That's about enough silence

The period of silence that has reigned over this blog for the last three months and change coincided with the end of my former career. In early March, I quit my job as a Korean translator and intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency. 

I didn't always love the job, but I felt some level of satisfaction in the belief I was good at it. The skill of understanding spoken and written texts and explaining their meaning, which I developed as a literature student and which has powered this blog, also made me uniquely built for the position. I was a decent translator, but moreover, I was adept at reporting what had been translated, and by being able to do both, it felt like it was somehow more than the sum of its parts. 

Since resigning, my family and I sold our house in Maryland, moved to Ohio where we are from, and I am currently looking for a new job. Although the deferred resignation program allowed me to continue receiving my salary until the end of September, that would have required me to be on administrative leave. It would have meant technically still being a part of the Department of Defense under Trump and Hegseth (NSA is part of the DoD). When I realized in early March that the deferred resignation program would allow people to move the date of their resignation up to any time they wanted, I sent HR notice that I wanted to resign that day. Then I took care of final administrative things and left. 

From the moment Trump was elected in November, I had a growing feeling of a moral obligation to leave my job. That grew as crazy talk from his camp increased leading up to his inauguration, and then it went into overdrive in the early days of him taking office. If it hadn't been for the deferred resignation, I'd have had to leave with no incentives, so in a way, it rescued me. Because of it, I was able to take early retirement. I don't want to act like I'm so noble I just walked away with nothing. I walked away with less than I could have, but not with nothing. I like to think I'd have resigned anyway, but I didn't have to test it. I now at least have a small pension to help out while I'm waiting to find a new job. It's not a ton, but here in Ohio, it'll go further than it would have in Maryland. I'll take a pension, because I'm not ashamed of the work I've done up to now, but I didn't want to keep getting paid my salary until the end of September, because I'd have been ashamed to continue to be a part of the DoD. 

The new job hunt isn't exactly going great; nobody in Ohio cares that I know a lot about North Korea. It would be better if I knew how a drop forge works. I can't even get interviews for a lot of entry-level positions. It was probably foolish to turn down all that free money, but it seemed right to me. By late February, some of the things that made me realize I needed to leave immediately were:

• Trump's executive order on transgender troops. Look, I've written on here before that I'm a liberal skeptic of some of what trans advocates are telling me. I'm not alone in this. There's a reason Trump spent so much money in October focusing on Harris's support for trans issues: because on some issues, like trans women in women's sports, there is a majority that opposes it. I honestly think that Democrats' refusal to move slower on trans issues is the reason Trump is president again. That being said, Trump went way beyond what was necessary in creating the order. He could have just said that gender dysmorphia was like other conditions that affect readiness, so the military can't allow it. Instead, he attacked the honesty and integrity of trans people who had volunteered for the military. It's the definition of dogma: treating your opinion like obvious fact, the way my sister-in-law talks about abortion. If trans identities are obviously made up, the order reasons, then anyone insisting on having one is obviously a liar. It's making trans people out to be morally corrupt and evil, instead of just too difficult for the military to treat. It was a dangerous demonization of a population.  
• The ambush of Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House, keeping in mind this is the guy running a country that was invaded.
• Just general talk of using the country's military to strongarm Greenland, Panama, or Canada made me not want to be anywhere near the DoD. That talk apparently isn't going away. 

I'm not judging anyone who stayed, nor am I judging anyone who took the admin leave as part of severance. I'm not speaking for anyone myself, or claiming I have special knowledge informing my decision because of my former job. My beliefs are based on nothing more than reading the same news anyone else could read. 

Many friends argued I should stay, based on the "one of the good guys" idea, that good people needed to remain in order to have at least some level of influence. Some people in government reason that we all serve the people, not the administration, and so doing whatever the administration asks is fine, unless it very clearly crosses legal boundaries. These arguments have their points, but I think something as outrageous as Trump II demands a tougher line, one less fraught with the possibility of putting me in a morally compromising position. Trump has made it clear he intends to push the boundaries of what is legal as far as he can get away with them, leaving civil servants to have to carry out a number of policies that are right on the border of what they should be doing. I didn't want to potentially be in such a position. And while every civil servant will have to work at some time during their career for policies they think are mistaken, there is a point at which those policies become so mistaken that I don't know how you can achieve the necessary separation from them to be part of carrying them out. I know that nobody will care that I left, and it won't be any skin off anyone's nose, nor will it change any discourse, but that isn't the point. I made a decision I could live with for my small life. 

A friend asked what made this administration so bad I had to leave, without even taking the severance pay. Surely I had tolerated questionable moral judgement from previous administrations, including the growth of drone attacks, which had no due process and which could sometimes hit innocent bystanders. Also, I stayed through Trump's first administration. 

As a matter of fact, during Trump's first administration, I was often the liberal in the room trying to get other liberals not to overreact. The first time, he spent most of his administration surrounded by grownups and trying to act like a semi-normal president. There is some merit to his criticisms of the neo-liberal world order, even if he's a terrible communicator of those criticisms and he has even worse proposals to offer as replacements. I actually liked his attempt to reach out to Kim Jong Un. I thought that whatever its faults, at least it was an attempt to do something different, and since nothing the U.S. had ever done with North Korea really worked, different was good. Until the final days of his term, I thought concerns about him wanting to be a king were overblown, and even after he did lose his marbles completely, he did, eventually, leave on his own. 

The reasons I left are also the reasons behind my shell-shocked "time for silence" post in March. This version of Trump is so obviously off the rails, so openly corrupt, I can't understand the lack of opposition from his own supporters. The only time he starts to face a real backlash is when tariffs look like enough of a reality the stock market crashes or people start to face the possibility of paying more for things they want. But if he gets Qatar to invest billions in his cryptocurrency and his business, that's too abstract for anyone to care about. It's so bad, I feel like I don't even understand the world, and my thoughts on it can't possibly have value. I couldn't have functioned professionally in that world, and I have a hard time even writing personally, when it seems like I've misread reality so completely.  

My plans for the future

Like I said, the job hunt isn't going great. An M.A. in English isn't a draw to employers. I don't have a teaching certificate, so I can't use my education for that. Even if I could, I have had an issue with my voice for a few years now that I can't seem to fix. My ENT said it was reflux-induced, but I've been taking antacids faithfully for years, and doing all the voice rehab exercises they prescribed, and I still often struggle to get my voice out. I had mentioned earlier that I might want to try blue collar work, but I have chronic foot pain that comes and goes, and recently I've had issues with my elbow, as well. I think both the foot and voice issues stem from the Marine Corps, but I never applied for disability, and now that it's been twenty-eight years since I was discharged, I will likely not be able to prove any service connection. Especially since the diagnoses I've gotten for both issues seem to suck and not help. I've had two job offers, both of which would be a challenge to my medical issues. We'll see how it all works out, but money's definitely going to be a concern again in a way it hasn't been for a long time. 

Now would be a great time, of course, for my writing career to suddenly take off. Sadly, it seems like I just keep missing the cut. I recently got another encouraging rejection from The New Yorker. This one said they weren't taking my story although "we continue to admire your writing." There's a lot to unpack in those six words. We? More than one person? Continue? So more than one person at TNY remembers who I am from one submission to the next and tracks it with some level of enthusiasm? It's certainly possible to make too much of a polite rejection, even though it's clearly more than a form rejection, but this does seem promising. However, I've gotten so many of these promising-seeming rejections from so many good outlets, it seems like that is now my level. I'm a not-quite-there writer. 

It's frustrating to me that I never made it, partly for reasons that every wanna-be writer would find true, but also because I feel like I have a novel draft that would be successful. I wrote a novel about NSA. Not a potboiler, and not even really a tell-all. It's more of a speculative, satirical novel. Like what Vonnegut would have written if he'd had my job. My writing resume isn't the best, but it includes wins in a few contests and about twenty short stories published in total. I can't believe that I can't send out a bunch of cover letters that say this is my writing resume, I worked at NSA, and I have a novel draft about NSA that's already been through pre-publication, and based on that find an agent willing to work with me. As it is, all I've gotten is the same we-like-it-but-it's-still-not-for-us line that seems to follow me everywhere. 

