The life lived in the external or internal world of a writer

When promotional material for Cult Writers: 50 Nonconformist Novelists You Need to Know fell into my inbox, I couldn't resist comparing its contents against my own mental list of quirky writers and literary obsessions.

Written by Ian Haydn Smith and illustrated by Kristelle Rodeia, this volume covers a decent cross-section of slightly off-mainstream literature available to the English reading public. Some of the writers are better known for their poetry or essays, but all had authored at least one novel. (For those interested, the publisher's page reveals the full list of writers.)

Note: The contents of my digital review copy differ slightly from the public list (swapping out five entries). I truly hope Eve Babitz and Joan Didion made the final cut over Joseph Heller and James Joyce.

I've read 32 of them, and obsessed over several of them throughout various phases of my life (though only one served as namesake for a pet cat).

Women writers are relatively well represented (23 of the 50). Regarding language, 18 of them do not write in English. All but 12 writers are dead.

Only one author had I never heard of (Juan Rulfo).

Each entry is topped by the writer's name and dates, with a pithy descriptive label, like "Chronicler of the Weird" (Murakami) or "The Literary Outlaw" (Genet) or "The Experimenter" (Lessing). Some of these are repetitive, not particularly insightful, arguably not even accurate, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with better options — that's a tough exercise.

The entry covers a combination of biography, publication history, and public reception — it sticks to objective fact rather than attempt to offer insight. There is little attention to any particular work, but in most cases a style is attributed to the author — "Southern Gothic" (McCullers) and poetic Confessionalism (Plath) — and their work is described in broad thematic strokes. Every entry is complemented by an illustration of the author (that's Bulgakov below, and can you guess who it is on the cover?), and some of them feature quotations.

The book is indexed (mostly people, institutions, publications, and prizes) and includes a list of key works for each writer.

But how do you define the cult status of a writer anyway? Without setting hard and fast criteria, Smith focuses on the fervour of their readership and their transgression of genre boundaries.

However, for all its focus on their work, this book is ultimately about the creators. Which raises another question: is a cult writer defined by the work they produce or the life they have lived? As you will glean from the portraits included here, the answer is: both. More specifically, it depends on the life lived in the external or internal world of a writer.

(Umm, what? I think I disagree.)

I would dispute the status of some of the writers included (and here my own biases will be laid bare).

One stumbling block for me is that I don't think it's enough to have authored a cult book to be considered a cult writer. To me, you're only a cult writer if, having experienced your work, I'm compelled to search out and devour everything you've ever written.

By my thinking, JRR Tolkien does not fit the bill. The world he created is massive and influential; Middle Earth inspires worship, but Tolkien does not. Besides, he is too obvious and too present in our culture to be a discovery — cult status is reserved for the special, beyond mainstream.

Pauline Réage authored but one book, The Story of O. She is, I think, unfairly labeled here as "the sado-masochist author," diminishing the sexual paradox of liberation in slavery that it explores and the controversial brand of feminism it inspires. While I think her novel is an important one and it enjoys elite status, the author, anonymous for years, remains essentially unknown.

Ken Kesey. Really?

And Ayn Rand. Does anyone read her seriously after high school?

But I was pleased to see Chris Kraus in this company (whose work I only recently discovered, and yes, I am compelled to explore more).

And then there are the inevitable oversights.

Smith justifies some of his choices in the introduction: "Thomas Pynchon stands in for other experimental writers such William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace." Even while they're all postmodernists, and often maximalists, they're quite different. I suspect Pynchon is less prevalent on college campuses today than the others. But maybe not. (Smith acknowledges, "Times are changing and so should this list.") Since the entries tend toward the biographical with only a minimal attempt to place these figures on the literary landscape and describe their significance and influence, the idea that one writer might stand for a group isn't strongly conveyed. (I would've chosen Bolaño to represent this group, because he resonates more strongly with this millennium's readers.)

Smith nods at a few other writers that didn't make the cut (I would have included Mark Z Danielewski over several of the others).

The one writer missing who, in my view, absolutely ought to be here: Clarice Lispector.

Despite my quibbles, I love lists, and I think Cult Writers makes for a great coffee table book. It has smallish dimensions but the illustrations are a lot of fun. It's not the kind of book you read cover to cover; you flip through and learn a random fact, reminisce over the copy of Cortázar your ex gave you, be inspired to finally read Train Dreams.

