tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32696458285462458602024-03-18T14:53:46.681-04:00Workshop HereticJacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.comBlogger499125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-20953136018706265052024-02-10T07:41:00.004-05:002024-02-10T08:00:44.999-05:00Why this Super Bowl stings a bitI'm from northeast Ohio and grew up rooting for the Browns. When I moved to Maryland near Baltimore in 2004, I didn't really embrace the Ravens, because, as anyone who knows their football history is aware of, when the Browns closed up shop in Cleveland in 1995, they moved to Baltimore. Then, using the players and organization they took with them, they promptly won a Super Bowl in 2001, the same Super Bowl that had eluded the Browns and continues to elude them to this day. <div><br /></div><div>When I watch football now, I try very hard not to root for teams. I want to enjoy the game with perfect equanimity, appreciating greatness wherever it shows. To help me achieve this emotional detachment, if I find myself thinking I might root for one team during a game, I immediately place a bet for the other team to win. This usually enables me to find some level of calm.</div><div><br /></div><div>During the AFC Championship game a few weeks ago, though, I was not able to keep calm. Even when I placed a bet on the Chiefs, I couldn't keep from rooting for the Ravens. No, it did not have to do with Taylor Swift hatred, although I do wonder why the universe thinks it necessary to heap so much good fortune on one person. It was because I was hoping a victory by the Ravens would put to rest a sneakily racist attitude still living among some fans.</div><div><br /></div><div>For a very long time, there were no Black quarterbacks. <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-sports/super-bowl-black-quarterbacks-patrick-mahomes-jalen-hurts-warren-moon-nfl-racism-1234678304/" target="_blank">Open and undisguised racism was a big part of it</a>. Coaches didn't think Black players were smart enough to be quarterbacks. They thought they were athletic enough to be running backs or wide receivers or linemen, but not quarterbacks. Last year's Super Bowl, when two Black quarterbacks faced off against each other, was a huge moment for the game. But there is <a href="https://www.si.com/nfl/ravens/news/quarterbacky-fox-host-blasted-baltimore-ravens-qb-lamar-jackson-apology-racist" target="_blank">still sneakily racist discourse about Black quarterbacks,</a> especially ones who are also athletic. Among fans I speak to or read, I continue to see and hear what I take to be coded racist language, particularly when it comes to the Ravens' quarterback, Lamar Jackson. This language will sound something like this:</div><div><br /></div><div>A: Mobile quarterbacks can win some games, but they'll never win a Super Bowl.</div><div>B: Wasn't John Elway pretty mobile? And Steve Young? </div><div>A: Yeah, but they were different. They were pass-first and then they ran when they had to.</div><div>B: Young played a long time. Elway played a long time. They both had a lot of years when they didn't win a Super Bowl. Won't Jackson likely eventually get one, too?</div><div>A: No, because he's just not that good. </div><div>B: Not good how? His teams put up tons of points.</div><div>A: But not in the playoffs.</div><div>B: Isn't it just hard to win playoff games against good teams?</div><div>A: But the greats do it, and he's not that great. He can run, but Super Bowl quarterbacks stand in the pocket and make throws in crunch time. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>When I hear this kind of bullshit from white fans, I feel like they're offering me a shibboleth, because they think that as a white person, I might want to join them in their coded horseshit. It makes me angry that anyone thinks I want to be a part of their shenanigans. </div><div><br /></div><div>Unlike Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, last year's winning Super Bowl quarterback, who is part white, Jackson does not give a great interview. He is not especially handsome or dynamic or magnetic. He's just a great football player. Vaguely racist fans, in their illogical worldview, don't see Mahomes as a violation of their rule that athletic, Black quarterbacks can't also be smart and efficient throwing the ball in the pocket. Jackson would have been.</div><div><br /></div><div>Jackson has had some great years, but never much playoff success. This year was his best year, and it had a lot to do with having an offensive coordinator who understood how to use him as a weapon. I think that often, when athletic quarterbacks have struggled, it's been because so few coordinators understand how to use them. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Ravens had a great chance. They were the best team in the league all year, they had home-field advantage, and they were relatively healthy. They just picked a lousy time to play their worst game of the year. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm not a football expert, but I think you can look at a few reasons why they lost. The Chiefs do have a very good defense, and their defensive coordinator came up with some clever tricks to keep the Ravens off-balance. The Ravens also probably didn't have a great game plan. A week after the Chiefs gave up a ton of running yard to the Bills, the Ravens, who were the best running team in the league, didn't really run the ball much. There was also some bad luck, like a fumble right at the goal line. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Ravens also probably suffered from the wrong mindset, playing not to lose rather than to win. That's the fault of everyone, not just Jackson. Jackson didn't play a great game. Brady, Manning, Mahomes, and the other greats have a lot of playoff wins to their name when they also didn't play great, but they played well enough to win. Jackson very nearly did that, gutting out a tough win under tough circumstances. Football is cruel. It's why I try not to root for teams. </div><div><br /></div><div>I did root in that game, just because I wanted a very stupid racist trope to get another kick in the pants. It'll have to wait until next year, though. I'm sure the NFL is thrilled to have a Taylor Swift extravaganza for its big night, and I'm sure ratings will be through the roof. The Ravens will be kicking themselves, although they shouldn't be. Football teams make adjustments throughout the year. They find weaknesses in other teams and shore up their own. The Chiefs benefitted from a bad spell in the middle of the season when other teams showed them where they were weak. They fixed the problem just in time to make a good run in the playoffs. The Ravens, unfortunately, didn't have anyone to show them where they were weak until that AFC Championship Game. </div><div><br /></div><div>I can't imagine how athletes pick themselves up emotionally from losses like that, where the job in front of them now is to go play another entire season well enough to get back where they were and redeem themselves. It must seem so daunting. But I hope they do it. Just, you know, not enough that I'm going to root for them. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-90168684974790255342024-02-04T09:20:00.000-05:002024-02-04T09:20:19.192-05:00Have I been a low-key CNF guy all along?Despair has its advantages. I know I've said a dozen times in the last ten years that I was giving up writing fiction, but this current funk feels more permanent, in proportion to the acuteness of the despair. At the very least, I needed a break, so for the time being, I've moved on from reading contemporary literary fiction. Not knowing what to read instead, I've been kind of choosing things at random. One recent book I read was the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Essays-2023/dp/0063288842" target="_blank">2023 Best American Essays collection</a>, edited by Vivian Gornick. It says "essays," but I think the book is filled with what might be more accurately called "creative non-fiction." Some of the entries are essays, in the sense that they're sustained discourse or argument about a subject or theme. But many are more short memoir.<div><br /></div><div>Whether they were essay or memoir, I found myself much more engaged and interested in the anthology than I have been in perhaps any volume of <i>Best American Short Stories</i>. I only found myself not generally enthralled with two of the entries. Maybe this is simply because it's new to me. People who spend a lot of time with one type of literature--like, say, the short stories that show up in literary magazines--tend to get a little fastidious. When "Cat Person" became a big sensation, the strongest backlash against it was from the literary fiction community, for whom it was just one story among many, and not the best example. Ordinary readers seemed to love it, or at least hate it in a way where they were interested in it. So maybe I just don't know enough about what contemporary CNF looks like to find the faults in this collection. </div><div><br /></div><div>I've had some exposure to CNF, of course, but never read one essay after another the way I did for the book. It's strange to say, but I found reading non-fiction, which you'd think of as dryer and more like work than reading stories, to be far less taxing than reading fiction. Reading it was closer to pleasure than I've felt in a long time. More than this being a result of my lack of exposure to CNF, I think I might have been discovering, this late in the game, that I've really got more of a CNF mind than a fictional one. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't mind the occasional slant-wise telling of the truth, but maybe at heart, I'm kind of a pragmatic guy who wants you to just give it to me plain. Even in reading fiction all these years, I think the greatest pleasure I've gotten in it has been when I've felt I was able to take a work of fiction and then re-cast it into an essay analyzing the fiction in plain language. I've valued the slant truth in no small part for the opportunity it's given me to try to straighten it back out. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even when writing my own fiction, I think I've tended to try to write the kinds of stories that lend themselves to the very kind of analysis I like to do. That contrasts with how a lot of fiction writers say they write. They tend to be more like method actors, who try to treat their characters like real people and then become them. I always found this way of talking about one's characters, like what they did "surprised" you, to be a little annoying and artificial. There was an episode of "Only Murders in the Building" this most recent season in which Matthew Broderick plays himself, only the version of himself is so obsessed with getting to the core of his character, it eventually drives his director, Oliver, to fire him. That's what a lot of fiction writers sound like to me. </div><div><br /></div><div>I've toyed with trying CNF over the years, but one major hurdle has stopped me. I still don't really understand the line between CNF and, say, a very good editorial. <a href="https://www.grammarly.com/blog/creative-nonfiction/#:~:text=In%20traditional%20nonfiction%2C%20the%20writer,first%2Dperson%20point%20of%20view." target="_blank">Google's first offered answer to the question</a> seems to me more or less in the right ballpark. It suggests that compared to traditional essays, CNF is more likely to emphasize scene, character development, narrative, and subjectivity. Concerning subjectivity, it suggests that: "In traditional nonfiction, the writer keeps a distance from the subject. But in creative nonfiction, the writer’s perspective, emotions, and insights can be part of the story. This is particularly true of personal essays, which are often written from a first-person point of view."</div><div><br /></div><div>Okay, so that would explain why sometimes, I've read CNF and not realized it wasn't a short story until the end. To judge by the 2023 anthology, some CNF is nothing but a personal story without any real reflection on how it might fit into a larger theme in the world. <a href="https://www.newletters.org/any-kind-of-leaving-by-jillian-barnet/" target="_blank">"Any Kind of Leaving" by Jillian Barnett</a> would be one example. Some begin as memoir but then transition into thoughts on how the personal fits into the political. For example, <a href="https://www.nereview.com/vol-43-no-3-2022/care-credit/" target="_blank">"Care Credit" by Angelique Stevens</a> begins with the author's own struggles with poverty, with her poor dental health as the leading symbol of that poverty, then occasionally moves into thoughts about American health care in general. Still other entries were very like traditional essay, with only small amounts of narrative or personal experience thrown in. <a href="https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/gender-a-melee/" target="_blank">"Gender: A Melee" by Laura Kipnis</a> could have appeared in <i>Mother Jones</i> or, if it was feeling particularly frisky that day, <i>The Atlantic</i>, and not seemed out of place. <a href="https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/life-and-story" target="_blank">"Life and Story" by Sigrid Nunez</a> is more "essay about the literature on why writers write with occasional personal information" than it is grounded in the personal with occasional references to the world. <a href="https://www.threepennyreview.com/an-archaeological-inquest/" target="_blank">"An Archaeological Inquest" by Phillip Lopate</a> begins with a story of someone giving him an old literary review, but the essay is entirely an analysis of the old review and an assessment of how literary culture has since changed. </div><div><br /></div><div>Other than the literary analysis I do on this blog, I think a lot of what I write on here <i>could</i> be considered CNF. But if so, it leans toward the kind of CNF where it's "essay with occasional personal bits" rather than the other kind, and I think the other kind is a lot more prevalent and likely to be published among journals that publish CNF. I think editors are unlikely to want much of what I write. One of the essays in the anthology this year was "Dreamers Awaken" by Scott Spencer, a memoir-short about a baby boomer who was once asked to play John Henry in blackface for a school concert. It's a great read, but at the end, it kind of intentionally avoids drawing conclusions about its meaning in the larger context of society. He is standing with a black school official he tried to apologize to, with her seeming to refuse to understand the meaning of his apology. "We were in our own little impromptu pageant, folktales from the future, and we were waiting for the invisible proctor to tell us in a whisper, or perhaps with some urgency, what to say next." It's perfect for the story, but I tend to write stuff that's more like "Here's how to solve racism" and then I use a few personal experiences to make my point. That seems likely to get the editor's "not for us" generic rejection letter. </div><div><br /></div><div>I started this blog as a way to work through the frustrations of trying to figure out writing, but also, since I was sure I <i>would</i> figure them out, to be a record in the future of how I had done so. It would be there to encourage others struggling along the same path. See how much trouble Jake had? But he got through it, and so will you. Now that I've despaired of ever really succeeding, I've often thought of just making this blog my whole writing project. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, that presents me with a problem of presentation. It seems like a successful blog (if such things still exist in a world with TikTok) would need to have content more or less centered on a coherent, central theme. Writing about literary fiction in some sense gave me such a theme. Readers might tolerate an occasional digression into "Here's how to solve racism," but only if I'm normally sticking to one kind of topic. "Jake's brilliant thoughts on sundry things" can't be the main draw of the blog. Not if I want people to read it, which I do.</div><div><br /></div><div>I guess I could change this to a blog that writes about CNF. I could write a lot of analysis of CNF, the same as I've done for fiction, and then occasionally mix it up with my own CNF. But CNF, I think, doesn't really lend itself to the kind of analysis I've been doing for fiction. Fiction isn't making an argument in a straightforward way. It needs analysis in order for ordinary human brains to see more in them than the surface story. But CNF is sort of already analyzed. Especially in the more essay-like forms of CNF, what it has to say, it has already said in more or less plain terms. I could write personal responses to CNF pieces, but for the most part, there wouldn't be a lot to break down. </div><div><br /></div><div>Ceasing to write altogether isn't an option for me. Responding to the world with words is like breathing. Despair will stop me from submitting stories to the journals who've rejected me a million times, but it won't keep me from writing. Not for good. As many doubts as I have about being as good as I wish I were, I also feel pretty certain I'm a better writer than many people who make a living doing it, so I feel like I deserve some sort of platform. Or if not deserve, at least it's not an abomination. </div><div><br /></div><div>Whatever form my writing takes from here, I'm glad I chose to spend some time with CNF, however I've felt in the past about the uncertainty of what it is. I felt things reading I haven't felt in a long time, and in the end, I realized I still have a lot more I want to say myself. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-40798933739545571222024-01-21T06:37:00.000-05:002024-01-21T06:37:22.386-05:00If my New Year's resolution was to remain ambivalent about writing, I'm nailing itFor most of my life, when I've considered the ubiquitous question writers get asked about why they write, I've always thought of it as something of an after-the-fact justification of what I was already doing. I wrote all the time, starting almost as soon as I became a serious reader as a teenager. So answering the question was something of a rearguard action, an attempt to justify what I was already doing. I was never going to come up with an answer that made me say, "Oh, you know what? That's a bad reason for writing. I should stop doing it." I couldn't help but write, so seeking to answer a question about why I was doing it was more of a philosophical curiosity than a matter of practical urgency. It wasn't like considering the question of whether I should take a particular job or marry somebody. It was more like finding myself naked in bed with a beautiful woman and for some reason taking a second to ponder the mystery of human sexuality and why we enjoy it so much. There was no doubt about what I was going to do; I was only indulging in a brief reverie before diving in. <div><br /></div><div>The question now, though, is totally different. After having spent most of my available free time over the last ten years focused as much as time would allow either on writing fiction or writing for this blog, I find myself unwilling to sit down and transfer thoughts into words. I still have the same urge as always, but inevitably, before I put my butt on the back-friendly yoga ball to begin writing, I am waylaid by wondering, "What's the point?"</div><div><br /></div><div>Most writers will say one reason they write is because they can't stop themselves. I always felt that way, too. So where I am now is like waking up and finding I don't like sex or chocolate anymore. Or maybe it's like still liking chocolate but the last 32 times I've eaten it, it's given me explosive diarrhea, so now I'm reluctant to eat it again. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't like refraining from writing. I don't feel like myself. But there are also some pretty strong reasons why I can't get myself into my seat to write. They're not as strong as explosive diarrhea, maybe, but they're strong enough I don't know if I'll be able to get over them.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">1. Maybe I'm not that good</h3><div><br /></div><div>When somebody asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, she said, "Because I'm good at it." I don't draw or paint precisely because what I create is ugly, and it gives me no pleasure to look at what I've made when I'm done. With writing, though, there are at least some occasions where I will re-read something I've written and feel joy reading it, the same kind of joy I would feel reading something somebody else had written. </div><div><br /></div><div>But for almost three years now, I've just been unable to get anything published. Part of that is on me. For all that time, I've only been sending in work to top-tier journals. After I won <i>New Letters</i>' Robert Day Fiction Contest in 2020, followed soon after by publication in <i>The Bellevue Literary Review</i>, I felt like I had drawn pretty close to my goal of writing fiction good enough to be published in top tier journals. It's not that I'm a journal snob. I was always gratified and grateful when any journal, no matter how small, accepted my work. But I want to be read. When I was sending out to every journal on Earth, it was partly about trying to figure out if I was in the right ballpark. After twenty or so of those acceptances, I had the feedback I needed. If I want to be read, it doesn't do any good to be published in a smaller journal. </div><div><br /></div><div>Since 2020, I've written five short stories that I think are better than anything I wrote before. None has broken into a top journal. I've still had plenty of encouraging rejections, including from <i>The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Agni, One Story, The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, </i>and <i>The Colorado Review</i>. Some have given me positive feedback more than once. </div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe I ought to keep plugging away, feeling like I'm close and I just need to bide my time and wait to get lucky, but I feel now like "almost good enough for a top-tier journal" is my limit. I can't write better than what I've done in the last three years, and it's not good enough. I understand that sometimes, it's a matter of luck. Every journal gets tons of great stories and can only publish a few, and they're looking for a blend of perspectives, so I might just not fit that particular edition. But if I were as good as I want to be, I'd be impossible to reject. I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDJQhe5hVCg0EDKkdgYfOexpIrWpBN83EhEjAoypbm_LzzbugO61FyNtBOUoO8pnXmxXLjepQ_Gc3ujyT_eDttqY8MarZ74SwN65Vo5XrEDl0xozewEXjMA7VVAg72LDZrXZ6KbtDIkAkG7iBZH1kXXpimZnxd9CDe9zTF2tFQU3uFKFjkEkhJDEPDtY/s259/gambler's%20fallacy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="194" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzDJQhe5hVCg0EDKkdgYfOexpIrWpBN83EhEjAoypbm_LzzbugO61FyNtBOUoO8pnXmxXLjepQ_Gc3ujyT_eDttqY8MarZ74SwN65Vo5XrEDl0xozewEXjMA7VVAg72LDZrXZ6KbtDIkAkG7iBZH1kXXpimZnxd9CDe9zTF2tFQU3uFKFjkEkhJDEPDtY/s1600/gambler's%20fallacy.jpg" width="194" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">When somebody tells me I should keep going with writing because I'm almost there, I always think of this gambler's fallacy meme my son showed me.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">2. For a variety of reasons, I don't think it's realistic I will get better</h3><div><br /></div><div>I might never have been talented enough. I'm sure there's a certain neural makeup to a great writer that's partly there when they're born, and that also has to be nurtured a certain way early on. It's possible I was doomed from birth, or doomed from early childhood because I missed certain developmental processes necessary to building the right neural network for a creative writer. </div><div><br /></div><div>But even if that's not true, even if I still had a chance in adulthood, I don't think I have a chance now. It's true that if you work at something, you tend to get better. I've definitely improved greatly since taking writing seriously in my early 40s. But I'm in my early 50s now, and I feel myself slipping cognitively in a general sense. It's maybe not serious yet--I forget a word here and there while speaking more than I used to, I find long hours at work less easy to endure--but it's enough that I'm probably not really building the new connections in my brain necessary to improve creatively. It's like where I am at the gym now. I'm not really out there to be the strongest I've ever been. I'm just trying to slow down decline. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even if I were younger, I've always had a stumbling block to developing as a writer, which is that I can't read prodigiously. I'm a good reader, but I can't read for long stretches most of the time. I get too caught up in my own thoughts about what I'm reading, and I have to take breaks to walk around and think about what I've just read. I've always been this way. It's always been a bit of an embarrassment for me around literary friends, who talk about reading a hundred books a year or more. I do read, of course. I don't do it efficiently, and so I don't read as widely as many serious readers do, but I try to make up for it by reading well when I do read. If I have to take a test, I'm capable of focusing for hours at a time, but I can't maintain that every day. </div><div><br /></div><div>Reading well if not much is fine for much of the kind of analysis I do on this blog, but I think you have to read both deeply and broadly to improve as a writer. A would-be great writer has to fill their mind all the time with the best writing. I can't do that, and even if I could, I'm probably too old for it to have the impact it would have on a younger mind. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">3. I can't get away from the world</h3><div><br /></div><div>I recently read <a href="https://thesewaneereview.com/articles/life-and-story" target="_blank">Sigrid Nunez's "Life and Story" in <i>The Sewanee Review</i></a>, in which she ponders the "why write" question at great length. It's a great summary of the many explanations people have given to this question, along with many of the doubts a writer faces if she has any sense. Many are the same doubts I've expressed over the years, such as the question of how to justify writing about unreal things in a world with so many real problems. </div><div><br /></div><div>One problem Nunez focuses on is how much concentration writing takes. All that concentration and focus and wrangling means time not spent with those around you. It means time not spent fixing the storm door or edging the lawn. It means time not spent on your day job, the one that pays the bills. </div><div><br /></div><div>Nunez recalls how her mentor, Susan Sontag, encouraged her to let writing be the central focus of her life:</div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>"While it seemed everyone else wanted to know how I intended to earn a living, or when I was going to settle down, Sontag was talking about something else. Put the writing first, she said. Teach if you must, but don't feel that you have to become affiliated with an institution. Don't give up your independence. Forget the safety of tenure. Forget safety, period. Forget everything but the work."</blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div>Living in financial uncertainty while devoted only to the work has been a popular choice for writers, perhaps second only to having enough of a fortune, through heredity or marriage, you don't have to think about survival at all. There's nobility to it, the same way there is nobility in those who choose penury and celibacy in the service of God. I was planning at one point on that path, but I fell in love and had a child, and at that point, I realized I HAD to care about safety. </div><div><br /></div><div>Almost twenty years later, now with two kids, both of whom are struggling to figure out their own path to financial safety, the demands of the world are as great on me as ever. It has an effect on my writing. Even when I try to conserve some energy for writing, the effort and time I put into my job robs me of those same resources I need for arduous creative work. It fills my head with the wrong kind of energy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, other writers have managed to succeed while working for a living, but I think most succeeded at a younger age than I am now. I have writer friends who work and raise kids and write, mostly at teacher or editor jobs that don't pay as well as my job does, which means they have extra financial concerns I don't. But the thing is that none of those friends are doing any better at succeeding--based on my definition of the term--than I am. That's in spite of the fact that their teacher/editor jobs give them a better network to publicize their work with than I have. Writing is hard to do well even if you mortgage everything to focus on it, and anyone who's trying to both raise a family and cut open their spiritual veins to bleed onto the page is going to have an even harder time of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>In my case, because my day job I've ended up in could be thought to be important in a cold and calculated "real world" sort of way, I often wonder if the morally right choice isn't to shutter writing altogether and focus on my day job. There's a good chance that an improvement in my ability to do my job could have more of a positive impact on the world than anything I'll write at home. The only reason I've continued to write is because my own mental health couldn't stand not doing it. I wouldn't have been able to do my day job at all if I didn't write, I reasoned, because I'd have killed myself or ended up in a loony bin. Sometimes, though, I think that my indulging of my writing habit is just my own selfishness or ego. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">4. I'm exactly the wrong level of educated as a critic now</h3><div><br /></div><div>Since fiction writing wasn't working out how I'd hoped in the near term, I felt like I'd found a nice niche writing analysis of literary fiction on this blog. This was mostly of short story anthologies, such as <i>Best American Short Stories</i> and, if I had time and energy for it, <i>Pushcart</i> or <i>O. Henry</i> as well. It felt useful to me, because I thought that as a veteran of graduate-level studies in literature, I could be something of a bridge to ordinary people looking to investigate literary fiction. I've certainly been grateful for podcasts from philosophy Ph.D.s or other experts who seek to open up their disciplines to curious outsiders. I hoped to do the same for literature. </div><div><br /></div><div>I realized I wasn't quite a full expert. I didn't go on for a Ph.D. myself, and there are gaps in my understanding of literary theory as well as the history of literature and literary criticism. Still, since as one of my favorite professors as an undergrad said, you can never go wrong with a sensitive close reading, I felt like performing my close readings for all would help them to do their own. </div><div><br /></div><div>I was happy with my approach of close reading with occasional supplements from theory or literary history until last year. The mistake I made was trying to take criticism more seriously. I'd decided that since I was unlikely to ever make the breakthrough as a fiction writer I hoped to make, I should focus instead on doing the best job of writing the blog I could. I tried to go back and fill in gaps in theory and history.</div><div><br /></div><div>All I succeeded in doing was to become more aware of how great a gap I have between the knowledge I actually have and what I'd like to have. To fill that gap, I'd have to quit my job and spend years pursuing the expertise I lack. All so I could write a blog that maybe a few hundred people occasionally look at. If I wasn't going to abandon my life for fiction, I certainly wasn't going to do it for writing about fiction. </div><div><br /></div><div>So I've ended up in a place where I can't go back to just doing close readings, and I'm nowhere near being able to write what I'd like to be able to write, so I don't want to write anything. My shoot-from-the-hip close readings no longer seem to be enough, and what I'd like to do--a still-accessible but more informed flavor of criticism--is beyond me. I feel like the incarnation of Pope's a little learning being a dangerous thing, only I'm aware of how dangerous I am. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">My cycle</h3><div><br /></div><div>So that's where I am. I'm miserable not writing, because it doesn't feel like me, but I'm also miserable writing, because it feels pointless. Yes, I know that many, many writers offer the therapeutic advice that you should write for yourself and whether it gets published or wins awards or earns praise isn't the point. But I do not want to write just to amuse myself. If nobody is ever going to read what I write, I don't want to write. That's not human connection, which, I think, ought to be at least part of why someone would write. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>My day job values being succinct above all other writing virtues, and they love it when you can draw a picture for something instead of making people read words, which everyone hates. So I've summarized all the above verbosity into the following flow chart:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhLjofD9UKczI-bOMpgNJ_0qev0SAx7mWoOuxWVpWKfRc9py9dwMy9E43TUJSQltrNDN80uJiUEWj4-QuS8JY9Bdpse2yvE22iHlkPCOjh_fbsTDW1BVyB8yDUap7UDn1IJJ6ovntkiQh2vOOLRfstZwhSdGs6vryokqI2u98inAvtDLsT60te5L1uQyjk" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="527" data-original-width="900" height="374" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhLjofD9UKczI-bOMpgNJ_0qev0SAx7mWoOuxWVpWKfRc9py9dwMy9E43TUJSQltrNDN80uJiUEWj4-QuS8JY9Bdpse2yvE22iHlkPCOjh_fbsTDW1BVyB8yDUap7UDn1IJJ6ovntkiQh2vOOLRfstZwhSdGs6vryokqI2u98inAvtDLsT60te5L1uQyjk=w640-h374" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-65971972672589624092023-12-07T02:53:00.001-05:002023-12-07T02:53:11.711-05:00Looking for life after literary fictionCan one Marie Kondo one's reading life? Decide to leave unread that which does not bring one joy? It seems obvious that one could, although since my late teen years, I've made a lot of my reading decisions based at least in part on what I thought I <i>should</i> read. In fact, I probably weighed <i>should</i> over <i>want to </i>most of the time. It comes with making literature your major, I guess. You fall into a habit of thinking that if you're not reading something on an assigned list, you'll pay for it in the end. <div><br /></div><div>Since I took up writing seriously ten years ago, I've probably gravitated toward literary fiction at least in part because I thought it was what I should read. It wasn't the entire reason, though. There were at least two other reasons. First and by far the larger of the two reasons is that I read seeking answers to life's big questions, and I thought I'd find that more in literary fiction than in, say, books about sexy cowboy werewolves. I mean, I'm sure <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Feral-Wolf-Ranch-Book-3-ebook/dp/B08B5F1DT7/ref=sr_1_5?qid=1701896325&refinements=p_n_feature_two_browse-bin%3A14431141011&s=books&sr=1-5" target="_blank">Renee Rose and Vanessa Vale</a> have a lot of great thoughts about why there is something rather than nothing and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, but perhaps it's fair to say that these thoughts don't quite make it into their fiction. I wanted fiction that met my expectations of substance. So in a very real sense, literary fiction is what I want to read. The second reason is because I felt like my own writing was probably more like literary fiction than anything else, and I wanted to learn from others to improve my own work. </div><div><br /></div><div>After ten years of it, though, I've been a little disappointed in literary fiction's ability to come through in either category. On the one hand, I can count on one hand the novels and short stories I've read in the last ten years that I found deeply transformational in terms of how I view my place in the universe. Meanwhile, although I've definitely improved as a writer and now accomplished things that are pretty good for an amateur, I'm stuck and unlikely to get unstuck. My ceiling seems to be to occasionally get a good response from the top tier journals but never quite make it in. Since I do not wish to only be a consumer of fiction but a producer as well, I've found my participation in a scene I can't break into very frustrating. Frustrating enough that I will drop my annual critical project in the middle because a s<a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2023/10/every-story-everywhere-all-time.html" target="_blank">tory rubbed me the wrong way and I wasn't quite able to explain why</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>But it's not like I'm going to quit reading altogether. At times over the last ten years, <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2018/01/fing-pig-and-why-im-rethinking-what-i.html" target="_blank">I've wondered whether I really am a lit fic writer </a>(or primarily a lit fic reader). I love a well-made sentence, or a voice that sticks with you for days after you read it, but there were times I found myself wishing I could read a story once in a while where you could summarize the plot in a few sentences. Or where I could even tell what the plot was the first time through reading. </div><div><br /></div><div>So after putting down this year's <i>Best American Short Stories</i>, the first thing I picked up was an anthology of science fiction short stories. There wasn't an obvious equivalent to BASS in sci-fi, but "The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023," edited by R.F. Kuang, had "American" in it, so I picked that. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">It's different, all right</h3><div><br /></div><div>The first story in the anthology was first published in <i>Conjunctions</i>, which I know as a publisher of lit fic, so I was wondering if I'd even made a change. This story, "Readings in the Slantwise Sciences" by Sofia Samatar, could have been in BASS. Well, kind of. If could have been in BASS if the guest editor were really into hippie fantasy. But in general, it was still what I would characterize as being a somewhat language-centric story. </div><div><br /></div><div>After that, though, there started to be a real divergence from lit fic. One thing that surprised me was the prevalence of fantasy. I guess the name of the book did have fantasy in it, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was sort of guessing the mix would be about 17 sci-fi to 3 fantasy. Some of the stories were a little bit tough to classify as either, but I believe the anthology more or less alternated between sci-fi and fantasy, with some of the fantasy entries being horror.</div><div><br /></div><div>I did not care for most of the fantasy, and I found myself wishing the publishing industry did not find it necessary to package sci-fi and fantasy together. I don't find they really have that much to do with each other or scratch a similar itch, and rather than making each other strong by joining forces, I found that the combination was in danger of causing their mutually assured destruction. I'm not going to go into depth about why I disliked most of the fantasy entries, because it's not my thing and that really is all there is to it. I find few things less magical than magic. "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss was an exception, but for the most part, I was much more interested in the sci-fi stories.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the difficulties in writing science fiction is how to explain how your world is different from the reader's world (and often how your world got to its current state from the reader's world) without boring the reader with exposition. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/emA8l2fBM6Y" width="320" youtube-src-id="emA8l2fBM6Y"></iframe></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>This is an especially perplexing problem for a sci-fi short story, which has very little space in which to build an alternate world. Consider "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills, one of two stories in the collection reflecting concerns in the current, real world about bodily autonomy in the wake of the overturn of <i>Roe v Wade</i>. The world of this story has a whole slew of new controls on nubile and especially pregnant women to introduce, so how does it do it without a lame screen scroll type of information dump?