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 made it to Target. Not that it did me much good - the pharmacy was closed, and it was not in my plans to stick around until they opened. My plan was to take the bus back downtown, and catch the Whitely bus. My knee was hurting. Thing is, the Mall bus was late enough for me to miss the Whitely bus. Instead of just hanging around the bus station, I walked down to the Village Pantry and got me a pack of smokes. It was not such a long wait for the bus.
Back here, I put away my groceries from Target. I checked my email. Another rejection came in this afternoon:
Thank you
for sending us your submission to Perceptions Magazine. Although
"Problem Solving" did not receive a majority vote from the board of
editors, we appreciate the chance to review your work and the effort you
put into your submission. We encourage you to submit again in the
future.
I talked to my sister just before fixing dinner. After dinner, I decided to run through some places to put my adaptation of The Masque of the Reed Death. I wrote that up in Searching for a Place to Submit My Play.
The rest of the night was spent in preparing the play for submission
(and I screwed that up for one place) and getting it sent off.
Leaving aside the patronizing tone of the French publishing industry,
even the most ardent Ernaux reader might debate the author’s choice to
publish the digressive, possibly repetitive, and steeply self-exposing Getting Lost. Yet
this is neither the decision of a willful exhibitionist nor a
provocateur — in the style of Georges Bataille or the Marquis de Sade —
eager to antagonize the establishment at whatever price.
For Ernaux, turning to the minutiae of everyday experience is a way
of avoiding the preciousness of a detached writerly persona that seeks
to speak in universal tones about its subject or pass moral judgement on
the world. Her work, depicting complex topics like abortion, caring for
an ailing parent, and maternal ambivalence, has consistently shown that
neither stance is consistently sustainable.
###
Ernaux’s primary allegiance as a writer — even to the point, she
admits, of “danger,” “risk,” and all-consuming “obsession” — is to
sentences of uncompromising and forensic truth, rather than to
“politics” per se, especially of the identity-forming kind. Within the
nonliterary world, Ernaux has been a committed partisan, both of the
Yellow Vests movement and of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. She sees no
contradiction being willing to think in a serious unconstrained way
about the complexities of interpersonal relationships and standing
unequivocally behind the oppressed.
Accordingly, she has bristled at attempts by readers and critics to
reduce her work to a simple expression of some kind of political
identity. “I don’t write with my uterus,” she once famously said,
fatigued by always being termed a “woman writer,” “I write with my
brain.” The purpose of Getting Lost’s exposure of her most uncensored thinking is to affirm her radical commitment to honesty, however coarse.
Rachel is on. I need to shower and write a letter and get to bed. Tomorrow, I must work.
...Yes, I’m saying I find Ernaux’s narcissism, like Macron’s, offensive.
I have my own university (call it Mel) different from Melinda’s and I teach creative writing there. “Focus on the work not the writer” is (obviously) what I say to students when they start workshopping each other’s work. Hope they don’t read Sydney Review of Books because here I am.
Ernaux the human is political. She is committed for instance to the Palestinian cause as an active participant in BDS and a signer of many high-profile letters condemning the state of Israel. In her Nobel Prize speech she says, “I grew up as part of the postwar generation, following World War II, when writers and intellectuals positioned themselves in relation to French politics and became involved in social struggles as a matter of course.” The reason she writes and it’s always been so is “to avenge my people” and Ernaux’s people are France’s working classes, particularly working-class women whose lives have been wrung by poverty, patriarchy, humiliation, secrecy, shame.
She writes not to but from – from her “experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior”; “class defector”, she calls it elsewhere. What many describe as a forensic register to Ernaux’s writing is a mechanism countering any possible contempt or condescension by privileged readers toward her people. A wall. For this and for her focus on the everyday Ernaux went decades being “ignored or patronised by the French literary establishment,” notes Nelly Kaprièlian.
What I have always loved most about Ernaux is how she sees literature as a collective undertaking.....
***
Ukraine my homeland is fighting for its survival in part because of two things that didn’t happen in the early 1990s: Russia’s nuclear disarmament after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and a lustration process purging KGB men and women from participating in post-Soviet public life. Ukraine and Baltic states went through lustration. Ukraine of course gave up its nuclear weapons as well.
It’s been surprising to learn from my little perch in Australia how ready people are to stomp with both feet on the reality that Russia, not America, not China, is at present the deadliest imperial power and biggest terrorist organization in the world. Who knew it’d be such a bummer for so many, they’ll grab at whichever ideological lasso is thrown around Ukraine’s neck—anticolonialism, white-on-white violence, multipolarity, Global South v. Global North, NATO warmongering, racial capitalism, proxy American war, criminal dominance of the West—grab at and posit Ukraine, simultaneously mirroring Russian propaganda aims, as a costly and disingenuous distraction from real struggles and real wars.
Up around 3:30 thanks to the hip. Ninety minutes later, and I am waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. Do I go to work or not? I am not expected there, but I need the money and have little to do today. Well, the story is done. I do have plenty enough paper to get typed. I have another half hour to make my decision - or to admit a decision has already been made!
Overnight, "Problem Solving" was rejected again:
Thank you for
giving us the opportunity to read and consider "Problem Solving."