I'd happily bestow this book on the right college student, possibly annotated to better mould their mind.

Whom would you include in a list of cult writers everybody needs to know?

The one realm of free expression

Most mornings I wake with my body full of tension, as if I've been clenching my jaw and my fists all night.

One night this week I dreamt I went to a party. It was in something like a gallery space. I was only there because a man I have a crush on (but who is off limits) was in attendance. But I wouldn't leave the ground level because I refused to take the elevator, which I assumed would be virus-infested. Which meant I was essentially acting as greeter for people I didn't know at a party I didn't really want to be at. I stepped back from all the air kisses, puzzled that no one was talking about the elephant of the plague, as if it had never existed.

I recently stumbled across an article on How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism, and it has spurred a new obsession — investigating my dreamlife. That life is typically closed to me — for most of my life, I have slept deeply and do not remember my dreams. My sleep over the last year or so has become restless — light, often interrupted, and inadequate — an effect of various stresses and preoccupations but also of aging and my changing body. But this month I am dreaming more.

Charlotte Beradt collected dreams in Nazi Germany, which were finally published in 1966.

The links between waking life and dreams are indisputable, even evidentiary. In an afterword, the Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim notes the collection's many prophetic dreams, in which, as early as 1933, "the dreamer can recognise deep down, what the system is really like."

See also Sharon Sliwinski's discussion, adapted from Dreaming in Dark Times.

Beradt's dreamers "grappled with collaboration and compliance, paranoia and self-disgust, even as, in waking life, they hid these struggles from others and themselves." I suspect we are also dreaming about compliance and paranoia. I don't mean to suggest that our quarantined lives are in any way comparable to the terror of the morally repugnant Third Reich. But pandemic means health and economic crises, with everyday stresses to cope with and moral imperatives to contemplate.

Surely the collective psyche of our society is in turmoil. Are we dreaming of life under lockdown, or after lockdown? Of our old life, or a better life?

At times, The Third Reich of Dreams also echoes Hannah Arendt, who saw totalitarian rule as "truly total the moment it closes the iron vice of terror on its subjects' private social lives." Beradt seems to agree with this premise — she understood dreams as continuous with the culture in which they occur — but she also presents dreams as the one realm of free expression that endures when private life falls under state control. Under such conditions, the dreamer can clarify what might be too risky to describe in waking life.

How does the stress of physical distancing with its associated enhanced need for emotional connectedness present in dreams?

Yesterday, there was a puff of a bee outside on the stairs up to my apartment, dead I thought, but when I went back down to bring up another load of bags, I noticed it was still moving. When we went out for a walk later in the day it was gone. That must be how the bees got into this morning's dream. There was a bee on my mother's kitchen counter, it was slow, like it was drunk, but I managed to wave it through the front door. Then there was another that emerged from between the fruit on the counter, it looked bright and young, but it struggled to fly at all, I trapped it under a glass and took it outside. I started turning over everything in my mother's kitchen. I knew the bees were back from wherever they'd disappeared to, but they are all sick and dying.

What are you dreaming these days?

(Deborah Levy dreamt a pangolin walked into her bathroom.)

How much I am a person

Now that I have so much time to myself, I wonder at my times of happiness, why I've been allowed them, even now when I am lonely. Why I can walk and how even walking, at the right hour, in this temperature or that one, the lights just coming on, or the sky lightening, I am able to love it. How much I am a person.

I am zipping through Indelicacy, by Amina Cain.

I wonder why everybody says they have so much free time now. Were they always out at bars and restaurants? Or at the gym? Have I always lived slower than them? Or less fully?

Arguably I have less "free time" now than before. I cook more, I clean more. At first I resented this. But now I am feeling fine. Happy, even. Perhaps introverts are better equipped for lockdown. After some initial sleep disturbances, I am starting to feel remarkably rested. I have books to read and things to learn.

Yesterday, Poland reopened its forests.

Yesterday I took delivery of a dozen samosas and a mango salad. And a fresh baguette.

Yesterday, we watched a movie about a sinister religious cult that was even weirder than we'd hoped.

Ideologically opposed to her own despair

I choose what I want to see. I know I am imagining this. I, in the here and now, am willfully abstracting my own history. Because? There are a number of answers to this but today's will be: I can never find my past where I think I've left it and, in his designated role as catalyst, he is the worst offender of all. He will never just lie down where he lay. I keep discovering him wandering around inside me again.

Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride, is another in a series of slim, meditative novels I appear to be drawn to these days.

The prose is beautiful and easy, but this is not an easy book to read. One has to work to assemble the story.

Strange Hotel is a little like a pared down version of Helen Weinzweig's Basic Black with Pearls (but ultimately very different). One review says it's reminiscent of Joanna Walsh's work, including Break.up. Deeply interior.

We know next to nothing about the narrator — not her name or profession or why she's travelling so frequently to international destinations. We don't know what her days are like. We have only glimpses of hotel-based evenings, mornings, and middles of the night.

There's a neat thing McBride does in switching form third person to first person, I barely noticed it at first, but it is very deliberately meaningful. It's a lovely interplay of the past and present, how we become who we are. (And it tells me that if I'm aware of that, I've got a better shot at authoring my own future.)

She scans her body for some distracting wound to press but it's pretty well; even her mouth is not, currently, in need of a dentist. Her skin, despite her revels, bears not the slightest nick. Her shoes may be nondescript but fit so she has no grazes or blisters to attack. In short, she possesses no immediate means by which to hurt herself back into the clear. How she longs for that sky to be blue. But, ideologically opposed to her own despair, she contemplates a heavy blow to the wall instead. And the ameliorating effects of such an activity are: the gratifying click and bruise of knuckles. The pain shooting its ferns up into her arm. The slightly amazed exhalation, then the clarity behind. All very tempting, yet she does not permit herself this. There remains the matter beyond the door, and only with careful deliberation will she ensure it becomes appropriately resolved.

I'd been meaning to read McBride for years, and this new novel felt like the right place to start. I'd heard or read an interview that basically covered what's documented in this exchange in The Quietus:

I was writing about a middle-aged woman – which makes sense because I am a middle-aged woman – and how angry and bored I am by the tropes about, you know, what it's like to be a middle-aged woman and what our preoccupations are, the things we worry about and how we're supposed to behave.

So, yes, I really wanted to take back the notion that a middle-aged woman going to a hotel room to have some anonymous sex with someone is an act of self-hatred and self-harm.

So, being a middle-aged woman who is somewhat preoccupied with the notion of a middle-aged woman engaged in and enjoying casual sex, how could I not read this?

I was a little disappointed, then, to find this book was not so subversive as to let its narrator simply take pleasure. She satisfies a physical need while applying an emotional analgesic. (But I forgive McBride. After all, this is not my story.)

We learn that she's known heartbreak and grief, but we're never told the full extent of it.

While it's not exactly self-destructive behaviour she engages in, it carries an element of undermining her own pleasure, if not her happiness. It's not unconnected to her emotional past, and it's a conscious effort to maintain her current level of emotional well-being. She's afraid of falling in love again (I'm not), because it would be a betrayal of her "true" love, because it would be an act of forgetting, because it would open the door to the potential for fresh loss.

She has lingering concerns about whether anything exists beneath what she is standing on. And, let's face it, there's nothing like the threat of the abyss to make one reluctant about purposefully striding across an unfamiliar floor.

Reviews
Frieze
Pi
Interview: The Quietus

A creature of oil and mess and stain

Day 35. No baguette. My mistake: Too early to the grocery, before they'd received their bread delivery.

I am starting to find my groove. Yoga, jigsaw puzzle, German lessons. Work. Watch a movie, read a book. I could almost enjoy lockdown. Except for the part where I have to procure provisions.

Yesterday I ventured to the pharmacy. Hands sanitized, but stopped at the door. Questioned, instructed, and allowed in. (I hesitated, wondering if my list really warranted a trip. What did I need here that I couldn't get on my weekly grocery trip?)

Approach the counter, let the employee know what you want and he'll go get it for you.

Extra-strength Tylenol. Small or large?

Hair conditioner. Brand? I don't know. Whatever's on sale. (Can I smell it first?)

Cortisone ointment, I brought an empty tube. But I want the higher percentage.

Pads, do they still call them maxi pads? Mini pads? I need a pack of regular, and pack of long, or heavy flow. Brand? I don't know. I usually stare at the shelf for ten minutes wishing I had the gene for brand loyalty and trying to remember what I bought last time. (Have I really been doing this for more than 30 years?) He brings me a package. No, I want thin. (They still make non-thin?) No, not panty liners. Yes, that'll do. And a pack now for heavy flow.

