An actual revelation: "Evensong" by Laurie Colwin (Best American Short Stories 2024 and moving past the election)

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

-Phillip Larkin, "Church Going"

A friend of mine was explaining to me the other day what her parents were like. She said her father's motto was "nobody lives forever," which didn't make him so much a thrill-seeker as just someone who accepted that he couldn't control everything in his life. My friend's mother, on the other hand, stressed to her children that they should trust in God. My friend observed that "in the end, they kind of came to the same thing," and she laughed at the thought that her parents, now divorced, would be chagrined to know how much alike they were.

That's pretty much what "Evensong" teaches us. The unnamed narrator is a control freak who desperately needs to learn to let go. She finds that while you can learn to let go without a religious experience, change will still share psychological similarities to metanoia. It will have "elements of" religious conversion, as the opening paragraph warns us. 

The narrator admits to her need to control. In the face of an uncontrollable and in many ways unknowable universe, some react by just going with the flow. The narrator chooses the opposite path: "I am by nature a person whose constant battle against encroaching chaos is fought by list-making and organizational thinking. I make grocery lists that cover our immediate needs, our staple needs, our long-term needs, and our long-term needs of a special nature, such as a dinner party a month away." This is a response to stress much like that of PTSD victims, who cope with trauma by staying always on guard. Her anxiety extends beyond planning for events. She also worries about being in emotional debt to others. After explaining how family friends the Billiards did very normal friend things to assist them, like help them find a home and recommend doctors to them, the narrator confesses that "Sometimes when I cannot sleep at night I am tortured, as if by bedbugs or red ants, at the size of this debt."

Is this attempt to control everything working out for her? It is not. "My family tells me that I can sometimes be seen baring my teeth or muttering to myself as I make these lists." 

So the narrator (I looked very closely to be sure she's not named. I thought maybe they slipped the name in there somewhere, but it looks like her lover Louis prefers to call her things like "silly girl") ends up in an affair with Louis Billiard, the patriarch of the family she is anxious about being in debt to. Why does she get involved? She claims she doesn't have reasons, but instead feelings. Her feeling is that Louis was attractive to her because he was fatherly. He does a lot of her family's household fix-up chores. 

There are two reasons a fatherly person appeals to her. First, it gives her a sense of order and safety in a world that makes her anxious on account of its unknowability and unpredictability. She thinks to herself at one point wistfully about "how beautifully ordered are the lives of children!" It's an order she longs for as an adult, and a relationship with a father figure allows her that kind of safety.  

The second reason is a more transcendental longing. God is called father in more than one religion, and dozens more cast God in the role of father even if they don't call him that. "This alliance had a preordained, familial feeling to it that I found irresistible." She is seeking comfort on a much greater level, even while she accepts solace on the much smaller scale of a human affair. 

Orderliness is the first thing she notices about the Anglican seminary in her town: "...the orderly workings of this place--its piper on St. Andrew's Day, its Christmas procession and Easter picnic--would remind you that the season had changed, and you would know, because the hours are marked by bell ringing, what time it was at least five times a day."

Louis is the opposite of a control freak. His surname, "Billiards" seems to suggest randomness, because of the way once a billiard ball is hit, it is controlled by forces of physics. It just goes wherever the universe takes it. That's what Louis does one day just after he and the narrator are done "fooling around" and she mentions that she doesn't know anything about the meaning of the church bells she's been hearing for a decade. He jokes "from the couch to church," sacrilegiously, but he seems to genuinely enjoy the service. He enjoys it the way he enjoys all other things in life, as a "sybarite" or hedonist. 

When the narrator complains about joining in the service, he seems to half pity her and half scold her. He points out how half-hearted her and her husband's Judaism is. When she worries she'll have to kneel, he asks, "What future for the Jews?" Meaning not "Jews are heretics," but rather, "You modern Jews with your lack of ceremony have forgotten what is enjoyable about religious services and why they're so popular all over the world." 

Louis introduces the narrator to the aspect of religion that is healing for her. It isn't that she actually converts--in many ways, the narrator stands out for being such an unusually reliable one on this subject--it's that the rituals help take the place for her of obsessing. She asks Louis how he gets so good at using the different books in the service, and he tells her "practice." So she starts to practice, too, going to Evensong every day for weeks on end.