I'm confounded by it all, as I am by so many things these days. A decent book sale number is 3,000 copies. I feel like an NSA book would have that many more or less baked in. A lot of employees or former employees would buy it, as would people curious about it. Only one other NSA novel by a former employee has come out, as far as I know, and that one was kind of a rah-rah NSA book that wasn't very good. 

I tried to tell a different kind of truth in my novel. Maybe it's all a little too high-concept to pitch well, but my basic approach was this: I took the fictional country of Zendia, which NSA has used to teach basic analysis concepts for years, and I pretended that Zendia was actually a real country whose very existence is so secret that the government had to hide it. They chose to hide it in plain sight by pretending it was a made-up country and using it as an example for training. My main character is one of the few people read in to the very secret "Roman A Clef" project who knows that Zendia is real. He's a Zendian linguist, one of the few who still exist. By using a made-up country, I was free to talk about surveillance in ways I wouldn't have been able to if I'd used a real country. (I guess. This guy seemed to be able to talk about a whole lot I wouldn't think you'd be allowed to say.) 

My point wasn't really to do a tell-all about NSA. I was intentionally silly, because specific facts about NSA aren't really what matters to me. I wanted to take a deeper, more philosophical look at the notion of surveillance itself. Because I was once religious and will never really be free of magical thinking, I often let myself believe that writing this book was the whole reason I was put on the Earth. So when I think that this book will never happen, it's easy to start asking myself what, exactly, I'm doing here.

There are also concerns about what would happen if I ever did get the book published and it did succeed. NSA has a pre-publication requirement, and while the official policy makes it seem like it's not all that strict in terms of what you'd have to get pre-publication review for (not for something like this blog post, for example, because general thoughts about my life and NSA don't qualify as "official NSA  information"), I certainly have heard versions of my obligations while at NSA that would suggest I'd never be able to do an interview about the book without first getting all the questions and answers approved. It would make publicity kind of hard. 

Also, I'm kind of done with NSA. I'm ready to do something else. I don't really want to spend the rest of my life being "the NSA writer." If I could do the novel and move on, that would be great, but I have a feeling the novel would come out and that's who I'd be forever. I guess that's what happens if that really is my purpose for being here, but I'd also be happy if from this moment forward I never thought about NSA again.  

The future of the blog

As far as the future of this blog, I do really enjoy taking stories apart and showing how they work for readers who don't necessarily have the literary background to do it but who would still like to enter into a deeper relationship with texts. It's also nice to try my hand at reading something challenging and discuss that reading with other literary people. A few times in the last month, I've had the crazy idea to try to make this blog my job. I'd certainly have to switch platforms, I think. I might even have to turn it into a podcast, but if I did that, I think it would be a lot harder for people to find what they're looking for. The audience I have in mind has a job in something very non-literary, but they've picked up Best American Short Stories or something like it, and they're giving it a go. They get stuck and Google to see what they can find, and they spend five to twenty minutes on my blog, hopefully getting unstuck. A podcast is way harder to do that with. It's harder to skim and harder to tell ahead of time if it's what you want. 

Also, when you run a podcast or a blog you make a living off of, there's kind of a heavy sales element to your life. I haven't been assiduously avoiding sales work in my job hunt just to fall into it on my own. Having a podcast is like having a Mary Kay business: you don't have friends, only potential customers you socialize with. 

There are also some possible futures in front of me that would make continuing the blog difficult. I will probably need to go back to school if I don't want to work low-paying jobs the rest of my life. Law school is a possibility, but if I did that, law school would become my life, and I can't see finding the time to keep this blog up. I've been volunteering lately for the Immigrant Worker Project, tutoring in English. When I went in there to meet them, I spoke with the head of the IWP, who is a lawyer with the stereotypical piles of cases on his desk, working overtime lately to just try to get the government to follow basic due process with his clients. If my purpose in life isn't to write the great philosophical-satirical spy novel, helping people to keep working and keep living their lives isn't a bad alternative. I've been working at improving my Spanish (and quickly forgetting my Korean, which, sadly, I think has no future in my life) in order to be of more use to them. 

If not law school, I probably need to learn something else. There's a small chance, I guess, that I could try to finish my Ph.D. in English at Kent State and use that knowledge here on the blog, but that chance seems remote. Much like that chance that I'll ever find I have some actual special purpose in life. 

I recently heard Michael Lewis on a podcast talking about his book Who is Government? He had so much belief in the power of stories to change the world. He said it doesn't seem like there is change for the longest time, and then suddenly there is a whole lot of change at once. I don't know if I believe that, or if that's just something that people who traffic in stories tell themselves to feel better. It's certainly hard to explain the direction the world seems to be headed when there are all these great stories. If the problem isn't the stories, but the readings that given interpretive communities give to those stories, then I've been happy to try to improve the interpretive communities I am a part of. My optimism about the world varies wildly from day to day and month to month, which is why my willingness to throw myself into the blog and writing also varies along with it. Right now, it seems like maybe it's time to close the literary chapter while I'm closing other ones and worry about taking care of my family and tending my own garden. We'll see how I feel in the fall when BASS comes out again, this time under a new editor. 

For today, though, I didn't want the silence of bewilderment to be the last word on this blog. Consider this my contribution, pointless as it is, on this day when so many are pushing back against the possibility of kings here in America. 

A time to be silent

Whatever it is I've been doing, I don't think it's working. 

I've exhausted myself most of my life to try to understand the world, but as I look out at it now, I don't understand anything. The things I'd come to believe tell me that we shouldn't be here, but here we are. 

A major part of my regimen to understand the world has been reading, studying, and writing fiction. That must be where at least a big part of the problem lies. I know I've said many times on here before I would stop writing or blogging, but I think now is different. I have a unique opportunity to remake myself, to turn aside from all the projects I've been working on and go in a totally new direction. 

When you realize that you don't understand anything, I think it's appropriate to be silent. I'm going to take time to see what silence teaches me. I know some will say that times like these call for speaking up, rather than silence, but I don't believe my speaking up has ever done any good, so I'm just going to try something else and see how that goes. I intend to make this an all-encompassing discipline, almost monastic. If it works out, I'd even like to pick an occupation that makes long periods of silence possible, something blue-collar. I don't have much ability in this realm, and I'm kind of old now for that kind of work, but I'd like to try. 

I think this might really and for real be the last post I make, after all the previous threats to not post anymore. Thanks to those who've shared a quest to understand stories with me. If there is any power behind the universe with power and will to intercede, I'd ask it to show pity and mercy to us lost humans trying to figure out the world and caught up going along for the ride on an attraction we didn't volunteer to get on. I'd couple that appeal with one to anyone reading this to also show pity and mercy toward those stumbling through life alongside us. 

"Junior" by Katherine D. Stutzman (O.Henry Anthology)

Once upon a time, when the influence of the American New Critics was at its height, it was considered de rigeur that a work of literary art should have an ending that called back to the beginning. Above all, a work should feel whole and unitary, the critics of that era felt. This is no longer considered a necessity, but it is still nice to find a work that feels as whole as "Junior" by Katherine D. Stutzman. It makes it easy to understand why critics have felt this was such an important goal to strive for. 

Nearly all of the story has a very limited scenery. It almost all takes place at the farm along the Herne River where Junior has lived his whole life. Junior takes care of cows and his father in equal measure. When he finds out that the Herne is going to be dammed up and the town of Willards Mill flooded, "Junior Ogilvy does not alter his routine." 

That opening line of the story could well serve as a synopsis for all of it, in that most of the slow drama in the story involves Junior trying to maintain equilibrium and normalcy as his town is about to disappear, along with his farm, his way of life, and, it so happens, his father, who is dying in the room upstairs. Junior and his father are a perfect example of individuals trying to live their private lives when something big and public comes along to interrupt them. In this case, there has evidently been some kind of eminent domain claim made on the land where they live that means they will have to move. It's the sort of event that reminds those affected how contingent everything in life is, how the things we've done for so long that we not only take them for granted, but even take for granted taking them for granted, can be taken from us. It's a reminder that there is a public and political side to life even for those trying the hardest to keep it out and live privately. 

