I got a great note today from a student at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Davis. The student was part of a class of ordinary people from all walks of life who spent eight weeks studying Best American Short Stories. They made use of my humble little blog (and also Karen Carlson's blog) while discussing the stories.
I'm tickled to death to hear this. My ideal readers are not literary professionals; they're ordinary people looking to make serious reading part of their lives, and this group is exactly that. I understand tomorrow is the class's last day, so thanks to all, and I hope everyone enjoyed the reading.
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Two TV convenience stores and the complicated lines dividing what is racist, offensive, hurtful, and satire
Netflix released a comedy special by Aziz Ansari recently. I was interested to see what Ansari had to say after the controversy he was involved in last year where a woman he took back to his apartment accused him of being way too aggressive. Unlike most stories of celebrity misconduct, I took an interest in that one, because I really liked Ansari's show Master of None and I liked the person Ansari seemed to come across as while playing someone fairly similar to himself.
Ansari's recent comedy special was...okay. He started off by addressing the story from last year. Without going into too much detail, he essentially said that he's felt bad and embarrassed about it, and that he's used it as a moment to rethink how he acts and to try to change. He said he has friends who have drawn the same conclusions, and that if that's been the main result of the incident, then maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. Since his actions probably weren't illegal, only really, really shitty, maybe that's all he needed to say.
But perhaps because he was forced to start off from a position of admitting his own failures, he then stayed in comfortable territory for the rest of the show. He gave a lot of time to the subject of racism and how he thinks it's funny to see white people suddenly aware of the racism in the world becoming overly zealous about wanting to change it all at once. He wasn't mean about it; he said, in all sincerity, that this generation of white people was trying harder than any other. The punchline to that set-up was that "I just don't think we're going to solve these issues during this brunch."
Fine. Ansari needed a win after a tough year, and he went with his bread-and-butter. But along the way, he brought up the controversy concerning Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the long-time Simpsons character. Ansari's line was something like, "Of course it's racist, but just because white people just realized that doesn't mean we all have to be upset."
I'd heard of the controversy, but since I haven't watched the Simpsons in about 20 years, I'd never really looked into it that much. After a little research, it seems like the present push to brand Apu as a racist character started with a 2017 documentary called "The Problem with Apu."
It so happens that my viewing of Ansari's documentary was a break for me in watching a show about some other Asian convenience store owners. Kim's Convenience is about a Korean-Canadian family running--very much according to stereotype--a convenience store in Toronto. It's a not-great-but-solid show, which I enjoy largely because I like seeing what the show's Korean-Canadian writer Ins Choi finds funny about his own community. The show doesn't have a whole lot of real highs, but it's consistently good, and it's rounded out by some funny reoccurring side characters, so I keep watching it.
Maybe most viewers don't notice that Jung, the family's estranged older son, is played by a Chinese actor (Simu Liu). His pronunciation of Korean is egregiously awful. Jung's friend, "Kimchi," is played by an actor of mixed Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and his Korean is probably worse. That's not necessarily a problem, because an important part of the show is that the kids can't speak Korean and the parents can. There is an episode where Janet, the Kims' other child, is frustrated at a Korean restaurant that she can't speak Korean to the waiter. Janet, played by Korean actress Andrea Bang, pronounces words badly, too. It's a real thing from real life in Korean diaspora communities, and so it's fine that Jung can't speak well. The show needed a character who would look Korean but also have a really fit physique (because it's a reoccurring source of humor), and maybe they needed to go with Liu out of what was available. But it does mean some of the key roles in a comedy about Korean people are played by people who aren't Korean.
I have to admit that when I first heard that there was an objection to Apu, I thought it was a myopic critique. Apu is obviously a satire of how Americans often view Southeast Asians. There is an episode where there is a bowling team called "The Stereotypes," made up a sea captain who talks like a pirate, an Italian chef, a Scottish janitor, and a redneck. Apu looks at the team as they are winning and laments, "Oh, they begged me to be on their team, begged me!" The show has never hidden the fact that Springfield is full of stereotypes. The show began as a running gag about American stereotypes, including the eponymous family of five. It seemed to me that as long as the audience was in on the joke, and it was clear that the writers of the show understood that there was more to Indian-Americans than convenience store owners with funny voices, then Apu was in-bounds. So when Hari Kondabolu, the film maker who created The Problem with Apu, stated that the main issue was that "it's a white person's perception of an Indian immigrant," I think, well, yeah, that's the whole point, isn't it? Isn't the show about how simplistic American perceptions of complicated things tend to be?
But I'd like to consider the arguments that Apu is, if not outright racist, at least problematic. The problem with Apu might be that it's racist, but it might also be that it's offensive or hurtful, which are related but different in key ways. I'm taking these objections largely from Jeet Heer's piece in The New Republic, which I thought was balanced and took seriously the counter-arguments. There are three main objections to Apu I can see:
This is a claim that requires a little bit of cultural archaeology to confirm, but it's probably true. In 1990, there were no other depictions of the Desi diaspora on TV. It was okay to make fun of Scotsmen or Italian mafia-types or slack-jawed yokels, because there were other depictions of them to balance those out and make it clear, on the whole, that what viewers were seeing was an over-simplified stereotype. But there was no such balance to Apu.
I wonder if this is as true now, when there have been a number of excellent shows about Southeast Asians. Literature from the region has been influential in the West for decades. If a show appeared now with a character like Apu, I wonder how it would be perceived, especially if that character were just one character on a show with others from the Desi diaspora to balance him out.
For the Kims, they are appearing at a time when Korea is possibly less understood in the West than India and Pakistan, largely because so many people in India and Pakistan speak English. Western notions of Korea center around North Korea and missiles and Kim Jong Un's ridiculous hair and Gangnam Style. The Kims are similar to Apu in that they run a convenience store--a stereotypical profession for their demographic--and have accents, but they are an improvement in that one sees behind the curtain of a whole world of Korean disaporic life. There's the centrality of church and the cut-throat politics that go on in church. There's the slow move away from some long-held Korean beliefs, like that the Japanese are evil and signing your name in a red pen might kill you. There's the generation gap and the things that bind generations together.
In other words, the show is about the Kims, and this gives the Kims agency. The Simpsons did try to do this, to their credit. Apu got married and had kids, which was a big deal in a show where almost nothing ever changes in a way that would upset the basic formula. He got more shows that were about him than almost any other stereotyped character in the show. But it's not the same as having the show be about him. Because Kim's Convenience is entirely about the family, they are able to have characters both act in ways that make them part of a larger group (Korean-Canadian immigrant) and also be themselves in ways that set them apart as individuals within a larger group. The Simpsons didn't really accomplish this with Apu.
It might be unfair to lay all of this at the feet of the Simpsons. They weren't responsible for there being no other depictions of an Indian-American in the 90s or well into the 00s. And whatever Apu was in 1990, he was an improvement over I.Y. Yunioshi from 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. With Yunioshi, the joke was on him. He was a warmed-over version of World War II propaganda making the Japanese stupid and buck-toothed. With Apu, the joke was at least partly at the audience, if the audience was smart enough to get it.
Of course, the audience wasn't always smart enough to get it, and that's the point of critique #2.
Ansari's recent comedy special was...okay. He started off by addressing the story from last year. Without going into too much detail, he essentially said that he's felt bad and embarrassed about it, and that he's used it as a moment to rethink how he acts and to try to change. He said he has friends who have drawn the same conclusions, and that if that's been the main result of the incident, then maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. Since his actions probably weren't illegal, only really, really shitty, maybe that's all he needed to say.
But perhaps because he was forced to start off from a position of admitting his own failures, he then stayed in comfortable territory for the rest of the show. He gave a lot of time to the subject of racism and how he thinks it's funny to see white people suddenly aware of the racism in the world becoming overly zealous about wanting to change it all at once. He wasn't mean about it; he said, in all sincerity, that this generation of white people was trying harder than any other. The punchline to that set-up was that "I just don't think we're going to solve these issues during this brunch."
Fine. Ansari needed a win after a tough year, and he went with his bread-and-butter. But along the way, he brought up the controversy concerning Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the long-time Simpsons character. Ansari's line was something like, "Of course it's racist, but just because white people just realized that doesn't mean we all have to be upset."
I'd heard of the controversy, but since I haven't watched the Simpsons in about 20 years, I'd never really looked into it that much. After a little research, it seems like the present push to brand Apu as a racist character started with a 2017 documentary called "The Problem with Apu."
It so happens that my viewing of Ansari's documentary was a break for me in watching a show about some other Asian convenience store owners. Kim's Convenience is about a Korean-Canadian family running--very much according to stereotype--a convenience store in Toronto. It's a not-great-but-solid show, which I enjoy largely because I like seeing what the show's Korean-Canadian writer Ins Choi finds funny about his own community. The show doesn't have a whole lot of real highs, but it's consistently good, and it's rounded out by some funny reoccurring side characters, so I keep watching it.
 |
| This show is only about a 7/10, but it's a 7 every episode, so it's worth a watch. |
Maybe most viewers don't notice that Jung, the family's estranged older son, is played by a Chinese actor (Simu Liu). His pronunciation of Korean is egregiously awful. Jung's friend, "Kimchi," is played by an actor of mixed Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and his Korean is probably worse. That's not necessarily a problem, because an important part of the show is that the kids can't speak Korean and the parents can. There is an episode where Janet, the Kims' other child, is frustrated at a Korean restaurant that she can't speak Korean to the waiter. Janet, played by Korean actress Andrea Bang, pronounces words badly, too. It's a real thing from real life in Korean diaspora communities, and so it's fine that Jung can't speak well. The show needed a character who would look Korean but also have a really fit physique (because it's a reoccurring source of humor), and maybe they needed to go with Liu out of what was available. But it does mean some of the key roles in a comedy about Korean people are played by people who aren't Korean.
Three possible critiques of Apu and what the Kims have to say about it
I have to admit that when I first heard that there was an objection to Apu, I thought it was a myopic critique. Apu is obviously a satire of how Americans often view Southeast Asians. There is an episode where there is a bowling team called "The Stereotypes," made up a sea captain who talks like a pirate, an Italian chef, a Scottish janitor, and a redneck. Apu looks at the team as they are winning and laments, "Oh, they begged me to be on their team, begged me!" The show has never hidden the fact that Springfield is full of stereotypes. The show began as a running gag about American stereotypes, including the eponymous family of five. It seemed to me that as long as the audience was in on the joke, and it was clear that the writers of the show understood that there was more to Indian-Americans than convenience store owners with funny voices, then Apu was in-bounds. So when Hari Kondabolu, the film maker who created The Problem with Apu, stated that the main issue was that "it's a white person's perception of an Indian immigrant," I think, well, yeah, that's the whole point, isn't it? Isn't the show about how simplistic American perceptions of complicated things tend to be?
But I'd like to consider the arguments that Apu is, if not outright racist, at least problematic. The problem with Apu might be that it's racist, but it might also be that it's offensive or hurtful, which are related but different in key ways. I'm taking these objections largely from Jeet Heer's piece in The New Republic, which I thought was balanced and took seriously the counter-arguments. There are three main objections to Apu I can see:
1. Although the show is full of stereotypes, Apu was unique in that his was the only depiction of Southeast Asians and not corrected somewhere else in culture.
This is a claim that requires a little bit of cultural archaeology to confirm, but it's probably true. In 1990, there were no other depictions of the Desi diaspora on TV. It was okay to make fun of Scotsmen or Italian mafia-types or slack-jawed yokels, because there were other depictions of them to balance those out and make it clear, on the whole, that what viewers were seeing was an over-simplified stereotype. But there was no such balance to Apu.
I wonder if this is as true now, when there have been a number of excellent shows about Southeast Asians. Literature from the region has been influential in the West for decades. If a show appeared now with a character like Apu, I wonder how it would be perceived, especially if that character were just one character on a show with others from the Desi diaspora to balance him out.
For the Kims, they are appearing at a time when Korea is possibly less understood in the West than India and Pakistan, largely because so many people in India and Pakistan speak English. Western notions of Korea center around North Korea and missiles and Kim Jong Un's ridiculous hair and Gangnam Style. The Kims are similar to Apu in that they run a convenience store--a stereotypical profession for their demographic--and have accents, but they are an improvement in that one sees behind the curtain of a whole world of Korean disaporic life. There's the centrality of church and the cut-throat politics that go on in church. There's the slow move away from some long-held Korean beliefs, like that the Japanese are evil and signing your name in a red pen might kill you. There's the generation gap and the things that bind generations together.