In some ways, it's just another obsession, but the difference is that this obsession doesn't indulge her instinct to control. Instead, after wondering over and over why she is even going to the services, she arrives at an epiphany that's the opposite of trying to control:  "Then one day I had an actual revelation. It came to me that I might never know very much about anything. It might never be imparted to me what I was doing at Evensong. 'The thing about the unknowable,' I said to myself, 'is that you have to accept that it just isn't knowable, and that's that.' I found this very relaxing."

And just like that, she's better. She ends the story enjoying time with her family and wanting to examine her own faith tradition more deeply. Her affair has made her a better wife and mother. Maybe Louis, the father who fixes things, knew that's what she needed. Maybe he just did what he wanted to in his sybarite way, and this ended up also being the right thing, because the universe rewards people who don't try to control it. 

We all still have a longing for the ineffable and transcendent, even agnostics like me. We're the same species that built all those churches. For those of us who can't believe churches mean what they used to mean for centuries but who still feel the same psychological and emotional emptiness, we have to find something of equal sacredness and seriousness to replace it. I've said many times literature and the close study of it somewhat fills that hole for me. The narrator seems to have managed to fill it for her as well. 

A little puzzle I leave to others

I'm not going to get into this, but I think someone interested in racial or social theory could make a lot of how the narrator worries about how unknowable everyone is, but the only person she thinks she can confidently know is the woman in the African dress. She's sure that person doesn't have inexplicable affairs. Why is she so sure of this? Why, of all the unknowable people in the universe, does she think this one person alone is knowable? I leave it to someone else to pull this thread. 

Election eve special: Was I wrong? Is Trump a fascist?

A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article about a retired professor who is a leading expert on authoritarian governments who went from thinking that calling Trump a fascist was overblown and unhelpful to thinking it was the right term. I wouldn't have thought much of it, except that George Saunders, who runs a Substack dedicated to answering questions from writers, recently revisited his 2020 short story "Love Letter," in which a grandfather of the not-too-distant future answers questions from his grandson about how his generation let the fascist government his grandson lives with happen. I found the story a little irksome when I looked at it as part of Best American Short Stories in 2021. While Saunders did manage to make it more than just a political essay disguised as a story, I still felt it was too on-the-nose about Trump, and also too willing to do what I felt was a bit lazy, namely to call Trump a fascist.

I acknowledge Trump has fascist tendencies. The question is whether having fascist tendencies makes one a fascist. With Trump, I don't think it does. A fascist takes risks to obtain power. When supporters take over the Capitol, a fascist will call on all supporters everywhere to back him. He wouldn't lamely and dazedly say, "You're right, but also go home." Calling him a fascist essentializes and simplifies the complexity of his badness. Other descriptors that come to mind for him before fascist are con man and robber baron. If we switch from nouns to adjectives, undisciplined and simple come to mind before authoritarian. 

Let's look at a list of things Trump allegedly wants to accomplish, according to a New York Times article. It's broken down into objectives related to do illegal immigration (build camps, carry out mass deportations, reinstate a Muslim-country ban, and try to end birthright citizenship), using the Justice Department to go after his enemies (investigate Biden, indict those who challenge him politically, target journalists), using military force in Mexico and on American soil (declare war on drug cartels, use federal troops at border, deploy forces to Mexico), and increasing presidential power (strip employment protections from civil servants, bring independent agencies under presidential control, purge intelligence and law enforcement agencies as well as the Pentagon). 

The illegal immigration stuff might be objectionable, but it's not the stuff of a dictator. He'll almost certainly fail to end birthright citizenship, because the originalist Supreme Court he put in place would see that as changing the Constitution. The same goes with using American military force outside of the country, even if he's saying he'd send it to Mexico, which would be politically disastrous. Saying he'd use it in the country is hedging toward authoritarianism, although saying he'd use it to defend the border sounds to me a little more like defending the country from external threats than internal ones. So we're left with using the Justice Department to go after political enemies and taking power away from parts of the government he thinks don't serve his interests. 

If he uses the Justice Department to investigate Biden, the Obamas, or the Clintons for specious reasons, then that is a strongman action. It's moving in the direction of fascist. I admit that, and I hope it doesn't happen. I hope people understand that there is a difference between a guy who was always facing lawsuits before he was president continuing to face them afterwards on the one hand and cooking up charges out of revenge on the other. This is something we'll have to watch. He'll face the same headwinds as before, and even if he appoints Justice Department officials willing to do his bidding, he'll need enough lawyers willing to work the cases the department takes. That might be a challenge. 

Trump's relationship with the law is troubling, for sure, but to me, doesn't a fascist just throw enemies in jail and not worry about using the Justice Department or the FBI to carry out an investigation? 

