Alcove in the Hoose Library of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. I sat more than a few hours here as a student.
Axis tilt! How we take in the world is changing. Arbitrarily I declare 02-02-2020 to be the official start date for the new curriculum we are all learning. Ontologies without borders. The grand reopening party is beginning!
Received email from Unlikely Stories, an on-line journal of arts and culture, they will publish a piece I’d sent. I’m thrilled, my second appearance with them. Jonathan Penton, the editor-in-chief, has been gracious. The journal has been around for over twenty years and is based in New Orleans (!!!). They always have good content. (So how’d I get in??!!)
So yeah, cool. But mostly, now with two personal venues plus Amazon, I don’t have time to go through the submission process as much as I used to. I have one submission outstanding, once upon a time I had dozens. But with Stark Impressions and WUTR, plus my Kindle books, I have my own outlets, and they are demanding content.
Again, inadvertently living the dream! (Caution: sweet dreams may lead to waking melancholy.)
I’m reading George Meredith’s The Egoist on and off and on. Enjoying the satire. Chapter 5, “Clara Middleton,” had me laughing out loud. But it’s a looooonnnnnng book…IYKWIM.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes long books, too, but also short ones. I don’t have the ability to describe how much I respect him as a writer. (First read him for a Russian Literature in Translation course at the above mentioned University of Southern California.) His short story, For the Good of the Cause, is a virtuoso performance. The story is in six parts, and part one is not just part one, it is an opening number. With amazing writerly bravado, he makes the entire section dialogue amongst government bureaucrats, through which the reader can see the characters, you can feel the atmosphere, the smell of the office, the lighting, the costumes and furniture. But ominously it sets up through contrast the remaining five parts, classic Solzhenitsyn depictions of grinding bureaucracy.
© 2020 Randy Stark
Please visit my website at www.randystark.com and my page at Write Up The Road.