Unfortunately, your submission is not the right fit for our journal at
this time. We appreciate your interest in New Delta Review and wish you
the best of luck placing this work elsewhere.
Thank
you for your submission to Defunkt Magazine. Although we must decline
your submission this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it. We
hope you'll keep us in mind in the future when you send out your work.
Yep, I kept my day off. I started off to Target about an hour ago, only to remember it does not open until 9 or 10. I went, instead, to McClure's for a bottle of Coke. The knee hurts. The hip does not.
Did I mention I spoke with KH last night? I did. Not a peep out of any else but E.
I read Between Two Worlds, a review of a James Hogg biography, by Michael Lister. That was from Textualities, a Scottish site.
Not a critical biography, James Hogg: ALife, is
minutely researched and locates the writer in the social, economic and
cultural contexts of his time. Its defining characteristic is in the
particularity of detail that Hughes provides about the publication and
reception of Hogg’s works, from ‘Jamie the poeter’s’ first published
poem, which appeared in the Scots Magazine when Hogg was in his early twenties, to the last pieces he contributed to Fraser’s Magazine,
shortly before his death in 1835. Hughes throws remarkable light on the
Edinburgh and London publishing scenes of the time, and on the new age
of periodical literature that swept across Britain and North America
(where several of Hogg’s works were published, though not to his
pecuniary advantage, as they appeared in pirated editions that UK
copyright could not protect).
Scottish short stories come from a
tradition where stories were told to entertain and inform. They carried
fear, risk, menace and warnings; they established boundaries and ensured
continuity, especially informing young women on the dangers of men and
young men on the dangers of women. And even though they could be dour
and a wee bit thrawn, they were used to enhance what were seen as
traditional Scottish values of acceptance and neighbourliness, and while
danger was usually on the other side of the hill, they carried life in
all its variances with our twin identities of voice and place.
It’s
worth remembering that these social priorities arose in the
predominately rural society that existed in Scotland for millennia
before cities arrived, and in many cases these priorities prevailed in
cities through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I grew up listening to stories told by my older relatives. Log ago, I was told if I could write as I talked, I would have something. Still working on that suggestion without much success - so far.
These stories linked contemporary
readers with Scotland’s oral tradition and often combined
straightforward historical fact with plain storytelling, putting us in
touch with our common heritage that reaches beyond more formal records.
Their humanity and straightforward storytelling often obscure where one
ends and the other begins.
And
travellers were profligate in their telling. Like true custodians they
enjoy nothing better than to share these stories, as much as they shared
the songs.
It’s important
to understand that these origins are anything but literary. The stories
were memorised and orally transmitted; they kept the past alive and
restored it to contemporary audiences. Duncan Williamson maintained
these stories, especially those you hear in childhood, remain with you,
so that both the story and the teller are never forgotten.
I have not been writing my short stories in the first-person. Why this is, I have no explanation other than decades spent doing formal writing.
I have written elsewhere that the short story is a very subversive form:
“Images
have to be sharp and characters must arrive fully formed rather than be
given time to develop. This precision … (is) imposed by the form. Most
of the craft of short story writing is hidden; if you see it, it hasn’t
worked, but as with any literary form, the craft and mechanics are on
display if one is willing to look.”12
It
is difficult to read a collection of Scottish stories without becoming
aware of the spoken voice and the power of first-person narration. It is
absolutely crucial. It establishes the tone and direction of the story
by forming an immediate and firm pact with the reader, appearing in
every instance to take him or her into the writer’s confidence. Not
surprisingly, it is the first decision a writer takes and one he is
often not aware of making, since its influence is often instinctive.
###
Of course, the first-person narrator
is a direct link to the oral tradition, offering more than just a method
of sharpening a story’s range and power. A third person narrator cannot
make characters say more than the scope of the action permits. On the
other hand it is entirely legitimate for first-person characters to give
themselves over to reflection, reasoning, political opinion,
philosophical meanderings and so on.
Scottish
writers have become especially adept in employing the intimacy of
first-person narration in a third-person narrative. Stream of
consciousness is common, especially when dealing with the young mind or
in establishing the problems of identity. And though further study is
obviously needed, this device, as well as first-person narration, has
been used by writers as diverse as Margaret Oliphant and Muriel Spark,
who use details to build an atmosphere, which they just as tellingly
deconstruct, or allow to crumble. It has been employed by male writers
such as Grassic Gibbon when writing about women, by writers as distinct
as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and generations of children’s, crime
and romantic novelists.
And I think there are lessons there for us in Indiana, in the Midwest, and maybe across the United States. It feels like a kick to do more first-person stories.
I think this aligns with some of what KH and I have been talking about, especially last night, about what I am seeing in the stories I have been reading lately. Or a lack, to be more precise.
But where are their voices? Where are
the people who danced in George Square? Have the fat bullies who kicked
food around the Square the evening after the Referendum result won?
Where are the voices of protest against the status quo? We have plenty
descriptions of urban poverty, of intellectual poverty, of poverty
induced by crippling want that is often induced by alcohol or drugs. We
know what these things are like, but where are the radicals who do more
than point these things out and whine about their condition? We still
have folk telling us what’s good for us. We need to tell ourselves
what’s good for us and to act on it. For all of this and much more the
short story is the perfect vehicle. Scottish stories now take on the
world’s confusions stretching from politics of gender through politics
of war and landing back home with the politics of domesticity.
