisonment. Saying such a thing would be heresy exceeding Luther's, and Nietzsche's. So I do need to keep writing and reading. The writing and reading give me purpose here.
While reading Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, my mind kept going to my own writing. The fiction mostly, but also this journal, these notes. Yes, I had this feeling somewhat while reading The Brothers Karamazov, but Dostoevsky's style did not taunt me the way Mantel's taunted me to get back to work. Besides, I had set today - my commissary day - for getting typewriter cartridges. My hiatus has come to an end. That thought prodded me through Mantel's novel.
Nick Lowe's "Breaking Glass" (or is it "Sound of Breaking Glass"?) is on the radio right now. It still sounds good.
The writing makes me feel I am doing something useful. I can only spend so much time here recollecting my sins - I have no other means of atoning for them than my writing. If I can sell them, then maybe I will not be living on the dole, or on the street, in 2022.
The reading list does seem a bit harder to justify. Mom once took away my books (hid some of them from her) when I was somewhere between 8 and 10. She thought I was reading too much. It may be then I began discounting fiction and privileging non-fiction. The only book I recall from that period is one of C.S. Forester's Hornblower books. I still had that when I got arrested. The reading list contains only fiction.
The list has problems. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon apparently disappeared [from the prison leisure library, sch 6/12/2025] the same as did Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Since Morrison's Beloved is already on the list, I substituted Ian McEwan, who I have heard good things of but not read (and we have a copy in the prison's leisure library!) Maybe I can get a copy sent in of Song of Solomon.
I found a duplicate on the list, just recently. Two entries for The Handmaid's Tale. I decided to read Kate Chopin, instead.
I also dropped The Count of Monte Cristo. It is huge. I need to get to my writing. I swapped in a Richard Ford novel. I have heard of him; Joel C read one of his novels and liked him. I do not think I can learn much from Dumas.
Because of the writing, I decided to put off War and Peace. I did pick up Latin Literature (penguin Classic; Michael Grant, ed; 1978) with the thought of going back to Tolstoy. Now, I will do the Romans, and then Ralph Ellison paired with Lord of the Flies, then go to I, Claudius and Howard's End. I will pair Maus now with War and Peace. I may not clear out the locker this way, but I will work out the reading list. I will go back to War and Peace when I get the stories done for "Only The Dead and The Dying", or I run out of typing supplies.
By having goals and purpose, I avoid my time imprisoned doing me instead of me doing my time. Perhaps, I will emerge from here without my brains being addled, capable of a better life than the one I ruined. Why do I think the BOP would disapprove of my plans?
Americans have a Manichean idea of how writers as supposed to be: Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Certainly, Americans of my age older have this idea.
Hemingway: drinking hard, hunting hard, fishing hard, dropping in on wars and bullfights; a lean, masculine prose.
Fitzgerald: drinking hard, living in the city in a high style, sensitive instead of macho, a more lush prose.
The Hemingway writers, as I think them: Norman Mailer, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy.
The Fitzgerald writers: Jack Kerouac, Richard Ford, Paul Auster
Yes, most have drank themselves to death, thankfully.
But there was a third great writer of the Twenties and Thirties who provides a third way of being a writer.
Like Fitzgerald, he graduated an Ivy League school.
Like Hemingway, he was an ambulance driver in World War One.
Unlike either, he had a variable style and was concerned with ideas and big strokes.
He managed to outlive both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
The foregoing came to me today after reading John Dos Passos Coggin's The World at the End of a Line in The American Scholar, particularly the following:
Dos Passos loved and extolled the sea every bit as much as his friend Hemingway. From 1928 to 1935, before their friendship frayed under the strain of the Spanish civil war, the two men often fished the waters near Key West together, catching tarpon, sailfish, marlin, wahoo, mahi-mahi, and tuna. The tropics were also the doctor’s prescription for Dos Passos’s recurring bouts of rheumatic fever. They usually brought along a couple of bottles of champagne, but by custom these remained untouched until the first fish was caught. Everyone on Hemingway’s boat received a nickname: “Dos” or “Muttonfish” for Dos Passos, “Hem” or the “Old Master” for Hemingway, “Old Bread” for the boat’s engineer, and “Saca Ham” for the cook. Conversation on these expeditions remained light. “It was a delight to be able to chatter amiably on all sorts of topics without tripping over that damn Party line,” wrote Dos Passos in his 1966 memoir, The Best Times. Hemingway was as competitive at fishing as he was with everything, but nobody got too sore. “Hem was the greatest fellow in the world to go around with when everything went right,” Dos Passos wrote. Hemingway once invited Arnold Gingrich, the editor and cofounder of Esquire, to go fishing with the gang. “The man was in a trance,” Dos Passos remembered. “It was a world he’d never dreamed of. He was mosquito bitten, half seasick, scorched with sunburn, astonished, half scared, half pleased. It was as much fun to see Ernest play an editor as to see him play a marlin.”
Unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution. The friends operated at different speeds: Hemingway raced; Dos Passos cruised. Take, for example, the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Dos Passos enjoyed the experience primarily for the spectacle, the food, and the drink. Hemingway saw it as a test of manhood. There “were too many exhibitionistic personalities in the group to suit me,” Dos Passos wrote. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves.” Likewise when it came to fishing, Hemingway and Dos Passos had different motives. Dos Passos fished “for the pot”—to catch lunch or dinner. For that reason, he disliked fishing for tarpon, which figured among Hemingway’s favorite quarry, no matter the theatrics involved in fighting them. “I hated to see the great silver monsters lying in the dust on the wharf,” he wrote. “They aren’t fit to eat. About the only use is for mounting. Some people make knicknacks out of the dried scales. Sheer vanity catching tarpon.” Dos Passos looked to the sea as a salve for his spirit. It was in 1924, during a break from writing one of his best novels, Manhattan Transfer, that he discovered Key West. He understood that islands in general—and by extension, the sea—tended to refill his cup of inspiration. He called his happy affliction “islomania.”
I do not always know what to do with myths. I think my natural inclination is to knock the hot air out of them; certainly to give them a jaundiced viewing. Thank you, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Dos Passos kicks in the myth of how an American writer should behave and how he should write. More to the point, he offers an alternative for the American novel that created by the myths of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
I will shoot my mouth one more time before closing, saying that Ross Lockridge, Jr.'sRaintree County and Don DeLillo's Underworldstrike me as Dos Passos novels.
I called it before 9 pm and was up before the alarm at 3:30 AM.
Joe Biden is not running for President. Strange to say, but the world has not stopped spinning. he has put the country ahead of his ego and his ambition. If Washington is great because he gave up power willingly, then Biden's place in history is assured.
Presidents tend to be larger than life: Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump. Biden was never more than life-sized. Maybe it was the almost accidental nature of his presidency. Maybe it was the large and painful personal losses fate had imposed on him. Maybe it was because he was already an old man when he ascended to the nation’s highest office.
But Biden was never bigger than his office.
I suspect that is precisely why he became a great president.
Every act of writing is an act of faith: that your words will hold together and take root, that they will endure the spans of doubt and insult, and that, given enough time, all of those words will blossom into something splendid and godly and you will be alive to see it. But when I sit to write my novel, all I see is a pursuit into oblivion, a bridge into space.
I feel pretty good. That I did not get the apartment in the order I wanted to have it by now, does not seem to bother me. I am ready to start the day. I will do what needs done later. I feel that I have things in enough of an order. What doubts I have about "Road Tripping"'s ending are not dragging me down. Let us hope the feeling persists and I am back on track. Say hey.
I went to work. There I was miserable, putting a lot of effort into standing upright. The dizziness hit about five times - when I put my head down, when I moved my head too fast. I also got into it with one of the cooks. Try to help and she got angry. People seem to have far less of a sense of humor nowadays.
During group "therapy" the counselor gave me something to think about - concerning 1984. He said he didn't buy it because people want just power for itself. It came to me that there is no one person wanting power. There is the Party. Organizations do want power and keep power for its own sake. The Death of Stalin makes this point, if it is for laughs, The people only serve the monster of the apparatus. It has been too long since I read Thomas Hobbes, but it seems to me that he made the same point.
