Guilty

Okay, another workday ending at  2 pm. I got a ride to the bus station, caught the 2:30 up to FedEx, missed it on its way back, so waited a half hour by visiting Aldi. Dark chocolate seemed called for. There was another layover between the 3 pm bus downtown and my bus home. I got here at 4 pm. I have to admit I felt like doing nothing.

Have I ever mentioned how riding the bus is very helpful for teaching patience? Well, it is.

I ripped through my email. Then I started working on this post at 6:46 PM.

Tomorrow, I need to take my pay stubs to the food stamps office. I do not see doing much writing tomorrow.

One subscription, so far. Which lets me know the people who I keep sending posts to are not really that interested in what I am writing. They have this in common with magazine editors.

I talked to my niece today. She rather likes "Love Stinks." I await KH's final word after Saturday.

CC's rummage sale started and then stopped due to heat.

That is pretty much all my news. I will watch The Blacklist at 8, then trip down to McClure's. I want to do some editing of my newsletter.

If you want to subscribe to my blog, go to the menu on the right hand side of your screen and select the second icon.

Whatever else is going on, why nota bigger stink about Study shows sharp increases in maternal deaths over two decades. I seem to recall Republicans claiming Obamacare would bring us a culture. It seems they were talking about themselves.

If you worship David Foster Wallace then I suggest Where be your jibes now by Patricia Lockwood and published by The London Review of Books. I cannto make the stretch, maybe I am too old. Yes, to Cormac McCarthy or Colson Whitehead or Don DeLillo or Michael Chabon, but I cannot wrap my head around Wallace. Sorry. Although, I did prefer his essays to his Infinite Jest.

Jack Hanson reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Call of the Tribe for The Nation under the headline The Miseducation of Mario Vargas Llosa. Llosa is another I can take over David Foster Wallace.

Liberalism’s key virtue, Vargas Llosa insists, is the primacy it grants to the individual over the collective. The title of the volume, The Call of the Tribe, comes from Popper, who is perhaps most famous for The Open Society and Its Enemies, his critical-historical account of the intellectual origins of authoritarianism. This study, which attacks Plato, Hegel, and Marx for their “historicism” (Popper’s curiously misapplied term for social theory aimed at the prediction of future events), is still taken seriously by many liberals, despite a broad consensus that Popper’s thesis is based on a profound misreading of both political and intellectual history. Vargas Llosa cites him, along with Hayek and Berlin, as having had the greatest influence on his own political development, particularly in coming to understand the role of liberal society as the protector of the individual against the ever-present dangers of primitivism and irrationality, the anti-civilizational “call of the tribe.”

For Vargas Llosa, as for all of the thinkers he explores, the history of the 20th century is the fight of the liberal West against various manifestations of that call, which, in modern societies, takes the form of the mass or crowd. Citing Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, in which the emergence of the crowd in modern times is analyzed and warned against, Vargas Llosa writes: “The ‘mass’…is a group of individuals who have become deindividualized, who have stopped being freethinking human entities and have dissolved into an amalgam that thinks and acts for them, more through conditioned reflexes—emotions, instincts, passions—than through reason.” Crucially here, the liberal ideal is not a goal to be achieved but a neutral state to be protected. It is, in this telling, the natural form of human life, as opposed to the imposed structures of any other kind of social organization. Such naturalism is not merely a tendency but a main tenet of Vargas Llosa’s liberalism, and it accounts not only for the vehemence with which he attacks the thought that he believes threatens it (above all, the leftist positions he claims once to have held), but also for the means by which he defends what is now the mainstream—not to say hegemonic—social order.

***

I have to admit that by the end of The Call of the Tribe, I felt a kind of malaise, having read the litany of liberal virtue in so many iterations. Why, the question nagged, in its fourth (or, arguably, eighth) decade of nearly unchallenged global hegemony, do the representatives of Western liberalism feel the need to defend it against threats that have been for so long neutralized? And then it occurred to me that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup d’état, the death of Salvador Allende, and the beginning of a decades-long tyranny supported and praised by, among others, Hayek, Friedman, and the US government. Allende, as it happens, is one democratically elected socialist for whom Vargas Llosa, if this book is any indication, retains some sympathy, if only in retrospect. Perhaps, he seems to suggest, the transition to a more fully liberal economy could have been accomplished more smoothly, less forcefully. Still, the Chicago Boys took over, the left was destroyed, and it is in the nature of stories to be retold, of rituals to be performed, of victories to be commemorated.

Sad that free-market economists found so much to like about dictators. 

I think Liberal Patriot has a pint with its Class Is Back in Session!, let's drop racial affirmative action for class affirmative action; it should get us to the same point. Of course, we may need to recognize that everything in this country is run by a bunch of white Ivy Leaguers.

Grants for arts in Indiana here. See, culture is not really dead in Indiana.

Summer flopbusters: why were Indiana Jones and The Flash box office bombs?:

What could have gone so disastrously wrong for these apparently safe bets? In the case of Dial of Destiny, it is almost as if depending on the sustained affection of an older, nostalgic and largely male audience, rather than including anything that could entice a younger, diverse demographic, has proved a flawed strategy.

***

The reasons for the crash of The Flash are less mysterious. You might blame the curse of the multiverse, which makes the exploits of different versions of the film’s hero seem less compelling than they would have been before this scenario started dominating everything everywhere all at once. Perhaps there is a reality in which the allure of the multiverse is not waning – but this isn’t it.

Just holler hey, Bo Diddley:

 sch 7:33

Mario Vargas Llosa

I did not stick my nose into Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel lecture because I think I read it and wrote about it while at Fort Dix FCI.  January Magazine interviewed him in 2002 on the release of his The Feast of the Goat. That novel was the last of his books I read while at Fort Dix and my notes should appear here some day. Let me say this novel and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  opened my eyes about Trujillo and the Dominican Republic. You should read both of these novels, asking yourself is this what we want for America? Are these the people America should have been supporting is a very good second question.

He explains that The Feast of the Goat had its genesis more than a quarter century ago when Vargas Llosa visited the Dominican Republic on a film project. While there for several months, he heard numerous stories and anecdotes about Rafael Trujillo. And though Latin America has never been in short supply of dictators, Trujillo's was the "most emblematic of dictatorships," particularly in scope and grotesqueness. He was virtually unparalleled for his brutality, corruption and human rights abuses. "Trujillo created an opera in his real life. He was the director and the Dominican people were the actors."

