Commemorating a sad day with a critical contribution to world culture

This morning, we had to put our beloved dog Manley down. He was well over sixteen, although we don't know his exact age, and after surpassing our expectations over and over for how long he would make it, it was finally time. I held him in my lap as he went, a devotion he honored by peeing all over me as he expired. I wouldn't have it any other way.

After I got home, I found myself thinking of the song "I Miss You" (보고 싶다) by Kim Bum Soo. It's from the Korean drama Stairway to Heaven (천국의 계단), which happens to be the first one I ever saw. Koreans use the expression "Korean Wave" (한류) to describe the insane rise in global popularity of Korean pop culture that started happening early this century and has only gotten bigger since. Their dramas were a big part of that wave, and this was one of the first mega successes. Kim Bum Soo's song was a big reason why.

I've had this song in my head for over twenty years, but I've never really been able to figure out the lyrics. The hardest thing about translating Korean is that the language often just doesn't state what the subject of the verb is. To use one example, without any context, the sentence "가"(which, believe it or not, is an entire sentence in one syllable), can mean: I go, he goes, she goes, we go. they go, (or "are/is going) for all of those). It can also be the imperative, "Go."

There are some really good translators out there in the world doing good work for free with Korean songs on YouTube. I figured I'd find a decent version of this song with no trouble, but all I saw was one trash translation after another. With a song this special and, without much exaggeration, of this much historical importance, having a bunch of crap English versions out there in the world just won't do. So I've worked with my most trusted Korean translation partner to produce this version below. Please feel free to refer to this if you ever feel sad and want to cry along to a song for a while.

Also, please give your dogs some love today. What kind of god loves us enough to give us something as perfect as a dog, but hates us enough to make them live such a short time?

This is a link to Kim Bum Soo singing the song in concert, along with a pretty good translation, far better than the terrible ones that are out there. I only quibble in a few places with my version, below.

 아무리 기다려도 난 못가

바보처럼 울고 있는 너의 곁에 

상처만 주는 나를 왜 모르고 

기다리니 떠나가란 말야

 

No matter how long you wait, I can't 

Be your side, where you're crying like a fool.

Why don't you know that I only hurt you?

You're waiting there, but I'm telling you to leave.

 

보고 싶다 보고 싶다 

이런 내가 미워질만큼 

울고 싶다 네게 무릎 꿇고 

모두 없던 일이 될 수 있다면

 

I miss you, I miss you 

So much I hate myself

I want to cry, come kneel in front of you

And make it like nothing ever happened.

미칠듯 사랑했던 기억이 

추억들이 너를 찾고 있지만

더 이상 사랑이란 변명에 

너를 가둘 수 없어

 

The memory of loving you like crazy,

The reminiscences are seeking you,

But I can't use love as an excuse

To keep you locked up anymore

 

이러면 안되지만 죽을만큼 보고 싶다

 

I shouldn't be like this, but I miss you so much I could die.

 

(Then the last three stanzas repeat, before it ends with the following line.)

 

죽을 만큼 잊고 싶다

I want to forget you so much I could die.

I guess I'm being fair to this mediocre Covid story: "The Honor of Your Presence" by Dave Eggers (O.Henry anthology)

It's taken me a while to post on the next entry in the 2024 Best Short Stories collection, mostly because I wasn't sure I was being fair to it. It's got a couple of triggers that tend to set me off. It's long--like either a really long short story or a kind of short novella. It's by a big name that even I recognize, although I don't make any effort to know who the big figures in fiction are. So in order to justify its length that it took up first in One Story and then in this anthology, it ought to be good, or else I'm going to assume it's there because of the pedigree of the author and not the strength of the story. I was pretty sure it was a kind of mediocre story about human connections with Covid-19 as a backdrop, but I wanted to sit on it a while to make sure it wasn't my own biases. After taking a little extra time to think it over, I'm pretty sure this is what it seemed to me. I don't like making these posts primarily reviews instead of focusing on analysis, but sometimes, a story just doesn't grab me as being worth the trouble of analysis, and then I kind of need to revert to a review to explain why. 

I don't usually spend time reading what other people have said about a story, but I really wanted to see if someone else could convince me I was wrong, and since the story was published as its own book (which should tell you something about how long it is for a short story), there are a lot of comments about it in Goodreads. I indulged a few. I think Dann LaGratta pretty much hit the nail on the head: "The synopsis promises a 'meditation on why humans congregate and celebrate,' but the vibe just feels very much like it was written during the Covid shutdown and just kind of thrown out there." LaGratta is now my favorite Goodreads commentator. He even abuses the word "just" like I tend to. 

That's the story in a nutshell. If this were a story by a writing student you were talking about in a workshop, you'd say it was pretty good, but as a long story that took a spot in one of the top journals and then also took a spot in one of the best anthologies, it better justify itself, and it doesn't. It's about Helen, who organizes events but doesn't like to go to them, and her wacky uncle Peter, a bon vivant who sometimes pretends to be more British than he is and who loves gatherings. He pushes her to put herself out there and she eventually meets someone who helps her remember that human connections can be good. 

Peter delivers the story's core line, commenting on the development humans are going through during the pandemic: "We're experimenting. We're emerging, and no one cares, and everyone understands." It's a kind of sweet line, and it does encapsulate one truth of the pandemic--although a truth that definitely ought to be balanced against other, darker ones. It's a truth that takes a long damn time to arrive at, though, and the characters aren't quite wacky and enjoyable enough that I was glad to be on the ride for so long. 

Look, Eggers is apparently a great guy who's done wonderful things to support writers, so this isn't about hate. But I wish journals and anthologies wouldn't give away the precious few spots they have available for what amounts to lifetime achievement awards. I'm sure One Story had a hundred better stories with more urgent truths to tell that it rejected because the writer was a nobody. 

Anyhow, since there's not much to dig into here, and not much of a layer below the one that appears to most readers, I'll move on to the next story. 

Therapy as art and art as therapy: "The Last Grownup" by Allegra Goodman (O.Henry Anthology)

For reasons I only sort of understand, the show Rick and Morty is very polarizing and sometimes written off as puerile, sexist, or misogynistic. One episode in particular seems to divide not only people who hate the show from those who love it, but even fans from other fans. It's the Pickle Rick episode. If you've never seen the show, it's about an older man named Rick who is so intelligent he is almost godlike in his ability to control the world. Rick travels the multiverse with his grandson Morty looking for adventure. Morty is a normal fourteen-year-old kid who struggles to understand his grandpa, while Rick struggles to maintain his sanity when he knows only too well how meaningless life in the multiverse is, where there are infinite versions of himself and everyone else. Rick uses alcohol to try to dull the pain, and he tries not to love those closest to him, because he thinks that will only increase the pain of life in the multiverse. 

In the Pickle Rick episode, Rick turns himself into a pickle. He says he does it to challenge himself, but in fact, he actually does it in order to avoid going to family therapy with his daughter and kids. Through a series of unlikely events, Rick ends up actually challenging himself much more than he meant to, but, because he's Rick, he survives. At the end of his adventures, he finds himself in the therapy session he meant to avoid with Dr. Wong, voiced by Susan Sarandon. 