</div><div><br /></div><div>Guest editor R.F. Kuang, echoing advice she herself has received, recommends dealing with the problem by writing "not from the point of view of someone encountering a world for the first time, but of someone who has lived in this world all their life...What do they notice? What is new to them? What is so natural to them that it hardly warrants comment? What are the bizarre pronouncements that only they could make?" </div><div><br /></div><div>Some of the stories in the BASFF anthology pull this off better than others. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" goes in the complete other direction. It reads like a mockumentary, and at least half of the narrative is exposition, the kind that would be given to the viewer of a non-fiction documentary. I found the effect a little bit dull, and this was one of the stories I struggled the most to get through. Other stories pulled off Kuang's advice much better. "Termination Stories for the Cyber Dystopia" by Isabel J. Kim, "Pre-Simulation Consultation" by Kim Fu, and "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente were the three best stories in the collection. "Termination" in particular was extremely adept at getting the reader to understand its world without breaking from the narrative to explain it. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Committing to the bit</h3><div><br /></div><div>Huang expressed her love in her introduction for stories that "commit" to whatever storytelling choices they make. This love spills over for her into "camp, silliness, and everything stylized." This includes <i>Moulin Rouge, </i>which I also love, but also the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, which I detest. She loves ""genres that lean fully into what they are," stories that "take themselves completely seriously." She is tired of "leather-clad superheroes winking to declare, 'Don't worry--I'm not taking this too seriously." She is wary of irony, which she feels often substitutes for wit. </div><div><br /></div><div>Compare this to literary fiction. If literary fiction had a motto, it might be an adaptation of what Harold Bloom wrote about poetry in his introduction to the 1997 Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" anthology. He said that "all bad poetry is unfailingly sincere." I think this could well be the motto of a lot of literary fiction as well. It might believe that all bad fiction is unfailingly sincere. </div><div><br /></div><div>So we have two poles here, lit fic preferring cool detachment over sincerity, and Kuang's vision fo alternate world fiction as charmingly naive and self-serious. Since I've been reading literary fiction for a long time, I've probably come to identify a little bit with the idea that I should have some level of detachment from my own work, that I need to be its master and, no matter how emotionally I identify with its subject matter, that I should make decisions about the story with an objective eye.</div><div><br /></div><div>There were times while reading BASFF that I could, in fact, have lived with a little less "commitment" and a little bit more attention to language, form, and style, the very things I've been thinking literary fiction overemphasized at times. I'm not going to name stories here, but a few used words wrong or had a style that was so "sincere," so untainted by discipline and art, it became jarringly unpleasant.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, on the whole, I found it a welcome reprieve from literary fiction. I liked stories where plot was at the center. I liked stories that were quixotically taking on universe-sized questions rather than soberly putting a small portion of existence under the microscope. While my literary fiction reading might have occasionally made me too snooty for some parts of the anthology, I also found myself wishing that many literary fiction stories could allow themselves the openness, silliness, or lack of concern for propriety in the stories I was reading. </div><div><br /></div><div>I suppose it should be no surprise that my preferred style might be somewhere between high art and low. I need enough plot and "commitment" to be engaged, but also enough skill and control to be entranced. I don't want so much earnestness there is no thought of form, but I don't want form to take over so much there is no possibility of earnestness trumping form, leaving some parts technically imperfect but emotionally resonant. </div><div><br /></div><div>Politically, I'm too conservative to be a liberal and too liberal to be a conservative, so why shouldn't I be in a no-man's land aesthetically in writing as well? In any event, it was enjoyable to do something different, so I'll probably continue with "different" for a while. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"> </h3><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-74923790803929907532023-11-01T15:35:00.000-04:002023-11-01T15:35:14.853-04:00Enough for nowI've sworn I was finished with writing and blogging about writing and so on enough times now that nobody will take me seriously if I swear I'm done again, but I am taking a break. The last story was a good place to end, what with its relevance to current world events and the fact that almost the last words in it were "I am sorry, Jacob." Kind of like the universe was talking directly to me in response to my complete failure to accomplish what I wanted to as a writer. I'm not in any kind of place to give myself over to the stories in BASS this year. <div><br /></div><div>This fall is the twentieth anniversary of the end of my time in graduate school, and it's been ten years since I picked up my notebook again and actually gave writing a sustained try. Right now, I feel like all of that was a huge waste of time. I don't really have anything great to replace it with, but I don't want to keep going enough that I'd rather deal with a big empty place in my life than with continuing to fail. </div><div><br /></div><div>Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to keep doing this. That's why I gave BASS another try this year. But the few people who comment on here aren't really enough for me to say this is a good use of my time and effort. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-72182235097331088982023-10-30T04:25:00.004-04:002024-01-09T16:17:27.605-05:00Pulling at the fringes of the universe's tallis: "The Master Mourner" by Ben EhrlichIt's pretty obvious that "The Master Mourner" belongs to a class of stories that could be grouped under the category of "stories with ambiguous endings." The way you're asking yourself "What did he say to her" at the end of <i>Lost in Translation</i>, or the way you're wondering what was real and what was an implanted memory at the end of <i>Total Recall</i>, or the way you're asking yourself "What the hell did I just watch?" after <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> or <i>Inception</i>, so at the end of "The Master Mourner," I think it's pretty easy to find yourself asking what has gone on. The story itself encourages the reader to look for secret conspiracies and hidden shenanigans, beginning as it does with the Hebrew school teacher who once helped the Irgun to carry out a terrorist plot against British occupiers of Israel by distracting them with her piano playing. The reader at the end of "Master Mourner" is justified in wondering if he, too, has been distracted throughout in order to be surprised by a bomb at the end. <div><br /></div><div>There are hints throughout the story that a secret plot--in both the literary and espionage meanings of the word--is going on beneath the surface plot, which resembles a familiar Jewish coming-of-age story. Jacob, son of Henry Singer, fails to emotionally connect to his mother's death when he is young. Jacob only experiences mourning as series of social obligations he must fulfill: "...to open the door with my face prepared with a mourner's mixture of pale sorrow, stiff resilience, and a hint of eye-smiling gratitude for the offering of yet another fruit basket." He looks upon his duties as a mourner much like he looks upon singing and praying at church--as something to be endured until it's over. Meanwhile, Jacob's father seems to check out emotionally after the death of his wife. He retreats to a "different realm," one in which nothing reaches him, where even if Jacob tries to yell to him or to buy the wrong eggs to "get him out of reverse," the sound is "inaudible to him." As opposed to the Hebrew teacher with her three hearts allowing her to be resilient even through trauma, Henry stops running, a hobby he seemingly enjoyed, because, he claims, he has a bad heart. Bad heart, indeed. </div><div><br /></div><div>That's the surface story, at least, but there's another story straining to be heard throughout. Even inanimate objects seem to be trying to let Jacob know something is afoot. The pews in synagogue squeak "No!" and "Please" to him. The floors of his house say "No! Stay!" when he goes to answer the door in the middle of the night. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then there's Jacob's understanding that the universe is full of mysteries to be solved and resolved. When he attends temple as a boy, impatiently waiting for the end of service, he spends "most of the time playing with the fringes that dangled from my father's tallis. I tugged at them, pretending they were levers that opened the ark or did some other unexpected trick." Jacob hopes to open the ark, the replica in the temple of THE ark, the ancient religious relic that supposedly housed the glory of the Lord God himself. Jacob hopes, that is, to unlock the mysteries of the universe. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, he is doomed to disappointment. Moses-like, he hears the voice of God as a young man when he is coming out of the drug store where he picked up medicine for his ill mother. Jacob is wondering if he will end up like his father, and God Almighty answers: "Of course." Near the end of the story, Jacob, having tried to embarrass synagogue icon Bernie Bernstein, is ashamed when he realizes Bernie lost a brother in the Holocaust. At this point, Jacob realizes "that everything I thought I was I was not and everything I would be I would never be and everything I assumed I would never be I would most certainly be." Jacob's not going to live up to his big dreams of penetrating the big mystery of it all. Can the reader hope to escape the same fate?</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1b1YBSyQTkUeJRXu9ptTBpg9NBhgfKGRr6hFD4N8YP1R9qa6FJlDuMXaukjvvCFeIZa52etY0596Wq38ZLsbxe7xgyCffDFEycUNQKTnp0wynztg7rcFvDLWqE8ja_Vr9_xwAn58x9XRxeixHdQoLcGUj_U0jjE-JICVU1xtUT-BNHvwJN1VWzRm0GMA/s1200/Arthur.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1200" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1b1YBSyQTkUeJRXu9ptTBpg9NBhgfKGRr6hFD4N8YP1R9qa6FJlDuMXaukjvvCFeIZa52etY0596Wq38ZLsbxe7xgyCffDFEycUNQKTnp0wynztg7rcFvDLWqE8ja_Vr9_xwAn58x9XRxeixHdQoLcGUj_U0jjE-JICVU1xtUT-BNHvwJN1VWzRm0GMA/s320/Arthur.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">God's presence everywhere can be viewed as either a balm or a menace. </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Who is Bernie?</h3><div><br /></div><div>After opening with the former-terrorist-turned-Hebrew-school-teacher telling Jacob's class that God is everywhere, the story then encourages us to equate the suggestively named Bernie Bernstein with God Almighty. The idea of God's omnipresence could be viewed as either reassuring or a threat, but in context, it feels more like a threat, given that it's coming from the woman who once played piano until her listeners ended up in chunks all over the keys. It's more "God can get you anywhere, any time" than "God is always there to help in time of need." This affects how the reader feels when Bernie replaces God in Jacob's mind: "This was after my mother passed, during the time when I realized that God is not everywhere; Bernie Bernstein is everywhere." So Bernie feels like a vague threat throughout. But is he? </div><div><br /></div><div>The first thing you'd have to say about a name like Bernie Bernstein is that it's an obviously Jewish name. Sure, "Bernie" doesn't have to be a Jew, nor, technically, does "Bernstein," although most people with that name are Ashkenazi Jews. But I doubt anyone would hear that name and not assume the person answering to it was Jewish. It literally "doubles down" on its Jewishness. You couldn't have that name and pretend not to be Jewish if you were ever in a position where you thought it was dangerous to be Jewish. Henry Singer isn't the same. The surname Singer has been pared down from the one used by "longer-surnamed shetl dwellers from the morasses of Eastern Europe" who are Jacob's ancestors. Henry (a name more German than Jewish) might have wanted to distance himself from his Jewishness, a feeling Jacob shares, as he doesn't like to think about the people from whom he is descended. Bernie has taken the opposite approach from blending in. He's not just Jewish; he's Jewish, damnit. </div><div><br /></div><div>A second unmistakable thing about Bernie is that he's an important member of the congregation. Henry's the one who first identifies him as such. He receives congratulations at the end of every Shabbat service for nothing more, Jacob thinks, than having survived another week. </div><div><br /></div><div>Henry actually seems to like Bernie, in spite of how one seems to value his Jewish identity and the other seems to downplay it. Before long, Bernie is Henry's only friend. They're both in the same business together, and they meet once a week to talk about the old times. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Punishment or sympathy? </h3><div><br /></div><div>So what the hell happens with that ending? One possible way of reading it is that Bernie has killed or attacked Henry. We've just learned that Henry is the only member of the congregation who violates the laws of the Sabbath by driving to temple rather than walking to it. In this sense, one could read it that Bernie, the image of the traditional Jewish community, is taking the place of the omnipresent God who can punish us when we do wrong. If this is what happened, then Henry's saying "I'm sorry, Jacob," is him apologizing for doing "what had to be done," the same way Morah Lev did what had to be done when fighting for Jewish independence. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't think that's what happened, though. When Jacob sees Bernie at the door, it's with a torn shirt, which could suggest that there was an altercation between Bernie and Henry. But it's much more likely that this torn shirt is the traditional torn shirt of shivas, the mourning ceremony. The story is called "The Master Mourner." Jacob believes that he's mastered the art of mourning, by which he means looking grave and telling people thank you for bringing over a whitefish salad, but it's Bernie who is the real master mourner. The torn shirt isn't a sign that Bernie has attacked Henry; it's a sign that Bernie has joined Henry in genuine mourning, at least partly in order to help Henry with his own loss. In this sense, the "I'm sorry" isn't "I'm sorry I did something terrible," it's a genuine expression of sympathy. </div><div><br /></div><div>Bernie has already had a lifetime of practice in mourning, having lost his brother in a concentration camp years ago. If we extend Bernie from an individual to being a larger symbol of the Jewish community and its ability to endure suffering over the ages, he's had much more than one lifetime. This symbolic reading is suggested by Jacob's inability to guess Bernie's age: "He could have been anywhere between thirty and three thousand." If Bernie isn't just one person, but a symbol of Jewish endurance over the ages, then this explains why his continued survival from week to week is such a cause for celebration. </div><div><br /></div><div>With all this practice mourning loss, Bernie is the perfect person to help Henry. He's not God's terrifying presence seeking vengeance for sins to the ends of the Earth; he's the comforting presence of Jewish tradition there to help Henry. Bernie isn't interested in punishing Henry for driving himself to temple. Henry has said he's too "heavy" to walk; Bernie merely wants to help lighten Henry a bit by mourning along with him in his loss. Bernie has already had one opportunity to get angry about another driver, that being Jacob when Jacob almost ran into him with a shopping cart. Bernie didn't get angry, though. He merely advised Jacob to "drive the cart" rather than "let the cart drive him." Bernie doesn't object to traditions changing. The important thing is that as they change, they should serve the people who carry them out, rather than the other way around. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">What's up with Morah Lev?</h3><div><br /></div><div>Reading Bernie as a symbol of Jewish tradition and its ability to provide comfort makes sense to me, but what, then, to make of Morah Lev, the Hebrew teacher who once duped a room full of British administrators carrying out the Palestinian Mandate to their deaths? Some people today will argue that Irgun wasn't a terrorist organization. They will point out that Irgun at least occasionally attempted to minimize deaths. I hardly qualify to pass judgment on this. I will only say that Morah Lev might signify a counterweight to Bernie. If Bernie represents the ability of a people to endure through resilience and tradition, Morah Lev is the voice that insists that a people can only endure if they fight for it. Bernie is a people enduring through culture; Morah Lev is a people enduring through defending themselves by any means necessary. </div><div><br /></div><div>To strengthen herself for her role as defender of the people through violence, Morah Lev carries out a series of rituals of her own. She uses three colors of lipstick at once and braids her hair (using three strands, I presume--is there another way to braid hair?), rituals meant to reinforce the three levels of heart she has to maintain. </div><div><br /></div><div>Henry doesn't have much to say about Morah Lev except to call her "colorful." Morah Lev operates on her own logic. That logic might serve to prevent some tragedies for the Jewish people, but it has nothing to say once loss has already occurred. She is unable to unsee the blood and flesh on the white keys of the piano she used to distract her victims to their death. Mourning isn't for her. Her three hearts keep her strong, but they are too strong an armor to pierce through mourning in order to heal.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's the cultural symbol of endurance in Bernie, rather than the military one in Morah Lev, that ultimately stands as the hope in the story. At the end, having shared in real mourning with Henry, Bernie hands Jacob literal keys, which are hard not to also read figuratively as unlocking some kind of code for life. Having received the keys, Jacob then runs upstairs to see his father. That is, Jacob is ascending a stairway to Heaven. In the original, Biblical account of Jacob seeing the stairway to Heaven, God reaffirms his covenant with the Jewish people, in which he promises to make of them a great people and to give them a land to dwell in. Jacob isn't running to find his father dead. He's running to join with his father in continuing life. </div><div><br /></div><div>The story doesn't deny that situations may call for Morah Lev's ways, but they do seem to suggest that the key to a continued future for the Jewish people has more to do with the comfort and encouragement of tradition and culture than through the might of arms and the cunning of plots. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Timing</h3><div><br /></div><div>This story was published in <i>Gettysburg Review</i> (RIP--the loss of which may require its own mourning) months ago, but it comes out now as part of <i>Best American Short Stories</i> at an interesting time. Yet another terrible chapter in the long history of irrational hatred for Jews has taken place, leading to yet more mourning, to more torn shirts and paltry-feeling signs of sympathy from the community. Israel's government, led by a ruling party which is in some ways a direct political descendant of the Irgun, has launched a counter-strike, which some say is too much, but which Israel justifies, given the extremes of inhuman hatred its people face. </div><div><br /></div><div>I've been debating continuing with BASS blogging for some time, or even with literature and writing as an earnest pursuit. One of the reasons I always feel this way is that blogging about a short story seems so irrelevant, given the number of people suffering in the world. This story, though, seems to be arguing that without an identity beyond survival, survival will ultimately be pointless and short-lived. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-33013857362865710662023-10-26T14:52:00.004-04:002023-10-31T05:31:30.588-04:00Every story, everywhere, all the time: "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-LinI should love "Treasure Island Alley" by Da-Lin, right? It's got time travel of sorts and a TV cartoon version of one of the four Chinese classics and science and it's about confronting death. It's a slightly less frenetic version of "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," a comparison I'm going to bet I'm not along in making. So why didn't I like it?<div><br /></div><div>While trying to answer that question for this post, I've realized how frustrating it is to do literary criticism as a part-time affair with a day job that's totally unrelated to literature. I spent some time in between my last blog-through of Best American Short Stories and now trying to shore up some of the gaps I have as a lay person, but that has only served to make me more cognizant of all I don't know. Even to do this as a hobby, I don't feel skilled enough or learned enough. <div><br /></div><div>I feel that lack the most with stories I don't like, and I really disliked "Treasure Island Alley." I will try below to explain why, because I think it's owed, but I am admitting that this attempt at a critique is poor. I just don't have the skills to do more than weakly point to what I want to say. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">What's wrong with it</h3><div><br /></div><div>"Treasure Island Alley" is what people mean when they say that all the stories in lit journals sound alike. They don't, but there are certain types of stories that give that impression. </div><div><br /></div><div>There's a formula to this brand of story. We like to think of literary fiction as the kind of fiction that doesn't have follow conventions, but it's got plenty of its own. They might be conventions they teach at Iowa, but they're still conventions. The formula for this type of story goes something as follows:</div><div><br /></div><div>1) Find some fact about the universe, quirky cultural icon, or profession not many people do. Make sure it's one your audience isn't likely to know much about, so they're sufficiently awed when your character waxes rhapsodic about it for the rest of the story. Science is a good choice, because most literary journal editors don't know much about science, nor do their audiences. If a whole generation of writers could get away with trying to convince non-scientists that physics teaches us the truth of Buddhism or Taoism, you can certainly get away with having a main character who thinks the mitosis he studies in the lab teaches valuable human truths that help him cope with the loss of his daughters in a boating accident. If you're familiar with the history, culture, or language of any part of the world outside the two coasts of the United States, you can also use literally anything you want that's just lying around. Extra points if it will seem exotic to editors, as nearly everything will. </div><div><br /></div><div>2) Got your object or icon or unusual profession? Good. Now add some kind of tragedy, and have the main character go on and on for about twenty pages trying to make use of the thing you've picked to help him or her figure out the tragedy and other mysteries of life. No amount of improbable clinging to the thing is too much. It's not overkill; it's narrative unity. </div><div><br /></div><div>3) Add a bunch of really specific and esoteric-seeming details. If you can (you always can), render them in staccato sentences. "The metal and oil scent of the armory." "Pungent amines seeping into the wood chairs in the lab." Everyone will call this "lyrical" and they'll say you're making whatever thing you chose to shoehorn into every part of your story beautiful, even though you'll probably be thinking to yourself the whole time that your character's determination to read every phenomena in life through the same lens isn't beautiful; it's Quixotic. Our culture decided long ago to admire Quixote, against the express wishes of text. So go with it.</div><div><br /></div><div>4) Finally, go on TwitterX and sell it as a funny, whacky blend. When you get interviewed about it and they ask a "fun" question, like how would you describe your story in six words, say, "Vampires, Formula One, and stinky cheese," and then laugh and try to mean it. Literary fiction is so fun! Why don't more people read it? </div><div><br /></div><div>Other stories that do this? This is where I know I'm weak as a critic. There was <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2019/08/dump-all-over-story-about-four-year-old.html" target="_blank">this story several years ag</a>o, but one writer who leaps more immediately to mind is Andrea Barrett. Like Da-Lin, Barrett went fairly far down a graduate school path in the sciences before turning to writing, and she's used that background to turn out a series of these kinds of stories. Barret and Da-Lin both know enough science to know more than their audience, which is all they have to know. Da-Lin can add her past in Taiwan to her pool of knowledge most people don't have. A typical Barrett story features a famous scientist making their discoveries and then turning their discoveries in the lab into meditations on life. It will develop a mantra-like summary of a scientific truth and re-use it throughout the narrative. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>That's the formula used in this story. The s<span style="font-family: inherit;">tory takes the Monkey King, Chinese funeral practices among wealthy people in Taiwan circa 1980(?), and some random science-y facts, throws them all in a blender, and comes up with something that is, I guess, supposed to be "<span style="background-color: white;">a deep search for nothing less than the meaning of death," according to the New England Review, which originally published it. But it's not that. It only appears to examine the meaning of death; in the end, it doesn't take death on. It disappears into its cultural tokens and kind-of-science-y stuff, and it lets those icons try to make the story seem to say something that it doesn't actually say. Since most readers don't really know what the hell the Monkey King is or anything about the science of immortality, it's guaranteed that they'll think it's deep. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;">If I were a better critic, there'd be a section here tying in Karen Russell, who I think does something similar. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;">The end result is a story that mimics a real spiritual and emotional journey, but doesn't ultimately lead anywhere. It's Western yoga. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">I very nearly quit over this one</span></h3><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white;">Something came undone in me reading this story. I don't know what I'm doing with these blog-throughs any more. I have too much education in literature to do fun reviews, but not enough to do the serious analysis I want to do. We'll see how the next one goes. I might not do this again. </span></div></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-9377578316667352362023-10-22T18:48:00.001-04:002023-10-22T18:48:04.641-04:00The ghosts are us but not literally like in that one Nicole Kidman movie: "Camp Emeline" by Taryn Bowe<div>Some stories don't require much critical or theoretical intervention to interpret. That's just the way it is. They speak for themselves quite nicely and most readers are able to "get it" without needing much intermediary exposition. Sometimes, as in "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the story just before this one in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, that's because there's not much of a story there worth giving much thought to. There isn't any deeper layer to it, and the lack of things to say to expand upon the story is a good indication that the story isn't the kind of story you're going to treasure for a long time. Then there's a story like Taryn Bowe's "Camp Emeline," where the lack of things to say after the story is over isn't an indication that the story isn't worth thinking about long after the last words, but only that it managed to make most of what it had to say overt. Like its main character Libby clearing garbage out of the lake, you don't have to dive very deep to find what you're looking for.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've only got a hodge-podge gallimaufry of thoughts on this story. Mostly, what occurred to me were a few minor observations about technical or formal considerations that made the story work.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The right moment to begin</h3><div><br /></div><div>Any beginning fiction-writing primer will stress the importance of starting the story at the right moment. Two key considerations for picking this moment are first to ask the question "why now?" and secondly to try to move as close to the moment of crisis for the main character(s) as possible.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Camp Emeline" doesn't start back when Emeline is born with spinal bifida, nor when she gets sick, nor when she dies, nor when the parents are struggling to win a malpractice lawsuit against the hospital after she dies. It starts with the family trying to use the money they've won in the lawsuit to honor their daughter after they've already won. This is an interesting choice, and maybe, with this one choice came the entire success of the whole project. There's a whole different, Erin Brockovich-kind of story that could have been told. This could have been about the plucky family that took on the big charity hospital with all the celebrity endorsements and how they won and how they didn't do it for greed but instead are trying to give back with the money they won by opening a camp for other kids with disabilities. The beginning of "Camp Eveline" could have been the happy ending of another kind of story. But this story isn't so much about what happened as it is about how people cope psychologically with what happened. So it starts with happily ever after and points out that sometimes, happily ever after is the saddest moment, because it's the moment when a family that's been deferring its feelings, pending the outcome of their settlement, finally has to deal with them. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Terror misdirected</h3><div>In the 2001 movie <i>The Others</i>, we spend the whole movie afraid that supernatural beings are trying to kill Nicole Kidman and her two spectrally pale children, only to find out at the end that they were the dead ones the whole time. I kind of thought it was a movie that asked the question, "Has it been long enough since <i>The Sixth Sense </i>that we can pull this off again?" but also partly a nice misdirection. One of the scariest ideas is not that there's something to fear, but that the thing to fear is something completely different from what you should be afraid of. </div><div><br /></div><div>The word "ghost" appears three times in the story. The first time, it's to describe the camp the family has bought, before they've fixed it up, as a ghost town. That last time reflects the first, calling it a "ghost camp." But the second time, Libby, the first-person narrator teenage girl struggling to cope, calls her and her family "ghosts." She's gone to the wilderness to look for a sign from the dead, but they're the ghosts. This is a perfect way of describing the feeling of losing someone close to you. It is a ghost town, but not because of all the undead from yesteryear haunting the place. It's a ghost town because they've themselves are only pale shadows of their former fully living selves. </div><div><br /></div><div>There's another misdirected terror in the story. Libby has been directing all of her feelings about her lost sister and the wreck her parents became because of her death by engaging in sexually stupid behavior. She's been giving out hand jobs to losers at school for twenty-five bucks, and occasionally having sex with people as long as they are okay with her occasional outbursts of violence during sex. Her mother found out about the hand jobs, and now the two barely speak to each other. Perhaps partly because of this awkwardness, the parents do absolutely zero checking in on their children throughout the story as Libby and her brother Eli hang out with a twenty-four-year-old drifter who says he comes with the camp her parents bought. Libby is begging someone to take her up on her attempts to act out sexually, and she's come across precisely the profile of person you'd be worried about her coming across. So the reader does a bit of white-knuckling the book (or device, for those on Kindles), worried that she's about to find exactly the trouble she's looking for, like this is Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" </div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out, though, that there was nothing to fear. The drifter, who has his own people he's lost and is hurting in much the same way, turns out to be just what Libby needs. I'm not sure this is how it's likely to work out most of the time in life. I think most of the time, teenage girls probably ought to stay out of the shacks of twenty-four-year-old drifters with pasts. But the guy's got a good heart, and the two manage to help each other face their issues by a series of conversations that up their pain in very minimalist ways. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbmZ2-N90xKVJmv-Ny4qoEaes1JL2FI7TRqMjA_WPIcdAKGBPymG-XdV-uhmwg3GqXaQOjRZaIpR0kmnS66FnmFnzNPH9nHpn2-q-2GlooVo22euJowYlD2gk3qHsB2Cwea8vh_FW2o91GUyPe1gBX8fIHS-zxsidyFTJfvY5gCs1wdoEPpLuOFdPPq7I/s1200/the%20others.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbmZ2-N90xKVJmv-Ny4qoEaes1JL2FI7TRqMjA_WPIcdAKGBPymG-XdV-uhmwg3GqXaQOjRZaIpR0kmnS66FnmFnzNPH9nHpn2-q-2GlooVo22euJowYlD2gk3qHsB2Cwea8vh_FW2o91GUyPe1gBX8fIHS-zxsidyFTJfvY5gCs1wdoEPpLuOFdPPq7I/s320/the%20others.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unlike "The Others," "Camp Emeline" doesn't make every shot a carefully contrived chiaroscuro. It throws light and dark around loosely, and uses both large and small tableaux. </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">An interesting stylistic quirk</h3><div><br /></div><div>The opening lines paint a scene, in this case the natural scene of the camp around the lake. After two sentences, though, while still in the same paragraph, it changes to a quick summary of the past leading up to the beginning of the plot that begins "When the settlement money came in..." This "When the settlement money" could have been the opening lines on their own. I'd have probably written it that way, because I kind of have a thing about not liking to open with scene descriptions, but scene description is a tried-and-true story opening. That opening paragraph feels like it has two starts jammed into one rather long paragraph. And while much of the story mostly moves along quickly, some of the individual paragraphs break the typical logic of the paragraph, jamming more than one main idea in before providing an indentation to indicate a change. The third paragraph does this much like the first, beginning with the father going in to Meredith to buy flashlights and batteries, then digressing into how the parents have been off their game since Emeline died, then talking about Libby's risky behavior and the rift it's caused with her mom, then moving back to another description of the camp again, ending with the first reference to it as a ghost town. These aren't on every page, but they do show up now and again. The logic of these paragraphs is more associative than linear, which mirrors the way the story is more about feelings about what happened than what happened. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">So does Emeline give them a sign or not?</h3><div><br /></div><div>The quest for a sign from the dead sister/daughter Emeline continues throughout the story. Libby sees her mother swimming in the lake and wonders if she's also looking for a sign. </div><div><br /></div><div>There are three mentions of ghosts in the story, and also three mentions of loons. The three times loons are mentioned are actually not far off from the three mentions of ghosts.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCk4Zg9RHdj4cgdTpeBfKE5vh0JZH6AmKnNkl4jIrzcK1rJf1UKR6cgdyv9HhE9kNFoh2BTwPv44jYwxIWBu1ovFjoH4As9EPgZ0Xvn9fgfDHQu3Z5KC8JQzl9cPxIf22UiyDSYWC1AFRiXZ9LihITZgBB2nSi8Gnj-A3cXiqufE7U0o2W3f-TDhIypi8/s500/loons.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="500" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCk4Zg9RHdj4cgdTpeBfKE5vh0JZH6AmKnNkl4jIrzcK1rJf1UKR6cgdyv9HhE9kNFoh2BTwPv44jYwxIWBu1ovFjoH4As9EPgZ0Xvn9fgfDHQu3Z5KC8JQzl9cPxIf22UiyDSYWC1AFRiXZ9LihITZgBB2nSi8Gnj-A3cXiqufE7U0o2W3f-TDhIypi8/s320/loons.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I probably only said this line to myself 8,000 times while reading this story. </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Ghost/loon combo one: "Without campers, the camp was a ghost town. I could hear loons wailing. 'I'm here,' they seemed to say. 'But where are you?'" </div><div><br /></div><div>Ghost/loon combo two: Libby and the drifter are out on the water in a canoe at night, and when Libby could "hear the loons wailing, (she) knew (she and the drifter) were moving toward the center where they'd built a nest." Not long after this, the drifter asks Libby if everything is okay with her parents. "Probably not," she answers. "It's like we're all ghosts." </div><div><br /></div><div>Ghost/loon combo three: On her last night with the drifter just before the camp opens, they are in the shack listening to the rain. "One of the loons wailed. I waited for another to call back. That's why they cried like that, I'd read, to find a mate, or sometimes, if their calls were short and clipped, to locate family, to check if they were out there still, alive. Before the end of their night together, Libby thinks that she feels "stronger than before (she'd) come here, to this ghost camp, to his little shed." </div><div><br /></div><div>Loons, if you've ever heard them, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A23jUixSJM" target="_blank">sound a little ghost-like</a>. It's tempting to think that Emeline is speaking through them. But the loons are actually symbols of the survivors, who are the real ghosts, still looking for their lost loved ones. There is no sign from the dead. The only sign that they were ever there is the mournful wailing of those still alive, which marks both the dead's former presence as well as their current absence. </div><div><br /></div><div>At the end, Emeline's former presence and current absence is replaced by Libby mourning over the newer absence of the drifter. Meanwhile, there is a new presence, that of the just-arrived campers, that feels to her like a menace. Maybe it's because the new campers, which were like a new puppy to get over the lost dog to her parents, have arrived to her before she's ready.</div><div><br /></div><div>If this were a typical Hollywood movie, the presence of the wise, older-but-still-somehow-not-a-sexual-predator drifter would have healed Libby enough to allow her to honor her sister by passing on her love for Emeline to the campers. The final scene would be Libby doling out the love in the parking lot to the new children, perhaps looking wistfully off as she sees the drifter walking down the road in the distance. Instead, our final scene is Libby cowering in the Drifter's shack, praying for any kind of illness that will give her an excuse to not meet these kids. She isn't yet done looking for her lost loved ones, and she's not willing to replace them. </div><div><br /></div><div>When the drifter first brought up his lost ones to Libby in the canoe, he was sick for a few days after. It's possible this sickness was the poison of losing his loved ones leaving him at last. So while we don't see Libby totally healed, I don't think we should completely ignore her self-evaluation that the drifter's presence has made her stronger than she'd been. Her sickness--or wish for it--is a sign she's ready for the next stage in healing. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-14503547835398883602023-10-20T17:36:00.003-04:002023-10-20T17:36:10.934-04:00I mean, if you say so: "His Finest Moment" by Tom BissellMy first and most enduring reaction to "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the third story in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, is to recall "Post" by Alice McDermott from last year's BASS, and for all the worst reasons. Like "Post," "His Finest Moment" seems to me to be inspired by a type of story that dominated the news for a few years, one that probably every short story writer during that time took on in some way. (<a href="https://www.marylandliteraryreview.com/fiction/collision/" target="_blank">Here's my effort</a>.) "Post" was a failure to me because it did nothing to distinguish itself from the thousands of other COVID-19 stories that went out, and Bissell's story, at least on the surface, seem an awful lot like just one of many "Me Too" stories. It doesn't do anything that would make the reader think differently the next time some famous and beloved man is taken down by accusations of sexual assault. It's sort of a formulaic, ripped-from-the-headlines morality tale, full of cliches: the upset and betrayed spouse, the girl about to lose all respect for her father, the plucky and intrepid reporter getting to the heart of the story.<div><br /></div><div>Unlike "Post," it's at least mercifully short and written at a pace where the momentum never slows. It's clearly a paint-by-the-numbers done by a master, but it's still paint-by-the-numbers. I tried very hard to look at this story in some way that would make me understand what Zyzzyva saw in it to publish it to begin with or what BASS saw in it to second that motion by putting it among the year's best, but I have failed. </div><div><br /></div><div>The story is about a writer who likes to include morally complicated characters in his novels, although the stories themselves aren't formally complex. The writer ends up mirroring his own characters' moral ambiguity in his own life, becoming a rake. Among his many escapades is one particularly shameful, alcohol-fueled incident involving non-consensual touching and kissing. He knows it's not excusable and he knows there's no way to explain it to his wife or his daughter, although he's trying to in the last hours before the story comes out. Other than a few flashbacks to tell us what he's done and to review how the reporter kept after him until her story was complete, it stays in the moment of the night the story breaks, as he bumbles his way through telling his family what's coming. </div><div><br /></div><div>I kept trying to figure out if the story "His Finest Moment" was an attempt to do what its own main character does, to write a morally complex person. But it's not. The night of his assault, which was the "not his finest moment" that completes the thought of the title, he'd just attended the launch of his very successful latest book. "It just wasn't a night he wanted to hear <i>no</i>, in the end." This isn't the <i>Lolita</i> of Me Too. </div><div><br /></div><div>"His Finest Moment" doesn't do what the author in its narrative does. It doesn't grant its characters complexity. The author is pretty much a bog-standard cliché of a libertine rake. The author congratulates himself for being complicated, but the text of the story he's in does not. And that's likely the point. The story seems to want to deromanticize the solitary author, depraved in the name of his art. It's the anti-Lolita. The man is a sexual predator and not worthy of ennobling by crediting him with complexity. He might seem complex, but "formally," he's not. </div><div><br /></div><div>This treatment of sexual predators kind of mirrors a shift in moderate leftist thinking on this in the last ten years. It used to be that conservatives were the ones to say that if someone rapes a woman, he should be castrated or murdered. Liberals were sometimes wont to say that you had to look at how predators themselves had often been abused or how they had mental illnesses or generally, how it was more complicated than conservatives thought. But liberals have simplified their thinking on sex crimes. They're not calling for castration and the death sentence, maybe, but they are unwilling to let powerful men off the hook when it comes to maintaining their careers in the public spotlight. We've come to accept that there is no excuse for sexual assault. It's not complicated. </div><div><br /></div><div>Which--okay. I agree with that change. And I can see that the form of the story follows the function. It's a simple story that tells a simple truth. If this had appeared in the <i>Maryland Literary Review</i>, I'd have thought it was more than good enough to be there and that the writer had a gift for keeping the momentum of a story moving. I'd have hoped the writer had tried other, more ambitious things. But I don't really see this as a great story, one worthy of coming back to over and over. The effect, I think, is supposed to be something like that of all morality tales: by watching the main character go through the painful process of knowing he's destroyed his family and his fortunate career, men should contemplate the wages of sin and not repeat those sins themselves. That's useful, I suppose, but I didn't need a story by a talented author to make me consider this. If I'd ever dreamed of putting unwanted hands on a woman, the last ten years of news headlines would already have scared me straight. (I haven't, by the way. I'm chicken about even approaching women. I've had sex with two women in my life, both of whom I married.) </div><div><br /></div><div>This won't go down as one of those BASS stories I really actively dislike, like "Post" or "<a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2020/11/missing-winning-dunk-apartment-by-tc.html" target="_blank">The Apartment</a>" by T.C. Boyle. It's an okay story, and if BASS editors say they love it, well, if you say so. Maybe the real reason I'm not in love with it is because it violates what Peter Rabinowitz called a "convention of notice." That is, in a BASS story, you kind of expect stories to be packed full of things you only notice after coming around to them again on a second or third reading. Certainly, "Do You Belong to Anyone," the story before this in the collection, met that convention. A few years ago, Mary Gaitskill's "<a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-return-of-literary-court-this-is.html" target="_blank">This is Pleasure</a>" met that convention in spades with her MeToo-ish short story. Maybe my whole objection here is nothing more than me being a guy who tries to read BASS in a way where I notice things and then write cleverly about them. A story like this doesn't give me the chance. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-31610892117861672672023-10-19T19:59:00.001-04:002023-10-23T04:41:12.906-04:00Complicated by ambivalence: "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam<p>I think it's fair to say that "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam puts a lot of demands on a regular reader, one who isn't heavily invested in literary fiction. It's not that it's terribly hard to follow what's going on, but the tone of the story--which is actually the opening to her novel, <i>Hangman</i>-- isn't one that's designed to make turning the page easy. The story announces early on that it's full of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, and the style lends itself to that. That's artistically honest, but it means a retired engineer in Sacramento reading the story for an adult enrichment class might struggle with it. I'm going to argue, though, that although its feeling is kind of similar in places to the infamously self-indulgent and pretentious movie <i>The Brown Bunny</i>, with a traumatized character unable to feel who travels bleary-eyed and emotionless through a landscape, "Do You Belong to Anybody" is a satisfying story. </p><p>Let's start, as I sometimes do when a story hides its own plot a bit, with a very prosaic and artless retelling of the "what" of it. While this might be taking what was done very skillfully and artfully and turn it into something bland, I think that a reader, armed with the simpler history, can go back in and more fully enjoy the verbally richer version.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikg4EqgqSzhDSK1bWPO2hclSxlm98KlT0XY6_viHJi-Wqv-B9lBJFkNpmr93iQ7jX8GlXbwhXL7GMonrtDeH6PHSUid5VN7ODpQQ4NCrEUqquVKJnLXPDDu94FhTuPo6tBZHmBLSYcT0h1Za02_4DnXZW9e-YSJhmof3AYhoqZB6QfLYwryb-Xnz1s8yk/s290/bb.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="174" data-original-width="290" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikg4EqgqSzhDSK1bWPO2hclSxlm98KlT0XY6_viHJi-Wqv-B9lBJFkNpmr93iQ7jX8GlXbwhXL7GMonrtDeH6PHSUid5VN7ODpQQ4NCrEUqquVKJnLXPDDu94FhTuPo6tBZHmBLSYcT0h1Za02_4DnXZW9e-YSJhmof3AYhoqZB6QfLYwryb-Xnz1s8yk/s1600/bb.jpeg" width="290" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We've been through worse, people. Hang in there.</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The plot reworked for non-English majors</h3><p>Two brothers, sons of a wealthy landowner, are living in Ethiopia at what I believe is the end of the reign of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie" target="_blank">Haile Selassie</a>, around 1974. Sometime after the takeover of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derg" target="_blank">Derg</a>, the quasi-Marxist organization that replaced Haile Selassie, confiscated their land, one of the brothers, the unnamed narrator of the story, goes to fight them by joining one of the armed groups opposing them, perhaps the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_People%27s_Liberation_Front" target="_blank">Tigray People's Liberation Front</a> or one of the other regional liberation fronts. This brother is captured by the Derg and put in prison to await execution. While in prison, many of his comrades are put to death, and his son is born. His wife brings the son to see the father in prison. The son is named "Revolution." </p><p>Somehow, the fighter brother does not die, but when he leaves prison some time in the early 1980s, he also leaves the country. Perhaps he is too traumatized to remain, perhaps his life is still in peril (the Derg won't be overthrown for another ten years or so)--we aren't told. But he never comes back. For twenty-six years, he remains in the United States, where he drives a taxi cab like so many other members of the Ethiopian diaspora. He also gets remarried. Meanwhile, the brother who stayed out of the fighting takes care of the abandoned son and wife, but he develops health conditions that are hard to treat. The non-rebel brother called the exile brother for years asking for money to help with his condition. Exile brother did not seem to help much. Eventually, the brother who stayed dies, and the exile brother returns to Ethiopia for the funeral. His wife has helped him pack and made all his travel arrangements for him. While on his way to the funereal, he happens to overhear his brother's son retelling his whole story. The narrator's nephew doesn't appreciate the narrator's sacrifices in joining the revolution; instead, he hates the narrator for abandoning his family.</p><p>There is a possibility I have it wrong. There have been many cab drivers' strikes in Addis Ababa, so that's an unreliable way to date the story, but I'm pretty sure about this being generally correct. If so, he's back in Ethiopia somewhere between 2006 and maybe 2010. That would make sense with the "America having some economic issues now" thoughts of the taxi driver the narrator encounters. It's the only thing that fits, timewise. </p><p>Of course, the story doesn't actually ever say it's Ethiopia. It doesn't make any of this simplified version overt, and you'd have to know something about Ethiopian history, as by wild fate I sort of do, to pick all this out. Otherwise, it's just a story about "some place in Africa," which is, unfortunately, the way some critics have read it. One <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/hangman-turns-the-novel-of-migration-upside-down?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=yewnorker%2Fmagazine%2FScience+%26+Tech" target="_blank">review of Hangman </a>even suggests that reading Ethiopia into it might be counter to the novel's purpose. Which on one level, I sort of understand--the story doesn't name anyone or any place, and seems to invite as much ambiguity about place as the narrator feels about everything. Still, all of the details fit a history of Ethiopia.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Why no names? </h3><p>The story's style is aggressively blank. In the first few lines, the narrator violates that time-honored rule of unimaginative editors everywhere and uses passive voice several times: "I...was told"..."arrangements had been made"... "my clothes had been packed"..."jacket...was handed to me" and so on. </p><p>In real life, passive voice is used when we want to hide the subject. For example, if I broke something my mom cared about, and she asked what happened, I might say, "It got broken" rather than "I broke it." There's something similar going on here. It so happens that it's the narrator's wife who's being elided here, because, as we later find, she's the one who packed his clothes and made his arrangements. We might think that the narrator had something against his wife that made him want to keep her out, but we soon find that no names are used anywhere in the narrative. We don't get the name of the country he's going to, the names of any of his relatives, the names of any of the people he meets, not even the name of the former president who founded a charity that operates in Ethiopia (Clinton, I presume). Even the radio does not "care to identify" the occupation of a woman in an accident. </p><p>There is one exception, perhaps. The narrator recalls a story of two women who were his passengers in his cab once. They did not pay the full fare, and when he asked for the rest of the money, one called him the N word. It wasn't his name, of course, and even hearing it confused him, but it was an attempt at a name. In retaliation, he locked one of the passengers in the car and drove her back to where he had picked them up. Almost the only thing that can stir our emotionless narrator to action is to be called by a name, even a name that is not his. </p><p>The narrator prefers a nameless state because a name indicates a specific something, and the narrator prefers vagueness. A name also indicates belonging, and the narrator resists "belonging to anyone," in the term of the title. </p><p>He is, above all, ambivalent. He shows no preferences for one food over another, and is sometimes unaware of his own physical inhabiting of his own body. When the passenger next to the narrator on the plane complains that his own life has been "complicated by ambivalence," he thinks this makes him different from the narrator and, really, from anyone who has to work for a living. The passenger thinks he suffers from ennui because he has nothing he really needs while most people might struggle for a living but at least know why they're struggling. In reality, the narrator is suffering from something similar. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">From ambivalence to preference</h3><p>There is a break in the ambivalence, however. Once on the plane, the language changes from English to "our destination's national language," most likely Amharic. When a flight attendant asks the narrator what he wants to drink, he can't answer because he doesn't have any preference. She then changes languages and he suddenly realized he wants coffee. </p><p>In Ethiopia there are over forty languages spoken. Most people have at least two languages, one that they speak at home and then the national language of Amharic. I think what has happened is that the attendant first asks him in Amharic, and then when she switches to his home language, maybe Oromo or Tigrinya or something else, he suddenly remembers what he likes. Perhaps the use of the language he grew up with brought back memories from before his trauma, memories that allowed him to find a human inside himself with wants. Soon after, she asks again if he wants sugar, and not only does he say he does, but he finds it "delicious." Later on, when he goes to an Internet cafe, he doesn't even have to wait to be asked to know he wants a macchiato. They don't have it, but at least he knows what he wants. The possibility of overcoming ambivalence is dangled before the reader. </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The four dialogues</h2><p>Most of the structure of the story is built around four dialogues, three of which the narrator participates in and one that he overhears. In two of the three dialogues he participates in, there is an interrupting narrative. In the first case, it's a movie that the narrator watches on his seat mate's device. In the second, it's the narrator himself recalling a story from when he drove a cab in the U.S. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Dialogue 1</h3><div style="text-align: left;">The first dialogue is with the man on the plane who thinks he's unfortunate to have everything he wants, so much so that he can't even muster lust for his mistress. This conversation is interrupted a few times by the attendant asking about coffee and sugar, and then, after the narrator struggles to sympathize with the man, the man begins to watch a movie on his device. The narrator watches alongside.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's some type of artsy film about a man who wanders a cityscape asking people if they belong to anybody. He starts by asking people on a street corner, and then he begins to wander the city in search of people to ask. When he runs into obstacles, he just keeps going, finally climbing a building and falling off. At this point, the DVD player goes blank, and the narrator realizes the man next to him is dead. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">There are two things about this movie that stand out to me. First, it's a doubly and even triply indirect or vicarious experience for the narrator. It's a movie, so that's one level of indirectness, as watching or reading any story involves an audience experiencing somebody's else's lived reality. But it's technically the movie of the guy next to him, which he's just watching out of the corner of his eye. Since it wasn't the narrator's choice to put the movie on, he could claim that he's not really "watching a movie" in the way we normally mean it. So if the movie is good or bad or objectionable, it's not the narrator's fault that he chose it. Third, at one point in the movie, the character in it is himself watching a movie, in fact a pornographic one. I suppose this counts as a type of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_abyme#:~:text=In%20Western%20art%20history%2C%20mise,suggests%20an%20infinitely%20recurring%20sequence." target="_blank">mise-en-abyme</a>, a sort of picture-within-a-picture or art-within-art effect, as when Hamlet watches a play within the play <i>Hamlet</i>. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The effect of it is that the narrator, who is unable to feel anything, is permitted to feel indirectly through this triple filter. The man who, as his nephew will put it, "pretended...that like an angel he had no relation to anyone," is able to face the question "Do you belong to anyone?" This is a question he's been running from for twenty-six years, and now he has begun, at least indirectly, to confront it. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">When the plane disembarks, people start to offer their condolences to the narrator for the dead person next to him. Maybe they assume that they are related because the flight crew covered up the man's head, so they can't see that these are just two people who happened to sit together. They don't "belong" to each other. In any event, the narrator finally receives the condolences he's had coming to him for a long time, but when they finally come, they are misplaced. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Dialogue 2</h3><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The narrator takes a cab to the bus station and ends up talking with the driver. The driver reminds the narrator of a younger, better-looking version of himself. The driver, like the hero of the movie he has just partly watched, has to navigate a cityscape. Unlike the hero, though, he can't just go through obstacles. Instead, he has to continually go around them in new ways, as the obstacles themselves seem to keep moving. During his conversation with the driver, the driver does not believe the narrator is a cab driver in America, because the driver believes everyone in America gets rich. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This scene with the taxi driver could maybe be seen as another form of mise-en-abyme, because the narrator is seeing himself reflected in the driver. But it's not an infinite repetition, because the narrator has a difficult time getting the driver to see the himself in the narrator. This all has a bearing on the dialogue that nearly closes the story, the one the narrator overhears between two people in which one person, his nephew, argues that history is cyclical. We've already seen a few examples of cyclicality and repetition in the mise-en-abyme of first two dialogues, but perhaps there are limits to the repetition. It's ambiguous, like the narrator is himself when he cannot decide which man he agrees with in the argument.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I've already commented on the significance of the flashback story the narrator tells the driver of is own adventures in taxi driving. It's the only time in the whole story in which the narrator overcomes his ambivalence and takes decisive action. Except, maybe, for re-discovering that he likes coffee and sugar. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The narrator discovers he has lost his luggage. Does this mean he has been forced to let go of the past he was carrying with him? Will he overcome his trauma and its attendant ambivalence? </div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Dialogue 3</h3><div style="text-align: left;">The narrator meets an aid worker from the <Clinton?> Foundation on the bus to his destination, which is somewhere many hours' ride from the capital in Addis Ababa. Here, we start to get details of the narrator's life, but even those come grudgingly. He doesn't want to answer the aid worker's questions about his family, but he does mostly because he can't think up a lie. To the reader, his answers might even seem more evasive then they are revealing, but in the final dialogue, the whole story, more or less, will come together, and we will learn that everything he told the aid worker was true.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In the context of the final debate between someone who argues that history is doomed to repeat itself because of human greed and weakness and another man who argues that progress is possible, although difficult and never final, this third dialogue might itself be seen as an argument for the possibility of progress. At the end of it, for one thing, they have actually made it to his destination. For another, he's started to face his past, albeit involuntarily. It's possible at this point that the narrator will be able to achieve some sort of catharsis. Maybe he will meet the family he abandoned at the funeral and make amends? </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The overheard dialogue</h3><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">But no, it's not to be. Instead, the narrator happens to overhear two men at a cafe arguing about world history, and is forced to listen as his own story is told. It's the second time the narrator has indirectly been told a story, and this one's retelling his own. Cyclical history seems to be reasserting itself, and with it, the narrator also returns to his ambivalence, his avoidance of conflict. He flees the scene just as he is being invited to join the two speakers.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">As he leaves, he complains that even if you've already suffered greatly, there's no guarantee you won't suffer more. It's the second time he's worried about guarantees, the first being when he noted that "even a guarantee was unreliable, as anything could happen between the present and the future, including death." </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">There are, at the end, nothing but cycles in the story, and even the apparent progress is undone, just as the man scaling the buildings in the overseen movie only ends up falling to the ground. Does the narrator belong to anyone at the end? He's steadfastly refused to name anyone, including his son, his brother, and the wife who arranged his whole trip for him and without whom he can't find his blood pressure medicine. Although he's shown occasional capacity for action, it is eventually swallowed up by ambivalence, or at least "complicated" by it. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This is, perhaps, the inevitable fate of the person who refuses the "comforts of complicity," as the nephew puts it, who faces "being tortured, or imprisoned, or separated from one's family." The narrator is viewed as a bad man by his family at the end, although he, unlike his brother, did the noble thing in putting the needs of his family above the needs of society. The nephew, rather cynically, holds that sacrifices only matter if they achieve success. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The funny thing is that if I'm right about the political situation being referred to in the story, the man did have a role in success. The TPLF and its allies did overthrow the Derg. He is visiting Ethiopia more than fifteen years after the fall of the Derg, when the TPLF that overthrew it is already beginning to annoy Ethiopians itself. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Given that the TPLF (technically, the EPRDF, but the TPLF always dominated the coalition in these days) that played such a key role in liberating the country was beginning to wear out its welcome, it's no wonder sacrifice seems pointless. Given how it seems that human malice always comes back, and how sacrifice never seems to achieve the hoped-for end, how could one not be ambivalent?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Three after-the-fact digressions</h3><div style="text-align: left;">I've treated this like a short story, because that's how it appeared in "The Paris Review" and in BASS. I'm sure it takes on a different meaning as the start of a novel, but since I'm reviewing BASS and not the novel, I've treated it the way it appeared. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Secondly, I comment every year on how many stories in BASS aren't set in America, how they require the reader to have a rather deep understanding of political and geographical settings elsewhere that, frankly, I doubt most readers have. Maybe it's possible to appreciate this story without knowing the exact historical setting, but reading it the way I did made me feel like some of my readings last year, such as the one I did for <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-opposite-of-history-mr-ashoks.html" target="_blank">"Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjina Sathian</a>, may have missed the mark. I really doubt that most American commentators do a good job reviewing work set in foreign countries. They'll treat a story that is obviously--to anyone who knows Ethiopia--set in Ethiopia as sort of a generic tale of sub-Saharan African. But that's really because Americans can't tell one African country from another. So I'm very skeptical of professional critics commenting on stories like this. That includes me on many stories. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Finally, I'd like to note something about coffee. <a href="https://www.nescafe.com/in/understanding-coffee/coffee-history#:~:text=Ethiopia%20is%20widely%20considered%20to,goat%20herder%2C%20around%20800%20AD." target="_blank">Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee</a>. If you're a coffee lover and you've never had coffee out of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebena" target="_blank">jebena</a>, you need to correct that right now. I have often been told by coffee snobs that I am not a real coffee drinker because I don't drink it black. But let me tell you, the majority of Ethiopians don't drink it black, either. For the most part, they love to put as much milk and sugar in it as they can. So if any uppity coffee drinker gives you a hard time for seasoning up your gross bean juice, let them know that the real coffee drinkers don't drink it black, either. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-69407512125477816932023-10-17T06:56:00.004-04:002023-10-17T07:06:23.208-04:00Balancing the social ledger: "Tender" by Cherline BazileThere are at least three meanings of the word "tender" I can think of, and all of them play a role in the short story "Tender" by Cherline Bazile, the first entry in the 2023 "Best American Short Stories" collection. The most-used meaning is more or less synonymous with "sensitive," as in "I twisted my ankle and now it's kind of tender." That's the meaning that gets overtly mentioned in the story, when Eden protests to her best friend Fatima that Fatima is braiding her hair too tight. "You know I'm tender-headed," she says. If Eden--an ironic name if ever there was one, because he life is no paradise--is tender, she's entitled. She's poor-ish, she's an immigrant child in a place where that hurts her social standing, and, most importantly, she suffers physical abuse at the hands of her mother. So that's one meaning. <div><br /><div>The second meaning is related, but in a more positive and active sense. It's the meaning that shows up in words like "tenderness," where it means something like "kindness." Eden is craving this kind of tenderness, and she envies Fatima for her supply of it from a boy they both like and, more importantly, from Fatima's mother. One tenderness the story itself shows Eden is that it does not render a scene of violence for the reader to witness, but in Eden's life, she's lacking it badly. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The third meaning is one we don't use much in everyday English, but it leaped out to me about halfway through. It's the one that means "to offer," as in "tender a contract offer" or "tender a resignation." After Eden's hair braiding at Fatima's house--which Fatima's mother helps with--is interrupted by the arrival of Fatima's father, leading to an argument, Fatima takes Eden home. Fatima tries to seek sympathy from Eden--to seek tenderness, that is--but Eden doesn't want to give it. Eden refuses to grant Fatima the right to be unhappy with her home life, because, Eden insists, arguments aren't as bad as getting hit. Later, reflecting on this, Eden recalls how Fatima had "gone frigid in the car, how she wanted my sympathy without ever offering hers."</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Relationship ledgers</h3><div><br /></div><div>Eden seems to think sympathy should be reciprocal. It's almost transactional, to use a word now much abused, but which I nonetheless think fits here. Eden thinks not only that she shouldn't have to give sympathy (or tenderness, perhaps) without receiving some in return, but that the level of sympathy one receives should be equal to the level of hardship one faces. Since Eden thinks her life is much worse than Fatima's, she thinks she should receive more sympathy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Once I realized this, I started to see a lot of other transactional philosophies at play in the story. </div><div><br /></div><div>1) Eden's mother believes she could get the best of transactions, that when she calculated what she got for what she gave, she should come out ahead. When her mother sees the scarf on Eden's head that Fatima's mother loaned to her, she says, disapprovingly, that she bets "she bought it for one hundred dollars. I could have found it at a yard sale for five." </div><div><br /></div><div>2) The white people in the story show two different philosophies. On the one hand, they believe the world is set up in such a way that needs will be met. That's why they push Fatima and Eden into a friendship (the only two black kids in school are surely meant to be together) and why they also think the mutual blackness of Eden and Chris, the only black boy in school, is "sufficient cause for a wedding." Because life has taught them that most of their needs will be met, they believe the universe works like that for everyone. They have a lot of "of course it's that way" assumptions, and when they calculate the plusses and minuses of social interactions, they do not doubt that they are right. Transactions are not do-or-die for them, because they assume there's enough of everything to go around.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there is also a sense in which the white kids also believe in retribution for bad transactional behavior. When one white girl confesses to stealing earrings from Walmart, she apes the language of social justice to justify it. "I don't even feel bad about it," she says, because "they treat their workers poorly." </div><div><br /></div><div>To some extent, both Fatima and Eden are being influenced by these kids. Whether that influence is good or bad isn't clear, but at the end, I think that at least the results of the first kind of thinking might be healthy for Fatima at least. </div><div><br /></div><div>3) Fatima, who has recently taken to courting friendships with the white kids in school, occasionally mirrors their belief in reciprocity: "If someone doesn't give a fuck about you, don't give a fuck about them. Easy." However, her more frequent attitude seems to be that she should give more than she takes. Eden imagines that this is so Fatima can stay ahead in some competition they have going between them. Putting words in Fatima's mouth, Eden assumes that Fatima thinks the reasons she doesn't like having Fatima do her hair is that she "thinks I'm embarrassed because I can't pay her." And we as readers are tempted to believe Eden when Fatima sets up an ice skating party for kids at school and insists on Eden coming, even though it means Fatima will have to pay for it. We assume, with Eden, that Fatima is using her relatively better financial situation to demonstrate power over Eden. </div><div><br /></div><div>This assumption is stronger when we realize that Fatima is a good skater, that she is effortlessly gliding around the rink with the boy she and Eden both like while Eden keeps falling down with Chris. We think Fatima has orchestrated the whole thing in order to make Eden feel bad for being poor and to look foolish in front of others. But the ending undoes this whole assumption, both for Eden and for the reader.</div><div><br /></div><div>What kind of transactional ledgers does Eden keep? Well, she's kind of like her mother, believing she should get more than she gives, but with tenderness, not money. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Symbiosis</h3><div><br /></div><div>There is a whole other type of transactional model mentioned in the story, one that has a completely different way of calculating gains and losses. It's symbiosis, a relationship in which both parties gain something. It may not be an equal gain for both sides, but both sides get enough to think that they have profited from the deal. Although when it's mentioned, Eden is announcing that she's abrogated the symbiosis ("I've unhinged myself from our symbiotic relationship"), it's clear that this is what Eden longs for. Moreover, she kind of can't avoid it. When Eden falls on the ice at one point, she looks back to realize Fatima has fallen, too. "What happens to one happens to the other," she muses. "As if our bodies were bound together." Symbiosis here goes beyond simply a mutually beneficial relationship to a more literal meaning of the roots of the word. They are "living together" in the sense that they are almost drawing air with the same lungs. </div><div><br /></div><div>If Eden thinks that this symbiosis, this inextricable link, is forced, it's also something she very clearly longs for. The final words of the story reflect this longing, as she imagines having a mother like Fatima's, one who would "have time to do my hair, wrap me in her greasy legs, so that when she moved, I did too." </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">The twist (the story kind, not the hair kind) </h3><div><br /></div><div>Eden doesn't quite achieve this kind of intimacy, this tenderness, but her friend Fatima is at least the key to helping her to realize more fully that she wants it. As Fatima is taking Eden home from the ice skating outing, they stop at Subway. Eden has never eaten there before, and Fatima walks her through how to order in a surprisingly sweet moment. As they eat together, Fatima finally tells Eden what it is that's been bothering her about Eden the whole time. The story opened with Eden announcing that her best friend "doesn't like me much." We are led throughout the story to think the problem is Fatima, but at the end, we realize that Fatima had a good reason not to embrace Eden more fully.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fatima has just told the boy they both like that her father has another family. Eden thinks she should feel sympathy, but she only feels stupid she didn't already know. When she apologizes at Subway for not having been a good friend, Fatima complains that Eden acts "like me having a bad day is a personal affront to (Eden)." Suddenly, looking back at the story, we can see that Fatima is right. Not everything is about winning a game to Fatima. She simply had her own shit, and with Eden, whose longing for tenderness is so acute she cannot countenance it going to others, she couldn't get any sympathy. It was always a victim Olympics. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Will Eden be okay?</h3><div><br /></div><div>Eden can be forgiven for not understanding symbiotic relationships, or the way in which tenderness isn't a thing you get more of by failing to give it away. She's learned this from her mother, who is as stingy about affection as she is about paying for head scarves. Eden thinks at one point that it's "easy to feel like it's not a competition when you're winning." Since she's been losing both financially and emotionally her whole life, it feels like a competition to her. But I think there's hope for her. She claims that she's learning from Fatima. In fact, she claims that Fatima is teaching her "everything." The final moments of the story, in which Eden most openly expresses to herself her longing for tenderness and intimacy, are perhaps hopeful. Just as the scene in Subway revealed to the reader that Fatima wasn't really calculating and cold the whole time, it seems to have also opened up other possibilities for Eden in human interactions besides the need to come out ahead. Eden has hopefully gotten the point of her own story. </div></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-41872651409248977042023-10-09T08:21:00.004-04:002023-10-09T08:21:54.286-04:00Revisiting literary theory twenty years after grad school<p>Twenty years ago at this time, I was limping to the end of my Master's in English. Although I'd been accepted into the Ph.D. program, by the final semester of getting my M.A., I had already turned them down and wanted only to collect a piece of paper to document the poor life choice going to graduate school had been before heading off in search of the elusive "real job." </p><p>I'd probably gotten into literature in the first place for the same reasons many people do. Literature had offered to me, in the words of Harold Bloom, a chance to "enlarge a solitary existence." Far from enlarging it, though, graduate school seemed to make the solitariness more solitary. At the heart of this was something called literary theory. </p><p>For most people who never get further into literary studies than an introductory survey class in college or maybe even the survey courses of high school, they might think that what literature students do is what your Eighth grade teacher taught you to do when you were reading <i>Of Mice and Men</i>. You read a bit about the author's life, then you read the story, then you list the main characters, the conflict, the setting, and maybe write a few paragraphs about theme. If there's any difference between what English majors do and what high school English students do, most people would probably guess it's a matter of degree. Say, you read a whole biography about the author instead of a few paragraphs, and then you follow up <i>Of Mice and Men </i>by reading more Steinbeck, until you're something of an expert on his work. Then you move on to the next canonical author. </p><p>When I picked English as my major as an undergraduate (my fourth major in my first four semesters of college), I think that's also what I assumed it was. I guessed that you took survey courses up to the 300/400 level, when you started zeroing in on the authors you liked the most and got to take whole courses in them. But that whole time, I assumed that reading seriously meant mainly reading for things like setting, character, narrative arc, theme, and maybe, if you wanted to get a little crazy, trying to demonstrate how the work reflected social beliefs of the time of its creation. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Theory ruins Eden</h3><p>Imagine my shock, then, when I took a 300-level course in Baroque literature that spent far more time talking about Saussure, Derrida, de Man, and Foucault--theorists who wrote from the late 19th century to the late twentieth--than it did talking about, say, Pedro Calderon or other writers from the actual Baroque period. We got passages from these theorists that had been extracted from larger works, and I often could only vaguely guess what they were talking about. Maybe it was because I needed to read the whole work instead of just an extract, maybe it was because it was in translation, but it seemed like they were either making up words on every page or using words in ways I didn't recognize. </p><p>They seemed to be saying that language was so slippery that nobody could ever really understand each other, but also that language was so iron-clad it could be used as a tool of the oppressor. To the extent I could understand them, it seemed like the things they said were either intentionally provocative and false--early versions of internet trolls--or so obvious, I didn't understand why they went through all those mental gymnastics to arrive at such commonplace conclusions. My professor, in any event, seemed to think this stuff was the most fascinating thing she'd ever encountered, and she looked at literature not for plot, structure, and theme, but for all the circumlocutions of language these theorists claimed made up all human discourse. </p><p>It seemed to me like reading literature for everything except the reasons that made it worth doing in the first place, but once I became aware of theory's existence, I realized it was all over the study of literature. In fact, anyone who was considered a serious scholar was only talking about theory. Emotionally and cognitively engaging a text on a human level was the height of squareness. </p><p>Because everyone seemed to treat it with so much seriousness, I tried to learn about it. My undergraduate school didn't have an "Introduction to Lit Theory" course, so I tried reading books about it. One I remember actually finishing was <i>Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: an Introduction</i>. Someone had recommended it to me, and really, there weren't a whole lot of other choices. Eagleton was a Marxist, and he gave the entirety of the history of literary theory from a Marxist perspective, which meant it wasn't always a very unbiased way of learning about what some schools of theory believed, but I at least found Marxist approaches refreshingly grounded. They were about something in the real world I could understand. To this day, I'm still much more sympathetic to Marxist theory and other social-minded theories, such as gender theory or queer theory or Afro-American theory, than I am to the linguistically-oriented Continental theorists. (Of course, to the extent that some socio-centric theorists rely on the language centric ones, I hate them, too.) </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBjRtu1gl0DJNXI-ZRJZ1_glm9UFNS0VIcMqCOWsSQh5vsPq7dwM0YolTTCsKEHXaXpQDpASaAOgtQGAn0BEX3nlaTfWXlG0OlISr9iOgF2B8ffLVHFQSFBs0cge8ls1aSMYW8gHiR1licn2t2tJ-i-ked0Pp7acUdEECBx2orxWXbkaNL2ET5Bgr15k8/s600/honhonhon.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="401" data-original-width="600" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBjRtu1gl0DJNXI-ZRJZ1_glm9UFNS0VIcMqCOWsSQh5vsPq7dwM0YolTTCsKEHXaXpQDpASaAOgtQGAn0BEX3nlaTfWXlG0OlISr9iOgF2B8ffLVHFQSFBs0cge8ls1aSMYW8gHiR1licn2t2tJ-i-ked0Pp7acUdEECBx2orxWXbkaNL2ET5Bgr15k8/s320/honhonhon.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What I privately imagine every deconstructionist theorist looks like</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>I understood enough about literary theory by the end of undergrad that I did okay on my English literature specific GRE, which was about half theory and half actual literature, but I never felt comfortable with it. In grad school, I often felt unprepared for what we were doing. What annoyed me most was that I didn't really believe most students who were aping the language of theory understood it any more than I did. I thought they were using buzz words the way people in my job now do, to cover over their own inadequacies and as a substitute for real thinking. But I also knew I wasn't a master of the subject enough to call them out. Grad school was a mix between workshops where I wrote stories (which I could no longer write in a natural way, because theory had made me question what a story even was) and literature classes where we mixed theory nobody understood with literature nobody had time to read because we were too busy trying to learn theory. </p><p>I had to decide to either keep diving deeper into something I suspected didn't really have anything to it at the bottom, or I had to start all over in life. I chose to start over. I think I made the right choice. From what I know of what happened to literary theory after I left the academy and the<a href="https://www.full-stop.net/2011/08/01/features/essays/simon-nyi/is-literary-theory-dead/" target="_blank"> "theory is dead"</a> cries that went up a few years after I'd gone away, I might have been just a few years ahead of my time.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Return to theory</h2><p>In the last few years, though, I've sometimes wished I had a little more grounding in theory. I've now written over 100 entries in this blog analyzing short stories, along with a few on novels, movies, or TV shows. Anytime you're trying to examine what a text is doing and how it's doing it, you're kind of delving into theory. Yes, I can get by with my kind of cobbled-together half understanding (and I even sometimes tell myself this is an advantage as I try to be a bridge between an academic reviewer and an everyman reviewer), but I still think I'd benefit from having a better grounding in theory, even if I mostly reject it. </p><p>Ten years after leaving grad school (which is now ten years ago almost to the day), I decided to start writing fiction again. When I did, I tried something I'd never actually done the whole time I'd been a literature/creative writing student: I read a few introductory books on writing. It certainly helped. So I'm doing the same thing now with theory. Since I never had an "Introduction to Theory" class, I'm slowly putting myself through one now. I'm piecing together my own introductory course, one that might take me up to a year to complete, since I'm doing it on my own time and with huge, competing intellectual priorities interrupting. I've been at it about a month or so, and I've already made a couple of discoveries that I think are useful:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>I've learned that my own, private way of <a href="https://litmagnews.substack.com/p/literary-criticism-as-a-secular-spiritual?utm_campaign=comment&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=post" target="_blank">thinking of literature as a replacement for religion </a>isn't really original. Matthew Arnold saw "the great works" as a way of replacing religion, too. Arnold, however, didn't think of this replacement as a private matter, like I do, but a public one. He was concerned that as religion was losing its ability to keep society together, British society would fracture. He proposed inculcating the newly emergent middle classes into the same sort of literary exposure the upper classes had already been doing. By directing their tastes and moral sensibilities, Arnold hoped, the upper classes could maintain their influence. It kind of worked. This is also the birth of what we now know as English literature. There's a reason all that study of plot, character, and theme appeals to me so much and scratches such a similar itch to the one religion used to: because it was designed to do that. It's always good to understand that the ideas one comes up with have probably been thought by someone else, and it's also good to be able to place one's own beliefs in history. I realize my preferred approach was originally meant to be used as a tool of political conservatism, and I therefore am a little bit more circumspect about it.</li><li>Speaking of realizing other people think the same things you thought you came up with on your own, I was already, by the end of grad school, trying to sketch out my own response to language-centric theories that emphasized the futility of communication. I now realize that there was a school of thought all along that was building a philosophy similar to what I was coming up with on my own, except much better. It's called neo-pragmatism. It's favored by a lot of scientists who bother to think about these things, and it particularly appeals to me. One of my books for my self-made theory class is by Richard Rorty, high priest of the school of neo-pragmatism. </li><li>I've also reconsidered my ideas on the intent of the author in relation to the intent of the text and the intent of the reader. Peter Rabinowitz, in particular, has given me some useful vocabulary to think of these things, such as the "authorial audience" and his focus on the importance of conventions in reading and writing. These things will probably subtly change my approach to stories.</li></ul><p><br /></p>Best American Short Stories comes on in a week. I'm going to try for another year of tackling all twenty stories in it. Looking into my medium-term future, I'm eligible to retire in a little over five years. With the way prices of everything are going up, I doubt I'll be able to retire, but it'll be there as an option. In retirement, I might want to make criticism my main outlet (along with my own writing, of course). If so, I kind of need to fill in some gaps in my education in the meantime. The end of the canon as the basis of literary education was very freeing, but it meant that I kind of spent a lot of my time in school doing whatever I found interesting at the time and not getting enough exposure to influential writers I really should know. <p></p><p>I'm also looking into moving the blog to another platform, maybe Substack. I picked Blogger years ago because I'm lazy and it was easy, but I've often regretted that choice since then. I'm no less lazy now, so I might still never move it, but I'm going to force myself to at least do some half-assed looking around. </p><p><br /></p>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-7755620470370288842023-07-01T09:37:00.001-04:002023-07-01T09:37:30.069-04:00"Born in the USA" is fine to play on the day we celebrate the USA being born<p>Last year about this time, a friend of mine told me about how he was prepared to go to war against the DJ playing tunes for his neighborhood's Fourth of July celebration. The DJ had played Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," at the celebration the last few years prior, but for this particular celebration, my friend said had had enough. If the DJ was going to play the song again, my friend was ready to lay into him about how he had obviously never listened to the words to this song, because if he had, he would know it wasn't a patriotic song celebrating America, but a "song about how America was a piece of shit." (Those might not have been the exact words, but they were words to that effect.) Luckily, the neighborhood association intervened, and the song was not played. </p><p>Was my friend right? Is "Born in the USA" a protest song? Is it critical of America, so much that it ought not to be played during the celebration of our nation's birth? On one level, of course he's right. Although many listeners have--perhaps hearing only the chorus and the jubilant guitar refrain--misinterpreted it as a straightforward celebration of pride in being an American, that's not at all what the song is about. It's a song about a Vietnam veteran, returned from war, now finding no work and no future. He is musing about the friends he lost in Vietnam, the pointlessness of military action there, and perhaps the failure of the American dream, at least for him. "I was born in the USA," he thinks, but what has that done for me? </p><p>If it's not a patriotic song, it's certainly been misunderstood as one. A lot. <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/bruce-springsteen-album-born-in-the-usa-ronald-reagan-reelection/" target="_blank">President Ronald Reagan praised the song, apparently thinking</a>, as many of my friends did when I was eleven, that the song was really nothing more than someone shouting out that he was born here because he's just so gosh darn proud of that fact. I'm sure it's played at 4th of July celebrations all over America, and while people who've actually listened to the verses might raise an eyebrow, they probably get why it's being played. <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/03/26/706566556/bruce-springsteen-born-in-the-usa-american-anthem" target="_blank">Springsteen himself has joked</a> that he was glad people misunderstood the song, because it helped make him rich. But he's also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7XLeYMUZY4" target="_blank">played alternate versions</a> of the song that remove the triumphant guitar motif of that even take away the chorus, focusing instead only on the story of the veteran and his trials. </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">What I'm not saying</h2><p>One could make the classic argument that because protest is American, a protest song is therefore patriotic, because it's respecting the American right to protest. I think that's a valid argument 364 days a year, and certainly my friend wouldn't argue that Springsteen shouldn't have the right to sing this song. I'm not even sure my friend thinks it's a bad song, only that it's not appropriate for a Fourth of July celebration. Let's say I agree with him. Criticism can, of course, be not only consistent with patriotism, but an outright patriotic duty. Springsteen apparently wrote the song after interacting with Vietnam veterans' groups, who very much faced situations like the ones described in the song when they came back from the war. In 1984, many of them were still struggling to put their lives together. Of course, Springsteen should write a song about that. But it's legitimate to ask if the one time a year we're supposed to celebrate the country is the right time to play it for large audiences. The Fourth of July is perhaps the last public celebration we have in which we jointly express our common heritage as fellow citizens. So perhaps it matters how we express ourselves at these celebrations. </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Instead, I'm saying this...</h2><p>So I'm not arguing that protest songs or songs that call attention to flaws in society are inherently "patriotic," at least in a way that makes the fit for the Fourth of July. Patriotism, or love for one's country, is something I think I'm inherently suspicious of. It's in the same intellectual neighborhood as nationalism or provincialism. If it's better than those, it's in the sense that a healthy patriotism will remind us that we have a duty to the society we live in. As fiercely individualistic as our society is, we cannot ignore the welfare of our country without all of us suffering. We all have a duty to work for the common good of all. A good patriotic song, the kind that ought to be played on the Fourth of July, will strengthen that sense. </p><p>And here, I think the masses might have the right instinct when they think of the song as patriotic. No matter how much people might ignore the lyrics, I doubt most people are unaware that the song's first words are "Born down in a dead man's town/the first step I took was when I hit the ground." So they at least know it's a song about someone who's been through the school of hard knocks. And I think this is part of the appeal the song has for them. For most Americans, achievement of the American Dream is a little bit elusive. We are all subject to macroeconomic and macropolitical ebbs and flows over which we have no control. When "Born in the USA" came out in 1984, my family was always worried that the steel company my father worked for might lay him off. If it had, my life would have been very different. We've had recessions and pandemics and wars. All of these have affected some people in ways that derailed their dreams and their connection to society. </p><p>And yet, most people are still proud of being American in some way. I think that the persona of the song is, too. The textual evidence from the melody and the chorus, which is belted out with so much gusto, is a little too strong to be overruled by the harsh realities of the verses. In a sense, the persona of the song is saying, "I've been through some serious shit as a result of where I'm from, but it's also made me who I am, and so I claim that as my own. I belong to it and it belongs to me." </p><p>It's not unlike the spirit of a lot of rap songs that both criticize black urban life but also can be sentimental or strangely proud of the realities of that life, because it's what has made the rapper who they are. There are a million songs in this vein, but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2FMq4tRCWA" target="_blank">Nas's "Memory Lane"</a> comes to mind as one good example. To use a lesser-known but more local (to me) example, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9i5oQSi_ss" target="_blank">Tate Kobang</a> is a Baltimore rapper who never pulls punches when describing life in Baltimore, but who also gushes with love for the city. None of these rappers pulls punches when describing the life they grew up with, but they also freely express love for home. They are fiercely "patriotic" about their hometowns. </p><p>That's what "Born in the USA" is. It's a patriotic song for the rest of us, the ones for whom the American Dream is not working out like we'd hoped. As the guy who just moved back in with his parents when his start-up folded during COVID restrictions looks around on the 4th, he might see people for whom the American Dream is working, and he might feel like America isn't for him. He might hear a more unproblematically patriotic song, like Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American," and wonder why everyone seems to be ecstatic about the American experience except him. "Born in the USA" is for him. Whatever Springsteen might have intended, the audience gets a vote about what songs mean, too. Audiences have heard a song about a man for whom being an American did not mean a life of privileges, but he still seems to enthusiastically claim his heritage as an American. They have responded to it. They have felt unexpected joy in the song and in their country. They have felt themselves awakened to the promise of America even while hearing of its failure. They have even felt "patriotism," by which I mean they have a sense that they owe something to America. They, like I, hear the song and perhaps think that if it came to it, they'd be willing to die for this leaky, jury-rigged, held-together-by-duct tape of a republic. </p><p>If most people, or even some people, react to the song in the same way, then it's probably worthy of being played as background to some burgers and beers and fireworks once a year. </p>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-47558165817705535552023-06-18T09:54:00.001-04:002023-06-18T10:13:08.343-04:00Polar Art in the age of Polar Politics: How Disney made a shit movie and knew exactly what it was doing<p>I've never liked Bud Light. I don't drink beer much, and when I do, I usually have to pick something a pure beer drinker would turn their nose up at in order to enjoy it. But we bought some Budweiser recently. It might never get drunk. That's because even though I'm not entirely on board with every talking point from the trans-rights camp, I thought the Budweiser boycott was so over-the-top and so disgusting, I had to help offset the costs Budweiser had incurred somehow. </p><p>Of course, I'm never going to drink enough Budweiser to make up for the loss of its core customers. If you'd asked me a year ago if I'd lament the market loss of Budweiser, I'd have said no. I don't think it tastes very good, and I've never been able to understand why it's the default American lager. I also was never going to be able to support the NFL enough to make up for its loss of fans when some defected over the choice of players to kneel during the national anthem. The cost to the bodies of players makes me an ambivalent fan, and I never watch much other than the playoffs, even though I think football itself is a very compelling game. </p><p>And I would never, ever have dreamed that there'd be a time in my life when I'd end up feeling obliged to defend Disney. If I were asked to think of a stereotypical evil corporation, Disney might be near the top of my list. Not because they're part of a conspiracy to usurp power from world governments, but because they own damn near everything in entertainment and that's just not good for people who want good art. But here I am in the two thousand and twenty third year of this here Christian era, having no choice but to root for them in the mother of all stupid feuds, because...well, I guess because Disney is more on my team now than the other guy down there in Florida. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">A shitty movie I'm forced to root for</h3><p>I went to see the new Little Mermaid last week for a birthday party. The parents booked a theater. I myself have no idea why Disney has been cramming live-action (and by "live-action," I mean almost entirely gaudy CGI) versions of its 90s hits down our throats. Well, I mean, of course I know. It's--to use a phrase nearly a million people on the Internet have already used--a cash grab. (Most of these references differ only in which adjective they attach to "cash grab"--joyless, soulless, cynical, etc.) I really like the parents, though, so we went. There was also, as I'll get into below, another reason to go. </p><p>I haven't seen any of the other recent remakes, so I was willing to at least give this one a shot, but it was worse than I feared. Very early on, I pulled out my phone to look up how long the run time was. It's 45 minutes longer than the original. By fate, my former spouse was a fan of the 90s Disney movies, so I'd seen the original many times. I'm not going to say I loved it, but at least you could say that what it did, it did concisely. </p><p>I don't really want this post to become a review of Little Mermaid, but here are some things I hated about it:</p><p>-The CGI was awful. Somehow, Disney spent 250 million dollars making this thing and managed to make it look like an adaptation of a play that only had three sets in the original production. They didn't know what to do with all that money, and it shows. The people barely look human--or mer-human-- in the underwater scenes. </p><p>-There is very little interesting visual development of the underwater world. For example, during Ariel's first big solo (which doesn't finally appear until like 20 minutes of the movie have gone by, even though it's the setup for the whole conflict), rather than get a lot of wide visuals that both develop the underwater world and give the audience a sense of the breadth of her ambitions, we get an endless series of face closeups. We get it. She looks wistful. Show us something else. As it is, that scene is classic tell-don't-show fallacy. </p><p>-The frequent dark shots were strange. The big number, "Under the Sea," is almost the only color palette we get under water that's not incredibly dark, and then it's over-the-top garish. Ariel no longer comes from a happy world that's troubled by the Sea Witch. She comes from an oppressive world, and it's a wonder why it took falling in love to get her to leave. (I'd include a photo here to show what I mean, but Disney terrifies me, so I'm not going to even try for fair use of their photo.) </p><p>-Did we need Eric to be developed? Part of the reason the show is so long compared to the original is that they decided to develop both Eric, the prince Ariel falls for, and his world. In fact, we see a lot more about the island he comes from than we see about Ariel's underwater world. But one of the things I like about the original is that it's a gender reverse of a lot of children's stories, in which the prince rescues the maiden. Often, the maiden has no real voice, personality, or agency. It doesn't matter what they think, because they're there to be saved. In the original movie, it's the reverse--only Ariel's interior life matters. It was a woman's story talking to women. I can see why someone thought it necessary to let us know why Ariel falls for this guy so much that she's willing to risk it all, but there was far too much bloat with the additions. </p><p>-Sight gags that were just flat. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Colorblind casting</h3><p>I also don't want this to be a post about colorblind casting. If you've never heard of this term, feel free to Google it and lose the rest of your day reading about it. It's a big topic, certainly beyond me to do it justice. There are plusses and negatives to it, and it's not just conservative reactionaries who hate it.<a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/12/9/unpop-opinion-color-blind-casting/" target="_blank"> There are a lot of liberal who aren't fans, either</a>. That's not surprising, because most liberal thought has moved away from espousing color-blindness as a model for racial equality, even though when I was a young person, color blindness was the "woke" position. En Vogue's "Free Your Mind" encouraged us to "be color blind," for example. It's strange to me that there are conservatives who object to colorblind casting, because it probably fits their proposed solutions to racial strife more than it does liberal solutions. </p><p>But because there were people objecting to Ariel only on account of the fact that she was played by black actress and singer Halle Bailey, liberals were pushed into a position of having to defend the show. As <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23357114/the-little-mermaid-racist-backlash-lotr-rings-of-power-diversity-controversy" target="_blank">a Vox article pointed out,</a> it was pretty similar to what happened with Amazon's Tolkien-ish cash grab "The Rings of Power." (One thing Americans did not pay enough attention to, by the way, was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/09/the-little-mermaid-global-backlash-black-ariel" target="_blank">how much Asia resisted a black Ariel</a>. American public discourse probably does not give our country enough credit for not being the most racist place on the planet. But I digress.) </p><p>For the record, I think colorblind casting does make sense in some cases. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/arts/television/hamilton-colorblind-casting.html" target="_blank">There have been some critics who particularly opposed it in the musical "Hamilton</a>," but I think there's a case for that being the right venue for it. "Hamilton" isn't a period piece. It's a musical that's somewhat farcical, albeit still very serious. It's an interpretation of the meaning of America through song. That belongs to all of us, so if you want a black actor to play Jefferson, do it. The same thing with Shakespeare. Our local Shakespeare company has an all-black troupe. It also often casts women or non-binary actors in male parts. Cool. Great. Don't care. It's our common cultural possession. There's room for traditionally cast performances and non-traditional ones, too. As long as somebody is still performing Shakespeare, I'm happy. In "Rings of Power," we were (sort of) in Tolkien's legendarium, which is now nearly as much of a common cultural heritage as Shakespeare, so colorblind casting makes sense there, too. The show sucked, but not because it had black dwarves. Dwarves aren't real, so there can't be a "wrong" color for them. Also, one of the real problems reading Tolkien is how often "black" is used as a synonym for "evil." I have no problem with an activist attempt to mend this flaw. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Intentional and absent-minded uses of color</h3><div>In "Little Mermaid," I think we're in about the same place we are with "Rings of Power." Mermaids aren't real, so there's no wrong color for them. In fact, I kind of liked that all of Ariel's sisters were different races. Since they're supposed to be from the seven seas, it would make sense that each of them has a different outward appearance that mirrors the different qualities of the oceans of the world. Good. </div><div><br /></div><div>But "Little Mermaid" is kind of a story about prejudice. Ariel's father's prejudice toward humans is a direct cause of all the conflict. So maybe it wasn't right to use colorblind casting? In Eric's human island world, he is a white adopted child of a black mother who rules the island. There are a mix of people of color and white people in the island's society. There's nothing wrong with this, but maybe "Little Mermaid" is a story that called for a more intentional use of color in order to heighten the themes relative to prejudice going on. Maybe the mer-people should have been mostly people of color and the land people mostly not? Or vice-versa? </div><div><br /></div><div>It's not of great importance to me. It's a made-up world, so really, they can cast whoever they want anywhere they want, but in the case of an already sloppy movie, colorblind casting felt more like yet another sloppy detail rather than something intentional. The movie's overall inattention to color made it feel like its use of human color was also not terribly thought out, either. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, once there is a backlash specifically aimed at Bailey merely for being a black Ariel, I feel like I have to forget all the reasons I hated the movie and defend it, because as dumb as it was, anti-woke online campaigns are even dumber. Bailey is a very talented singer and and a beautiful young woman, which is about all that's required to play the part. There were ninety-nine reasons to object to the movie, but that wasn't one. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Commerce, politics, and art</h3><div><br /></div><div>A movie like this from a company like Disney ought to unite right and left in our contempt for it, just like liberals and conservatives ought to both agree that Budweiser does not taste good or that Chik-Fil-A has amazing service or that the NFL produces a great product but at a heavy risk to its players. In our political environment, though, even banal choices like our beer become part of political team sports. </div><div><br /></div><div>Disney isn't stupid. Although franchises like the Avengers were <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-avengers-seduced-both-liberals-and-conservatives" target="_blank">cleverly middle-of-the-road in their politics</a>, the company realizes that when it remakes its old movies, there is going to be hate from someone. So they make their choice. Production of Little Mermaid began long before their fight with the governor in Florida, but from here forward, their feud with DeSantis has essentially made it for them. They picked the side that tends to watch more movies. Conservative Christians haven't been letting their kids watch Disney since long before the company first gave health care to same-sex partners of homosexual employees. So if they must choose, that's their choice. </div><div><br /></div><div>My lifetime saw the rise in literary theory of the notion that there is no apolitical art. Even the choice to be apolitical is a political choice. This might be true, but man does not live by the bread of politics alone. Art is a primal human instinct, a reaction to the million inexplicable strange realities of existence that affect us all. Art has also always lived under political stress, from wars to censorship to famine. The current political environment, though, has given us a system in which it is increasingly difficult to market art without a clearly identifiable political belief system to sell it to. The insistence that everything is political has effectively made art, race, and politics the servants of commerce. Have an opinion about police treatment of black people? Great! No matter what the answer is, we know what to sell you!</div><p>Moreover, this arrangement of commerce and politics encourages a kind of art in which shibboleths to the intended audience are more important than the art itself. Whereas "Hamilton" had colorblind casting and was excellent, "Little Mermaid" had colorblind casting and was terrible. So was "Rings of Power." But it didn't matter. These were art decisions made by committees who saw success in one place and tried to imitate it. When they failed to grasp what made it work the first time, they cried foul, knowing it would force half the public to back them. </p><p>Everyone ought to be able to agree that Amazon and Disney are two greedy companies that made garbage products, but because anti-Woke proponents just couldn't control their racism, it made their political opponents have to change their opinions of the products, at least in public. If people really hate seeing people of color cast as characters they've always thought of as white that much, they ought to at least wait to speak up until after they've seen the product. If it's as bad as "Rings of Power" or "Little Mermaid," the crap product will do their work for them. Decrying a fictional creature being played by a person of color, however, just triggers a political survival instinct and means that people like me are going to go out and buy a ticket--along with some movie-related merchandise for the birthday girl--when we might have otherwise stayed home. From Target, just for good measure. </p><p><br /></p>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-8720582841343234062023-05-17T15:24:00.005-04:002023-05-17T15:24:38.290-04:00Writers born and writers madeA friend recently told me a story about his son's cross country team in high school. His son one was of a core group of runners on the team who had worked hard, taken special lessons from coaches brought in to help the team, and gradually brought their times down incrementally throughout the year. About halfway through the year, a kid of Ethiopian heritage joined the team. He'd never trained and hadn't really ever worked out in his life. In his first race, he blew away the team. <div><br /></div><div>I know people <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/06/africa/kenya-runners-win-marathons-trnd/index.html" target="_blank">aren't entirely certain there's a genetic reason</a> Kenyans and Ethiopians win nearly every long distance race, but <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/why-kenyans-make-such-great-runners-a-story-of-genes-and-cultures/256015/" target="_blank">it seems pretty hard to exclude genes as a big part of the story</a>. Certainly, this kid, who was born and raised here and so never got a chance to develop his lungs in the elevation of the Rift Valley, didn't benefit from the other reasons often suggested for why Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate long-distance running. He must have had genetic advantages. </div><div><br /></div><div>It reminded me of <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/books/2015/02/27/21792750/things-i-can-say-about-mfa-writing-programs-now-that-i-no-longer-teach-in-one">an editorial that made a bit of a splash a few years ago</a>, in which a former MFA instructor "finally told the truth" about MFA programs now that he didn't teach at one anymore. The big thing I took away from reading it was that the guy felt that writers were either born with a special something or they weren't, and even in MFA programs, most weren't. You had to be born with it and then develop it early or you were never going to have the stuff. He did admit that you could have the stuff and not develop it if you were lazy, and you could be born without the stuff and still put out something decent if you worked hard, but generally, you had to be born with the right neural wiring and then follow up with the right kind of upbringing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Assuming we limit the editorialist's comments to "high art" fiction, I can't deny he's wrong. I don't think he's right if we are talking about general novel writing. Science fiction writers who are experts in fields of science often write good fiction without having worked their whole lives at it. Same with mystery, crime, fantasy, and romance. But with literary fiction, when I read the smartest lines by an Elizabeth McCracken or Emma Cline or Mary Gaitskill, I think yeah, there's no way I could do that, no matter how long I work at it.</div><div><br /></div><div>That leaves me wondering. My friend is a big believer in nature being a stronger element than nature in success in life. I've lived most of my whole life, though, believing the opposite. I don't think you can do anything if you put your mind to it, but I do think that if you work at something, you will almost always get better at it. And I think that the difference in success in life for most people is simply putting in more than the minimum effort. Maybe that's because I've been around a lot of government employees in my life, so I've become used to the idea that putting in effort will make you stand out, but I've seldom seen hard work go to waste. I'm a big believer in the idea that if you work hard, it will pay off. It may not pay off with everything you hoped it would, but it will pay off.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/39UCSfQwO8E" width="320" youtube-src-id="39UCSfQwO8E"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">Is that enough to keep going on as a writer, though?</h3><div><br /></div><div>That's reassuring for most things in life, but writing is something I want to be one of the best at. I want to be in <i>The New Yorker</i>. I want to be good enough that I could live off being a writer. I want to be remembered for what I've written. I want what I've written to be a comfort to people struggling with life. Anything else is a failure. And at my age, it's a pretty good bet I'm going to end up a failure. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the odds are that I was never going to be good enough. Maybe it's because I started too late. I didn't really develop a focused interest in literature until my 20s, and then I had a family, and I didn't get to serious writing until 40. More likely, though, even if I'd started earlier, I'd never have been good enough. Writing isn't unique in this, of course. Plenty of people who get started on things find out halfway into childhood their dreams will never come true. Writing is just different from sports in that it allows you to harbor fantasies a lot later in life. </div><div><br /></div><div>A lot of writers I know who've had even less success than me tell me they keep going because if they quit, they don't know if they'd be able to keep living. I guess a lot of us are doing things we never imagined we'd be doing for a living, and one way to live with that is to keep telling yourself you've got something else secret going on the side. I'm a little too honest for that, even if lack of honesty might make me happier. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't think it's really possible to live happily. I think it's possible to live for a purpose, and that purpose will keep you centered and fulfilled. But when the thing I'd like to be my purpose isn't really possible, then what does one do?</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Writing as fuck-you</h3><div><br /></div><div>When I was an evangelical as a young man, I used to believe that if it weren't for God, there'd be no point to life. I wondered why non-religious people didn't all kill themselves. Then I became one. The best I could come up with in the meantime was to continue living as an act of defiance. If I'd be put into a meaningless universe, I could continue living and acting as though life did have meaning, if nothing more than as a fuck-you to the mad fate that had placed me here.</div><div><br /></div><div>Over time, I replaced defiance as a raison d'etre with writing as a purpose. If I'm never going to achieve what I'd like to as a writer, though, then maybe it's best to combine the two ideas. Continue living and writing, even though writing is a continuously meaningless act, out of nothing less than defiance. I wasn't born with enough talent? I started too late? Still going to keep writing. </div><div><br /></div><div>The meaning now has to change. It can't be that I'm trying to be Melville. That's gone. It's not going to happen. But I can try to get better. It's disappointing, of course, to have to lower my expectations so much. The good news, though, is that the desire to get better isn't a pipe dream. It's nearly a law that if you work at something, you will get better. Even if there are cosmic speed limits in place for everyone based on things they can't control, nearly everyone can also push just a little bit closer to those limits if they just keep at it. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-73799515228435230752023-03-04T08:31:00.000-05:002023-03-04T08:31:03.283-05:00My own damn storyI've been talking about the stories of others on here for a long time. Today, I thought I'd try something different. I'm going to post a story of my own. This means that this story won't be eligible to be published elsewhere, but I'm okay with that. It occurs to me that even when a story does get published somewhere, it's unlikely many people will read it. I've won a few contests and been published in a few of the "better" journals, and not one person has ever reached out to me to say anything about something I wrote. How much less of a readership can I get from publishing on my blog?<div><br /></div><div>In any case, this story is a 7,400 word allegory, which isn't likely to get published by anyone. A few smaller journals said they liked it and wanted to see other things I'd written, but nobody is going to publish this. But it's an example of the kind of story I wish I'd see more of. When <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-unmagical-magical-realism-of-karen.html" target="_blank">I was critiquing Karen Russell</a> the other day, for example, I was saying that I'd like to see more stories that feel like they were written out of a sense of urgency, rather than because a talented writer found a thing to write about. I'd like slightly unpolished truth rather than beautiful half-truth. That's what this story is. It's the least likely thing I've written to get published, and yet it might be one of my favorite things I've written. Here goes:</div><div><br /></div><div><br />
