#and they churn out a dozen or more books a year. i can’t maintain that pace

[sunriseverse]

i know 7s probably pays their translators like shit since we’re not exactly, like, a vaunted profession, but god sometimes i long for the prestige (that exists only in my head) of having a real translation job with monetary benefits. instead of my realistic path which will be graduate -> find some job that i can handle working consistently -> do translation as a hobby if i have the time

[nickgerlich]

Clothes Encounters

What goes around, comes around. When I was a kid, we were still in the Spy v. Spy era, an artifact of the Cold War with the USSR. We didn’t trust them, and they didn’t trust us. You never really knew if your operatives had sold out to the other side. The story of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed President Kennedy, was fresh in our minds. Prior to his misdeed, he had defected to the USSR, and then defected back to the US. If ever a person were shrouded in mystery, it was LHO.

Today, while we aren’t exactly best buddies with Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, it seems we are more concerned with China. Our relationship with them has always been tenuous at best, and whereas not long ago we simply outsourced much of our manufacturing to them, they have now developed to the point that they are a formidable economic foe, not to mention political.

Thus, we find ourselves concerned about companies like TikTok (banned by 34 state governments), Temu and its ridiculously cheap bargains, and Shein, the fast-fashion giant. All were founded in China and maintain ties there, but all have US operations as well. I suspect those US operations are more smokescreen than anything, designed to deflect criticisms and concerns.

Shein, the e-commerce darling during COVID, is now planning an IPO for the US. But before it does so, it must try to shake a slew of allegations centered on forced labor in its supply chains, labor violations, and stealing designs from independent creators. These are the kinds of things that will find Shein appearing in case studies and text book chapters for years to come. Ethics, anyone?

Fast fashion, by definition, is not just quick, but also cheap. Companies routinely introduce new items every week, not so much to follow a trend, but to create one instead. Items may have a shelf life of as few as six weeks. The implicit message to customers is that, if you want to stay on the bleeding edge of fashion, you have to buy in early, and be prepared to keep buying as new items come out.

What people do with those now-it’s-in-now-it’s-not clothes is up to the customer. Quality is usually suspect, given the price. And, given that the garments are designed to have such a limited run, they don’t have to hold up to dozens of washings. Thus, last month’s hot item may languish in the back of a closet, be sold or donated, or, in some cases, thrown in the dumpster because it is already falling apart.

A quick look at the Shein website as well as their Amazon store quickly reveals their target market: young and female. Yes, they have some men’s clothing, but it’s kind of like going to a Lush store in the mall. You know, the one with all those overly fragrant bath soaps and personal care items that draws in women by the score. There is a tiny men’s section with shaving butters and the like, but you have to look for it. I bet they have those for the poor guys being dragged along for a day of shopping.

Technically, Shein is a DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) firm, a purely online retailer of its own wares. It has, however, dabbled with pop-up shops in large US cities. I wouldn’t be surprised if it expands on these, just like eyeglass maker Warby Parker has done with its shops. But I have my doubts they would start distributing through other retailers, primarily because those cheap prices don’t carry very high margins to begin with. Prices would have to go up to give various channel members a piece of the action, which would then defeat Shein’s primary advantage.

But back to ethics. These allegations are huge, and China, like other Asian nations, is rumored far and wide to have some of the worst working conditions on the planet. Never mind the fact that Americans can’t just fly to Beijing, rent a car, and pay a visit to these factories.

Then there’s the issue of intellectual property. If you’re busy churning out new items on a weekly basis, there’s a need for fresh takes on style. I could see a creative team having to work 24/7 to keep up with this treadmill.

Lastly, there are lingering concerns about US data, which Shein swears is kept here under lock and key. TikTok owner Byte Dance swears the same thing, but that didn’t stop those states from banning them on government-owned devices.

It’s enough to make me compare the current situation to that of my youth. While the case against Mr. Oswald ultimately found him to be the lone assassin, there are still lingering unresolved issues even now. We may never know the details of his behaviors and actions leading up to that tragic day in Dallas.

Shein has its work cut out for them. I am pretty certain we may never truly know all the ins and outs of this firm. The opaque curtain behind which it operates shields them, but will probably also lead to investor skepticism. And that’s a style that no one looks good in.

Dr “Count Me Out” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[socialjusticeartshare]

AP Visits Immigration Courts Across US, Finds Nonstop Chaos

LUMPKIN, Ga. — In a locked, guarded courtroom in a compound surrounded by razor wire, Immigration Judge Jerome Rothschild waits — and stalls.

A Spanish interpreter is running late because of a flat tire. Rothschild tells the five immigrants before him that he’ll take a break before the proceedings even start. His hope: to delay just long enough so these immigrants won’t have to sit by, uncomprehendingly, as their futures are decided.

“We are, untypically, without an interpreter,” Rothschild tells a lawyer who enters the courtroom at the Stewart Detention Center after driving down from Atlanta, about 140 miles away.

In its disorder, this is, in fact, a typical day in the chaotic, crowded and confusing U.S. immigration court system of which Rothschild’s courtroom is just one small outpost.