This grand drama, this theatricality of the regime encouraged Vargas Llosa to fantasize about writing the novel. "A novel is not a book of history, " he says.

 And in keeping with his oft-repeated philosophical belief that novels should enhance and amplify life, not merely recount it, he has taken some liberties with history. But he quickly adds that "with essential facts, I have been loyal."

It was important to Vargas Llosa to not portray Trujillo as a monster from the get-go, but rather as a human being who lost his humanness as he accumulated power. He strongly believes that such a transformation is fueled by "the complicity of the people," and by "the abdication of the right to resist."

About writing I found this: 

In regard to the writing process, the topics of his books often concern things that have touched his life, though he does not go looking for them. "I don't choose my subjects; I am chosen by them." When that happens, he feels "a curiosity, an entusiasmo," he says, using the Spanish cognate.

Before he even begins to write, he has been working on mapping out episodes and character/plot trajectories. When the writing starts, he works hard, remaining very disciplined. "Each novel is an adventure."

He says passionately: "I don't like the feeling of emptiness when you finish a book," a process than can take several years. To cope, he accumulates projects and immediately jumps into the next one. "I don't like to be nostalgic about projects."

For All Who Write From The Margins, For Those Who Think They Should Quit

This post I write for the would-be writers of Indiana, for the Midwest, for any place away from and disdained by the literary mainstream. 

I am too old to have done anything particularly significant with my writing. Whatever hopes and faith people had in me 40 plus years ago, have been dashed, left on the wayside. That I came back to writing is my attempt at atonement, nothing more. I do not expect to be published. I only continue with those efforts to prove my long-ago supporters were not wrong. 

You may have better luck. Consider, José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature from The Millions:

The Latin American Boom of the 1960s and ‘70s is associated with some of contemporary Spanish-language literature’s most towering figures, among them Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. But of all the giants translated, American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.

***

The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is Donoso’s chronicle of this multi-generational, multi-cultural revolution of language from one of its earliest advocates and oldest mentors. Throughout this slim, warm memoir, Donoso performs two great tasks: to convince you that the Boom never existed for writers, but that only writers could have produced it....

***

Quoting Angel Rama, Donoso says it plainly: “The great figures project their master over very long periods, giving the sensation from a distance, that they have cut the grass at the roots so that nothing new can grow.” It’s hard to imagine any young artist learning developing at any point in our commercially-essentialized age, but Donoso’s generation faced its own venomous predecessors who rejected anything but the cleanliness and security of trite parlor fiction. But Donoso felt that in a world undergoing rapid changes—politically, socially, environmentally, and so on—this fiction had all the impact of a decrepit museum.

***

The Latin American Boom of the 1960s and ‘70s is associated with some of contemporary Spanish-language literature’s most towering figures, among them Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. But of all the giants translated, American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso.

The Latin American Boom, of course, was somewhat artificially constructed—a marketing term by U.S. publishers to name and corral the Spanish-language arts, for which the ‘60s and ‘70s were especially fecund years. How else could writers as stylistically and geographically diverse as García Márquez, Silvina Ocampo, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante fit under the same tent, if not for the efforts of editors and publicists at highly regarded American publishing houses? But soon the Boom became a two-sided effort: The reason you now know and appreciate so much Latin American literature isn’t just thanks to editors like Toni Morrison, Alice Quinn, and Victoria Wilson—or such inexhaustible translators as Suzanne Jill Levine, Hardie St. Martin and Leonard Mades, and Edith Grossman—and but also the champion of his generation that was José Donoso. In fact, Donoso isn’t just the greatest writer of the Boom—he wrote its biography!

***

The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is Donoso’s chronicle of this multi-generational, multi-cultural revolution of language from one of its earliest advocates and oldest mentors. Throughout this slim, warm memoir, Donoso performs two great tasks: to convince you that the Boom never existed for writers, but that only writers could have produced it. Donoso lays out this paradox in the book’s final pages:

[T]he question of the constitution of the Boom, of who does and who does not belong…. is naïve and false, as false as the notion of stagnation in human and political relations, as false as the idea of perpetual unanimity of opinions… [T]he [Boom] seen from the outside, and the reasons for inclusion or exclusion… are more than anything mirages seen by those who are excluded and who want to belong.

***

I could point to various novels in which the dominant classes of Latin America are shown in the full height of their ferocious power as the owners of bodies, lands, and impunity, but perhaps this novel [The Obscene Bird of Night] and also On Heroes and Tombs by Ernesto Sábato, in which monstrosity and decadence are prominent, were the most influential to me.

This contradictory assertion and deep understanding of inclusion came from personal experience. Donoso developed as an artist during a time when, as he writes in his memoir, “the novelist in the Spanish American countries wrote for his parish: about the problems of his parish, addressing himself to the number and level of his readers… without much hope of anything else.” The literary culture that Donoso grew up in emphasized an academically-minded, morally rigid literature. Novels lacked ambiguity, pronouncing themselves as entirely above or below the mores of their time, squeamishly submissive to the attitudes and preferences of previous generations.

Quoting Angel Rama, Donoso says it plainly: “The great figures project their master over very long periods, giving the sensation from a distance, that they have cut the grass at the roots so that nothing new can grow.” It’s hard to imagine any young artist learning developing at any point in our commercially-essentialized age, but Donoso’s generation faced its own venomous predecessors who rejected anything but the cleanliness and security of trite parlor fiction. But Donoso felt that in a world undergoing rapid changes—politically, socially, environmentally, and so on—this fiction had all the impact of a decrepit museum.

And in Donoso’s opinion, what could be more essential to writing than living within the ever-changing world around you? Rather than pretend a perfect tradition, Donoso understood that his work grew from “a mestizaje, a crossbreeding, a disregarding of Hispanic-American tradition… [which drew] itself almost totally from other literary sources… our orphaned sensibility let itself be infected.” Just as each Latin American country was questioning its own identity, so too did the Boom authors write in order to reflect a world beyond their parish. Of those giants, Donoso explored class and gender; Carlos Fuentes history and culture; and Mario Vargas Llosa sex, politics, and the corruption of ideals. (This was the Vargas Llosa of a different lifetime, whom Donoso supported from the very week his first novel was published; Vargas Llosa described Donoso as “the most literary of all the writers I have ever known, not only because he had read a lot, and knew everything there is to know about the lives, deaths, and literary fair gossip, but because he had modeled his life as shape fictions.”)