Maybe toilet paper. How much is it?

And on it goes.

Some things, like cat litter and kleenex, I decide can wait till I'm browsing grocery store shelves myself.

Do they have any Easter chocolate left? Am I allowed to ask that? There are now two women waiting behind me. (Well, one woman is two metres behind me; the other is standing near the entrance, to ensure appropriate physical distancing.)

It's not often I have to articulate my shopping list and the micro decisions regarding size, brand, quantity. And in another language to boot. [I remember needing bandaids in Portugal, 1993. (And a corkscrew.) Everything in Poland, 1994.]

Still reading Eimear McBride's Strange Hotel.

While she may not consider herself to have achieved any particular greatness in life, it's been hard enough to keep on clocking those decades up. To get to her late forties has taken a lot of ploughing through. There may have been considerable work put into forgetting too — sometimes with more success than she cares to admit — but without those accumulations displayed in plain sight it would be as if she had never lived at all. She'll not stoop to clichés about the blank canvas of youth — despite, generally, subscribing to their truth. She's just not unhappy about being a creature of oil and mess and stain. She has been bitten and will bite and there is a life in her home, even when she is not around, which bodily exists and is true.

I regret not asking for smokehouse almonds. They're hard to find.

You too have experienced time

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

There's a lot happening in this little book, even while it feels like there's nothing happening at all.

Just the other day I heard one woman tell another that slowness is a form of goodness.

Weather, by Jenny Offill, covers climate crisis and survivalism, drug addiction and depression. Relationships under strain. Health concerns and health care concerns. The political climate. How to turn dread into action. How to use a can of tuna as an oil lamp. How life doesn't quite go to plan. Whom to invite into your doomstead.

Spare on the surface but dense with meaning, as the LARB put it.

This book was released February 11, with several positive reviews published at that time and throughout the month, largely before COVID-19 affected our privileged Western lives in a material way. Had it been released a scant six weeks later, it might've been considered in a different light.

My reading of it, the beauty of it for me, is inextricably linked to the backdrop against which I experienced it.

There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term "milling" to describe most people's default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.

We've been milling for weeks now. We are milling at home alone. Don't go out unless you need to, they tell us.

"Why don't they farm deer?" I wonder. "Is it because they are too pretty?" She shakes her head. "It's because they panic when penned."

Groceries once a week. The occasional sanity-preserving walk to breathe in the fresh air, although it's sometimes more stress-inducing than is worth it. Avoid physical proximity; nod in acknowledgement when someone veers off the sidewalk to make way.

"Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life."

It is eerie how relevant I find her words. I did not read this novel for plot; I read it slowly, for daily meditation.

It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause between the waves.

Tragically, I will not remember this as a novel that inspires environmental change. There is no disaster event, other than the one we've lived with for years. No climate climax. Weather does not show us a world gone wrong, but slowly going wrong, anticipating the effects. It's the atmosphere we live in, and with a more pressing crisis now invading our lives, it's hard to remember that we even care about the environment. It's a luxury to think about the future of the planet when our daily actions may have more immediate life-or-death consequences.

Ironically, pollution is down and oil consumption has dropped drastically, as traffic dwindles to a trickle of essential services.

He tells me that at the wilderness camp they teach the kids something called "loss-proofing." In order to survive, you have to think first of the the group. If you look after the needs of others, it will give you purpose and purpose gives you the burst of strength you need in an emergency. He says you never know which kids will do well. But in general the suburban kids do the worst. They have no predators, he says.

Weather is full of meditative wisdom, though it hits a mark other than the one intended.

The book ends in hope, kind of. Disaster doesn't strike, it only continues to loom. Everything seems to come into balance.

Literally, the closing page leads us to the Obligatory Note of Hope, where Offill invites us to consider, "How can we imagine and create a future we want to live in?" She also offers Tips for Trying Times, which I find are perfectly suited to these pandemic days.

It's summer and there's nowhere for anyone to go.

"Why did you wash your hands for so long?"

"They were very dirty."

There was youth and then there was later

On the thirty-first day, I run out of the good scotch. I listen to Beethoven's Ninth repeatedly, with its Ode to Joy.