Shrouded in secrecy, the immigration courts run by the U.S. Department of Justice have been dysfunctional for years and have only gotten worse. A surge in the arrival of asylum seekers and the Trump administration’s crackdown on the Southwest border and illegal immigration have pushed more people into deportation proceedings, swelling the court’s docket to 1 million cases.

“It is just a cumbersome, huge system, and yet administration upon administration comes in here and tries to use the system for their own purposes,” says Immigration Judge Amiena Khan in New York City, speaking in her role as vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

‘You Can’t Turn the Titanic Around’

“And in every instance, the system doesn’t change on a dime, because you can’t turn the Titanic around.”

The Associated Press visited immigration courts in 11 different cities more than two dozen times during a 10-day period in late fall. In courts from Boston to San Diego, reporters observed scores of hearings that illustrated how crushing caseloads and shifting policies have landed the courts in unprecedented turmoil:

Chasing efficiency, immigration judges double- and triple-book hearings that can’t possibly be completed, leading to numerous cancellations. Immigrants get new court dates, but not for years.

Young children are everywhere and sit on the floor or stand or cry in cramped courtrooms. Many immigrants don’t know how to fill out forms, get records translated or present a case.

Frequent changes in the law and rules for how judges manage their dockets make it impossible to know what the future holds when immigrants finally have their day in court. Paper files are often misplaced, and interpreters are often missing.

In Georgia, the interpreter assigned to Rothschild’s courtroom ends up making it to work, but the hearing sputters moments later when a lawyer for a Mexican man isn’t available when Rothschild calls her to appear by phone. Rothschild is placed on hold, and a bouncy beat overlaid with synthesizers fills the room.

He moves on to other cases — a Peruvian asylum seeker, a Cuban man seeking bond — and punts the missing lawyer’s case to the afternoon session.

This time, she’s there when he calls, and apologizes for not being available earlier, explaining through a hacking cough she’s been sick.

But by now the interpreter has moved on to another courtroom, putting Rothschild in what he describes as the “uneasy position” of holding court for someone who can’t understand what’s going on.

“I hate for a guy to leave a hearing having no idea what happened,” he says, and asks the lawyer to relay the results of the proceedings to her client in Spanish.

After some discussion, the lawyer agrees to withdraw the man’s bond petition and refile once she can show he’s been here longer than the government believes, which could help his chances.

For now, the man returns to detention.

___

In a federal building in downtown Manhattan, the docket lists stretch to a second page outside the immigration courtrooms. Crowds of people wait in the hallways for their turn to see a judge, murmuring to each other and their lawyers, pressing up against the wall to let others through.

“It’s been more difficult to get my client’s case heard than to litigate [it]. It’s kind of crazy.” —attorney W. Paul Alvarez

Security guards pass through and chastise them to stay to the side and keep walkways clear.

Immigration judges hear 30, or 50, or close to 90 cases a day. When they assign future court dates, immigrants are asked to come back in February or March — of 2023.

The country’s biggest immigration caseload is in New York City, spread over three different buildings. One in 10 immigration court cases are conducted there, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

On average, cases on the country’s immigration docket have been churning through the courts for nearly two years. Many immigrants have been waiting much longer, especially those who aren’t held in detention facilities.

With so many cases, immigrants are often double- and triple-booked for hearings. That can turn immigration court into a high-stakes game of musical chairs, where being the odd man out has far-reaching consequences.

Rubelio Sagastume-Cardona has waited two years for a New York judge to consider whether he should get a green card.

The Guatemalan had a hearing date in May but got bumped by another case. On this day, he finds himself competing for his space on Judge Khan’s calendar with someone else’s case — a space Sagastume-Cardona only nabbed because his lawyer switched him with another client, who now must wait until 2023 for a hearing.

“It’s been more difficult to get my client’s case heard than to litigate” it, says his attorney, W. Paul Alvarez. “It’s kind of crazy.”

The protracted delays are agonizing for many immigrants and their relatives, who grapple anxiously with the uncertainty of what will happen to their loved ones — and when.

Hope and Joy Are Tempered by Uncertainty

And it isn’t confined to New York. In myriad courtrooms, similar scenes play out as immigrants and their lawyers jockey for space on too-cramped calendars.

Courts in San Francisco and Los Angeles each have more than 60,000 cases. And cases have been pending an average of more than two years in courts from Arlington, Virginia to Omaha, Nebraska, according to TRAC.

In Boston, Audencio Lopez applied for asylum seven years ago. The 39-year-old left a Guatemalan farming town to cross the border illegally as a teenager in 1997 and soon found a job at a landscaping company where he still works, maintaining the grounds at area schools. But it was just this past November that he headed to the imposing Boston courthouse to learn his fate.

He brings his wife and three children into the courtroom, including a baby girl who munches on Cheerios while sitting on her mother’s lap until his case is called.

Lopez tells the judge about his devout Christianity and Bible studies, his kids’ education at a charter school and dreams of going to college, his fear of having to move his children to a dangerous place they’ve never been.

He’s hoping to stay in the country under a provision for immigrants who have lived in the country more than a decade and have American children who would suffer if they were they gone.