However, I am not sure the idea that people do not seek power for the sake of power hold up very well. You have to get around Nietzsche's Will to Power. Maybe Freud, too. I can, and have, argued with both. Power in the sense of survival is what I get from Nietzsche; I can go for that. We want our environment and its contents not to destroy us. Still, it may be that Americans, if not much of the developed world, do not equate attaining political power is the way of ensuring one's safety in the world. Where grabbing and holding and exerting power was a defense to physical destruction for Stalin, Augustus, Alexander, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Richard III, Elizabeth Tudor, or Louis XIV. My counter-examples would be Cesare Borgia, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Nicholas II of Russia, and Trotsky. Democracy spreads power amongst the people. At least, American democracy did; the Weimar Republic is the counter-example. Democratic politicians need not worry about being executed by their opponents - so long as democratic norms hold. What a democratic people need fear is a single person overthrowing the democratic government. The autocrat sees the people as a threat to his power. The other threat being other would-be autocrats thinking they can do a better job as autocrat. No, I think the counselor underestimates the potency of power as a life goal.
We watched a short video about dopamine and putting off our desires. I think this was not news to me, and a job I am already doing well. Putting off gratification I knew how to do when I was young - having to save money to do anything has that kind of effect. Part of my depression was looking around at what others had and wondered why I put off acquiring more, and then realizing that I had gone too far to have what my friends had. Nowadays, I am back to putting off gratification. Writing will do that to you. Draft, revise, revise, revise, revise is not a recipe for instant gratification. No one asks me about my motivations, no one asks about my writing, while it seems many make assumptions that I have certain pathological orientations. I should be more amused by the disparity between reality and their assumptions, only they worry me with their projections. It seems to me those making their assumptions are far more perverse than I ever tried to be.
When sex becomes a spectacle (Engelsberg ideas). I knew guys who bragged about the numbers of women they knew. I was always more interested in the experience. By the way, you who make their assumptions about my possible pathologies - I think you are more interested in exerting power over those weaker than you, and I find that the worst sort of experience. I would rather drive a Bugatti than a Ford. But I think the article makes me out of step with my times.
These cultural strands proved just as influential as technology in pornography’s domination of public discourse. In the response to Bonnie Blue’s pursuit of notoriety, we witness the exhaustion of moral frameworks. There is little condemnation – few voices raised about ‘good’ or what is right or wrong. Multiple columnists, sensing something troubling about her project, scramble instead to identify harm and desperately seek to assign her victim status, but she refuses that narrative. Others search for feminist meaning, but she denies them that interpretation, too.
What remains is sex as pure spectacle – a performance stripped of the privacy that once made it intimate, the relationship that once made it meaningful, and the mystery that once made it erotic. We have arrived at Reagan’s nightmare, but through a path he never anticipated: through the complete triumph of publicity culture itself. The bedroom has become a broadcast studio, and what was once private has transformed into the ultimate public performance.
I do not see the word mentioned in the article, so I will: where is the humanity in all of this? No wonder people are willing to marry their AI chatbots.
After group, I put in my first app for a new apartment. People had made the recommendation and the price tempted me. Going inside, my heart sunk. It looked like a nursing home. I do not care to be around old people. Death is on my mind enough. The real problem I did not see until I left the place. There is a childcare place across the street. This did not show up when I looked on Google Maps, nor did I see it when I got off the bus. Crossing Walnut Street without getting hit occupied all my thoughts. When I got home, I called and told them to disregard my app.
I talked to my sister yesterday. She thinks I should get a trailer or find a place like a senior center. I do not like the trailer idea - they devalue too quickly. Although I am alone, I do not feel lonely. There is plenty for me to do without me feeling like I am overwhelmed. Dating seems silly at my age, with these annoying health issues, and little money. There is also the issue of my memory - I cannot get past romantic failings - and that death looms for me and whoever I might get attached to. No, I would prefer younger people. Dr. Johnson said something to the effect that was how to stay alive.
Back home, I napped for an hour before going west to Payless for dinner items. Only problem was I had no appetite when I got home.
I worked on my new alt-history story and worked on my email. I did submit a story on Thursday, but none yesterday. Then I went back to bed. I woke around 11 and could not get back to sleep. Back to writing and listening to YouTube videos.
Today, the alarm went off at 6 pm and I decided to sleep in. I started working on this post an hour ago.
I should do laundry. No, must do laundry.
And clean up a little around this place.
I have paid a little attention to the news. Trump keeps blundering his way. The Republicans want to make themselves the only power in the country. They think they have God on their side. That we seem to be a people of low intelligence and a high need for coddling, they might succeed. May the Good Lord take pity on us.
