At last, the writer himself is skeptical of literature so I don't have to be: "Dorchester" by Steven Duong (Best American Short Stories 2024)

Pretty much every year I've blogged BASS, I've hit a point where I start to wonder if literature has any real social value, by which I usually mean whether it has the ability to help change anything from bad to better. There will be very heart-wrenching story about something terrible going on in the world, and I'll wonder: does this story, as sharply as it's written and as keenly as it observes the terrible thing, do anything? Does it help at all to make that terrible thing less terrible, less likely to happen? Stories that have led me to ask these kinds of questions include "The Hands of Dirty Children" by Alejandro Puyana and "Anyone Can Do It?" by Manuel Munoz.

"Dorchester" by Steven Duong even outdoes me with its skepticism about literature, because it goes a step beyond just wondering about whether literature, in this case a poem written by the main character, Vincent, has any social utility. Vincent questions not just whether literature is useful in fighting injustice, but whether the community that produces and supports it is always true and honest. Accusations that poets lie go back at least as far as Plato, of course, but Vincent seems to be calling out art in a way even Plato didn't. Plato complained that poets made up events that hadn't ever really happened. Vincent is accusing art of being, at least occasionally, emotionally false. He's not accusing just any poem of this kind of falsehood, but his own poem about a recent hate crime against an elderly Vietnamese woman, a poem that has gone viral among the kinds of people who follow poetry: 

Even then, before the poem was published, before it was widely shared by online literary types and blown up by the Chinese American congresswoman who retweeted it in May along with the appropriate hashtags, I knew that the best response to a horrific act of violence was not this poem. I told myself that I had to put my feelings into words, that this was how I dealt, how I coped and mourned. And it was. But there was also a thrill in writing about something so recent and terrible, a thrill, too, in connecting it to the various swirling traumas of my own life, however tenuous the connections. Even before I had a full draft on the page, I imagined people encountering my poem on a pristine website, sharing screenshots of it, chittering away in various comments sections, making careful conjectures about the relationship between the speaker and the poet. I wanted the noise. It was ugly of me to want it so badly, but I did.

That's some pretty bold stuff, even in a work of fiction, because it's opening the door to the possibility that artists are sometimes publicity whores, even when they're seemingly writing about tragedies concerning communities they themselves identify with. I imagine that's a part of art most "online literary types" would prefer not to think about. Conservatives have been accusing liberal outrage about certain high-profile instances of injustice as "virtue signaling" for years, and Vincent isn't too far from saying the same thing. 

Vincent works among these "online literary types." It's not exactly clear what his employer is. It might be a literary magazine, or it might be some kind of community arts organization. One of Vincent's jobs appears to be to convince people to pay $800 for a six-week lyric essay class, which itself seems a wry kind of commentary on the ways in which "literature" is for privileged people. The workers there seem well meaning. Vincent describes their opinions on politics and literature as "pristine," the same word he used to describe the website he dreamed of his poem appearing on. 

Pristine things usually require some effort to maintain in a pristine state. They have to be encased in plastic and set on a shelf, kept apart from interactions with the environment that might damage them. Calling both the website and the ideology of the literary workers pristine is to point out how insular they are. Everyone complains about how the Internet and social media have served to divide us by allowing people to only associate with others they agree with, but the "online literary types" are no different. 

Vincent compares writing his poem to doing his job. They both are very easy to do once you figure them out:

    About his job:  "It was a job anyone could become good at given enough time and Adderall."

    About his poems: "My poems came from a scary and uncertain place, and this was because they came easy to me. This was the most shameful part. It was easy for me to write in an angry way, using a large and prophetic voice I did not entirely believe in to describe the hurts I had accrued, to write the word body and mean a thousand imagined bodies, bruised and bleeding, to write the word war and mean some argument I had with my mother once over dinner. I wrote like this all the time. I wrote this poem about the woman in Dorchester in one sitting."