After about an hour of questioning, Judge Lincoln Jalelian tells Lopez he’ll take the case under advisement. The government attorney says she won’t oppose granting Lopez a visa due to his “exemplary” record and community service, which means he’ll likely be able to stay.

But even as he dreams of his family’s future in America, Lopez admits the hope and joy are tempered by uncertainty because his wife’s status is still unresolved. She applied separately for asylum five years ago and has yet to have her immigration court hearing.

“It’s a good first step,” Lopez says a week later. He praises God, “but we hope He can show us another miracle.”

___

A toddler’s gleeful screams fill the immigration courtroom in a Salt Lake City suburb as he plays with toy cars while his mother waits for her turn to go before the judge.

Ninety minutes later, the boy is restless, and the 32-year-old woman from Honduras is still waiting. She pulls out her phone, opens YouTube and plays children’s songs in Spanish to calm his cries.

There are many children in the immigration courts, though the courts are hardly a place for kids.

In Chicago, a plastic box of well-worn books in English and Spanish sits in the corner of the court waiting room. But the chairs don’t move and there are no changing tables in the bathrooms, leading a mom to change her newborn’s diaper on a narrow counter between sinks.

Many children have immigration cases of their own. AP reporters saw appearances by children as young as 3. They sit on wooden benches with their parents, grandparents or foster families.

Teenagers scroll through smartphones; a toddler with a superheroes backpack swings his tiny, sneakered feet.

There are also American-born kids tagging along with immigrant parents the government seeks to deport.

The number of children in these courts has swelled since the Obama administration and continues to grow under Trump, with border arrests — many of them children and families — soaring in May to a 13-year high.

Mejia Was Barely a Teen When an MS-13 Gang Member Pressured Her to Be His Girlfriend

Now, nearly one in 10 cases in the immigration courts is a child who came to the country without parents, court data shows. Since September 2018, another 118,000 cases involving parents and children were placed in fast-tracked proceedings aimed at deciding cases in a year.

The administration aggressively tried to slow the arrival of young migrants by separating families — a policy that was later reversed — and tightening rules for relatives to get them out of detention. But thousands still arrive each month and end up in immigration courts — sometimes, into adulthood.

Now 20, Veronica Mejia, says she was barely a teen when a classmate who belonged to the MS-13 gang pressured her to be his girlfriend. After being assaulted and harassed by gang members, she moved to live with her adult sister in a new city and her family later decided to send her north.

Veronica Mejia left El Salvador as a young teen and has now lived a third of her life in the United States.

And it took her that long to get her day in a Los Angeles immigration court.

Now 20, Mejia raises her right hand and vows to tell the truth. She says she was barely a teen when a classmate who belonged to the MS-13 gang pressured her to be his girlfriend. After being assaulted and harassed by gang members, she moved to live with her adult sister in a new city and her family later decided to send her north.

Six years later, she has a job in a California warehouse, a boyfriend and an 8-month-old daughter with chubby cheeks and pierced ears waiting down the hall.

Related Story: Trump Immigration Policies Inflict Lasting Harm, Democrat Says

Immigration Judge Ashley Tabaddor in Los Angeles asks why she didn’t stay with her sister. The government lawyer questions Mejia’s credibility.

The hearing ends, and Tabaddor takes a five-minute break. Mejia sits and waits in the courtroom, tears streaming down her face.

When Tabaddor returns, she says she believes Mejia. But she says she doesn’t qualify for asylum under the law and issues an order for her to return to El Salvador.

Mejia walks down the hall with her lawyer. Her boyfriend hands her the baby.

“We’re going to appeal,” she says, sitting down to nurse the wide-eyed infant. “For her — how am I going to leave her here?”

___

A piece of toast with jam sits on the desk in Tabaddor’s office, half-eaten from the morning’s breakfast though it is nearly lunchtime.

On her computer, there are eight color-coded dashboards showing how close she is to meeting goals set by the Department of Justice for the country’s 440 immigration judges. Like many, she’s nowhere near completing the annual case completion target, and her dashboard is a deep red.

“So far, everyone has told us they’re failing the measure,” says Tabaddor, speaking in her capacity as president of the immigration judges’ union.

While they wear black robes and preside over hearings, immigration judges are employees of the Department of Justice and don’t have the same power or autonomy as criminal court judges.

The Trump administration has made that clear, issuing new quotas and rules for the judges and placing them under tight scrutiny in a push to move cases more quickly through the clogged courts.

The measures have pitted the judges against the agency in a full-on fight. The judges’ union has called for the courts to be made independent and free of government influence. In turn, the Department has asked federal labor authorities to put an end to the union.

“All of this is frankly psychological warfare,” Tabaddor says. “I’ve had so many people say, “I have a mortgage; I have a child who needs braces. I don’t want to fight.’”

In the immigration courts, the friction has taken its toll. Judges are overbooking calendars to try to meet quotas, while the Trump administration has limited their ability to manage dockets as they see fit, adding to the mounting backlog.

The Entire Effort Is a Quest for Efficiency

Officials also issued rulings making it tougher for immigrants fleeing gangs or domestic violence to win asylum, leading to more denials and potentially more appeals.

