Stuck in this cage of anxieties

Here were the contents of his wandering consciousness: Was this a new bedspread? Was this abstract painting the same in every room of the hotel? How did the artist feel about a great, big deal to mass-produce his ugly painting for the Radisson corporation? Did it make him feel more like an artist or less? If it was in every room here, did it also mean it was in every Radisson? Did they ever clean this room? Had anyone ever died in it? How many other people had fucked amid these pleasant neutrals? How long had he been here already? Was he always here? Did he always exist in this room?

And: Was his career over?

And: Was his wife going to leave him?

And: Why, at forty-two, was he still stuck in this cage of anxieties that he was hoping, by now, would have begun to mellow?

There were too many words forming images in his head. There were too many concerns. My god, how many drugs do you have to take to become the canine part of yourself: wordless, directionless, worry-free — to submit to just feeling, just instinct, just the very moment?

Long-Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, is funny. It's also tragic. It's about a kidnapping, but it's not really about the kidnapping. It's about all the money, but it's not really about the money. Reviews tend toward the lacklustre, focusing on the unlikability of the book's characters, their whiny dramas of privilege and entitlement.

Inspired by a real-life kidnapping of a wealthy Long Island businessman, the novel imagines the trauma and fallout experienced by the victim, his mother, his wife, his two young sons, his as-yet unborn daughter, and pretty much everyone in their wake.

"This happened to your body. This did not happen to you. Don't let it in." 

The novel's current day is a few decades after the kidnapping. The perspective shifts from one child to another: middle child Beamer, failed Hollywood writer on a quest for the ultimate blackout; eldest Nathan, land use lawyer, "drunk on the promise of a life of low-risk, nonconfrontational tedium"; and genius Jenny, who thinks of "wealth as a crippling starting position."

You should know also that it's a Jewish family. Long Island Compromise is very much about inherited trauma, the trauma of the Holocaust and the immigrant experience, and the burden of survivor's guilt. It describes what it is to grow up with money (but like, a lot of money) when your parents grew up without money, and what it is to grow up with a father who's barely there and with a mother who's too much there, and what it is to grow up when the main character of your own life story is somebody else. It's about keeping secrets, keeping tradition, keeping up appearances, keeping your mouth shut.

The compromise, we learn, is what happens when horny teenage Jewish boys seduce willing but "good" Catholic girls: anal sex. When Beamer suggests it as a title for his father's memoir, it's a metaphor for technicalities, how to get away with not playing by the rules (cuz rules, it seems, are for chumps).

I'd been looking forward to this novel with some trepidation, Brodesser-Akner's previous novel having triggered in me some kind of breakdown involving buckets of tears and necessitating talk therapy. I expected wit, insight, feminism, pop culture, and some nasty truths. By that measure, Long Island Compromise read as a serviceable distraction from my recent overwhelm, wherein I have felt tried and tired in a very ordinary way.

He began to see all of time as happening simultaneously, or close to it. He began to see that he could be at work, or at Nathan's baseball fame, but he could also be locked in that basement. He sat at a Passover seder and saw that this thing that had happened to the Jews, their slavery in Egypt, seemed so ancient, but it wasn't. It was like yesterday. All the periods of time you thought were so long ago were so much closer than you thought they were, just a breath away. Moses was parting the Red Sea and Zelig was stowing away on that ship and Ruth was giving birth to Nathan and Carl was being chained to a pipe all at the same exact time. How can you get over anything if it all is just constantly happening?

He remembered Ruth telling him about post-traumatic stress disorder, back when she still thought things could be different. He laughed at that: post-trauma! anyone who named it that didn't really understand it. There is not post. There's only trauma. Over and over. Time moves on, but you stay there forever. No wonder there was no treatment. How do you treat what now called your life?

Review.  
Excerpt.

Some catastrophes have their own architecture

I'm fed up with sincerity. All I want is to be a complete asshole. To be negative about everything. To hate people. To feel contempt for them. To pretend they're to blame for all my problems. I'm reminded of something I heard at a meeting: "A relapse is something you construct." Some catastrophes have their own architecture.