In the meeting, Rick blurts out his disdain for therapy, and Dr. Wong responds with a monologue of her own. Rather than it them all out, I'll just paste the .jpeg of it that someone helpfully put on Reddit:

Dr. Wong's rejoinder (which Rick later will comment on, hypocritically, with the dismissal of "what a monologist!") should make it clear that the show isn't dismissing therapy. It gives both characters strong lines, and it's possible to side with either Rick's masters-of-their-own-destiny-don't-need-therapy beliefs or with Dr. Wong's sensible and non-threatened rebuttal. By giving Dr. Wong the last word, though, the weight does tip slightly toward her. (Also, Rick will voluntarily go to therapy in later episodes, and he will do so in a way that takes therapy at least somewhat seriously.) But given all Rick knows, even if we side with Dr. Wong, it's hard to escape the feeling that there is something to his approach to life. 

What the hell any of this has to do with "The Last Grownup"

When I analyze a story, I feel pretty free to use however much theory, close reading, criticism, and personal reaction make sense to me with each story, and in whatever combination. In the last year, I've been bringing in more and more theory, probably because I've been reading more about it. When I read "The Last Grownup," though, my reaction had everything to do with a series of thoughts about therapy and the meaning of life I've been playing with for years. 

The story is about a woman who is kind of controlling, in both good and bad ways. For most people, their good characteristics are intimately and inseparably linked to their weak ones. Assertive people don't get taken advantage of, but they sometimes offend others. Caring people make sure others are okay, but are sometimes too nosy. Creative people find novel solutions to problems, but they also often are a mess and they resist doing things that don't really require a creative approach. And so on. 

Debra in "The Last Grownup" is, depending on whether you're her justifying her attitudes or her ex-husband complaining about them, either a very responsible planner or a neurotic control freak. 

Admittedly, Debra tended toward the worst-case scenario. It made Richard crazy, because she was always, as he said, fast-forwarding. But she had foresight. She prepared. She planned meals and vacations, scheduled lessons, pre-registered for summer camp. Slow down, Richard would beg her. Cut back, get help! Of course, he never considered helping. When they fought he said, But you insist on doing everything.

This was true. No one had ever told Debra to stay home and do everything; that came from her. Nothing compelled her but her conscience and her common sense. 

I know some people like Debra. We all probably do. The Debras of the world are often underappreciated and derided, even by those who benefit from their borderline obsessive preparedness. At the outset, Debra's marriage has already been over for some time, but the official paperwork has just been filed and the divorce is now official. Her kids are on their first weekend visit with Dad since the official end, and she's lost in her house without them. The story will be about her figuring out what the good and bad parts of her personality are, where preparedness ends and obsessive, fast-forwarding, control freak begins. It will be her doing what therapy calls "the work." Therapy, in fact, makes at least one direct appearance in the story, as we listen in on part of one of Debra's meetings with her therapist. There is also an indirect appearance of therapy when Debra's sister, during what may be considered the muted climax, instructs Debra on a technique for expressing her anger. 

My feelings about therapy and the unexpected sexual politics of it

I've never been crazy about therapy. This is partly because people close to me in my life went to therapy, along with a psychiatrist who prescribed medicines, for a very long time without it seeming to do much good. It's also got something to do, though, with how in modernity therapy seems to have creeped into territory that was once occupied by religion or philosophy. For example, the whole world seems to treat suicide like it's primarily a question of mental health, but it's not. Therapy takes it for granted that suicide is bad. If I were the cynical type, I'd say that's in part because you can't bill dead people. Like any belief that takes something as an a priori principle, it's kind of boring to listen to its proponents try to explain why you should accept the belief in the same way. Therapy isn't discovery of fundamental truths, but it's often presented as having the same gravitas, like once you've started therapy, it's like you've gone on a quest for the meaning of life. You haven't. You're just on a quest to learn how to stop annoying people. 

After decades of trying to work to become intelligent, or even, in my more daring moments, to become an intellectual, I realize I'm no Rick Sanchez. I know full well that it's impossible to measure intelligence accurately, but let's pretend you could. In the types of intelligence that matter to being able to judge meaning-of-life questions, the math/science/language/reasoning types of intelligence, I'm maybe a 7 or an 8 out of ten. In effort, I'm a 9 or a 10 out of ten, so I make up for my quasi-mediocrity a bit, but all that work has done is make me realize how futile the work is without also being a ten of ten in natural ability. So maybe I don't have Rick Sanchez-level authority when I say I feel like life in this here multiverse presents us with a prima facie case that there is a lack of inherent order and meaning that's at the very least a bit disorienting, but I do think that I have cause to say that therapists might be side-stepping the real issues, and that they aren't the people with the most relevant things to say about the big questions in life.

I'm not quite a nihilist. Life may not have any inherent meaning, but it's kind of like living in a video game like Minecraft. There's no set order to how you "win" the game, but there are some rules in the sense that "if you do this, X will happen," and there are ways to play the game that are fun and ways to play that aren't fun. I try to play in ways that are fun. It so happens that those ways include not ruining the game for others, so I don't believe that all ethical decisions are equal. Even this borderline nihilism, of course, might raise an instinctive disdain among some intellectuals who feel they've graduated from it, that existential despair is a juvenile state of mind indicative of poseurs in the college coffee house, wearing berets and beating bongos and misquoting Sartre. They're like A.J. from The Sopranos, mispronouncing the name Nietzsche (which I admit I have to look up how to spell every time). I understand the resistance to poseur-y nihilism, but that doesn't mean that the class of people who think they're better than it have really made their case for something else. That includes therapists.

This near-nihilism of mine might not seem to have any reference to sexual politics, but it could, I suppose, be subject to a critique that it falls in the same vein of sexist dismissal of a feminist aesthetic that Nathaniel Hawthorne did when he dismissed popular female novelists of his time as a "damned mob of scribbling women." He meant, in part, that his work was serious but that the women to whom America was "wholly given over" to were not. Hawthorne's characters lived in a dark and brooding universe still haunted by the ghosts of Calvinism or the Book of Ecclesiastes, and there is a sense of the vanity of all things under the sun, whereas the novels he derided were about the business of living life and life lived well, without any need to justify it, and they put away the sense of vanity and fully turned their attention to the secular business of living in all its small and wonderful detail. 

This divide between "serious" fiction and frivolous has never gone away, and there has always been a bit of a sexual dimension to it, with serious white men writing ponderous stories about old men living alone in a cabin that appear in the New Yorker and women writing very talented prose about a seamstress that appear in Harper's. That's perhaps why early seasons of Rick and Morty, where Rick very much is into his "therapy is stupid" philosophy, earn the reputation for misogyny. 

There is also a political dimension to the divide: Hawthorne's preference for eternal meaning-of-life-type issues over life-in-front-of-your-face ones could be seen as devaluing the struggle to improve life on Earth for the masses, because what's the point of short life in this valley of tears, anyway? As Siggy in What About Bob?  put it when pushed to learn to dive off a dock, "With all the horror in the world, what does it matter?" 