In a glass building overlooking the Potomac River from Fall Church, Virginia, officials at the Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review try to find ways to stay ahead of the ever-growing backlog.

They’re adding interpreters in Spanish and Mandarin, judges and clerks. They’ve started special centers to handle video hearings for immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border, while smaller cities like Boise, Idaho, that were once served by traveling judges are now video-only.

There’s so much chaos it’s hard to keep track. At times, an interpreter is missing, or stumbles over dialects or local slang. Video systems fail.

They’re moving to an electronic system to try to put an end to the heaps of paper files hoisted in and out of courtrooms.

The entire effort is a quest for efficiency, though director James McHenry acknowledges “we’re still getting outpaced” by new cases.

The agency hopes tightening the system can make proceedings more efficient, while remaining fair to all. “We are trying to break down the false dichotomy between fair and efficient,” he says.

The attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement tasked with upholding the country’s immigration laws also feel the crunch. Their numbers haven’t changed even as the docket has swelled, says Tracy Short, the agency’s principal legal adviser.

They’re in court four days a week with caseloads that have doubled from a decade ago, leaving minimal time to prep for hearings.

“I feel like I’m already stretching them to the breaking point,” says Wen-Ting Cheng, who oversees the agency’s 100 trial attorneys in New York.

___

The disorder stretches well beyond the bustling courts of the country’s cities. A lawyer takes a red eye from Los Angeles to Houston, then flies to Louisiana, rents a car and drives for an hour to reach a remote detention facility.

Michael Navas Gomez, a political activist from Nicaragua, is wearing a jail jumpsuit, and ready for his day in court after being detained five months. He and attorney Joshua Greer watch a video monitor for their hearing before an immigration judge who sits 1,000 miles away in Miami, Florida, along with the government’s attorney.

But the stack of documents recounting how Navas Gomez was captured, beaten and burned by pro-government forces is missing. The judge searches for the files while Navas Gomez’s lawyer scrambles to get them sent again so the judge can read them.

The system requires careful choreography among judges, lawyers and language interpreters. Immigration attorneys travel long distances to reach remote courts and follow clients shuffled to different detention facilities, while interpreters crisscross the country to provide translation to immigrants when and where they need it.

There’s so much chaos it’s hard to keep track. At times, an interpreter is missing, or stumbles over dialects or local slang. Video systems fail.

And there are papers everywhere — except, sometimes, where they are supposed to be.

Adding to the problem is that many immigrants don’t have lawyers, and there’s no requirement for the government to provide any for them. So oftentimes, immigrants wind up arguing their cases on their own in an incredibly complex area of law.

Not All Are so Fortunate

At the facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, most attorneys’ offices are hours away from the town, which has more detainees than residents. Immigrants have no access to email or fax machines and the phones don’t always work. When they do, immigrants must pay for expensive calls to relatives to ask for help finding records to back up their cases.

And that’s also the case in other detention facilities like the Louisiana one where Navas Gomez has his hearing.

The 30-year-old is lucky to have a lawyer who gets a detention officer to scan and email his files in time. The judge steps out to read them, and his hearing goes ahead.

Navas Gomez tells the judge how his captors scalded him with boiling water, leaving a scar, and released him days later in a remote sugarcane field. The judge agrees to consider his case, and nearly a month later, he is granted asylum and leaves the detention center a free man.

“It was truly beautiful, thank God,” he says weeks later, living in Los Angeles.

Not all are so fortunate. At the Stewart facility in Georgia, a Honduran man who wants to apply for asylum isn’t sure he’ll be able to get the documents he will need to make his case. His mother fled to Costa Rica, and his daughter is here with him.

He asks the judge if there’s way for him to let the court know if he decides before his next hearing that he’d rather just be deported.

Judge Jeffrey Nance tells him he can request deportation by putting a note in a box by the facility’s cafeteria, and he’ll call the man back to court.

The man nods and returns to take his seat in the gallery, his cheeks damp with tears.

___

The stakes are high for those vying to remain in the country. Some want to stay under a provision that opens the door for those without legal papers who have American relatives.

Others, who arrived recently, are seeking asylum to protect them from violence or persecution.

Those hearings are especially daunting, and most asylum seekers don’t win.

The rest are mostly slated for deportation and often have little chance of being able to stay legally in the United States — at least for now.

Their fate often depends on the luck of the draw in a system with extreme disparities from judge to judge. There are judges who reject 99 percent of asylum cases before them; others approve more than 90 percent, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The Trump administration last year started forcing some asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until the day of their hearings, and families often stay in ramshackle border cities for weeks with their children, with virtually no shot at finding a lawyer. Many of them appear in tent courtrooms on the border that are closed to the public and difficult for lawyers to access.

In El Paso, Texas, immigrants waiting in Mexico show up on the border before dawn and are loaded U.S. government vans and driven to a downtown federal building for their hearings. They appear in courtrooms so crowded the government has barred observers from attending, and immigration detention guards patrol the hallways and escort immigrants on trips to the bathroom.

Immigration Judge Lee O’Connor, who hears these cases in San Diego, snaps at a Honduran mom whose infant bangs on audio devices in court and warns a Salvadoran woman she’ll be at a disadvantage without a lawyer.