And here is another rejection for a different story:
Dear Samuel,
Thank you for the opportunity to read "Exemplary Employee."
Unfortunately, your story isn't quite what we're looking for right now.
In the past, we've provided detailed feedback on our rejections, but I'm
afraid that due to time considerations, we're no longer able to offer
that service. I appreciate your interest in Clarkesworld Magazine and
hope that you'll keep us in mind in the future.
Isolation and loneliness are so prevalent in our society
today. A fundamental argument in your book is that this is toxic,
leaving us traumatized, disconnected, and ashamed, which you have long
claimed is the root cause of most chronic illnesses.
We’ve evolved in communal settings for millions of years. Our
prehominid and our hominid ancestors and our species lived in a
community in close, cooperative, collaborative contact with others. The
hypercapitalist ideology of people being competitive, aggressive,
selfish, individualistic creatures is almost guaranteed to isolate
people.
In the UK, they had to appoint a minister of loneliness. Loneliness
is as much of a health risk as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, and the
number of lonely people is going up all the time, significantly in the
last several decades, particularly under neoliberalism. So, when I talk
about society being toxic, I literally mean that it actually undermines
human health by the very assumptions that it makes about what’s
necessary for human life.
How is the nature of our current system connected to rates of illness in our society?
If you look at the research on stress, the commonest triggers for
stress response are lack of information, uncertainty, loss of control,
and conflict. There is uncertainty, with an 8 percent inflation rate in a
relatively rich country like Canada. What control do you have when some
corporations thousands of miles away decide your fate or politicians
far away decide your fate?
Inequality creates stresses on people, and the more the burden of
inequality on somebody, the greater the risk of illness. That’s why
Indigenous women face much more stress than the average person.
Inequality itself is a stress because, in a society that values people
according to economic achievement, those with less are made to feel
inferior. Even if people who are making an adequate living feel
themselves to be inferior, that’s a stress in itself. Then there is the
totally unresolved issue of racism in our society, of which the health
impacts are tremendous. Then there’s the gender gap; women account for
80 percent of autoimmune disease diagnoses. Stress isn’t just an
abstract psychological event; it translates into physiology in the
endocrine system, which organizes the hormonal apparatus, burdens the
nervous system, taxes the heart.
Toxic societies kill us. Makes sense to me. Then, too, I managed to survive through my own craziness where I felt cut off from family and friends, and that became in my mind their dislike for me.
Please
accept our apologies for the delayed response. We thank you for the
opportunity to review your work. After careful reading and
consideration, we did not select it for publication. We wish you luck in
finding the right place for this piece. In the meantime, please take a
look at our current issue.
Best,
The Editors
Target later. Placing stories now. Work, of a sort.
Whatever is going on at work, but we are a tired and cranky
bunch. It is not even that we are moving anything all that heavy or
different. I was tired out by noon, and my lower back ached before
the last break. I caught the bus back downtown, chose to go back to
the room, and eat at the Puerto Vallerta - too tired to cook or go to
the grocery. I did go to McClure's after eating to eat a bottle of Coke. Back to the room, and not wanting to go anywhere else. It is getting cold, again.
Another night of sleeping a few hours and then
waking up. I had gone to sleep around 7 and decided 3 am would work.
I crawled out closer to 3:30. I did some legal research, I sent a
couple of emails. I read Stolen,
burnt, unfinished: The greatest books we’ll never get to read
from The Brisbane Times.
Also from last night, I found Orthodox Kokomo's Blog. I need to get to a church, but my unwillingness to get a car has me bound to Muncie. Maybe someone close to Kokomo will want to check out this blog.
Did I read Getting Lost – Annie Ernaux last night or the night before? Anyway, the more I read, the more the Nobel Prize winner seems interesting.
I think I read South Carolina Constitution Includes Abortion Right, State Supreme Court Rules when I woke at 11 thinking it was 1 AM (hey, the CPAP machine obscured the clock). This has importance to the politics of abortion, but to me the thing was the use of a state constitution. I wanted to write more, but time is short and no one is reading me for this stuff.
Take a look at the latest from Raleigh Review. Some good stuff here.
Not getting anything worthwhile done here. I have tabs open to research places to submit my stories. I have a bit of legal research to do. Too little damn time. Please get me through this day.
Not quite worried about myself, but usefulness seems precarious. I do worry about finding my way.
No response from my PO or from the polygraph guy about the time for next month's polygraph.
Up before the alarm, again. I did not get much sleep last night, but I had some strange dreams. Part of one sticks in my mind: running, as in moving one's feet like a runner, up to South Bend with my cousin Paul.
I did some reading before the bus came. Breakfast was an apple.
Every year, book publishers are inundated with manuscripts written by
budding authors, hoping for their big break. To help sort through the
mass of unsolicited proposals, publishers often turn to emerging writers
prizes: apart from money and mentoring, the recognition gained via
awards helps authors get eyeballs on their words. Surveying these awards
is one way to help put together a picture of the up-and-coming authors
set to storm the publishing world.