Those general philosophical preferences applied to the story

Knowing full well that my inclination for the eternal over the secular and for theoretical concepts over paying attention to the practicalities of life run the risk of being either frivolous or sexist or politically retrograde, those are still my inclinations, and I take them with me to a story like "The Last Grownup." 

My instincts are to find that although I can recognize the quality of the craftsmanship and that the story is, in the terminology of the New Critics, a "well-wrought urn," it also doesn't resonate with me the way "The Castle of Rose Tellin" did a few stories back. (And if there's an argument that my predilections aren't totally sexist, maybe it's that I loved Kate DiCamillo's story, and that I recognize that to the extent there really is a distinction to be made between transcendental fiction and secular, women can write the former as well as men.) 

"The Last Grownup" lets us watch as Debra "puts in the work." Part of the work includes the early phases of "feeling her feelings," as the kids say, but because Debra is Debra, the self-pity and inaction of the opening pages doesn't last. She gets almost excited about working with her ex-husband and his current girlfriend in the process of teaming up to get the whole family onboard about Richard and Heather getting married and having a baby. Yes, it means some pain for her as she watches her husband move on, apparently doing well in his own process of working on himself, as he's lost weight and quit smoking. But it also gives her something practical to do, which she loves. She finds herself, as she often does, fast-forwarding, wishing that Richard and Heather could just hurry up and get this whole transition over with so they could be a few years down the road and already adjusted to the change. "Debra wished it had all happened already, so she didn't have to watch."

Although the narrator assures us that Debra is "good at therapy," meaning that she listens to her therapist, knows the language of therapy, and can recognize the places in her life where therapeutic concepts apply, it's also true that she's guilty of everything Richard says she is. In the first conversation we see Richard and Debra have after the divorce is final, Debra is jumping ahead to Richard proposing to Heather, when he's really just talking about himself making smell steps of improvement. Debra then spends much of the narrative writing the story of what will happen before it's happened. 

The conflict of the story develops when Debra, Richard, and Heather hatch a plan to tell the kids about the baby and their marriage. During their meeting to formulate the plan, Debra is a little pushy--not too much, but enough that Richard and Heather could plausibly say that the plan was Debra's, even though Heather seemed to instantly recognize the wisdom of it. They seem to all be on board, and Debra, happy to have a role to play, writes up a "family proposal," which is kind of like one of those well-meaning corporate values statements that companies immediately ignore when it becomes difficult. Before she can drop the document on the family, though, Richard and Heather depart from the plan and tell the kids everything all at once, instead of telling them first about the marriage and later about the child, as the adults had agreed to at their meeting. 

Mini-lit court

I could have made this post very different. It could all have been one of my literary court entries, and we could have examined whether Heather and Richard were in the wrong for deviating from the plan. Debra's sister Becca sure thinks they were. She thinks Debra ought to be angry about it, and she even gives Debra a little drill to do to work out her anger. She has Debra plant her feet, breathe in and tighten her whole body, including making fists. Then she is supposed to let it go. Which made me wonder: was this a drill where she was supposed to get in touch with her anger rather than justify it away, or to let her anger go? Because Becca seemed to be advocating the former, while her drill was more about the latter. 

In any case, if I were to have done a literary court back-and-forth argument, one strong case against Debra would have been her attitude at the end of her meeting with Richard and Heather, where she feels superior to them, the "last grownup on Earth," in contrast to their foolish optimism launching them into a difficult future. A full litigation of the case would probably have revealed that it wasn't clear whether Richard and Heather were in the wrong, and that, by extension, the failure of Richard and Heather's marriage wasn't entirely the fault of either party. 

The big theme

Debra's revelation seems to be that she needs to let things go more. She tells Max, the dog, that "sometimes you have to rest," and she recognizes that the things she's lost will eventually turn up, probably when she's stopped looking for them. It's a very complete ending, and yet I find myself wondering why I don't feel much. Maybe I'm just a sexist bro and that's why I like Rick and Morty. Maybe I'll never much love a story that doesn't have a white whale in it somewhere, along with a hapless villain-hero trying to kill it. 

As much as I say I value big, cosmic themes, most of the problems that occupy my mind in real life are practical ones. Right now, I've been spending most of the past four months trying to find a job to replace the one I gave up--for reasons I can't believe are wrong--and feeling more and more anxious as the time I'm looking lengthens. I curse myself for not having learned more practical skills in life, like how to do household repairs or knowing more about finance or having chosen HVAC repair trade school instead of an M.A. in English. 

I try to divorce real-life stuff from "what's life all about, anyway" questions, and to put more weight on the second, but there's an inevitable link between the two, because of a lot of the angst that's there is tied to real-world issues. I partly see the universe as potentially hostile because I doubt my own ability to take care of myself and my family in it. This fear would be lessened if I spent less time thinking deeply about short stories and more time learning to run a CNC lathe. Not worrying about what could go wrong and preparing to avoid it is a better way to actually keep the bad thing from happening, I get it.  And yet, I can never fully make myself commit enough to playing the game that I'm willing to quit spending time asking what the point of the game is, anyway, or how the game is put together or what kind of madman created it and put sentient beings inside of it. 

A good deal of story analysis can be done without emotion. One can read closely for meaning and apply theory to it. AI can probably do a (mostly shitty, for now) job of coming up with a thoughtful reading, even while it doesn't "think" about the meaning of the stories at all. But literature really has no point if it doesn't eventually cross a threshold from "meaning" to "meaning something to me." And when it comes to "meaning something to me," I find it hard to feel much about a story that's a "therapy" story, where the revelation has something to do with a small change that will bring a small improvement in one's happiness, provided one is willing to be content being a slightly less annoying parent to one's children and not ask inconvenient questions like why did I bring children into a universe in the first place when this universe is a place where it is possible that those children may be kidnapped and raped and tortured? 

I'm being unnecessarily difficult, I know. I have made personal changes before as a result of revelations from fiction, whether in a book or on the screen or on the stage. Those changes have usually, although not always, made my life easier or better. So I'm not saying every story should be Moby Dick. If it were, I'd probably eventually get sick of it and want some stories about the everyday relationship issues of a butcher in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am saying that there are stories about doing the work, and there are stories about why one should bother to do the work, and I feel myself more drawn to the latter. When I do arrive at those moments in my life where I feel convinced I should do the work--and those are probably the majority of moments in my life--I'm grateful for art that is focused on how to do it. But I will probably draw what benefit I can from the story and then throw it to the side ungratefully. In that sense, a story like 'The Last Grownup" is to me the way people like Debra often feel--full of forethought and wisdom and totally underappreciated. 

The thing about the narrator in "Marital Problems" by Robin Romm is that she doesn't have any

Organizing a story around the search for an item is both an ancient practice and also still a ubiquitous one in modern times. Jason looking for the Golden Fleece or Perseus seeking Medusa's head.  King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail. To the best of my ability to understand their plot, nearly every Avengers movie between 2012 and 2018. There's something very satisfying and centering about the quest for an item. Every book on writing will tell aspiring authors that if they want their audiences to care, they have to make their characters want something, and the quest for an item makes that something very easy to identify. 