“I can’t defend myself because I don’t know anything about the law,” she tells him, sobbing.

Wondering What Went Wrong

Miguel Borrayo, a 40-year-old mechanic who sits before an immigration judge in a courtroom outside Salt Lake City, tried to find a lawyer to help him argue he should be allowed to stay in the country with his American children, despite lacking legal papers.

But he was told it would cost up to $8,000, and he didn’t have a strong case.

So he goes it alone.

Borrayo tells the judge he never had any trouble with the law since slipping across the border from Mexico in 1997 until he turned his car into a McDonald’s parking lot on a family outing for ice cream and came close to a man who was passing by.

The man was an immigration agent. Shortly after pulling into the drive-thru, Borrayo was arrested.

But Immigration Judge Philip Truman spends little time on how Borrayo ended up in his courtroom. He asks about the immigrant’s two teenage children.

Borrayo tells Truman they are both healthy and good students. His 16-year-old daughter dreams of someday becoming a veterinarian. His 13-year-old son wants to become a mechanic, like his dad.

His wife, the teens’ mother, works part-time so she can care for them.

Article Source

[writingasritualworkshop-blog]

Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals

This opening week I want to bring up a book you might already be familiar with, Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. It collects quotes & descriptions of artist's processes--some of the sections were first posted on his blog, dailyroutines.typepad.com, which inspired the book. The examples I find helpful are about writers who collect the bits & pieces of what’s useful & develop a routine from there, not the ones who impose an entire life-structure.

In Currey’s descriptions I see some discussions of writing routines employing a familiar, even cliche, structure of devoting huge chunks of hours in to writing, often in way that seems real-life-negating. They are something similar to this exchange between the fiction writers Jonathan Lethem & Paul Auster:

JONATHAN LETHEM: What were you doing today before I appeared in your house?

PAUL AUSTER: The usual. I got up in the morning. I read the paper. I drank a pot of tea. And then I went over to the little apartment I have in the neighborhood and worked for about six hours. After that, I had to do some business…

JL: For me, five or six hours of writing is plenty. That’s a lot. So, if I get that many hours the other stuff feels satisfying. The other stuff feels like a kind of grace.

I feel like I've heard or read that advice so many times, that one must devote the full day to writing. There is something deeply unhelpful about it. It seems only useful to people who have built their entire lives around writing, no other jobs, their children being taken care of by others, responsibilities covered by others. There’s also a sense of entitledness & chest-thumping privilege to it. This privilege might, albeit, be hard-won after a career as a writer, but it doesn’t seem helpful to the pragmatics of fitting writing into a daily life.

Then I read this description of Jonathan Franzen’s early-career writing process:

To force himself to concentrate on his 2001 novel, The Corrections, he would seal himself in his Harlem studio with the blinds drawn and the lights off, sitting before the computer keyboard wearing earplugs, earmuffs, and a blindfold. It still took him four years, and thousands of discarded pages, to complete the book. “I was in such a harmful pattern,” he told a reporter afterward. “In a way, it would begin on a Friday, when I would realize what I’d been working on all week was bad. I would polish it all day to bring up the gloss, until by four in the afternoon I’d have to admit it was bad. Between five and six, I’d get drunk on vodka—shot glasses. Then have dinner, much too late, consumed with a sick sense of failure. I hated myself the entire time.

That seems to me so very, very sad. (And I even left out the part about how this writing practice ruined his marriage). 

It is also, it seems to me, self-congratulatory in how it buys into a Romantic cliché of how the artist or writer must abandon or destroy everything in their life for the sake of art. As if writing or art is not part of a life, but a wrecking ball.

On the other hand, Currey’s book & blog are also full of examples of routines & processes that feel far more organic, more integrated into a busy life. A 2001 Atlantic article on the short fiction writer Alice Munro discussed the development of her routine in this way:

As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children's nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven. It took her nearly twenty years to put together the stories for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968 when Munro was thirty-seven.

In an 1982 interview with The Paris Review the poet Phillip Larkin said this of his writing routines:

The best writing conditions I ever had were in Belfast, when I was working at the university there. Another top-floor flat, by the way. I wrote between eight and ten in the evenings, then went to the university bar till eleven, then played cards or talked with friends till one or two. The first part of the evening had the second part to look forward to, and I could enjoy the second part with a clear conscience because I’d done my two hours.

I like how both Munro's & Larkin's integrates the work of writing into a stable & fulfilling life, rather than portraying writing as some kind of wildness. These also fit with Currey’s description of Wallace Stevens’s routine in the book:

In 1916, when he was thirty-six years old, Stevens accepted a position at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained employed as an insurance lawyer until his death. Far from stifling his creativity, the job seemed to suit Stevens’s temperament and even encourage his poetry. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me,” he once said. “It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life. I am just as free as I want to be and of course I have nothing to worry about about money.”