Last night I dreamt I was in Vietnam with a man I didn't recognize for a car parade I didn't care about. The man was a fool and his car was so white it sometimes looked black. While he enjoyed a hero's breakfast before the event, I waited for someone else to fall in love with me. I wanted to go see the cars lined up on the boulevard, so I stepped out of the hotel directly onto the beach. There was no road. The building extended out into the water, and several dozen loungers were set up but, oddly, not facing the water, rather looking along the sand and into the forest. The water was blues and greens I'd never seen before, with exotic trees on the beach leaning down to drink from it. I wanted to snap a photo, if I could just get around the corner of the building. The gentle waves are lapping at my feet already. I'm wearing white sneakers (in fact, I think I'm wearing tennis whites) and in my left hand is Strange Hotel with my index finger marking my place and in my right hand my phone poised to take a picture. My shoes are already wet so I step forward a bit further. And the current pulls my feet out from under me, I'm only a metre or two from the edge, and I can see the bottom, but I can't touch it, it's dropping away beneath me, and I think about dropping my book and my phone but already it seems too late and I wake up with a gasp.

Afternoon featured a live-streamed yoga session. I'm doing the seated cat pose and suddenly my cat, seated on the chaise longue directly in front of me, sleeping so soundly seconds beforehand, is very alert and looking at me intently, as if to say, what the fuck are you doing?

Sometimes she forgets all the places she's been until someone asks and she'll remember then. Then remember that what she's been regarding as bedrock has, in fact, acquired sediment. No, she hadn't been there once but now she has. The time for not knowing about it has passed, and often considerably, on. She likes to think this happens only about countries, allowing her to enjoy recalling that she had indeed travelled and is no longer the girl who's never been anywhere. When this happens it's a real, and valuable, pleasure but is also not the only occasion it happens to her. She keeps so little of her past bonded close that she frequently has cause for surprise. Here lies a whole slab of your life you've completely left out in the cold. Not on purpose, out of cowardice of shame. Not, in fact, for any good reason she can name. Except there was youth and then there was later but only youth got to dig its claws in.

She's heard it's to do with "getting older" or lines on the face, or greyer, or the hideous "thickening around the waist". It's about finding it harder to get pregnant — which she does not even want. It's having too many children or not enough. Being with someone too long or too long without. It's disparities in the workplace. Professional failure, or success. It is that despite everything, all that's been accomplished and all that's been missed and all the accretions of the life that's been lived, for a woman in her early forties, unhappiness is what's assumed to be in store. That, and the mandatory belief in a younger face behind her face which is the only place where the possibility of any happiness resides. She really admires the effort and co-ordination it surely required to make this belief as rottenly insidious as it is now. But she does not believe it and objects to the assumption she ever would.

The world does not want you to go into yourself, the instructor says.

We practice mindfulness. We practice yoga. Everything is practice.

This writing is practice. I practice German and music. My cooking is practice. I practice breathing. What the fuck are we practicing for? Will there be a show? Will I be good enough? I've been practicing for a lifetime. We practice to master something we can never master.

There's nothing to be gained by the gratuitous exacerbation of pressure.

The arches of her feet unclench

Twenty-eight days later. Every morning between 7 and 7:30, I hear a flock of geese fly overhead.

Once or twice a day, we hear an airplane. The girl and I look at each other and wonder: Who is on it? Where do they come from? Is it like this over there too?

Groceries today. A woman near me was roundly scolded by store personnel for shopping with her teenage son. She was aggressively defensive about her bad back, she can't carry all these provisions by herself. He was escorted to wait outside. I went off-list and bought jellybeans.

Guided meditation today. The guide's wisdom: The mind wanders; that's what it's meant to do.

Yoga today. The more I practice, the stiffer I become. As if awareness of my tension heightens it.

Everything today.

This week I'm reading Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride. It could be a while before I find myself in a strange hotel.

There's not much she knows about that, pours, and does not spill a drop. Drink. She drinks it down with some considerable relief at outmanoeuvring her travel fatigue, the buzzing, the desiccating heat and its risk of a maudlin dusk. That's it right now, agitating her veins. Coursing through until the arches of her feet unclench — the most secret pleasure of drinking, she thinks, and unquantifiably nice. Her wrists will follow soon. Inevitably, knees. Loosed shoulders are desirable, if difficult to achieve. The key is to stop before it gets behind the eyes, after which all circumspection generally flies. That's tight-rope drinking. Tonight she will make the attempt — to unhitch from while remaining in possession of. This is her intention. Certainly, more is not in the plan and, unwilling as she is to expand on that, she had little difficulty in recollecting why. So, she will drink only until her musculature relents which, even from this starting point, will require some intransigence. She has the time for it though, probably plenty too.

