NECESSARY TO SUSTAIN LIFE
Kristin Garth āDaddyā book review, ISPT chapter at Donāt Submit, Exacting Clam cover
What is going on with this autumn? I made a prediction back in September, more like a premonition I had, that if I were a seer or a medium then Iād say this autumn would be full of startling energy shifts and wrenching transitions. Whether that came to pass or not Iāll let you be the judge of, I think it depends upon your scope. Globally the world is going through horrible shifts of energy as we witness the Israel-Gaza conflict, which I will refrain from speaking too much about except to say that on social media a relatively sophisticated information war is taking place. Psychological warfare, propaganda, disinformation. Itās in your face all the time practically. Somehow the war in Ukraine didnāt seem this visceral, hypermediated, and Argos-like, the monster with 100 camera-eyeballs and yet so many of them in Gaza are blinded by design. Itās upsetting and who can predict where it will lead? With great sadness I plumb my soul as an observer and find that I canāt say what I want to say about it all because I donāt want to be inhabited, possessed by the forces of propaganda in one direction or another. Something in me tells me to wait until some salient moment to speak, when speech is truly free and the facts are clearer. On twitter/x, I follow various accounts across the spectrum of opinion about the conflict. I tell myself thatās good, thatās healthy, but it feels sickeningly confusing to read varying viewpoints and also see how some are speaking with little substance or justice and others are afraid to speak for fear of being punished and labeled as a hate-monger. Iāll leave it alone for now, but with this statement which is the most that I can say: all throughout the war on terror, Afghanistan, Iraq, all the battle zones of the past twenty years or so, I have felt the worst variety of hatred for people in positions of power, mouthpieces who twist and turn words into pretzels when trying to excuse and obscure civilian casualties, for military purposes. I damn those people and their lies. Thereās a lot of it about right now.
I have recently come into a situation where I have access to a vast library. Iām hoping this will cut down on my bad habit of buying books constantly. So far I have taken out Nathalie Sarrauteās The Age of Suspicion, Alain Robbe-Grilletās Topology of a Phantom City, the first volume of Questioning Minds which is the collection of letters between Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport, another book by Kenner the name of which escapes me about modernist American writers, and a book about Franz Kafka. I feel like it is time to really buckle down and try to read Kafka which Iāve never done yet. I also want to read more Dostoevsky and try to resume reading Marcel Proust. I recently read three of Jean Genetās novels and his biography and Iām digging dead gay French writers for some reason.
Buying the Sarraute book (essays about the novel as she saw it in the 1950s) and the Kenner/Davenport letters would cost a fortune. Theyāre highly expensive somewhat rare books. Having a library card is the perfect workaround for that. I recommend it to those who can crawl your way to a good university library, or any library with a tentacular reach.
Iām going to be in the Winter ā23 issue of Exacting Clam!
These are screen shots from the Exacting Clam website. Itās run by publishers Sagging Meniscus. Thereās a lot I donāt know about the publication or these people but itās dope to me. I have a cartoon in there that I hope makes somebody chuckle. Itās in print!
I have started to try to work on writing book reviews again and have arranged for the website A Thin Slice of Anxiety to publish a column of mine (donāt know how regular itāll be) of reviews called Ricochets. The first one was a review of Kristin Garthās new short story collection Daddy which is not completely but largely about women with severe cases of ādaddy issuesā and the men who exacerbate them. Itās not exactly light-hearted stuff as people whoāve read Garthās fiction and poetry will be aware. Here is the link to that book review, hopefully it comes across in hypertext land:
http://www.athinsliceofanxiety.com/2023/11/ricochets.html?m=1
I also published another small chunk of the novel I See Prism Threads at Donāt Submit. This writing project has been a somewhat desperate and impulsive series of off-the-top-of-the-dome unrefined writings that I want to interlace with a limited crew of characters with an eye toward constructing a novel around them, growing it like a crystal lattice. Pieces of the novel have mostly been surfaced at Donāt Submit but have also been at Expat Press and Bruiser Mag and also of course, here at Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin. This chapter is about making money to stay in a relationship, where love meets reality. Here is āThe Bandage Dropperā:
https://donotsubmit.net/the-bandage-dropper-by-jesse-hilson/
Itās not a lot going on, and I seem to feel exhausted these days, unable to make headway in reading or writing books for any period of time. Thereās quite a few books I want to read, the above library books as well as some crime novels etc that Iād like to review. But itās hard to focus and concentrate.
I feel socially cut off from people much of the time these days. Iām not painting. Artistic triumphs are hollow and/or fleeting. Iām alone. I worry about my sanity often. I feel like a different person every time I go to sleep and wake up, or leave the house, or even pass through a threshold from room to room. I think some of it is seasonal, itās fall, itās before the holidays begin. I have ambitions but little energy or willpower. Or money of course. Maybe that will change in 2024. Maybe Iāll meet a whole raft of new people and accomplish things that will amount to a goddamn.
***
Still on that country music. Dave Dudley - āTwo Six Packs Awayā