Nearly all advice about writing poems or stories or essays or whatever tends to present it in terms of "craft." It breaks down writing a great poem or whatever into techniques and steps. Because anyone can do these steps, it seems like a wonderfully democratizing thing to have art consist of the performance of craft. But it also means that anyone, whether they are sincere or not, can simply master the steps and perform them. AI can do it. An artist can also help his cause by understanding the expectations of the reading community, which Vincent clearly does. Erica tells Vincent his poem is brave, but there's nothing less brave than writing a poem that the intended community is guaranteed to approve of. 

The antithesis of bullshit

In stark contrast to Vincent's cynical use of craft, the expectations of his literary community, and even his own identity is his relationship to Leah, his quasi-dominatrix girlfriend. Although they met under circumstances that led them to perform certain community expectations, telling sob stories about how hard it was to grow up Asian to the Asian student society in college, Leah and Vincent soon develop a great deal of authenticity in their relationship to one another. Vincent tells Leah his big family secret, which is that his mother lied about them being refugees who got out on a boat just as Saigon was collapsing. They were actually regular immigrants who left Vietnam nine years after the war. 

It's not clear why Vincent's mother preferred to tell the story the way she did. Maybe she wanted to inspire her kids with stories of her family's narrow escape. Maybe she enjoyed being admired for her perseverance through trials. Whatever the case, Vincent, who originally applied to his writing program saying his mother's stories were the inspiration for him wanting to be a writer, is now afraid that he will somehow inherit her penchant for framing stories in ways that wrap himself in the suffering of others for the sake of his own ego. 

Admitting this to Leah unlocks something in her. "I had greased some secret machinery in her, whatever it was that allowed her to be who she was." She sticks two fingers down his throat, yanks his head down, and presumably forces him into cunnilingus. But before that, she tells him the words that become the bedrock of their relationship. She says she doesn't think she can ever lie to him. 

It's surprising, given how much time Vincent spends in a collar around Leah and how much of the time is her ordering him around and ignoring his wants, but their relationship is kind of sweet, and it works. It works because there's no bullshit to it. It's possible to try to guess at reasons why each person craves the roles their do in their dominant/submissive relationship. Maybe Vincent, whose mind is always racing as he crushes packs of Adderall, likes the way being put in a collar and told what to do focuses his mind. Maybe Leah, who suffers anxiety in crowds or from unexpected noises, likes the comfort of being in control. Whatever the reasons, what's most important about the relationship is that it's not something either one does to gain approval from any communities they belong to. Nobody knows about it but them. They do it because it feels right and it feels honest to them. They'd tried other arrangements, and none felt right. So they do it this way. That's all there is to it. 

Leah's way of talking to Vincent echoes the honesty of their arrangement. "She always texted in short commands like this. It was a great power of hers. Her economy of language drove me into brick walls again and again," Vincent confesses. She just says what is, and this has more power than any of the carefully curated language used by the writer-administrators he works with. She's a better judge of his poem that anyone else is.  

I wonder if dominatrices in general make good literary critics. 

What kind of change has Vincent undergone at the end?

It looks for a moment like Vincent disavows bullshit, that he has refused his inheritance of "the liar's gene" from his mother. The moment when he is about to be honored by reading his viral poem aloud at a "Stop Asian Hate" rally, he "swallowed two Adderall and boarded the red line to Dorchester." Getting on the bus to Dorchester is exactly what the speaker in his poem, the one he wrote but didn't mean, did. It seems at this point that he's trying to give his poem some after-the-fact sincerity by meaning what he didn't mean when he wrote it. He realizes he doesn't belong on the same stage as the daughter of the slain woman. She means what she says. So he goes to Dorchester almost as penance, to try to recapture some authenticity. 

That's what seems like the catharsis, but then there's a denouement that seems completely out of tune with the catharsis. Back with Leah and serving her needs, he checks a mouse trap he's set. There's a mouse in it, and although Vincent had wanted to set the mouse free, he can see the mouse's legs are maimed and he'll have to put it out of its misery. He can immediately see himself writing a poem about killing the mouse, and as he writes it in his head, he is already starting to duck the truth. "There were so many ways to write the true thing, but I wouldn’t. I wanted the lie. I wanted what I wanted, and no amount of leaves and water could carry it away from me." The "leaves and water" are a reference to something a therapist had recommended to him, that when he had a stray, interrupting thought, he send it down a river in his mind, like a leaf on a current. But Vincent can't. He's got the "liar's gene" too bad. 

