So, the last time I posted anything, for my monthly IWSG post, I said this:
Yup, I haven't posted anything this year, so of course I had to start with a "thank god it's over" about 2020. (Though my hopes are not high for 2021 being all that great, either. Maybe it will be, but as long as it's better than 2020, I'll take it.)
Hours later, white supremacists were invading the US Capitol building in an armed insurrection.
I spent the following weeks alternating between tensely holding my breath in terror of further violence closer to home (the advantage of being in the Midwest is that it's far from anything bad happening on the coasts, but the enormous disadvantage is that there are a lot of white supremacists, gun nuts, and other right-wing extremists) and actively trying to think about absolutely anything else, meaning that I really threw myself into finishing that proofreading job, working on the rewrite of my novel, reading, and playing video games.
I'm glad to say that last night around 11:00 I finally finished the new draft of the novel, which is now nearly twice the size of the old draft: the original (well, the most recent version of it, which had had minor edits done from the true original draft) was 134 word processor pages and 79,980 words long (with each chapter having a title), and the new draft is 241 word processor pages long, and 144,730 words long (with chapters not having titles). Of course, since I'm adapting it not into a new novel version but into a text-based game, there is some extra text involved in the terms of choices to be made by the player, alternate versions of combat scenes dependent on those choices, and of course game over scenarios, but I doubt those added much more than five thousand words, maybe ten thousand at the outside, but there aren't really enough of them to make it likely there's anywhere near that many words involved. It's not ready for entering into the game engine yet (especially because I realized very late in the draft that my brain kept sabotaging me and defaulting to types of armor that were impossible to make in the Bronze Age, so I have to go back and fix a lot of that text) and I'll need to write up many more glossary entries, plus some post-game information about the real versions of myths I was drawing from (in part because one of the characters most people will assume I made up is actually a very minor mythological figure, though one who met a very different fate), but the hardest part, the redraft itself, is over, so that's great.
But that's not actually what I wanted to post about. The main thing I wanted to post was a quote from one of the books I read in the last three weeks. It's called The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig, and it's one of the many book projects I've backed on Kickstarter. In this case, it's one of the ones from Tough Poets Press, which finds long out-of-print novels (and plays and collections of poetry) and gets the rights to bring them back into print. I've backed a fair number of their projects, though most of them are still buried in various places in my constantly growing to-read pile. Anyway, the main reason I backed this one, I think, was actually because of the description of one of the author's "second novel, Singermann, a semi-autobiographical novel of a Jewish immigrant peddler's family in the early 1900's American frontier. The novel is notable in that it is one of the earliest instances in American literature of a gay protagonist whose character is portrayed in a compassionate, non-stigmatizing manner." (Quote from the "About the Author" page in the back of the book, which I believe is exactly the same text from the Kickstarter page, only I'm too lazy to go check.)
The Flutter of an Eyelid was written in 1933, and it bears the hallmarks of its age in terms of racism and misogyny (though not as badly as many other products of the age do), and frankly some of it feels anti-Semitic to the modern reader, but it sounds like the author was Jewish himself, so it probably wasn't actually anti-Semitism, or if it was, it was merely echoing the attitudes of the era in the increasingly unreliable narrator. (Or something.) Anyway, it's a very unusual book, and I don't even know if I want to recommend it, though I did overall enjoy it: it started out feeling like it might be a less normal, more extreme novel in the vein of Day of the Locust, but it went off those rails pretty quickly and ended up in all sorts of very meta places.
Anyway, fairly late in the book (pages 244-5 of 298), there's an extended speech (or internal monologue?) from a character named Sol Mosier on the subject of patriotism that felt very appropriate right now, so I wanted to share it:
"If, in school, we had been taught that life is an endless chain of pleasant and grievous futilities, how much happier our adult years would be! Instead of which, we were taught the beauty of a blind patriotism, the goodness of chastity, the decency of hard work and the importance of conformity. It is not until we grow up that we learn how patriotism is an emotion that has little or nothing to do with shooting and military drill. It is only when we are grown that we know how patriotism has everything to do with the picture of a certain street in a small country town, red brick houses surrounded by tall trees and pale green grass in the dawn. Patriotism has much to do with Fifth Avenue and Michigan Boulevard at two 'clock of a rainy morning; but the saying, 'My Country, right or wrong!' is not patriotism. When I was a child, the teacher used to make the entire class rise every morning and salute the flag. I remember it went something like this: 'I salute my flag and the Republic for which it stands. One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.' After several years, I began to speak these words as a parrot would speak them, finding no thought, beauty or affection in them. How much more beautiful patriotism could have been made for me had the teacher spoken of the iridescent plumes of geysers in Yellowstone Park, the varied scenes of hill and plain in Montana, the golden wheat fields of North Dakota, and the Mississippi River as it drifts, with a slow, turgid charm, past small hamlets in Missouri and Louisiana. But I had to learn all this for myself many years later. How much better I would have understood patriotism, if the teacher had told me about the radiance in the faces of immigrants when they first catch sight of the Statue of Liberty! For it is obvious that the most patriotic American is the one who has just arrived, and does not, as yet, know of America's heartaches and disappointments."
And, with that thought, I'll close out this post in the hopes that January 6th was actually 2020's last horrifying gasp, and that 2021 proper has now started (though certain Senators seem determined to prevent that), and in the hopes that in the coming days, months and years we'll see more of the kind of patriotism Sol is endorsing at the end of the speech, and a distinct lack of the type he rejects in the middle.
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