"Try to keep it out" is what Junior does to the very last. There is a great moment when he gets a letter from a sister he hardly knows. She lives at Fort Drum in New York, where she is married to a soldier. She is offering to bring their father to live with her, since Willards Mill is about to be flooded. She can provide for the old man's comfort while Junior goes off to make a new life for himself. It's a very fair and thoughtful offer, but Junior can't bring himself to accept it. He can't even respond, because responding would be acknowledging that the thing is about to happen. When he first gets the letter, he "does so in the morning, feeling that it will be better to carry the letter's contents out into the cold, into the barn, among the cows with their breath steaming from their nostrils, rather than carrying it into his little room under the stairs and into his sleep." He physically removes the letter as far from his inner life as he can, hoping this will also keep it emotionally and psychologically removed. 

This story reminds me of TMBG's best album

Junior isn't in complete denial. He worries that his father might not die before they have to leave. He sells his herd, knowing they can't stay. He does prepare for leaving on some level, including building a coffin for his father with the scraps of lumber left at the Willards Mill hardware store. He sees signs all around him of other people preparing to leave, and he knows he will have to, as well, and soon. Nonetheless, he stays until almost the very end, until at last his father dies and he can put him in the coffin he built. He puts the coffin on the cart he used to use for carrying milk, and he heads off. Here is where the end loops back to the beginning so neatly: "When at last Junior Ogilvy leaves Willards Mill, he does not go down through town and away along the River Road. He walks beside his mule out behind the farmhouse and across the pasture. He will find his way up and over the hill, to another valley, to a place where he can put his father into the ground and begin again." 

The beginning of the story was Junior trying to maintain normalcy as the big world was forcing change upon him. The end is him determined to reestablish a new normalcy after enduring the change. Junior is an incredibly normal and unremarkable person--even the name "Junior" suggests that he is not original--but his determination to continue on with his normal life, to find meaning in it for himself, is admirable. In a setting largely circumscribed by the shabby furniture of his bedroom or the bleak landscape seen from the window or the cold air of the barn, Junior struggles to make it all mean something and to remain steadfast in his belief in what it means. 

Aside one

Let's be honest. For most of human history, and very much including the present, country folk have been conservative and city folk have represented change. Pastoral settings are the site of people with traditional morality, while cities contain those with a more flexible moral vision. Free-thinking city folks tend to either idealize the country or to belittle it. When they are belittling it, it's by calling its denizens things like "xenophobic." 

Junior doesn't spend much timing musing about outsiders. The story takes place less than a year after the end of World War I, but Junior doesn't even consider this fact. He doesn't waste any breath or thought cursing those city slickers who came up with the idea to flood the valley, undoubtedly to build something that will benefit them and not him. But I think we can understand why someone in Junior's position might be a little suspect of outsiders. Part of the psyche of working the land, I suppose, is to believe in the importance of permanence. Putting all that work into the soil would be impossible if one didn't believe things would be more or less the same tomorrow as they are today. Putting this story in Junior's perspective makes the supposed "xenophobia" of country dwellers a little easier to understand, because there isn't much that comes from outside that is really there for their benefit. 

Aside two (the Internet sucks now) 

Where the hell was Willards Mill? Where is the Herne River? A Google search, which is now more about Google's AI than its old algorithms, keeps insisting I mean the Rhine in Germany, which apparently goes by a town called Herne. I cannot convince it that this isn't what I mean. The story is pretty clearly not in Germany, not with a town called "Willards Mill" and a complete lack of mention of the war. If I try to search Willards Mill, I get deluged (hahahhaha deluged) with stuff about a fictional town from some show called "Stan Against Evil." Flipping it all around and adding in terms about flooding and so on doesn't improve my results. The Internet sucks now, because it's trying to think for me, and it won't believe me if I try to tell it that's not what I'm thinking of. 

So either this is historical fiction set in a town someone in the U.S. with a local history known only to those from the area, or this is a completely made-up episode. It doesn't really matter too much to me, but I do wish I had more confidence that the Internet wasn't ganging up on me to make it harder to find out.  

Obviously, my O'Henry read-through is delayed

This is just a note to say that I realize it's been a while since I last posted. I do intend to try to get back to the short story anthology blog-through soon. Just been a lot going on personally the last few weeks. Like, a lot. I know I'm not unusual to be going through stuff, and generally, I've got it okay. I'd say I'm grateful, but it always seems weird to me to be grateful when, as an agnostic, I have no object of gratitude. I guess I'm just grateful to the universe, although that never feels quite right, either, because part of gratefulness is that I have it better than most, which is sort of including the relative badness that others endure as part of being thankful. So maybe not grateful, but more that I acknowledge my relative good fortune. I apologize for having been self-indulgently self-pitying at times on this blog, although I guess that goes with the territory of being a writer sometimes.

I will attempt to both get back to the literary analysis soon and to be a better person in general. It's never clear to me if those two things are linked, if reading literature closely can help one to be a better person of if it's actually the opposite, and literature is bad for one's moral development. In any event, I'm going to try to accomplish both things, and soon. Thanks for reading.  

 

This story might as well be written by AI: "Hiding Spot" by Caroline Kim (O.Henry Anthology)

"Hiding Spot" is a boilerplate, familiar-to-the-point-of-tedium, well-worn story of Korean immigrants. If you were to create a "Korean immigrant story" bingo card ahead of reading it, you'd be yelling "bingo" in very short order. We have: Korean immigrants who hide valuables in the house, a Korean mom and dad who run a dry cleaning business, a dol (a party thrown when a child turns one), and old Korean parents who go to church and are disappointed in their child. It's full of the kinds of Korean cultural markers that would be part of a one-hour introduction to Korea class. They might as well serve bulgogi and kimchi with it. 

The few times the story starts to introduce something interesting or insightful about Korean-American life, it doesn't keep pulling the thread. There is a part where Mrs. Lee observes that Americans think you need special breakfast food for breakfast, but Koreans just eat soup and rice or whatever they were eating the night before. Okay, but what of it? Stay with that for a second. Likewise, we see Mr. Lee reading Chosun Ilbo, maybe the most conservative of the mainline Korean newspapers. You can't have him reading that and not have it matter, but it doesn't. Other than disappointment in his son for being a drug addict, Mr. Lee doesn't show any real conservative tendencies. He's old-person conservative, not politically so. 

In the end, it's another story where immigrants and their families in America have psychological issues because of a divided identity. That's got to be the most common theme in immigrant literature. This story is linguistically dull and uninventive and overall lacks any ambition. It's a story that's been told a thousand times, and not in terribly different words. It's the second story from the New England Review I've read written by a Korean-American writer about Korean-American life, and both times I felt that the editorial staff got duped by a dull story that they couldn't tell was dull.  

Solidarity is a pipe dream: "Serranos" by Francisco Gonzalez (O.Henry Anthology 2024)

I've fallen behind on my analysis of stories from the 2024 Best Short Stories collection, a.k.a. the O.Henry Prize Winners anthology. It's been a trying time. I'm going to try to push through. This is going to be a half-assed post. The next few might be. Apropos of nothing, I'm looking for a new job, and if you happen to think I'm an amazing writer and know someone willing to offer anything remotely reasonable for this golden ergonomic keyboard of mine, please let me know. 

Two groups that should be on the same side and aren't

That's "Serranos" in a nutshell. There's the old school undocumented laborers who live in Ranch View Mobile Estates, the ones who work in a vineyard serving rich people, and the new school "Serranos" from the highlands back home who move into the Holiday Rambler next to all of the older laborers. The Serranos aren't circumspect like the old schoolers; they are loud and proud and set of fireworks on Fourth of July and play loud music and put American flags on the backs of their bikes that they ride to their jobs at the Greek restaurant. 

The children of the lowlanders admire the Serranos. Because the children have citizenship (for now! Stay tuned to see how this 14th Amendment drama shakes out!), they aren't as timid as their parents, and they like that the Serranos aren't timid, either. The children resent the parents for being--in their view--jealous of the freewheeling nature of the Serranos. The lowlanders begin to want the Serranos out, because their behavior draws too much attention. Although the mother figure among the Serranos, "Mother Paz" eventually charms the lowlanders with her southern-style tamales, and the elders finally appreciate the raw "sincerity" of the Serranos, the damage has already been done.  The Serranos are eventually picked up by Immigration before any real bond of solidarity can form. The old-timers become even more cautious not to be noticed. One day, before heading off to work, the lowlanders see Mother Paz back at Ranch View. She slips quietly into the Holiday Rambler. The old-timers recognize their fears toward their neighbors, how it was "easy to hate them," but they "couldn't bear to love them." They knock on her door in a belated, small gesture of understanding. 