The story is, in my mind, at least the equal of Plato in terms of calling the value of art into question. It's obviously not telling us that art is always insincere, or else this would have been a non-fiction essay instead of a short story. But it is the work of an artist who is willing to undergo more honest introspection than most, who will tell us artists need to beware when they are being feted, because it is so easy to substitute what we want for what is true. It may be baked into the DNA of the artist such that it will never be completely eradicated. 

The people around Vincent tell him his poem is "brave," which of course it isn't. But Duong writing this story was brave, and it was brave of The Drift to publish it, and it was brave of BASS to include it in its anthology. 

If the Raneys had showed up, would the parents still have split?: "The Bed & Breakfast" by Molly Dektar (BASS 2024)

My mother enjoys watching a show on Discovery called Homestead Rescue. A grumpy old man in a dumb cowboy hat named Marty Raney goes off with his two kids to rescue people who idealistically tried to establish some kind of independent/off-grid/subsistence homestead and failed at it. I am sympathetic to the desire to set up on one's own. Mrs. Heretic and I almost did this once. We put an offer in on a four-acre property in Pennsylvania. I was going to commute down to my job, Mrs. Heretic was going to stay home with our son and our dog, and we were going to--I don't know, do something with chickens and apple trees, maybe. 

We won the offer, but I got cold feet, and because the owners had taken more time to respond than we'd given them in our offer, I was able to back away. Given that this was pre-Raneys, I think those cold feet saved us. I don't even like to mow the lawn. The spirit was willing, and living a different kind of life was very attractive, but the flesh and our know-how were both weak. I can't fix shit. How was I going to build a chicken coop?  

The father in Molly Dektar's "The Bed & Breakfast" has been bitten by a similar bug to set up on his own, and he eventually prevails on the narrator's mother, sells the family home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and moves his wife and three children to Italy. There, instead of building a self-sufficient homestead, they occupy a dilapidated old farm house and try to renovate it so it can become a Bed & Breakfast. (There is probably a reality show for this situation that fits better, but I only know the one show. I can almost guarantee Karen Carlson will know the right show.) Like the families in Homestead Rescue, the father is in a bit over his head. He isn't able to make good on his promises to get the roof and plumbing and stove going before winter hits. Eventually, he wears out the patience of his wife, Sara, and she takes off for a few days, leaving the father to both try to fix the house and tend to the children.

On one level, then, the story operates as a kind of anti-Under the Tuscan Sun, and the anti-every-story-about-deciding-on-a-whim-to-move-somewhere-to-change-your-life. "The Bed & Breakfast" begins sounding like a familiar family-overcomes-hardships-to-accomplish-its-dreams story; in fact, if I had been reading this in the personal essays section of a news outlet, that's probably the direction this story would have taken. The family would have finished its remodel, become financially successful, and made its own relational foundations as strong as the house. But this is fiction, and it's got elements undermining that trajectory--the trajectory the father dreams of making come true--from the very beginning.

My mom loves this show, but it feels a little staged to me. 

 

Houses as metaphors, homes as metonyms 

Let's start by acknowledging that this story does what countless others have done before and uses the physical structure of the house as a metaphor for the family that lives within it. Maybe the simplest and most well known example is Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," in which the crumbling house dies at the same moment the ancestral family living in it comes to an end. 

"House" and "home" are sometimes synonyms and sometimes not quite. "House" always refers to a physical structure of bricks, wood, and drywall, but "home" can sometimes mean the physical structure and sometimes means the family living inside of it. When used to mean the family inside the home, the word is operating as a metonym, rather than a metaphor. 

Metaphor draws a comparison between two different things by pointing out their likeness. "This family is as broken as the walls of the house it lives in" would be a metaphor. Metonymy, meanwhile, brings together two different things more by contiguity. So when an article on parenting strategies recommends certain approaches in order to "make for a happy home," it is using the building in which the family lives to mean the family itself.  