Sonofabitch pinot noir today.

The engulfing doom

Neath the sea the land sinketh, the sun dimmeth,
From the heavens fall the fair, bright stars;
Gusheth forth steam and gutting fire
To very heaven soar the hurtling flames.

The fates I fathom, yet farther I see;
Of the mighty gods the engulfing doom.

Today is day 27 that we are removed from our lives. I'd suggested a casual curriculum a couple weeks ago — a book to read, a language to learn, some documentaries to watch. I'm pleasantly surprised that Helena took it to heart.

Last night, we watched Werner Herzog's Into the Inferno, ostensibly about volcanoes, but more about volcano-rich belief systems, including North Korea, with an odd bit in the middle about fossil hunters.

Also, Herzog recites from the Codex Regius, an Icelandic book of Norse poems.

Comes the darksome dragon flying,
Nithhogg, upwards from the Nitha Fells.
He bears his pinions as the plains he o'erflies,
Naked corpses; now he will sink.

Nature is fearsome. This time disease, a dragon of doom.

All merged into one enormous rock

I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. Dear bookseller, I would like to read a novel about the banal pursuit of carnal desire, which ultimately brings unhappiness to the ones who pursue it, and to everyone else around them. A novel about a couple trying to rid themselves of each other, and at the same time trying desperately to save the little tribe they have so carefully, lovingly, and painstakingly created. They are desperate and confused, dear bookseller; don't judge them. I need a novel about two people who simply stop understanding each other, because they have chosen to not understand each other anymore. There should be a man who knows how to untangle his woman's hair but who decides not to one morning, perhaps because now other women's hair has become interesting, perhaps because he has simply grown tired. There should be a woman who leaves, withdrawing either slowly or in a single sad and elegant coup de dés. A novel about a woman who leaves before she loses something, like the woman in Nathalie Léger's novel I'm reading, or like Sontag in her twenties. A woman who begins to fall in love with strangers, possibly only because they are strangers. There is a couple who loses the ability to laugh together. A man and a woman who sometimes hate each other, and will, if they are not stopped short by a better part of themselves, block out the last ray of innocence left in the other. A novel with a couple whose only engaging conversations are about revisiting past misunderstandings, layers and layers of them, all merged into one enormous rock. Dear bookseller, do you know the myth of Sisyphus? Do you have any version of it? An antidote? A piece of advice? A spare bed?

— from Lost Children Archives, by Valeria Luiselli.

Love in the time of corona

Allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it makes a date so much less boring.

I considered deleting my dating apps. What's the point of them? It's not like I could actually meet up with someone for a date these days. Besides, I'm too busy barely surviving and self-caring and learning German.

But sometimes those apps help keep boredom at bay, if not loneliness. They help me maintain romantic hope: some photogenic and articulate man will someday swipe me off my feet.

Maybe this plague will give me perspective. Dating has been tiring and tiresome of late. Generally I prefer to meet my potential matches as soon as possible — in-person chemistry is so important — but the rules are changing.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I can't seem to stop making bad decisions. The weird thing is they don't sneak up on me. I can see them coming all the way down the pike.

Maybe I could use this time to consider what it is I really want and possibly even nurture something meaningful through text.

I shouldn't be surprised: dating apps are seeing a lot of activity during lockdown, you horny bastards. Men I barely glanced at are suddenly concerned for my well-being. At least there are some forthright ones among them: "Wanna have video sex?" (I don't see the point of video sex with a stranger. I date because I want someone to touch me.)

One fellow invited me over to his place, suggesting I simply stay there for the duration. In another lifetime I might've taken him up on it. But plague-dating requires a different level of trust.

I just... I couldn't bear the part where you fell out of love with me, I tell the guy who smiles at me on the subway. Telepathically. But he hears me. Now he's playing some game on his phone, not looking at me at all.

Techniques for calming a fearful mind

There are little signs everywhere in the library now that say BREATHE! BREATHE! How did everyone get so good at this breathing thing? I feel like it all happened while I was away.

Today nothing much happened. I feel outside of time.

I burst into tears while making my morning cappuccino. The coffee was so much better at the office. Maybe it's the hormonal flood of PMS, or the onset of menopause, one or the other, I can't tell which. Maybe it's because I didn't sleep well.