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">Schneufel
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Des reckoned the
party had already gone on long enough, but it was still too early to leave
without offending the others. It had turned out to be more of a multi-day
convention than a party, although the Wills, Laura and Joe, had distinctly called
it a “party” when they’d invited him. They’d promised an array of absorbing
board games, the kind that would take Des’s mind off questions having to do
with what Joe called the “heartless voids and immensities of the universe,” the
kinds of questions Des’s mind tended to drift to when not engaged in something
else. Friends of the Wills would be there, and Laura and Joe were sure everyone
would be thrilled they’d brought Des along.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He’d
always wondered what the Wills’ house looked like, figured it was sure to be
full of the most wretched kinds of curios he’d ever seen. Would it be ceramic
salt and pepper shakers glazed in the kinds of blues and whites you’d normally
see on Mary in old paintings of the Holy Family? Miniature windmills that wound
up to spin past idyls of maidens kissing shyly by dikes? Puppy statues made of
baked straw? Laura seemed the type, and Des had wanted answers. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
the party hadn’t been in the Wills’ home at all. It was in the conference center
of a hotel, one of those nondescript boxed buildings that spring up near
industrial parks, with a pinkish faux granite exterior and a loopy cursive sign
almost too Baroque to read. Des had noticed it from the road once and only once
before, just because it made him wonder who would ever stay at a hotel like
that. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Turns
out, he would. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sitting
at the table next to Des, Jung spun the donkerwheel. He was strong with a
permanently flushed face, and when he spun the wheel, it could take as long as
five minutes for it to finally run out of momentum and land on the sign that
told him where to move. Des didn’t understand why the game’s designers had
built the donkerwheel to spin for so long. It meant that a lot of the game was
full of dead space and waiting, like the creators hadn’t considered what it
would be like to actually play the game. The designers could have made it so it
maxed out at three rotations, or they could have just built a digital machine
with a button you pushed to tell you your fate. Instead, Des had some time to
kill, which he did, as he’d done so many times already by now, by examining the
mural on the ceiling of the conference room.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
never ceased to amaze him how much actual care someone had put into it. It must
have been painted by someone who’d wanted to be a real artist, then realized a
hotel in an industrial park was the only patron they’d ever have, so they’d
decided to put everything they had into it. How strange that a space normally
reserved for the most cynical of interior design had been treated with such—there
was no other word for it--sincerity. Des had already discovered so many
wonderful hidden treasures in the mural, he’d lost count. The elk whose fur partly
concealed a whole civilization on its back, so if you looked closely enough,
you’d see an entire world riding along as it bounded a stream. The skyscraper
with lights on it that were really suns. The heron in a completely different
scene that somehow reflected the light of the sun from the skyscraper in
another world back, as if distance were only a symbol in a math problem, and
math that meant nothing more than the game Des played below the mural. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
the donkerwheel finally ticked down, Des realized he hadn’t seen anything new in
the painting for a while. Maybe he’d gotten tired of looking. Hadn’t one of the
players once said that when you no longer took joy in the mural on the ceiling
of the hotel, that’s when you knew it was time to quit playing the game? Or had
Des made that up himself, one of the first times he’d started to question
himself how much longer he wanted to keep playing? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Jung lit up with
anticipation to see where the needle would land, and Des felt a surge of fondness
for him, wanted to hug the guy with an almost desperate affection. Players had
come and gone during the convention, but Jung had been at the table with him since
Day One. He was as excited to play the game now as he’d been when the
conference started.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How
many days ago had that been now? He’d lost track of the days during the
Schneufel World Tournament. That’s what the sign in the conference room called
it. World Tournament, as though the players had trained for this, as though their
participation made them distinguished somehow. In fact, nobody seemed to
understand the game much better than Des did, although the conference was the
first time he’d played.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jung
studied the donkerwheel for a moment. It had come up with
green/seventeen/positive alignment. On most turns, it would have been a very
lucky spin, but Jung was trying to complete his second set of thacktongs so he
could level up his prutel. There was almost nothing he could do with the spin
he and everyone else had waited so long for. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Trade?”
he asked no one in particular, the futility of the question masked in his voice
by his indefatigable optimism. Nobody answered, and he set his token aside to
let the next person spin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You
played that round as well as you could,” Nipsy encouraged him. “Big risk, big
reward, but also big risk, big loss, sometimes. Nothing you can do about it.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Yep,
some days you eat the bear, and some days, the bear eats you,” Jung said, sticking
his hand in the bowl of chips. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">When the Wills first
brought him to the table on day one of the conference to introduce him around and
teach him the rules, several of the players had made the same joke. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Teach
him the rules? That should be easy. There are none.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the most literal sense, they were right. The box the game came in, which had required
the use of a luggage cart to bring in from Amanda’s car (she’d graciously
brought the game, as well as fondue), contained no printed sheet of instructions.
On the box was a photo of the two mountain chains players had to pass through
on their trips around the board, along with an appropriately mixed-race and
mixed-gender set of players smiling and laughing as they waited on the results
of a donkerwheel spin. There was but one small moustache-shaped blurb of text
on the box, and it said, “The only rule is to have fun!”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
hadn’t kept the players at the board from creating plenty of rules of their
own, none of which were written down. Essentially, Des had figured out in the
days since he’d started playing, it wasn’t a game where you could win or lose,
exactly, but you could gather more or less esteem from players at the board for
how actively and creatively you played. This esteem came from a number of
purely subjective factors: how brave you were in making decisions, how well you
cooperated with others, how calmly you took setbacks, and, most importantly, your
level of enthusiasm about playing. You could be terrible but have a good
attitude, and most of the other players would give you the head nods and
encouraging words that were apparently the whole point of the game. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
sounded non-competitive, but in fact it could be extremely competitive
sometimes, although entirely in a passive-aggressive sense. Players developed
grudges if they felt their moves hadn’t gotten enough grunts of approval from
others, which made the offended parties withhold their own encouragement in
turn. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jung
was a welcome relief from this unspoken, non-competitive competition. He really
believed the whole point was to have fun, and he only wanted everyone to have a
good time. As a result, he got more approval than almost anyone playing the
game, maybe precisely because he cared so little about things like approval.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
think it’s about time to call it a night,” Joe said. He had been elected
Pingling Master by unanimous consent, because he had a way of keeping the game
on track without being too bossy about it. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Des,
why don’t you spin the ole donker there and then seal your move?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
didn’t spin very hard, but he also tried not to spin too softly, because he
didn’t want it to seem like he was judging Jung by contrast. Live and let live,
Des thought, and there was no reason to make others feel bad about playing how
they liked to play. The game was still fun, mostly, even with everyone’s
idiosyncrasies. Maybe because of them.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
spun it far softer than he meant to. The three gears on the wheel barely made
it the required one time around to count as an official spin. He glanced
sideways at Jung--he hoped not enough to be noticed--but Jung didn’t seem to
pay any attention. The wheel came up gold/twenty-one/neutral. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
was the kind of spin Des seemed to get more of than he deserved. There was no
other way to put it: he was a lucky Schneufel player. At first, he’d thought
the others were somehow rigging the wheel to give him good moves to help him
out as a new player, but his good fortune had gone on well past the point of
him needing help understanding the game. Was it possible he had a gift for
being lucky? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Luck
had its downsides. It brought envy. He had a large collection of Zimfla for a
newer player, something that the older hands didn’t seem to appreciate much. When
he’d gotten fifty Zimfla in the first day, they’d congratulated him, and
there’d even been applause, but lately, they tended to watch him rake in his
coins without comment. The vague sense that his luck had worn his welcome thin
with others was part of why he’d started wondering how much longer he wanted to
keep playing. It was exhausting, trying not just to play a game with no real
rules, but to make others appreciate how he played it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
decided to take a huge risk with the points the spin had given him. He applied
all twenty-one mobility credits to sending his third prutel up the Glorbor Pass
into troll country. It was a reckless move, one usually only taken by players
so behind on resources they had nothing to lose. It could pay off mightily, but
it could also mean losing a good chunk of his wealth. The others would have to
respect that. He thought he remembered a line of poetry in praise of moves like
that, one a player who’d since left the conference had used to try to explain
the mysterious, unwritten rules of Schneufel:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">If
you can make one heap of all your winnings<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">And
risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">And
lose, and start again at your beginnings<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;">And
never breathe a word about your loss;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
couldn’t remember what the “then” in the “if-then” of the poem was, but he was
reasonably sure it was something good. Des sealed his move in the envelope of
ceremonies and padded across the checkered carpet of the conference room to the
restaurant, trying hard not to look at the games being played at other tables.
He’d been strictly warned on the first day about the etiquette of not watching
other tables, although nobody had ever explained why.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Like
every night, he ate with Joe and Linda. They ordered the extremely rare steaks
the hotel was famous for. One of the oddities of the steak was that the hotel
strongly recommended—insisted would be more like it—that it be paired not with
wine, but with milk. It’s what all three had eaten on Des’s first night, after his
first few hours of Schneufel. He’d been so excited about the game, he kept
forgetting to eat while he talked long into the night with the Wills about everything
he wanted to do while playing Schneufel, and Linda would cut off red, wet
chunks of meat for him and fork them into his mouth, forcing him to stop
gushing long enough to eat. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How
endless the possibilities of Schneufel had seemed to him then. How much the
game seemed to fill every emptiness he’d ever had. How long now since he’d felt
that way. Eating the same meal as that magical first night somewhat revived the
feeling, or at least the memory that he’d once felt that way about Schneufel
made him nostalgic enough to forgive the game for the ways it had since shown
itself to be less than he’d hoped. Maybe the problem was with him, not the
game.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“If
you ever get tired of playing Schneufel,” Joe had said that first night as
Linda shoveled food into Des’s mouth, “it means you’re playing it wrong.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Tonight,
Joe and Linda seemed more pensive, less celebratory, although not in an unhappy
way. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You’ve
gotten to be so good at Schneufel you don’t really need our advice anymore,”
Joe said. He’d ordered a Scotch and soda to go with his steak, and although
Linda eyed him warily as he drank, she said nothing.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“It’s
what we hoped for when we brought you here,” she said. “I hope Schneufel is
everything you hoped it would be.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
wanted to reassure them that it was, that he was having such a good time, he
never wanted to leave, but he couldn’t. The steak tasted had a soapy taste to
it, the milk sour. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“We
wanted to say how glad we are you came,” she told him. She sawed a piece of the
meat, stabbed it with the tines of her fork, and held it up as if to ask if he
wanted her to give it to him. Des didn’t move.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You’re
kind of moody tonight,” Joe said.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Joe,”
Linda warned him. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Joe
muttered something else, and though Des couldn’t quite hear it, he could guess
it was Joe’s nickname for him whenever he felt Des wasn’t showing enough
gratefulness for being at the party: “Desultory Des.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“What
I’m saying is that we’ve come to think of you as a son, and that playing
Schneufel is better with you than we ever thought it could be. It’s like we’re
playing a whole new game.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
tried to swallow the piece of steak, found it too big and had to gulp milk to
help coax it down his gullet. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“We
know the game’s not always perfect. Why Helen acts the way she does sometimes,
but oh, I shouldn’t talk about others like that…”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Thanks
for coming is what your mother, I mean Linda, wants to say, Des,” Joe put in.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Yes,
thanks for being here.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Joe
sniffled a bit, and a tear started to come out of one eye, but he pushed it
back with another swallow of Scotch. Linda wasn’t as fastidious about showing
her emotions, and she cried as she ripped through a piece of raw beef with her
knife and held it out to Des one last time. Des, still coughing from the last
bite, hesitated. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Do
it for me,” she pleaded.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
sat alone at the bar afterwards, stirring grenache with a mixing straw.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Zimfla
for your thoughts,” the bartender said. He had a round face and overly large
ears, like he’d been built to invite you to talk to him.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
found himself pouring out his thoughts before he was even aware of having
decided to share. Yes, the problem had been that he’d been keeping his feelings
to himself. To tell someone else would be a great relief. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“It’s
Schneufel,” he said.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Uh-huh,”
the bartender dried a glass without looking at it, focused on Des. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Like,
there is so much about the game to love, and what I love most about it are the
people playing it with me. Even the annoying ones, like Helen, have their
moments.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Go
on.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“But
as much as I love the people I’m playing with, and as fun as Schneufel used to
be, I’m kind of wondering when it will end. I like everything about it except
for the fact it seems to go on too long. If it had ended after a few nights,
right when I made my first songong, that would have been perfect. I could have
left the game and the hotel and gone back to whatever is outside of here having
had just the right amount of Schneufel.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
see,” the bartender said, something in his posture now changing, the cadence of
his glass-wiping slowing. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Like,
if I just hated Schneufel, I’d know what to do. I’d leave and not feel bad
about it. If I loved Schneufel, I’d know I want to stay and keep playing. But
I’m somewhere in the middle, and I’m just stuck there day after day. The game
is okay. The people are charming and endearing and make me want to stay for
their sake. And I’ve been remarkably lucky in the game. So lucky, I even feel
bad complaining, which makes me feel worse, and then the game seems to be
taking even longer. I even start resenting the people I love, because I know
I’m staying for them, which means I feel like they’re forcing me to do
something I don’t want to keep doing. But that’s unfair, because it’s not their
fault.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
bartender stopped wiping, set the glass down, his hand edging its way toward a
large red button on the counter Des had somehow not noticed before.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Are
you saying you’re thinking of quitting the game and checking out of the hotel?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Something
told Des this was a question he couldn’t give the real answer to. It had always
been implied, maybe, in the comments made by players at the board, or the bits
of wisdom his “parents,” Joe and Laura, had passed on to him. Like Joe’s
comment that if you were tired of playing Schneufel, that meant there was
something wrong with you, not with Schneufel. Whatever else you did at the
hotel, you should never question the absolute value of playing the game for as
long as you could keep playing it. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Oh,
of course not,” Des said, giving his glass a twirl he hoped would look
nonchalant. “I mean, of course I want to keep playing Schneufel forever. I’ve
got Joe and Linda’s feelings to think about, don’t I?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
bartender’s hand stopped moving toward the button, but didn’t move away. Des
sensed he’d have to come up with more.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I’m
just upset because of the way Helen and Nipsy seem to be mad at me all the time
about how many Zimfla I’ve got. Like, I can’t help the way I spin.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
bartender’s hand moved, at last, away from the button and back to the glass,
which he massaged through his towel with the same hypnotic motion he’d been
using before.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Yes,
sometimes the reactions of others can affect our own perceptions of Schneufel,
can’t they?” he said.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“It
seems like that.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I’m
going to recommend a book for you,” the bartender said. He wrote the name on a
cocktail napkin. “You’ll find it in the hotel library.”<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“There’s
a library?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You’ll
find the hotel has a lot of interesting things if you look. That’s why it
doesn’t make sense for anyone to talk about checking out when you haven’t
experienced the whole hotel yet.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
bartender’s face, which had seemed smooth and inviting at first, now seemed
swollen and engorged, like he’d feasted on Des’s words. Des wanted to pay his
bill and go, but suddenly realized he didn’t know how to pay. How did he not
know this? Had he been letting Joe and Linda pay for him? That seemed wrong to
him now, that he’d been around long enough to pay for himself.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Don’t
you remember?” the bartender asked. “The bill is paid for.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Paid
for? How?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“It
comes out of your Zimfla balance in Schneufel, of course.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You
mean the game actually means something outside the conference room?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Of
course it does,” the bartender said, like Des had asked the silliest question
imaginable.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Zimfla
and prutels and all those other nonsense words…all that absurd stuff about
there not being any rules and the whole point being to have fun…that game has
actual consequences as far as being able to eat and pay for my room?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Why
do you think everyone is so jealous of your luck?” the bartender asked.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Back
in his room, which Des suddenly realized was a very well-apportioned suite with
warm and soft carpet, graceful arched windows to let in the gentle morning
light, and a refrigerator stocked with all the things Des loved, he thought
about the meaning of this new information. The game mattered. It wasn’t just
for fun. This changed everything. It also seemed unfair to the point of
absurdity. How could the game matter? It had no rules. Nothing about it made
sense if you thought about it too much. Why was it even called “Schneufel”?
There was nothing in the game called a schneufel. It’s like the game had been
named at random, and all the rules had fallen into place without anyone having
thought it all through. Of all the reasons to reward someone with comforts, the
hotel chose the spin of a badly designed donkerwheel and the accumulation of Zimfla?
Des had only felt mildly irritated and fatigued by Schneufel up to now, but suddenly
he felt that irritation turn to resentment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
also now regretted his choice to risk all his Zimfla on a reckless move. He’d
sealed that choice in the envelope of ceremonies, though, meaning first thing
the next morning, he’d likely lose almost everything he had. What would happen
to him then? Would he have to move in with Joe and Linda?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
Joe consulted the Pingling charts in the morning, though, the unthinkable
happened: Des had beat the long odds up the Glorbor Pass, avoided detection by
the troll hordes, and made off with a treasure chest full of thousands of Zimfla.
He was the richest man at the table, and he’d done it trying to go broke back
when he hadn’t even realized Zimfla really mattered. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
table broke out into a roar of applause that didn’t even feel fake to him. That
kind of luck was so extraordinary, maybe the players felt themselves fortunate
just to have been around to witness it, even if it hadn’t hit them. Perhaps it lifted
their spirits because if it had happened to him, it could happen to them, too.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
played the game the rest of the day in stunned silence. What would he do with
that much Zimfla? He’d never even looked at prices of things before, didn’t
know what things cost. How rich was he? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Joe
kept slapping him on the shoulder, proud as though the success were his own,
telling him that he’d have to be responsible with all that good fortune. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Put
it somewhere where it’ll be safe. Let it work for <i>you</i> so you don’t have
to work for <i>it</i>.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jung,
however, said that if it were him with all that Zimfla, he’d have fun with it.
Have pool parties on the roof of the hotel, drink caviar and eat Cristal,
haw-haw. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Helen
pursed her lips and said that if it were her, she’d do something for all the
players at the other tables who slept in the basement.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“The
basement?” Des asked.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Linda
hushed Helen before she could say anything more. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
ate alone that night for the first time. He ordered cold noodles in a spicy
broth that made his eyes water. He never wanted to taste flesh again. After
dinner, he wandered the hotel to places he’d never been before, past the pool
and arcade he’d spent so much time in when he’d first arrived. There was a
solarium filled with gaudy flowers or plants with long, short leaves that
looked like swords. The plants were labelled with their names: hibiscus,
African violet, spider plant. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
corridor went on a long way past the solarium with nothing of note, making Des
wonder why such a barren stretch of the hotel even existed, until his arm
bumped against the knob of what looked like a supply closet. His forearm
throbbed, and as he grabbed it with his other hand, he saw the sign on the
door: <i>stairway</i>. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
wondered if he’d need some kind of key to enter, if maybe only staff were allowed
to use it. He’d only ever taken the elevator to his room, and it had never
occurred to him before that there might be another way to navigate from level
to level. When he pulled the handle that had struck him, though, it turned
easily. The stairway smelled like dust and air that needed light. He thought of
trying to use the stairs to go up to his room, just to see if he could find his
way by a new route, but he thought of what Helen had said. <i>The people in the
basement</i>. Was there a basement? The stairs went in two directions, up and
down, so it stood to reason there was.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
took a step down and the hotel didn’t explode into alarms, so he took another,
and then another. The staircase wound around and around downwards. Why would
anyone build a basement so deep? When he was just about to give up, thinking
he’d never have the energy to walk back up so many stairs, he at last saw
another door at the bottom of one final rung of steps, and he opened it.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
smell hit him so hard he couldn’t see, and when he at last thought he had
acclimated to it, he tried to take a step forward, and it hit him worse. Des
doubled over, his hands on his knees, retching, the spice from the noodles
burning his throat on the way back up. He stayed that way, doubled over, for
some time, short of breath but afraid to take any air in, until at last, his
body, trying to save itself, seemed to have cut off its own ability to smell,
and he stood up and walked forward.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Countless
human skeletons moved listlessly, lined up along a straight expanse of room
that went on forever in both directions with no rooms or walls to break up the
view. They were lying on ragged blankets, mostly staring off at nothing,
although there were smaller skeletons swirling around like gusts of wind here and
there playing a game of tag, unaware of the filth they played in. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
worried that the skeletons might attack him if they noticed him, but none came
close. Once in a while, he would lock with the vacant eye sockets of one, but
the only response he got was the skeleton would lift one arm with great pain,
the bony hand turned, palm up. He turned and ran back to the stairway,
terrified the door had locked him in and cursing himself for not propping it
open. Otherwise, why would they all stay in the basement? But the door opened.
He ran the countless flights of stairs back to the door on the main level,
listening the whole time for clacking feet following him. He heard nothing. He
burst back into the hallway, ran through the empty hotel back to the main lobby,
hit the button to his room, and stayed on top of his covers the rest of the
night, shaking.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
Des started giving his first Zimfla away, he didn’t know how word got around to
the other players at the table, but it wasn’t long before they all seemed to
know, even though he’d tried to keep it quiet. He thought Joe might disapprove,
would think he was throwing his Zimfla away. Instead, when Jung shouted out to
the table that Des had paid for rooms and meals for a few wretches from the
basement, Joe had been one of those who’d cheered the loudest. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“That’s
my boy,” he yelled.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Surprisingly,
it was Helen who seemed displeased, although she’d been the one to bring up the
idea of giving to those in the basement in the first place.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
guess it’s something,” she said. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
hotel management was nothing but gracious when he gave them a donation and
asked them to pull ten families of skeletons from the basement and put them in
rooms. They’d called him a “hero.” They even reduced the rate on his room so
much, he actually made money through his donation, which made him feel so
guilty, he soon gave more, then more still. The hotel didn’t keep discounting his
room, but they did give him a plush chair to sit at the Schneufel table with,
marked “Continental Class Seating for Mr. Des Only.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Schneufel
was fun again. It still seemed unfair beyond reckoning that a game with no
rules could also determine everything about a person’s physical comfort, but at
least he was in a position to help others. He began to give more and more, and
although his fortune waned somewhat, he still had far more than he needed. It
was absurd that fate kept gracing his spins on the donkerwheel, but by helping
others, he felt he was giving a meaning to fate it didn’t have on its own. Once
in a while, someone from another table would try to shake his hand and thank
him for giving them a better room, until hotel security came to chase them back
to their own table and their own game.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Nobody
stopped Des from wandering about the room, though. Rules didn’t seem to apply
to him, so during Jung’s ridiculous spins, Des started getting up from his
special chair and watching other tables. Some tables were playing Schneufel,
too, but most were playing a completely different game. It had different names
at different tables, but the rules seemed to be more or less the same. Unlike
Schneufel, where one player or a couple of players could amass significantly more
wealth than others but everyone had at least something, the games the others
played all had one player with all the big items—whatever they called the Zimfla
in their game—and everyone else had nothing. Although the skeletons were
wearing a thin layer of skin Des had bought them and cheap clothing to cover
over their tenuous flesh, he could still easily see that beneath, they remained
chipped and sagging bones. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Des
started sleeping poorly, so poorly he was exhausted all the time and would nap
here and there, including at the Schneufel table, suddenly waking up when
someone would tell him it was his turn. He’d wander the hotel at nights, going
further and further down hallways he’d never explored. From the outside, it had
seemed like a very ordinary hotel, and he couldn’t imagine how there was enough
space inside for everything, but the more he wandered, the more it seemed there
would never be an end.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
night, he found the library. It was between a potted plant and an ice machine
that clanked non-stop. It had three concentric rings of shelves of books with
occasional breaks in each ring to allow you to move from one to the other. He
picked up a book at random.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">If
you can keep your head when all about you<o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">Are
losing theirs and blaming it on you,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">If
you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;">But
make allowance for their doubting too;<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>So
that’s where it came from. He picked up a different book, battered and coming
apart, dogeared with excited-looking circles around words drawn around the
words inside. One circle penned in this question: “Is it that by its
indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the
universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when
beholding the white depths of the milky way?” Joe had been to the library, too,
it seemed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>What
surprised Des wasn’t that bits of wisdom he’d heard quoted for as long as he
could remember were actually from books that could be found in the hotel
library, but that the people who’d quoted them must, at some point, have been
feeling the way he felt. If not, why had they wandered the hotel long enough to
find the library? Why was it okay to quote the things one found in the library,
but not talk about what had made you want to go there in the first place?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
passed between the openings in the rings of shelves, felt himself being pulled
toward the center of the room, until he found it: perched on a small table was
a single book lying open. Des read the words, but found he somehow already knew
them. <i>The proud man’s contumely. A bare bodkin. Lose the name of action. </i>It
was as though he’d said the words himself, forgotten them, and then come to the
library to remember what he’d once said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
tried the basement again, but found, to his surprise, that the number of
skeletons in the basement had only increased since he’d last been there. Some
were too sickly to even raise their bony hands in supplication. The noise of
the smaller skeletons playing had disappeared, leaving only the smell and the
quiet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
wandered back to the bar. There was no telling what time it was, other than it
was the middle of the night. The bartender leaned on the bar, his head propped
up against his hand, somehow holding himself up in his sleep. In a corner
someone was guiding a floor buffer, his hands out in front of him at a right
angle as though he was revving the engine of a motorcycle. Des could tell the
man was a skeleton wearing a borrowed skin suit, probably so as not to upset
the customers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>At
a table in a corner sat a woman, rectangle of a suitcase propped up on the
floor beside her, its handle telescoped out, like it was a dog waiting to be
taken for a walk. He’d heard the expression “dust of the road” before, but she
seemed, literally, to be covered in a fine, red, film.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
didn’t want to disturb her. If she was there at this ghostly hour like he was,
maybe some kind of unsettled thought she couldn’t nail down had driven her
there, and she wanted to be alone to hammer at it. He chose a table far from
her, but almost as soon as he sat down, he heard her voice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“I
don’t suppose you know anything about…snuffel, do you?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Des
looked around for others she might be talking to, although he knew they were
alone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“Snuffel?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“It’s
a game, I guess.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“You
mean Schnuefel?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“Oh,
is that what it’s called? Sorry. My friends Ed and Sally invited me here to
play it. They say they love it and think I’ll love it, too.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“So
you just got here, then?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“Hence
the suitcase,” she said, giving the handle a waggle or two.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
sort of knew Ed and Sally. They’d joined the game a while ago—long enough not
to be new, but not so long ago he could say much about them. They sat on the
other end of the table.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“I
do know about Schneufel, to answer your question,” he said. “But I’m not sure
I’m the right person to tell you about it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“Well,
I know nothing, except that I like Ed and Sally and didn’t want to say no to
them, so whatever you know will be more than I do.” She pushed a chair out next
to her for him to sit in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“I’m
Jenny.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“Des.”