In one branch of literary theory connected to structuralism, metaphor and metonymy are seen as working against each other, both narratively and also psycho-linguistically. Metaphor seeks to bring things together. It is a unifying force. Metonymy, meanwhile, tends to destroy unity by making one thing continually grow out of another. 

In "B & B," the home operates both metonymically and metaphorically, meaning it is both unifying and dividing. That is because the people in it have opposing desires for both unity and individuality, none more than the narrator, pre-teen Louise. (Or rather, adult Louise recalling her pre-teen self.)  

Father Metaphor and Mother Metonym

"The house has a good foundation," Louise's father Peter declares after he's had a chance to do a little work. "Doesn't matter that it's out of level. It's a good foundation." To Peter, if the house has a good foundation, the rest will come in time. He then invents a metaphor to explain his approach to renovations: "We're making a house sandwich!...Foundation and roof first. They are the bread of the sandwich. And the rest--the walls, the windows, plumbing, another stove, furniture--is the delicious ingredients. And the foundation is all good!"

Given Peter's metaphorical bent, it's hard not to think that he applied his belief in the strong foundations of the house to extend to the family as well. He probably thought something metaphorical like, "My family's foundation is as strong as the foundations of this house." 

For Peter, taking the renovations one step at a time, it was logical to think in terms of foundation above all. Humans very often proceed from a very metaphorical line of thinking in which if the foundation is good, then the whole project is likely to be good. One of Jesus' most famous parables, the man who build his house on sand and the man who built his house on rock, argues for this very line of thinking. It's tempting to end up thinking that foundations are really all that matters. In fact, the father's name, Peter, seems to be playing with this whole idea. Peter the apostle used to be called Simon, but Jesus gave him his new name, a name which means "rock," because Jesus wanted to make Peter the rock upon which his church would be built.  

In Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, although there are foundational human needs, such as safety, food, and water, if humans do not continue moving forward with achieving their desires--if they do not, to use the father's metaphor, keep adding to the inside of their sandwich--they become psychologically unfulfilled and are unhappy. 

This is where mother Sara is. She isn't impressed by the father's continued insistence in the solidity of the foundation. She's concerned about the inside of the sandwich. She wants beds for her children to sleep in, rather than hay. She wants curtains and flowers to adorn the insides. She wants a second stove so her children don't freeze. 

If we want to play games with the meaning of her name from the Bible, too, we can see that as the namesake of the mother of a great nation, she represents not things coming together and becoming one, but rather an offspring that multiplies and spreads throughout the Earth. 

The father thinks that if the children get cold, they can just come share the parents' room and its stove. He thinks the family is all one unit, so it's fine to all huddle together. The closer they get, the better, at least in his mind. His thinking is metaphorical, and therefore unifying, seeing the family as a whole rather than a grouping of individuals. The mother, however, realizes that they cannot ask their now sexually mature older son to share a bedroom with them, because it will drive him out of the house. She respects the individuality of the members of the household. Metonymical thinking allows greater freedom, more room for play and for individual development. 

Ultimately, Sara will exercise her own individuality to such an extent she will leave the family, at least temporarily. When she does, she still respects the children's individuality, saying her leaving was because she couldn't make the children into bargaining chips, but only herself. 

There is one exchange that is particularly telling of the different assumed family vs. individual assumptions between Sara and Peter. Sara is speculating on how long it will take to have the place made into a B & B, and she thinks it will take two years. In an aside to Peter, she adds "if you don't get it done first" (emphasis mine). Peter responds with, "We'll get it done" (emphasis mine). 

Louise as a union of metaphorical and metonymic thinking 

Louise's age isn't given, but she's between her thirteen-year-old brother Lewis and her nine-year-old brother Lindsay. So she's a pre-teen, an age when the budding desire to mark oneself off as an individual coexists with a lingering, childish desire to remain safe within the family. 

It seems that for the most part, it's the binding, metaphorical thinking that is holding strong. Although part of her knows that things are about to change and that her desire to remain a non-individuated part of a whole may be a last stand, that's the primary impulse in her. At the ages the children are in the story, the breakup of the essential unity is likely to come anyway, but it also seems that the move to Italy may be helping to speed it up. 