***

...Well, say you read and wrote in a time of boring consecution, inundated by hype for literary cultures that are neither your own nor any good at all. What would Donoso do? First off—ignore the hype! You’ll never grow as an author if you only read and discuss the market-generated communities that you’ll never belong to. Instead, focus on who you are, and accept the fact that spending your life writing is about as uncool as it gets. But remember that to be cool has nothing to do with writing, and that like all great art, writing can become the altar of a community just as unsightly and weird as you. Rather than emulate the “perfection” of previous generations—emulate a culture whose language could not imagine our own—let us write in a language our own, and only hope that such language appears fanged and inhuman to anyone who can’t understand. With effort, and patience, and genuine love for your kind, Donoso didn’t just write a perfect novel—he created a space for many more perfect novels to exist.

I quoted so much (and there is even more worth reading at the original site) as evidence that it is not the location of the writer that matters, but the writing done; the decision to write as you will rather than what is fashionable.

I had to destroy my life when I was almost 50 and have friends push me to where I am now.

 

What I suggest you start earlier, less dramatically. Take chances, what do you really have to lose?

sch 11/26

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Odyssey, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Irvine Welsh Walk Into A Bar

One thing lacking during prison was information.  I did not read Llosa, “A Confederacy of Dunces”, or Irvine Welsh until then and without much context. I keep my eye out for articles that will fill in the context for me.

 The Odyssey piece is here because it is so big this summer.

 I hope this helps your education, too.

Mario Vargas Llosa by Gerald Martin review – the Peruvian leftist who fell in love with Margaret Thatcher  (The Guardian)

Gabriel García Márquez is the book’s foil: the magician to Vargas Llosa’s realist, the man who stayed with the leftist tribe while his lesser rival abandoned it. Martin, now the biographer of both, is uniquely placed to reconstruct the most famous right hook in literary history. In 1976, Vargas Llosa floored García Márquez with a punch after allegedly accusing him of overstepping the mark by comforting Patricia during the collapse of their marriage.

The punch marked more than a personal rupture. It sealed an ideological one. García Márquez later remarked that there were only “two soups on the menu”: capitalism and socialism. Vargas Llosa turned up his nose at one and spent the rest of his life gorging himself on the other.

China understands The Odyssey better than we do | The Spectator

The party is afraid not of Plato but of Uighurs, whom it has smeared as terrorists and agitators. What the party actually wants from the ancient Greeks is a pedigree. In November 2024, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a letter to the first World Conference of Classics in Beijing, urging scholars to “embrace the responsibility of advancing classical studies.” A Chinese School of Classical Studies now operates in Athens. A Chinese translation series of western classics, which includes Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau, has sold tens of millions of copies across a thousand titles over four decades.

The West is putting the same inheritance on trial. In December 2024 the British government moved to end the £4 million Latin Excellence Programme. The program had carried Latin into 40 non-selective state schools, where more than a third of pupils were eligible for free school meals. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson had launched it to stop Latin being reserved for “the privileged few.”

The pressure comes from more than one direction. In January 2026, Texas A&M University ordered a philosophy professor to remove readings from Plato’s Symposium from an introductory ethics course or be reassigned, under a new university policy against teaching “race and gender ideology.”
On the academic left, the pressure is harder to describe. The Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta has written that classics was “a cheat code for mastering whiteness.” In that reading, the ancient work must answer our quarrels before it is allowed to tell us anything of its own.

On August 14, The Odyssey opens across most of China’s nearly 800 IMAX screens. More than 250,000 people had registered to see it before tickets went on sale. They probably won’t ask whether Homer needs forgiving. That was always our question, not his.

You might want to think about this one. I am. All the cultural malarkey imposed on us by neurotic, insecure boys like Elon Musk and his online cohorts does not address the poem. All that interests them is their obsessions and terrors for which they want to make use of Homer and his descendants.

How ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ Skewers the Lit Bro Before He Even Existed (Literary Yard) helped me understand a novel that I thought had not aged well and whose protagonist irritated me to no end.

If you finish that novel thinking “Ignatius gets it”, well brother, you don’t get it. And that’s the most Ignatius thing about you.

The dunces were never in a confederacy against Ignatius. He was a confederacy of one, at war with reality. And you will never win that war, no matter how many times you quote Boethius.

Trust me on this one.

I am. Perhaps my understanding was affected by being in prison, reading the novel in isolation, without any knowledge of lit bros.

‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns (The Guardian) because I read The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins while in prison and had seen the movie Trainspotting.

Can Nothing Save Us? is published this month, but it has a long back story. Welsh originally thought he was collecting material for an HBO pilot on the superstar DJ – this was in 2014 – with his friend Calvin Harris. (Welsh also DJs and co-owns a record label.) From the DJ boxes of Vegas, he’d look out at “this ugly scene where middle-aged sleazy guys grind up against young women who’ve been comped for the clubs” – but the project stalled and Welsh realised he had the makings of something different: “A novel about modern America.”

He gave the draft to his editor and some writer friends. “And they all said the same thing. ‘This is shit!’”

Welsh re-read it. “Fuck, they’re right,” he thought.

Rejection must be unfamiliar to a multimillion-selling novelist. But Welsh did manage to sell the screen rights, and while he watched the writers’ room work through his pages, he became “a voyeur of my own material” and understood how to fix his novel.

 sch 8/8

Mario Vargas Llosa Writing About Flaubert and the Novel

 Mario Vargas Llosa and Flaubert were two writers I knew of but did not read until prison. I enjoyed both (although I liked Flaubert's Sentimental Education more than I did Madame Bovary) and learned from both. I suggest them to your attention.

LitHub translated Llosa's All Things Are Possible: Mario Vargas Llosa on the Eternal Youth of Flaubert’s Writing. It is short, I suggest reading it if you are a reader. Writers, I urge their reading.

This was a flagrant yet mysterious break with the past. It consisted of explaining that the ordering element of a story can be an imitation of an all-knowing God, or simply a character who can know no more than what ordinary people like us know about others, with all the fallibility that knowledge implies. In a novel, as in Madame Bovary, there can be a godlike, omniscient narrator and various character-narrators, as long as the limits of each are respected.

At the level of prose, Flaubert always believed that the excellence of a phrase depended on its music and that one out-of-tune syllable was enough for the musical perfection of the phrase—to which Flaubert attributed incantatory qualities—to be lost. The five years he spent writing Madame Bovary were the richest and most creative from the point of view of the structure of the novel. If we are to be honest, the true creator of the modern novel was Flaubert.