Right from the first sentence of Robin Romm's "Marital Problems," we have a MacGuffin driving character action, a thing the narrator Paige and her husband Victor are looking for. It won't appear until the story's closing act, and when it appears, we'll realize, as one often does with MacGuffins, that it wasn't about the thing itself.

What they're looking for is a dead bird buried in the binoculars case of Victor's dead father. Their flibbertigibbet daughter has used the case to bury it, but being a flibbertigibbet, either doesn't remember where or simply won't say. Victor never knew his deadbeat dad, but recently, a half brother who found Victor through a DNA database brought him their father's binoculars so Victor could have something of their father. Their father, it turned out, was a birder, which is to say one of his favorite pastimes was looking for things. Which makes their MacGuffin sort of circular: they are looking for something that encases the thing you use to look for something. Add to this the fact that the daughter and her babysitter buried the bird while the parents were at an actual funeral, and you've got a good deal of circularity going on here.

You could say that there is yet another layer of circularity to the search, because Paige knows that for Victor, his missing father has made him feel like he's been missing something his whole life. So they're looking for the thing that represents the thing he's always been looking for. When Victor rages about wanting to beat up their terrible contractor Marco, Paige knows what he's really doing is expressing his "ancient, private rage" against his father. 

Along with the search for the MacGuffin, Marco's kitchen remodel forms a good deal of the tension in the story. Marco is terrible, but Portland is an expensive city, so they're kind of stuck with the only contractor who will do their kitchen for what they can afford. Paige is attracted to Marco, but seems in control of her attraction, enough to make fun of herself for having it. 

The narrator's own, private desire

Paige believes she knows about Marco's marriage and that it is unhappy, although he hasn't said so explicitly. She notes that although she can figure out what's going on in the marriages of other people, she's not sure what's going on in her own. In her marriage to Victor, there has been a loss of sexual desire that comes with age, and she's not really up to doing the work to get it back. In her imagination, Paige contrasts her own sex-less marriage with the life of her friend Danielle, whom she envies. Danielle is wealthier than them, and last night Danielle just left her daughter Madeline with Victor and Paige in order to have sex with her new boyfriend, sex Paige imagines in satisfying detail. So in addition to the physical object of desire in the binoculars case serving as a casket that the couple wants to find, Paige has her own mental object of desire, which is the life of her friend Danielle. 

This could be the makings of a tragedy, but instead, the story is a rom-com. Paige's willingness to follow her own fantasies and note the lack of reality in them allows her to survive the things that typically doom a marriage. She describes Marco as "Hansel all grown up, a fairy-tale boy," meaning she knows that her imagination of him isn't real. Paige also is conscious throughout of the things she has, even when envying the things she lacks. She knows her husband is still attractive and that other women envy her the way she envies Danielle. Paige recognizes that although Danielle's daughter has things their daughter Lucy lacks, Lucy is bright and quick-witted and much prettier than Madeline. 

Paige is just doing what all good wives and mothers do when she indulges her fantasies a bit.

The story's tension is released in a climax as satisfying as the sex Paige imagines

All three sources of tension--the missing binoculars case, the bum of a contractor, and Paige's envy of Danielle--come together in an explosive climax. Madeline and Danielle come to Paige's house to help locate the missing binoculars case. Marco is there, and it turns out, he was the guy Danielle had sex with the night before. Victor, fed up with Marco, spills the beans about Marco being married, and Marco, fed up with Victor making him actually do what he was paid to do, punches Victor. At the same time, the girls show up with the bird, which turns out to have just been the dead bird. There never was a binoculars case. 

The climax is not the fulfillment of fantasies, but their dissolution. There never was a binoculars case. The father wasn't worth getting to know. Marco isn't a god with muscles carved of soap. Daniele's life isn't perfect. Victor has reasserted his position as a good partner, because he uses Marco's sudden outburst to threaten to call the police, thereby extracting promises from him to finish the kitchen at last. In the story's final lines, Paige considers the dead bird. It's some common backyard bird, one so "close at hand, you wouldn't need binoculars to find it." It's one of the most common endings to a MacGuffin story, the ending that what you were looking for was there all along, but it manages to do it without being in the least bit trite. 

In reality, there was never a moment in the story when Paige didn't know she had what she wanted. This isn't the familiar story of the young person who dreams of going off to find adventure only to realize adventure was right under their nose the whole time, but more of a person who suspected her life was good in spite of its growing weight and difficulty, who finds at the end that her suspicions were correct. 

My blogging pal Karen Carlson jokes sometimes about how "sensitive portrayal of a marriage falling apart" is a lit fic cliché. A story called "Marital Problems" could have become that story, but it isn't. It's about how to make a marriage survive its issues, not a meditation on how it falls apart. That's because it's a comedy, not a tragedy. Ultimately, it's Paige's own self-effacing sense of humor that helps her marriage to survive. She refuses to take her own feelings too seriously, contrasting them with people like Daniele, "so quick to feel their feelings, as if they curate and file them carefully so that whenever they think a thought, they can find the corresponding emotion." We often speak as though being in close touch with one's feelings is emotionally healthy, but it's Paige's own ironic distance from hers that helps her to arrive at her recognition of the good thing she has going.  

Nancy Drew learns the value of abstract art: "Rain" by Colin Barrett (O.Henry Anthology)

Most literary theory is painful to read, but there's one story from the discipline that is actually kind of a good yarn. Stanley Fish was teaching a class on mystic poetry, and he came in to the classroom one day and found five names of linguists still written on the board from the previous lecture. The names were Jacobs, Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, and Hayes. Instead of erasing the names, he presented the names to his students as though they constituted another mystical religious poem for them to study. The class wasted no time coming up with highly original interpretations that made the five names seem like what Fish had told them it was. Jacobs became Jacob from the Old Testament, Rosenbaum and Levin were some kind of indicator of the Jewish people, and Thorne pointed to the crown of thorns Christ wore during his crucifixion. Somehow, it all fit together. Fish's point was that interpretive communities tend to read things according to the standards of their community. If they are looking for a mystic poem, they'll find one. 

I've recalled this anecdote because in reading "Rain" by Colin Barrett, it's possible someone might accuse me of inventing meaning in a particular way because I'm a literary blogger who is committed to finding just that kind of meaning in stories, not because the meaning is really there. Of course, I run that risk with every story, as some people are inclined to resist readings that find any kind of meaning that isn't overt, but it's particularly true with this story, because the story itself is so simple, it's hard at first to see that there is anything going on other than two sisters spending an ordinary day in their non-traditional Irish family. (In this case, not meaning that they're of Irish ancestry, but that the story is actually set in Ireland.) 

The surface story

Scully and Charlie are sixteen and thirteen. They are schlepping ice and snacks back from the store for their family when they see a note pinned to an old public phone booth: "IF ASHA CALLS TELL HER TO GO HOME." 