In North Carolina, the three children all slept together in one big bed in the attic. As Louise saw it, "The three of us were essentially one person. I was the holy ghost." Louise equates the essential oneness of her and her siblings with the divine. Even their names, all beginning with "L," seem to suggest that they are all part of the same whole. 

Many coming-of-age stories focus on children wanting to be seen as individuals, to come out from the stifling hold of the family, but Louise mostly wants the opposite. At least three times in the story, Louise stresses that what she most wants is to remain as an assimilated part of the hive-life of the family, not to stand out on her own. When her father takes her on a supply run, he asks her if she likes Italy, and she thinks, "The truth was I didn’t like being singled out and asked like this." At another point, she confesses that she "didn't like to be alone this way." 

When Claudio tries to show her favoritism by letting her win the chocolate gelato her brothers also coveted, Louse has her most extended meditation on what she wants: 

"I didn’t like walking alone, so I made my brothers come with me. I liked to feel like we were all one person. I had decided that I didn’t like winning the chocolate gelato, or Claudio’s good favor; I didn’t want attention that pulled me away from them. And, equally, I didn’t want the house to become a bed and breakfast, and all this dirt and strangeness to wash away."

That all sounds like she's her father's daughter, who thinks of the family more corporately than as individuals, but think about the end of that last passage. Her greatest wish is that the B & B will never come to be, because that would mean the end of the last-stand togetherness of her and her brothers. In her heart, she wants her father to fail. She cannot have her desire unless her father fails, but if he fails, then what she wants will fall apart, anyway. 

Louise's own duplicity complicates her understanding of what she wants

Louise's inner ambivalence is made more acute by her own lack of authenticity. The narrator, who has an adult's voice looking back on the younger Louise, judges younger Louise somewhat harshly in places. When the family arrives in Italy, the father gives the two brothers bowl cuts. He then tries to convince Louise to get her own hair cut short. This is the one time she tries to resist being made one with her siblings. "Holy Trinity" Louise would have wanted a haircut to match them, but here, for the first time, Louise wants to keep her hair long. 

When her father then forces her to get a haircut anyway, the neighbor Claudio shows up. He looks at her and asks if she is okay, and she starts to cry. We might think as readers that she is torn up about having to get her hair cut short and ugly, but the narrator insists that the younger Louise wasn't really all that sad. Instead, she was manipulating Claudio. In the older narrator's assessment, the younger Louise's tears were "partly from true emotion, and partly from conceit." (Conceit, in this case, meaning "an artistic device" rather than "excessive pride.") She pities Claudio for not being able to decipher young Louise's duplicity, her manipulativeness. Later, when the father has a spider near his ear, Louise screams, and Claudio knocks it off, more because of how it scared Louise than because it was a real threat. Again, the older narrator pities Claudio for being a rube, who "didn't know how it worked, how I could be scared and not scared at once."  

Young Louise is already torn between wanting to remain within her family and not seen as an individual on the one hand and wanting to be her own person on the other, as seen in her momentary reluctance to get her hair cut like her brothers. Her interior life is further complicated by her own duplicity. If she is being dishonest with others, is she not likely being dishonest with herself? She wants family unity like her father, but she also doesn't want him to achieve his dream of a B & B, which--because Sara had made finishing the rehab a condition of her continued presence in the family--would mean the breakup of the family's unity. She's of two minds, although her heart seems to be with holding onto her brothers as long as she can, and her inability to be honest about her division is making it harder for her to know where she herself stands.

Claudio

On the one hand, Claudio is a helpful neighbor, brining tomato plants and chickens, giving the children treats, and offering advice to Peter. On the other hand, he's the central force that destroys the unity of the family Louise wants so badly to preserve as long as she can. When Claudio--whom we are told, significantly, pronounces his name "Cloudy-O," like a cloud--shows up, he tells the children to pray that the drought lasts, because their roof will not be able to handle a storm. So the "cloud" is telling the children to beware of the rain, which is to say to beware of the cloud himself. Claudio is announcing himself as a threat. 

Louise and her brothers share one another's dirt when taking baths. She thinks of this dirt as part of what unites them. She doesn't want "all this dirt and strangeness to wash away." But the onset of clouds and rain will do exactly that. 