I lack the music, or my music is that of a wheezing, out of tune squeezebox, but I know what I lack from reading Flaubert and Llosa.

sch 8/29/22

The Guardian Reviews Harsh Times by Mario Vargas Llosa

I never read Mario Vargas Llosa before prison.  There I read two novels and s book of essays on writing. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is a writer worth reading. Now he he has published a new novel and here are some excerpts from the the Guardian's review:

This is the kind of novel that mocks the give-it-10-pages, I-need-to-be-grabbed-because-life-is-too-short school of reading. Even those of the trust-the-artist, persevere-and-stand-fast persuasion should prepare to be tested. I confess: I was confused, bewildered, lost. I wrote down the names of the characters. I backtracked. I cross-tracked. I re-tracked. The shape of the narrative only really began to declare itself around page 90. But then … oh, what an engaging education Harsh Times turned out to be, and how I came to look forward to my time in its company.

***

 A substantial part of Vargas Llosa’s gift has always been to illuminate the interior lives of characters regardless of their moral position – something only the greatest writers can do. Everyone in this book is mired in consequential life-and-death decisions. We fear for Marta Borrero, Armas’s lover, when she flees Guatemala in terror in the back of a car driven by the monster, Gacel. We cheer for her when she sinks her teeth into the ear of the degenerate Héctor Trujillo. Somehow, we care about Colonel Enrique, the vile head of Armas’s security, as he crawls back from the rag-and-bone degradation of five years in variously savage prisons infested with “perverts”.

***

 ...Sure, this novel isn’t Vargas Llosa’s finest (although I can’t think of many rival eightysomething authors who could do better). But it is replete with his deep human sensibility; it swarms with life and a determination to tunnel down into the underlying truth of humanity. Power. Politics. Credos and dogma. Senseless, casual death. Hopeless, casual love. The perpetual cruelty that greed recycles. The intergenerational legacy of stupidity. The way humansscontinually end up running things to their own detriment. Our own detriment.

So why not read it? I will. There will be something to learn from Llosa.

sch

The Guardian About Mario Vargas Llosa

Alberto Manguel writes in ‘We waited greedily for his novels’: Mario Vargas Llosa, a revolutionary of Spanish-language fiction what may be enough to get you to read him.

Until then, the so-called “novel of protest” in the literatures of Latin America had Zola as its model. Under the large shadow of the author of La Terre and Germinal, writers such as Ciro Alegría and José María Arguedas had written about the lives of those whom our European culture had taught us to deny. Vargas Llosa didn’t follow Zola but rather chose Flaubert as his guide, writing a decade later a splendid essay, The Perpetual Orgy, in which he argued that Madame Bovary kickstarted the modern novel by establishing an “objective” narrator who, because they refused to preach, gave the illusion of telling a story that was true.

We waited with greedy expectation for Vargas Llosa’s next novels, The Green House (1966) and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), and later Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) and the erotically humorous Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), all the time trying to discover who this man was who, in public life, swayed his political alliances from left to right, all the time remaining committed, in his fiction, to basic precepts of human empathy. 

 sch 4/20

Sentenced 13 Years Ago

 Today, Thirteen years ago, I was sentenced to 151 months in federal prison. I am still not sure what profit there was to the country in giving me 91 months over the minimum of 60 months. It did give me a reason to keep writing, and the opportunity to do so. It may be you readers of mine will find that a good thing, or a bad thing. The judge told me my sentence would deter me and others. I thought myself quite sobered and deterred by what I had done to myself by not carrying out my plans of suicide; since then I do not think anyone else was deterred by my sentence – unless you have closely read these notes. That day, I did not care about its length. I had a certainty that my COPD would finish me off before I came back to Indiana. So much for the best laid plans of mice and men.

In light of my personal history, this headline coming through today raises all sort of questions and amusement: Muncie Marine convicted in Jan. 6 Capitol riot placed on probation. Deterrence is a word that sounds good to politicians and the public.

When in prison I decided if I was going to keep writing, I had 40 years of writing to catch up on. I set myself a course of reading. A name that came up, one that I had heard from reading Gore Vidal, was Italo Calvino. I did manage to read one short story. I forget the title; that does not matter. It made sense of all the praise. Would that I had read him when I was younger, when I ahd the chance to be a better, more broad-based writer. Therefore, please read The Guardian's A brief survey of the short story: Italo Calvino.

In a lecture delivered in New York in the spring of 1983, Italo Calvino remarked that "most of the books I have written and those I intend to write originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind: when I have convinced myself that such a book is completely beyond my capacities of temperament or skill, I sit down and start writing it".

Like much of Calvino's work, the statement is at once ironic and quite serious, and is justified entirely by his extraordinary bibliography....

I woke 90 minutes ago, scarfed down two Pop-Tarts (probably bad for me), and went straight to “Road Tripping”. I will run it through the spell/grammar checker after I type up this post. I do that through Google Docs, LibreOffice seems to strain at a 125-page document (a bit over 38,000 words). In my mind, it is done and is worth showing to the world. Which may say something about the  state of my mind! Firefox, or Firefox and my monitoring software, do not like Google apps. I am working in Firefox right now. I will boot Chrome later.

Another writer I got tot read in prison was Mario Vargas Llosa. Reading The Guardian's Mario Vargas Llosa says latest novel will be his last. This news feel like the passing of an era. Like Keith Richards saying he will no longer play guitar.

Peru’s best-known living writer, the Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, has announced that his seven-decade literary career is coming to an end and that his latest novel will be his last.

In a postscript to the new book, Le dedico mi silencio (I Give You My Silence), the 87-year-old novelist writes: “I think I’ve finished this book. I’d now like to write an essay on [Jean-Paul] Sartre, who was my teacher as a young man. It will be the last thing I write.”

Le dedico mi silencio has been described as a love letter to Peru and to música criolla, the country’s distinctive blend of European waltzes with Afro-Peruvian and Andean influences.

Find him, read. Especially, if you are from our Midwest thinking you are too far off the literary paths to write anything worthwhile. Yes, that was my viewpoint 40 years ago. Whether I am writing anything worthwhile remains an open question. (Which reminds me, do buy my stage adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death; the link is to the left of your screen. If you want a freebie example, there are also links to Passerby and Death and a Kiss!)