It seems like nearly every best-of short story anthology has at least one hard-luck Latino story. This one stands out for the realistic way it portrays how people under stress actually behave, which isn't always nobly. There are too many things to worry about to be noble. The point of view of the narrator, the first-person plural "we/us," is always a loaded one. It can emphasize community by making all of the characters in the story belong together, or it can emphasize the opposite, which is polarity, because "we/us' implies a "they/them" who aren't part of the community. That's how it was in "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado. This story's use of we/us is also the latter type of use. 

The vast majority of people on the globe have every reason to work together to make their lives better, and yet it seldom happens. If it does happen, it usually happens too late to do much except remember. This story is incredibly timely, probably too timely. I should probably switch to reading werewolf romances for a while. 

The best lines from the Lord of the Rings movies that aren't in the books

Many years ago now, I wrote about the ten things from the Lord of the Rings movies that drove me the craziest. They mostly involved changes to the books that I thought departed thematically from their source material, rather than just on a straight plot level, to the ruin of all. Since the coming week is going to feature both the second coming of a man I can't believe was ever taken seriously as the chief civil servant along with super cold temperatures, it's going to be a bleak couple of days. I thought I'd try to inject a little hope by returning to the work that I think is more about hope than any other I've ever read seriously, which is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey said, if there is one image that best captures what LoTR is about, it's a trumpet braying in defiance. So let's defy this week by considering Tolkien and the movies he inspired a little bit. 

Since the goal this week is to spread hope, I'd like to find something to celebrate in Jackson's trilogy, rather than something to be annoyed by. If earlier, I wrote about changes to the source material that I thought changed the theme in ruinous ways, this time, I'll write about good changes made that were appropriate to the medium of film, changes that either preserved the original themes or even advanced them in new ways.

Here are the rules

I'm only dealing with new material on a dialogue level, meaning I'm looking for best lines that are in the movies that aren't in the books. Of course, with Jackson's movies, "not in the books" is a little bit difficult to decide upon. A characteristic of all three movies is that they often include dialogue that is in the books somewhere, but not in the place where it appears in the movie, or even in the exact words or spoken by the same character. 

One example is the very opening lines of the movie. There is a voiceover by Galadriel that begins, "The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air." In the book, these lines are spoken almost exactly like the ones in the movie, but they are spoken TO Galadriel, not by her. It is the Ent Treebeard who says them. And he isn't saying them near the beginning of the story, but near the very end, after the ring has been destroyed.  

A second example is spoken by Gandalf to Pippin to comfort him as he is afraid during the battle with Mordor in Minas Tirith. Pippin says he didn't think it would end like this, and Gandalf says: 

"End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it....White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise."

Part of this is invented whole cloth, and part of it is taken from narration, not spoken dialogue, that occurs early in the books. Frodo is in the house of Tom Bombadil (a section that I think was wisely excised from the movies), and Frodo has a dream. In the dream, he sees a pale light..."growing to turn the veil (of rain) all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise." Much later in the book, we realize that this was foreshadowing Frodo's journey across the sea to Valinor, because once he is away, he recalls the dream, only now he adds "white shores" to it. So in the movie, Gandalf is making explicit what the books only ever hint at darkly, which is some hope of a destiny beyond death for humans and hobbits.

It's sort of a subjective call, then, to decide whether lines from the movies are "not in the books" or they are. I don't aim to be consistent. If it feels to me like the line is new enough, I'll count it.

As far as criteria for best, that is subjective, too, obviously, but I'm looking for something that stands on its own as good enough dialogue that it was worth inventing it. The line should reveal character, move the plot, or develop the themes of the story. I will also be awarding bonus points if the line in question has become a fruitful source of LoTR-related memes. I'm not a huge meme fan for the most part, but the memes from LoTR are still top-notch twenty-five years later, and I will honor some of the lines for having created their own secondary art form. 

The list

These are in no particular order, except for the last two, which I consider the best.

What about second breakfast?

This line, spoken by Pippin before he has quite processed what it means to have agreed to accompany Frodo on his flight from the Shire, does a great job of establishing both Pippin's pre-heroic-journey priorities as well as developing our understanding of hobbit lives. The list he enumerates after second breakfast of other hobbit meals often forms the backbone of the menu during LoTR watch parties. The line is loveable and funny and comes with a good sight gag from a mildly annoyed, mildly amused Strider. Sadly, the expression "second breakfast" is not in the books at all, although you could easily infer its existence from both LoTR and The Hobbit. 

One does not simply walk into Mordor

The king of all meme-creating lines. The king of all lines from the movies that one ends up twisting into other sayings in real life. The king of lines that show us the temperament of Boromir, who is brave and noble, but who thinks that everyone not from Gondor just doesn't know shit about what it's like to face real fucking combat, man, so fuck all you civilians. 

...and I'm coming with you!

Ah, Sam. Such a familiar character from the moment we meet him, and yet so true and faithful that by the time the story is over, he's taken the archetype he fits into and broken it and remade it into his own image. When Frodo tells Sam that he is going to Mordor alone, Sam's response, "Of course you are, and I'm coming with you," tells us many things about Sam. One, it tells us that he had already guessed Frodo's mind, which he usually does. Second, it tells us everything we need to know about what Sam's core principles are and where his head is going to be at for the rest of the movies. 

I've said before that one thing I don't like about the movies is that they switched many characters from having a flat arc to a positive one, because that's what movies usually do. Aragorn is the biggest example. But Sam is the one character whose pre-adventure character is the same as it is at the end. Except for maybe getting up the courage to ask Rosie Cotton to dance. 

I would have followed you....my captain, my king

I used to be kind of indifferent to these lines, but they've grown on me. It's important that Boromir isn't just a throwaway character who is only there to convince viewers that the ring really can corrupt and that maybe not everyone will get to live to the end of the story. Boromir deserves to be mourned, and it's worth taking a beat to acknowledge that he was a worthy man done in by evil. In the books, the three walkers Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli take an insane amount or time, under the circumstances, to sing a funeral song for him. I think the movie is right to redeem him fully in the eyes of the audience by telling us that if it had come to it, he would ultimately have welcomed the return of the king.

Those without swords can still die upon them

This is one of those lines I'm taking liberty with, because Eowyn does say them in the book, but in a very different place. She says these lines while in the houses of healing in Gondor after she awesomely slays the Witchking of Angmar because he is the absolute baddest of bad asses in Tokien's supposedly misogynistic story. She wants to go out and join those assaulting the Black Gate, and she is frustrated that her healers will not allow her to go. I think the movies needed to leave out most of the houses of healing scenes just for time purposes, but it was important that they include this line somewhere. Having Eowyn say it to Aragorn allows us to know her mind before and during her fateful decisions, rather than after. 

I have been working on and off for a while on a long paper concerning disobedience to orders in LoTR. There are at least five times in the story where someone disobeys an order and if they had not done so, Frodo's quest would have failed. Eowyn is as good an example as any, and this line shows that she has the clear, internal moral vision that is necessary to make the incredibly difficult decision to follow one's internal orders over those of authority. 

Elrond's warning to his daughter that Aragorn will still die

Holy Jesus, if you want to read something sad, read the full story of Arwen and Aragorn's love from the annexes to Return of the King. In the movie, Elrond is borrowing from that part of the annex. I was glad that it was worked into the movies in some way, and I also love the use of some of Tolkien's archaic, noble language here, the reference to the enormous past that Middle Earth has had, as in "splendor of the kings of men undimmed before the breaking of the world." I'm not a huge fan of a lot of choices the movies made with Aragorn and Arwen, either individually or as a couple, but I was fine with adding in Elrond's resistance to their marriage mostly because it led to this insertion. 