As far as firing law, intelligence, and military officials goes, I can't help but be a little amused by liberal angst over this. It wasn't that long ago that liberals generally regarded these parts of the government as being ground zero for fomenting fascism. Now, they seem to secretly hope Trump is right and that they really are a deep state that can work against him. They seem to have discovered, to their surprise, the same thing Trump did, also to his surprise: not everyone in the military or in intelligence services is a white, Christian crypto-fascist. Most have been educated to cherish the Western tradition as much as anyone else has. It might be a version of the Western tradition that values Beowulf more than Foucault, but it’s a vision that still values freedom of thought and expression.. In fact, the majority aren't. As Michael Wolff put it in Fire and Fury: 

"Trump's criticism seemed to align him with the left in its half century of making a bogeyman of American intelligence agencies. But, in quite some reversal, the liberals and the intelligence community were now aligned in their horror of Donald Trump. Much of the left--which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community's unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower--now suddenly embraced the intelligence community's authority in its suggestion of Trump's nefarious relationships with the Russians."

It often seems that the stands political sides take have as much to do with opposition to the other side as they do with their own ideologies. As they circle one another and take jabs, they sometimes end up reversing roles. That's how conservatives ended up being the ones clamoring to end a proxy war with Russia or how liberals are now the champions of free trade and the need for a strong and militarily engaged America on the world stage. That’s what’s happening when the NYT is fretting about Trump dismantling intelligence services. 

I can't stand Trump. I hope that's apparent. I can't stand him because I don't think he knows where Laos is on a map, because he thinks his hazy sixth-grade understanding of American history is enough to base decisions off of, because he is boorish and crass and lacking in the most basic understanding of how to treat people. However, occasionally, I understand his skepticism about the country that was handed to him, about the world order everyone said was unassailable. I hate that he lacks the logical and verbal skills to better express his skepticism with that world, but I understand why he feels that way. Before Trump, I was also skeptical of some of the same things. If I support them now, it's only because the last person I want to upend what has been there is him, and I think with all the problems the old order had, it's better than what he will put in its place. 

Still, the desire to change some officials might not be fascist. It depends. Your typical civil servant is supposed to swear an oath to the Constitution. They're allowed to have political feelings, they just can't share them qua civil servant. That is, you can say "I like Kamala Harris," but you can't say, "I work for the FBI and I like Kamala Harris." But high-level officials who run executive branch agencies are often political appointees, and Trump could well demand they be loyal. If he starts requiring loyalty oaths to him rather than the Constitution, or if he changes hiring programs for regular civil servant jobs to favor those who supported him, then we have a problem. 

Maybe I'm splitting hairs unnecessarily, but it does feel important to me that the left not excessively resort to charges like saying Trump is racist or fascist. He's got enough wrong with him that needs patient attention and analysis that getting off track is a distraction and wasting energy. I also think the left has done itself harm by crying wolf every time Trump says something stupid, which has made others suspect that Trump's criticism of the media has merit. I understand the desire to fight Trump for every inch of terrain, but that's not a good strategy. There is such a thing as strategically allowing an opponent to move forward such that he overextends himself. 

I say all this because unfortunately, I think it's going to matter after tomorrow night. I'd love to be wrong. I'll be the happiest person to be wrong if I am, but I have little doubt left that we're about to face another Trump presidency. When that happens, I'll get my chance to see if he really was more fascist than clown. Unfortunately, if I'm wrong, I guess nobody will get the chance to gloat about it. Maybe I'll get the chance to give George Saunders some cigarettes in prison. 

ESL or PoS?: "Phenotype" by Alexandra Chang (BASS 2024)

When I was a 19-year-old Korean student at Defense Language Institute, our military language instructor (MLI) told us a story that was meant to inspire us to become knowledgeable of not just the language, but the culture. As he explained it, there had once been an incident in his unit in Korea when they were interacting with South Korean allies. There had been a slight disagreement, and an older ROK soldier had raised his hand slightly at one of the Americans, as if to hit him. This led to others jumping in to intervene and prevent a brawl, and the incident came to the attention of my MLI's commanding officer. After interviewing the parties involved, the MLI was able to defuse the situation by explaining that Koreans often raise their hands like that without actually meaning to hit anyone. If anything, it had been a gesture meant to make light of a small disagreement, not to make it worse. The Korean person was joking like he would have with one another Korean, and didn't realize it would get the reaction it did. The intrepid and culturally aware MLI explained all this and thus averted an international incident, and the Korean-American alliance remains strong to this day. Or something like that. I was touched and determined that I, too, would be a vessel of cross-cultural understanding. 

