#jim dodge

[blondebrainpowered]

Career Opportunities, 1991

[sabinahahn]

Inktober day 5.

“Well,” Bob offered with a dry sweetness, “for sure it’s better than something worse.” Rain on the river Jim Dodge

#dailyDrawing#Inktober#inktober2025

[tomorrowusa]

Blue Illinois held local elections last Tuesday. Overall, the Land of Lincoln got even bluer.

Lost in Tuesday's national news of Elon Musk's defeat in Wisconsin and the serious GOP shrinkage in two Florida US House districts, Republicans suffered significant defeats in local elections in Illinois. Notably, the GOP-backed incumbent mayor of Aurora, the state's second largest city, was upset by a pro-Dem candidate.

Illinois GOP suffered major election losses in suburbs that are critical for its rebuilding effort

“There was a broad rejection of what Donald Trump and the Republican Party stands for, and Illinois Democrats had perhaps one of the best nights we’ve ever had,” Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said on an unrelated press call Wednesday from Mexico, where he is leading a state trade mission. Statewide, the Illinois Democratic Party said it backed 280 candidates in Tuesday’s election and 222, or 79% of them, were victorious. The governor attributed the results in Illinois to both organization among state Democrats and broader national pushback against Trump administration policies and government cuts being spearheaded by Trump-aligned billionaire Elon Musk. “The anger is felt in Illinois, as it is across the entire country, and that did play a role, there’s no doubt, in turnout and in the actual results,” he said of the government-cutting actions of Trump and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

A lot of these elections are technically nonpartisan, though that doesn't stop local party organizations from backing specific candidates.

In one election which got a disproportionate amount of attention, a far right MAGA supporter was defeated by an old school mainstream Republican.

Two-term Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, a Republican, was defeated by Democrat-backed John Laesch to lead the state’s second largest city. In Orland Park, two-term Mayor Keith Pekau, a supporter of far-right elements of the state GOP, was ousted by more moderate Republican Jim Dodge. Both Irvin and Pekau, building off their past municipal election successes, had previously sought higher office — Irvin as a candidate for the GOP nomination for governor and Pekau seeking a congressional seat — only to be defeated in those bids before losing Tuesday.

In the 20th century, suburban DuPage County was solidly Republican. It is becoming increasingly reliably Democratic.

Democratic victories in the eastern side of DuPage County tell much of the tale. Addison Township — which includes suburbs such as Addison, Wood Dale, Bensenville and Itasca — once had one of the most powerful vote-getting operations in the region. Home to past U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde and former Illinois Senate President James “Pate” Philip, Addison Township was flipped from Republican to Democrat in Tuesday’s elections, including the ousting of GOP Supervisor Dennis Reboletti, a former state lawmaker, according to unofficial results. In neighboring York Township, home to former one-term Illinois House speaker and longtime GOP leader Lee Daniels of Elmhurst, the GOP lost the race for township supervisor and highway commissioner as well as trustees. Further west in DuPage’s Milton Township, home to the county seat and the once-conservative bastion of Wheaton, voters swapped out the Republican leadership for Democrats. The county’s Democratic chair, Reid McCollum, called the voting “a profound statement,” adding that he expects Democrats will win all 49 contested township races across the county.

Illinoisan Pat Brady, one of the few remaining anti-MAGA members of the Republican National Committee had harsh words about his party's leader.

[T]he Trump nonsense does not work in Illinois, certainly not statewide,” Brady said. “The guy at the top, he’s just out of control with tariffs, incorporating Greenland, everything. I think there’s a lot of insecurity and fear, quite honestly, about what this president’s going to do,” he said. “And that translates to how the Republican brand has been so diminished by him. I’m not sure if it can be fixed, but it can’t be by a Trumpian candidate based in Illinois.”

[biblioklept]

A review of Stone Junction, Jim Dodge's alchemical pot-boiler

Jim Dodge’s 1989 novel Stone Junction tells the life story of Daniel Pearse, a young man of preternatural talents and sharp intelligence who trains under various tutors in a secret society, steals an enormous diamond, and eventually attains enlightened apotheosis. A lot of other stuff happens too. Dodge subtitled his novel An Alchemical Pot-Boiler, a description that punctures any premature…

View On WordPress

[kaipanzero]

Career Opportunities (1991)

[dharmadischarge]

Top 5 Novels: or it gets dark around here early.

So now I am trying to say something. That is all. No, that will not do at all... Here is a list of my top 5 novels, with one short review and four long ones.

1, Jim Dodge - Stone Junction. Reading Stone Junction by Jim Dodge is like meeting the father you never had

2, Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow Subtlety is overrated... and just because you have a boner doesn't mean you're a terrorist. I mean, it doesn't mean you're not causing those rockets to come from the sky. But, still, that is beside the point.

For me, this book is about obliterating the arbitrary distinction between high and low culture. The ironically arbitrary distinction between good and evil and the dangerously subtle distinction between despondency and hope.

Fractured, layered, elusive, you could accuse Pynchon of all these things.

The way characters bleed into one another to make one voice. A hellish symphony of discordant cries of pain reaching out to a belief that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and paranoia is the glue.

Also, it is funny. Like in a dumb way and there are songs. Also, dumb.