In other words, the show is about the Kims, and this gives the Kims agency. The Simpsons did try to do this, to their credit. Apu got married and had kids, which was a big deal in a show where almost nothing ever changes in a way that would upset the basic formula. He got more shows that were about him than almost any other stereotyped character in the show. But it's not the same as having the show be about him. Because Kim's Convenience is entirely about the family, they are able to have characters both act in ways that make them part of a larger group (Korean-Canadian immigrant) and also be themselves in ways that set them apart as individuals within a larger group. The Simpsons didn't really accomplish this with Apu.
It might be unfair to lay all of this at the feet of the Simpsons. They weren't responsible for there being no other depictions of an Indian-American in the 90s or well into the 00s. And whatever Apu was in 1990, he was an improvement over I.Y. Yunioshi from 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. With Yunioshi, the joke was on him. He was a warmed-over version of World War II propaganda making the Japanese stupid and buck-toothed. With Apu, the joke was at least partly at the audience, if the audience was smart enough to get it.
Of course, the audience wasn't always smart enough to get it, and that's the point of critique #2.
2. Apu put a gun in the hands of bigots to shoot at Southeast Asian people
I'm going to quote Heer at length:
"Older desi, not just me and Shanker but Kondabolu’s own parents (who joke about his “Apu hair”) see Apu as a minor inconvenience. But younger desi, including many comedians and actors that Kondabolu spoke to for his film, have experienced a very different reality. They grew up in a world where The Simpsonswas a pervasive part of popular culture and Apu the only Indian-American character everyone knew. They were taunted and bullied in school, with Apu’s name and catch-phrase (“Thank you, come again.”) used as an insult. It’s their lived experience of growing up with Apu that shows why this minor character is so pernicious.
Apu is now a slur more than he is a character. It’s true, as Shanker argues, that other slurs existed before Apu. But those slurs didn’t carry the cultural authority of The Simpsons. When a bully calls an Indian American “Apu” or says to them, “Thank you, come again,” he isn’t just demeaning the person by himself (though that is wrong enough); he’s using The Simpsons to justify his contempt. As The Problem With Apu showed, Apu makes desi kids feel insulted not just by individuals, but by American culture at large. That’s why the film changed my mind. It featured testimony about Indian-American experiences I wasn’t aware of. I was bullied for being Indian American, as Kondabolu’s subjects were, but I wasn’t bullied with language from one of the most famous shows on TV."
It's very hard to contest an argument that's not about the abstract logic of whether something is racist or offensive, but about how it has practically affected a generation of young people. Yes, if the Simpsons would never have existed, bigots would have figured out something to throw at Indian-Americans, but the Simpsons--whatever the show's intent--gave them that something, and because it was the most popular show on TV for a while, it gave them a feeling that their insults had authority behind them.
Here, I'd like to coin a term. I'm calling this the "good fences make good neighbors fallacy." In Robert Frost's poem "Something There is that Doesn't Love a Wall," a provincial neighbor twice repeats this phrase. It has since occasionally been cited as a solid maxim, citing Frost as the origin of the thought and using his respected place in American letters to give it weight. But in the poem, of course, the quote about fences is something that's being undermined. Fences seem to fall down on their own, because keeping people apart is artificial and unnatural. But in popular memory, the phrase is often remembered on its own as a maxim to be respected.
That's what happened with Apu. Americans were supposed to see Apu as a representation of what our own poor understanding projected about a group of people. Instead, a lot of Americans saw it as a real representation of what that group was really like, and used it to justify their own ugly behavior.
You can argue that the Simpsons aren't responsible for the audience not paying attention enough to get what the real joke was, but at some point, maybe the Simpsons should have taken responsibility for how their creation was being used. A gun manufacturer has some responsibility for how the guns it makes are being used, and the Simpsons should have taken the same responsibility.
I don't disagree with this premise at all. And maybe the Simpsons' creatives agree, too, and have altered Apu over the years. Since I haven't watched the show in so long, although I think it's possible that the show actually has changed how it's depicted Apu, I can't really confirm that. But Apu has gotten at least some agency in a few episodes.
I can only report that when I was still watching the show, I liked Apu. When there was a script that focused on him beyond just being the funny man at the convenience store, I thought he was a hard worker, smart, thoughtful, and with a lot to offer the community of Springfield. But as long as a generation of kids grew up hearing "Thank you, come again" as an insult, I don't know how much my view of Apu matters.
What would a Korean-American or Korean-Canadian's experience of Kim's Convenience be? It's a little hard to compare between the two shows here, because when the Simpsons came out, it was the biggest thing on TV. Everyone knew about it, even people who didn't watch it. It was on a network that had just begun, and its creation increased the number of TV options by 33%. Kim's, meanwhile, is a moderately successful show at a time when there are more streaming services than there used to be TV networks. There are thousands of shows running right now. So the cultural weight of the two is not even in the same stratosphere.
But if we try to imagine Kim's as a juggernaut and imagine what its impact might have been on Korean diaspora living in North America, I think it's at least possible the show might give similar ammunition to bigots. Bigots might mimic the accent of the two elder Kims, or ask a Korean student in their class if she has to get to her job at the store afterwards.
To summarize, The Simpsons probably should have taken more responsibility for the impact it had back in the heyday of its run, but it did, I think, make some effort to do this, and whatever it did, it likely would have been used by some people for evil purposes. I am very sympathetic to the stories of young people who were bullied based on Apu's depiction, but in some ways, this is a critique of all of us and our culture rather than a critique of the show.
3. Brownface
This is the real heart of the matter, I think. It was possible to overlook for so long because we only hear Azaria, rather than seeing him. If he'd had to pull an actual brownface like Ben Kingsley in Ghandi, I don't think the character would have survived so long. But it is, in fact, a white person doing a voice that's a stereotypical Indian character. He's not the only white actor of his time to have done so. Robin Williams used a similar voice as a bit from time to time.
How angry do we get about this? I have to admit, I'm never sure. I've written before about how even though I accept that white actors shouldn't put on makeup to play other races, I don't feel the same way about putting on makeup to play an old character, even though old actors are available. This makes it hard for me to figure out WHY I feel this way about blackface/brownface/yellowface.
One reason is just economics. The Problem with Apu isn't just the story of Desi kids getting picked on. It's also the story of Indian-American actors having a hard time finding roles. It would have been nice to give an actual Indian actor the chance to play Apu. Even if the role still called for a stereotypical voice, an Indian actor might have done it with more authenticity and nuance. And it would have meant a steady paycheck for an underrepresented group.
Apu's existence also meant that as these Indian-American actors were trying to break in, they were often asked to play a role like Apu. The roles called for goofy, over-the-top accents and clownish behavior. Apu, by being such a perennial favorite, prevented the existence of better roles.
These are strong, practical reasons why brownface is at least hurtful, but I think most critics feel it's more than that. They think it's offensive, racist and immoral. They think it's a remnant of colonialism.
I think they have a point, but only if categories like racism aren't viewed with an either/or switch. Things can be relatively more or less problematic from a racism perspective. Attending a Black History Month seminar is a zero out of a hundred on the racially problematic scale. Asking to touch your black friend's hair is a 37. Touching it without asking is a 51. Tweeting that members of Congress who were mostly born in the U.S. should go back where they came from is a 73.
Where is Hank Azaria aurally buy not visually portraying an Indian-American character, in which the portrayal is understood by discerning viewers of the show to not be accurate?
Before you answer, consider Kim's Convenience again. There is an actor on it playing a Korean who is Chinese. This is just one of thousands of examples of movies and shows using East Asians interchangeably when it comes to nationality. And if you answer "close enough," you're essentially just pointing out how stupid the whole modern notion of race is. It's nothing more than "a group of people who look similar enough that most white people can't tell the difference." Moreover, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee doesn't really talk like his character "Appa" (dad). He does a really good impression of a Korean immigrant who speaks English as a second language, but that's not how he talks. As the show points out, older Koreans get upset when their kids talk like them. So why is it okay for Lee to do it when Azaria can't? Is it okay to learn an accent and play it, but only within your race? So a British actor can do an American accent, but not an Indian one? Even if he grew up in an Indian quarter of London, and he can really nail it?
But why does this matter if the actor does not appear on screen? All the show really needs is a voice that will sound like what it's supposed to sound like. If a computer could do it, the show could use a computer. But we're not there yet, so shows have to keep using humans. But what is inherently racist about a voice that belongs to a man of one race sounding like an intentionally stereotypical version of another race? In fact, wouldn't it be easier for the white man to do this than the Indian actor, who might be, ironically, too authentic? If the bit calls for a white guy sounding like what ignorant white people think Indians sound like, then a white guy might do it best. Especially if that white guy is a really talented voice actor like Azaria.
It's important that "Appa" and "Omma" have accents on the show. It's an integral part of how the world views them, and it's also an important part of who they are. They are people forced to carry on their lives in a language that will always remain difficult for them. That gives them a sense of vulnerability and bewilderment, but it also gives them a sense of nobility for their bravery in facing such an alien and disorienting life.
Apu hasn't been a fully sympathetic portrayal like Appa and Omma, but it's also not a mocking portrayal like Mr. Yunioshi. It's a satirical character that somehow became more popular than anyone imagined and then stuck around for three decades. Along the way, it caused collateral issues for groups of people that are unfortunate and sometimes heartbreaking.
So what do we do?
Ansari wasn't zealous about Apu. He pointed out that even his own show, Parks and Rec, probably did some things a decade ago that shouldn't be included now. Much like his "upward and onward" take on his own failings with a date he went on 18 months ago, he felt like the important thing to do is not to re-litigate the past, but to improve.
The Simpsons have, I think, tried to change their portrayals of some characters over the years. But they probably missed a chance to do better after the documentary on Apu came out. They could have worked with some of the best Indian actors to come up with a new trajectory for Apu. Instead, the show wrote a sort of anemic response into an episode, "No Good Read Goes Unpunished," shrugging their shoulders at how social norms of what is "politically correct" change. It's the very kind of view the Simpsons would have skewered 20 years ago.
You can't write a good story until you've written a hundred shitty ones. Society can't get it right before it's gotten it wrong. We need to keep working to get better, but it's better to work to find ways to improve rather than people to blame. I think the Indian-American actors who have criticized Apu deserve credit for not being particularly acrimonious. They've told their story, expressing admiration for the Simpsons along the way. Every one of the actors criticizing Apu is aware of all the counter-arguments I've made here, and so is reasonably circumspect about how forcefully they criticize the show. Their reasonableness should be met by The Simpsons with the same.
It's not too late. Despite rumors Apu would quietly leave the show, he was still in a few episodes in Season 30, which just finished two months ago. The show can't have too many legs left. A really successful episode get two million viewers these days. Azaria has expressed a desire to have more Southeast Asian writers in the in process. If Apu could somehow be rehabilitated before the show ends, it would not only make a nice coda to a show whose importance in American culture can hardly be overstated, but it would even make all those old episodes more watchable, because they'd be part of a continuum that ended in a better place.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Disciplining your inner child the German way: "Past Perfect Continuous" by Dounia Choukri
I have no idea how the order of stories in the O.Henry anthologies are chosen. In Best American Short Stories, it's simply alphabetic order based on author surnames. That means when there is something weirdly similar about two consecutive stories in the collection, as my blogging buddy Karen Carlson and I both often seem to think we see, it really is just a coincidence. O.Henry definitely doesn't use alphabetical order, so I assume the similarities between "Past Perfect Continuous" and the two stories before it ("Stop-n-Go" and "Lucky Dragon") is intentional. It's the third straight story where World War II is important in some way. Like "Stop-n-Go," the power of memory to shape reality and change our perceptions of time is a key theme, while it also shares "Lucky Dragon"'s interest in how a nation re-shapes its psyche after losing a war it was wrong to start.
In this case, it's Germany, not Japan, and there are echoes not of a Samurai code of honor and its attendant sense of shame, but Nazis who still walk among us. The presence of Nazis still in the picture, as well as photos of "hollow-eyed World War II soldiers lying on the side of the road on page 135" of a school girl's textbook do not allow the grown-up generation to look back on the past with the usual nostalgia.
It is the narrator's Nazi aunt whose words open the story, ripping apart any sense that the past was better: "The past is so fat, no one would ever know if you slipped a lie into its armpit." However, not all the adults share her contempt for the past. The parents of our 13-year-old narrator do allow themselves to re-shape their former days according to their liking, assuring themselves that "there will never be the likes again!" and "Those were the days!" They are momentarily nonplussed by the girl's question, "But what about the Second World War, huh? Were those the good old days?" But they recover, seeing even in this horror some kind of good: "When the past sucks it just becomes a welcome lesson in how not to do things." It's a very forward-looking answer.