Until this video, I thought I had never visited Vermillion County, Indiana. Wrong. Turns out I was there in 1972, on the way back from St. Louis, my mother stopped in Dana to see the Ernie Pyle memorial.
I do not see any reason for going back. Although, this video might describe much of Indiana.
Oh, yeah, I quit my job this morning.
I stick with this - sweaty and oh, so human:
Which may be why I am never sure what to do with Roman Polanski: An Officer and a Spy movie review (2025) (Roger Ebert). Like the reviewer says about this movie, so with much of life, you have to make up your mind.
I got to say my new home has an interesting collection of books. Lots of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler.
I have read Cussler off and on for years. Like Jimmy Buffett, his real big hit was a long time ago and repeated endlessly ever since. For Cussler, that hit would be Raise the Titanic.
Cussler has paper thin characters, villains that would make Sax Rohmer or Ian Fleming blanch. He starts with a prologue - usually some secret history - and I read to see how he will connect the prologue with the main story. I admit once he makes the connection, the book is over for me.
However much Cussler loves his word processor and information drops, he loves other machines even more. His antique planes and cars, and the ships that might not all be antiques, receive a respectful adoration - if not more. His Dirk Pitt is not an ocean-going James Bond, but he does belong to the boy's own adventure club. I thought of Richard Hannay just now, even though it has been a long time since I read those books; not sure exactly why this character came to mind. Go figure out that one for yourself.
And I got to think that Cussler has a sense of humor when I find him injecting Clive Cussler into Valhalla Rising. He makes himself a deus aux machina. I recall him doing this in another novel without also recalling the novel's title.
Another touch of humor - I hope - was in an offhand comment about the Titanic having broke in half as it sunk. Hello? How then was there a Raise the Titanic? (And here I first felt the impingement of imprisonment. I know Wikipedia has the answer. I dearly, dearly miss Wikipedia.)
[Wikipedia does note this problem! Go here. sch 11/3/22.]
I am not sure what humor Tom Clancy has after reading The Bear and the Dragon. If there is any, it was in the Chapter tittles. At 1,137 pages in paperback, this is not a spy novel or a political thriller, but both and more. It came off as an alternate history (certainly not our world of 2000) working as a wish fulfillment for Clancy. As maybe three books instead of one, a mass of words needing an editor. Yet, I finished this instead of The Brothers Karamazov.
The heroes present no flaws, make no errors, and have all the humanity of cardboard. Out of all the characters in this huge novel, I can recall only two of interest, and both were Russians. Cussler's Pitt sweats like a human being, unlike anyone in Clancy's book. I cannot even say that Clancy caught my attention in any of his technology the way Cussler did with a Ford Trimotor airplane. I write this even though I think Clancy writes better a better narrative, has a better prose, than Cussler.
Harry Turtledove gets more credit from me for handling the multiple character/multiple plot style of novel. Clancy announced one major plot with the equivalent of the U.S.C. band on Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." This Clancy was certainly a book in need of an editor.
[And it was, of course, a bestseller. sch 11/3/22.]
So why did I read the whole thing? For the lights shone on our history! Here are the reasons for me saying this:
The attitude towards the Chinese in 2000 was fear and hostility. Bears to remember the Chinese shot down one of our planes in Bush's first term.
How we viewed the last Communist country - China - as plodding into economic failure instead of a bright future as the mortgagee of the United States.
That Russian had a future as a democracy and as an economic power. Instead, Russian democracy seems challenged, its economy gangster-ridden, and not very happy with the United States.
That Russia might have joined NATO. I remember thinking of this as a good idea during Bush's first term. Not looking so good now.
A competent CIA and NSA. I think all that got blown away on 9/11/2001. (Even though Ian Fleming in From Russia With Love poked at the CIA as not competent.)
That stockbrokers should be praised as industrious capitalists. How a stockbroker does this, becomes industrious by creating nothing of value, is not clear to me. Besides after the Wall Street bailout, it is hard to see the Wall Streeters as anything other than irresponsible frauds dependent on Uncle Sam to bail them out.
I can see reading more Cussler, but I have had enough Clancy.
I woke up after two hours of sleep. I really need to get that Ben-Gay, I can only use the bag in certain circumstances. Since I was up, "True Love Ways Gone Astray" went to Glint.