This is how I conceived my commitment to writing, which does not consist of writing ‘for’ a category of readers, but in writing ‘from’ my experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior; and from my longer and longer memory of the years I have lived, and from the present, an endless provider of the images and words of others. This commitment through which I pledge myself in writing is supported by the belief, which has become a certainty, that a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.
We see it today in the revolt of women who have found the words to disrupt male power and who have risen up, as in Iran, against its most archaic form. Writing in a democratic country, however, I continue to wonder about the place women occupy in the literary field. They have not yet gained legitimacy as producers of written works. There are men in the world, including the Western intellectual spheres, for whom books written by women simply do not exist; they never cite them. The recognition of my work by the Swedish Academy is a sign of hope for all female writers.
In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and/or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies.
For a different kind of writer, see Sad Girl Manifesto from The Baffler.
It seemed a very long day at work. I had to struggle very hard to keep myself going. It was not the work was onerous; just that it seemed to take so very long, measured against the clock. It was rainy and cloudy, and the outside lights were on before 6 pm. I stopped off at McClure's, and got 3 bottles of RC Cola. The first they have had all week.
Back in the room, I ate dinner, and have been doing some reading this evening:
From The Guardian: Georgia girl, 12, killed by father after family court grants him custody. First rule of family court: judges think if both parties are unhappy with their decision, then they have done their job right. Secondly in Indiana, between grandparents and parents, the grandparents have to show that the parent is unfit, and their having custody is in the child's best interest (take a look at In re Paternity of LJS,923 NE 2d 458 - Ind: Court of Appeals, 2010.) Third, I had a Madison County judge give custody to a father at an interlocutory (the hearing to set up temporary arrangements) hearing because the mother had tested positive for marijuana from a birthday party a month before where the children were not in attendance but where the father had been invading the marital home, harassing wife by empty the dirty litter boxes on the floor because the judge did not think anyone smoking marijuana should have custody of a child; the same judge did not believe the mother was the problem, even after a custody evaluation, until she kidnapped the child. Judges are not exempt from being idiots.
Also from HuffPost: Attorney Claims Trump Would Have Immunity Even If He'd Said To 'Burn Congress Down'. The creeps keep sprouting up like mushrooms. We have Presidents, not kings. The President can do the wrongs that kings are exempted from. I cannot yell fire in a crowded theater, nor can I incite a riot. Donald J. Trump cannot try to overthrow the Constitution and then claim the Constitution as his protector - for it was the Constitution that made him President. To give him a pass would destroy our Constitution, our freedoms, our country.
‘My Fourth Time, We Drowned”, the first book written by
Hayden, was triggered by a Facebook message the writer received asking
for help from an Eritrean refugee held in a Libyan detention centre. The
title is a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North
Africa, including dozens of first-hand narratives from people currently
living in Libyan detention centres, revealing that they were all
incarcerated as a direct result of European policy. This book is about
people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive
in a system that wants them to be silent.
I mentioned the new Star Wars show Andor in Ruined Thursday, Going Nowhere. Today, The Los Angeles Review of Books has a piece on the same show, Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor”. Not your usual appreciation of Star Wars, but maybe what I need to dampen my cynical views to the stuff since The Empire Strikes Back.
THE PRIMAL SIN of Star Wars — or the thing that made it great, depending
on your perspective — is its adolescent narcissism, from Lucas naming
the protagonist after himself to creating the Force as an in-universe
stand-in for his own desires. Why, after all, is the force so strong
with Luke? You know the answer, and it has nothing to do with
midi-chlorians: he’s the film’s most very special boy, not an ordinary
kid at all, but a prince, a hero with a destiny, and his father’s only
son. The Force is the effect of the camera and protagonism — a diegetic
trace of extradiegetic will — fulfilling the child’s wish to be the center of the universe. It makes the universe his toy: Lucas created it, so the universe obeys Luke’s commands.
The author has given me a wholly new view of the franchise.
It feels un-feminist to credit my nervous breakdown – or even
O’Keeffe’s – to the presence or absence of men. However, it is hard to
escape that characterisation. We are driven mad by circumstances. Women
creatives – artists and writers, musicians and ballerinas – are fraught
with this tension. They weaponised their own fragility to create art and
to heal. In her essay ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), Virginia Woolf
talks about being haunted by an angel – the ghost of a perfect woman,
submissive and pure, one who hides that she has a mind of her own. Woolf
was so bothered by this phantom, she ended up killing it. And when the
angel is killed, all that remains is a common woman with an inkpot, says
Woolf. The common woman’s imagination seeks dark pools. It swims ‘where
the largest fish slumber’. The depth of a woman writer’s sorrow is an
ocean trench, and the saltwater stings her, before allowing her to rise
to the surface. Unlike the angel, the writer is an oddity. An
aberration.
I wonder often, if I am not on the brink of mania, or writing through
the too-muchness of my emotions, would I be as simple and unremarkable
as Woolf’s angel? One of my biggest fears before starting a course of
psychiatric medication was precisely this: what if my creativity was
mere pathology? Would I cure away my penchant for words and syntax?
Would I stop being the aberration I thought I was?