The parents and grandparents are stereotypical Germans according to what most of the world thinks about them. I really do not know much about Germany, but that didn't affect my ability to read the story, because the characters draw from a very easy-to-recognize palette of German traits. The parents are practical, stolid, stoic, disciplined, hardworking, and focused more on the present and future than the past.
But Aunt Gunhild, an iconoclast who smokes and lives alone (her Nazi husband killed early in the war), has a different relationship to the past, the present, and the future. If most of the members of the narrator's family white-wash the past, put their nose to the grindstone in the present, and are apprehensive about the future, Gunhild, perhaps because she is not sentimental about the past nor is she denying herself in the present, has a more optimistic view of what is yet to come.
The narrator is coming of age, and trying to negotiate for herself how she will internalize time. This is partly expressed in the girl's burgeoning awareness of grammatical tenses, an awareness that is full of the double meaning in "past perfect," both a fully completed action at some time in the past, but also the way people sometimes view the past as without stain.
She is already learning that time flies and with it comes change. The boy she used to wrestle with in an innocent and childish way ended up on top of her the last time they got into a play scuffle, "as if I were a raft on a river he'd wanted to explore." Now the future is frightening, full of "breasts, bras, boys." Aunt Gunhild tries to impart a sense of hope for the future to the girl, asking her what she wants to do with her life and reassuring her, when the girl finds herself wishing for a "past without the need to fill in the present," that she is "so very lucky to be growing up in this day and age."
Theft continually crops up in the story. The narrator's friends begin daring each other to shoplift. Aunt Gunhild, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac. What's this got to do with time and growing up and growing old? Time steals our past from us. The girl doesn't steal items like her friends do, preferring instead to pilfer mementos with value only to her.
The girl eventually learns a sort of middle road between starry-eyed nostalgia for the past and callous disregard for it. We all long for a past with meaning. It's why it's "important that stories are recorded for the future." We can be clear-eyed about the past without being cruel to our feelings for it.
This kindness to the past is actually expressed early on in the story: "If the past is another country, then it must be lenient toward trespassers." But it isn't until this country of the past is linked to the present that hope arrives for the girl. She realizes that "the present was another country" just as the Berlin Wall is falling, and the entire country, now reunited again as it once was, weeps for the old days and weeps for the present. "It was history. Everything was liquid."
I don't normally care much for time-related themes. It seems like writing literature about gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. It's just how the universe is, and a difficult stone from which to draw the water of a story. The most interesting aspect of time to me is how traitorous it is to the human psyche. We make mistakes, and through those mistakes we change and become new people, but our present selves continue to be harmed by decisions made by a former self we no longer are. This drove me crazy in the Marine Corps, where I learned early on what a dumb, dumb mistake it had been to join but still had to stay in for six years because a foolish younger person with my name had signed a contract. I'm sure prisoners feel this in a much stronger way, serving out a sentence for something carried out by a person they no longer recognize. But the Proustian fetishization of time never really appealed to me.
So this story had some bias to get over for me, and it managed to do it. It did it through pithy observations and a focus on the human reality of time rather than time as a philosophical curiosity. As I try to push through my adult life occasionally apologetic to the young person I used to be who is now stuck inside a grown man who hasn't accomplished much of anything that younger person wanted to do in life, I appreciated the message of the need to be kind to our past, present, and future selves.
In this case, it's Germany, not Japan, and there are echoes not of a Samurai code of honor and its attendant sense of shame, but Nazis who still walk among us. The presence of Nazis still in the picture, as well as photos of "hollow-eyed World War II soldiers lying on the side of the road on page 135" of a school girl's textbook do not allow the grown-up generation to look back on the past with the usual nostalgia.
It is the narrator's Nazi aunt whose words open the story, ripping apart any sense that the past was better: "The past is so fat, no one would ever know if you slipped a lie into its armpit." However, not all the adults share her contempt for the past. The parents of our 13-year-old narrator do allow themselves to re-shape their former days according to their liking, assuring themselves that "there will never be the likes again!" and "Those were the days!" They are momentarily nonplussed by the girl's question, "But what about the Second World War, huh? Were those the good old days?" But they recover, seeing even in this horror some kind of good: "When the past sucks it just becomes a welcome lesson in how not to do things." It's a very forward-looking answer.
The parents and grandparents are stereotypical Germans according to what most of the world thinks about them. I really do not know much about Germany, but that didn't affect my ability to read the story, because the characters draw from a very easy-to-recognize palette of German traits. The parents are practical, stolid, stoic, disciplined, hardworking, and focused more on the present and future than the past.
"Our women braved north German winters in clumpy shoes that gave them chilblains. They married early and stayed married to reasonable men with ice-blue eyes, men who only traveled in wartime. When the rest of the family had gone to sleep on starched sheets, they would sit in the halo of their own silence and mend the clothes as wounds on their own skin. By the time their faces were as threadbare as their husbands' last fine-rib undershirt, their past would be woven into a fixed memory, the first spring after the war or that summer when the goat had clambered up the stairs and nibbled on the sleeping children's chins."
 |
| I don't know much about Germany beyond stereotypes, but that didn't really ruin my reading of this story. |
But Aunt Gunhild, an iconoclast who smokes and lives alone (her Nazi husband killed early in the war), has a different relationship to the past, the present, and the future. If most of the members of the narrator's family white-wash the past, put their nose to the grindstone in the present, and are apprehensive about the future, Gunhild, perhaps because she is not sentimental about the past nor is she denying herself in the present, has a more optimistic view of what is yet to come.
The narrator is coming of age, and trying to negotiate for herself how she will internalize time. This is partly expressed in the girl's burgeoning awareness of grammatical tenses, an awareness that is full of the double meaning in "past perfect," both a fully completed action at some time in the past, but also the way people sometimes view the past as without stain.
She is already learning that time flies and with it comes change. The boy she used to wrestle with in an innocent and childish way ended up on top of her the last time they got into a play scuffle, "as if I were a raft on a river he'd wanted to explore." Now the future is frightening, full of "breasts, bras, boys." Aunt Gunhild tries to impart a sense of hope for the future to the girl, asking her what she wants to do with her life and reassuring her, when the girl finds herself wishing for a "past without the need to fill in the present," that she is "so very lucky to be growing up in this day and age."
Theft continually crops up in the story. The narrator's friends begin daring each other to shoplift. Aunt Gunhild, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac. What's this got to do with time and growing up and growing old? Time steals our past from us. The girl doesn't steal items like her friends do, preferring instead to pilfer mementos with value only to her.
The girl eventually learns a sort of middle road between starry-eyed nostalgia for the past and callous disregard for it. We all long for a past with meaning. It's why it's "important that stories are recorded for the future." We can be clear-eyed about the past without being cruel to our feelings for it.
This kindness to the past is actually expressed early on in the story: "If the past is another country, then it must be lenient toward trespassers." But it isn't until this country of the past is linked to the present that hope arrives for the girl. She realizes that "the present was another country" just as the Berlin Wall is falling, and the entire country, now reunited again as it once was, weeps for the old days and weeps for the present. "It was history. Everything was liquid."
I don't normally care much for time-related themes. It seems like writing literature about gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. It's just how the universe is, and a difficult stone from which to draw the water of a story. The most interesting aspect of time to me is how traitorous it is to the human psyche. We make mistakes, and through those mistakes we change and become new people, but our present selves continue to be harmed by decisions made by a former self we no longer are. This drove me crazy in the Marine Corps, where I learned early on what a dumb, dumb mistake it had been to join but still had to stay in for six years because a foolish younger person with my name had signed a contract. I'm sure prisoners feel this in a much stronger way, serving out a sentence for something carried out by a person they no longer recognize. But the Proustian fetishization of time never really appealed to me.
So this story had some bias to get over for me, and it managed to do it. It did it through pithy observations and a focus on the human reality of time rather than time as a philosophical curiosity. As I try to push through my adult life occasionally apologetic to the young person I used to be who is now stuck inside a grown man who hasn't accomplished much of anything that younger person wanted to do in life, I appreciated the message of the need to be kind to our past, present, and future selves.
Monday, July 22, 2019
The Old Man and the slow lane: "Stop-n-Go" by Michael Parker
There are certain stories that have a tendency to remind me how every narrative doesn't just tell a story, it performs an act. Often more than one act. It's easier to notice in a poem, perhaps, because some poems carry the act they are performing within the name of the type of poem they are: elegy, lament, threnody, ode, aubade, ballad, etc. These types of poems announce that they are there to praise, to remember, to criticize, to call to action, and so on. But stories can do the same things. It's just harder to notice. Poetry is broadly divided into the narrative and the lyrical, and the actions performed by narrative poems tend to be just what they sound like: to tell a story. Although a narrative poem can be as thematically complex as a lyrical one, we don't often think of a narrative poem as performing as many different actions, and we carry this belief over to thinking that all stories are there to do the same action--tell a story.
But Michael Parker's "Stop-n-Go" does seem to be performing an action. To use the language of visual art, it is painting a portrait. It is a very short story, taking perhaps five minutes to read (ten if you're me and you get distracted easily). The story is book-ended by a typical portrait of an old man. He is confused by the world he now lives in: "...he doesn't understand a good three-quarters of the things he hears people say. Commercials on television perplex him." At story's end, he is taking out his feelings of confusion and anger on the world around him, driving slowly on purpose to the grocery store and making traffic back up behind him, reveling in how he is inconveniencing all these people "in a hurry, eager to get to that someplace, he doesn't know where or care, somebody told them they needed to be."
There's not much surprising there. It's kind of a high-brow version of a comedian's cheap laugh at the aged, if anything. But in between the beginning and the middle, the old man thinks back to his time in World War Two. There are two major events in the war that come to him. First, he was wounded badly in the night, and he wasn't sure if he would bleed to death first or freeze to death. He was picked up by "some old boy" and taken to a medic. The old boy then did what fighting men and women are still taught to do with a hypothermia case today--he stripped down and got inside a sleeping bag with him.
The second thing he remembers is the liberation of Dachau. The story elides everything he saw there but one, which is how the Roma families outside the gate refused to leave after they were set free. One place was as good as another to them, so they stayed in the shadow of the place they had recently almost died.
You could say the story's theme is something like the meme I've seen a few versions of on social media:
OR...
That might be part of it, but that's not all of what this story's quick drawing of the old man is about. The man is struggling to interpret the world of today, but he's also still stuck trying to decipher the meaning of events from long ago. These were the central events of forming his adult psyche, and they happened when he wasn't at all ready for them. There is a hint of an unresolved homo-erotic feeling for the "old boy" who rescued him: "It felt like a sin to still retain the memory of the roughness of the boy's cheek when in the night it grazed the back of his neck but this wasn't thing, nor was getting shot at and lying alone in the cold and dark trying to choose which way to die."
The old man compares the feeling of lying next to the old boy to the feeling of lying next to his wife, but I don't think the main point is that he repressed homosexual urges his whole life. It's more that it was so unexpected to find something so gentle and tender coming from a man lying next to him in the middle of the most hellish thing he ever experienced. The boy was "all muscle and hairy," and so the feeling of lying next to him should have been less confusing, more obviously distasteful. But here the old man is, decades later, thinking that this isn't how it felt, and that's hard for him to parse. We don't have to think of the old man as secretly gay to imagine that he would be confused to realize that he could feel something for a man that was even comparable to the feelings he felt for his wife.
I don't think he's mean at the end because he repressed homosexuality his whole life. That's a possible reading, but I think it's equally justifiable and probably more interesting to think of him as just not being able to reconcile the cruelty and the sweetness of the world.
Portraits are often intentionally vague, forcing the viewer to make a series of choices in how to read the lines on the face or the intention in a gesture. In a moment of viewing and without any other information, we are asked to determine if we like this person in the painting. That's how this story treats its subject. Whether we sympathize with a man and find ourselves reconsidering our own impatience with the elderly or we find him contemptible for the way he has chosen to side with spite over sweetness, we are at least realizing there is an interiority and an agency we don't normally ascribe to the old guy who holds up traffic. Whether we're on his side or not, the important thing the story accomplishes is to make us consider the choices of a person whose actions do not normally concern us.
But Michael Parker's "Stop-n-Go" does seem to be performing an action. To use the language of visual art, it is painting a portrait. It is a very short story, taking perhaps five minutes to read (ten if you're me and you get distracted easily). The story is book-ended by a typical portrait of an old man. He is confused by the world he now lives in: "...he doesn't understand a good three-quarters of the things he hears people say. Commercials on television perplex him." At story's end, he is taking out his feelings of confusion and anger on the world around him, driving slowly on purpose to the grocery store and making traffic back up behind him, reveling in how he is inconveniencing all these people "in a hurry, eager to get to that someplace, he doesn't know where or care, somebody told them they needed to be."