The unspoken corollary of being a vessel of cross-cultural understanding is that in addition to knowing when someone has quite unwittingly and innocently caused turmoil, you also have to know when someone really is just a piece of shit. Because there are times when everyone will look hopefully to the "maybe it's just a cultural thing" excuse to overlook bad behavior, and it will be the job of the cultural ambassador of good feelings to say no, as a matter of fact, that translates just fine, and that guy is really is an asshole.

That's what Judith in Alexandra Chang's "Phenotype" needs to do with KJ, the non-genius grad assistant she's dating while she's an undergraduate in cellular biology. There's a point in the story where she gets a text from him that says "You're pretty today." She decides not to be offended by the subtext, which is that she isn't pretty every day, "because he's ESL." (ESL means "English as a second language," a now somewhat dated but still used abbreviation.) She explains that she has "met a lot more foreigners working in the lab and ha(s) gotten very good at understanding ESL people."

False confidence of youth aside, she's probably not entirely wrong. She's at an Ivy League school with a lot of international students, and no doubt she's gained some skill in hearing past the slight mistakes people make to understand what they really mean. Of course, one thing about ESL is that every person struggles in a different way, largely depending on what their native language is. So there isn't one big "ESL," and she might be better with some versions than others.

Her confidence in her ability to parse the meaning of non-native speakers is contrasted with her lack of confidence in how people see her. She's worried about her "phenotype," her observable characteristics. She's had braces on for nine years, and she is always concerned about getting food stuck visibly in them, or about kissing badly because of them. She dislikes her hair. 

Judith isn't simply over-confident or under-confident; she vacillates between one pole and the other. She's sure she's the equal of anyone in her program, and she's headed for being a "real" doctor. At the same time, she obsesses incessantly about her braces, and once those are removed, about the teeth below them. She also worries about whether she will bleed when she has sex the first time with KJ, and then, when she doesn't bleed, about that as well. 

Ranks

Part of her attraction to KJ might be that he is a lot more self-assured than her. He probably doesn't rate his self-assurance, but he's got it, anyway. She's especially attracted to his aggressiveness on the soccer field, where he sometimes gets into fights. She thinks his assertiveness comes from his time in the military, where she was, Judith reports, "ranked very high up" before coming to graduate school.  

Judith is kind of obsessed with ranks, which is probably a common syndrome for people who go to Ivy League schools. She tells us that her cell biology program is "ranked eleventh" in the country. She's very gratified when KJ tells her she's one of the top-ranked students in her class. 

One problem, though: there is no way KJ was "ranked very high up" in the South Korean military before coming to graduate school, unless he is very, very much older than her. I take it that he's more like four to seven years older rather than twenty, so Judith has either misunderstood KJ or KJ has lied/exaggerated. He probably did his mandatory 18 months of training, after which he might have been a lower NCO, enough to boss around newer conscripts, but not at all "ranked very high up." Judith is not a reliable narrator at judging her own powers of comprehension nor of judging where people really "rank." 

Is KJ a dick or is that the fault of a cultural misunderstanding?

Perhaps some of KJ's faults have a cultural origin, but his tacky insistence that visitors to the BBQ he and Judith host to announce their relationship to their peers should pay for their portion of the food is definitely not Korean. Any Korean who's ever invited me to anything would have insisted on treating. They also would have made sure the spread was top-notch, instead of half-assing it like KJ did. Among his other flaws:

• Indirectly telling Judith "she'll get better" at kissing, meaning she sucks at it, when she's feeling self-conscious about it
• Wanting to date Judith so he'll stop being just another Korean grad student, thereby using her
• Pointing out that she has food in her braces when it's the one thing she's most sensitive about
• Bragging about his incredible willpower
• Looking disapprovingly when she doesn't bleed after sex, meaning he's semi-upset she might not really be a virgin, although he himself isn't one

I think that while the form of KJ's douchery may be culturally influenced, he's still a douche. That is to say, a Korean-American douche might be a douche in a different way from other people, but the basic doucheness will still be there. KJ is, in fact, a kind of douche that Koreans themselves often complain about. It's significant that he calls out being "traditional." In some ways, he is. He's the kind of Korean man that Korean women have been complaining about for the last twenty years. 

I know most of you can't understand this song, but she's singing about a dude a lot like KJ. 