More of my morning's reading from The Guardian (book reviews):

Determined: Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky review – the hard science of decisions 

Into this bewildering terrain steps the celebrated behavioural scientist Robert Sapolsky, who sets out in Determined to banish free will once and for all – and to show that confronting its nonexistence needn’t condemn us to amorality or despair. It’s only one aspect of the book’s strangeness that he does this in a style that often calls to mind a hugely knowledgable yet stoned west coast slacker....

***

Along the way, he makes impassioned arguments against such ideas as “grit”, which seem to suggest that those raised in situations that tax their willpower could just choose to develop more of it. Yes, there are people who “overcame bad luck with spectacular tenacity and grit” – but their capacity for tenacity and grit was bestowed by luck, too. Everything is luck, including whether or not you have the right character traits for dealing with bad luck. In the words of the free-will sceptic Galen Strawson, “luck swallows everything”.

Determined is a bravura performance, well worth reading for the pleasure of Sapolsky’s deeply informed company. What’s less clear is whether this inventory of the causes of human behaviour should change anyone’s position on free will. After all, most free-will deniers make their case on a priori grounds, meaning that their arguments aren’t dependent on specific scientific findings. If the entire present state of the world was caused by the entire state of the world just before that, and the world back then was caused by the state of the world before that, and so on, then the details of exactly what’s causing what don’t seem to matter.

***

Later in the book, when he turns to the question of how we should live in the absence of free will, Sapolsky’s humane worldview comes to the fore. Some argue that realising we lack freedom may turn us into moral monsters. But he makes a moving case that, really, it’s a reason to live with profound forgiveness and understanding – for seeing “the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done”. It is the ultimate philosophical grounding for the idea that “there but for the grace of God go I”. A familiar paradox lurks here, as with any discussion of how we ought to respond to the absence of free will: if there’s no free will, surely we’re just going to respond however we respond? But this doesn’t mean Sapolsky’s absorbing and compassionate book won’t change how people think, or how they behave towards one another. It just means they won’t have freely chosen to make that change.

I remain unconvinced.

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench review – national treasures sounds delightful:

The narrative takes the form of a series of informal and intimate conversations between her and fellow actor Brendan O’Hea. Tips on how to speak iambic pentameter, memories of the great actors and directors she’s worked with over the years, and musings on the inner lives of Shakespeare’s numerous heroines are interspersed with industry gossip, reflections on triumph and disaster, and personal meditations on love and loss (she met her late husband, actor Michael Williams, while at the RSC). Mischievous and convivial, Dench delights in sending up O’Hea whenever his questions become too probing or pretentious. After hearing of her two tilts at Lady Macbeth, O’Hea remarks “You adore this play, don’t you?” “Love it,” she replies. “Beautifully constructed, terrific story, great part, short, no interval, pub. Heaven.”

 ***

In less assured hands a book such as this could seem cloyingly self-reverential – dare one say “luvvie”? – but it’s a mark of Dench’s impish genius and O’Hea’s deftness that it genuinely feels like you’re sitting at her kitchen table with her. It’s companionable and compelling – if you love Judi Dench or Shakespeare (and most of us do), look no further.

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke review – an upper-class monster sounds worth finding - if I had the time for more books!

In her foreword – rather disapprovingly you feel – Moshfegh describes him as “not really a character in any usual sense” because he lacks “the lowest level of agency and self-definition”. We can see clearly how this condition was baked in by his early experience, the product of a methodical process. Perhaps we can’t forgive him for the revenge he takes on that upbringing; perhaps we can. But that we can understand him at all we owe to Brooke’s immoderate talents. Sometimes her subject matter is as genuinely hard to swallow as the food congealing on a seven-year-old boy’s plate – “large pieces of fat, with several veins peeping through” – but the book’s success is its readability in the face of that.

Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse: ‘It took years before I dared to write again’ 

Fosse’s plays seem calculated to discomfit such theatregoers, pushing deep into enigmatic meaning and plotlessness (he notes witheringly that his work has been called “post-dramatic”). His characters sometimes have names but are more often called “The One” and “The Other”, or “The Woman”, “The Boy”, “The Older Man”. There is humour but the dominant moods tend towards dread, claustrophobia and sexual jealousy, his characters often struggling to connect. Playwriting allowed Fosse to employ silence in a way he couldn’t in prose. “I could use the word ‘pause’ a lot, and ‘he or she breaks off’, and somehow make the silence speak and establish a second silent language behind the spoken language.” Whenever he gets this feeling now, he says, he knows he’s writing well.

***

Shortly afterwards, in 2012, Fosse collapsed. He was drinking so much that he had stopped eating. Alcohol had helped him perform the role of theatre star. “I’m a shy and in a way very private person, and the theatre is the opposite. So I was the wrong person for the job.” He doesn’t have regrets – “It’s nice to drink whisky with Simon Stephens,” he says, laughing – but when he left hospital he never drank again, and claims not to miss it. “I think basically writing resembles drinking to me. When you drink you become someone a bit different, and you get rid of your normal self. And to me writing … it’s not to express myself, it’s to get rid of myself.”

Drama hasn’t been as simple to kick. After a few years during which, alongside prose, he only translated plays (including the Norwegian version of Simon Stephens’s stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), he has returned, in a smaller way, to writing them. In fact his latest novella, A Shining, is a prose version of a new play, In the Black Forest, which had its theatrical premiere in Oslo in September. This brief, haunting work isn’t the best place to start with Fosse, though. In his case, which is rare, the Nobel has been awarded to someone who has very recently published their masterpiece. Septology, an 825-page novel written in a single sentence, may sound like a daunting entry point, but Fosse’s mastery of rhythm (superbly recreated in English by translator Damion Searls) is so total, the compassionate attention he pays to his characters so affecting, that the book quickly immerses the reader in its flow. It is a unique literary experience.

***

Fosse fuses domestic realism – making food, getting ready for bed, looking after a dog – and the mystical. There are two Asles in Septology, doppelgängers between whom Fosse shares out details from his own life. The Asle who narrates the novel marries a Catholic, converts and, eventually, quits drinking. The other is an alcoholic; early on he’s found collapsed in a snowy street. One Asle has no children, while the other has had three with two different women. Fosse, meanwhile, has had six with three wives. His oldest children are grown, while his youngest is yet to start school.