Stevens was an early riser—he woke at 6:00 every morning to read for two hours—and unfailingly punctual in his work habits. He arrived at the office at 9:00 A.M. sharp and left at 4:30. Between work and home he walked, a distance of three or four miles each way. Most days, he took an additional hour-long walk on his lunch break. It was on these walks that he composed his poetry, stopping now and then to scribble lines on one of the half-dozen or so envelopes he always had stuffed in his pocket. At work, too, he would occasionally pause to write down fragments of poems, which he kept filed in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, and he would routinely hand his secretary these various scraps of verse for typing. Although his colleagues were aware of his poetry, Stevens assiduously avoided talking about it, preferring to maintain the face of a mild-mannered, somewhat aloof businessman in all his public dealings with the world.

This slightly longer excerpt from a 1993 Paris Review interview with Toni Morrison also makes sense to me in how it shows Morrison developing the practice that fit her life & mind & also adapting it as she lived, rather than shifting her lift to fit the practice. And I like how she collects ideas & examples from other writers that assist her.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that you begin to write before dawn. Did this habit begin for practical reasons, or was the early morning an especially fruitful time for you?

MORRISON

Writing before dawn began as a necessity--I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, Mama--and that was always around five in the morning. Many years later, after I stopped working at Random House, I just stayed at home for a couple of years. I discovered things about myself I had never thought about before. At first I didn't know when I wanted to eat, because I had always eaten when it was lunchtime or dinnertime or breakfast time. Work and the children had driven all of my habits... I didn't know the weekday sounds of my own house; it all made me feel a little giddy.

I was involved in writing Beloved at that time--this was in 1983--and eventually I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.

Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don't remember exactly what the gesture was--there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard--but we began to talk about little rituals that one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn't have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that's a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space I can only call nonsecular... Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It's not being in the light, it's being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

INTERVIEWER.

What about your writing routine?

MORRISON

I have an ideal writing routine that I've never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn't have to leave the house or take phone calls. And to have the space--a space where I have huge tables. I end up with this much space [she indicates a small square spot on her desk] everywhere I am, and I can't beat my way out of it. I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was. But that is all any of us have: just this small space and no matter what the filing system or how often you clear it out--life, documents, letters, requests, invitations, invoices just keep going back in. I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that--mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.

My concluding quote from Currey’s book reports this about Stephen King:

In his memoir On Writing, King compares fiction writing to “creative sleep,” and his writing routine to getting ready for bed each night:

Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night—six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight—so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.

As you develop & implement a daily writing practice, think about what might work best for this encouragement into the unlocked places for your mind. Reflect on what has worked for you in the past & what hasn’t & why. Think about how you can best pragmatically & artistically create a portioned-off, sacred space in the day for writing. 

[cubaverdad]