Dear Dickhead, by Virginie Despentes, is a catastrophe: poor characterization and muddled philosophizing make for a boring novel that brings nothing new to #MeToo feminism. Also, everyone is a complete asshole.

An established, middle-aged author (Oscar), who is also a recovering alcoholic and party guy, is accused of past sexual transgressions by his young publicist (Zoe), who as a result of his behaviour felt compelled to leave her career in publishing and is now a social media influencer. For some obscure reason he takes up a correspondence with a childhood acquaintance, his older sister's best friend (Rebecca), who grew up to be a famous, drop-dead-gorgeous film star now facing ageism (but it doesn't really help that she's a junkie and a selfish bitch). 

As an epistolary novel, it's a complete failure. Featuring email exchanges between Oscar and Rebecca, and then missives (blog posts?) from Zoe, their voices are indistinguishable — they all embody a similar kind of anger, victimhood, entitlement, righteousness, moral ambiguity. A good character doesn't have to likeable; I appreciate a provocative stance, but they should show some distinct personality if they hope to leave a mark.  

Rebecca is rightfully skeptical of Oscar's past behaviour and current motivations.

I don't believe that every victim's word is sacrosanct. Obviously, women sometimes lie. Either because they have no principles or because they think it's fair game. But the number of pathological liars among victims is infinitesimal, whereas the percentage of rapists among the male population speaks volumes about the state of male heterosexuality. Yet I suspect you're far more shocked by the possibility of an unfounded accusation than you are by the fact that some of your friends are rapists. On this basis — how can I put this delicately? — even with a supersize dose of compassion, it's hard to feel sorry for you.

While there is a resolution of sorts of the main plot point, there is not much character growth to speak of, beyond Oscar's and Rebecca's progress in beating addiction, and an inkling of an awareness that the world is bigger than themselves — they still have a very long way to go. 

Heroin is to crack what great literature is to Twitter — a whole different story. I say that because it sounds good. Deep down, real junkies take drugs because they know they're worthless. Whether you're shooting dope or smoking crack, what you're really doing is reminding yourself that you're shit. When you become a junkie, you're saying to the world, you really think you're saying to the world, you really think you're better than me? You're deluded. Shooting up and fucking up is our way of telling other people how much we despise them. Their pathetic efforts to stand on their own two feet. I'd rather die than do yoga.

I don't understand the praise for this book. There are cuss words and sex and drugs — does this pass as transgressive? It bored me. I often couldn't tell who was speaking, to ascertain whose past (or gender, or profession) was formative in shaping the arguments put forth. Their logic was convoluted. Clearly Despentes has (more) things to say about sexism and feminism and #MeToo and ageism and the effects of Covid isolation and refugees in France, but these epistolary explosions don't merit the label of "novel" — a book of incendiary essays would've had bigger impact.

My generation of women are famous for our ability to put up with shit. We were told, "No feminism, it turns men off," and we said, "Don't worry, Daddy, I won't bother anyone with my little problems." But all around me, I saw women being broken. That it all happened in a dignified silence didn't help anyone.

Excerpt.

Trying to balance it all

What are you looking for? she had asked me.

I think about it. A place for these dreams that I don't know what to do with?

This weekend I read an entire novel in my phone, not something I thought I would ever do. But I got an alert from the library that my loan was expiring soon, and I’d completely forgotten that I'd waited for it and checked it out, but clearly I hadn’t bothered to download it to my reader, and I figured that by the time I went through the tedious process of connecting and deauthorizing and reauthorizing and turning around three times while reciting backwards the final chapter of something I had not yet read, it would’ve expired, so maybe I’d just glance through it on my laptop. The laptop, being lightweight and portable as it is, is actually well suited to reading in my swing chair, but I could not find a setting to enable full screen, so there was the browser window bookmarking various things that need my attention and displaying the time, which was an obstacle to satisfactory immersion, so at some point after the first cocktail while the evenings chops were still marinating I switched to reading on my phone.