There's not much surprising there. It's kind of a high-brow version of a comedian's cheap laugh at the aged, if anything. But in between the beginning and the middle, the old man thinks back to his time in World War Two. There are two major events in the war that come to him. First, he was wounded badly in the night, and he wasn't sure if he would bleed to death first or freeze to death. He was picked up by "some old boy" and taken to a medic. The old boy then did what fighting men and women are still taught to do with a hypothermia case today--he stripped down and got inside a sleeping bag with him.
The second thing he remembers is the liberation of Dachau. The story elides everything he saw there but one, which is how the Roma families outside the gate refused to leave after they were set free. One place was as good as another to them, so they stayed in the shadow of the place they had recently almost died.
You could say the story's theme is something like the meme I've seen a few versions of on social media:
OR...
That might be part of it, but that's not all of what this story's quick drawing of the old man is about. The man is struggling to interpret the world of today, but he's also still stuck trying to decipher the meaning of events from long ago. These were the central events of forming his adult psyche, and they happened when he wasn't at all ready for them. There is a hint of an unresolved homo-erotic feeling for the "old boy" who rescued him: "It felt like a sin to still retain the memory of the roughness of the boy's cheek when in the night it grazed the back of his neck but this wasn't thing, nor was getting shot at and lying alone in the cold and dark trying to choose which way to die."
The old man compares the feeling of lying next to the old boy to the feeling of lying next to his wife, but I don't think the main point is that he repressed homosexual urges his whole life. It's more that it was so unexpected to find something so gentle and tender coming from a man lying next to him in the middle of the most hellish thing he ever experienced. The boy was "all muscle and hairy," and so the feeling of lying next to him should have been less confusing, more obviously distasteful. But here the old man is, decades later, thinking that this isn't how it felt, and that's hard for him to parse. We don't have to think of the old man as secretly gay to imagine that he would be confused to realize that he could feel something for a man that was even comparable to the feelings he felt for his wife.
I don't think he's mean at the end because he repressed homosexuality his whole life. That's a possible reading, but I think it's equally justifiable and probably more interesting to think of him as just not being able to reconcile the cruelty and the sweetness of the world.
Portraits are often intentionally vague, forcing the viewer to make a series of choices in how to read the lines on the face or the intention in a gesture. In a moment of viewing and without any other information, we are asked to determine if we like this person in the painting. That's how this story treats its subject. Whether we sympathize with a man and find ourselves reconsidering our own impatience with the elderly or we find him contemptible for the way he has chosen to side with spite over sweetness, we are at least realizing there is an interiority and an agency we don't normally ascribe to the old guy who holds up traffic. Whether we're on his side or not, the important thing the story accomplishes is to make us consider the choices of a person whose actions do not normally concern us.
Thursday, July 18, 2019
An allegory about a country that really is an allegory about a country: "Lucky Dragon" by Viet Dinh
When literature professionals interpret a story and see big ideas woven into it, lay readers often cry foul. They feel that the literary folks are reading too much into what they see as a simple story. One of the most common versions of this disagreement comes with stories that professors and critics see as speaking in some larger sense to the state of the country in which the story is set. One could cite any number of "great American novels"--Huck Finn, Grapes of Wrath, Great Gatsby--where these arguments might play out in a classroom, where students might accuse professors of finding something that isn't there.
But "Lucky Dragon" by Viet Dinh overtly encourages us to see the struggles of the story's protagonists as deeply tied to the state of post-WWII Japan. As one character tells the captain of the Lucky Dragon, the ship from which the story gets its name, "Your struggle is the nation's struggle."
I may have overstated it in the title by saying it's an allegory of Japan, as allegory has a fairly limited meaning, but the fate of the main characters is very much meant to mirror Japan in the first decade after the war. The crew of the Lucky Dragon have the bad fortune to be out fishing near enough to the Bikini Atoll when America tests its giant nuclear bomb that they all get radiation poisoning. (You get it? The ship is called "Lucky" Dragon, but they're all terribly unlucky.) The crew doesn't really understand what happened, but when they get back to Japan and it all gets straightened out, the crew is loved and showered with affection and money by Japan and others throughout the world. Japan has been transformed from the pre-war colonial power, raping Korean comfort women and killing wildly in Nanking, to a sympathetic victim of war. As the main character puts it when he finds out what happened, "Hadn't they already been thoroughly humiliated?"
But the crew doesn't stay sympathetic for the public, at least not the captain, Hiroshi. His father, who lives by the old code of death before dishonor and has never forgiven his son for allowing himself to be taken as a prisoner of war rather than die, tells the newspapers that his son was one of the shameful ones who tried to escape from a POW camp and failed. The public turns against him, at least in Japan.
At the same time he is being rejected, the bodies of the crew are turning reptilian. There is more than one dragon in the story than the boat. One of the crew died soon after exposure to the blast and was buried at sea. When the crew reluctantly throws his body overboard to bury him, his body is "seized" by Ryujin, the mythical dragon who is also the god of the sea. The crew then begin to turn dragon-like themselves.
The townspeople misinterpret the transformation of Hiroshi and his friend Yoshi. They think the two are turning into ningyo, or mermaids. To eat the flesh of a ningyo makes you immortal, so the townspeople grow increasingly avaricious of the flesh of Hiroshi and Yoshi. But here, Hiroshi tells us that the townspeople have misread the signs, because even if they were mermaids, to catch a mermaid is to invite bad luck.
In the end, the story seems to land on the idea that Japan can be forgiven, but only by abandoning its warrior ethos. Although most of the public shuns Hiroshi for having surrendered, one person defends him. And the public does seem to feel pity for the other members of the crew: "...public opinion of them swayed from disgust to pity, and now, to sympathy. It was possible that people thought differently of (Hiroshi) too. Perhaps they were willing to forgive his conduct in the war. Strange: when he was a man, he had been a monster; now that he was a monster, he was once again a man."
However, the public does not ultimately leave behind the old ways. They chase Hiroshi, who is carrying the dead body of Yoshi after he commits suicide, to the edge of the water. The two transform into water dragons and return to the sea.
I didn't like the story the first read-through. Parts of it felt over-written. There was a sentence that used the word "endemic" in a way I don't think is correct. I thought it relied a lot on obvious symbolism for a story about Japan.
But there was a bigger issue. Trying to make Japan seem sympathetic because they were the victims of atomic bombs is telling half the story. I do not claim to be any kind of Japan expert. I carry with me a lot of the prejudices of Korean people toward Japan--not to the extent that some Koreans do, but I'm aware of what colonial Japan was like. I can certainly feel some sympathy toward civilian casualties, and of course the children were not to blame for anything, but Japanese culture bought wholesale into the ethos that made them a colonial power. So the Japan-as-a-victim story rubbed me the wrong way.
But on a second reading, I saw that the story wasn't really excusing Japan's pre-war militarism. The father's attitude is clearly the wrong one. Yoshi (which means "good" in Japanese) sums up pre-war Japan: "We were cursed even before we went to war...our skin matches our souls."
The transformation of the crew of the Lucky Dragon into monsters completes a cycle. Japan comes from the sea and goes back to the sea. Japan must become a monster before it can be transformed back into something human. Japan was monstrous before the war, but fire has transformed it back into something human. It has learned wisdom from its suffering.
I hope other world empires will take note of the lesson so they don't have to learn it the hard way.
But "Lucky Dragon" by Viet Dinh overtly encourages us to see the struggles of the story's protagonists as deeply tied to the state of post-WWII Japan. As one character tells the captain of the Lucky Dragon, the ship from which the story gets its name, "Your struggle is the nation's struggle."
I may have overstated it in the title by saying it's an allegory of Japan, as allegory has a fairly limited meaning, but the fate of the main characters is very much meant to mirror Japan in the first decade after the war. The crew of the Lucky Dragon have the bad fortune to be out fishing near enough to the Bikini Atoll when America tests its giant nuclear bomb that they all get radiation poisoning. (You get it? The ship is called "Lucky" Dragon, but they're all terribly unlucky.) The crew doesn't really understand what happened, but when they get back to Japan and it all gets straightened out, the crew is loved and showered with affection and money by Japan and others throughout the world. Japan has been transformed from the pre-war colonial power, raping Korean comfort women and killing wildly in Nanking, to a sympathetic victim of war. As the main character puts it when he finds out what happened, "Hadn't they already been thoroughly humiliated?"
But the crew doesn't stay sympathetic for the public, at least not the captain, Hiroshi. His father, who lives by the old code of death before dishonor and has never forgiven his son for allowing himself to be taken as a prisoner of war rather than die, tells the newspapers that his son was one of the shameful ones who tried to escape from a POW camp and failed. The public turns against him, at least in Japan.
At the same time he is being rejected, the bodies of the crew are turning reptilian. There is more than one dragon in the story than the boat. One of the crew died soon after exposure to the blast and was buried at sea. When the crew reluctantly throws his body overboard to bury him, his body is "seized" by Ryujin, the mythical dragon who is also the god of the sea. The crew then begin to turn dragon-like themselves.
The townspeople misinterpret the transformation of Hiroshi and his friend Yoshi. They think the two are turning into ningyo, or mermaids. To eat the flesh of a ningyo makes you immortal, so the townspeople grow increasingly avaricious of the flesh of Hiroshi and Yoshi. But here, Hiroshi tells us that the townspeople have misread the signs, because even if they were mermaids, to catch a mermaid is to invite bad luck.
In the end, the story seems to land on the idea that Japan can be forgiven, but only by abandoning its warrior ethos. Although most of the public shuns Hiroshi for having surrendered, one person defends him. And the public does seem to feel pity for the other members of the crew: "...public opinion of them swayed from disgust to pity, and now, to sympathy. It was possible that people thought differently of (Hiroshi) too. Perhaps they were willing to forgive his conduct in the war. Strange: when he was a man, he had been a monster; now that he was a monster, he was once again a man."
However, the public does not ultimately leave behind the old ways. They chase Hiroshi, who is carrying the dead body of Yoshi after he commits suicide, to the edge of the water. The two transform into water dragons and return to the sea.
Personal reactions
I didn't like the story the first read-through. Parts of it felt over-written. There was a sentence that used the word "endemic" in a way I don't think is correct. I thought it relied a lot on obvious symbolism for a story about Japan.
But there was a bigger issue. Trying to make Japan seem sympathetic because they were the victims of atomic bombs is telling half the story. I do not claim to be any kind of Japan expert. I carry with me a lot of the prejudices of Korean people toward Japan--not to the extent that some Koreans do, but I'm aware of what colonial Japan was like. I can certainly feel some sympathy toward civilian casualties, and of course the children were not to blame for anything, but Japanese culture bought wholesale into the ethos that made them a colonial power. So the Japan-as-a-victim story rubbed me the wrong way.
But on a second reading, I saw that the story wasn't really excusing Japan's pre-war militarism. The father's attitude is clearly the wrong one. Yoshi (which means "good" in Japanese) sums up pre-war Japan: "We were cursed even before we went to war...our skin matches our souls."
The transformation of the crew of the Lucky Dragon into monsters completes a cycle. Japan comes from the sea and goes back to the sea. Japan must become a monster before it can be transformed back into something human. Japan was monstrous before the war, but fire has transformed it back into something human. It has learned wisdom from its suffering.
I hope other world empires will take note of the lesson so they don't have to learn it the hard way.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Sometimes it just smacks me in the face...
Of course I realize that fiction writing is making things up, but when I've really been at it a long time at one stretch, it strikes me how absurd a practice it is to keep creating realities for imaginary people. I often treat fiction writing like it's a very serious business. Many writers do. But it's probably healthy to take a step back sometimes and just think about what it is we're doing in a more macro sense. I just spent the last hour imagining the love life of two people who don't exist until I had given one of the two fake people a little tendency to do something that slightly bemused or irritated the other. I'm daydreaming, which is often thought of as one of the biggest wastes of time one can do--so much that we yell at students who are caught doing it when they're supposed to do something else--and then putting the results of that daydreaming on paper.
No activity could be a more confident assertion that life is ephemeral and not something, ultimately, to be taken that seriously. Or, as Vonnegut put it, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different."
No activity could be a more confident assertion that life is ephemeral and not something, ultimately, to be taken that seriously. Or, as Vonnegut put it, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different."