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“Like
‘des’cribe. Why don’t you describe the game to me?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>The
next morning, after a night of no sleep and excited conversation, he couldn’t
wait to introduce Jenny to Laura and Joe. Of course that was the answer to what
he’d been feeling all along. The answer wasn’t in giving his money away to the
poor, trying to bail out the ocean of sadness with a teaspoon, but in finding a
companion to share the game with. It was in one of the first books he’d read in
the library. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>But
when he brought Jenny to the Schneufel table, their hands locked together, a
stupid smile on Des’s face, Laura was sitting alone. Nipsy was holding both of
Laura’s hands between her own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“This
is Jenny. I just met her.” Ed and Sally got up from their end of the table when
they saw Jenny. “Where’s Joe?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“Your
father, I mean Joe, won’t be playing with us anymore. It was his time to stop
playing.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“What
do you mean, it was his time to stop playing? Why isn’t he here?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>“You
know he would be if he could. Oh, and now you have a friend. He wanted that for
you for so long. I’m sure wherever he is, somewhere out there on the road
outside the hotel, he’s happy for you.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>Des
felt like the hotel’s raw steak had stuck inside him and he couldn’t get it to
go down. He wanted to flip the table upside down, to ruin the game for
everyone, but Linda was obviously trying hard to keep it together. And there
were Ed and Sally, giving their condolences to Linda so sincerely, while also
so happy to see Jenny at the game and with a friend already…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>How
many thousands of days of Schneufel Des played after that, he couldn’t say. By
unspoken but common consent, the players hardly spoke of Joe. Des didn’t wander
the hotel anymore, because Jenny now shared a room with him. She soon invited
friends, who stayed with them in their room until they learned to play the game
well enough to have a room of their own. She loved the game, she said, and the
best part was playing it with Des.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>After
Joe’s departure, Helen took over as Pingling Master, which made the game far
less fun for Des. He knew she didn’t like him, although he could never figure
out why. Whereas Joe had had a way of getting people to follow the rules
without making it feel like he was telling them what to do, Helen wasn’t shy
about turning suggestions into commands. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>It
was about this time that Des’s luck began to change. It didn’t go all the way
bad, but it wasn’t always great, either. For the first time, he had to work
hard for his Zimfla, something he found inconvenient, because now, with a room
full of people depending on him, was the first time he actually needed more of it.
He wasn’t poor, but he wasn’t rich, and now he had to put a lot more effort
into the game. This, along with Helen, made every day feel more like work and
less like a game where the only rule was to have fun. He kicked himself for
having given so much of his wealth to the skeletons, calculated over and over
in his head what kind of room he could have moved Jenny and their dependents to
if he still had all those Zimfla he’d given away.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>In
time, Linda started having a hard time seeing the board and needed help from
other players to know when it was her turn and what she needed to do. She
couldn’t spin the donkerwheel for herself. One day, words came to Des he knew he
must have been thinking for some time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><i>When
she finally leaves the game, I’ll be free to go myself</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>But
she didn’t leave. Her eyesight got worse, until she really was blind and couldn’t
make out the painting on the ceiling anymore. She had to be wheeled to the
table, and now she ate in the evenings with Jenny and Des, where the two of
them took turns feeding her as she had once fed Des when Schneufel had seemed
full of promise to him and he’d been glad they’d invited him to play.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
started wandering the hotel again at nights. Jenny said nothing, although once
in a while, when he’d end up in the bar, he’d find her there, as if she was
making sure he wasn’t trying to find any new players the way he’d once found
her. Des didn’t go to the library. The answers to his problems weren’t in there,
nor in the gym or the spa or the bar or the rooftop vista, either. He wasn’t
sure the answer was in the hotel at all, but he’d been a guest there so long,
he’d forgotten what life was like outside of it. Had he even had a life outside
the hotel? Or had people just told him that so long, he’d believed it? He
couldn’t remember. What if life outside the hotel didn’t exist at all? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>One
day, after Helen had been particularly fastidious about enforcing the norqual
rule concerning prutel trades, Des had gotten up without even waiting for the
last player to seal her move. He went to the elevator and hit a button without
looking at which one. When it opened on whatever floor it was, he turned left
and started running. He ran until he had to bend over and press his hand to the
cramp in his abdomen, then straightened up and ran again. He’d grown old in the
hotel. When he couldn’t run anymore, he walked. He walked until he wore
blisters into his feet. It no longer surprised him how large the hotel was. Why
shouldn’t it be this big? Could he even remember seeing it from outside
anymore? He took his shoes off and walked in his socks, which relieved some of
the pain from the blisters. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
walked for hours. What would Jenny be thinking? She must have known he wasn’t
at the bar. He hoped she knew that whatever he was doing, it wasn’t looking for
a replacement for her. She was the only one who could fill that position for
him. A replacement might revive him for a while, but he knew it would end up
just making him resent the game even more. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He’d
been so lucky in Schneufel. He had a nice room, good food every night, Jenny to
share it with, plus all the players they’d brought to the hotel. He was fully
aware of the privilege he had, but rather than making him feel grateful, it
made him feel worse. Even with this privilege, he was tired of playing.
Schneufel wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t great, and it was, above all else, far,
far too long. There were people who loved him, and he loved them back, but this
love kept him trying to swallow the same thing that had stuck in his throat
ages ago. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>And
then a door. The end of the corridor. There really was one. The door was glossy
and black, and it had no handle. He’d have to shove it hard with his shoulder to
get through. A voice in his head. <i>There’s the rub</i>. The wall around the
doorframe in all directions was stained red, as though someone had thrown
pitchers of fruit punch at the door over and over just to watch the juice
splatter in all directions. <i>Must give us pause</i>. Written on the wall in
black ink next to the red splatters were names. Scott. Idris. Jin-hee. Gigi.
Big Tex. Azeb. Joe. <i>And lose the name of action</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -12.0pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>He
turned from the door. There was an emergency phone on the wall, but he sensed
that if he used if from that spot, he might regret it, the same way he’d known
there were some subjects with the bartender it was best not to talk about. He’d
found the door out. That was enough for now. Knowing the door was there was
somehow enough for him to not need the door, at least not right now. Maybe
after Linda had gone through it. Maybe after Jenny had. Maybe when fate pushed
him through, like it had Joe and so many others. Who knew? Maybe it wouldn’t be
that long. He’d always had rather good luck. </span><o:p></o:p></p><br /></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-58461791495795918962023-02-27T20:26:00.004-05:002023-02-27T20:26:48.025-05:00The unmagical magical realism of Karen Russell: "The Cloud Lake Unicorn"<div>"When discussing book ideas with an editor, it's good (for a novelist) to mention that the story is either magical realism or surrealism. That way, the editor will start thinking about the story according to their own designs, and pretty soon, they end up liking the idea." -Kim Young-ha, "Corn and me" (translation mine)</div><div><br /></div><div>"The unicorn kept changing as she walked toward me." Karen Russell, "The Cloud Lake Unicorn"</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Seems like a lot of these short story anthologies I read and sometimes blog through really, really want me to read Karen Russell. This will be the fourth time I've blogged on one of her stories, to go along with at least two other times I've come across her from back before I used to write about reading Best American Short Stories, Pushcart, etc. (<a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-story-too-strong-for-its-container.html" target="_blank">First time</a>, <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2019/10/i-am-whatever-they-wish-to-make-of-me.html" target="_blank">second time</a>, <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2022/12/more-lamenting-than-preventing-ghost.html" target="_blank">third time</a>, and she also had "Madame Bovary's Greyhound" in the 2014 BASS and "The Prospectors" in the 2016 BASS.) I also went and read her novel <i>Swamplanida!</i> a few years ago.<div><br /></div><div>One of the reasons I took the time to read <i>Swamplandia!</i> is that Russell always makes me unsure of myself as a critic. Everyone seems to love her. I can certainly see why people enjoy her work, but the level of devotion she inspires is hard for me to understand. There is obvious, raw talent in every page. Her stories, though, have the feeling to me of a Netflix original movie: each feels as though it was written by a team of bright professionals who have studied what makes for a successful story and included all of these things without quite managing to fully give life to their creations. A solid 6/10 nearly every time, with enough moments to make you finish it, but nothing you're going to remember for years afterwards. A Karen Russell short story feels to me like what we'll get in a few years when we ask ChatGPT to write a magical realist short story with a monster in it. <br /><div><br /></div><div>There are people out there,though, who gush about Russell like she's near the pinnacle of American literature at the moment. <a href="https://chireviewofbooks.com/2019/07/22/karen-russell-on-home-monsters-and-magical-realism/" target="_blank">This guy</a> is a good example; he says she's not only a good writer, but that her work has "truly and deeply impacted" his life. Impacted his life? Truly and deeply? Those are big words. I can point to precious few writers who have done that for me. There are many writers I enjoy, but few who have made me actually change the course of what I do and how I think about core issues. I'm curious how Russell has done this for this critic. As I read the piece, though, I began to suspect that she hadn't really impacted his life. She'd just impacted his understanding of literature by opening his<span style="font-family: inherit;"> "<span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;">eyes, as a budding college student, to the wondrous world of magical realism."</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;">Oh. Is that all she did? Taught him that a genre of literature exists in which the fabulous is combined with the realistic? (Also, Russell did that? Not the hundred years or so of writers doing it before her? Even Russell found out about Gabriel Garcia Marquez at a young age, she says in that same interview. I feel like few people would ever read Russell who weren't already serious about literature, so it's hard to guess how she was someone's first taste of magical realism. But I digress.) </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;">The critic goes on to also say her stories "...</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;">took me to worlds I hadn’t yet known. They taught me about guilt, love, loss, and, mostly, what home was—and could (and can) be." I find this hard to believe. Those are just phrases you throw out to overly praise a work. Those are blurbs, not what actually happened in his life. It's rather like when people claim Jesus or Gandhi as a role model. Really? In what way would you say you're living a life that adopts theirs as a model? I don't believe this critic really thinks differently about, say, what home means as a result of reading Russell. I think he read work that he enjoyed, saw material in it that referred to the meaning of home, and then chose that subject as a good thing to list to make it seem like she has affected his psyche on a deeper level. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #0a0a0a; word-spacing: 0.018px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EMvFcws0RvLBhQ3o7XuXNzPZADwh_piVDGa5BRLUmCKdixVrM8UrAaHQHR03iV6d5dSR6OQBDnVV6tPKXRW5gZRJubrUu8t_6GkZwVE9rn6on0h6JEH2h5pv4Q2GqHryDS2jW3CpOOLo5H-uh1yv3XBQs1wvEYEzdBZhJf7hV0AWShAQ11t1Lro5/s622/magicalrealism.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="233" data-original-width="622" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EMvFcws0RvLBhQ3o7XuXNzPZADwh_piVDGa5BRLUmCKdixVrM8UrAaHQHR03iV6d5dSR6OQBDnVV6tPKXRW5gZRJubrUu8t_6GkZwVE9rn6on0h6JEH2h5pv4Q2GqHryDS2jW3CpOOLo5H-uh1yv3XBQs1wvEYEzdBZhJf7hV0AWShAQ11t1Lro5/w640-h240/magicalrealism.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, I'm aware of how "problematic" Perez is. I follow him on Twitter. Sometimes, I think he's a parody of himself, because he's now decided he's an outlaw and he takes his outlaw persona too seriously. Other times, like with this tweet, he's really insightful and pithy. I'm willing to take the mix, which is why I follow him.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><h3 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></h3></span></span></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Theme and subject</h3><div>There is a frequent tendency among people who talk about literature to confuse theme and subject. Subject is what comes up in a narrative. Theme is an attitude toward what comes up. For a very long time in Western literature, the dual purpose of narrative was assumed to be "to delight and instruct." This meant that authors often wanted to make sure their audiences understood the theme by making it explicit. Aesop's fables are of course one example, but even in epics like the Iliad we were told at the opening what the poem was really "about." Medieval morality plays made sure to drive their point home, but many of Shakespeare's plays also made sure we got what the point was with a prologue or epilogue that made it explicit. Driving the point home was the norm. </div><div><br /></div><div>Not all of Shakespeare's plays did that, though. Arguably, the one play of his that continues to speak most profoundly to "the human condition" is <i>Hamlet</i>. <i>Hamlet</i> stands out for how ambiguous it is, relative to other literature of the time, about what its "instruction" is. It's the most modern of his plays. The Romantics saw in it an example of "negative capacity," the ability to imbue characters with ideas without the narrative becoming fully identifiable with those ideas. Modern fiction theory loves the notion of negative capacity.</div><div><br /></div><div>I certainly wouldn't want to read fables that wrapped up with a two-sentence explanation of the moral of the story. Thematic ambiguity is fine. It's okay that I'll never be able to state the theme of <i>Hamlet</i> in a fully satisfying way. But I at least have some kind of sense about what the subject I should be looking to attach a theme to is. I know the area code of the theme in a great work, even if I don't know the address. In <i>Hamlet</i>, it's something about how weird and fleeting life is and what the point of it is and how we can ever know anything definitely and how difficult it is, if you really think about anything, to determine one's course of action. I know that's what the play is ultimately about, even if I can't quite say exactly what it is saying about those ideas. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Back to Russell</h3><div><br /></div><div>With Russell, though, I really can't tell where the center of the story I'm supposed to be digging to find is. Partly, I think that Russell is a victim of her own talent for observation here. She'll be writing along, and something appears in the story, and she's got a bit she comes up with on this thing, which is great, but it's so powerful, it blows the whole trajectory of the story off course. The density of some of these passages exerts a gravitational pull on the overall narrative that's so strong, the center keeps veering all over the place. I first noticed this in<a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-story-too-strong-for-its-container.html" target="_blank"> "The Tornado Auction</a>," but it's also very apparent when reading "The Cloud Lake Unicorn," which is in this year's Pushcart Anthology.</div><div><br /></div><div>The story opens with neighbors hauling trash out. Russell riffs on the dual meanings of "refuse," both verb and noun. Russell often deals with ecological stress in her work, so I figured we might be getting some kind of statement on consumption here. We don't even get through the opening two pages before there are three different themes on the subject of "refuse" emerging:</div><div> </div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Trash/consumption as a reason for ecological disaster.</b> The "Cloud Lake" of the title is gone now, a victim, perhaps, of urban sprawl or climate change. The mist of its ghost is a hinted-at but never-arriving monster. </li><li><b>Trash pickup as a religious ceremony.</b> The narrator, Mauve, calls hauling trash to the curb a "secular ceremony of reckoning and forgetting." She later calls the trip to the curb a "pilgrimage." </li><li><b>Trash as a record of human consumption</b>. "The curb is like the diary where we record our hungers." One thinks of future civilizations performing archaeological studies of us through our buried trash heaps, making guesses about what our lives were like and what mattered to us. </li></ol>Any of these is fertile ground for a thematic foundation to build a story on, but the three are pulling in somewhat different directions. In one, trash is a sin that harms the Earth. In another, it's a quasi-religious ceremony in which we are absolved of our past foolish consumption choices. That is, it's not a sin so much as absolution from sin. In the third thematic possibility, trash is instead a record of human activity. </div><div><br /></div><div>There's nothing necessarily wrong with these differing meanings of refuse being at war with each other. In fact, the whole story could have unfolded as a meditation on the tension between these meanings. When Mauve reveals that she is pregnant, she goes to a drug store she is nearly certain is a mob front. Already, the theme of consumption as a sin seems to be striving for primacy over the others. After Mauve learns she is pregnant, she throws the pregnancy test stick in the trash. I found this interesting, because Mrs. Heretic and I still have the pregnancy stick from when we learned we were having our son. It's our "diary" of our "hunger" for a child. Mauve doesn't want the record, though, although we soon learn that it isn't because she doesn't want the child she thought she could never have. Rather, a "violent desire" to have the child comes over her. The "refuses" the record of wanting the child while still wanting to keep the child herself. There's a great setup here for a tension that could continue.</div><div><br /></div><div>Instead, a fucking unicorn shows up and the whole thing goes off the rails. The unicorn is the kind of thing people rave about in Russell. To me, though, the magic in her magical realism is usually what makes the whole framework of her narratives wobbly. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">What is the unicorn?</h3><div><br /></div><div>My blogging friend Karen Carlson <a href="https://sloopie72.wordpress.com/2022/11/12/bass-2022-yohanca-delgado-the-little-widow-from-the-capital-from-iparis-review-i-236/" target="_blank">accused me</a> of "taking the fun out of musicals and the magic out of magical realism" last year <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-monster-was-us-whole-time-little.html" target="_blank">when I was commenting</a> on Yohanca Delgado's "The Widow from the Capital." Seriously. It was savage what she wrote. Our friendship may never recover. Here's what I said: </div><div><br /></div><div><div></div><blockquote><div>Whenever I encounter magical realism, I like to think of the bits of magic sort of like the songs in a musical. In a musical, characters are going along talking to each other like normal people, and then suddenly, they burst out into song and a choreographed dance number. Which--I don't know what your life is like, but the people I know don't do this.</div><div><br /></div><div>Unless the song is diegetic, you're not supposed to think that the people in the story are really singing and dancing. It's a dramatic and lyrical expression of the feeling a character or characters would be having at the point in the story, or it's a way to establish a feeling to a plot point, rather than just having it happen It's the same thing with soliloquies in plays. In real life, people don't talk to themselves out loud in poetry while other people fade into the background. You're meant to think of this as an opening into the psyche of the character by means other than action and normal dialogue.</div><div><br /></div><div>When something that doesn't happen in the real world happens in a story where most things do happen in the real world, then, I look at it like a song in a musical. It's not about the thing, it's about what the thing signifies. The women aren't afraid of being cursed by a voodoo doll; they're afraid that the little widow's lack of concern for their faces means they aren't really that important. The "we" is facing a threat from the "them." </div></blockquote><div></div></div><div><br /></div><div>I might add mockumentary-format shows like <i>The Office</i>, too. As much as "The Office" attempted at the end to make the whole documentary format make sense by putting together an in-universe movie based on the hijinks at Dunder-Mifflin, it really never made sense that a camera crew was interviewing the people in this office for so long. Same with <i>Modern Family</i>. Instead, the cutaway scenes are just a means to get into the interior mental landscape of the characters, to get their inner thoughts, without having to do a voiceover of those thoughts, like in <i>Dexter</i>, or an aside to the audience as in many plays.</div><div><br /></div><div>That doesn't mean you can't still love the music or come away from a night watching <i>Les Miserables </i>feeling full of hope and humming a tune. It doesn't mean that the magic can't still be magical; it does mean, though, that the magic has to fit the world, just as the songs have to fit their world. If the Jets busted out in a funk tune in the middle of a jazzy <i>West Side Story</i>, it wouldn't be right. Similarly, you can't just throw a unicorn in somewhere that it doesn't belong. </div><div><br /></div><div>So what is the unicorn in "The Cloud Lake Unicorn," and does it fit its world? It's many things:</div><div><br /></div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>It's an immortal being, and therefore a representative of a different way of experiencing time</b>. The opening lines of the story refer to "extraordinary time," and the notion of the unicorn's special relationship to time is mentioned again, but not sustained. Mauve worries when she first sees the unicorn that she will chase the animal "out of time and back into eternity," for example. Time is a very powerful subject, and so this is one of those centers of gravity that pulls the story in another direction from the main one. It's a false passage the the maze of the narrative. </li><li><b>The unicorn is the reward of God/nature to the pure</b>. The unicorn first comes to Mauve when she is hauling the parts of a cherry tree she's pruned to the curb. Mauve's landlord/roommate Edie has left the tree's health in the hands of God by hanging rosaries on it, but Mauve has "stepped in for God" by taking care of the tree. Is the unicorn, then, like a dryad, a spirit of the tree or of nature, come to Mauve because Mauve is pure of heart and cares for nature? Is Mauve's trash somehow a purer offering to the secular god than that of others? </li><li><b>The unicorn is a symbol of hope in a world that seems like it's mostly dying</b>. If there is a passage in "The Cloud Lake Unicorn" that sort of announces, "This is what the story is about," it's this: "Hope can be agonizing...But you have to keep hoping." The unicorn is haggard and beaten down by eternity, just as we are haggard and beaten down my time, but she ultimately gives birth alongside Mauve, the two sharing a "powerful lifewish in common." Having another child means another consumer, another producer of trash. It might be a stupid thing to do, but Mauve has one anyway, which is an act of foolhardy optimism. </li></ol><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Too many thematic centers of gravity</h3></div><div><br /></div><div>These three different meanings of the unicorn aren't like the three possible meanings of "refuse." There isn't a natural tension between them; instead, they occupy three totally different spheres. They don't have enough to do with each other that all of them can be introduced into the story and still keep the narrative moving toward a solitary purpose. The moment one of them becomes the center of the story, the others recede into the background. I can see a critic reading some of the material referring to an alternate time and thinking therefore that this is somehow a central motif in the story or that the story has something profound to say about different ways of experiencing time. It doesn't, though, and the opening line of the story, "Before I started living on extraordinary time, I used to set my watch by Garbage Thursday," contains not one, but two red herrings. A gushing critic would praise the story for its "examination of the subjectivity of time" or something like that, but in fact, the story doesn't do that at all. It refers to this notion--an oft-examined idea in literary criticism and one literary readers would be familiar with--and then relies on the readers to fill in the blanks if they so choose. The magic in a story like this isn't in the story itself. The readers are filling in the lack of magic with their own meaning. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is why Caro is in the story, attempting to resolve all these imbalances by insisting any sort of symbolic reasoning is wrong. "You think everything has to mean something," she chides Maude. "But you're not the addressee on the envelope here, OK? Mostly the world is talking to itself." Fine, except the world throughout the story clearly is trying to talk to us, and we are desperately trying to talk back to it. Caro doesn't resolve the tension, then. </div><div><br /></div><div>I tend to think the genesis of this "too muchness" in Russell's work is her own outsized talent for observation. A story like this is bursting with moments of keen observation. Mauve is like a skilled comedian; anything that comes across her path is grist for her wit. She looks at the positive pregnancy test and muses, "What a strange way to take the temperature of your future." She riffs on how all pregnancy calendars compare fetus sizes to fruit, then ends with this beauty: "At week forty, the fruit bowl of metaphor abruptly disappeared, and the analogy sutured itself into a circle, beautifully tautological: your baby is the size of a baby." There's a whole schtick about how "perform" is a disconcerting word to hear attached to surgery. All of these individual passages are delightful, but after too many of these, the reader begins to suspect the narrator. This isn't a narrator's voice; it's the voice of an author who sees too many things and can't help herself from pointing them out. I eventually started feeling like Elaine in one episode of Seinfeld:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGgCtHmDhpzI1lG7L9oCdcMmQrWLHQkTU6HmL2lRdW2_IV1wKjRI9_3XLCQtn0xPZr237qzJeECv2zEw3AeTXbWg2paKmB6czUPRf9DBGRVPyAqC5xZVeNbsY8Gf-oco5kNP8875kb41XDv6zKN_ur32tR8fufKt_4TsOCbgM2HzZRyUApi1bm6kX5/s982/Isthisabit.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="982" data-original-width="736" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGgCtHmDhpzI1lG7L9oCdcMmQrWLHQkTU6HmL2lRdW2_IV1wKjRI9_3XLCQtn0xPZr237qzJeECv2zEw3AeTXbWg2paKmB6czUPRf9DBGRVPyAqC5xZVeNbsY8Gf-oco5kNP8875kb41XDv6zKN_ur32tR8fufKt_4TsOCbgM2HzZRyUApi1bm6kX5/w300-h400/Isthisabit.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div><div>A Russell story is full of brilliant moments that feel like bits, like an observant, witty person is sharing the stored-up observations in her treasure chest. Like a comic's set, though, these often don't have a unifying grand scheme. There's five minutes here on using public bathrooms, then a quick pivot and we're off to the travails of air travel. Occasionally, a very skilled comic can create an entire performance with a unifying theme, but it's rare. Most comedians instead opt for the illusion of unity by ending on a callback joke. The surface unity in a story like this is often nothing more than a good callback joke. </div><div><br /></div><div>The unicorn is such a callback joke. So are most of the monsters that appear in Russell's fiction. They're attempts to make a story that is held together in general only by the force of the narrative intellect appear as if its whole is organic. Critics who are only paying attention to surface phenomena see them and think they're reading something that explodes with meaning, when instead, I tend to see stories that are merely pregnant with potential meaning. I mean, they're pregnant as fuck, as in this story that is literally about a pregnancy, but there is sometimes too little urgency to answer a central question and too much joy chasing issues around the center to get to the birth. I don't feel like the story got its start with a burning question about the universe. I don't sense urgency. Instead, I feel like it started with a writer who is good at writing and so she does that. </div><div><br /></div><div>My favorite story from Russell was "Madame Bovary's Greyhound," which appeared in the 2014 BASS and which has no magical creatures. In fact, other than its movement into the POV of a dog, there is nothing magical in it at all. It is also the most focused story I've read of Russell's in terms of arriving at a central theme. In this case, the greyhound learns the importance of becoming her own master, which is something her own former owner failed to understand. It has a great last line that feels perfect and earned and complete. Much of her other work feels to me like a symphony with eleven movements. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm certainly not saying Russell is some kind of hack. I won't argue with <a href="https://sloopie72.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/pushcart-2023-xlvii-karen-russell-the-cloud-lake-unicorn-from-conjunctions-76/" target="_blank">Karen Carlson for liking the story</a>. I liked a lot of its parts, too. I'm more saying that the author is not being served well by a critical community that seems incapable of seeing magical creatures and finding them anything but, well, magical. Russell's work deserves the reading it gets, but it also deserves serious consideration, which seems to be lacking. Criticism often seems to boil down to either allowing someone into the circle of admired writers or not allowing them in. It seldom offers much in the way of explaining why one should be excluded or what might still be lacking in those approved. Russell is a hugely talented writer, but the iron of criticism that should sharpen the iron of her talent is nowhere to be found. </div><div><br /></div></div></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-89138907843734625392023-02-11T18:54:00.001-05:002023-02-11T18:54:09.614-05:00The mounting, undeniable backlash against women--by women: "The Children are Fragile" by Jen Silverman<div>Now Zeus was a womanizer,</div><div>Always on the make.</div><div>But Hera would usually punished her</div><div>That Zeus was wont to take.</div><div><br /></div><div>-Cake, "When You Sleep" </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>I'm taking my sweet-ass time blogging through whatever parts of Pushcart 2023 strike me as worth writing about. That's nice from a stress perspective, but it's bad <a href="https://sloopie72.wordpress.com/2023/01/18/pushcart-2023-xlvii-jen-silverman-the-children-are-fragile-from-the-sun-544/" target="_blank">when Karen Carlson notices something</a> I was going to write about and takes it before me. In this case, she thought to compare <a href="https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/544/the-children-are-fragile" target="_blank">"The Children are Fragile" by Jen Silverman</a> to Mary Gaitskill's "This is Pleasure," which <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-return-of-literary-court-this-is.html" target="_blank">we both blogged about when it appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020</a>. The reason Silverman's story reminded me of Gaitskill's is that both, as I put it when writing about "This is Pleasure" a few years ago, are "<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">about how agonizing it can be to determine, in some cases of alleged sexual misconduct, not just </span><i style="background-color: white;">whether </i><span style="background-color: white;">the person charged is guilty, but </span><i style="background-color: white;">how </i><span style="background-color: white;">guilty, and whether the degree of guilt ought to matter when it comes to consequences.</span></span>"<div><br /></div><div>Both stories are built around the reactions of an older woman when she hears that a charming, successful older man she knows has been accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment. In both cases, they are reluctant to believe the charges, and in both cases, that's partly because they're of an older generation that understood the rules of interaction with men differently. They understood them <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-humiliation-of-aziz-ansari/550541/" target="_blank">how Caitlin Flannagan explained them in 2018</a> when she reacted to accusations by Aziz Ansari's date that he'd been overly aggressive trying to get her to have sex with him. After acknowledging that the articles and books on sex she'd read as a young woman didn't prepare her to be a scientist or a captain of industry like today's women are ready, Flannagan also claims that they did make her generation "strong" in a way that modern women aren't:</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: AGaramondPro, "Adobe Garamond Pro", garamond, Times, serif; font-size: 22px;"><blockquote>But in one essential aspect they reminded us that we were strong in a way that so many modern girls are weak. They told us over and over again that if a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it. If he kept going, you got away from him. You were always to have “mad money” with you: cab fare in case he got “fresh” and then refused to drive you home. They told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the C-Suite. But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.</blockquote></span></div><div><span style="font-family: AGaramondPro, Adobe Garamond Pro, garamond, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 22px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: AGaramondPro, Adobe Garamond Pro, garamond, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 22px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">It felt very much like "The Children are Fragile" was responding to exactly this kind of thinking about the younger generation among some older women. In this case, the point-of-view character is the older woman Marsha, who goes by the rather pregnant nickname "Mars," suggesting both the warlike, strong god of war as well as a reversal of the old book on relationship advice "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Mars is definitely not from Venus. One of the things she will not brook is being called "Marsha," perhaps because in "Mars" she is more able to deny her sense of affinity with other women. She's been through a rape in her life, a "survivor" in the current lingo, although she herself hates that particular expression. She instead recasts it, as she does her name, by referring to Greek mythology:</span></div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>She didn’t think of herself as a victim, but she also didn’t like being called a “survivor”— it felt condescending, like an award given out after battle by the people who had stayed home. When she thought of herself in relation to that event — which was not often — she thought in the terms of Greek melodrama. Oedipus putting out his eyes, Agamemnon punctured with swords, Odysseus exiled far from his home. Something about men in the face of implacable power: they could fight and lose without being weak. She had fought and lost, but she would never agree to think of herself as weak.