So there's really nothing mysterious here. When people tell Judith that the reason she and KJ are still together is because they don't really understand each other, they're at least half right. They mean that if she understood KJ better, she'd know he's a dick. I think she does know this, but there are two things working against her being able to admit it. One is that she's very unsure of herself, and she covers for it, as many people who are unsure of themselves do, by acting like she knows exactly what she's doing. If she'd only ask someone else for an objective opinion, she'd quickly realize what it seems she already suspects. Instead, she protests too much that she doesn't care what others think. She insists she and KJ work together, right down to the final line of the story.

The second reason is that she's been hidden behind braces for nine years and KJ noticed her before anyone else did. Understandable, maybe, but unfortunate for Judith. 

Ultimately, Judith doesn't really have a catharsis where she realizes she can do better, where the confident part of her starts to take control of the more timid part and she tosses KJ to the curb. Instead, the end of the story shows her going another layer deep in self-denial and in telling herself that this relationship is good for her. When she sniffs KJ's junk after sex, she smells "sweat and dust and the yeast we use in lab." In other words, he smells like hard work and an experiment, but she tells herself it "is not an unpleasant smell at all." Maybe it isn't unpleasant, but it isn't what's best for her, and it is going to take quite a lot more experimentation before she figures it out. Readers are denied the satisfaction of seeing her move forward in life and instead watch, likely somewhat knowingly, shaking their heads and thinking "such is youth."

Judith's voice

The voice in "Phenotype" is tricky to pull off, because Chang needs to give her narrator a naive and somewhat obtuse voice without boring or irritating the reader too much. Judith uses some trite phrases as she talks herself into a bad decision. Her similes, like "felt like stepping into the lab's cold room on a humid summer day," and "my teeth...felt like wet rocks along the lake," are not the best. (Although comparing watching KJ's hyper-aggression on the soccer field to "watching a nature show about her boyfriend" is better, maybe because she's got more power of observation when it's something close to science.) That's how it should be, though. It's important to remember that this isn't Chang trying to knock us out with her most dazzling prose. It's Chang trying to let Judith be Judith and yet still arrange it that what Judith says to us doesn't flop like her barbeque did. For Judith to pour out psychologically aware and insightful prose just wouldn't fit her character. 

Does this count as a reader reception investigation?

I don't usually do research about stories from BASS. I might look up elements of the story that are unfamiliar to me, but I don't go looking for information about the authors, nor do I seek out interviews where they might have shared their thoughts on the stories. I don't look for other criticism, either, and not just because it isn't there most of the time. I do this in order to let my own judgement roam freely. In this one case, though, I decided that after I already wrote my take on the story, I would read what Alyssa Songsiridej said about the story in Electric Literature, since it's likely everyone who read the story there also read what Songsiridej said about it. 

Songsiridej found the story more of a straightforward sweet reminiscence of young love than I did, and she also found Judith less naive than I. In fact, she cautions readers against thinking of Judith as naive: "...you might guess that the only reason Judith is dating KJ is because of her naïveté. You would be tempted, as Judith’s labmates are, to talk about their relationship derisively." Songsiridej doesn't see it this way, though: "While definitely inexperienced, Judith is also a little intense, studying and digesting her slowly widening world with the acute observations of a young woman eager to achieve." 

I agree that Judith is observant, maybe even a little precocious with her ability to see the world. She isn't merely naive, but naievte is a big part of the equation here. It's why she's willing to believe her unremarkable boyfriend was really highly ranked in the South Korean military. 

There's a curious heading to the story the way it's laid out in Electric Literature. It has a subtitle that goes, "The scientific method does not apply to first love." It's so prominent a tag line, I thought for a minute it was the title of the story. That's a pretty aggressive suggestion to readers about to dive into the story, and I also think it's totally wrong. Judith does nothing with her first love so much as treat it like a science experiment. The last image we get of her is of her going to great lengths to gather data on KJ, smelling his crotch after they've had sex the first time. What she smells reminds her of the lab where she does real science. She is very much applying the scientific method; she's just making mistakes. Much like some scientists become so enamored of their theories that they misread data, Judith's confidence in her own ability to interpret data is derailing her. I think eventually, Judith will amend her errors, but for the present, what we're seeing is how even smart people can talk themselves into bad choices. 

Sonsiridej's reading is looking ahead to a nostalgia for first love that will surely one day come for Judith, but that's jumping the gun a bit from where we are in the story by the end. Of course it's normal to feel nostalgia about past relationships, even ones that weren't right, but Judith still needs to be disillusioned about her current relationship before she can get to the other side of it and appreciate what was gold in all the dross.