There won't be a Shire, Pip

Of the three movies in the trilogy, Two Towers is easily the weakest. There are some questionable choices of manufactured conflicts meant to give arcs to characters. One of those conflicts is the one the two "other" hobbits, Pippin and Merry, face. They stumble across Ents, who are very strong and could be powerful allies in the war. They try to convince the Ents to join the war, but the Ents originally aren't interested. They eventually change their minds, but in the space between the Ents' decision to sit out the war and the decision to get involved, Pippin thinks that maybe he and Merry should just hightail it back to the peaceful Shire. Merry rightly observes that unless evil is stopped, the Shire will soon be as bad as everywhere else. 

I've said this line about a million times, every time someone brings up leaving the U.S. now that Trump is president again. The fires of Isengard will spread unless they are stopped where they are. This isn't quite explicit in the books, mostly because the Ents never actually reject the notion of going to war, but I was fine with making it more of an explicit theme in the movies. I think Tolkien would have agreed with the sentiment. With confronting all manner of evil, there are times to "fly, you fools," and there are times to turn and confront the evil. 

So it begins

This isn't an especially good line. It's kind of boilerplate action movie fare. Chosen for its extreme memeability alone. 

Share the load

Also chosen mostly because of the memes it has inspired. I’m not a terribly huge fan of how the Smeagol/Sam/Frodo relationship is made into a love triangle in the movies. This line is part of that whole indulgence, but at least it’s one that leads to funny comments.

I give hope to men/I keep none for myself

I'm not the only person not crazy about how Aragorn is changed in the movies from a guy who knew he wanted to be king to a guy with a crisis of identity because he doesn't want to be one. So I don't really like that one scene that many people love where Elrond comes to Aragorn to give him the sword (that he had already had for two whole books in Tolkien's version) and convince him to "put away the ranger" and "become the king you were born to be." 

However, that scene does contain another reference pulled from the appendices. It's actually Aragorn's mother who said she kept no hope for herself, although she had given it to men by bearing Aragorn. (Aragorn's name as a child is Estel, meaning "hope.") I said above that LoTR is more about hope than any story I've ever thought about a lot, and it is, but part of its message concerning hope is that a realistic appraisal of the world will mean having to carry on without hope sometimes. I just can't think of a better message for this week.

Pippin's "Home is Behind" song to Denethor

If you've read the books, you know they're just crammed full of songs. It would have been impossible to put even a quarter of them into the movies, but the movies do want to reassure viewers who love the books that yes, they're aware that it's sad to leave all of that out. There are a few moments when the songs and poems work their way in, even if in shortened form. Aragorn sings part of the Lay of Luthien, and he also sings of the ancient story of how his ancestors arrived upon the shores of Middle Earth. Treebeard sing-songs about the lost Ent-wives. Maybe the best use of the musical/poetic material from the books is when Pippin sings for Denethor, who has lost most of his mind and is about to lose the rest. Once again, the writers of the movies wove the song in from other places in the books. In the books, Pippin still sings the lines heard in the movie, but in a very different context. He sings them while the hobbits are traveling and still in the Shire, not yet fully aware of their peril. 

The song in its full version from the book concerns a traveler who is thinking about all of the places in the world he hasn't gone yet, and the traveler decides for the moment to delay seeing them and to head home to fire and lamp and meat and bread. In the movie, using only that one verse from the song, it takes on a different meaning. Tolkien used some songs repeatedly in his work, changing them slightly as the context of the story changed, and the movies did the same thing. "Home is Behind" was the best example of it, and so I single it out here as an example of something the movies do well throughout. 

The journey doesn't end here

I wrote about this one in the introduction above. I'm okay with making the movies more overtly Christian-ish and marginally less pagan-ish. It's there in the books, just not quite so confidently stated. If anyone is going to tell humans and hobbits that there is a chance they survive death in some way, it's Olorin-Gandalf, who learned mercy from Nienna herself. Although Tolkien's legendarium is pretty vague on the fate of men beyond death, I think it's possible Gandalf actually knows what he's talking about. Nienna was the sister to Mandos, sort of the Hades of Tolkien's world, and she lived on the borders of Mandos' kingdom. It's possible Gandalf wasn't just making that up to make Pippin feel better. 

That still only counts as one

Most of Gimli's D&D dwarf yuk-yuking in the movies annoys me. This one doesn't.  

Aragorn's inspirational speech at the black gates

Almost none of this is in the books. The one line that is, "Stand, Men of the West," has a totally different meaning. Aragorn isn't saying "stand your ground and fight," he's instead saying, "Look, Frodo just finished the quest, so quit fighting and stand still." I don't find this speech all that great, and Viggo Mortenson's voice sounds a little funny in parts, but I think it was probably important to show Aragorn being, I don't know, kingly in battle or something. Since they had to write a speech from scratch, they did a good job of at least making it sort of within Aragorn's character, understanding the weakness of others and trying to reason with them rather than order them. 

Okay...now the two best ones

Second place: A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to.

Wait...this isn't in the books? The line feels so natural in the movie, it seems like it must be in the books, but it isn't. When I heard this line in the movie way back in the day, I felt like I was home, and I enjoyed the ride for the next three hours. But it's not in the books. Check me on this. 

There are some observations in the books on how Gandalf comes and goes as he pleases. Maybe the closest the books come to the pith of what Gandalf says is when Gandalf arrives in the nick of time at the Battle of Helm's Deep. Aragorn, meeting Gandalf at last, says to him that "Once more you come in the hour of need, unlooked-for." Gandalf replies that it shouldn't be "unlooked for," because he had said that he would return and meet him here. In other words, you should have trusted that I would show up when I was needed. 

I'm not sure what made the movie's writers put this line in. Maybe after reading and re-reading the story, they themselves were struck by how many times Gandalf seems to arrive just in the nick of time. It's certainly true in The Hobbit. 

It's also sort of a foreshadowing. Gandalf is NEVER late, but later on, he's not going to show up when he promised Frodo that he would. He 'broke tryst" as he will say at the Council of Elrond, and that has never happened before. So it's setting up what happens later, which Tolkien does all the time. Oh, yeah, and it also establishes that Frodo is one of the few people close enough to Gandalf to be able to trade banter with him. Great addition. 

First place: My friends! You bow to no one. 

I get angry in the books when the hobbits go back to the Shire and nobody seems to understand that Frodo is the goddamn savior of the planet. I know, I know. It has to be that way. Frodo even says so, in some of the most poignant words of the whole trilogy: "I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them." But do all those dumb hobbits really have to go about not realizing who Frodo is? It angers Sam, and it angers me, too. 

Frodo may be stoic about not fitting in around the Shire when he comes back, and of course, he never wanted to be treated like a hero. But he is a hero. He's the hero of heroes. 

The book does grant him a good deal of being treated like the hero he deserves, just not in the Shire. When he awakes after nearly perishing in the fires of Mount Doom after completing the quest, Frodo is told of the honor he and Frodo will be held in: "The clothes that you wore on your way to Mordor...even the orc-rags that your bore in the black land, Frodo, shall be preserved. No silks and linens, nor any armour or heraldry could be more honourable." There are festivals in honor of Frodo and Sam, and minstrels write songs about them, and the people go so far as to use quasi-religious terms about them: "Praise them with great praise!" 

The movie was never going to include a long segment on the Scouring of the Shire or all the other things that happened in the books to the hobbits when they returned home. It wasn't going to have a segment with a minstrel singing "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" (although the much shorter animated version did include this song). But you know what? Frodo suffered for our salvation. He deserves his moment. So does Sam. If Merry and Pippin happen to get honored along with them, fine. They're kinsmen of Frodo. His kinsmen can have my praise and thanks, too, just for having been related to him. It's a necessary scene, not so much for the movie, but for me to feel whole. There is a moment when everyone recognizes that in spite of all the heroism that went on, the only two real heroes are the ones who slogged it out to the finish line in a land far beyond hope. 

Choose your own analysis: Is "Didi" by Amber Caron dull or terribly clever?