Convicted of Murder, and Now Swept Up in U.S.-Cuba Shift

Convicted of Murder, and Now Swept Up in U.S.-Cuba Shift Ishmael Muslim Ali now lives a quiet life in Cuba, where he remains wanted by the F.B.I. for aircraft piracy. Credit Cave 7 Productions For more than 30 years, Ishmael Muslim Ali has lived a relatively full and unremarkable life in Cuba. He taught English in the nation's public schools, worked as a translator and raised a family — a quiet coda for an international fugitive. Or at least, that was the case until last month, when President Trump announced a partial halt to relations with Cuba unless certain conditions were met. Handing over Mr. Ali, who resides on the F.B.I.'s most-wanted list for hijacking an American Airlines flight and fleeing to Cuba to escape multiple life sentences for the murder of eight people, is one of those conditions. Mr. Trump's demands contained the usual requirements for Cuba: free and fair elections, allowing a political opposition and opening up its economy. But they also included a call for the extradition of all American convicts who had fled to the island for asylum. Among them are Assata Shakur, also known as Joanne Chesimard, who is wanted for escaping from prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, and an estimated 70 others who have taken refuge in the communist nation. As to the threat of being sent home, Mr. Ali, 69, harbors no concern. The Cuban government has already made it clear that the extradition of those granted asylum is off the table — along with the other demands laid out by the president. "They want their sovereignty respected," Mr. Ali said in a telephone interview from Cuba, among his first public comments in three decades. "They are not going to let anybody bully them." He said he felt reassured that the Cuban authorities would not let him be sent back. After all, he said, Mr. Trump's stance is a return to the old Cold War animosity that further hardened the Cuban government's positions. Beyond that, experts say that if the United States requests the extradition of its wanted criminals, Cuba may do the same. That could include a request for Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban with ties to the C.I.A. who lives in the United States but is wanted in Cuba for, among other things, his possible role in the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. Mr. Ali's case stretches back to a turbulent time in American history, when political radicalism sometimes crossed into violence and hijackings were carried out dozens of times by dissidents and those evading the law. But his case continues to reverberate today, in the racially charged debate over American justice and the churn of relations between Cuba and America. His case, along with that of his co-defendants, is the subject of a new documentary, "The Skyjacker's Tale," that was publicly released in recent days in New York. The story began on Sept. 6, 1972, in St. Croix, in the United States Virgin Islands, when five masked individuals killed eight people at the Fountain Valley Golf Course. The murders rocked the small island and summoned a wave of law enforcement authorities from the United States to conduct the investigation. The club, owned by the Rockefeller family, was frequented by the wealthy. Soon after the murders, Mr. Ali, at the time known as Ronald Labeet, and four others were arrested and charged with the crime. The trial drew some of the most prominent liberal legal figures of the time, including William Kunstler, who defended the activists known as the Chicago Seven, as well as William Estridge, a lawyer for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The trial was over in less than a year, and eventually all of the men were convicted and given eight consecutive life sentences, plus 90 years, for the crimes. They were shipped to prisons in the continental United States, where three of them remain today. One of the men, Raphael Joseph, died in 1998, after being pardoned. Mr. Ali, who was considered the leader of the group, and the others convicted maintained their innocence, arguing that their original trial was unfair. The film raises allegations that the suspects were tortured while in custody and that the judge presiding over the trial was biased because he had represented members of the Rockefeller family in his private practice. After being convicted, Mr. Ali spit on the floor, and he and his accomplices struck out at the marshals who took them into custody, according to news accounts at the time. "Even at the trial, we were freaked out on an emotional basis," he said. "We felt anger and desperation that we had a judge who didn't care about the law." He added: "I would be different now. I would be with my defense in a much different way than I was at the time. But you can't go back. Life isn't that way. You have to go forward. The way we tried to get justice, how we acted in our desperation to seek justice, it don't justify what was done to us." Mr. Ali's conviction was upheld on appeal. And despite his proclamations of innocence, many feel his conviction, and the sentence, were justified. "Proclaiming his innocence is ridiculous," said Jeffrey Resnick, the chief prosecutor in St. Croix in 1972, who said there was overwhelming forensic evidence — as well as witness identification and confessions — of Mr. Ali's guilt. "There is no doubt that they did it." Michael Joseph, the brother of Raphael Joseph, also believes Mr. Ali is guilty and published a book on the massacre in 2015. Mr. Joseph, a lawyer in St. Croix, says the events he details in the book, which specify Mr. Ali's role in the murders as well as that of his brother, are based on conversations he had with Raphael after he was pardoned. In a presentation he gave on the book in 2015, he described Mr. Ali as a "wicked man" and claimed that he held a gun to his brother's head to make him participate in the robbery-turned-massacre. Following his conviction, Mr. Ali fought to be returned to St. Croix. After more than a decade in prison, he was sent back to the island, though only for proceedings in a civil suit he had filed, asserting that his rights had been violated when he was placed in solitary confinement for 90 days. He was awarded $12,000 in damages and placed aboard an American Airlines passenger plane bound for New York on New Year's Eve in 1984. Mr. Ali went to the bathroom repeatedly during the flight, complaining of stomach pains. On his final visit, he emerged with a handgun. (He did not say how he got it.) He then commandeered the plane and forced it to land in Havana. Upon landing, he was taken into custody. The Cuban authorities convicted Mr. Ali of hijacking the plane, and sentenced him to 10 years in jail. He served seven years and got an early release for good behavior. Afterward, on the petition of Ms. Shakur, Mr. Ali says he was granted asylum, the beginning of an entirely new chapter for him. "I have a quiet life. I've been married two times. I have kids and a family here," he said. "I can't complain. I'm really thankful to the Cuban government and the Cuban people for the way I have been treated." In Cuba, he says he has found a peace he never experienced in the United States, where race was an issue in every facet of life. "The thing about race here is that it's not an issue," he said. "In the U.S., you are always aware of the race difference. There was always someone or something you had to be fighting against. Here in Cuba, that has been wiped out by the revolution for ages now. I just feel like another citizen here." His reasoning for participating in the film, he said, was to raise awareness about his co-defendants, arguing that they have spent their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit. It is not quite guilt that he feels for being the only one to escape, he says, but rather a consciousness that he is the only one who was able to live a real life. "It hurts me every day to think about them," he said. "When I think about my co-defendants, what they have suffered bothers me." A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Convicted of Murder, and Focus of U.S.-Cuba Shift. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe http://ift.tt/2tsHTbP via Blogger http://ift.tt/2sDKNYs

[youngerdaniel]

A Brief and Smarmy Rant

Okay, today we’re gonna talk about ideas, and you’re not gonna like it. Today, you’re not going to find soft introspections into being away from home, or deep insights into the craft, or whatever. However, on that note, a disclaimer: I am not a professional. I’m just a guy, with a couple of book, screaming at the world.

I’m going to be very salty. Prepare.

For a couple of years, I’ve been a spectator-participant in a Facebook group for novelists around the world. Conceptually, it’s meant to be a sort of melting pot of ideas, where people can turn when they need something fact-checked, or when they find that meme on the web that only we scribes would properly appreciate. But here’s what actually happens on the page: a near constant stream of “OMG I’m just not feeling motivated to write today. How do you come up with ideas? How do you work when you’re not inspired? [insert additional toddler-level complaint about the craft.]”

I left the group today, but I’m signing off with a treatise. A salty one.

First of All, Fuck Your Not Feeling Inspired.