In Coco Mellors’s novelCleopatra and Frankenstein
(2022), her depressed artist protagonist wonders if one can have depth
without cutting open one’s own heart for public consumption. Can one be
recognised as suffering without swimming naked in the public oceans of
abnormality? Could the quirks of our brain rest easy without pushing us
into frozen catatonia? I do not have answers. I suppose it will be a
perpetual exercise to try to find words for the liminality in which I
often find my inner life. There is the churning of the whirlpool of the
unconscious, the swift stream of Ophelia’s brook, the dark rivers upon
which Charon waits – hand outstretched for a final fare. Yet there is
also the blue ocean flanked by warm sand on a seaside trip in the
summer, the cool of the River Cherwell as a friend punts and I laugh, a
strawberry ice cream cone in hand. There is the River Thames, peeking
from the distance when I look out my office window in Covent Garden, my
gaze meeting the London Eye.
I suppose there are no easy metaphors to find. Water takes the shape
of its container, madness the shape of its vessel, too. There’s a shore
at the end of the waves, though. To drown is not the only course. I can
write my way to a raft that will carry me to land.
Yes, we can write our madness and perhaps right it, too.
I have spent the last 12 years trying to overcome the nihilism I plunged myself into. Still, I had to read Psyche's How to be a happy nihilist. Come on, that title is a WTF kind of thing, an unbeatable inducement to one's curiosity. Some bits:
Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next
time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened
space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to
offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances:
‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’.
But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim
(skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an
intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to
light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression.
Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled,
elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an
adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of
dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout.
The fixation with making all areas of existence generically
meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly
really, really matters. Daily newsletters flood our inboxes,
prescribing never-ending tasks and goals to meditate over and mark as
complete. In the shower, we listen to podcasts about making this day count, then towel off and cram in a few minutes of mindful journalling about what we managed to meaningfully achieve the day before.
###
So what’s the alternative? Is the answer to embrace a state of
pointless, nihilistic chaos? Yeah, pretty much. At least that’s what’s
worked for me.
For the past few years, I’ve been consumed by nihilism. Reading that,
it would be fair to assume things haven’t been peachy. But my descent
into the controversial philosophy hasn’t been a grim road of despair and
hopelessness. Quite the opposite. It’s become one of the most
illuminating and fortifying parts of my life.
Rejecting the urge to seek and denote meaning to all things has
changed the way I assign value and spend time. It has challenged what I
focus on and, most importantly, what I disregard. I’ve found that a kind
of optimistic or ‘sunny’ nihilism highlights the delicate beauty of
existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the
everyday. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the power of
sunny nihilism, it’s necessary to begin with the philosophy itself.
Er, I am not sure if I agree. I do agree that if everything matters, then nothing matters. This does not seem to me a very modern problem. When in recorded history have we not needed to select gold from dross. Seems to me this started with Socrates. Regardless of what I did with my own life, one must make choices - one cannot date the brunette and the blonde at the same time. I think I can make choices of what is meaningful and what is crap without calling it nihilism.
One more bit, explaining the types of nihilism:
Breaking it down further, the American philosopher Donald Crosby divides
nihilism into four main forms: moral, epistemological, cosmic and,
perhaps the best-known, existential. Moral nihilism rejects fundamental
ideas of right and wrong; epistemological nihilism takes issue with
absolute truth; cosmic nihilism considers nature to be inherently
indifferent and hostile; and finally we reach existential nihilism, in
many ways the culmination of all these considerations, which probably
keeps most people up at night – the basic idea being that there is no
meaning to life, everything is pointless.
I still entertain the cosmic nihilism - I am pretty sure the universe has no interest in me or in you. I think I can live with that. What got enmeshed with my depression and which I am trying to overcome is existential nihilism.
Read it, if you like, and feel free to leave a comment below.
I have been listening to WPRBsince a little after 6 pm. Go Hanna! The following I heard on Hanna's show, liked the sound of it, and found it on YouTube:
I found CC. Well, I found where she was a few months ago. It was where I thought she had gone to ground. Which irks me - I could have had it all wrapped up with her months ago.
I have some typing to do, and no plans on going anywhere else, so I close out with this report at 9:05 PM.
I got through the mail – like many things for me, it took longer to get at than get through. The thing to do is now to get calls made and see what can be done about getting the insurance fixed.
I can say this: America needs universal health care. It is just rational.
Review of Poor Things film (who would think Alasdair Gray or Yorgos Lanthimos might ruffle feathers; I still have not been able to will myself to watch The Lobster. I have been lax in my movie going this year, but this one, if it comes to Muncie, I will see.)
5 Things I Learned About Psychology That Every Fiction Writer Should Know (mind-wandering has helped me; some of my best ideas have come after writing a story, then thinking of something else, and finding something I missed in the story I thought had been written. I do think the act of typing subsumes often the job of writing.)
And then there was Eleanor Careles' Writing Like a Partisan: A review of Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Céspedes from New Inquiry. Considering how Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz and MAGA creep towards fascism, this one interested me, so quotes follow, as time runs out for getting to work. Having read Elena Ferrante, I am interested in Italian novels and how they deal with politics.
From Careles' review:
Alba De Céspedes’ intimate account of
the “inescapable, tremendous force of the family” links Italy’s past
with its present. In 1952, when Forbidden Notebook was
first published, Italy was rebuilding itself as a newly democratic
nation; however, while fascism had fallen, the power of the Church––and,
consequently the ideal of the indissoluble family––remained strong.