</blockquote></div><div><br /></div><div>Mars has two parallel questions she is dealing with in "The Children are Fragile," and they are linked. Fist, she is hearing one accusation after another being levelled against the charming director of a theater she's known casually. She, too, had seen some warning signs, but nothing definitive, and she was in any event conditioned, as a "stronger" woman of her generation, to not make too much of it. As the accusations mount, she is forced to ask herself whether she should have seen it coming. The second question she has to ask herself is what responsibility she has to protect Sheila, her student in playwriting. Sheila has been complaining about a roommate who gives her "looks." Mars doesn't exactly blow off Sheila's concerns, but she doesn't offer her any useful advice, either. Over time, Sheila is more and more rattled by the roommate's allegedly creepy behavior, and, after writing a string of erratic short plays about murder, disappears from class. Mars makes some effort to make inquiries, but it probably isn't really enough. </div><div><br /></div><div>Every time Mars tries to rationalize some behavior that the older generation would have met with "strength," Sheila insists that it should be met with community disapproval and sanctions. This is true from the first moment they discuss the accusations against the theater director, and it continues throughout. Sheila gets impatient and even angry with Mars for using words like "questionable" to describe men's bad behavior instead of "appalling." While Sheila is determined to believe women, Mars rejects "believe women" as a slogan and therefore, like all slogans, not useful. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Mars' own words as evidence of thematic center</h3><div><br /></div><div>One could think of "The Children are Fragile" in the same sense as "This is Pleasure" as leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the older generation or the newer one is right, but I think the weight tends to lean in favor of the younger generation being, if not totally right, at least less wrong than the older one. The evidence comes in Mars' own words. Early on, when discussing the idea with the soon-to-be-disgraced director of getting exposure for the plays of some of her students, she talks about how important it is, at this stage, to provide them with "encouragement." </div><div><br /></div><div>The director responds with the rather Darwinian suggestion that maybe there's too much encouragement, that it might be better to let the kids who are "doomed to write," who would "do it even if they had nothing," come to the fore. Mars responds with, “But wouldn’t you like to see what those kids can do if they aren’t constantly worried sick about having nothing?” In this case, Mars is explicitly rejecting strength as a requisite for success in life. </div><div><br /></div><div>Furthermore, Mars insists twice, which is twice too much, that she "doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about what other people think." She means it in one sense, the self-empowered sense of being one's own judge. What she misses, though, is that her own toughness has made her forget about the other sense of caring what other people think, which is known as empathy. In this case, she should be especially empathetic to Sheila, because Mars is supposed to be the older, wiser woman who can help Sheila learn how to navigate the hazards particular to women, especially those in theater. </div><div><br /></div><div>The story ends with Mars wondering impotently, after equally impotently making weak attempts to help Sheila, whether she should be looking at things differently. It ends with an "I don't know," but the "I don't know" isn't really ambiguity; it's an indictment. Mars should know. She should know better. Mars thinks at one point about Sheila that she was "capable of a ferocious conviction that Mars herself had not possessed at that age. For this reason, among others, Sheila both irritated and impressed her." Mars' agnosticism at the end isn't ambiguity; it's lack of conviction. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Women propagating mistreatment of other women</h3><div><br /></div><div>There was an article recently in Vox about the "<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23581859/me-too-backlash-susan-faludi-weinstein-roe-dobbs-depp-heard" target="_blank">mounting, undeniable backlash against #metoo</a>." When I saw this article linked on Twitter, I also saw a lot of comments from people who hadn't read it saying things like, "It's about time," and, "I'm glad to see this article, because clearly it's gone too far," etc. The article, though, was actually not critical of #metoo, but was written from a feminist perspective. It claimed that the backlash was inevitable and part of a historical trend. Whenever women began to make advances in society, like they did in 2017, there was always a movement to restrict their rights, especially their rights to earn money or to reproduce freely. The article looked at the overturn of <i>Roe v. Wade</i> as part of the backlash. </div><div><br /></div><div>What both "This is Pleasure" and "The Children are Fragile" get at--the latter much more than the former--is the way that the inevitable backlash against women is often coming <i>from</i> women. One of the justices behind overturning the right to an abortion was a woman. As <a href="https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-021-01085-z" target="_blank">studies on the practice of female genital mutilation</a> show, the forces that keep women from gaining equality aren't always exogenous; often, the forces that keep it in place are from the older generation of women. That's what "The Children are Fragile" is about. In its critique of the "strength" narrative of the older generation, it was responding to pieces like the one Flannagan wrote for <i>The Atlantic</i>. I'm not entirely convinced, actually, that the story isn't also responding directly to "This is Pleasure," which had a more ambiguous view of the gray areas of sexual misbehavior. When she meets with the director early in the story, he tells her it's for pleasure not business, although she can discuss business if she wants. Mars responds, "“I always have business to discuss...but it gives me a great deal of pleasure.” Was this a sly reference to Gaitskill's story? </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXHd04PMvI6CR2gerdp0pvu-8XxvEoQNxM2wIS-_4Bp_zA-em6Hyi5SDUAr0WREzoaG287_tbTwVpT8FxYP-7sHzpvJt5Sn7LnB6z8PdJtH7CyHfXab4hRTQHJCCVZeerbwq8GXslxcjPBRiDqdRS4P73pLuk2Yn-Uo-uumoIFIPpPV9HxAGJa67lZ/s1600/hera.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1059" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXHd04PMvI6CR2gerdp0pvu-8XxvEoQNxM2wIS-_4Bp_zA-em6Hyi5SDUAr0WREzoaG287_tbTwVpT8FxYP-7sHzpvJt5Sn7LnB6z8PdJtH7CyHfXab4hRTQHJCCVZeerbwq8GXslxcjPBRiDqdRS4P73pLuk2Yn-Uo-uumoIFIPpPV9HxAGJa67lZ/s320/hera.jpeg" width="212" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The original "women should be stronger when men try to take advantage" proponent. </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Another implication of #metoo</h3><div>There's one of those "talking past each other" dialogue sequences in "The Children are Fragile" that made me think there might be a better way to communicate what #metoo is all about. Or maybe what the inferences of #metoo are for most men. Most men aren't actually going to force themselves on women to the extent that, say, Harvey Weinsten did. </div><div><br /></div><div>I think there is some genuine concern that too much focus on explicit consent might ruin some of the genuine fun of flirting. That might be a bit of what makes the ending of "This is Pleasure" so hard to pin down. To kill off all unwanted advances, we'd probably be killing off some actual wanted ones. There is sometimes a thin line between pleasure and its pain. That's where some of the pushback to #metoo has been coming from, some of it from women. </div><div><br /></div><div>When Mars and Sheila were talking about the looks Sheila's roommate was giving him, Mars very often came close to offering helpful advice. She never quite got there, though, because she was focused too much on clearly over-the-line behavior or on clearly communicating feelings about not-quite-over-the-line behavior. Sheila understood that neither was going to happen. If she'd have tried to communicate to her roommate how his looks made her feel, everyone would have said there was no ACTUAL harm done, and they'd side with him. This is maybe one of the most important lessons of the #metoo moment that comes from listening to women's stories. </div><div><br /></div><div>There are three levels to male bad behavior that have gotten into the news:</div><div><br /></div><div>1: Clearly requiring sex based on one's position of power</div><div>2: Not clearly requiring sex based on one's position of power, but still pushing it on someone who felt pressured because of a power relationship, and </div><div>3: Behavior that is gray, such as jokes or innuendoes or "bad boy" behavior that some people like, some people feel neutral about, and some people really don't like. As Karen put it in her blog, "there are looks and there are looks." Not everyone agrees on which are which. </div><div><br /></div><div>Both "The Children are Fragile" and "This is Pleasure" are operating on this third level, with maybe some of level two. While "This is Pleasure" is a meditation on the ambiguities of level three, "The Children" is about how serious violations of level three can be to the psyche of the offended. Even if violations on this level never go beyond unwanted looks or comments, those alone can be damaging. They may be damaging to some people and not to others, but it's important not to cast this is in terms of "strength." It's especially important to avoid referencing preferences relative to ambiguous gestures and words with a strong/weak dichotomy. Because really, the point for everyone relative to third-level questions is not what is absolutely right or wrong, nor what women should be expected to take or not expected to take. It's a renewed sense of consideration. It doesn't matter if a man <i>should</i> be able to look at a woman if he doesn't touch her or say anything to her. What matters is whether it bothers the woman in question, just as I may have a right to blare my music with my car window down, but I still shouldn't, because it's likely most people in my listening blast radius don't like K-pop much. </div><div><br /></div><div>The two considerations of level three behavior that "The Children are Fragile" brings up are that women shouldn't determine how strong other women should be about level-three behavior they don't like, and men looking for unspoken confirmation that their gestures or words are wanted should assume they're not as good at reading signs as they think they are. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-9032840976084839822023-01-26T04:08:00.005-05:002023-01-26T04:08:56.404-05:00The poetics of patriarchy: "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta <p>In the past, I've enjoyed blogging through the short stories in the annual Pushcart anthology, probably more than I've enjoyed blogging through Best American Short Stories. The stories in Pushcart have a different feel. They're less likely to be products of the elite of literary fiction. Sometimes, they're by complete newbs, and that gives the volume a rawer, more outlaw feel to it. </p><p>I also approach a Pushcart blog-through differently from BASS. With BASS, I force myself to at least write something about every story. Even if I'm basically passing, I have to at least say why I'm passing. With Pushcart, though, I only do the stories that move me. If that's only three in the whole volume, then I only write about three. There's no pressure. Also, since many of the writers in Pushcart are complete unknowns, unlike the majority of writers in BASS, I tend to avoid writing about a story I didn't like. There aren't a ton of critics out there putting fingers to keyboard about these authors, so why make the one critical piece on their work something negative? There's no point to it. Since I don't like writing negative pieces, the decision to skip those makes the project a lot less arduous. </p><p>So it's unusual that I'm writing about a story from Pushcart I didn't like. I don't actually mean that the story isn't written well. It fulfills very precisely the expectations of our time for what a short story in a literary journal should do. The writer did what she needed to do to get published by a hard-to-get-into literary journal (<i>The Idaho Review</i>). It's precisely because the story is a success at what it is that I felt while reading it like something clicked about why I don't like a certain type of story, one that's extremely popular now and possibly even the default aesthetic for developing writers. What follows is a critique not of this particular story, but of that aesthetic. If this work is such a good example of a particular literary style that I wanted to use it as a springboard for a deeper examination, then it can only be seen as a success.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">No ideas but in things</h2><p>I don't know if William Carlos Williams' dictum of "no ideas but in things" really was a watershed in cultural history, but it feels that way to me. Hardly a writing advice book fails to cite this credo. It fits the aesthetic approach of Ray Carver, who was probably held up as the ideal writer in many graduate writing programs when I was in school. </p><p>Fiction has always featured use of significant details that appeal to the five senses in order to establish setting, tone, mood, and theme. <i>Don Quixote, </i>nearly the first true novel, did it. Homer gave us the wine-dark sea. There's nothing new about stimulating the brain's sensory apparatus through evocative words, but in no-ideas-but-in-thingsism, the things are no longer just setting. They start to take over. We don't have a woods laid out so we can imagine people doing things in it, but rather a woods that contends with the people for our attention. Setting isn't just there to provide a place for characters to do make decisions in. The props are the show. Mood isn't supporting the action, it is the action.</p><p>It's appropriate a poet like Williams was the one who bequeathed this idea to us, because it's fundamentally a poetic logic. More precisely, it's the logic of lyrical poetry, rather than narrative poetry. The guiding force isn't the plot, but rather the emotions and feelings of the narrator. We aren't concerned with hunting a deer in the woods, but with a stream-of-consciousness series of sensory impressions that accompany hunting a deer in the woods. The end result for a short story that employs this aesthetic is that you get a story where it can be challenging to summarize the plot. Sometimes, there isn't much of a plot. There's people and the things around them and the feelings those things evoke.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRUcUP7xFWFbR4POQfErTe1OAxVFqXUdu_eb_Oczl4wU4XnS1cleN4B9hfvGkhsaG-6PCpTXDtM1qpXVHKzL3fxFqWgn7Ows_S52bYEoP3n6iBdR1t2yYiwXHyRSYFWKT9H2lM1BdFLzO-2jwmL0nZFFmuAt_WOkYVZ3bsiEvMRXbZJx4d5yqKVpg3/s1200/buggyride.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1200" height="137" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRUcUP7xFWFbR4POQfErTe1OAxVFqXUdu_eb_Oczl4wU4XnS1cleN4B9hfvGkhsaG-6PCpTXDtM1qpXVHKzL3fxFqWgn7Ows_S52bYEoP3n6iBdR1t2yYiwXHyRSYFWKT9H2lM1BdFLzO-2jwmL0nZFFmuAt_WOkYVZ3bsiEvMRXbZJx4d5yqKVpg3/s320/buggyride.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Does this picture get you horny? It does for the main character.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Lists!</p><p>That's the effect of the approach in "Ambivalence" by Victoria Lancelotta. It's such a poetry-as-story approach, in fact, that its opening lines break into poetry-like line breaks: </p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify;">On Wednesday mornings the father hoists someone else’s</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> daughter onto his naked lap</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> bends someone else’s daughter over the press board motel desk</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> flips someone else’s daughter onto her skinny back</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> does not think about his own</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> will not think about his own.</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> His own is younger than this one</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> But not by much</span><br style="text-align: justify;" /><span style="text-align: justify;"> not by enough.</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify;">I read a lot of stories in litmags and anthologies that seem ruled more by the logic of poetry, the dictates of language over logic that poetry brings, and the associative and connotative connections of imagery over movement from one plot point to the next. One of the characteristics of these stories is that they're just chock full of stuff, of "things." In an early description of Samantha, the too-young girl the father is having sex with on Wednesdays, we get things that appeal to nearly all the senses: "This one has lavender-pointed toenails and skin that tastes like watermelon candy. She has sticky lips and straight white teeth and when he looks at them he can think of nothing but what they feel like on his nipples." </span></span></p><p>One of the frequent characteristics of a lyrical-poem-as-short-story is the list. Lists are <a href="https://thanetwriters.com/essay/form/what-is-a-list-poem/" target="_blank">a frequent device in poetry</a>. Even more traditionally narrative stories often will resort to mini-lists, <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-to-be-lazy-as-shit-as-writer-and.html" target="_blank">often in the form of triplets that the narrator is noticing</a>. In "Ambivalence," though, the narrator is so frequently listing things, the lists begin to take over. "Herewith, a partial accounting of things the father doesn't know," begins one list. In another place, we get a list of things the father doesn't think of when he's banging the young tweaker: "No daughter, no five-bedroom house, no three-car garage...no tennis club membership, no Saturday tee time...No airport lounge priority pas and no NFL season tickets." </p><p>These lists are sometimes of the more common variety, the one of listing things the POV character is noticing. For example, the father is aware of many of the peculiar props present in Amish country in Pennsylvania, where he goes on Wednesdays to have sex with Samantha. He thinks of taking her to a restaurant with "plastic tablecloths, plastic flowers. A small wooden triangle pegged with brightly colored golf tees meant to keep children busy." Soon after, he lists off things he remembers his daughter having put in her mouth when she was young. The story goes way beyond these lists of items in the immediate scene, though. Anything in the story can help build a list. </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Nihilistic realism</h2><p>Some people really love this poetic device, but at some point, I found it oppressive. By constantly putting the human characters in a world of unending things that can be listed and then including their own behavior among those lists, the story puts human behavior into a category of "things," things that just are. Human behavior is no different a thing from a road. Both include things to be listed. Human behavior cannot transcend, then. It's part of the environment it's playing out in and will only ever get dragged into it.</p><p>Because of this, the story ultimately feels more like it is admiring self-destructive sexual behavior in young women and the predatory men who take advantage of them than it is critiquing it. Or, if not admiring it, it is impotently bemoaning it. The tone is almost one of joy that such things exist, because they give the narrator such exquisite lists to make. There is no thought of building a critique of either men who take advantage of such women or of the women who make youthful bad decisions (as <a href="https://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2018/10/what-if-your-like-isnt-big-joke-emma.html" target="_blank">Emma Cline did in one of my favorite short stories</a>), because a critique is an idea, and ideas should only exist in things. Long, relentless, and eventually disheartening (even if perceptive) lists of things. If this is realism, it's realism with a series of nihilistic assumptions lurking behind it. </p><p>Maybe someone will say that if I felt oppressed by the poetic of the narrative, then it succeeded, because women feel oppressed by the sexually predatory men who take advantage of women like these. I'm not so sure. Part of this story reminded me of the HBO series <i>Euphoria</i><u>,</u> which I watched about ten minutes of and then turned off. (Only to have my daughter watch it on my account, so HBO kept sending me updates about the show.) I don't care if the actors are over 18. They're playing kids--wildly oversexed kids. Don't tell me that if I feel uncomfortable, then the show is succeeding. That show gratifies the very men who prey on young women's immaturity and poor decisions. It gratifies sex offenders. It normalizes behavior that hurts the people who perform it. It's exploitative and so is this story. While <i>Euphoria</i> is exploitative in that it takes teen angst and turns it into a titillating HBO show with lots of T&A, "Ambivalence" is exploitative in that it takes advantage of the poetic possibilities in suffering to luxuriate in those possibilities without offering a roadmap out. Roadmaps out are preachy, didactic. Things listed in sharp and clever detail are smart, modern, objective. </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">The revenge of poetry students</h2><p>This has ended up sounding like a criticism of this story, but it isn't. The story was written under certain aesthetic expectations, and it succeeded in meeting those expectations. It's certainly not the only story to have done this. It was just a clear enough example that the outline of what those aesthetic expectations were became clear to me. Plenty of other stories do what this story did. They find some injustice, some imbalance in the world, some tragedy, and they explore the poetics of its awfulness with a sharp eye and a complete unwillingness to impose any kind of corrective force to it. </p><p>I often think that a decent working definition of literary fiction in the 21st century might be "fiction in which plot is not a primary consideration." Obviously, this definition doesn't work for every story you might find in <i>The New Yorker</i> or <i>The Georgia Review</i> or <i>The Missouri Review.</i> There are still a lot of great stories with plots you could summarize. These are usually my favorites stories. This definition does work, though, for a surprisingly high number of stories. Robert Olen Butler's <i>From Where You Dream</i> pushes this kind of writing, one in which a story feels like a dream, and his book has been extremely influential. I think a lot of writing programs think they've succeeded when their students begin to write like this.</p><p>When I was in graduate school, my advisor, Cris Mazza, once remarked in class that because fiction sometimes sells books and poetry hardly ever does, it's somewhat easier to have an objective discussion about what works in fiction than in poetry. If nobody expects that a poem will ever be read by more than a small handful of award panelists or graduate advisors, then it's hard to know if the poem "works." With a story, though, there's at least some hope that if the story "works," then people will like it. I thought this was a good argument, and it had something to do with my decision to change from a poetry focus to one in fiction. I felt kind of bad for poets, actually. </p><p>But perhaps poets have gotten their revenge by exporting some of their aesthetic preferences into literary fiction. Maybe many of the people writing literary fiction, or the editors of literary fiction, are others who once wanted to be poets. In any event, while I don't necessarily hate every story that conforms to the aesthetics of lyric poetry, I do more readily connect with stories that have at least some plot to them. This story was more of an evocative description of the status quo into which a disruptive force would naturally come in a more traditional narrative structure than it was a tale of people and their trail of decisions. </p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: justify;">Other views: My friend Karen Carlson is actually ahead of me in reading Pushcart. When we do BASS, she's usually behind, meaning I've already stolen all the easy stuff to say about a story. Now I have to follow her, which is going to make it a lot harder for me to have anything original to write.<a href="https://sloopie72.wordpress.com/2023/01/12/pushcart-2023-xlvii-victoria-lancelotta-ambivalence-from-idaho-review-19/" target="_blank"> Here's her take on this story</a>. </span></span></p>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-33774315095031854642022-12-31T10:28:00.000-05:002022-12-31T10:28:24.042-05:00Did Best American Short Stories 2022 move me?I never went beyond getting my M.A. in English, but I was a serious student of literature long enough that some of the ethos of the profession has stuck with me. It still seems strange to me to talk about literature from a personal standpoint. It's fine to talk about what literature means, but not so much about what literature means <i>to me</i>. <div><br /></div><div>As I've been considering how to wrap up my read-through of Best American Short Stories 2022, it occurred to me that maybe I'd ignore the impulse to repress my personal feelings. To use a Bible-reading metaphor I've employed before, this is more of a "devotional" reading--meaning one in which I read to find out what the text tells me about my life--than a hermeneutical reading. </div><div><br /></div><div>Isn't what literature does to us internally why we read literature in the first place? A scholarly approach is useful because it deepens what happens to us internally, but ultimately, reading happens alone, completely within our minds, and we read because we are hoping something will happen there inside us that will--what? Make us smarter? More resilient? More philosophical? Less judgmental? Give us smart things to say at parties? Give us useful things to say to loved ones who are struggling with life? All of these? </div><div><br /></div><div>For me, a story has succeeded when there is something that happens in my life after I've read it and I'm reminded of the story. The story somehow seems to inform the way I think about whatever it is I'm facing. It might offer a solution. It might simply frame the problem in words like I never would have been able to. It might make me more aware of something that had never gone beyond the level of unconscious acceptance before. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Will any of these stories come to mind later in my life?</h3><div><br /></div><div>I guess the only way to tell if a story is a "personal classic"--meaning a story that frequently comes to mind later in life--is to live your life and find out. But you can kind of tell right away sometimes. I knew when I read "The Breeze" by Joshua Ferris that I would keep thinking about that story forever, and also with "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken. Those are probably the two modern stories I think about the most. They join older stories like "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and a handful of Borges shorts--just to limit it to short stories--as frequently used furniture in my brain. Will anything from 2022 do the same?</div><div><br /></div><div>I did think that the 2022 collection was one of the better ones I've read in the now ten years I've been reading BASS. I liked nearly all the stories. Even the ones I didn't like, I mostly recognize that I can see why someone would have thought they were good. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet as good as these stories were, I think it's highly unlikely I'll think again much about more than a few of them. The ones likely to stick in my brain are: "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado, "Sugar Island" by Claire Luchette, "The Souvenir Museum" by Elizabeth McCracken, "Bears Among the Living' by Kevin Moffett, and "The Beyoglu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra" by Kenan Orhan. So six. And in reality, I doubt it will be that many. (This list doesn't mean I necessarily thought those were the six best, but more that they will be the most memorable.) </div><div><br /></div><div>Honestly, I had a hard time remembering some of the stories two weeks after I blogged about them. Karen Carlson was a little behind me this year, and when her posts would come out on the same story I'd already blogged about, I sometimes had to think really hard to even recall what story she was talking about.</div><div><br /></div><div>What does that say about literature? These are twenty stories that cleared enormous hurdles, both in their original publication and in their selection for a best-of anthology. They're all top-notch from a craft perspective, and many of them have the feel of being truly felt in their creation, not just cynical works that meet the expectations of literary fiction readership. But I won't remember most of them, and that's after having spent the time to read them all twice and think enough about them to write posts others would read. Most people likely won't spend nearly that much time on them. Does that mean most literature, even good literature, has a very short shelf life and a very small cultural impact? </div><div><br /></div><div>Clearly, literature has been a big part of making me who I am. Anytime I'm alone and thinking about my life and my place in the universe, thoughts that have their origin in literature make up a big part of the noise in my head. It's largely a useful noise, one that is a little bit clearer and more beautiful than some of the other sounds--the ones made up of how much I hated public school or how much the Marine Corps messed with my head or how bad I think I am at being a grown up. But reading literary fiction isn't, maybe, a very efficient method for culling useful information. If I'm only going to remember at best 30% of the stories I read a year after I've read them, and if maybe less that 2% are going to have any lasting impact on who I am and how I think about the world, then that means I'm kind of wasting a lot of my time when I'm reading fiction. </div><div><br /></div><div>Sure, I might be changing unconsciously from stuff I don't remember, but I think the real change comes from the stuff you're constantly chewing over. If even the best of what's being put out doesn't mostly make its way deep into the psyche, then what am I really accomplishing with all the reading of stuff that doesn't knock me off my feet?</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">It's not the fault of the writing, I think</h2><div><br /></div><div>I often run into people who spin some version of, "all the writing today is shit." I don't think that's true. By any measure of what makes good literature, most of what's in BASS is good. Every year, I pick out one or two that I think don't belong, but mostly, it's not that the quality is bad. Maybe that's just the way literature is. Maybe for people who read a lot, the impact of each story tends to be less. When I was a kid, I thought Wendy's was the best food in the universe. Now that I'm grown and I've eaten other things, I realize it's not good at all. A more refined palate can be harder to please. Maybe that's why every survey of "the best five novels" always tends to lean toward the kinds of novels people read in junior high or high school. As we grow, it becomes more difficult for literature to affect us deeply, so when we are groping for a novel that really moved us, we have to go back to a time when we could still be easily moved. </div><div><br /></div><div>I suppose there might still be some value in reading stories that others might value. If I'm not an unusual reader, and most readers who take reading seriously will only remember a small percentage of what they've read more than a few months after reading it, then I can probably also assume that the stories others will remember are likely to differ from mine. Maybe someone else will long treasure "The Wind" by Laruen Groff or "Foster" by Bryan Washington. Is it valuable to me, as means to understanding others, to at least be exposed to what might move someone else, even if it doesn't move me?</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm sure it has some value, but I don't know if the value justifies the input of effort and time. Literary Twitter and the literary community tend to talk often as if everything they read is devastating and leads to eternal psychic wounds from which the reader will never recover. I think that's unlikely. I can't believe everything everyone reads is really that unforgettable. Which is pretty humbling. It's a pretty natural tendency for writers to write because they want to be remembered. But given the churn of stories that are out there, writing might actually be a really bad way for most people to be remembered. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't deny that among the reasons I have for writing, the desire to be remembered is among them. It's very sad to me to think of it one day being like I never existed. It makes me wonder what the point of even living is if I can't leave something behind that will outlast me. I guess most people think of having kids as their legacy, but I think of whatever my kids do in their lives as their own legacy. I want something more. And it's enormously frustrating to me that I haven't done more to increase the readers I would need for the kind of legacy I want. I write the stories I want to read, assuming that what I love others will love, but I'm constantly disappointed to find there aren't many others who love what I love. Still, I've kept going, because if I wanted to be remembered, what, really, was my alternative? </div><div><br /></div><div>But thinking about BASS 2022, I'm maybe left with the feeling that leaving a legacy as a writer is even harder than I've thought it was. Getting into BASS is very, very hard. Even if I personally hate the story, nobody gets in there by accident. But even if I did keep persevering enough to one day accomplish that milestone, would it even matter? I recently was reading about the "<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-story-at-the-center-of-the-bad-art-friend-saga" target="_blank">bad art friend</a>" controversy, and the article mentioned that one of the people embroiled in it had been published in BASS several years ago. When I read that, I couldn't place the story at all. I had to go back and look at it again. When I read it again, it was like reading it for the first time. I'll remember her more now for the stupid controversy than her story. </div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">What this all means for me for next year</h2><div><br /></div><div>I know I keep promising I'm quitting writing or quitting literary fiction or quitting whatever, and then I keep going back on my word. I'm the kind of guy who needs a purpose in life, and when I ditch the one I've got, it ends up being so frightening looking for a new one, I quickly end up right back where I was, sure it'll be different this time. But thinking about it in the cool, objective light of day, maybe the concern I've always had for whether literature is good for you is in some ways justified. So I'm at least going to start 2023 doing other things. If this is terrifying to me from a raison d'etre standpoint, I can look at it as diversification from my main goal, rather than outright abandonment of it. </div><div><br /></div><div>What I maybe walked away from BASS this year with more than anything was the feeling that although many people can write a good short story, only the greatest of a generation can write an unforgettable one. Elizabeth McCracken can write a story I'll never forget, but I'm no Elizabeth McCracken. For most people, that wouldn't be a reason to give up. For me, though, I'm not sure. I think I need a little more time away. I need to do things other than literature so the effect of literature has time to become new to me again. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-61271416802542858492022-12-17T11:27:00.003-05:002022-12-17T11:27:24.327-05:00Something there is that loves a wall: "Foster" by Bryan WashingtonThere are some stories that wear their themes on their sleeves. They're not trying to hide what they're about in any way. In fact, they're screaming out to the reader, "This is what the story's about!" "Foster" by Bryan Washington is that kind of story. It's about a guy who puts up walls in his relationship so he doesn't get hurt. His friend at work even tells him that, and when the protagonist snarks that this isn't exactly a profound observation, his friend says that this is true, but there are really only so many reasons why a person does what they do, and this is the protagonist's reason. <div><br /></div><div>So why does he eventually let in his boyfriend, Owen? Because of a cat, essentially. And here's where I have to ask: am I the only one who's going to draw a comparison between "Foster" and <i>Breakfast at Tiffany's</i>? I'm not saying the story is derivative or anything. I'm just saying that this is a story about someone who doesn't want to be a part of a family or to belong to anyone because of his own painful family history, and because of that he's reluctant to even name a cat he's taking care of. There's even an important supporting character who is Japanese, although thankfully not a horribly racist caricature. I thought of <i>Breakfast at Tiffany's</i> almost immediately. I figured it's something everyone would say about it, but so far, I'm the first person who's talked about this story on the Internet who's drawn the comparison. </div><div><br /></div><div>Because the story essentially does its own detective work for us, there's not much for me to say here. A character has had a past that makes him mistrust family, so when his partner, although a good person, suggests they form their own type of family, he resists his partner. The cat pushes through his emotional walls the way he pushes through bathroom doors and makes him decide to care. Draw the curtain. </div><div><br /></div><div>And so we've come to the end of BASS 2022. I might eventually do a wrap-up, although I think I need some time to reflect before I do. I know I've terribly half-assed some of the analysis I did this year. My heart wasn't in it. I feel pretty certain now that the literary fiction world doesn't have any room in it for me, so that makes creating my own little part of the community less appealing. I'm going to go spend a few months doing totally non-literary things. </div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-58121564565986679092022-12-13T16:51:00.001-05:002022-12-13T16:51:41.599-05:00Now with 33% more "what"!: "Elephant Seals" by Meghan Louise Wagner<p>As intricate as a story as "Elephant Seals" is, I actually don't have that much to say about it. I suspect most writers who read this story will immediately be reminded, as I was, of <a href="https://genius.com/Margaret-atwood-happy-endings-annotated" target="_blank">Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings</a>." Atwood's short story is taught in almost every "introduction to the short story" class, not just because it's a good story, but because it has a lot to say about plot. Like "Elephant Seals," it's got alternate story lines and multiple possible endings. It's famous for the line dismissing plot, calling it a "what and a what and a what." "Elephant Seals," by committing to the idea for much longer than "Happy Endings" does, might be thought of as a "what and a what and a what and a what." </p><p>One interesting thing about "Elephant Seals" is that it frequently refers to "versions," but it doesn't actually call them "versions of the story." The opening line has it that "Most versions of Paul and Diana stop to see the elephant seals on their way to California." Not "most versions of the story of Paul and Diana." Are we dealing with a multiple dimensions story, like when interdimensional cable television on an episode of "Rick and Morty" lets everyone see their alternate lives in other universes? </p><p>This seems more likely than it being "multiple versions of a story that I created." If so, what's striking is that there is so much consistency from universe to universe. If there are infinite universes, there ought to be infinite universes in which Paul and Diana never meet at all. There ought to be infinite universes in which they never even existed. Instead, they seem to meet in most universes. There are some in which Paul is killed along with his parents at age fifteen when their store is robbed, but in most versions, we are told, Paul and Diana do end up meeting each other. </p><p>That's kind of a key to the whole story. Multiverse theory can be very disorienting. It's the defining character trait of Rick on "Rick and Morty" to feel overwhelmed by ennui because his interdimensional portal gun allows him to see just how pointless we all are in a multiverse that has infinite versions of us. For Rick, what sliver of meaning that exists comes from him being the best version of all the Ricks, the "Rickest Rick."</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhoxPPT5rTweQx7WKewbmAE3IdQqGSI8Z_RFgUi0bXqS9IGQwvePPAlw47NwUd15XrQcxuRs7NK4IJ-uXlGZ_sg1Ns4As-YT7h7g5H2K5sx9p3NnzjiHHnWKRxxNHOdCJXHGgobsK_gFfu7nPKtrm_6UYgESP9npPv8ewQ9609vNxYuwvIZp2TTIBE/s275/randm.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhoxPPT5rTweQx7WKewbmAE3IdQqGSI8Z_RFgUi0bXqS9IGQwvePPAlw47NwUd15XrQcxuRs7NK4IJ-uXlGZ_sg1Ns4As-YT7h7g5H2K5sx9p3NnzjiHHnWKRxxNHOdCJXHGgobsK_gFfu7nPKtrm_6UYgESP9npPv8ewQ9609vNxYuwvIZp2TTIBE/s1600/randm.jpeg" width="275" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There was a time when I would have worried about what letting people know I like this show would do to my reputation, but I don't think my reputation could get any worse, so I might as well run with it.</td></tr></tbody></table><p><br /></p><p>In "Elephant Seals," there's less of a focus on which version of a person is the best than on which version is the most authentic. Although there's only one version of Paul that "gets it right," it's not really about this version being the best; it's about this version being the most "Paul." </p><p>That's the point of the touching closing:</p><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>"They travel between eleven and thirteen thousand miles each migration cycle, farther than any pinniped....They eat fish and squid and creatures that only dwell in the deepest, darkest ocean floors. They go out in the world and explore, but they always return to the same spots, the same beaches, year after year. They don't forget where they come from. They don't forget where they really live."</blockquote></div><p>What orients people in "Elephant Seals," even in a cosmos where a multitude of cosmoses is possible, is that there is some authentic us that continues to crop up over and over again. There's some "home," even in the infinite multiverse, that we find ourselves constantly coming back to. That's how "most versions" of us can end up doing the same things, even though in an infinity of choices, there shouldn't be a "most" anything. There should be infinite universes in which we all don't exist. Instead, most universes, perhaps because even the multiverse has some basic true character to which most universes tend, will create the same people doing more or less similar things. </p><p>I don't know if I believe in the multiverse. I don't know if, assuming the multiverse exists, this is a particularly soothing vision of it. It's possible that it really all does mean nothing. I might be the shittiest version of me that exists. Lately, I've certainly been thinking that might be the case. Nonetheless, I do like the story for having a point about life in the multiverse that I can at least understand. </p>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-53679508399712893502022-12-11T13:34:00.002-05:002022-12-11T13:34:18.904-05:00Two kinds of replacing: "The Sins of Others" by Hector TobarThis is one of those stories where you can get to the end, think for all the world that you understood what happened, and still feel a little lost what the story was supposed to be about. Sometimes, it can be helpful to recount the bare facts, simplified from how they were relayed in the original narrative. While this can kill some of the organic joy that comes from the livelier telling, the more objective look at the raw materials of the story can sometimes help clue a reader into the meaning. The basics of the plot are:<div><br /></div><div>1) A man named Karl Segerstrom has hit his wife with a pickup truck, apparently in some kind of jealous rage.</div><div>2) However, there is a law, called the "Replacement Law," which allows him to find someone else to serve his sentence for the crime in his place.</div><div>3) The person he selects is Juan Ignacio Hernandez Perez, with whom he once worked in an auto mechanic's shop.</div><div>4) The provisions of the law are unclear, but it seems like they allow a citizen of the United States to nominate an illegal immigrant to serve the punishment for a crime in his or her place. Since Juan came to the U.S. illegally in 1996, he works for Karl.</div><div>5) Juan is not able to appeal this based on his productive life in the United States. However, since the government seems to be very half-assed about its enforcement, leaving most replacement convicts to wander around an old hotel that serves as a prison, Juan is able to escape fairly easily.</div><div>6) While escaped, he goes back to his old life, and he soon learns that charges against Karl were dropped, which means Juan is free to go.</div><div>7) However, Karl later attacks the man his wife had been sleeping with, earning him another charge, one that Juan again has to serve out.</div><div>8) Juan serves it out until Karl, beside himself that his wife has left him for real, kills himself. Juan is now free to go, as long as he keeps his nose clean and nobody else grabs him as a replacement for their crime.</div><div>9) While going on walks in his free-again life, he worries about the graffiti he sees on the wall, which includes a tag for one "Weedwolf." He worries that Weedwolf will get into some kind of trouble and make Juan pay for the crime. He thinks that if this happens, he will escape from prison, get a gun, and kill Weedwolf. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>That's the plot, more or less. I left out some stuff about his dead wife and kids, and there are some people along the way who treat him with unexpected kindness, but that's the essence of what happens. It's not too hard to follow, once you figure out what's going on, but a reader might wonder if there's some hidden layer to the story. If it's in Best American Short Stories, after all, shouldn't it have some brilliant second layer beneath the main layer? </div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Different kinds of replacements</h2><div><br /></div><div>If there is a deeper layer, I think it's hidden in the many meanings of "replacement." On the one hand, there's the obvious meaning of one person doing something in place of another. Human history actually has a long track record of allowing one person to do something unpleasant in place of another. The rich have been able to bribe others to serve their sentences for crimes or to go to war in their place. "The Sins of Others," though, doesn't seem to be a story that's criticizing how the wealthy get away with things by exploiting the poor. If anything, Juan seems better off than Karl.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's a more recent connotation to "replacement," though, and it's infusing this story with a hint of another kind of meaning. The "<a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/05/16/1099034094/what-is-the-great-replacement-theory" target="_blank">Great Replacement Theory</a>," the notion that white people in America are intentionally being replaced by other races in order to subvert the political order, gained attention recently because it apparently motivated the shooter at a mass murder in a Buffalo grocery store. It had already been in circulation long before that event, though.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I was first starting the story, I thought that maybe the "Replacement Law" had to do with this second meaning. I thought the law would be something like, "Every time a white person is taken out of society, a minority has to be taken out, too, in order to balance it out." That led to a whole different dystopian story in my head, which didn't turn out to be the actual story, but this second meaning of replacement never went away for me.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Great Replacement Theory is an offshoot of something else that's been going on as long as there have been discriminated classes of minorities in the world. Scapegoating is where we take the evils of society and place the blame onto the discriminated class. It's yet another kind of replacement in which the minority group takes the blame by proxy for something that isn't really their fault. In America, immigrants are often blamed for crime or for high unemployment or other evils. </div><div><br /></div><div>The replacement that's operating in "The Sins of Others" is close to this kind of replacement. It's the old game of blaming the minority taken a step further. It's large-scale social scapegoating brought down to the individual level. The story dramatizes the effect of all kinds of conspiracy theories surrounding immigrants by taking it out of the abstract and social and moving it down to one person taking on the punishment of the sins of one other.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXwX0BbxZz7FvMJdFsqls_A-WwNOHDdcYZuQgqf4wGsZjZCrcpjhJeX_DkMT5igBOvM2-V5YozjLJ9tYSjA6c0kmojlSLG_5l1HBQe8hjJUdsgP5StPWQpGHabHHd-5ENlSbMJhinxpTYM3jl4kmNXIULEFnXk_6fRsI7SzTco2Uq38FGkYtmzZMC8/s839/weedwolf.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="839" data-original-width="601" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXwX0BbxZz7FvMJdFsqls_A-WwNOHDdcYZuQgqf4wGsZjZCrcpjhJeX_DkMT5igBOvM2-V5YozjLJ9tYSjA6c0kmojlSLG_5l1HBQe8hjJUdsgP5StPWQpGHabHHd-5ENlSbMJhinxpTYM3jl4kmNXIULEFnXk_6fRsI7SzTco2Uq38FGkYtmzZMC8/s320/weedwolf.PNG" width="229" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The ending is about to get a little bit strange.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Weedwolf</h2><div><br /></div><div>If that's how the story is working, then how to make sense of the enigmatic ending? What the hell is "Weedwolf" all about? If I'm to assume it wasn't meant to be a reference to the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2095824/" target="_blank">2011 schlock horror film about a werewolf who kills stoners in a Texas town</a> (which now I'm really interested in watching), then we as readers must be left to our own devices to try to understand what's going on here. I see two possible readings.</div><div><br /></div><div>First, although Juan is paranoid about whether Weedwolf is out to get him by doing something unthinkable and then making Juan pay the penalty for it, perhaps Juan is himself Weedwolf. "Weedwolf" is awfully close to "werewolf," a sort of bugbear or bogeyman the community fears but which isn't real. How like the threats from immigrants in conspiracy theories! Especially when we mix in drugs with the werewolf. Juan is thinking he needs to destroy this imaginary foe, but in reality, the town is already preparing to destroy him, because it views him as the monster. This is why Juan imagines Weedwolf as being "about his age." He's imagining the version of himself that the community sees.</div><div><br /></div><div>The second option is a little more depressing. Juan, tired of being the scapegoat for others, is now inventing a bogeyman of his own, a shadowy, sinister threat in the dark plotting evil. Juan has adapted well to society in America. He's living the American Dream, minus his short stint in prison. Has he, now, handed down the scapegoating to someone else? Is he now so protective of his own, hard-won place in the community that he is willing to join the majority in finding others to blame for what's wrong?</div><div><br /></div><div>There have been a few stories in BASS this year that re-look at this age-old motif of the community and how it polices outcasts through informal enforcement of community codes. "The Little Widow from the Capital" did it, as did "Soon the Light," "Mbiu Dash," and, to a lesser degree, "Bears Among the Living." There must be something about this horror-adjacent theme that people find illustrative of current popular discourse. There's a reason Jordan Peele keeps cranking out horror movies as a way to talk about race in America.</div><div><br /></div><div>The way you read the ending will determine which type of horror this is. If it's the first reading, then the real terror is that there is no reconciliation possible for the monster. Once someone is outside society, they will forever remain there, meaning their only choice is to become progressively more monstrous. If it's the second reading, then there is a chance for reconciliation, but only by joining the mob as it acts more monstrous than the bogeyman it fears. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-36477307114819748762022-12-10T09:02:00.001-05:002022-12-10T09:02:07.671-05:00The First Rule of Quasi-Affair Club: "Ten Year Affair" by Erin SomersA friend asked me out of the blue the other day whether I had a lot of "platonic friendships." Depending on how rigorously one reads Plato, that could mean several things, but I had a feeling he meant it in the more generally used sense of being friends with a woman but not romantically involved with her.* <div><br /></div><div>"You mean," do I have a lot of female friends?" I asked to be sure.</div><div><br /></div><div>When he said that was, in fact, what he meant, I said that I did have a few, and I was even close with some of them, but that I tried to be careful of those relationships. I always feel at least some level of attraction to female friends, so I have to be honest with myself what my intentions are with some of the interactions I have. </div><div><br /></div><div>That doesn't mean that I eschew all female companionship other than Mrs. Heretic just because I feel some level of attraction to these friends. On the contrary, I fully believe in the life-affirming value of a low-key, unspoken-but-felt attraction between two people that is "platonic" on one level but might, in the world of the imagination, be not only non-platonic, but outright filthy. I think a healthy and happy marriage can endure many of these relationships from both spouses over the years, but only if they follow the rules.</div><div><br /></div><div>"But what rules, Jake?" you say. I'm glad you asked. For I am not only an expert semi-skilled literary critic, but also a six-sigma blackbelt in the art of the quasi-affair. For years, I've kept the rules of conducting these relationships to myself, but today, for the low-low price of nothing, I am giving them away. </div><div><br /></div><div>What makes a quasi-affair, or quasi-romance? You've probably had them as far back as middle school. There's someone of the opposite sex (again, please see my disclaimer at the bottom) you interact with, and you feel some attraction, but maybe she's dating someone else or you are or it's just not strong enough to pursue or your mom won't let you date girls yet or whatever. So you more or less flirt. It's fun. Occasionally, it might be more serious than that. Maybe you share some real trouble you're going through, and you have an actual deep discussion. Both of you meet emotional needs for one another, and the fact that it remains uncomplicated makes it easier to keep meeting those needs.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZFPVgaavjWg9-EQaYqM5Rl9alqOQnJ82FAaePoQNk65vjw5-Kdwe9M1TIGzliHc47exBMrZk5mwpMswTzF4XXO-CqGnOGuMoirIKlAjE26xlOSjlsXgp2JlKTq5sJM9RtdFbxw2Y-megTSXbULml19M_U9_76HxS1DacGxx2cHfws7hi0DzGecoDI/s1000/affair.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="718" data-original-width="1000" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZFPVgaavjWg9-EQaYqM5Rl9alqOQnJ82FAaePoQNk65vjw5-Kdwe9M1TIGzliHc47exBMrZk5mwpMswTzF4XXO-CqGnOGuMoirIKlAjE26xlOSjlsXgp2JlKTq5sJM9RtdFbxw2Y-megTSXbULml19M_U9_76HxS1DacGxx2cHfws7hi0DzGecoDI/s320/affair.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If done right, the quasi-affair or "emotional affair" will never leave you like this person, inexplicably taking the time to button his shirt instead of just leaving quickly and buttoning it outside.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>As adults, one of the most common ways to find a quasi-romance partner is through work. There's an opposite sex (read the note at the bottom) co-worker, and you interact a lot, and you get along and find a lot to like about each other. But she's married and so are you, so it never goes beyond being friendly at work. </div><div><br /></div><div>Well, it kind of does. There are a million small cues you can give each other to let the other person know there's some level of attraction there. Depending on how strong these signals are, the relationship might become strong enough to be an "emotional affair," or an affair that's got everything in it but the fucking. </div><div><div><br /></div><div><div>It's not even necessary that both parties are attached otherwise. If one person is married and the other isn't, this is still a good place for a quasi-romance to bloom. What's important is that both parties are getting something emotional out of it. For the married person, they are confirming that they've "still got it" without needing to undo the family unit. They gain confidence. For the unmarried person, they also gain a feeling of satisfaction from being attractive enough that even a married person would be willing to flirt with danger with them. Through a million unspoken and daily interactions, both are confirming for the other that, "Yes, you are an attractive person." </div><div><br /></div><div>In a happy marriage, the satisfaction comes from going deep into a relationship. It's very fulfilling, and it's worth the work, but it also frustrates a human impulse in which romance is more about breadth than depth. We want to know that a lot of people find us attractive, even if we don't want to have relationships with them. We want to know we aren't stuck with this person out of necessity, even if we wish to remain stuck with them out of commitment. </div><div><br /></div><div>If both parties in a quasi-romance do it right, they can satisfy one another's emotional needs for years, even decades. Because the romance never turns sexual, the fantasies never get old. There is always potential energy in the relationship that never gets turned to kinetic, never wears out or gets used up, and that helps preserve one's energy in general. </div><div><br /></div><div>I recently told Mrs. Heretic that the only reason I ever did anything remotely grown-up in my twenties and thirties was because I thought I would get laid for it. As we go deep in our real romances, this motivation wanes, but a quasi-romance can shame us into exercise or motivate us to work hard so we look good at work. There are a lot of plusses to a quasi-romance, but you have to follow the rules.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Okay, I've teased the rules a lot now, so what are they? There aren't a lot.</h2><div><br /></div><div>1. The first rule of Quasi-Affair Club is that you don't talk about the quasi-affair with the quasi-affair partner. </div><div>2. That is also the second rule. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdwllKebiV6QF0mP_qVwxEhSukExMO2dCIYx35eGtaE7h5UbYpLc2qEgGvMRBDZO6tf6BLILkeA6hdC72ldNSPtZYblGdyAbhUsha_QMWnLBI44p-dLStt9s0SjVQGyCC1HFJKv14QhDBqRWnhSGValssujehdYKHDy8PHAsmumjtwybkYvSrlTdmz/s976/fightclub.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdwllKebiV6QF0mP_qVwxEhSukExMO2dCIYx35eGtaE7h5UbYpLc2qEgGvMRBDZO6tf6BLILkeA6hdC72ldNSPtZYblGdyAbhUsha_QMWnLBI44p-dLStt9s0SjVQGyCC1HFJKv14QhDBqRWnhSGValssujehdYKHDy8PHAsmumjtwybkYvSrlTdmz/s320/fightclub.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yeah, I Fight Clubbed my rules. </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>What makes a quasi-romance so great is its endless potential to be anything. It's a very delicate thing, though. Ask too much of it, and it will quickly fall apart. You can't send a drunk text to the quasi-romance partner asking, "Hey, what are we doing here, really?" You can't even say, "I wish we could be romantically involved, even though I realize we can't." That ruins it.</div><div><br /></div><div>The point of these relationships is to allow each other to live a separate life, one that's full of quotidian, bullshit responsibilities that have nothing to do with the quasi-romance itself. It's a symbiotic relationship in which both parties restore the self-esteem of the other without requiring anything permanent. Through words and gestures, one person tells the other that they are attractive and that maybe, in a different universe, there might have been something there. And that needs to be enough for both.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are three things that can happen when you bring the latent feelings out in the open. One is that the other party will tell you they don't feel the same way, in which case, you've lost all the good feelings you had. The second option is that the they tell you they do feel the same way and they want to be with you, and now you have to make a choice. Everything just got real in a relationship where the whole value was in its fantasy quality. The third choice is that you both acknowledge your feelings but decide to not do anything about them for family reasons. This preserves the status quo in the real-world relationship, but the fantasy relationship will never be the same. </div><div><br /></div><div>Note that the rules of Quasi-Affair Club to do apply to people who are in unhappy relationships and who therefore want to have real affairs. That's a different thing, and we'll look at whether Cora or Sam really should have been in Real Affair Club instead of Quasi-Affair Club below.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Do you see what Cora did wrong, class?</h2><div>"Ten Year Affair" by Erin Somers understands the value of a quasi-affair. When Sam, the long-term quasi-romance of Cora, finally decides to leave his wife and ask Cora to run off with him, Cora is actually kind of put out. He asks what she is thinking, and she responds, "None of your business." She's right when she thinks, "Really, it had almost nothing to do with him."</div><div><br /></div><div>The reasons she's right to think this is that in a correctly run quasi-romance, the internal imagination of each party, or what it means to them, isn't the business of the other party. Whatever it's meant to her for the ten years they were together, it's none of Sam's business. He was something she needed to get her though whatever emotional shit she was going through, and she was the same to him. But there's no need to explain what that something was. If she wants to tell another girlfriend about it, that's fine, but Sam can never know. </div><div><br /></div><div>The problem, though, is that Cora openly admitted early on what her feelings for Sam were. She kind of harassed him a bit, actually. It's easy to understand why. Cora is used to being told she has a great personality, but she isn't much of a sex symbol. She wants, for once, to be objectified. She wants to get fucked "into the astral plane" and forget about her life for a while. That's all very understandable and valid, but saying it out loud is a violation of the rules of Quasi-Affair Club. </div><div><br /></div><div>As I said above, the rules of Quasi-Affair Club only apply to people who are more or less happily married and looking to remain so. The quasi-affair is an outlet meant to prevent a real affair. Cora, although she seems mostly happy in her marriage, also really wants an affair. I think Cora has pursued the wrong thing. If what she wants is to feel desired, then maybe what she wanted was a consensual, no-strings sexual relationship, maybe one she could have told her husband about. If he wasn't okay with that, there are other options, like swinging. Cora wanted more than just to feel attractive, she wanted to feel smolderingly attractive. So she brought the rules from the Real Affair Club into the Quasi-Affair Club, which is why the thing was ultimately doomed. Unfortunately for Sam, it seems like he's the one who's going to suffer for it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Why does Sam, who seems to only want an emotional affair, eventually succumb to wanting a real one? And why, when he does, does he take it so much further than Cora wanted to? We can only guess. Maybe it has something to do with how capable his wife, Jules, is. Maybe over time, he's begun to think that Jules doesn't think much of him, because he's the weak half in their relationship. Cora has never wanted anything but to have torrid sex with him, so it may have eventually seemed to him that his emotional needs would have been met better with her.</div><div><br /></div><div>After Cora has been imagining a real affair with Sam for years while also managing her real life, we get a sneak peak into what Sam's imagination has been doing with the relationship. To Cora's surprise, in Sam's fantasy, she is reading poetry instead of doing mom stuff. She's almost offended by it. This is why the first rule of Quasi-Affair Club is that you don't talk about the quasi-affair with the person you're having the quasi-affair with. You'll likely to find out that you're getting different things out of it and that you're being put into the imaginary life of the other person in a very different way from what you'd hope. Which is fine as long as nobody ever reveals this to the other person.</div><div><br /></div></div><div>Sam's feelings for Cora were more "platonic," and therefore, perhaps, a little deeper. The danger of Cora's feelings for Sam was that if her fantasy ever came true, it might end up in a tryst they'd have to keep hidden. The danger of Sam's feelings for Cora was that if his fantasy ever came true, he'd leave his wife and wreck a couple of homes.</div><div><br /></div><div>There was nothing wrong with the way either Sam or Cora felt. Human psychology is strange and often doesn't make any sense. We need to feel desired sometimes by people we cannot begin to fulfill. A sensitive person will understand this need in others and fill it, having their own needs met in return, and neither couple ever needs to acknowledge it. "Ten Year Affair" is incredibly perceptive in understanding these rules, and the way it shows its understanding is by observing what happens from breaching them.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>*Throughout this post, I'm going to be casually talking about male-female relationships in a way that I acknowledge may come across as "heteronormative," meaning it might seem to suggest that heterosexual attraction is the assumed sexual orientation. I don't mean to do that, but it ended up being very cumbersome to keep qualifying everything with "in heterosexual relationships" or a similar caveat. Please read this entire post as though it were in brackets. Around those brackets are all the other sexual ways of being in the world that aren't heterosexual and more or less nuclear-family-centric. These other ways aren't "abnormal," even if they're not in the majority. I'm equating relationships in this post to heterosexual relationships because writing it the other way wasn't pretty. </div></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3269645828546245860.post-60375446179179146162022-12-09T18:48:00.001-05:002022-12-09T18:48:27.354-05:00The opposite of history: "Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjena SathianEvery year when I blog on Best American Short Stories, I end up pointing out at least a few times about how unusual it is to be reading a book celebrating our national literature that requires the reader to know so much about other parts of the world. Call it the literary consequences of being a superpower. Korean short story collections are mostly written by ethnically Korean people about ethnically Korean people, and nobody in Korea thinks twice about this. Ethiopian literature is written by people from Ethiopia, mostly about Ethiopians. That's the point of having Ethiopian literary anthologies: to encourage the development of native literature. <div><br /></div><div>Things are a little different in America. When you're a superpower, your country is made up of people from every corner of the globe. They come here and they bring their experiences with them. It makes for a pretty interesting literary tapestry, in much the same way the restaurant choices in most American cities are a lot more interesting than they might be in less cosmopolitan in other parts of the world. It also, however, creates challenges for an American reader, as some stories require an ability to adapt to new cultural contexts in ways that the native reader of an anthology of, say, Kenyan literature would not. </div><div><br /></div><div>In "Mr. Ashrok's Monument" by Sanjena Sathian, the story gets kind of deep into the reality of Indian life. There's a ton of satire going on, and while the story itself provides most of the keys a reader needs to at least know what the joke is supposed to be, I gather it's not as funny to me as it would be to someone who's actually been directly a part of Prime Minister Modi's historical and cultural flim-flam. </div><div><br /></div><div>My approach to "World Lit as American Lit" is to trust the story to tell me what I need to know. I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching what I come across in the story. If the story thinks I need to know more, it will tell me. If it doesn't, either I should have known it (in the estimation of the author), or it's not that important. So much like I did with Kenan Orhan two stories ago, I'm going to kind of go in with only the little bit I know about the country the story is set in.</div><div><br /></div><h2 style="text-align: left;">The public and the personal in parallel</h2><div><br /></div><div>It's pretty common in a story that's so obviously skewering political leadership as "Mr. Ashok's Monument" is to put the public or political in conflict with the private or personal. That's what I thought this story was doing at first. I thought Mr. Ashok, caught up in the government's fervor to create a conveniently nationalist view of history, was getting his personal aims squashed by the political aims of the government, personified by the very funny Department of Symbolic Meaning. After reading to the end, though, and then reading through again, I think this story takes the more unusual approach of putting the public and the personal more or less on the same course such that they mirror rather than oppose each other.</div><div><br /></div><div>The government is attempting to sell a particular version of history to the public. This version is build around "ITIHAS," or "glorious history," and involves the aggressive campaigning of a giant bureaucracy (the Ministry of Culture, National Identity, and Historical Interpretation). It is the job of this bureaucracy, which includes the Department of Symbolic Meaning in which the narrator works, to determine how to make history edifying for the public. Of course, any time you try to make history be edifying instead of just be what it is, you end up perverting it, and that's very much what the department does. Even though the narrator's boss is named "Satya" or "Truth," there is very little truth going on. Their version of truth is more about what can make the people feel they are part of a glorious destiny--a destiny the current administration is leading them on--than it is about dealing with the real complexity of history. </div><div><br /></div><div>One of the government's chief tools in its campaign is preservation. The main campaign of the department is called an "ITIHAS-Preservation Campaign," a term rife with both capital letters and bluster. One of the things they seek to preserve are monuments. Monuments, if well preserved enough, do not change. In a sense, this is the opposite of history, because history is always ongoing and therefore always changing. It is also always changing because scholarship is always helping us to rethink the past. With a monument, though, the point is to create a version of the past and ensure that it never changes. History is complicated. At one point, the narrator lists off a number of questions that history presents him with, questions that he feels so certain are not appropriate for someone in his job, he had to repress them during his patriotic polygraph. Monuments often erase complexity.</div><div><br /></div><div>With this campaign going on in the background, Mr. Ashok, a wife-beating, confused, would-be upwardly climbing tour guide, turns to stone one day. We are led to believe that his turning to stone is his "comeuppance," as one journalists suggests. His wife has told him he is made of stone, so it seems an appropriate punishment. There's maybe more to it than that, though. Mr. Ashok is, if the bits of news can be believed that a Westerner like me who doesn't follow India with any particular intent hears, sort of a throwback. He is kind of a living monument to a type of man in India who time will hopefully one day soon leave behind.</div><div><br /></div><div>The ITIHAS campaign talks a lot about how the West has stolen from India, but Mr. Ashok's wife has also learned from a Western NGO that she no longer has to have sex with her husband when he wants or put up with him hitting her. <a href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/southasiasource/understanding-rape-culture-in-bangladesh-india-pakistan/" target="_blank">There is a giant generational battle being waged now in India to end rape culture in India</a>, and Mr. Ashok is part of it. He is, in fact, part of the complicated evolution of history.</div><div><br /></div><div>All of him has turned to stone except his "member." He's a particularly lascivious man, so that might be the one part of him that is most resisting being turned into a monument, a relic of the past. He doesn't want to change and stay within the complicated movement of history. He'd rather turn to stone than learn a new way of dealing with the world, especially after working so hard to get ahead in this one. He thought he'd done the right things to succeed in the world as it was, so changing now requires more of him than he can bear. </div><div><br /></div><div>Eventually, he decides to fully indulge his lust, and this is when the last bit of him turns to stone, and he is no longer able to move, but rather becomes a statue in the very caves in which he used to give tours. There's a double critique going on at the end. On the one hand, it's critiquing the government for trying to lionize a version of the past. By seeking to preserve, it has actually killed the thing it seeks to make use of. On the other hand, it's critiquing a version of Indian male identity that no longer has a role in the future and needs, frankly, to become "the opposite of history," or which is something preserved in the past and no longer a part of the present narrative.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a layered ossification at the end. The government's attempt to "preserve" the version of history most advantageous to it ends up killing history, and the personal attempt to ward off the march of time ends up doing nothing more but condemning oneself to no longer being able to change. </div><div><br /></div><div>I may have butchered this reading, because I don't really follow Indian issues and there are certainly all kinds of inside jokes I don't get. I can kind of guess at them, but there is certainly a lot more going on that someone in India would get. On another level, though, it's not hard at all for a contemporary American reader to comprehend the attempt to create a mythical nation that once was, call it "great," and call on others to return to that greatness that never was. It's not hard at all to imagine the result of refusing to change as becoming the very monuments that false preservationists wish to preserve.</div><div><br /></div>Jacob Weberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17591038654403487222noreply@blogger.com3