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
I just need you to listen: "Nayla" by Youmna Chlala
We're all familiar with the problem seemingly every couple faces where one person tells the other about some terrible thing that happened, and the partner tries to fix the problem, only the person with the problem isn't looking for a solution, he/she just wants to be heard. Although it's stereo-typically the woman who just wants someone to listen to her problems, I've often been the one in relationships who wanted more emotional support than solutions. Maybe it's because I had a mother of strong German roots who was always and only ever focused on solutions, to the exclusion of a sympathetic and neutral ear.
But when it comes to my literature, I want a story to have an opinion on the problem. It's great that the story can make me care about the issues a character is facing, but I also wouldn't mind hearing a suggestion or two about how the character ought to go about extricating herself from the problem. I read to enjoy, but I also read to learn, and if a writer with some life wisdom can somehow drop a bit of knowledge into the narrative in a manner conducive to me not being such an idiot all the time, I'm usually pretty grateful.
Youmna Chlala's story does a great job presenting the problems of its two characters, who are stuck in some kind of refugee camp. The scenes are evocative and vivid, and I have some idea of the stresses of living in the camp, even though I don't really know what country the camp is in or what nationality the refugees are. But the story doesn't offer much in terms of what the characters ought to do to survive, or what society ought to do in order to do better by them. It's just a snapshot, which does a lot to humanize the characters, but doesn't attempt much beyond that.
When I wrote stories based on the Eritrean refugees I knew, I made some attempt to transfer what it seemed to me they had learned that gave them the ability to survive things I never could have made it through. I may have taken the wrong lesson from their lives, but I made some effort to guess what the lesson might be.
I liked Chlala's story, but I think it will probably only leave a brief impression on me and then fade away. There really isn't much more I can say about it, so I won't labor to squeeze seven more paragraphs out just to prove I tried.
But when it comes to my literature, I want a story to have an opinion on the problem. It's great that the story can make me care about the issues a character is facing, but I also wouldn't mind hearing a suggestion or two about how the character ought to go about extricating herself from the problem. I read to enjoy, but I also read to learn, and if a writer with some life wisdom can somehow drop a bit of knowledge into the narrative in a manner conducive to me not being such an idiot all the time, I'm usually pretty grateful.
Youmna Chlala's story does a great job presenting the problems of its two characters, who are stuck in some kind of refugee camp. The scenes are evocative and vivid, and I have some idea of the stresses of living in the camp, even though I don't really know what country the camp is in or what nationality the refugees are. But the story doesn't offer much in terms of what the characters ought to do to survive, or what society ought to do in order to do better by them. It's just a snapshot, which does a lot to humanize the characters, but doesn't attempt much beyond that.
When I wrote stories based on the Eritrean refugees I knew, I made some attempt to transfer what it seemed to me they had learned that gave them the ability to survive things I never could have made it through. I may have taken the wrong lesson from their lives, but I made some effort to guess what the lesson might be.
I liked Chlala's story, but I think it will probably only leave a brief impression on me and then fade away. There really isn't much more I can say about it, so I won't labor to squeeze seven more paragraphs out just to prove I tried.
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Everyone is a better parent than me: "Counterblast" by Marjorie Celona
I've seen the same New York Times article about a half dozen times since it came out late last year. The main point of "The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting" is that parents today spend much more time and money parenting than they used to, and it's wearing them out. My social media accounts must think they know something about me that makes them keep putting this article in my site. They're not wrong.
When Mrs. Heretic and I had our son about a decade and a half ago, we really wanted to be good parents. We read a lot of books, talked to parents we thought were doing it right, and discussed our philosophies before he came along. But nothing went according to plan. One problem was our son's sleeping habits. We had planned to use the Ferber method (stick 'em in a crib and let them cry until they give up, more or less), but Mrs. Heretic, who is a sensitive soul, couldn't abide hearing him cry. This meant we let him co-sleep. There were a ton of books by people with credentials telling us this was not only okay, but was natural and how most of the world did it. So he slept with us. Then he kept sleeping with us until he was about ten, because he just couldn't sleep alone.
I didn't really mind, and I don't think Mrs. H did, either. But it was always a little bit embarrassing when we went to visit somewhere with friends or family, and those people told their kids to go to sleep at 8 PM and then the kids went without question, while I had to disappear for an hour in the evening in order to coax our son to sleep. We got a lot of looks like we were a couple of pretty good fools.
The same thing happened with discipline. We decided we didn't want to spank our son. We wanted him to learn to treat others like he wanted to be treated out of a sense of empathy, not because he'd catch hell if he didn't. Plus, a lot of literature made it seem like spanking was child abuse, and our son would never be a healthy adult if we did it. So we followed this plan, even though we'd both been spanked as kids and thought we turned out okay.
But our son was not the sweetest to others. And he was sometimes so out of control in public, I'm sure the first thought of everyone around us was that we were terrible parents and that what that boy needed was a swift swat on the behind. The closest I've ever come to getting in a physical fight as an adult were some of the times my son misbehaved on airplanes. Meanwhile, the parents we knew who had the nicest, best behaved, kindest kids all openly admitted they spanked their kids. We felt like we'd overthought everything. Maybe the traditional, mid-western ways of child-raising we'd be brought up on and which many of our friends and family still used were best. We ended up occasionally spanking our son (usually on an airplane when I was about to lose my mind), but we were so half-hearted about it, I think we ended up just getting the worst effects of both parenting methods.
We were two grad-school educated parents; how come every parent we knew seemed to be better at parenting than us? We were putting way more time and effort into parenting than our parents did, but not getting results that stacked up. Everyone else seemed to think parenting was easy. They had more kids than us, and theirs were all great. What was up?
The reason I launched into that long auto-biographical detail (longer than the actual story review will be) is to say I find the story relatable. There's not much an ordinary reader won't be able to figure out in "Counterblast" as far as what the story's about. It's not a story that hides its meaning. It's about the difficulties of parenting in the modern world, about how educated parents trying to do what experts tell them to do find themselves seemingly outparented by more capable, more grounded people who never seem to doubt themselves much.
The story's mother and POV character, Edie, is terrified of her daughter being unhappy. This manifests itself in her extreme reactions to the baby's crying. As a result, Edie has built a schedule for her and her baby where the baby is prevented from crying for long periods of time because her needs are met. Edie is both defensive about her parenting style and also afraid she's doing it all wrong, especially when confronted with how capable her husband's sister is with kids.
Edie's obsessiveness, we're told early on, leads eventually to the end of her marriage from the baby's father. We watch the couple as married parents of a one-year-old, but the story already told us in the first paragraph that a divorce is coming. The stresses of parenting will end the family. That's modern life.
The main thematic punch in the story is contained right there in the title. The "counterblast" is this:
There's not much more to say about it. The story gets parenting in the early 21st century as I experienced it about right.
I will add that the narrative structure does a nice counterpunch to go with its thematic counterblast. It started off making me think it would be about what a terrible husband Barry was. The narrator tells us early on that Barry gets off easy in life because he's good looking, that he can't hold down a job, that he can't finish a task. I thought the story would be about men who suck, but it wasn't. Not long after the narrator is annoyed with him for acting like an idiot on an airplane, she says this about the husband: "My husband was the only person who had ever loved me as much as I needed to be loved. Everyone up to this point had loved me in a sinister way. My husband was the first good person I had ever met."
From that point on, I felt much more sympathy for the narrator. She feels her way of coping isn't right, but she also can't correct it. She feels she is failing her daughter and husband, but to do anything else would be impossible, because the very strength of her bonds makes her unable to love in any other way.
From what I can tell about how the author reads this story, judging from her comments in the back of the anthology, I'm not sure I agree with her. A lot of parts of this story were auto-biographical for her. She got a lot of the old-fashioned advice to her modern and quasi-obsessive way of doing things. She said: "I wrote it because I was angry at all the wrongheaded advice I was given about babies--stuff I found cruel, much of it from doctors. This story, to me, is a kind of corrective--a way of saying...that any move away from love is a move toward ugliness and a move toward sorrow." That's not actually how it read to me. There seems to be a lot more ambiguity about the efficacy of modern all-in parenting techniques and a lot more realization that folk-wisdom methods often do a good job than her interpretation seems to allow. But also in this modern world, whatever technique you use, you're going to feel guilty and think you're doing it wrong, because there are legions of experts there to tell you how wrong you are.
Like I said, I found this story easy to relate to. Some fiction just seems destined to be used one day as a cultural artifact by those trying to understand the zeitgeist of an era. I can see this story, years from now, being used by sociologists studying declining birth rates in early 21st century America. We had two kids, but only one the biological route, and the themes explored in this story had a lot to do with why we did, even though once upon a time we had talked about having a house full of kids.
When Mrs. Heretic and I had our son about a decade and a half ago, we really wanted to be good parents. We read a lot of books, talked to parents we thought were doing it right, and discussed our philosophies before he came along. But nothing went according to plan. One problem was our son's sleeping habits. We had planned to use the Ferber method (stick 'em in a crib and let them cry until they give up, more or less), but Mrs. Heretic, who is a sensitive soul, couldn't abide hearing him cry. This meant we let him co-sleep. There were a ton of books by people with credentials telling us this was not only okay, but was natural and how most of the world did it. So he slept with us. Then he kept sleeping with us until he was about ten, because he just couldn't sleep alone.
I didn't really mind, and I don't think Mrs. H did, either. But it was always a little bit embarrassing when we went to visit somewhere with friends or family, and those people told their kids to go to sleep at 8 PM and then the kids went without question, while I had to disappear for an hour in the evening in order to coax our son to sleep. We got a lot of looks like we were a couple of pretty good fools.
The same thing happened with discipline. We decided we didn't want to spank our son. We wanted him to learn to treat others like he wanted to be treated out of a sense of empathy, not because he'd catch hell if he didn't. Plus, a lot of literature made it seem like spanking was child abuse, and our son would never be a healthy adult if we did it. So we followed this plan, even though we'd both been spanked as kids and thought we turned out okay.
But our son was not the sweetest to others. And he was sometimes so out of control in public, I'm sure the first thought of everyone around us was that we were terrible parents and that what that boy needed was a swift swat on the behind. The closest I've ever come to getting in a physical fight as an adult were some of the times my son misbehaved on airplanes. Meanwhile, the parents we knew who had the nicest, best behaved, kindest kids all openly admitted they spanked their kids. We felt like we'd overthought everything. Maybe the traditional, mid-western ways of child-raising we'd be brought up on and which many of our friends and family still used were best. We ended up occasionally spanking our son (usually on an airplane when I was about to lose my mind), but we were so half-hearted about it, I think we ended up just getting the worst effects of both parenting methods.
We were two grad-school educated parents; how come every parent we knew seemed to be better at parenting than us? We were putting way more time and effort into parenting than our parents did, but not getting results that stacked up. Everyone else seemed to think parenting was easy. They had more kids than us, and theirs were all great. What was up?
Isn't this a story review?
The reason I launched into that long auto-biographical detail (longer than the actual story review will be) is to say I find the story relatable. There's not much an ordinary reader won't be able to figure out in "Counterblast" as far as what the story's about. It's not a story that hides its meaning. It's about the difficulties of parenting in the modern world, about how educated parents trying to do what experts tell them to do find themselves seemingly outparented by more capable, more grounded people who never seem to doubt themselves much.
The story's mother and POV character, Edie, is terrified of her daughter being unhappy. This manifests itself in her extreme reactions to the baby's crying. As a result, Edie has built a schedule for her and her baby where the baby is prevented from crying for long periods of time because her needs are met. Edie is both defensive about her parenting style and also afraid she's doing it all wrong, especially when confronted with how capable her husband's sister is with kids.
Edie's obsessiveness, we're told early on, leads eventually to the end of her marriage from the baby's father. We watch the couple as married parents of a one-year-old, but the story already told us in the first paragraph that a divorce is coming. The stresses of parenting will end the family. That's modern life.
The main thematic punch in the story is contained right there in the title. The "counterblast" is this:
"I am sorry for the way I am, I wanted to tell my husband. I am sorry for my narcissism and the peculiar way I navigate the world...I am sorry that I need things to be just so, that I cannot relax and do things any other way but the way in which I do them. I am sorry that I need so much time with Lou. I am sorry that I try to control my environment and everyone around me. I am sorry that I feel things so intensely and that the intensity of my love for Lou creates a kind of counterblast of rage for all other things. I am too full of love and thus I am too full of sorrow."
There's not much more to say about it. The story gets parenting in the early 21st century as I experienced it about right.
I will add that the narrative structure does a nice counterpunch to go with its thematic counterblast. It started off making me think it would be about what a terrible husband Barry was. The narrator tells us early on that Barry gets off easy in life because he's good looking, that he can't hold down a job, that he can't finish a task. I thought the story would be about men who suck, but it wasn't. Not long after the narrator is annoyed with him for acting like an idiot on an airplane, she says this about the husband: "My husband was the only person who had ever loved me as much as I needed to be loved. Everyone up to this point had loved me in a sinister way. My husband was the first good person I had ever met."