Back up at 7 am. I did some reading, some posts for here. Laundry started at 8:15 and done almost an hour ago.
Drive around Indiana and you’ll
probably notice more and more homes and businesses powered by solar
energy. This saves consumers money and creates a less expensive and more
reliable grid for all Hoosiers. But a recent opinion issued by the Indiana Supreme Court could halt solar’s growth, unless our legislature takes action.
The issue is how solar owners should
be credited for the electricity they generate, but don’t use themselves.
When solar owners generate extra electricity, it flows out through
their electric meter to their neighbors. Solar owners earn credit for
this electricity on their bills.
When the General Assembly first
addressed compensation for solar owners back in 2017, they told Hoosiers
they wanted to ensure fairness for all involved. But that’s not what’s
happened.
The court
destroyed the purpose of the legislation by allowing CenterPoint, a
utility that provides electricity to customers in southwestern Indiana,
to drastically slash the compensation customers receive for the extra
solar energy they produce and share with their neighbors. Similar cases
are pending on appeal for Indiana’s other four investor-owned utilities
and now seem destined for the same fate. This radical change in solar
policy makes it difficult, if not practically impossible, for many
families, schools, houses of worship, farms, and businesses to offset
the financial investment of installing solar panels.
I do not expect the Indiana General Assembly with its Republican majority to do anything that helps out Indiana's citizens with solar panels. The Republicans have been telling people for too long climate change is not real. Donald J. Trump pals around with the Saudis, who certainly do not want us to become energy independent. Maybe Hoosiers wanting clean energy should tie it to book banning ( Indiana lawmakers revive bill at center of book-banning dispute for 2023 legislative session) or abortion. In the end, all I can is: thisis what you get by voting in Republicans.
Weirdly, that is not the case now. Lynchian is the go-to adjective to
describe any sniff of the uncanny and esoteric on screen, from Donnie
Darko to True Detective. It will never be a mainstream quality, but it
exists explicitly in orientation towards the mainstream, often
represented by the discordant versions of 50s Americana that appear so
often in his work. And so his destabilising vision has become a common
lens for discerning the truth about the “normal world”: that white
picket fence America paints over deviant and sometimes evil obsessions,
as in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, or that Hollywood is in fact a
nightmare factory, as in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Lynch
playing John Ford, maybe the most establishment of all golden age
directors, in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is a neat joke about his skewwhiff relationship with the mainstream.
###
Online especially, we respond to this fragmentation with ever-more
polarised positions, ones that seek to permanently separate virtue from
vice. But Lynch’s great moral conviction has been to show us to what
extent good and evil are inextricably wound around each other and
coexist in the same person. Excessive zeal, like stainless Agent Cooper,
is replaced by his scowling, mullet-haired doppelganger. Corruption and
entropy are part of life; not exactly a commercial proposition, which
is probably why Lynch hasn’t made a feature in more than 15 years. But
even if not everyone wants to lend their ear, he burrows onwards – as in
Blue Velvet – down into the cochlea and inside our heads. Happy
birthday, Mr Lynch, and thanks for showing us the way to seventh heaven.
Which reminds me, I still have seen neither The Elephant Man nor Easerhead.
The latter trashes the biography, but maybe answers my own question about Mailer - was he a novelist?
Bradford’s contention is that Mailer’s obstreperous life was the novel
he didn’t have the time or the talent to produce. It’s a flippant
misjudgment: his best work, in any case, is his nonfiction, in which he
studied the “psychic havoc” incited by contemporary events. In response
to the killing of the Kennedy brothers he elaborated the kind of nuttily
ingenious conspiratorial plot that now proliferates on social media. He
treated Marilyn Monroe as a goddess sacrificed to her worshippers and
in doing so he came to see that celebrity is a kind of death cult,
dooming those it deifies. Reflecting on the 1969 moon landing, he
wondered how this human incursion might have disturbed the quiescence of
outer space. Mailer’s abiding subject was America’s id, “the dream life
of the nation”, and he ventured intrepidly into that irrational
underground.
Having read his work on the 1968 political conventions andhis novel The Naked and the Dead, I prefer the former. When I was young, Mailer was notorious, and maybe better known for his notoriety than his work. I do not think he was as great as he thought, but he needs to be remembered as having talent.