This isn't the first time Scully has seen this note, and she's been trying to work out what the details behind it are. She shows an almost Sherlock Holmes-level of attention to detail. It's not warm-hearted, like a parent would write if their child were missing. And it says "go home," not "come home." Someone, Scully realizes, knows enough about Asha to know she might call this pay phone, but not enough to know where Asha is. 

Because the story is from Scully's point of view but not her first-person narration, it's hard to say for certain what details we get are hers and which are the narrator interpreting through her senses.  Some perceptions are clearly labeled as hers, but some aren't, but we can assume that at least some of the highly perceptive account of what Scully sees and senses is her own, leading us to understand that Scully, like other literary detectives, tries to understand her world through keen observation. 

If someone is going to accuse me of reading too much meaning into this story, I can at least say that the story invites creative meanings by having Scully convinced throughout that there is an answer to the riddle of the note, and the answer is hiding in plain sight if only she and Charlie can puzzle it out. If that's not an invitation to look for mysteries hiding in plain sight of the story, I don't know what is. 

Scully is on the case, although it's not quite an X-file.

Looking a little closer, the note isn't the only place where meaning is hiding just below the surface. The title of the story is "Rain," and at the outset, it looks like this is referring to real rain, because the girls have come out from the shop just after a rain and all the trees are wet. But a little later on, we find that the boyfriend of their mother is nicknamed Rain, because he reminded their mother of German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Rain himself seems to believe that dreams can signify something more than they seem to, because he interprets a dream about losing one's teeth to concerns about money. The text is inviting the reader to go beyond surface level, to investigate. 

Rain and their mother Mel seem to be long-term romantic partners who live together. They're not the only people at the house. Victor, who is Rain's friend at the psychiatric hospital where they are security guards, is there. So is Mel's younger sister Natalie and Natalie's two-year-old rambunctious daughter Tessa. It's a pretty full house, and it's obvious that on days when everyone is off work, this gathering of everyone in the home is pretty normal. According to the routine, Rain and Victor will eventually go off to the pub while Mel, Natalie and the girls stay at home, watch movies, and drink Coke and eat digestives (sort of like cookies). 

The economy of the story, which gives us very little information about each character, is violated when we learn about the artistic temperaments of Mel and Rain. This is the only part of the story that is expansive in its explanations. Both are apparently artist enough to be considered artists by other people, although Rain doesn't seem to keep it up anymore. Mel does "realistic" art where the things she draws look like the things she sees. In fact, Scully is taken aback by how realistic they are, and she wonders if anyone can make art of greater verisimilitude than her mother can. Rain, on the other hand, does abstract art:

"Rain had painted abstracts, near identical pictures featuring dense, somber swabs of muted color that looked depressing and dreary, like pictures of migraines or terrible weather. Mel's pictures were charcoal and pencil sketches of body parts; sections of torsos, faces with precisely smudged mouths and wary, animate eyes, disembodied hands and feet flexing and gesturing in white space."

Scully is glad that Rain has given up art so she doesn't have to see his work anymore. It's clear she values her mother's work over Rain's, because it looks like the thing it's of. Her work is more difficult, she feels. She understand that in art, there's more to it than just being accurate, and she knows that Rain's work was more valued by people who knew about art than Mel's, but she can't help thinking Mel is more talented. Her feelings about his art mirror those she has for him: she doesn't hate Rain, but she doesn't love him and isn't sure she actually likes him.

And now we turn Thorne into a crown of thorns

It's notable that the pictures Mel draws have "wary" eyes and disembodied hands and feet. It's like she's drawing crime scenes. Perhaps Mel has endured some trauma, or maybe she just shares her daughter's interest in solving mysteries. If so, Mel seems to approach the mysterious the same way as her daughter: by using reason and close observation of what is there. Her work values precision over artistic feeling and exaggeration. Rain's doesn't. Rain's work emphasizes feeling.

And that's the conflict, such as it is, in the story. It's not set up to be a high-tension conflict. In fact, Scully realizes at last, Rain, for all his faults, seems to know how to allow for choices to be made in ways that avoid conflict. He knows that Scully must have been wanting to go out and see what the pub is all about. He's willing to take her along, but that would mean Scully making a decision to change the status quo, choosing a night out over staying in with her mother and family. It would mean a decisive step toward growing up. Rain rigs this choice for her, though, by asking if both Charlie and Scully want to come along. He knows Charlie will want to, but only if Scully does, so Scully can say yes while making it look like she's doing it to be considerate of her sister. Nobody is making decisions in defiance of any established order; they're all just being considerate of others. 

Rain's intuitive approach has advantages Mel and Scully's logical and deductive one doesn't. There's no great storm in this story that leads to a thundering climax, only a soft rain that gives way to growth afterwards. The moment when things seem like they might erupt, when Rain declares, "Enough of this...Hand me my sword, Victor," isn't Rain about to explode. His "sword," it turns out, is a knife on his key chain. He's breaking up ice with it. It's a tool to get things unstuck, and it's attached to keys, the universal metaphor for something that solves a problem. This moment is the moment when Rain is going to solve a problem that nobody even knows is a problem yet. 

The conflict of the story has passed, and nobody even realized it was a conflict, including the reader. It was there, though, hiding in plain sight, and it was Rain who cracked the case. Just like the rain at the outset of the story, that passed while the girls were inside and didn't even know it was coming, this Rain has quietly descended without anyone else knowing. 

Rain has solved one problem before it became a problem, but by story's end, nobody has cracked the case of the missing girl on the phone booth. Rain doesn't even know anyone named Asha. Perhaps Rain, by teaching Scully about a different way of approaching problems, has given her a key to unlock it, or, if not this particular problem, other problems in her life. Scully notes that you can only learn tricks like this from Rain about how to get what you want but disguise it if you "paid attention." She is an expert at paying attention, and perhaps Rain has noticed this, too, which is why he knows he can communicate with her in a coded language. The text of "Rain" deals with its reader in a similar manner, locking its mysteries up in a way that only a reader who pays attention can unlock. 

Everything out there is dangerous: "The Castle of Rose Tellin" by Kate DiCamillo

There is a bit of a joke in literary theory that with a certain brand of New Criticism, all poems tend to be about poetry. If I say that at least part of what "The Castle of Rose Tellin" by Kate DiCamillo is about is the forging of the psyche of a young writer, I hope it won't be seen as glib, nor will it cause readers to groan and think the story unoriginal. Readers shouldn't come away thinking, "Oh, writing about writing, how novel." The story is about a lot more than that. It's about the most important thing there is to write about, which is dealing with the disorienting sense of life in the universe, a sense that comes upon children at about the age of Pen during the course of events in the story. 

I remember when it happened to me. I was about six, the same age as Pen in the story, and I was coming in from recess at school. Like most kids, I didn't want to come in, and my mind wandered. Why wasn't life all recess? Why did it have to consist of things people didn't like? In fact, why was it mostly occupied with disagreeable things one had to do in order to get to the few good ones? Before we even began to file inside, I had someone gotten to the question of why life even exists, how weird just being somewhere was, and my head was swimming, and I don't think I've ever really recovered from that. 