Depending on how you read "Didi" by Amber Caron, it might be a dull feminist morality tale that leans too heavily on the cultural and political tropes of recent feminism at the expense of character development, OR it might be a very clever commentary on how people can fail those around them when they lean too heavily on theories about the world to understand people who need help rather than observing the people themselves, OR it might be a no-fault story about how scary it is that the situation can change so quickly when caring for a child. As Val yells at Evan at one point in the story: "We have three options!" 

The first five and half lines above were all one sentence. Korean might be having an effect on my English prose. Let me explain in shorter sentences. 

Synopsis

Didi is a teenage girl in trouble who goes to stay with narrator Aunt Val and her husband Evan for a month one summer. Didi's father thinks their boring life in Westport, CT might be the antidote to the trouble Didi's getting herself in, sneaking out and wearing suggestive clothing that seems to suggest she's gotten promiscuous. Since Val used to do similar stuff when she was Didi's age, the father perhaps thinks she might be able to relate. For a while, things seem okay to Aunt Val and Evan, although Didi seems a little calculating, a little manipulative. Still, they seem to be having a good time together until Didi disappears one night. Didi's father leaves their home in East Texas to come to his sister Val's, and they wait. Didi eventually returns without explanations. Based on the details from the narrator, I see three basic ways of interpreting this story: 

Reading One

1) Didi is a troubled child because she falls victim to some of the pathologies recent feminism has highlighted that our culture creates specifically in young women. One point of emphasis in recent feminism has been to show how young women are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, to not occupy more space than is strictly necessary. It teaches them to be small, both in physical and auditory volume. Here, let me Google it for you...the first three hits that seem to me to more or less explain this belief are here, here, and here. This causes women to censure their actions, their words, and their thoughts, to be calculating about everything, and to worry constantly about how they are perceived. 

The first thing Aunt Val notices about Didi is how fully she is falling into this trap. 

The first thing I notice is that Didi is small, makes herself even smaller by curling up on a single couch cushion. She crosses her arms even when standing in large rooms. Tucks her legs under her body when she sits at the kitchen table, pushes her silverware under the lip of her dinner plate to take up even less space. Everything about her is scrunched, compact. 

So there it is, a pretty overt link between a character's issues and well-worn feminist theory. It gets returned to a few times in the story, showing us how little Didi eats (so she will be as small as possible), how she doesn't move at night while sleeping, how she even sleeps on top of the covers. At the end of the story, Aunt Val, who maybe understands Didi's underlying psychology better than the others because it was also her psychology, takes action to try and arrest Didi's habit for making herself small: "So I do the only thing I can. I pull her hands out of her pockets. I push her shoulders back. I am not gentle." Sort of a Marine Corps solution: quit slouching and get your hands out of your pockets. 

In this reading, narrator Aunt Val has correctly diagnosed Didi's ailment, and her final act in the story is the first act in Didi's healing process. Women, go ahead and take up space, this story is saying. 

To me, this is the most boring possible reading. While I think there's a lot of validity to the point raised by feminism about how women are taught to make themselves small, I also don't think there's a simple link between that tendency and the particular bad behaviors of struggling young women. You can't Marine Corps this shit and tell people to stand up straight and fix them. That hope kind of reminds me of the scene in Parenthood, where Grandma comes in and tells Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen a story about life's ups and downs, and just when the audience thinks this is the wisdom the two characters needed, Steve Martin shows the audience how wrong they were to expect such an easy solution to real problems to come from Grandma's story: "You know, a minute ago, I was really confused about life, and then Grandma came in with her wonderful and affecting roller coaster story, and now everything's GREAT again!"  

So reading one, which is a straightforward diagnosis of a problem and a solution from a more or less reliable narrator, doesn't interest me much.

Reading Two

2. The narrator's own misreading causes her to apply the wrong solution, or to misdiagnose the problem. The narrator is very quick to read a popular feminist interpretation of the problems of young people into Didi, but how closely is she really paying attention? She does, after all, miss a lot of clues that Didi was about to bolt right before she disappeared. And Evan, although he doesn't see everything, is the one who picks up on how she walks around with "mirrors" around her, like she's evaluating herself all the time and being extremely calculating and even manipulative. Aunt Val didn't see it. 

Val has a job studying shrimp. Part of this job involves cutting out the eyes of the shrimp in order to study their unique vision. Val confesses to being something of a voyeur. She's clearly obsessed with vision, with being able to observe. But she's willing to cut the eyes out of the shrimp to get at their secrets. She doesn't love the thing she studies. She only loves the power of being able to observe. Val doesn't even realize how twisted this is, because when Didi asks if the shrimp feel pain from her experiments, Val can only prevaricate and say that they're "getting better at controlling for that." 

Val also mostly pushes aside her realization of how the life choices she's forced on Evan have made him mostly unhappy. He's had to follow her around and to take whatever work he could find, because the couple was prioritizing Val's career. Val knows this, but manages to keep it mostly out of her line of vision, because it's uncomfortable for her. She'll observe anything, as long as it's what she wants to see. 

Val thinks she's a great observer, but she actually sucks at it. She replaces her theories based on whatever feminism she's read for actual observation. In so doing, she harms the person she's trying to keep an eye on. 

This is the most interesting possible reading to me. One kind of intriguing result of reading the story in this way is what it does to a direct address to the reader the narrator does at the end of the story. After Didi reappears, the narrator, speaking both to and for the reader, asks a series of questions: "And what is it you want to know? Whether my brother hits her?...Whether she is crying?...Or do you want to know where she was, what she was doing?" I didn't really want to know any of these things, but in this second reading, this series of questions can become a kind of projection onto the reader of the narrator's own failure to observe faithfully. She is criticizing the reader for being unable to interpret what happened because she can't bring herself to blame her own lack of observation. 

Reading Three

3. There really isn't anyone at fault here. Parenting is hard. Val once observed an overworked mother who accidentally locked herself out of her home while her toddlers were inside. It went from being a situation she had under control to an emergency in the blink of an eye. Maybe that's what parenting is, mostly. 

One of my favorite short stories ever, "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken, covers similar thematic terrain. That's also a story of parents who try a summer change of scenery to reset their daughter's troubling behavior. They also think it's working until they find out how terribly wrong they have been. 

"Didi" isn't as instantly and obviously a story about parenting I'll love as "Thunderstruck." I felt like with "Thunderstruck," I immediately felt it was a story that explained why parenting is so terrifying. "Didi" is a little harder to immediately file away as a story that revealed the truth about kids or teens or people who make bad life choices. But it is a story that rewards a second reading and a little further consideration.  

Unexpected jerk: "The Import" by Jai Chakrabarti (O.Henry Anthology)

Early on in reading "The Import" by Jai Chakrabarti and nearly until the end, I thought I knew what kind of story I was reading. I thought it was a "banality of evil" sort of story. We have Raj, who wants to do the right thing by not taking advantage of Rupa. When he finds out that Rupa, who has come from India to be the nanny to his child for six months (paid for by Raj's mother, who apparently has some amount of wealth), has her own child back home, he knows he ought to tell his mother to send her back right away. It isn't right to care for his child by making another child lose his mother, even if the money Rupa will make as a nanny will allow her to pay for private school for her child. But Raj is ultimately kind of a pliable man who enjoys ease and comfort. "Do enough" is his mantra at work, and it seems to be the same in most things. He isn't ambitious, and  he is prone to the sins of the flesh, as his occasional dalliances with Molly Choi demonstrate. He ought to send Rupa home, but her being there is so convenient. It makes his life much easier, so much more comfortable. So he falls into a "gentle forgetting" of Rupa's situation and chooses instead to enjoy the freedom her presence gives him. 

Raj is contrasted with his wife, Bethany, who is highly ambitious, which is why she stayed on as the full-time earner after the birth of Raj and Bethany's child. Bethany is opposed to hiring Rupa, and one of the reasons at least seems to be that she is uncomfortable with being one of those people who hires a girl from a poor village, taking advantage of her circumstances. When Raj finds out that Rupa has a daughter, he doesn't tell Bethany, and we, the readers, sort of figure it's because she'd say Rupa can't stay once she finds out. 