I have in fact been deeply engrossed in reading another novel over the last couple of weeks, States of Emergency, by Chris Knapp. I think I love this novel, but I am deeply frustrated by its being (as a review copy) in pdf format and therefore a strain on my eyes, as well as a strain on my brain as I’m unable to highlight passages, and am mystified by the perplexing muddle of prepositions and articles, as if they had all been removed and half of them randomly reinserted as part of some diabolical copyediting test. And it has me reliving 2015 and 2016 and reconsidering my own past and current states of emergency, though they are very different from the narrator's. 

So I took a break to read What You Are Looking for Is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama. And it was just what I needed— entirely undemanding and kinda sweet (verging on saccharine). It’s the naive career advice I needed to hear, less goal-driven than my sister would urge, slightly more practical than my manager’s suggestion to lie flat. (“Lying flat” is a Chinese concept, he told me, akin to quiet quitting, but more intentional, less burdened by external judgment.)

In What You Are Looking for, five Tokyo denizens, each the centre of their own story, ask the librarian at the community house for recommendations and get something different from what they'd anticipated. Through her intervention they begin to realize a life (dare I say "career path") for which they are best suited, by making adjustments (to attitude if not action) or by making peace. 

The book covers various scenarios: working mom, retiree, unskilled shopgirl, unemployed artist, and entrepreneur wannabe. 

The themes are fairly universal and translate well to North American culture, where for the most part identity is tightly linked to job. Being a company man may no longer be valued, or even possible, as it once was, and perhaps this mentality lingers a little longer in Asia, intertwined as it is with traditional expectations and obligations. 

Seitaro clasps his cup in both hands. "What kind of job do you think is totally secure?" he quizzes me in return.

"A public employee like you, or a big corporation?"

"Nothing is," he replies, gently shaking his head. "Not one single job I could name is absolutely secure. Everybody just does their best to hang in there, trying to balance it all."

His expression is mild, but his tone is dead serious.

"There no guarantee of certainty in anything. But the flip side to there being no guarantee of security, is that there's also no certainty that something is a dud."

The book isn't a dud, but it's thin and insubstantial — not the type of literature that typically feeds my soul. I only read it because it warranted inclusion in the 2024 Tournament of Books. But for a few hours, it charmed me and soothed my worries.

I think my cat is dying and I'm losing my mind

I've been grieving for my cat for six weeks now. She's alive, but we don't know what her future looks like. Every 8 hours I put drops in her right eye. It looks unchanged (except for that one day I was convinced it was clearing up), a puddle of dried blood clouding her iris. I worry that she's not eating enough, I check her litter obsessively. She's clearly depressed, adjusting to limited vision, and she's wasting away. Most days I cry, away from my daughter, away from my cat, because I need to stay positive for them. I've always cried to Rosie about everything. But not this. It's exhausting.

We'd been to emergency (that day I came home and she was yowling), and we follow up with a regular vet within the week. Did the emergency clinic give us a prognosis, he asks. You understand? They'd told us she was old. It's probably chronic kidney disease. It's probably a heart condition. It's probably a tumour that burst into her eye, she's probably riddled with cancer. But nothing definite. She's old. (She's only 14.)

We agree to do bloodwork to give us an indication of Rosie's overall health. It comes back mostly normal. Strange, he says. Nothing a little dietary adjustment couldn't improve. Still, he tells us to give her all our love and prepare for the worst. (He also tells us about the best Polish restaurant in Mexico City.)

A couple of weeks later, I call about a prescription refill. I send photos so the vet can better gauge the progress of Rosie's condition. He calls while I'm sitting with my mother in the ER, who's suffering a bout of UTI delirium. Her appetite is good, regular bowel movements, sleeping a bit more. (My mother interrupts to say she's not sleeping at all. Not you, mom; the cat.) Strange, he says. Normally, he sees a cat in this condition, it's dead in three, maybe five days.

Twice there have been issues with prescription refills. As if there's a note on her file: Don't bother, expected to die. (I think there may be a similar note on my mother's file.)