***

Despite these shared traits (Asle also has his creator’s grey hair in a ponytail, bald spot “still visible through the strands of hair”, and a penchant for scarves), Fosse isn’t interested in autofiction, which he once experimented with “before that even became a concept”. His ambition with Scenes from a Childhood “was to write exactly as it was. But I didn’t manage it. It started to take its own way, to be something else.” Was that frustrating? “I simply had to accept it,” he shrugs. “I could write down a kind of resumé of what happened but that isn’t literature. As soon as it gets a kind of literary quality it has transformed into something else. And I guess that’s close to what literature is all about. What you write, it needs to – it’s a cliche perhaps – but it needs to be bigger than life.”

Are Nobel Literature winners required to be obscure, or is it just American ignorance. Well, I prefer not to be ignorant, and the more I read of Fosse, the more intriguing he becomes. While reading this interview, I wondered what is going with Ball State Theater this season. Well, they are putting on Prom. I will plan on going, about time.

Since Firefox crashed 3 times in an hour, I closed out Crap from the Past, and watched the end of Philomena. Dench does a wonderful job. Teared me up, actually.

I moved onto last Thursday's Times Literary Supplement.

J.G. Ballard is a writer I knew of from movies; he remains unread for all he attracts me. The TLS published The crime of being alive The visionary brilliance of an author who believed in nothing:

The boldness of his sentences suggests someone fixed in their certainties, but the most striking aspect of Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007 – 119 examples of his literary ephemera filed into sections such as “Statements”, “Commentaries”, “Features”, “Reviews”, “Forum Discussions” and “Memoir” – is that he was in two minds about most things. His imaginative strength was built on ambivalence: “I believe in my own obsessions”, he wrote in a list for Interzone in 1984 called “What I believe” – a list that includes the declaration “I believe in nothing”. The things that obsessed Ballard, such as gated communities, the Heathrow Hilton, car crashes, runways, multistorey carparks, hypermarkets and flyovers, also appalled him. He wanted science fiction recognized as the most significant writing of the twentieth century, but also wanted it to remain what he called “invisible literature”; the task of SF was to look forwards, he said, but he also said that tomorrow has become today, in which case SF was dead. He believed in the unconscious as a “narrative stage”, but not in the rehearsals of psychoanalytic therapy that, by looking back to the roots of character and behaviour, ignored the psychological impact of the current mass-mediated life. (This was also his argument against the realist novel.)

Ballard liked the new “spoiled” French Riviera, he enthused in the Mail on Sunday in 1995, and would have lived there “if I could afford it”, which he probably could have done by then (the film of Empire of the Sun, written in 1984, came out in 1987); but his wealth made no difference to his modest lifestyle. He lived for fifty years in a semi-detached house in Shepperton (“a suburb of Heathrow airport”), where he set up his cottage industry and slept on a camp bed, as though still in a camp. While he claimed to have enjoyed the war and to have been unaffected by the sight of men killed in front of him, his interest in the future was clearly rooted in the traumas of the past.

His ambivalence extended to himself. Ballard disliked what he called the “career novelist” but this, nevertheless, is what he was; he also disliked the “Great Name” school of literature, but “Ballardian”, an adjective for his style of dystopian modernity, is now in the dictionary. A “sure sign of the second-rate”, Ballard said of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis in his contribution to the essay collection The Test of Time: What makes a classic a classic? (1999), is when “writers are more famous than their books”; and he must have hoped, as his own fame increased and his books became cult, that this wouldn’t prove true of him. He regretted, in a piece for the Guardian in 2007, that the surrealists died – as he too was then dying – “loaded with honours, prizes and, worst of all, respectability”. The Americans may have crowned Don DeLillo, his closest US counterpart, as their greatest living writer, but for the British, as Ballard put it in a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Fates Worse Than Death (1991), “success usually comes with a live round still in its chamber”.

Meanwhile, the last Literary Review has Shoot-out in Great Ormond Street (1988), a review of Running Wild by J G Ballard:

There are brilliant high points in Running Wild, not the least of which is the shoot-out in the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital when Marion is retrieved by ‘two small figures in white gowns and face-masks,’ who murder with the unreasoning deliberation of psychopaths. And when Richard Greville comes to reconstruct the massacre detail by detail, accounting for each child’s part in the tyrannicide, and demonstrates the meticulous planning which has gone into the killings, so that not a single adult is left alive on Pangbourne Estate – a theory rejected by the police – one is back with the solitary figure characteristic of all Ballard’s books, whose vision supports a universe.

Ballard has always taken uncompromising risks, and his psychological exploration of murder conducted by children is every bit as terrifying as the mental landscapes of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. No one has been prepared to go so far and push the frontiers of consciousness to their limits. Whatever Ballard creates is stamped with his individual genius; no one writes as well, and in fifty years when most of his straitjacketed contemporaries will have been consigned to oblivion, a new generation will be reading Ballard as the novelist of the immediate present.

 At The Literary Review, I had to read Author in Love for one reason, Vivien Leigh.

Her own beauty and sexual attractiveness are undeniable. Rex Harrison was deeply in love with her though they never so much as held hands. Even Somerset Maugham, not noted for his susceptibility to feminine charms, was enchanted by her. Watching them together, Garson Kanin wrote: ‘As for WSM, I have never seen this side of him – the gallant, courtly gentleman. The man on the make. Every warm instinctive exchange passes between them’. Churchill loved her films as, it seems, did Hitler. Despite the admiration of the war leaders, her talents as an actress are now less obvious than her beauty. Most of the films she appeared in were pretty poor and her performance suffered from the almost compulsory refinement of the period so that James Agate could say of her Lady Hamilton that it ‘reeks of Muswell Hill at its most respectable’.

Kenneth Tynan – who changed his mind after he had met her – gave her some memorably bad notices over the years, calling her Lady Macbeth ‘more niminy-piminy than thundery-blundery, more viper than anaconda’. As for Olivier, when Anthony Holden saw him watching one of her old films on television a couple of years ago, the tears were rolling down his checks as he said: ‘This, this was love. This was the real thing’. It is to Vickers’s credit that he is prepared to acknowledge it. Having fallen for Vivien Leigh himself, he has told her story as well as it is ever likely to be told.

That was also from 1988.