As the story got near the end, I was sure I knew what was coming. They'd already set up the boy loving the water and Rupa being unfamiliar with it, the lack of cell phone service. I was certain that we'd end up with a drowned child and husband/father guilty for it, not because he was greedy and rich and went taking what he wanted, but because he was essentially lazy and weak enough that he was unable to turn down what made him temporarily happy. Kind of like how we all aren't that great about living in an environmentally friendly way, even though we know it's important (something hinted at in the story by the heat wave in Iceland when Bethany goes there for work). Ultimately, although we think banal evil is less of a sin than active and ambitious evil, it still leads to tragedy. 

That's the story I thought we were getting until the very end. 

The twist

I wasn't quite as surprised by the twist in "The Import" as I was by two young people dancing to a fifty-year-old song in Spider-Man III, but I was still pretty surprised. 

At the very end, Bethany and Raj come back from visiting with friends who are about to get married. When they left their child with Rupa to go spend time with their friends, their child was asleep in a cabin by a lake, but by the time Bethany and Raj return, the cabin is empty, and the couple soon goes to look for their child frantically. They eventually find Rupa with their son on a canoe on the lake, and it seems like all is well, but Bethany loses her shit, and we suddenly find out that Bethany isn't really that nice of a person. She tells Raj to retrieve the child, but as for Rupa, she says, "I don't care if you leave her there." When Rupa is explaining what happened to Raj in Bengali, which Bethany doesn't understand, Bethany shouts, "What is she saying?...What did she do to my son?" In the end, Bethany and her friends pull Rupa to shore "as if she were their prisoner," although Raj feels that "it was not like that at all" because "she (Rupa) had come of her own intent." 

A crisis has brought out some bias in Bethany (and also her friends, for what it's worth) that up until that point, I had mistaken for principled concern. But Bethany didn't really care about Rupa; she cared about how it looked to have someone like Rupa working for them. Once we see this bias come to the front at the end, it's easy to look back and see how it was there all along. Bethany had called Rupa a "village girl," and Bethany was also the one who first depersonalized her by naming her "the import."

Just before the couple starts off to look for their child, Raj gets a familiar feeling in his belly, which is a sixth sense he's always had, warning him of trouble. As a reporter, he'd used it to duck out of protests just before they got really unruly. Of course, one could say this is another of Raj's faults of ordinariness. Shouldn't a dedicated reporter want to be there when the protest gets out of hand? Isn't that when the real news starts? This is another spot where I was all ready for a "banality of evil" ending, but it wasn't. Because really, it's Bethany, with her ambition, who perhaps ends up being even more evil than Raj. 

I like this story because it sort of differentiates between banal evil--which, let's face it, is pretty much all of us--and active evil. Active evil is the domain of society's Type A's. A lazy evil person will never take over a continent or commit genocide. Only someone with big goals and a lot of gumption will do that. It doesn't excuse banal evil, but it does show it as of a different kind and degree than active evil. It's like the old Catholic difference between venial and mortal sins. Raj is a venial sinner; Bethany might be a mortal one. 

Backing this up is the conversation Bethany had with her friends Helen and Rob just before the final scene. They are talking about Rupa, and although each of them says only a few words, they all reveal a lot about their attitude towards her. Rob calls her "the refugee," although she isn't one.. Helen rebukes Rob for calling her this, and then she mouths some words about how even if she is a refugee, we "shouldn't close our doors to everyone." Raj points out that she is in the country on a work visa, but then Bethany says something interesting. She says that Rupa is here to take care of their child, Shay, but then she adds that, "Plus, she's being paid for by Raj's mother, so cheers to that." 

This sort of sounds like Bethany is herself a banally evil venial sinner, just like her husband. She had objected many times to the whole arrangement of Rupa coming, but what had convinced her, ultimately, was that Raj's mother was paying for it. I imagine here someone who refuses to get a chemical treatment for their lawn because it's bad for the water supply, but then suddenly, they move somewhere where lawn treatments are free, and they say, "Well, if it's free, I won't say no." 

Is Bethany an actively evil person, or just a more ambitious level of banal evil than Raj? Rupa seems to have picked up on something when she tells Raj he ought to be more worried about "a woman who doesn't love you," and suddenly, the reader thinks of her many business trips and whether she has her own Molly Choi somewhere. 

In the end, the reader is left with several questions. Who was worse to Rupa, Bethany or Raj? Who is a worse person? And is Bethany's hard-working exterior hiding her venial sins or her mortal ones? 

The last line of the story is remarkable in its ability to maintain all the ambiguity without dispelling any of it. We have six characters in the final scene--Bethany, Raj, Shay, Rupa, and their friends Rob and Helen--all together. Rob and Helen are hauling Rupa back to shore in their boat, and Raj, Bethany, and Shay are all in the boat with them. Only Rupa is alone in the canoe, being treated like a prisoner, like the worst thoughts Bethany had about what she was doing with her son were all true. The last three sentences, from the third-person narrator, are these: "It was that you could know a person only so well. Then their own ideas would muddy the water. Then you'd have to return them to where they belonged."  

I don't always like ambiguous endings, but this one is really impressive in just how many ambiguities hang in the last few sentences, even at a linguistic level. Who is the "they" in "their own thoughts"? Is it the people in the boat? The people in the boat other than Raj, who doesn't think Rupa is the monster she's been made out to be? Or is it people in general, following the people-in-general meaning of the "you" in "you could only know a person so well"? The narrator has often followed Raj's consciousness with statements like these, giving us Raj's interior monologue without labeling it as such. But this might be a few lines in which the narrator is separating their voice from Raj's. 

Then in the last sentence, who is the "they/them" in "you'd have to return them to where they belonged"? Is it Rupa? Reading through the whole ending, there are a number of ways to interpret the whole thing:

1. "You can only know a person so well," was what Bethany, Rob, and Helen were apparently thinking of Rupa. Rupa's own weird, village ideas have muddied the water, literally, as we are out here on the lake because of the mess she made. We'll have to send her back where she belongs.
2. "You can only know a person so well," Raj thought, thinking of the cultural differences between Bethany, Rob, and Helen on the one hand and Rupa on the other. But Helen, Rob, and Bethany will all add their own ideas to read into whatever they don't understand about Rupa, and then they'll send her back to India. 
3. "You can only know a person so well," quoth the narrator, now fully separating from Raj, and thinking of all the people now in the scene. And all those people in the scene will use their own, imperfect understanding to fill in what they don't know, making mistakes as they try. I guess now I will have to put all these people and their flawed understanding back where they belong by ending the story. 

If we read it according to this last sense, then the story becomes less about the banality of evil and more about misunderstandings that are based on how we all have secrets and ulterior motives. Whichever way you read it, there is more to the truth of the story than any of the characters realize. 

On being an unsuccessful writer two weeks before Trump takes office a second time

"Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?'" - from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Early in 2020, The New Yorker published a George Saunders story entitled "Love Letter." It's an epistolary tale of a grandfather and his grandson in a much-closer-to-a-totalitarian-state-than-before in the aftermath of a then-theoretical second Trump term. Trump is not mentioned, but it is very clear that's the context involved. The grandfather is conflicted. Part of him wants to counsel his grandson to lay low, to make his way in the dangerous new landscape of America the best he can, because doing this and putting himself in a stronger position socially and financially is his best chance for being able to help the people he cares about. Open resistance is not a good strategy, because it only leads to one becoming weak. At the same time, the grandfather knows that what the government is doing to the people his grandson cares about is wrong, and he wants there to be some way to fight back. There is an underlying current in the story of the grandfather feeling he needs to explain to the grandson how older people allowed the world to get like this. His explanations are the only ones a culpable generation can offer: we didn't know it would get this bad, we'd have done more if we knew, we did what we could, but what could we really do?

When Saunders reconsidered the story recently, he expressed his hope that it was more than "just an opinion piece dressed up as a piece of fiction." Of course, even if it was a little too "on the nose," as he put it, that wouldn't have necessarily ruined it. There are plenty of stories that come across as direct commentaries on contemporary political situations that are nonetheless masterpieces, from Wizard of Oz to the works of Aristophanes to Citizen Kane to All the President's Men and on and on. Heck, even Ayn Rand's novels have plenty of people who love them, and they're basically political theory dressed up as novels.  