Every morning when I wake my first thought is of her. If I sense her in my bed, I reach out to check that she's breathing, and I pet her till the purr comes. Those mornings she's not in my bed, I panic. Has she slunk off to die? I'm crying again.

I am more distraught, or so I tell myself, at the prospect of losing my cat than of losing my mother. It occurs to me that I'm channeling all the stress of recent months (ailing mother, job change, general dissatisfaction) into my worry for Rosie. I'm depressed like I don't think I ever have been. I'm crying again.

I've been reading You Are a Cat!, a pick-a-plot book. In one thread, feline protagonist Holden visits a bookstore, whose previous denizen, Rosie, died. I'm crying again.

We're to see a veterinary ophthalmologist Friday. For two weeks I've considered calling, wavering between begging them to move up the appointment because she might die before then, and putting off the appointment for another week or two to relieve us all of the stress because she might die before then. Certainly, I can't face hearing a medical professional tell us that it's time. 

If she dies in her sleep, I'll bury her under the lilac tree outside my bedroom window, maybe plant a rose for her. I'm crying again. I don't know if this is legal. I ponder how I'll execute this plan without attracting the neighbours' attention.

Something's got to give. My mom's ok, she turns 91 this weekend. The houseplants are still ok. The outdoor garden boxes are beyond all hope. (What god can keep everything alive?)

Update (24.07.29): The ophthalmologist confirms that vision in Rosie's right eye is gone. But the anti-hypertensive medication is working. Rosie's not dying, she's been through a lot and she's tired; she'll be fine. And I'm crying again.

Life was work and also a performance

I perform in art time and in real time, and you can't tell the difference — no one knows how to separate a real act from an art act in my work. 

— Tehching Hsieh

Memory Piece, by Lisa Ko, covers the past, present, and future, with each major section focusing on one of a trio of lifelong friends: respectively, Giselle, the performance artist; Jackie, the techy; and Ellen, the activist. They met as teenagers, bonded over a barbecue.

Giselle's life starts to come into focus for her when she hears about a performance piece that can only be Tehching Hsieh's Rope Piece (for which I will be forever grateful this book introduced me to).

She could not make her mother happy yet felt responsible for her mother's unhappiness. Her coping mechanism was to treat everything like it was a situation, but her performance self and real self had become indistinguishable. Work was a performance; life was work and also a performance. It wasn't that she needed to wait for the perfect idea or invent something new. Instead, she recognized how she could shape her life into the performance itself.

(Perhaps I should treat my life this way: perform as an employee, perform as a writer, perform as a doting daughter, etc. to the best of my ability. Fake it till I make it.)

This is the most interesting section of the book for me — its exploration of art, time, labour, intention, context, posterity.

After months of writing her memories, Giselle had begun to see everything she did as future memory. The mundane could be fabulous; everything became expansive. This made her more daring, because when you saw life through the lens of potential nostalgia, even difficult events could carry the smallest element of fondness for having survived them.

(I think we do this every time we snap a photo.)

In the spirit of archiving the everyday, Jackie pioneers some blog software, but grapples with data management and the battle between democratization and turning a profit. When the dot-com bubble bursts, some of her moral grappling is alleviated. 

But. The novel as a whole doesn't really work for me. It's giving writer workshop. A couple linguistic anachronisms jarred me out of the story (young women were not calling each other "dude" in the early 1990s; similarly "vibe" and "hook up"  appear with clear 2020s usages). It describes the old women of 2040 as if they were the old women of yesteryear. 

Most significantly, I don't understand how we get to that future from here. It's a housing crisis taken to the extreme, compounded by constant surveillance and border checks. Despite the known evils of gentrification, real-estate speculation, property-flipping and vacation rentals, construction industry and municipal corruption, and plain old greed, it doesn't feel right for Ellen's story as a squatter fighting eviction to end up as it does. (At some point I figured that Y2K had transpired as the apocalyptic event some feared it would be. Except even in the novel's reality we know it didn't.) And I'm a little disappointed that aspects of Ellen's alternative living — community building, recycling and waste management, dumpster diving, rooftop-gardening — weren't more fleshed out. 