Paul Ginsborg writes
of how, “in the Catholic world of the 1950s, no social message was
preached with more fervour than that of the sanctity of the Christian
family.” The formidable force of the family is the governing matrix of
De Céspedes’ novel, which captures the tectonic intergenerational
shifts, class dynamics and daily textures of postwar Rome in the form of
a fictionalized diary. Forbidden Notebook
takes the ordinary feelings which might fill the pages of a
diary––conjugal discontent, maternal anxiety, shameful disclosure,
everyday ennui––very seriously. Without sentimentalism, De Céspedes
makes us feel the chronic, dull ache of the suppressed inner life.
A Cuban-Italian writer from a
political family, De Céspedes’ grandfather Carlos Manuel De Céspedes was
Cuba’s first president and the leader of its first war of independence.
Twice detained for her involvement with the Italian Resistance, De
Céspedes’ bestselling first novel Nessuno Torna Indietro, or There’s No Turning Back
(1938) was censored by Fascist authorities on the grounds that her
depiction of young female students living in 1930s Rome did not conform
to a “Fascist ethic.” A collection of short stories, La Fuga, or The Escape
(1940) was also censored. In 1943, De Céspedes escaped occupied Rome to
join the Allies in the South, where she worked as a Resistance radio
personality known as Clorinda. De Céspedes was a diarist as well as a
novelist, and, as Jhumpa Lahiri observes, “Forbidden Notebook
fuses these forms and disciplines.” An entry written in 1943 while De
Céspedes was a fugitive in the Abruzzi mountains speaks of the guilt of
knowing she would not be shot, like her male comrades, if caught by the
occupying German forces––her political solidarity dented by virtue of
her gender. After the liberation of Rome in 1944, she founded the literary journal Il Mercurio, which became a forum for anti-Fascist intellectuals and published writers including Natalia Ginzburg and Ernest Hemingway.
In the 1940s and 50s, De Céspedes was
one of Italy’s most popular and best-known writers, but in subsequent
decades, her novels have been forgotten. Forbidden Notebook
fell out of print and has only recently been reissued, first in Italy
and now, as part of a wave of new editions (Spanish, 2017; German, 2021;
Brazilian Portuguese, 2022), in Astra House’s/Pushkin Press’ new
English translation by Ann Goldstein, known for her translations of
Elena Ferrante. Its use of the diary as a novelistic device places De
Céspedes’ Notebook
within a feminist literary genealogy that can be traced at least as far
back as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). It is a
forerunner of Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook (1962), a hugely ambitious work of political commitment, and even of Annie Ernaux’s non-fictional diary Se perdre (Getting Lost, 2001), which writes through, with and around a blaze of female desire.
***
The narrator of Forbidden Notebook,
though, is no revolutionary. Valeria speaks with the anguished voice of
a “bridge” generation, torn between her parents’ conservative, prewar
worldview and the new, progressive horizons that her daughter Mirella
moves towards.
Mother-daughter relations are one of
the diary’s most charged and contradictory sites. Valeria is intensely
preoccupied with Mirella, to the extent that at times the diary becomes a
record of daughterly disobedience. De Céspedes writes with
excruciatingly observed detail about the relationship between mother and
daughter: as when Mirella, following a tense conversation with Valeria
about her older lover, rests her forehead on her hands and starts to
cry, keeping her fingers lifted to allow the freshly applied polish on
her nails to dry. Mirella’s refusal to conform brings out a stubborn
conservatism in her mother. But Valeria confesses to her diary the
internal dissonance that underlies her attempts to control her daughter:
“what I thought was solid in me loses substance as well.” The
fictionalized diary is a sustained exercise in dramatic irony. And then
there is Valeria’s formal, reserved relationship with her own mother, a
woman not just of another generation but of another, more aristocratic
class. Valeria’s mother represents rigid, traditional values, down to
her very posture: “I don’t know how to hold myself like her,” Valeria
writes, “maybe because I didn’t wear a corset.” The most marked
difference between mother and daughter is the fact that Valeria must
work for a living. Valeria’s mother disapproves deeply of this
situation; and Valeria’s own daughter is contemptuous of her
grandmother’s attitude. As Valeria writes: “In me these two worlds
clash, making me groan... Maybe I am only this passage, this clash.” At
moments like this, De Céspedes’ writing can turn you inside out.
***
Seventy years after the publication of Forbidden Notebook,
the family retains its near-sacred status, as its susceptibility to a
fascist politics shows. To question the priority accorded to the family
remains virtually unthinkable (with some bold exceptions). What we find in Forbidden Notebook is
an attempt to explode the ideal of the family from within: a forerunner
of the ‘Dreamers, awake!’ mode that rose to prominence in the art and
music of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. In the novel-diary, as in her advice
column, De Céspedes undoes common-place assumptions and evokes a sense
of radical possibility within a conventional format, and through
familiar themes: the family, love, sex, relationships. At a time when
the family is either weaponised by the far-right, or the final bastion
of survival against social and economic precarity in our own anni duri,
Valeria’s recommittal to the family reminds us of the difficulty of
escaping such deeply rooted structures, but also leaves us longing for a
different ending — for the possibility of emancipation from the
family’s formidable force. Perhaps stories of failed awakenings are what
we need most – reminders of what is at stake, when we undergo a
paradigm shift but do not act; when we betray our emergent desires by
clinging to what is known, despite the many ways in which it fails us;
when the awakened slip back into social and intellectual torpor.