I meet with the counselor at noon, and I am catching the 10:30 bus downtown. That lets me get some business taken care of down there - like a meal.
No response from my PO about the time for my polygraph.
I have had enough of today. I was up early, and I have been working on Dad's trust.
The email remains - under 10 to respond to.
I got this rejection for "When Thomas Kemp Went Missing":
Thank you so much for sending us your endeavors. It's unique reflection of the underside will not be revealed at this time, but please keep us in mind for creative work in the future!
“This discovery represents an extraordinary contribution to the knowledge of the maritime history of Sicily and the Mediterranean and highlights once again the central role of the Island in the traffic and cultural exchanges of antiquity,” said Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, Sicily’s regional councilor for cultural heritage and Sicilian identity, in a statement on the shipwreck. “The wreck, dating back to a crucial period for the transition between archaic and classical Greece, is a precious piece of the submerged Sicilian cultural heritage.”
The echoes between the curiosity cabinets of yore and our own media-steeped world offer opportunities for teaching digital and visual literacy, critical analysis, and historical thinking in the college classroom. As a historian of science who has taught about the history of collecting, I encourage my students to try to imagine themselves in the shoes of museumgoers and naturalists past. Images of historical artifacts from these cabinets as well as depictions of the collections themselves—all available to students through Artstor on JSTOR and similar resources—provide a tangible gateway to experience remote worldviews and mores. Such images can especially help STEM students see the value in humanistic questions, not least because curiosity cabinets were some of the original interdisciplinary spaces.
***
As an antidote to the divided attention that shapes student life, close observation of images can force students to slow down in an age of rapid information consumption. As a follow-up activity, the class digs into printed illustrations of wonder chambers in small groups. Each group receives a separate image to analyze. First, they spend five to ten minutes simply looking at the scene before them—identifying objects, pondering the collection’s organization, and noticing more the longer they look. Once that time is up, they take another ten minutes to discuss which three objects from the scene they would nominate to feature in an exhibition for their peers about the history of early museums.
Reading this, I thought how little mentorship we give to kids using the internet. Before, at least for me, there was someone to explain what was real and what was not. On the other hand, considering how many people voted for Trump, there is little critical thinking to be found in adult Americans.
Speaking of Our Fearless Leader, he has stepped into being an architect and artistic critic: Trump’s Culture Wars Come to Architecture. I am not much a fan of modernist architecture. However, the essay's author, Anthony Paletta, makes some good points I want to remember.
One is political:
It is also wrong to pretend that the reaction against modern and contemporary architecture is distinctive of Trump supporters, or to treat this as a manifestation of white supremacy instead of a broader, if complex, question of taste. On the left, for example, Nathan Robinson and Brianna Rennix’s Current Affairs piece from 2017, “Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture,” has been repeatedly cited in recent weeks, and Matt Ford at The New Republic weighed in with “The Non-Fascist Case for Traditional Architecture.” There have also been a number of accounts sympathetic to the order from Trump-skeptical conservative figures. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat’s argument that construction might best inspire a range of the public if it varied in character by administration likely isn’t wrong.
And historical:
Still, if there is a problem with contemporary building, it is not—as the Trump administration suggests—government elitism all the way down. The politically divisive debate over popular versus elite taste obscures other reasons why we don’t see more traditional construction, and that is a gap we should not leave for vengeful antimodernists to fill. Their account often amounts to the fairytale that austere academic elites took all of our nice buildings away, which we could have back if only we tipped them all out of the castle. In fact, the sway of fervent modernists over this domain has unquestionably declined, and these people aren’t usually the ones commissioning buildings anyway. The primary drivers of the decline of classical construction have been, instead, the economy of modern building methods and the adoption of standardized building materials, as well as a steep increase in labor costs in the last century.
And the ever-delicious irony that the elitists on the Right are complaining about what they endorse:
Indeed, civic construction trends have tended to follow those in the rest of society, which over the long midcentury ascendance of modernism were being set not by government and academic authorities but often by big business, tract homebuilding, and the like. Most unsatisfactory government commissions look like anonymous office buildings, not like avant-garde efforts designed to shock. If some right-wing populists are coming around to dislike these things, then all the better for an understanding of what has actually been going on, but their stock villains—left-leaning elitists—have not generally been updated with any accuracy. Deconstuctivist king Peter Eisenman, for his part, has declared that “most of my clients are Republicans, most of them are right-leaning,” and Sean Hannity lived in a Richard Neutra house. Former Civic Arts Society Board member and current Research Fellow Catesby Leigh did note, in a City Journal piece prefiguring much of the language of the executive order, that several of the order’s targets “cater to quintessentially private sensibilities that regard architecture in subjective, emotivist terms.”