But, admirably, this novel shows how three women manage to sidestep capitalism. A little.

Giselle said she had stopped identifying as an artist, but she still worked. Art work is work, it's labor. So is working in a café. It's all the same thing.

Something is lost here

But something is lost here. While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty. In Intercourse (1987) Andrea Dworkin warned of just this:

Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which in only — pathetically — a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses.

If sex education sought to endow young people not just with better "rote responses" but with an emboldened sexual imagination — the capacity to bring forth "new meanings, new forms" — it would have to be, I think, a kind of negative education. It wouldn't assert its authority to tell the truth about sex, but rather remind young people that the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them. Sex can, if they choose, remain as generations before them have choses: violent, selfish and unequal. Or sex can — if they choose — be something more joyful, more equal, freer. 

— from "Talking to My Students about Porn," in The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan.

(What would it be like to discover sex with a wholly open mind, with child-like innocence, without media influence? Instead, we live in a world where porn is now if not ubiquitous then very readily acquired. Granted, my generation sneaked peeks at girly magazines stashed in their dads' garages and  videos pilfered from adult-only backrooms. Sometimes I think I would've benefited from an education of this sort, beyond the romance and passion modeled for me by mainstream film and television. But it's all so performative, so results-oriented; and even when it's different, it's same same.)

The essays in The Right to Sex cover #MeToo, incels, porn, sex positivity, race, TERFs, sex work, carceralism. Clearly, sex is political. Mostly accessibly written, veering slightly into the overly academic, many of the issues described here are at the heart of today's feminist thinking. Endless questions raised, no clear answers offered. 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn't imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

Essays
Does anyone have the right to sex?"  
Who lost the sex wars? 

Reviews
Is a new book feminism’s next new wave or yesterday’s backlash?  
Who Gets to Be Desirable?  
Questioning Desire 

I didn't know what I wanted

The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake, transported me across time, space, and culture. Set in the 1970s (odd to call it a historical novel when it describes events within my lifetime), it has a peculiar quality of feeling true to its time — that is, I felt like I was discovering a decades-old novel inspired by real-life events, not reading recent release fiction.

My parents didn't know anything about university. My father hadn't even gone to high school — he'd had to start working right after his father died of a heart attack. More and more young people were going to college, though, and my mother wanted for me what other parents did for their children. Yet because it was a foreign world — a world she and my father were afraid of — they could offer no advice or direct encouragement. As a result, they could only give me mixed messages that reflected the confusion and insecurity they themselves felt. It's good to go to university, but university is only for rich people; you deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, but home is best and there are lots of jobs you could do with a high school diploma; and so on, back a forth.

I didn't know what I wanted, either. I was a mediocre student, the kind who was too conscientious not to do my homework but not smart enough to get good marks despite my efforts. I never failed but I never excelled. 

Akemi leaves home to study medical illustration in Tokyo. At the girls' boarding house where her lodging was arranged, she quickly becomes enamored of its most elusive (and somewhat disreputable) resident, Sayoko, an art student from a wealthy family.

Akemi struggles to assert her independence from her family, to see some of the world beyond her small village and study with the aim of establishing a career. Sayoko on the other hand is used to having her wishes granted, sees no need for school, and aspires to a wholly bohemian lifestyle.

We witness Sayoko bossing Akemi around and taking her friendship for granted, but Akemi is too fascinated to be able to extricate herself. 

Things turn strange when Sayoko meets an older couple. They are "artists" who stage happenings; they stay in Sayoko's apartment, and for a while it seems their lives are an endless orgy of alcohol and cigarettes, possibly sex, and just a soupçon of art. And then they're gone.

When Sayoko resurfaces and invites Akemi to one of their happenings in the wilderness, we see that the couple's charisma has cult-like proportions and things may not end well.

This novel is essentially Akemi's coming-of-age story, focusing on the nature of the girls' friendship, and its transience. But with a firm grounding in 1970s Japanese counterculture, it also explores the nature of art (and its transience) and what it is to live an artist lifestyle. 

Excerpt.
Interview, with excerpt.