Pen is equally thrown off balance in the story. How does she cope?

Contradictory threats

Pen's brother Thomas, who is three years older and three years more advanced in developing neuroses, tells her that "everything out there is dangerous."  Pen has already started to notice the same thing, although her fear manifests itself more as nausea than as paranoia. One characteristic of Pen's fears is that they are coming at her from two different sides. During the car ride to the family vacation in Sanibel, she feels claustrophobic. But she's also recently experienced a nearly opposite fear. Her mother took her to the circus, and when the clowns did their clown car bit, she was terrified. Her brother taught her the notion of "infinity" to describe the endless clowns, and she hasn't been right since. Infinity gives her an agoraphobia-like sense, that there are no borders and no limits, while claustrophobia gives her a fear of being too hemmed-in. She is suddenly aware of living in a universe in which both too little order and too much order are threats.

There are other indicators of similar fears. She is unnerved by the glass dining room table the family eats on during vacation, because she can see her feet below it. With the table she's used to, there is a visual limit that carves the world up into discrete chunks. The glass table removes those limits, and she feels disoriented. However, she also feels too hemmed in by the boxing gloves her father makes her wear at night to keep from biting her fingers. She worries that her hands won't be inside them anymore. So she worries when she can see her feet, but also when she can't see her hands. She's getting hit from both sides.

About those gloves

The gloves are the central image of the story. The father has decreed that Pen wear them in order to keep from messing up the shape of her mouth by sucking on her fingers in her sleep. The gloves are restricting, but they also have on them a kangaroo. This kangaroo is wearing boxing glovers with a kangaroo on them, which in turn has another kangaroo with boxing gloves. Pen imagines this repeating itself on into infinity, which then makes her woozy again, although she muses that an infinity of kangaroos isn't as terrifying as an infinity of clowns. (I think most people would agree.)

What Pen is experiencing is mise-en-abyme, "placed into the abyss" a technique in which a painting places itself inside itself, and then on and on. The Baroque movement in art was especially interested in this technique, perhaps because it was a time in intellectual history when the world seemed particularly unsettling. The Reformation had blown apart centuries of relative intellectual stability, and the introduction of novelties like calculus and the Scientific Revolution, which happened while the Baroque movement was already in progress, helped make the world seem even stranger, and perhaps much larger, in a dizzying way. 

It's appropriate that it was the father who forced the gloves upon Pen. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the father is the symbol of law in the form of language and cultural norms. The father impedes upon childlike imagination to bring structure. This is exactly what Pen's father does. He is, in fact, a literal lawgiver, because he is a judge. Pen calls him the "voice of reason and judgement." 

The law can be harsh, because it imposes penalties, but law always claims these penalties are for our own good. Without them, there would be anarchy, and so rules and discipline are a way of holding back one kind of threat, the one associated with infinity and too much freedom. The law is supposed to be like boxing gloves, something that is used to hurt, but not hurt as much. Of course, as soon as Pen introduces the idea of something not "hurting that much," she recalls how her father one pulled Thomas up by the hair in order to not "hurt him that much," but Thomas can only recall how much it hurt.

If too much freedom, represented in the story by Thomas and his willingness to invent facts and believe too many things, is one kind of danger, then too much law, represented in the story by the father, is another. Thomas worries that everything "out there" is dangerous, but the danger in their home is just as great. The father, most people would agree, is just abusive. He's wound up and on edge and Thomas, with his flights of fancy, drives him crazy and makes him violent. Pen is his favorite, but she suffers just as much from being near the violence. The mother chides the father, but she doesn't outright defy the law. In fact, she has submitted to it in many forms, including giving up her former dancing career. 

Pen's insight 

The family vacation gets more and more out of control as Thomas is determined to escape because he thinks everything is out to get him. Eventually, the car is wrecked and Dad is in a mental institution with a nervous breakdown. Unlimited imagination and rigid law have managed to nearly destroy one another, leaving Pen to try to figure out how to navigate her way between the two. It doesn't help that so many threats can't be seen, like the invisible flies that bite or the trap door from which the clowns emerge.

Pen's moment of insight comes on the beach after the father has gone to the mental institution. She is building a sand castle, and she looks around at all the shells. The shells are so numerous, they constitute a virtual infinity of shells, but instead of being made nauseous or unnerved by the infinity, she limits herself to only selecting a few of the shells to adorn her castle. She has used limitations to tame infinity, but she is not absolute in her application of the law, because she is still letting her imagination work on the construction of the castle. She builds a secret room beneath the castle to hide from the "Child Catcher," because "kids were against the law." If law helps her to control the dizzying effects of the infinite space of the universe and imagination, then imagination also allows her to fight back against the tyranny of law.

This is what writers and artists of all kinds do. They use form, like a sand castle, to shape reality and bring order to chaos, but they do not become such slaves to form that they are handcuffed by it. If her name, Pen, wasn't an indicator that she is a writer--whatever justification her father gives for naming her Penelope--then her final transformation is.

Pen also performs one other job of a writer: she is the memory for others. Her brother is unable to remember key points about the trip, but "Pen remembers it all."  He does remember the child catcher, meaning Pen's story she has created has helped him to survive the ordeal, too. 

I'm an idiot

I'm terrible with names in general. I knew my wife for months before I could remember her name. There have been times I've blogged about a writer and not realized I have blogged about them before. Because this story deals with what, to my mind, is the most important thing a writer can write about, I was interested in seeing if there was something more I could read by DiCamillo. Um, yes. She's the author of Because of Winn Dixie and several other hugely successful novels. 

I don't actually think my lack of knowledge of the landscape of contemporary authors hurts my ability to analyze fiction much. You can read a story for what's there without having any idea who wrote it most of the time. It was, however, an experience that Pen might have found vertigo-inducing to go from the minute details of a task like closely reading the text of this one story to realizing the person who wrote it is a really big deal. 

Intimacy on top: "My Good Friend" by Juliana Leite (O.Henry Anthology)

One of the most-read posts I've ever written was the one about whether the relationship between Frodo and Sam Gamgee included homoerotic elements. My conclusion was that the most interesting reading of their story is that in their extraordinary intimacy, trust, and love for one another, they do erase somewhat the border between friendship and romantic love, but that ultimately, their love isn't best understood as a lasting romantic one. 

The two unnamed characters in Juliana Leite's "My Good Friend" share a similarly hard-to-pin-down relationship, much to the consternation of the children of the narrator's good friend. (From here on, I will use "N" for narrator and "GF" for her good friend, as both are unnamed throughout the story.) The children whisper among themselves about the true nature of the relationship between their father and N, whose friendship predates their own existence, or even the marriage of their parents. N insists they have it wrong, and they are ingrates for thinking what they think and putting the word "friendship" in air quotes, but is she herself wrong or in denial about what her relationship to GF really is? Do the children see what she refuses to see?

There is no denying that N and GF share an exceptional level of intimacy. N comes to GF's house often for dinner, where they talk about loneliness and living without their deceased spouses. N is careful to wear perfume when she arrives and bring a carefully though-out desert; GF, in turn, shows how much he cares by cleaning his house with Pine Sol and making food she likes. 