Of course it was a good story. It was George Saunders. But there was still something that bothered me about it. Coming at the time it did, it couldn't help but be an admonition to its readers: In the fateful election of 2020, when democracy hangs in the balance, what will you do? Will you be able to face your grandchildren when they ask you about it? It was much more of a call to specific action than most stories are. That means that part of evaluating it should go beyond normal literary considerations, such as whether the characters were believable and affecting, and include questioning whether the piece was effective at one of its evident purposes, which was to persuade citizens to undertake political action. 

My perhaps somewhat peevish reaction to the story

Now that we have survived the election of 2020 only to lose in 2024, my reaction is not totally unlike that of the grandfather: What could I have done? What should I have done? Or even: I did what I could, but I wasn't in a position to do much, so my involvement didn't help, echoing a line of the grandfather to his grandson that getting involved would not help. If "Love Letter" is a challenge to its readers to do something, then my reaction to that injunction goes something like this:

• I voted for the right candidate, because I did the minimum that a citizen in a democracy can do, which is to fulfill what Lionel Trilling called the "moral responsibility to be intelligent." That is, I did enough work to vote for the right person.
• Of course, in our system, I get the same number of votes as people who didn't do the work. So my vote isn't worth that much.
• You could argue that I have a responsibility to try to persuade others, and I did, but persuading anyone of anything is very hard. Past a certain age, most people really don't change their minds about big stuff more than a handful of times in their lives. 
• And in any event, whom would I be persuading? I don't have much of a platform. I wish I had acquired a platform through my writing, but whether through lack of talent, lack of focus, or bad luck, I don't. 
• Even if I did have a platform, what would I do? If we consider "Love Letter" not as a detached work of art but as an attempt by a human writer named George Saunders to influence an election, what did Saunders really do with his platform? He wrote a story in the New Yorker, where the majority of readers probably already agreed with him.
• That story, rather than offer readers practical advice for how to get the outcome in the election that author and most of his readers alike agree would be the desirable one, did what literature often does. It didn't really propose a solution, but instead did a good job of describing the problem. Which is great for feeling seen, but not so great for getting the results one wants.
• Which is all to say that even if I had succeeded as an author enough to have significant numbers of people listen to what I have to say, I likely wouldn't have been able to do much with it. I can't even convince my sister-in-law in Ohio that Trump is bad for the country; what am I going to do to change the outcome of an election? 
• The story ultimately feels like a human author trying to pass the problem off to his readers, most of whom have far less ability to do anything that he does. It feels unfair.   

So that's one level of reaction I have to Saunders' story. The other level is somehow even more depressing. 

It's always frustrating to fail at writing, but it's especially so now

There is a weird feedback loop of circular logic in America whereby we assume that if someone is rich and famous, they deserve to be, so they tend to stay that way. And if someone isn't, they get dismissed, because if they knew what they were talking about, how come they aren't rich and famous? We assume winners win because they deserve to win, and losers lose because they are losers.

Faced with this kind of faith in the self-evidentiary logic of outcomes in America, the non-rich, non-famous class has only a couple of choices. We can accept our fate and turn inward, trying to focus on self-improvement in small and humble ways. We can practice a form of idolatry toward the chosen class and look up to them, following them on social media and hoping at most to be able to brush near their greatness, to one day get a like from them or to touch the hem of their garments as they pass by. Or we can press on with a quixotic quest to join their ranks, ignoring the odds and focusing only on the outliers, the occasional examples of people who cross the divide from the bungled and the botched into the successful.

Maybe I've been the bad reader all along, and this guy the good reader of the world, even if he hasn't read the book he's holding. 

Of course, many people have no desire to be rich or famous, and they live happy lives ignoring celebrities, politicians, and magnates alike. They are probably the wisest, and I'd be happy to join their ranks, except that what I most want to do in life is write, and I don't consider my writing to be successful if nobody reads it. There is an aspect of needing public cooperation to my goals in life. I don't want to be rich, and I don't need to be famous in the sense of being a household word in every home. I'm sure most Americans don't know who George Saunders is, either. Enough do, though, that he can rest assured his ideas have propagated in the world and will survive him. That may not matter in a political sense, but I do think that once ideas escape into the world, they never really go away. Saunders will live forever. I don't have that assurance. 

I live inside my head most of the time, and my head is full of stories and ideas that seem to me to have value, so I can't rest until I've gotten them outside my head and onto paper in the best way I can. I'm on the other side of fifty now, and it's increasingly unlikely anyone is ever going to read what I've written in sufficient numbers for it to matter. 

I should keep pressing on anyway, assured that even if I don't succeed at my goal, the presence of those stories and thoughts that won't go away is evidence that tending to them is what I should be doing with my time. I should have faith that they're there for a reason. But the election of Trump--again--and the concurrent existence of so many do-nothing celebrities and hangers-on and influencers and social media personalities, all of whom get to share their vapid ideas with so many, makes me think that there just is no reason or order or meaning to anything. The self-evidentiary logic of America is right. I'm not succeeding because I'm not chosen for success. I lack talent or charm or charisma or good looks or the right blood in my veins. The success of someone who seems to me to be so undeserving is proof that I have misread the world entirely. And if I can't read the world right, why should anyone want to read what I've written?  

The failure of the remedy: "The Home Visit" by Morris Collins

In the 2020 O.Henry anthology, one of my favorite stories was "Lagomorph" by Alexander Macleod, which I wrote about here. It was the story about a man and the family pet rabbit, which he still keeps with him after an amicable divorce. The rabbit is both a comfort to him and a source of bewilderment. Rabbits are hard to read, and in a sense, the rabbit becomes something of a symbol of the mystery of life itself. But a comforting mystery that likes its ears scratched. 

"The Home Visit" by Morris Collins has some overlaps with "Lagomorph." (If you're a student stuck with writing a paper, a compare/contrast of these two stories would be a great idea that, once you've read the two stories, almost writes itself.) In "The Home Visit," we have a couple that seems like it's headed toward divorce, rather than already being there. Their cat, Derek, which was a symbol of the togetherness of the narrator and his wife Alex way back when they got him, is now on the brink of death. In fact, the couple really probably should have put him down already, but then they'd have to deal with their own problems. Perhaps to prepare for the moment when it can't be put off any longer, they go to get a new cat, one that will allow them to continue avoiding their problems by focusing on the cat, and that's where they meet Sarah. Sarah is an eccentric shelter manager who thinks animals are naturally attracted to her and who can't quite remember the made-up Buddhist bullshit wisdom she tries to quote. 

Sarah is judgmental of the narrator and Alex during her home visit, obviously relishing her power. She also get progressively weirder. After taking Alex up on the offer to get drunk, they all head off together to put Derek down at a lovely country location Sarah says she knows about. Sarah calls a friend to drive them there, and when they arrive, we find out that the lovely spot in the country is her ex-father-in-law's ski lodge. The narrator decides he wants to call it all off, partly because he figures that once the cat leaves, Alex won't be far behind. 

In a lot of ways, it's familiar territory. "Detailed dissection of a slowly deteriorating marriage" is maybe the most oft-trodden path of 21st-Century literary fiction. But the story doesn't feel worn-out, because in the hands of an observant and wry author, you can make just about anything feel new. Part of the observation, in fact, is the circular nature of relationships, which somehow makes the frequent appearance of this type of story seem justified: it has to keep reoccurring, because the weaknesses of the characters are so baked into most humans, this story can't help but show up over and over. As a matter of fact, we kind of get a hint of recurrence, since Sarah, who judges the couple for their weaknesses, is herself divorced. Alex once tried to make a predilection for hats a distraction from her real issues, and we later see Sarah's ex-father-in-law and a boy who is with him both wearing porkpie hats, perhaps their own version of this same idiosyncrasy. 

What are the human weaknesses the narrator and Alex suffer from that doom their hopes and happiness? Things like a refusal to move past the way things were and be decisive about the future (narrator), the inability to pinpoint one's own restlessness and sense of unhappiness (Alex), and most importantly the way both parts of a couple look to one another to fix what's wrong with them and get disappointed when it doesn't work (both narrator and Alex). When they can't fill up what's missing for one another, they get a cat. When the cat is about to die, they get another. It repeats within marriages, and it repeats across marriages.