This is the most token bullshit I encounter in pretty much all walks of art. There seems to be this perception that inspiration is the fuel that drives scribes to the final page, but that’s garbage. Absolute hogwash. Writing isn’t just about sitting down and putting letters to paper; it’s about planning, structuring, and finding a chain of cause and effect that leads a character through a journey that effects them externally and internally. Don’t feel inspired? Great. Do your fucking work. If you want people to take you seriously enough to pay you, then start treating your work like a fucking professional. You don’t hear a mechanic say, “I don’t feel like it. I’m not inspired.” You’d probably lynch your barista if they told you it was too early for the inspiration to pour coffee. Fuck. Your. Inspiration. It’s great to have it, but if that’s the only thing driving you, you are doomed to fail.

You Don’t Feel Motivated? Great. Step Over and Let the People Who Enjoy this Shit Do It.

Same concept as above. Boo-hoo. You don’t feel motivated. But guess what? You have the easiest job on the planet: you plant your ass on a chair and let your brain make shit up for as long as it takes to find a good idea. Not motivated? If somebody put a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia in front of you, would you only eat it if you felt motivated? I can tell you with certainty that if you’re just starting out and this shit is happening to you, learn to get over it. Because nobody in the industry, not agents, publishers, or editors, will put up with your shit for more than 5 seconds before moving on to somebody who doesn’t whine like a toddler when they lose their steam.

The most important thing you can remember in this business is that writer’s are a dime a dozen. Sure, you may be brilliant. You might be the world’s greatest undiscovered mind in a whole millennium, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing if you can’t churn out pages when people ask for them. Seriously, just do a cursory search of “independent authors” in Google. You are in the most saturated industry in the world. 

Talent counts for a bit, but professionalism counts for a lot. So be a fucking professional. Writing isn’t a mystical unicorn job that always farts rainbows in your face... Well, okay, it kind of is. But there are days where you’ll just be shoveling the shit out of the unicorn’s pen. And you have to be prepared for it.

Can’t Come Up With Ideas? Try Investment Banking.

Welp, there it is, in its harshest form. This one is really the sand in my groin. Anytime I encounter a writer who says “Oh, I’m just having trouble coming up with ideas.” I want to Batman-on-Robin slap them into a different career path.

You can’t come up with ideas? Ideas? Not even good ones? 

You’re in the wrong wheelhouse, and trust me, I’m doing you a favor by telling you now. Ideas are cheap. In fact, ideas are free. And what’s more, ideas can be generated from anything. If you have trouble with this, and you’re adamant that you want to get into the biz, then start working on this. You can train yourself to become an idea generator, and in fact, you should. Because there will inevitably come a day where you’ll be asked to spontaneously come up with two or three ideas.

Picture yourself, in a pitch session with your agent/publisher/whatever... Don’t think this happens? Go read about the book industry. You’ve got that one idea about the mid-20s go nowhere who has an existential crisis when his mom winds up in the hospital with cancer, then the deadbeat dad re-enters the picture and your hero begins fixating on stuffed owls as your thematic motif...

“That’s great,” says the agent. “What else you got?”

And you don’t have anything. 

It’s my belief, and it’s based on some experience, that it’s far better to have a dozen or so ideas that at anytime can be developed than to put all your efforts into finding that one perfect idea. Why? Not just the pitch situation above, but also because it’s almost always the case that an author’s passion project is their weakest work. (Myself included.)

So get over yourself. Ideas are not hard to come by. Once you stop thinking that certain ones are beneath you, or outside the genres you want to work in, you can start curating elements that work their way into plots. The single most important thing to understand about storytelling, whether you’re new or have been at it for years, is that ultimately, it’s not about you. It’s about the people who read it. If you don’t think you can maintain a codependent relationship with your audience, then it’s time to start thinking about investment banking.

* * *

The theme that becomes obvious to me as I write this is that young writers are just that—young. There’s a certain amount of immaturity that’s tolerated from creative types because our process is mysterious. But really, that’s what non-artists think of all creatives and it’s entirely not true. All art as form, structure, tenets from which we hang our on ideas. In simpler terms, it’s a job. It has rules and expectations, and yeah, you’re making shit up while sitting in all kinds of fun positions... But it’s not magic. The result of consistent writing, of third, fourth, or fiftieth drafts and a willfulness to serve the story above one’s ego... The Finished Product, which a person then reads and can see in their mind... That’s the magic.

Self importance in young artists is common, and I get a fucking wasp in my bonnet when this sort of self-worship is disguised as victimization. It doesn’t make the work better. It doesn’t make the professional relationships better. It doesn’t do a damn thing but perpetuate the bullshit trope of artists all being delicate flowers that three-out-of-fifty people understand. Your job as a creative is to make yourself understood. If you can’t do that, the problem isn’t your audience—it’s you.

•••

A Less Dour Close

As I’ve mentioned above, anything can be learned. Somewhere in the far East, someone is presently learning to channel their chi into a fireball they can hold between their palms. Somewhere in LA, someone is learning to finish the VFX to translate that moment to film. You can learn to juggle knives, or hang-glide through tornadoes... But what was it that Mordo told Dr. Strange when he was first learning the mystic arts?

“Listen, you narcissistic bag of dicks... If you don’t get over yourself, you’ll never learn this shit. So get the fuck over yourself.”

I’m paraphrasing.

Step out of your own way, and start coming up with ideas. #endrant