N and GF's friendship continued on through their marriages to other people. N apparently adored GF's wife, Suzy, and Suzy seems to have returned at least some of the affection, possibly because it is impossible not to be charmed by someone who looks up to you so much: "Suzy bought (a tablecloth) and I copied her and bought another just like it but a little smaller. Suzy knew how to take care of a home, and when she was with me she would often slow down, so I could imitate her without rushing." Suzy interpreted N's imitation as flattery. 

N's imitation of Suzy didn't end with buying the same housewares. Because they got married within a few months of one another, they actually shared a wedding dress, Suzy wearing it first and N a few months later, with only a change of ribbon to make it somewhat her own. N even grew out her hair before her wedding because Suzy recommended it, and N trusted Suzy's sense of style: "I went along with my friend, because Suzy knew how to primp and preen like a lady, how to make those magnificent curls, wear perfumed handkerchiefs, etc." On the day of the story, N is still meticulous about applying perfume to her scarf before visiting GF. 

N describes her close relationship to GF as "sultry and velvety at times, but...also dull and tightly drawn, like a chicken wire fence." The children notice more of the "sultry and velvety" aspect of their relationship. Moreover, the children have picked up on how the relationship between N and GF has always, in N's words managed to "pour out of everything and embraced all the people we chose along the way." That is, their bond is so profound, it spills over to everyone else in their lives, much the way a loving couple's love spills over into their children. By the end of Suzy's life, Suzy is so close to both GF and N that they are jointly caring for her in her dying days. They bathe her together, because Suzy wants it that way, and N thinks it natural because they have both "known her naked body for a long time," both "seen that beloved body in all its phases." 

In the most striking image of the story, N describes herself and GF in a three-way union with Suzy as she lays dying: "My good friend and I would spoon Suzy, with her in the middle. We held hands, the three of us, and then we went to sleep. The children would tiptoe into the bedroom to take a closer look at those intertwined fingers, at our three hands joined at Suzy's hip. They suspected that there, hidden between our fingers, were all sorts of old things, things they'd only now realized and that would become too visible if they didn't do something to stop it." N believes that the children dislike seeing GF and N's "intimacy on top of her," but because their intimacy has a way of spilling out on top of everything, it can't help but do this.  

The children apparently believe that either their father and N always were in love with each other behind their backs, or that there was some type of swinging arrangement between their parents and their neighbors, N and her unnamed husband. Is there any chance that N is an unreliable narrator and the kids might be on to something? 

Do the kids know something about N that she doesn't want to admit to herself?

N's narrative style

Asking if N is an unreliable narrator raises a question: just what kind of narration are we reading? It's fairly similar to a diary or journal format. It's full of minor details of things, like which pastry shop she went to before her meeting with GF, how that shop differs from others, and the fact that she seems to have shrunk based on her difficulty reaching things on the shelf there. There are frequent digressions into her feelings on matters both great and small, much as one would do if the writing were only for one's own benefit. Twice, N refers to something she wrote earlier that isn't in the story we have in front of us, perhaps indicating that we are only reading a portion of her diary, the one for the day she goes to see GF for the first time after his injury. We know N keeps a diary, because she tells us that Raul once read nearly all of hers. Is that what we're reading?

If so, there are passages that complicate this possibility. Very early on she says there is "nothing new to report" about her roof tiles, the delivery of which have been delayed. If this were a diary, to whom would she be reporting? This might be simply dismissed as an idiosyncrasy of style in which she is reporting to her future self going back and reading her diary, but there are other passages that complicate this reading. At one point, when she is explaining how she views her relationship with GF, she says that "you would be wrong to imagine that" her conversations with GF were sad or melancholy. It's hard to argue that N would have addressed herself as "you" and then also instructed herself on how not to be mistaken in interpreting her own thoughts. The story seems to have an intended audience, and I don't think the "you" is the "royal you" of an author directly addressing us, the readers of the story in a literary journal or anthology. 

We already know that Raul read her diary. When he did, he complained to N that it was too full of her "innermost thoughts" and he asked her to put some action in it. We also know that N feels some animosity toward GF's children for the way they suspect her, although she assures them that she "loves them as always." Raul seems to get an especially large amount of her disdain. He ruined GF's morning ritual of reading the newspaper by telling him all the news before he got to it. Raul seems to be especially unaware of a rule N lives by, which is that some things are too precious to ruin by talking about them too directly. It's one reason GF remains unnamed throughout; he's too precious to her to name. Is it possible that what we are reading is N's diary, but her diary with the expectation that Raul will read it? That he will read it and share its contents with his siblings? Is it possible that this story is her "accidentally" shared narrative that will explain her relationship with GF to his children? After all, N confessed to a similar feeling with a book she was reading as Raul has with her diary--that it was too slow. Maybe she's decided to really give them something to talk about. 

Remains of the Day or something else?

There's one problem with trying to read the narrative as an accidentally-on-purpose shared diary entry: when the moment comes for GF to ask N to live with her, she says no, meaning there may not be anything for her to explain to the children. When GF asks her to move in, N feels like he has somehow violated the terms of their relationship. It isn't that he's looking at her as a replacement for Suzy. N is certain that this is the first day since his accident when his head has been clear enough he isn't confusing her for Suzy. When he asks her to move in, he first looks at a photo of his wife, and then he looks at her, indicating he knows the difference. She doesn't need to feel guilty that she's taking advantage of his senility to move in, but she still says no. Why?

Is this a Remains of the Day scenario, where she is missing out on a last chance for love? Is she denying that what she feels for GF might also encompass romantic love? Or is she right to try to keep their relationship where it has always been?

In spite of her initial rejection of the proposal, there's a hint that the relationship might be about to take on another element, although N needs a minute to warm to the idea. She looks at the photo of Suzy, and she thinks that "between the three of us there was a feeling of shared love, and not that same far-off love, our usual one." 

One of the kids interrupts this thought by calling GF, and the moment is lost, at least for that day. However, the story ends, as it began, by N talking about her long-delayed roof tiles. At the beginning, the clerk told her "all things in good time," and he was talking about his mother finding a late-life romance, but he also was referring to the roof tiles. The roof tiles are full of double meanings, then, and so they are at the story's end, too. At the end of the story, N intends to call back to find out about her tiles. She makes a special note about how long she's been waiting for the tiles, because she tends to forget for long she's been waiting for something after a good night's sleep. The double meaning, of course, is that she's been waiting on both tiles and for her relationship with GF to become something more, even if the something more isn't exactly romance and isn't something she can name. Or even wants to name.

When she calls the clerk, she intends to both find out about the tiles and also what movie the clerk's mother went with her boyfriend to see. Her interest in the woman's winter romance strongly suggests that she is also thinking about a change in her relationship with GF. 