From that point on, I felt much more sympathy for the narrator. She feels her way of coping isn't right, but she also can't correct it. She feels she is failing her daughter and husband, but to do anything else would be impossible, because the very strength of her bonds makes her unable to love in any other way.
From what I can tell about how the author reads this story, judging from her comments in the back of the anthology, I'm not sure I agree with her. A lot of parts of this story were auto-biographical for her. She got a lot of the old-fashioned advice to her modern and quasi-obsessive way of doing things. She said: "I wrote it because I was angry at all the wrongheaded advice I was given about babies--stuff I found cruel, much of it from doctors. This story, to me, is a kind of corrective--a way of saying...that any move away from love is a move toward ugliness and a move toward sorrow." That's not actually how it read to me. There seems to be a lot more ambiguity about the efficacy of modern all-in parenting techniques and a lot more realization that folk-wisdom methods often do a good job than her interpretation seems to allow. But also in this modern world, whatever technique you use, you're going to feel guilty and think you're doing it wrong, because there are legions of experts there to tell you how wrong you are.
Like I said, I found this story easy to relate to. Some fiction just seems destined to be used one day as a cultural artifact by those trying to understand the zeitgeist of an era. I can see this story, years from now, being used by sociologists studying declining birth rates in early 21st century America. We had two kids, but only one the biological route, and the themes explored in this story had a lot to do with why we did, even though once upon a time we had talked about having a house full of kids.
Friday, July 5, 2019
A better wrong tool: "The Tomb of Wrestling" by Jo Ann Beard (O. Henry Award Anthology)
We've probably all heard someone describe a traumatic experience, and because they were unable to get across the unusual cognitive reactions they had to the event, that person fell back upon lazily saying something like, "It was all so surreal." I'm sure I've said it before. People can be forgiven this little bit of narrative fuzziness, of course, just like they can be forgiven for being in shock during the event and failing to act in their own interests. When experts give self-defense classes, they often emphasize that what's important isn't so much what you do, but that you do something and do it decisively. Criminals often capitalize on the way normal people fail to react when under stress, because the first reaction of most people is to rationalize away being in the situation. Their rational minds can't square with irrational behavior, and so they shut down. That's what "surreal" means for most people--it's a world where the rational order breaks down. It's not totally unrelated to the artistic movement of surrealism, although it may be a bit of an inexact shorthand.
Jo Ann Beard's "The Tomb of Wrestling" is sort of what you'd get if you were telling your story about getting mugged on the subway and called it "surreal," but the person you were telling the story to happened to be an art scholar specializing in surrealism. That term is going to evoke certain reactions in your listener it wouldn't in the normal audience, who knows you just mean that you were flummoxed and didn't know how to act.
Instead, we get a story that more or less says okay, you want to talk about trauma as surreal? I'll show you what surreal means. The entirety of the story is suffused with surrealism; even the title is a reference to French surrealist artist Rene Magritte's 1960 collection "The Tomb of the Wrestlers." The main character, Joan, has studied art history, which allows the story to be unapologetically ekphrastic at times. It also allows the story to not only talk about surrealism as a technique and movement, but to actually be surreal, in the sense that it plays with time and place and narrative subjectivity.
If not for this playing around with these elements, we'd actually have a very simple story. Joan is an extremely mild woman. So mild, she carries a shovel around in the trunk of her car to help turtles off the road in order to make up for hitting a deer with her car once. So mild, she has been a vegetarian her whole life, ever since she met living farm animals as a child. So mild, she wet her pants in grade school rather than raise her hand. So mild that...well, you get the picture. She's not an assertive woman. Joan is attacked in her own home, almost killed, then hits her attacker over the head with her turtle shovel. She then panics, is unable to leave the kitchen where the man is lying, unable to call the police, unable to do anything logical to save herself. She mostly just waits while he slowly regains consciousness. Then, the big finish.
But because the story does play around with time and place and point-of-view, we have a lot to chew on as readers. The beginning of the story is a standard third-person-limited POV, although an agonizingly slow one. The first line tells us that she hits the guy with her shovel, but then we wait four pages to back up and see it happen, all the while being interrupted with small things Joan notices or remembers. As soon as her art history background and surrealism are invoked, though, the story begins to move around its point-of-view. We get the perspective of the attacker, the dogs outside, even a random coyote, heron, and frog.
"All around her, things had come loose from their meanings and were washing in and out with her breath like tidewater," we read, not long after the narrative begins to slip around on us. Or: "Something weird was happening to time--it was swirling instead of linear, like pouring strands of purple and green paint into a bucket of white and giving it one stir. Now was also then was also another then." There is no generic meaning to the notion of surrealism here. We're with a passionate student of the school, and we're going to get an ear full of what surrealism really means with graphic specificity: "The strange notions of the surrealists, with their unmoored minds and their brutal depictions of women. Limbs severed into doll parts and re-arranged, high heels turned upside down and presented on a platter like a roasted bird..."
But the story actually was published before Trump was even elected, which means it was written even before that. It pre-dates Me-Too.
More importantly, even though it frankly looks at threats from violence aimed at women, these threats are situated within a violent world where nobody is safe. As Joan is noticing everything with hyper-sensitivity on her route to hit her attacker over the head, she notices that outside the kitchen, "The hummingbirds had bad personalities, always trying to spear each other away from the trumpet vines and the feeders, their thumb-sized shimmering bodies aglow with bad intentions." She recalls being handed piglets to pet while in the pig pen "their mothers snuffled and bit each other." When we are in the head of the attacker, he recalls growing up with a grandfather who was a gravedigger, and how, when he walked through the cemetery, occasionally seeing people who died young, "You could feel the unfairness hanging over the tombstones."
So there is violence against women, and while that violence is worse for them, it's just part of the context of a natural world that lives with (and as a result of) violence every day. The violence against Joan is unfair, but there is nothing unique about it within a big, violent, unfair world. Outside, her dogs spend most of their time trying to figure out how to kill things for fun.
Joan is attacked in her home, which is, for most of us, one of the most fundamental symbols of civilization. It's the place where nature ends. But today, Joan couldn't keep it out. Nature, red in tooth and claw, has forced its way into her study while she read her art history, and she will either find a way to live in this brutal world or she will die in a hurry.
In this reading, the story is something of a female-centered Call of the Wild. Instead of embracing the inner ubermensch and overcoming the tame side of ourselves in order to become dogs with god-like powers, though, she is going to have to learn to deny her own soft and non-violent nature in order to survive in a brutal world.
This is a tall order for gentle Joan. "It went against who she was," both because of her lack of physical strength, but also because she just doesn't like to hurt things. She hated the way her family fished, ripping worms like licorice and throwing the trash fish into the weeds to suffocate. The person she admired most growing up was one of her grandmothers, the one who was "a silent, opinion-less woman from the unpopular side of the family."
Nonetheless, she is able to overcome her own timid and gentle nature. In the critical moment, when she needs to swing the shovel, she find that "There was no process, no hesitation, because she was operating like a simple organism in that moment, one that is programmed to survive, like a sperm, or hammerhead shark." There is enough nature still in her civilized heart to survive.
It's how Joan manages to find her inner shovel-swinger that's the interesting part. In order to save herself, she has to learn the mastery of tools, which is typically thought of as something of a man's domain. She's had some schooling in this area. Roy, the hippie-dippie guy she worked with in an art gallery back in Iowa, showed her how to "make the hammer work for her." This is something pretty much anyone being taught to use a hammer hears. It means to hold it in the right place to make your hand a fulcrum such that the mechanical advantage of the hammer is maximized, allowing gravity to do most of the work. It's remembering this advice that allowed her to swing the shovel hard enough to knock her attacker out. But having done that, her less aggressive, less wild side reasserts itself, and she simply watches, uselessly, while her attacker slowly revives, doing nothing more than poking him in the shoulder with the shovel from time to time.
What she needs is not just the basics of using tools; she needs a master class. It turns out her attacker has already had this class. He learned from a childhood friend he admired that real tool mastery meant using something nobody would have thought of as a tool to do the job. "Once you understood basic physics, you could use things as tools that weren't necessarily tools....He would never use the right tool if he could use a better wrong one."
Indeed, the attacker has fully absorbed this lesson by the time he is attacking Joan. He is choking her with a somewhat flimsy measuring stick. He barely even needs to concentrate as he does, "as though he could more or less do it by feel, like gliding underneath a chassis and tightening a bolt, gliding out again."
She cannot figure out for the life of her how to tie up her attacker's hands while he in out on the floor. Significantly, her current husband is nowhere to be found during the attack. He is only referred to in two dismissive passages, one about how he disapproves of Kraft singles (the monster!), and the other comparing him to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, which doesn't seem like much of a vote in confidence of the husband, either. If she is going to figure it out, she'll have to do it alone. Unable to find rope, she senses she will have to think out of the box, but can't quite wrap her head around how: "Other things could be used to tie him up, but what?"
Just as her attacker is beginning to wake back up, it comes to her. The dogs that have been outside trying to come in and see what they think of this stranger are stuck at the back door are her tool. It comes to Joan: "Let the dogs work for you." That is, let what's wild in nature work for you. Those who live by the sword of violence can be made to die upon it if those who want to live by something else can just keep their heads.
Joan has learned that she cannot really set herself apart from the natural world. Everything is connected, which is why in surrealism, a hammer can become a doll or a shoe or whatever. But if everything alike is a part of the natural world, then so is her attacker.
Indeed, there are constant connections between Joan and her attacker we learn about. Besides the way both are drawn to learn about unorthodox tools, there is the link both have to the "Tomb of Wrestling" concept. He grew up digging graves and looking at gravestones. She first realized her own vulnerability when wrestling with her first husband got out of hand and he pinned her easily. She has studied Dali's "In Voluptate Mors," but he is actually drawn to voluptuous death, and has been ever since he first saw a teacher holding up a skull with a pencil (another tool used in an unorthodox way). As the dogs tear him apart, he is enjoying "in morte voluptas," going from death into pleasure. He apparently didn't have a happy life, given up by a mother who didn't want him and then raised by violent grandparents.
If Joan has a violent side in her, then it's also true even violent people have a gentle side. Her father loved to watch boxing and tell her about how one guy "clocked" the other, but he did this while stroking a dog on his lap. Even Kyle, the guy who taught the attacker to dismember frogs and use the wrong tool, had cats he swore he tortured but which climbed on his lap anyway. This isn't a story about evil men and the patriarchy. The mothers and grandmothers in the story don't come off any better than the fathers and grandfathers. It's a story about the inevitability of unpleasantness in the world, and how no matter how much we try to set up ways to avoid looking at it, eventually it's going to find us, so we have to learn to either make it work for us or kill us. It's a story about how difficult it can be at the end of the day to differentiate oneself from those who use violence for pleasure if you're willing to use it for security.
That's not what we usually tell victims of violence. It may not be clinically sound. But then, this story isn't seeking therapeutic correctness. This isn't how you'd think to go about explaining trauma and violence to those who've suffered it, which is pretty much everyone. But it is, in its weird way, effective. By situating violence in a much larger and stranger context, the world in which frogs either jump fast enough to get away from herons or they end up as lunch, the violence of the violent somehow loses its punch. Compared to the therapies we would normally prescribe for those trying to recover psychologically and emotionally from violence, this story is, in many ways, a better wrong tool, if we can just have the wherewithal to make it work for us.
Jo Ann Beard's "The Tomb of Wrestling" is sort of what you'd get if you were telling your story about getting mugged on the subway and called it "surreal," but the person you were telling the story to happened to be an art scholar specializing in surrealism. That term is going to evoke certain reactions in your listener it wouldn't in the normal audience, who knows you just mean that you were flummoxed and didn't know how to act.
Instead, we get a story that more or less says okay, you want to talk about trauma as surreal? I'll show you what surreal means. The entirety of the story is suffused with surrealism; even the title is a reference to French surrealist artist Rene Magritte's 1960 collection "The Tomb of the Wrestlers." The main character, Joan, has studied art history, which allows the story to be unapologetically ekphrastic at times. It also allows the story to not only talk about surrealism as a technique and movement, but to actually be surreal, in the sense that it plays with time and place and narrative subjectivity.
 |
| I had to Google many elements referenced in this story. |
If not for this playing around with these elements, we'd actually have a very simple story. Joan is an extremely mild woman. So mild, she carries a shovel around in the trunk of her car to help turtles off the road in order to make up for hitting a deer with her car once. So mild, she has been a vegetarian her whole life, ever since she met living farm animals as a child. So mild, she wet her pants in grade school rather than raise her hand. So mild that...well, you get the picture. She's not an assertive woman. Joan is attacked in her own home, almost killed, then hits her attacker over the head with her turtle shovel. She then panics, is unable to leave the kitchen where the man is lying, unable to call the police, unable to do anything logical to save herself. She mostly just waits while he slowly regains consciousness. Then, the big finish.