I need to get dressed. It is 6 am. Kind of rainy out there. I need more time to read! No, KH, I am not going back to prison, so i can read all these books
that are still unread.
I made it through Wednesday without anything approaching fun or glory.
Internal distress, I think from the meds, left me tired. I even called CC to get a ride down to the courthouse. She couldn't make it, I walked. It was almost an hour of a walk. I have to admit I felt peppier when I got there – sweating and hot – but now my left knee was aching.
I got home about 3:30, tried doing some work, took a nap, got up and ate bean soup, went to work on stuff for dad's trust. I walked down to Dollar General for Coke and a block of cheese. I went off the reservation and had a little ice cream. When I got done with that, I read more on Christopher Marlowe. It is fuel for a fire that I am chewing over in my head. There is now a second play in my mind.
I woke at 4 AM. It is now a little after 5.
I feel still a bit disheveled – things that need done are not getting done. There was a time when this would have overwhelmed me and depressed me, not so much now.
The email distractions I have cut down. However, I want to point two pieces I have run across the past two days on depression.
There was no specific reason
why. Or, at least, none that I could figure out. I got up, wrote,
dropped my kids off at sports. That’s my usual routine these days.
(And, yes, I know it is a luxury.)
But something felt off — a
sense of dread hanging over me. I couldn’t kick my worries about the
future — where I’ll work next (and when), will the kids do ok in school
and in sports etc. — and it dogged me all day.
The dread that comes with depression, I knew. When I saw the counselor this Tuesday, I finally got around to talking about the anger and hatefulness I felt towards the world when depressed. Dread was there, too. The feeling of being cut loose, no connections to reality and no way back were also feelings I had. I am lucky that KH got me back to writing and Joel C kept me doing it, for like Cillizza wrote, it helps with my depression:
The other thing that helps me deal with bad days is writing. It helps me
process how I feel. And in sharing it, I feel like I am making a
difference — even a tiny one — in our willingness to talk openly about
our own mental health and, yes, struggles.
Crider, for example, said a persistent lack
of mental health resources has limited the work potential of some
people in his state.
“It not only keeps people out of the
workforce, but it also affects people’s attendance and focus on the task
at hand when somebody in their family is struggling,” he said. “And so
that’s one of the things I think we talked about quite a bit.”
Research from Indiana’s behavioral health commission in 2022 found that mental illness was costing the state more than $4 billion
in lost productivity and health care costs each year. The potential to
improve worker productivity was one reason the legislature earlier this
year near-unanimously approved Crider’s legislation that overhauled the state’s antiquated mental health system and aims to infuse $130 million more per year into services.
Crider said the workforce shortage requires
a comprehensive set of solutions. Quality of life is as important
as job opportunities — and that is especially true for remote workers
who can live anywhere.
I repeat myself by writing I do like the book reviews from The Brisbane Times. They have a sprightliness to their writing and in their thinking I find lacking elsewhere. There is also the cachet of finding something new.
Elizabeth and John focuses on the period from the 1790s until
the 1830s, but its intellectual framing is drawn from scholarship on
18th-century Enlightenment thought. To this end, we follow the story of
the Macarthurs through a set of familiar episodes – John’s service in
the military, their arrival in Sydney in the 1790s, their experiments in
sheep farming, the (so-called) rum rebellion, and John’s political and
commercial interventions in the 1820s and ’30s – but rather than being a
simple story of colonial ambition or burgeoning democracy, it is,
surprisingly, a tale of the influence of European philosophical and
scientific thought on the early colony.
Wool and kick-starting Australia's agricultural community seems to have been their claim to fame. More importantly, after reading the review, I want to know more about him and to read the biography.
But Fanatic Heart is a novel, and while it owes much to history, and to the journalism and Jail Journal
of the historical John Mitchel, the shaping is all Keneally’s. And he
is acutely aware of the risks of this “not entirely wisely embarked upon
novel of mine”, centred as it is upon a historical figure once
acclaimed as an Irish revolutionary, but now (and even in his own time)
reviled as a supporter of the slavery institutionalised in the southern
states of America.
Many Australian readers now may never have
heard of Mitchel; Keneally’s feat is to have brought him back to life
and to have recreated the fraught circumstances that made the complex
man – and the remarkable woman, Jenny Verner, who was his wife.
If Dark Winter was written by anyone other than
epidemiologist Professor Raina MacIntyre, it might read a little
paranoid; as if the author had digested one too many Cold War spy
thrillers while in lockdown. Instead it’s written by one of the world’s
leading experts on infectious disease epidemics, biosecurity,
bioterrorism prevention, vaccines and public health, who is also a
professor of global biosecurity at UNSW and head of the biosecurity
program at the Kirby Institute in Sydney.
That makes this book so
much scarier because the past, present and possible future of disease
outbreaks – both natural and unnatural – are dissected and analysed by
someone who knows very much what they’re talking about.