Claudio, we find at one point, is actually a bit of a racist, concerned about the people from "dirty" countries coming to Italy and not being Italian. He doesn't like the very dirt that Louise wants to hold onto. 

When the rain finally comes and we find that Peter's roof wasn't solid enough to keep the water out, Sara runs to Claudio's house. So the clouds really did bring about the breakup of the family.

Clouds and spiders

Clouds and spiders are two central images in the story, both lurking as threats to the family's unity. They appear together more than once. When the spider lands on Peter's head, it is "Cloudy-O" who knocks it off. Lewis goes to find the spider, and finds it is "gray-green like the storm clouds in the valley, which we had prayed against." When the storm finally breaks and drenches all the beds and curtains, all the middle of the family's house sandwich, it comes with "spider green clouds that meant the end of the drought." The two central images in the story are threatening ones, and their threats work in tandem. 

The catharsis is the victory of metonymy 

In a happy family story, there would have been some eventual Hegelian synthesis between the metaphorical, categorical, unifying thinking of the father and the metonymic, individualizing, diffuse view of the mother. This isn't a happy family story, though. In the end, the metonymy will win. The family's unity will not hold. The older narrator will have her reminiscences about the beauty of that unity's last stand, among the threatening but beautiful "red, silver, and gold...stars and webs" of Italy. But the dirt Louise saw as holding the family together ultimately "filled my nose and mouth," choking her. 

We never really get Peter's motivation for wanting to take the family to Italy. He doesn't say, "I want our family to stay together," or "I want to give up the rat race" or some other explanation of why he upends the whole family's existence in North Carolina. Without any explicit motivation, we have to guess based on what access we do have to Peter's interior life. Given his obsession with foundations, I think we can possibly guess that he viewed the B & B as a way to guarantee his family's continued unity.

In the end, though, families don't stay together forever, because they're made of of individuals who want their own, independent existence. Even Louise feels this pull, as much as she wants to hide it from herself and others. Eventually, water gets into the middle of the sandwich, and members of the family feel their cannot progress psychologically and emotionally within the home. The end of "Bed & Breakfast" recognizes this unavoidable fracturing of unity while still eulogizing its loss. 

Buzzkill: "The Happiest Day of Your Life" by Katherine Damm (Best American Short Stories 2024)

"The Happiest Day of Your Life" is a little too successful in its realism for my taste, in that it is a story about a wedding that is almost as boring as an actual wedding. We follow Wyatt as he gets drunk fast and deeply at the wedding of his wife's ex-boyfriend. Wyatt looks around for his wife, Nina, and failing to find her, gets drunker, interacts with guests, makes the bride's family run interference to try to get him off the dance floor where he is annoying everyone, and thinks about the meaning of life and which of Nina's exes he likes the most. 

The story contrasts the dreams of happiness that weddings--especially the modern American versions of them--represent compared to the reality. Not necessarily the reality of horrible divorce, but more like the reality of one person knowing that he was the one she chose when she wasn't short of options, so how does he live up to the responsibility of being the one she chose? Or how choosing someone might mean loving them deeply but also finding out they have serious mental illness issues that will make life different from now on. 

It isn't without its sweetness, but about halfway through I felt as tired of Wyatt's drunken antics as the wedding party. The story is mostly very closely following Wyatt's point of view and getting deeply inside his head, so it relies on Wyatt's head being an interesting place to make the story work. I found it an interesting place for about two songs. This is one of those stories that a lot of writers have probably thought to write or actually written. Most people have been to weddings, and weddings nowadays are kind of silly and kitsch and grossly wasteful and also a bit sweet. They're kind of out-of-body experiences, and every writer who's at one is probably writing in their head. But because it's a story that has occurred to everyone, there's a lot on a writer to make their wedding story be worth being the one that everyone reads. 

Damm has strong powers of observation and lively language. I'm sure I'd like other stories of hers, but this one seemed like she was turning her powers of observation on a setting and theme I didn't think really took me anywhere new. I am typically as bored by the act of talking about why I didn't like a story as I am reading the story itself, so moving on to the next one. 

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.