But because the story does play around with time and place and point-of-view, we have a lot to chew on as readers. The beginning of the story is a standard third-person-limited POV, although an agonizingly slow one. The first line tells us that she hits the guy with her shovel, but then we wait four pages to back up and see it happen, all the while being interrupted with small things Joan notices or remembers. As soon as her art history background and surrealism are invoked, though, the story begins to move around its point-of-view. We get the perspective of the attacker, the dogs outside, even a random coyote, heron, and frog.
"All around her, things had come loose from their meanings and were washing in and out with her breath like tidewater," we read, not long after the narrative begins to slip around on us. Or: "Something weird was happening to time--it was swirling instead of linear, like pouring strands of purple and green paint into a bucket of white and giving it one stir. Now was also then was also another then." There is no generic meaning to the notion of surrealism here. We're with a passionate student of the school, and we're going to get an ear full of what surrealism really means with graphic specificity: "The strange notions of the surrealists, with their unmoored minds and their brutal depictions of women. Limbs severed into doll parts and re-arranged, high heels turned upside down and presented on a platter like a roasted bird..."
But there is a relatively straight-forward reading of this story
In spite of the somewhat non-traditional narrative structure of this story, there is one reading of it that isn't all that hard to piece together from the fragments. It's tempting, reading a 2018 anthology here in 2019, to read this story as "another Me-Too piece." And it does fit into the discourse of violence against women that's being examined in our society right now. Joan recalls being picked up while hitch-hiking as a teen, and the two boys in the car with her made jokes about wanting to rape Joan and her friend. Or were they jokes? It's hard for women to know, and that's the particular, never-ending threat they face.But the story actually was published before Trump was even elected, which means it was written even before that. It pre-dates Me-Too.
More importantly, even though it frankly looks at threats from violence aimed at women, these threats are situated within a violent world where nobody is safe. As Joan is noticing everything with hyper-sensitivity on her route to hit her attacker over the head, she notices that outside the kitchen, "The hummingbirds had bad personalities, always trying to spear each other away from the trumpet vines and the feeders, their thumb-sized shimmering bodies aglow with bad intentions." She recalls being handed piglets to pet while in the pig pen "their mothers snuffled and bit each other." When we are in the head of the attacker, he recalls growing up with a grandfather who was a gravedigger, and how, when he walked through the cemetery, occasionally seeing people who died young, "You could feel the unfairness hanging over the tombstones."
So there is violence against women, and while that violence is worse for them, it's just part of the context of a natural world that lives with (and as a result of) violence every day. The violence against Joan is unfair, but there is nothing unique about it within a big, violent, unfair world. Outside, her dogs spend most of their time trying to figure out how to kill things for fun.
Joan is attacked in her home, which is, for most of us, one of the most fundamental symbols of civilization. It's the place where nature ends. But today, Joan couldn't keep it out. Nature, red in tooth and claw, has forced its way into her study while she read her art history, and she will either find a way to live in this brutal world or she will die in a hurry.
In this reading, the story is something of a female-centered Call of the Wild. Instead of embracing the inner ubermensch and overcoming the tame side of ourselves in order to become dogs with god-like powers, though, she is going to have to learn to deny her own soft and non-violent nature in order to survive in a brutal world.
This is a tall order for gentle Joan. "It went against who she was," both because of her lack of physical strength, but also because she just doesn't like to hurt things. She hated the way her family fished, ripping worms like licorice and throwing the trash fish into the weeds to suffocate. The person she admired most growing up was one of her grandmothers, the one who was "a silent, opinion-less woman from the unpopular side of the family."
Nonetheless, she is able to overcome her own timid and gentle nature. In the critical moment, when she needs to swing the shovel, she find that "There was no process, no hesitation, because she was operating like a simple organism in that moment, one that is programmed to survive, like a sperm, or hammerhead shark." There is enough nature still in her civilized heart to survive.
But there's something complex working in that simple reading
It's how Joan manages to find her inner shovel-swinger that's the interesting part. In order to save herself, she has to learn the mastery of tools, which is typically thought of as something of a man's domain. She's had some schooling in this area. Roy, the hippie-dippie guy she worked with in an art gallery back in Iowa, showed her how to "make the hammer work for her." This is something pretty much anyone being taught to use a hammer hears. It means to hold it in the right place to make your hand a fulcrum such that the mechanical advantage of the hammer is maximized, allowing gravity to do most of the work. It's remembering this advice that allowed her to swing the shovel hard enough to knock her attacker out. But having done that, her less aggressive, less wild side reasserts itself, and she simply watches, uselessly, while her attacker slowly revives, doing nothing more than poking him in the shoulder with the shovel from time to time.
What she needs is not just the basics of using tools; she needs a master class. It turns out her attacker has already had this class. He learned from a childhood friend he admired that real tool mastery meant using something nobody would have thought of as a tool to do the job. "Once you understood basic physics, you could use things as tools that weren't necessarily tools....He would never use the right tool if he could use a better wrong one."
Indeed, the attacker has fully absorbed this lesson by the time he is attacking Joan. He is choking her with a somewhat flimsy measuring stick. He barely even needs to concentrate as he does, "as though he could more or less do it by feel, like gliding underneath a chassis and tightening a bolt, gliding out again."
She cannot figure out for the life of her how to tie up her attacker's hands while he in out on the floor. Significantly, her current husband is nowhere to be found during the attack. He is only referred to in two dismissive passages, one about how he disapproves of Kraft singles (the monster!), and the other comparing him to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, which doesn't seem like much of a vote in confidence of the husband, either. If she is going to figure it out, she'll have to do it alone. Unable to find rope, she senses she will have to think out of the box, but can't quite wrap her head around how: "Other things could be used to tie him up, but what?"
Just as her attacker is beginning to wake back up, it comes to her. The dogs that have been outside trying to come in and see what they think of this stranger are stuck at the back door are her tool. It comes to Joan: "Let the dogs work for you." That is, let what's wild in nature work for you. Those who live by the sword of violence can be made to die upon it if those who want to live by something else can just keep their heads.
 |
| "The frog was either in the pond or in the heron as it flew slowly past the kitchen window," writes Jo Ann Beard, which reminds me of what Cleveland Indians broadcaster Joe Tait used to say: "Some days, you eat the bear, and some days, the bear eats you." |
But if she's part of nature, there's a corollary to that
Joan has learned that she cannot really set herself apart from the natural world. Everything is connected, which is why in surrealism, a hammer can become a doll or a shoe or whatever. But if everything alike is a part of the natural world, then so is her attacker.
Indeed, there are constant connections between Joan and her attacker we learn about. Besides the way both are drawn to learn about unorthodox tools, there is the link both have to the "Tomb of Wrestling" concept. He grew up digging graves and looking at gravestones. She first realized her own vulnerability when wrestling with her first husband got out of hand and he pinned her easily. She has studied Dali's "In Voluptate Mors," but he is actually drawn to voluptuous death, and has been ever since he first saw a teacher holding up a skull with a pencil (another tool used in an unorthodox way). As the dogs tear him apart, he is enjoying "in morte voluptas," going from death into pleasure. He apparently didn't have a happy life, given up by a mother who didn't want him and then raised by violent grandparents.
If Joan has a violent side in her, then it's also true even violent people have a gentle side. Her father loved to watch boxing and tell her about how one guy "clocked" the other, but he did this while stroking a dog on his lap. Even Kyle, the guy who taught the attacker to dismember frogs and use the wrong tool, had cats he swore he tortured but which climbed on his lap anyway. This isn't a story about evil men and the patriarchy. The mothers and grandmothers in the story don't come off any better than the fathers and grandfathers. It's a story about the inevitability of unpleasantness in the world, and how no matter how much we try to set up ways to avoid looking at it, eventually it's going to find us, so we have to learn to either make it work for us or kill us. It's a story about how difficult it can be at the end of the day to differentiate oneself from those who use violence for pleasure if you're willing to use it for security.
Which is not the usual way of looking at trauma
That's not what we usually tell victims of violence. It may not be clinically sound. But then, this story isn't seeking therapeutic correctness. This isn't how you'd think to go about explaining trauma and violence to those who've suffered it, which is pretty much everyone. But it is, in its weird way, effective. By situating violence in a much larger and stranger context, the world in which frogs either jump fast enough to get away from herons or they end up as lunch, the violence of the violent somehow loses its punch. Compared to the therapies we would normally prescribe for those trying to recover psychologically and emotionally from violence, this story is, in many ways, a better wrong tool, if we can just have the wherewithal to make it work for us.
Thursday, July 4, 2019
The plan for the next few weeks
After going back and forth on the idea for the last two months, I've decided to go ahead and review the stories in the 2018 O. Henry Award Short Story Anthology. This is the third of the three major anthologies a short story writer can get into, along with Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize. It's more similar to BASS in that O. Henry tends to pull from the major journals rather than look in unorthodox places like Pushcart does, and for that reason I've always just skipped it. I wasn't sure I'd have time to review all of it, since I've recently taken on some added responsibilities in my life. I'm still not 100% sure I'll get through all of it, which is why I've been reluctant to try--I didn't want a half done series of reviews to mock me for my inability to finish what I'd started. But after thinking about it, I'd rather at least try and fail then not try.
I'm pretty late reviewing these. The winners of the 2019 O. Henry awards have already been announced, and the new anthology comes out in the fall. The first story in the 2018 anthology was actually first published in Tin House before Trump was elected and before we all knew Tin House was shutting down. So this won't be the timeliest series of reviews, but I still think it's worth doing, if for no other reasons than for me to sharpen my skills at reviewing short stories, which I've discovered over the last two years I kind of like doing and might not be too bad at.
First review will be out tomorrow. Happy Independence Day.
I'm pretty late reviewing these. The winners of the 2019 O. Henry awards have already been announced, and the new anthology comes out in the fall. The first story in the 2018 anthology was actually first published in Tin House before Trump was elected and before we all knew Tin House was shutting down. So this won't be the timeliest series of reviews, but I still think it's worth doing, if for no other reasons than for me to sharpen my skills at reviewing short stories, which I've discovered over the last two years I kind of like doing and might not be too bad at.
First review will be out tomorrow. Happy Independence Day.
Monday, July 1, 2019
Still going farther, but not forever
I've wanted to be a writer since I was in the fourth grade and wrote stories about the super hero Electroman and his sidekick Fluffy, but I didn't work intentionally at it until I was 41. That may seem like a lie, since I had finished a B.A. and an M.A. in English by 31, the M.A. with a focus in creative writing. But I never really focused on the nuts and bolts of how to write. I just thought I'd read the writing of brilliant writers and somehow, I'd become brilliant, too. Like a lot of people who showed some ability at a young age, I was cocky, and I thought it was beneath me to do something as low-brow as read a book on how to write fiction. I got the results you'd expect from this approach, which is to say I failed, not only to get published, but also to write something worth reading. There were flashes of something interesting back then in what I wrote, but because I was too impatient wanting to be recognized for being brilliant, I only noticed the few flashes of what was good and refused to address the glaring holes. Then I quit, got a job, started a family, and didn't think much about writing for ten years. Work at least made me feel like I was good at something, and having a family scratched another deep itch.
On October 1st, 2013, my work shut down for four days. It wasn't a big deal, nothing more than what you might call a management dispute. It was a foregone conclusion that before too long, we'd get started back up and things would go back to normal. But for some reason, I found it so unsettling in those four days to not be at work, I started wondering what I would be without my job. Not much, it felt like. I needed to be something more than what I was at work. What else was there? It took about two seconds to realize what I wanted was to be a writer.
Maybe it was the wisdom of age, but this time, I was no longer too proud to look for help. I read a number of books on the mechanics of writing, figured out for about forty bucks what I'd gotten into 30K of debt failing to learn in grad school.