Reviews from The Guardian
I think of The Guardian as an English newspaper, that is regardless of what edition or the writer, there is an English sensibility.
“There’s
always a price to pay for freedom,” says Constance Debré, running a
hand over her shaved head and her neck tattoo that reads “plutôt crêver”
(“rather die”). The 50-year-old author, who faced a fierce custody
battle over her young son after coming out as gay in her mid 40s, adds:
“To me, that’s a happier, livelier way to see things: rather than saying
there are injustices or blows raining down on you, you realise it’s all
because you’re living life in the way you want, seeking out an
existence … trying to give life some shape. That’s why life and
literature are so connected: it’s the quest for form.”
Debré
tore up the rule book of French writing with a bestselling trilogy
based on the dramatic turn her life took after she came out. The darkly
comic, first-person account of a separated mother’s Don Juan-style
conquests of women is interwoven with scenes of her “taking an automatic
rifle” to her bourgeois life as a criminal defence barrister from a
famous French political dynasty. More than a coming-out saga, Debré
likens it to a Saint Augustine-style conversion, a total transformation.
The protagonist and narrator, who is not named, is clearly Debré
herself, following in a long French tradition of creative writers who
draw closely on real-life events – the most notable being last year’s
Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux.
Yet though the events are real, Debré firmly considers her work fiction
rather than autobiography or memoir, because it relies on the literary
art of constructing a narrative, creating a relationship between a
character and events. “What makes a novel is its form,” she says.
####
For Debré, style is what counts. Hailed by French
critics for her slap-in-the-face narration, she strips the French
language back to its most crude and colloquial, subverts punctuation and
deliberately goes against the current trend in French writing for
plunging into psychological explanation.
“I
wanted a style that would be the least verbose, very direct, fat-free,
efficient – with as little psychology as possible because I absolutely
detest that. I had in mind that well-known photograph by William Eggleston,
a naked bulb on a ceiling – just a bulb and three white cables in a red
room. It’s banal and it has an incredible strength. I wanted to get
back to that concept, which we’ve had in music, art, photography for 50
years. You find it less in literature, at least in French writing, which
is deliberately delicate. I wanted to grab events and grab the reader.”
Zink is both a very satisfying and a frustrating
writer. Her plots are shapeless but oddly propulsive. Her narrative
style is a tissue of quips that strays into glibness, even in her best
work. Within it, though, something more substantial is always implicit,
and now and then she turns and directly addresses it with a clarity that
feels almost violent. Her writing often has a slapdash manner that
suggests she’s too authentic to waste sweat on anything as cheap as
fiction, and this has the interesting quality of making the reader feel
more authentic, too. All these things are present in Avalon, and make it a pleasure, as all Zink’s work is. But one other Zink hallmark goes badly awry here.
Zink likes to situate her characters within subcultures: the world of environmental activism in The Wallcreeper, anarchist squats in Nicotine, the music business in Doxology.
She satirises these and mines them for quirky details, but also speaks
of them with authority and love. The great flaw in Avalon’s conception
is that Zink tries to work this trick with the lowlife world of the
Hendersons, but without the intimacy or the love. She has nothing but
contempt for these characters, and they remain vague and
one-dimensional. All they do is express crass bigotry and demand unpaid
labour from the hapless Bran.
###
...A lot of authors, even very good ones, write prose that seems designed
to win the approval of a focus group of typical readers. When Zink is on
form, her writing is a wild ride down a steep hill, into a creek, up
the other bank, through a henhouse and finally off a cliff only to land
safely in a wagon full of hay. Here is Bran reflecting on Jay’s terrible
dancing: “ … it was good, being an authentic part of Jay,but
no more made for exposure than his gallbladder or hypothalamus. Only by
shutting my eyes could I nullify the critical voice of the advancing
darkness we look to for salvation, which was also my voice.” And here is
a first kiss: “We kissed like Roland blowing his horn at Roncesvalles,
with desperation, yet no host of angels materialised to tell him it was
okay to get buyer’s remorse and ditch that girl.” Avalonis worth the cover price for the fun of these sentences alone.
TheCreative Act is, then, not an account of Rubin’s
ripsnorting career, wrangling 36th takes out of entitled guitar heroes.
It names no names. Rather, it is a distillation of the wisdom Rubin has
accrued over decades of bringing records to fruition. If it has an
unignorable precedent, it is Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a set of artistic challenges the British producer concocted alongside Peter Schmidt in 1975 to break through creative blocks (now an app).
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Buddhism, management theory or
the self-help shelf will also find plenty that feels familiar in Rubin’s
modus operandi. That’s not to say that Rubin is unoriginal or indeed
wrong, only that occasionally, these 400-odd pages can read a little
like “the 73 unexpected practices of successful creatives”.
The tone is gnomic and epigrammatic, and Rubin’s elevation of artistic
endeavour to the highest status of human achievement reverberates with a
solemn quasi-religiosity – one befitting a hardback with a fabric
bookmark – that is hard to square with his ballsy production work on Jay-Z’s epic banger 99 Problems.
You have the world at your fingertips, why not use the internet to expand your horizons instead of hiding in informational silos?