More recently from The Literary Review is Across the Great Divide, a review of J M Coetzee's The Pole and Other Stories. Coetzee is another writer prison gave me time for reading. I found him a writer of crisp, steady writing. He impresses by his quietness. Or so he seems to my recollection. The review says:

Novelists seldom grow old gracefully. ‘All writers go off,’ as the late Martin Amis once put it, and while they are hardly unique in that respect, when writers go off the consequences can be dire. A late run of mediocrity has a way of souring a literary legacy, which is one reason why new books by distinguished writers make reviewers nervous. Have they finally gone off? Happily, J M Coetzee seems to be one of the rare exceptions; rather than running out of steam, he has slipped comfortably into a late style. The stories in The Pole reflect on the relationship between ageing and artistry, touching on many of Coetzee’s characteristic preoccupations: self-knowledge and self-deception; suffering and empathy; the rights of the vulnerable. Together they might be said to constitute his portrait of the artist as an old man.

***

These stories are tinged with mourning – for the artist on his or her way out of the world, for the missed opportunities for connection and communication, and ultimately for the waning of the life force that Coetzee, like his alter ego, understands as the common inheritance of non-human species as well as human beings. But they are also touched with a moral intensity which, despite the ruses of fiction, is never quite separable from the voice of the author. Among the fruits of Costello’s wild imagination is a half-serious plan to construct a transparent model slaughterhouse so that the public might be introduced to the shocking reality of animal slaughter: ‘It occurred to me that if there were an abattoir operating in the middle of the city, where everyone could see and smell and hear what goes on inside it, people might change their ways.’ Idealistic, perhaps, but it’s a striking image: a transparent model inviting onlookers to bear witness to the suffering that sustains our common life. You get the feeling that Coetzee would like his fiction to serve a similar purpose.

Music also helped me get through prison, and prison also let me again appreciate music. One show I still make a point of listening to is WXPN's Land of the Lost. Here is the latest show from MixCloud. Eighties music. Listening to this on Friday was one thing left unmentioned in my report.

Going through the email to the newsletter from Counterpunch, which quite often sets my teeth on edge, and I was about to pan Israel’s Kristallnacht by Bruce Neuburger until I reached his conclusion. Justice, equity, must recognize the wrongness of both sides, must address the grievances and wrongs of both sides. 

In conclusion:

1) No acceptable resolution of this crisis, no path to peace, can be achieved, nor should be accepted, unless it is based on achieving the full rightsof Jews and Palestinians.

2) What I am saying should in no way be interpreted that Jews were merely the “puppets” of imperialism. But the dominant wealth and military strength of U.S. imperialism has given it leverage and U.S. imperialism has proven itself capable of the most grotesque brutality and cynical maneuvers to achieve its political aims.  Zionist oppression of Arab peoples since World War II is not the result of the will of Jews, but of a willingness of a section of Jews who embrace a racist ideology to shape the Israeli state to the needs of imperialism. Many Jews opposed this and still do. This number of anti-Zionist Jews is growing, but the overwhelming power lies with the imperialist nations. They must be called to account for their crimes! They and their Netanyahu-ist partners in Israel must be stopped from committing further crimes against the Palestinian people.

3. The struggle for a new, just social order centered on human commonality and cooperation—the not narrow, ugly, brutal sectarian madness of Zionism or a Hamas— is the urgent task for Jews, Palestinians, and all humanity.

NEVER AGAIN TO ANYONE!

I hope Joe Biden is doing what he can to reach these goals.

And here I am 13 years later, at peace, happy, freer than I was 10 2010. I hope my life meets your approval.

I need to move onto other tasks to justify not attending church.

sch

 

Movies and Theater, Muncie & Anderson; Books Worth Noting; Kit Marlowe Dies, Again

Ball State's Emens Theater calendar: Upcoming Events at Emens Auditorium.

 Anderson's Paramount Theater is showing movies again! A wondrous place to see movies. I wish more of the films rose to the ocassion.

Movies, movies, movies! Anderson's Paramount Theatre offers slate of free famous films (heraldbulletin.com)

I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP? 

Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?

 

 Books: The Curse of Queen Kelly (Film Comment)

 Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.

‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern  (The Guardian) 

I have a fondness for Llosa & Irvine Welsh & Téa Obreh & Kit Marlowe: 

I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa review – Nobel laureate’s final novel is a love letter to Peru (The Guardian)

When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.

Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph  (The Guardian)

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is at times quite astonishing.  

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher review – a masterpiece of criticism (The Guardian)

In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.

***

Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding.

Téa Obreht on Writing a Layered, Intertextual Tale of the American West (Literary Hub) - a delightful writer.

From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was  faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:

 

 sch

   

Blue Monday? Well, Another Day On The Way to A Dusty Death For Sure

I needed to go to Social Security and I did not. Frankly, I was tired when I got home from work and my left flared with pain. So what did I do? I went to the convenience store and then slept for two hours.

Then I found out I made a mistake in what I filed in my dad's trust case. That took time to fix it. Then there was more to do with that. I ended my day around 9 PM.

I finished watching Krull on YouTube. Oh, is it flawed, and it is some of the same flaws that I remembered from seeing it in the theater decades ago. It also has the same qualities - the supporting cast gives the movie heft. Somehow, the algorithms turned up Cult Classic '80s Fantasy Being Rebooted By JJ Abrams. I have been complaining for years about reboots of successful movies in favor of those which updating would improve. This could be the test case. 

Mario Vargas Llosa, giant of Latin American literature, dies aged 89  (The Guardian)

Over a career that spanned more than 50 years, Vargas Llosa charted power and corruption in a series of novels including The Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat. Living a life that was as colourful as his fiction, Vargas Llosa also launched a failed bid for the Peruvian presidency, nursed a long-running feud with Gabriel García Márquez and triumphed as a Nobel laureate in 2010.

I read Llosa, finally, in prison. He is not Marquez; he is his own thing and maybe easier for Americans to understand. Time comes for everyone, but I think this one ends an era of the big South American Writers.

Rejections continue, while I put submissions on hold.

Thank you for sending your work to ellipsis. Though it was not the right fit for the journal this time, we appreciate the chance to read it.

Best wishes to you and your writing.

Sincerely,

The Editors 

I keep trying to point out how the Ukrainian War is a religious war, and The Subjugation of Faith (Public Orthodoxy) makes that point.

Father Vladimir Budnik from the Kherson region was serving as the rector of a UOC church in the city of Golaya Pristan at the beginning of the full-scale war. According to him, “plainclothes men” began coming to his church as early as April 2022. “They wanted me to stop reading sermons in Ukrainian—they said: ‘Russia is here now, we don’t need all this.’ Then they started demanding sermons about the triune people: a common past, a common history, a common church. I evaded, made excuses that I don’t know Russian well, but they kept pushing more and more. I didn’t know how to get away from them,” the priest recounts.