I didn't really have an organized list of goals in mind, but I knew I wanted to get somewhere. Looking back now, I think I can put my hoped-for progress into this order:
1) Write something
2) Write something I don't think is terrible
3) Submit something
4) Submit something and get proof someone else doesn't think it's terrible
5) Get something published by someone other than myself
6) Get more things published
7) Get something published in a place that's really hard to get published
8) Start to be recognized primarily as a writer
#8 is where I wanted to get to starting off back in October of 2013. Some of these steps took a lot longer than others. Going from one to five was actually not too painful. Once I was willing to learn a few things, it's amazing how quickly things came together a little bit. I had my first story published in under a year from when I started. But going from five to six--getting my second and third publications, that is--took longer than getting the first story published. I really was close to giving up. In fact, I did give up. It was after deciding to give up, in fact, that one story after another just poured out of me. I kept writing, all the time wondering why I was doing it, because I'd already quit. I got my second story published in fall 2016, then a month later the third, then the fourth a few months after that and finally the Washington Writers' Publishing House called me in February of 2017 to tell me I'd won their fiction contest and they were going to pay me to publish my book. Whatever else happens in my life, I've had a book published, which means I am a writer.
Then there are the reasons I'm ashamed to admit exist. I want my ego stroked. I want to be admired. I want to show people they were wrong about me--not that I can really think of anyone who told me I was going to fail, so it's hard to find enemies. But spite has been a pretty good motivator for me in other areas of my life, so I try to find a way to make it work for me here. Spite-motivation comes at a cost, though: I am ashamed to admit this about myself, but envy of other writers getting the accolades I want has started to make it difficult for me to enjoy the works of other writers.
Normally, I don't worry too much that my motivations for doing something aren't 100% pure. Of course, nobody's motivations are entirely benign. We're all a mix of good and bad reasons why we do things, and to obsess over what particular blend of motivations is getting you out of bed on a particular day is to miss the point, which is to get out of bed however you need to.
But the last few weeks have made me worry about my own motivations, and wonder whether moving on to steps 7 and 8 is being withheld from me by the universe for my own good and the good of others.
It's not the first time or the tenth time I've heard that advice. I've tried to convince myself of it before. It certainly has all the taste and smell of wisdom: I can't control getting published, I can only control what I write, and if I believe in what I write, that ought to be enough. If it isn't, then no amount of publication or praise ever will be enough.
But like all good advice, it's damned hard to follow. I'm not sure I even am totally in control of whether I can follow it. The same obsessiveness that drives me to care too much about publication is also what makes me write stories nearly good enough for some really excellent journals. I've always liked being graded. Having tried to write something pure and only for the joy of writing it, I still no sooner finish it than I want someone in authority to tell me if I did a good job. That's just me.
To some extent, I may give off a more dire impression about how hard I take these things than is really the case. For whatever reason, when I started this blog about five years ago, I wanted it to be a true testament to what it's like working your ass off to write good stories when nobody cares. That includes trying to give an honest account of a lot of the negative thoughts I have, because someday, some other writer is going to think the same thing, and I want this blog to be here to let that writer know that others had the same thoughts. So I need to be open about the bad thoughts, even when they make me look petty. I try to record the good things, too, but I've just had more discouraging moments than encouraging ones. That's being a writer for most people. Anyone thinking about following the path I've been down ought to know that.
They also ought to know that there is no guarantee of ultimate success. There may not even be a good reason to keep trying until the bitter end. The writing industry, much of which makes its money off the dreams of aspiring writers, wants you to keep going past the point where you ought to quit. They want you to pay another contest fee, go to another convention, but another pile of books. I just want this blog to be honest enough to suggest that might not be the best move for everyone.
I'm going to keep on going, but I make no promises that I'm going to keep on going forever. A more naturally optimistic person would have been banging away at more writing for the last six months, encouraged to see signs of nearly making a goal. I'm not that person. If I were, I wouldn't be writing stories nearly getting published in the better journals. Optimism is great for achieving things in life, but it's boring as hell to read about. The terribly pessimistic side of me is intimately linked to the part of me that writes stories from a place of authenticity. What I have to see now is whether I can still be that person and get down this next road I marked out for myself.
On October 1st, 2013, my work shut down for four days. It wasn't a big deal, nothing more than what you might call a management dispute. It was a foregone conclusion that before too long, we'd get started back up and things would go back to normal. But for some reason, I found it so unsettling in those four days to not be at work, I started wondering what I would be without my job. Not much, it felt like. I needed to be something more than what I was at work. What else was there? It took about two seconds to realize what I wanted was to be a writer.
Maybe it was the wisdom of age, but this time, I was no longer too proud to look for help. I read a number of books on the mechanics of writing, figured out for about forty bucks what I'd gotten into 30K of debt failing to learn in grad school.
I didn't really have an organized list of goals in mind, but I knew I wanted to get somewhere. Looking back now, I think I can put my hoped-for progress into this order:
1) Write something
2) Write something I don't think is terrible
3) Submit something
4) Submit something and get proof someone else doesn't think it's terrible
5) Get something published by someone other than myself
6) Get more things published
7) Get something published in a place that's really hard to get published
8) Start to be recognized primarily as a writer
#8 is where I wanted to get to starting off back in October of 2013. Some of these steps took a lot longer than others. Going from one to five was actually not too painful. Once I was willing to learn a few things, it's amazing how quickly things came together a little bit. I had my first story published in under a year from when I started. But going from five to six--getting my second and third publications, that is--took longer than getting the first story published. I really was close to giving up. In fact, I did give up. It was after deciding to give up, in fact, that one story after another just poured out of me. I kept writing, all the time wondering why I was doing it, because I'd already quit. I got my second story published in fall 2016, then a month later the third, then the fourth a few months after that and finally the Washington Writers' Publishing House called me in February of 2017 to tell me I'd won their fiction contest and they were going to pay me to publish my book. Whatever else happens in my life, I've had a book published, which means I am a writer.
Life after the book
But I still wanted more, and here's where I get a little bit fuzzy on my own motivations, which is another way of saying I'm not sure how good of a person I am. There are legitimate reasons to want to be more widely known as a writer, like caring about the things I write about and wanting others to care about them in the way I do. There are neutral reasons, like just wanting to feel like I'm getting better at something I enjoy. This is sort of an extension of having decided to write seriously in order to be a more complete person than just a guy who worked and took care of his family. Nothing wrong with it. It isn't really a noble reason to write, because it's more about just feeling fulfilled than bringing something to others, but it's certainly not an evil reason for wanting to be more noticed for my writing.Then there are the reasons I'm ashamed to admit exist. I want my ego stroked. I want to be admired. I want to show people they were wrong about me--not that I can really think of anyone who told me I was going to fail, so it's hard to find enemies. But spite has been a pretty good motivator for me in other areas of my life, so I try to find a way to make it work for me here. Spite-motivation comes at a cost, though: I am ashamed to admit this about myself, but envy of other writers getting the accolades I want has started to make it difficult for me to enjoy the works of other writers.
Normally, I don't worry too much that my motivations for doing something aren't 100% pure. Of course, nobody's motivations are entirely benign. We're all a mix of good and bad reasons why we do things, and to obsess over what particular blend of motivations is getting you out of bed on a particular day is to miss the point, which is to get out of bed however you need to.
But the last few weeks have made me worry about my own motivations, and wonder whether moving on to steps 7 and 8 is being withheld from me by the universe for my own good and the good of others.
So much closer than I've ever been
After the book came out in 2017, I wrote another half dozen stories. I thought they were at least as good as what went into the book, but I couldn't get any published anywhere. There were a few positive notes with the rejections, but nothing landed anywhere. I revised a few and eventually got two published at smaller journals. I should have been happy with that, especially because one of the stories was inspired by my daughter, and she really loved what I wrote. But step #7 was to get into some journal that was really hard to get into. To me, that meant a "top 50" journal, according to one of the lists I had been using for years to determine where to send stories. (This is one such list.)
In summer 2018, I got on a roll. I wrote five stories, all of which seemed to me to be a clear step above anything I'd done before. No matter how much I account for my own bias toward my own stories, it's obvious reading them that I had some kind of breakthrough. I felt pretty good that one of them was going to get into a top journal.
The early returns seemed to justify my optimism. There weren't any acceptances right off the bat, but I did get personal notes from editors welcoming more writing. I knew these were different from the normal form rejections, because I'D GOTTEN the form rejections from these journals before. I got them from journals that'd never given me the time of day before, journals that had been represented in the "best-of" anthologies I'd been reading: Pank, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review (which I've always desperately wanted to get into because Gettysburg might be my favorite place on Earth), The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly, The Common, Shenandoah. Somehow, I have managed to make Glimmer Train's honor roll three times in the last year of their publication, including their last-ever new writer's contest (which I qualify for, having never been published in a journal with a circulation over 5,000).
Every one of those "we liked it, it just wasn't quite there" responses meant I'd really taken a leap forward, but it also meant I was still short. Each one left me between ecstatic and crushed. I was grateful to each editor for letting me know that what I'd written was enough for them to take notice, but also bitter I still had work left to go.
But no response had the dual effect this brief note I got two weeks ago did:
Dear Jacob,
Thank you for sending us "Love Hotel." We admire the way you write and regret that this story is not quite right for the magazine. We wish you the best of luck finding a home for the story, and we hope to read more of your work soon.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Doesn't sound like much, until you consider who "The Editors" are. They're the editors of the mother-humping New Yorker, a magazine ranked #1 or #2 in pretty much every "best journals" list.
This is the part where I'm not proud of myself
With each near-miss, I felt both happiness and sadness, and the sadness was for a mix of good and bad reasons. The good reason was that I was sad something I cared about wouldn't get a chance to find a larger audience. The bad reason was vanity. When I got that response from The New Yorker and thought for a second about what would have happened if I'd been just a little bit better, just a little bit luckier, my response was completely taken over by vanity. I'd have been admired. People would have been talking about me. I'd have been relevant and important and a part of American letters. I don't know anyone particularly wishing bad things for me, but dangit if such a person were out there, I'd have sure showed him. This was my Sam Gamgee with the ring moment, except what pulled me back from the abyss wasn't plain, good hobbit sense, but the fact I didn't really possess the ring. I didn't feel good about myself.
The point of writing stories is to write something that people will read and make them want, in some way, to become a better version of themselves. There is a lot of room for a variety of meanings about what "a better version of themselves" equates to, but that's the point of stories, and really all art. If that's not it, then there is no point at all. But how can I be the right person to write such stories when their effect on me, the closer I get to achieving the goal, is to become a worse person?
Then this note came in
One of the editors of one of the journals took the time to write a second note to me, beyond just the short "you nearly made it" response. I just got it today, while I was working on finishing up this post. It was sweet and earnest and kind. It included this line: "Concern yourself primarily with giving full life to your characters' stories, rather than obsessing about publication, and you'll likely create your best work." One conclusion I draw from this note is that the editor has taken the time to read this blog at some point in time. Hello. Thanks very much for the note.
It's not the first time or the tenth time I've heard that advice. I've tried to convince myself of it before. It certainly has all the taste and smell of wisdom: I can't control getting published, I can only control what I write, and if I believe in what I write, that ought to be enough. If it isn't, then no amount of publication or praise ever will be enough.
But like all good advice, it's damned hard to follow. I'm not sure I even am totally in control of whether I can follow it. The same obsessiveness that drives me to care too much about publication is also what makes me write stories nearly good enough for some really excellent journals. I've always liked being graded. Having tried to write something pure and only for the joy of writing it, I still no sooner finish it than I want someone in authority to tell me if I did a good job. That's just me.
To some extent, I may give off a more dire impression about how hard I take these things than is really the case. For whatever reason, when I started this blog about five years ago, I wanted it to be a true testament to what it's like working your ass off to write good stories when nobody cares. That includes trying to give an honest account of a lot of the negative thoughts I have, because someday, some other writer is going to think the same thing, and I want this blog to be here to let that writer know that others had the same thoughts. So I need to be open about the bad thoughts, even when they make me look petty. I try to record the good things, too, but I've just had more discouraging moments than encouraging ones. That's being a writer for most people. Anyone thinking about following the path I've been down ought to know that.
They also ought to know that there is no guarantee of ultimate success. There may not even be a good reason to keep trying until the bitter end. The writing industry, much of which makes its money off the dreams of aspiring writers, wants you to keep going past the point where you ought to quit. They want you to pay another contest fee, go to another convention, but another pile of books. I just want this blog to be honest enough to suggest that might not be the best move for everyone.
I'm going to keep on going, but I make no promises that I'm going to keep on going forever. A more naturally optimistic person would have been banging away at more writing for the last six months, encouraged to see signs of nearly making a goal. I'm not that person. If I were, I wouldn't be writing stories nearly getting published in the better journals. Optimism is great for achieving things in life, but it's boring as hell to read about. The terribly pessimistic side of me is intimately linked to the part of me that writes stories from a place of authenticity. What I have to see now is whether I can still be that person and get down this next road I marked out for myself.
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