I mentioned Mavis Gallant in Having Survived To Friday Night..., and today The Los Angeles Review of Books has Nadia Ghent review of “The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant.”
What The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant allows us to enter is not a museum of midcentury fiction, dead and irrelevant, but a master class in writing, one that is capacious and alive. Hallberg has beautifully arranged the 44 stories geographically and in roughly chronological order, similar to Gallant’s 1981 collection Home Truths, which creates a journey that puts the reader in the place of Gallant herself traveling from North America to Europe, from New World to Old, from the familiar to the unknown. It is a dislocation both physical and existential, where brief moments of illumination sweep across a character’s consciousness before it is plunged back into uncertainty.
Also from LARB is Annie Lou Martin review of Anna Moschovakis’s new novel “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth", The Destabilizing Force of Language. Whoever wrote the headline, I thank you. That is why I read the review and was rewarded with having to think about my own writing.
This paragraph struck me and I could not stop:
Moschovakis’s narrator, an out-of-work Method actress, becomes obsessed with killing her younger roommate, Tala. When Tala disappears, the narrator begins receiving messages from an enigmatic group with a Pynchonesque mystique, a catalyst for her already slippery psychic hold on reality to become precariously tenuous. Shifting surfaces betray a shifting core. As the narrator’s obsession with Tala’s absence deepens, language fractures, and the basic composition of reality undulates.
***
In An Earthquake, as in her other work, Moschovakis is clearly concerned with the way that language itself acts—as a way to construct and disrupt distinctions between self and other, as mimicry, as an object, as a way to establish direction, as a stabilizing and destabilizing force. Her sense of poetics never strays far from the material, from the body itself as an object that acts and is acted upon. Etymology is a teleology that crumbles when pressed; the narrator muses on “junk metaphors” like “go off the deep end,” pulls words apart to extract new meanings (“rehearse” contains the word “hearse,” etc.). Scratch an actor and you find another actor; scratch a word and you find another word.
***
It’s tempting, when reading a novel so clearly written by a poet, to elevate every image to the representational. The physical shifting of the surface of the earth betrays an unstable core, just as the narrator’s unstable sense of self manifests in her shifting facades as an actor. The reader is clued in to a deceptively simple set of conditions: there’s a relationship here between the surface and the core, between what’s said and what’s meant. But to read this novel as a clean metaphor would be reductive, and like any good poet, Moschovakis is concerned with the physicality of language on the level of both image and form. The form itself is unstable, shifting, and becomes increasingly less “stable” as the novel goes on. Each section breaks down, at the end, into a poem, like a sudden running up to the edge of language itself, causing friction, refusing a stable sense of meaning making. It’s a breakdown of structure to the point where even the sentence “disintegrates.” As the novel progresses, the language mimics the process of a mind engaged with an increasingly defamiliarized environment—obsessive, associative, and anxious.
I have not yet separated words from reportage. This I attribute to my years as a lawyer, as much as my reading of Hammett and Vonnegut and Hemingway. I cannot sing because I do not have an ear for melody. Nor am I any kind of poet, not even a poetaster. I need to think more about words creating images.
Language as a disruptive actor intrigues my brain. I like the idea while not sure how to use it.
The Paris Review released James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78. I have not time to read it. I was good and only napped for an hour, cleaned up the bedroom, but I have not had time to read the interview.
“No matter what ideology you turn to, no matter how utopian it is, it does not solve the problem of hypocrites, frauds and charlatans. And that is the topic of most of my satire. It’s not really the ideologies themselves,” he says. I begin to ask him more about his writing on identity politics, but he walks away.
So wealth is what they resent while idolizing billionaires. There is a satire there.
3:41 pm
Around 5 with the dishes done, and the bedroom tidied, I came back to the computer. I called KH. We chatted for a while about Bollywood movies. Then it was back to work for me. Now, I have had enough. Good night!