At some point, Father Vladimir had the feeling that he was about to be arrested—visits from government representatives were becoming more frequent. His fellow priest had already spent two weeks “in the basement”—the occupation authorities accused him of “collaborating with the Kyiv regime.”

Vladimir Budnik was fortunate: he managed to escape the occupation. Once he arrived in Kyiv, he received a text message from an unknown number warning him that they would come for him soon and that he needed to leave urgently. 

***

For example, the number of parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, subsequently incorporated into the ROC, decreased by 1.4 times, while the number of Protestant communities decreased by 3.6 times. The Catholic Church has been almost completely destroyed: out of 15 parishes of the Roman Catholic Church, only one remains; out of 49 parishes of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, none remain. 

Away from politics to Edna O'Brien, ‘You must read my diaries’: unlocking the private life of Edna O’Brien. A writer I wish I had read more of.

In prison, I got to re-read The Great Gatsby, as well as more of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. I had read it in high school. My Aunt Mary Ellen told me it had been her favorite novel, which made her in a small group, considering it was almost out of print when she was in college. It may be the best of Fitzgerald's novels, although I think This Side of Paradise was worth reading. It is now a  hundred years old with a variety of celebrations.

Gatsby @ 100: American Classrooms, American Dreams? (Public Books) makes several interesting points about Gatsby embodying/critiquing the American Dream, and its use in American classrooms.

In his speech at the Center for American Progress in January 2012, Krueger used the chart of the Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) to predict that “the persistence in the advantages and disadvantages of income passed from parents to the children” would “rise by about a quarter for the next generation as a result of the rise in inequality that the US has seen in the last 25 years” (see figure 1). In other words, the trajectories of rich families and poor or working-class families would continue to diverge. “Not since the Roaring Twenties has the share of income going to the very top reached such high levels,” he said. “It is hard to look at these figures and not be concerned that rising inequality is jeopardizing our tradition of equality of opportunity.”

***

Our survey finds that Gatsby is still taught in all kinds of schools, across every demographic. Often it’s as a required text or as a selection from a list of approved titles. In an era of high-stakes testing and diminished reading stamina, when an 11th-grade class might read only two or three books in a year, one of them is likely to be Gatsby. It’s a safe choice. If one were looking for them, the novel offers plenty of pretexts for challenges, but it’s not the sort of book Moms for Liberty is gunning for.

I spent some time putting together a collection of Macbeth scenes from YouTube for KH. I am also going to share them with you. 

What is a Novelist to Do?

 I will read anything by Mario Vargas Llosa. You search this blog for my other posts on Llosa. From LitHub, I saw the link for Mario Vargas Llosa on Looking Back, a Novel of Never-Ending War That Resists Easy Answers. That I read does not mean I do not skim a book review, and I did not think of a blog post until I came down to the last two paragraphs.

There is no reason for a novel to replace its readers, offering easy solutions, freeing them from the task of reflection and deciding for themselves what they might do if forced to contend with the same dilemmas. Fortunately, both Sergio and Marianela are alive, and Sergio has given his all to his career as a filmmaker. But after all she survived during her singular education, the fate of Marianela leaves me in terrified suspense.

Does she feel that she fulfilled her mission? Is she happy with herself? Or perhaps frustrated? It’s impossible to tell by reading this exceptional novel. But that is where the invisible work that its pages leave in our memory begins. What would you have done in her shoes? Would you have turned back, or persevered? How far would you go? Until when? Until you turned the whole world into a flaming meteor from which nothing and no one can escape? Good novels do not provide easy answers; it is the job of readers whose sensitivity is awakened by what is imagined there to know how to respond. The author of these outstanding pages can be satisfied that his work is done.

 Part of my campaign against a saccharine sentimentality has led me away from happy endings. For one of my novels, I think no one noticed the husband and wife would have to be dead for the novel to exist.

So, loose ends serve their purpose. I will take that as the lesson of the day.

sch 9/23/22

Books to Spark Your Creativity; 11-25-2019

 [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. This may have been for a presentation in one of the community college classes I sgned up for. sch 4/22/2025]

1. Diary of Ann Frank (diary)
2. Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (Memoir)
3. Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob Dylan (Memoir)
4. X-Ray, Ray Davies (Memoir)
5. The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, Joyce Carol Oates (Memoir)
6. Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup *  (Memoir)
7. The Story of My Life, Booker T. Washington * (Memoir)
8. Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou (Memoir)
9. Tibetan Peach Pie, Tom Robbins (Memoir)
10. Couldn't Keep It To Myself, Wally Lamb and the Women of York Prison (Memoir)
11. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell (Memoir)
12. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain (Memoir)
13. Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck (Memoir)
14. The Outsider, Richard Wright (autobiographical fiction)
15. Typee, Herman Melville (autobiographical fiction)
16. Bird on Bird, Anne Lamott (memoir plus how-to-write)
17. On Writing, Stephen King (autobiographical fiction)
18. If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Chester Himes (fiction by felons)
19. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (fiction by felons)

I did not get a chance to present my list last Wednesday. We - my group - decided to go on rather than await an extension cord for the projector. That list contained only books in the prison library, or I knew were on the compound. I picked them with an emphasis for familiar types in prison. The idea is creativity vented stress and was for the Success and Wellness class, so I think you can see the connection between stress relief and the requirements of the class.

I will add these for you:

1. Milan Kundera, Art of the Novel
2. Albert Camus, The Rebel
3. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
4. Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
5. W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
6. Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy
7. Susan Sontag, At the Same Time
8. Joyce Carol Oates, Faith of a Writer
9. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
10. V.S. Naipaul, Writer's People
11. Edward Said, On Late Style
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
13. Nelson Algren, Nonconformity

Is 32 books too much?

sch

[* These books were ones I had not read and still have not. And in the process of adding hyperlinks to my list, I came across the following:

1. Review: Letters to A Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (January Magazine)
2. Lost and Found Books: Nelson Algren's Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998) (Logos Journal)
3. On Late Style By Edward W Said (The Independent)
4. How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity (The Marginalian)
5. Hatred and Self Loathing: Naipaul’s colonial shame (The Elephant)
6. (Zinta Reviews) The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates
7. "Same Time: Essays and Speeches" by Susan Sontag (A Gathering of the Tribes)
8. The Summing Up - W. Somerset Maugham (My Maugham Collection)
9. Analysis of Milan Kundera’s Novels ( Literary Theory and Criticism)

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