Everyone will talk about how polarising this book is but I don't believe it. you can follow the bouncing ball and sing along or live in fear that at any moment the terror will become real and you will collapse into ellipsis...

It is the third and newer testament. An epilogue to western culture as racist cultural energy written by a crazy white guy. T.S. Elliot and his wasteland were a prelude, in hindsight, nothing but a john the baptist-like figure for the cross that Pynchon presents to all readers as their burden to carry with this book.

Hope is crazy painful, consciousness is such a fragile thing and the burden of consciousness is the pain of knowing that (beyond the act of effort itself) it is a futile one.

Jim Dodge once said, "a stone falls till it hits the earth, transcend what?" and that about sums it up.

3, Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian.

Blood Meridian is a kind of repetitious, primeval-hillbilly level of primitive interpretation of the morality expressed in the book of revelation fighting its way onto the page as barely literate poetry.

It is not a book of social niceties, justice, or the warm feeling you get when you do something good. also, this book could also easily be seen as porn for serial killers.

I scanned the reviews and saw all the campy (and not the good kind of campy) parodies this kind of book inspires in the age of irony we live in (though it seems like it is on its last legs). And while I like me a good parody, I find that Eli Cash did it better.

There is something to be said about how Cormac McCarthy (ab)uses the English language. The one good line I read from one of the negative reviews of his books was that a middle schooler could list what he doesn't like about the kids who bully him and that this list would have more emotional nuance and better use of punctuation than a Cormac McCarthy novel. This is fair.

The conceptional power of Blood Meridian though is that it frames cruelty and violence for what it is: reality. While also through its sometimes monotonous exaggeration of William Faulkners styled repetitions it creates a sense of unreality. A sense that like David Lynch's best work that we are walking, daily, through something so evil and violent that it borders on slapstick, and at last we laugh in self-defense.

I think the people who parody the book without much thought got trapt in the intellectual self-defense state that is part of coping and couldn't see the forest for the trees.

Civilization is a fragile thing, it is the human race trying to domesticate itself, and the longer it goes on the more it seems like we're just sweeping what we don't like under the rug.

4, John Crowley - Little, Big.

There is a kind of hokey-Americana style kitsch that most of my favorite writers could be accused of, from, Tom Robbins to Jim Dodge. John Crowley may be the peak of it. It could be because on the surface Americans don't have a unified culture we are a melting pot with capitalism only encouraging the lowest common denominator (the pursuit of greed as its own reward).

But in any creative act that does not presume to be the literal expression of anything but pure gratitude, there is politics. The politics of worth, of greatness, inherent value, and the desire to prove that the wisdom offered was truly earned. That a difficult pleasure does not mean that there is none.

This is an American fairytale. A once upon a time that seems eerily to remind of another Crowley, that codesigned the deck of Thoth tarot cards (A really good one for those curious) more than the writers of magical realism. And probably because I didn't read this in translation I preferred it to a hundred years of solitude. This may seem random to people of the fantasy crowd who know that genre is only a limitation to artistic merit if you want it to be (usually for cultural-political reasons). but people often compare this book to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing. And while they are both family chronicles with supernatural elements. this is kind of a shallow comparison.

Crowley's work is more in the tradition of an occult mystic, and Gabo is more a romantic using personal folklore as the vocabulary of that romantic expression (of which I think love in the time of cholera, is his masterpiece).

I am trying to not give away any spoilers, or even talk about specifics at all. but the ending is worth it. Like most things in life, it's your journey to go on so I won't ruin it for you, but they are out there waiting for you, where the lights never go out.

5, Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

"words save our live's sometimes"

I was a frustrated borderline feral child, who could not deal with reality. My parents taught me how to read and not much else. I was homeschooled and weighed three hundred pounds by the time I was thirteen. I remember one night unable to deal with any more abuse that I laid down and decided my dreams would have to be enough, I close my eyes and went away for a long time. Lettie Hempstock's ocean is real to me I almost drowned in it.

When I was a teenager the cult-like fundamentalist atmosphere of my home life became less extreme, but the damage was done. I was still in the ocean. it says something about my state of mind that the closest I came to getting traction on reality was starting a habit of reading insistently, my favorite book was Stardust by Neil Gaiman.

Once on Twitter, I told him "thank you" for writing it. I later after reading this book I wrote a short review of this book and sent it to him. He said "thank you" to me in a @ mention. It was nice. I later @ mentioned him in a playfully sarcastic way and he deleted his original comment.

I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was twenty-four or twenty-five. I have been told I had childhood-onset schizophrenia. I have been told I milk it. I have been told that I self isolate.

I have been writing reviews tonight, going through my favorite books, and just live streaming my mind. Thinking about how they made me feel and what they make me think. Neil Gaiman's work always makes my brain retreat on itself. Possibly because of stardust. But more than that it is the wisdom he has. He knows that stories are true in a way that transcends a mere list of facts. communicating for those with an ear to listen that there is more than what we know, there is more than our understanding, there is more than us. More than you, more than me. There is an ocean that is healing for some while necessarily absent for others.

We forget, and we remember. Each other and ourselves. Cruelty and innocence. But there is an ocean and it is Lettie Hempstock's.

[oldschoolteenflicks]

[cinematic-literature]

Black Mirror S05E03 (Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too)

Book title: Stone Junction (1990) by Jim Dodge