"My Good Friend" is about how deep and meaningful and intimate and beautiful a relationship can sometimes become when nobody is concerned about what to call it. N's free-flowing narrative style reveals her free-flowing philosophy of life, where she takes what comes and rolls with it, without feeling the need to push things in certain ways according to her preconceived notions. The only word N uses to describe her feeling is love, but of course, love can encompass a lot of things. We love our kids, our pets, our spouses, our parents, our friends, our country, and Diet Pepsi, all in different ways. That means calling it "love" doesn't really pin it down to any one thing. The love between N and GF always included more than one kind of love, and if it is changing at story's end, it's only a continuation of the love they have always shared, a love so full it overflowed and included those around them. It will continue to not be named, though, because things that N values are not for naming. 

Interlude: Why "Our Share of Night" by Mariana Enriquez is not pulp and is worth your serious consideration

I'm going to get back to analyzing literature for this blog. I intend to start back soon, picking up where I left off with going through the Best Short Stories 2024, a.k.a. the O.Henry anthology. I stopped in February/March, when I was contemplating giving up the job I've had most of my adult life and stumbling blindly through finding something new. I'm still in the stumbling blind stage, as I haven't managed to find a new job yet, but I'm also a lot happier than I was four months ago. Not having a security clearance and all the bullshit that goes with it has been very liberating. I went to Canada last week, and I didn't have to ask for permission to do it. If my unemployment goes on much longer, this euphoria won't last, but for now, I feel content. Who knows what effect this might have on how I look at literature? Not being miserable might make me suck. I often think that most of what I've accomplished in my life has been motivated by spite. Without it, will I be like Prince Zuko without rage? 

Before I get back into the O.Henry stories, I wanted to whip out a quick post talking about a book I spent most of June reading. It's Our Share of Night (Nuestra Parte de Noche) by Mariana Enriquez. This will be a pretty light commentary compared to what I usually do, but I thought there were a few quick points worth making.

Background: the internet still sucks, and why it took me so long to read

I've been looking for jobs that involve using Spanish. Korean isn't terribly useful around here, but Spanish isn't. While I look, I'm also doing some volunteer work teaching English to Spanish-speaking immigrants. I thought I'd read a novel in Spanish to reinforce the other refresher work I've been doing. To choose a novel to read, I Googled this phrase:

"Las mejores novelas literarias de México de los 2020"

I discovered you had to specify "novelas literarias" because if you didn't, Google would think you meant a telenovela and give you information about that. The reason I asked for Mexican novels is because that's the main kind of Spanish of the people I work with. Well, actually, most are from Central America, but their Spanish is heavily influenced by Mexican Spanish, and I figured I'd have an easier time finding Mexican novels than Central American ones, so that's what I looked for. 

At this point, AI hallucinated and told me that Nuestra Parte de Noche was a highly regarded Mexican novel of the 2020s. It is, in fact, neither Mexican nor from the 2020s. It's an Argentinian novel--something you can't miss from very early on--and it's from 2019. Not realizing this, I bought the book for Kindle and started reading it and was a few pages in before I realized what I had bought. For some reason, I decided to keep going. 

Argentinian Spanish is its own beast, something the characters in the book allude to. It has a second person singular form that doesn't exist anywhere else, and it took me a while to get used to it. That's partly why it took me so long to read. Also, I was spending a lot of time applying for jobs and feeling stressed about it. 

I don't usually write about literature that everyone else has read, because I like to fill niches that aren't already filled. You can easily go find dozens of decent analyses of this book online. All I'll offer here is a quick bit of apologia for the book to anyone who might have read it and wondered why everyone had such high praise for it when it could be mistaken for trash.

Why it's not sensationalist pulp

You might read this novel and be tempted to think it's just a really long pulp horror novel. At least one of the villains, Mercedes, is borderline cartoonish in her evil. There is also a lot of sex. Like, a lot of it. Not really a whole lot of sexual scenes in detail, but just a lot of sex happening casually. Hetero sex, homo sex, drugged-up sex, orgiastic sex, it's all there. Past this cursory consideration of the novel's content, though, there's a profound meditation on the loss that comes from political calamity. 

The novel has countless people who are kidnapped and then used in ritual killings as part of a cult, or they are raised to become monsters like the "imbunche." This all takes place while in the background, Argentina lapses into a period of political tyranny where tens of thousands of people disappeared, taken by the government to languish in prisons, to be tortured, or to be killed. The period of the novel includes time before and after the military dictatorship, but because that is the period the novel begins in, it has more weight than the others. 

It's impossible to write a novel that really gets at the heart of what it means for an entire generation of a country to be impacted by the trauma of having loved ones just go missing and never reappear. This novel comes close, though, and it does it by incorporating the magical and the occult and also through its epic scale. 

There are two types of disappearances that take place in the novel. One is when the leaders of the cult kidnap people whom they suspect nobody will miss, either to sacrifice them to the darkness in cults or to raise them in cages to become monsters. The second type happens when the main characters discover an alternate dimension, one in which the darkness seems to live and to which the living sometimes find openings. 

Having the cult be "real," meaning its dark god they revere can actually wound or even take the lives of those in its presence, has implications for the real-world dictatorship whose presence is always in the novel's background but never fully revealed. It has a different kind of effect than it would if, say, the members of the cult were insane and sacrificing people to a god who isn't real. That effect is to weaken the dictatorship, to rob it of its power and majesty and its self-importance. The dictatorship isn't the real power in the world of the story; they're just one more government of many, all of which are manipulated by the members of the cult. Moreover, the power of all governments is dwarfed by that of the dark god they unknowingly serve, a power that is at times in the novel equated with nature. The novel manages, therefore, to both take seriously the trauma of having had a loved one disappear but also to remove the feeling of dread seriousness with which a dictatorship much clothe itself in order to succeed. 

Even the epic scale of the novel helps in this process of denying the military dictatorship this feeling of grandeur and self-importance. In the scope of history, the dictatorship was just a blip on the radar. 

However, that blip continues to have devastating psychological consequences for those who lost someone to the dictatorship. Throughout all of the horrors of the novel, the story manages to carve out space for real pathos in its human characters living with the guilt and pain of having had a loved one just disappear. The chapter "The Problem with Empty Houses, Buenos Aires 1985-1986" is the best part of the novel, and it builds with slow and perfect timing to the loss that defines one of the central characters of the book. Themes dealing with generational trauma are perhaps a bit overdone these days, but "Our Share of Night" manages to reanimate these themes with new feeling precisely by decentering human psychological trauma at points in the novel. By making human loss and the whirling currents that spin out from it small in comparison with the cosmic powers that cause that loss, we are able to feel what it is that makes human experience of loss so painful: our rediscovery of how nearly complete our lack of power is. This lack of power comes in two varieties: the lack of political power among the weak in comparison to authority, but also the lack of power of all humans before forces greater than us all.

This second type of weakness has two sides to it, and the other edge of the sword means that the very political authorities who imagine they are strong when they manage, for a time, to wield that power, will end up feeling the sting of that reverse side when the power inevitably turns against them. In a sense, the novel is a more powerful dismissal of political power than Shelley's "Ozymandias," because for Enriquez's overturned cruel tyrants, there isn't even a "colossal wreck" remaining as testament to a fallen power. There is only the disappearance into the nothingness of history of those who once made others disappear. 

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.