I'd read an article before going to sleep about a study of coronavirus in cats and whether they could carry the virus from human to human. Apparently cats can become infected from a human and can pass the disease to other cats, and if you are sick, you should protect your pet by keeping your distance. Yesterday I'd noticed Rosie sneezing more than usual, so I drifted off to sleep thinking I must've picked up the virus on my grocery excursion, I must be asymptomatic, and Helena's simply lucky, or immune, and while I've been wallowing in the company of my cat and relishing our early mornings together when she burrows into my right hip, the whole time I have in fact been killing her, and this preoccupied my dream life last night.

I tried to work, but that didn't go very well. I'm mad at myself for having taken on work I shouldn't have to do. I'm mad at myself for not initially understanding the extent of another job. And I'm mad at myself for not being able to pay attention.

At least I had a yoga break (via Zoom, with coworkers), difficult as I find it to breathe these days. I zoned out through my other two meetings today.

I did spend some downtime deliberating over which jigsaw puzzle to purchase. My current puzzle is 2000 pieces and slow going, it's fucking hard actually, a veritable tsunami of puzzle, everything is blue. I bought it for myself at Christmas because I like to have a puzzle to get me through the cold, but this winter I went to Morocco instead, as if I knew I wouldn't have the opportunity to travel again anytime soon, as if I knew I should save that puzzle for a metaphorical rainy day. Ordinarily when I start a puzzle, I have to finish it — I forgo sleep and showers and spend all my time on it. But this is no Christmas vacation. There's no deadline — it's not as if I have to clear the table before the dinner party. So I've been pacing myself. But someday in the not-too-distant future I will finish it. I have my eye on a couple 4000-piece more-conventional landscapes, and I should pick one while shipping is still available.

I wonder if I were reading something other than Weather right now, would I also find it profoundly appropriate?

Q: What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos?

A: You can teach them to sew, to farm, to build. Techniques for calming a fearful mind might be the most useful though.

The incredulity response

"Wait," I say. "Were you talking about seconds? When you said you were so out of step and living slowly, did you mean by seconds?" She considers this. "Yeah," she says, "seconds probably."

I feel out of step.

Today I had a nap. A rainy-day late-afternoon two-hour nap. An emotionally necessary nap, not a physical one. I feel guilty about it. I need to make up work time.

Apparently thousands of masks arrived in Quebec the other day, which were then mysteriously routed to Ohio.

They are starting to fine people for being outside unnecessarily, for gathering. This is fast becoming constitutionally treacherous territory. As if groups of two or more might be "conspiring." (Conspiring to what?)

The provincial premiers plan to release their modeled projections, but the prime minister is holding back. What does he not want us to know? Is he afraid of instilling panic? What would we do as a panicked society? The toilet paper and the flour are already gone. Congregate in the parking lot of Timmie's?

Or is it a question of timing? Maybe he's timing the panic response for maximum effect. To stop us dead in our tracks.

"What it takes to survive a crisis" looks at how people respond to life-threatening situations:

People simply don't believe what they're seeing. So they go about their business, engaging in what's known as "normalcy bias." They act as if everything is OK and underestimate the seriousness of danger. Some experts call this "analysis paralysis." People lose their ability to make decisions.

The incredulity is starting to wane. We are entering another phase.

But this is a crisis on another scale. The times call for a benevolent dictator. We might be lucky. If we're lucky.

Weather is clearly about a different sort of crisis, but it's discussed (to this point) only tangentially. The feeling of crisis is broadly applicable.

That night on the show, there's an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it's a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brains refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. "Those who live move," he says.

Where can we move to?

The acceleration of days

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?

Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

Day 21 of wfh. Today I went to the grocery store.

I woke later than planned. No reading ritual, straight to work. There is not enough separation between work and real life these days. Whatever "real life" is.

I'm trying to find the optimal off-peak shopping time. I wanted to put in a couple hours before a midmorning excursion.

Today I put on real pants, not yoga pants or cozy leggings.

I haven't done groceries in two weeks. I used to simply pick up whatever I needed on my way home from work. I haven't figured out how to shop in this new world. I made a list, but it stopped making sense as I filled my cart. It doesn't help that my local grocery store recently renovated and reorganized. I don't know where anything is anymore.

In and out, they say. Be efficient with your time and in your choices. I have a mini meltdown in aisle five because I can't find any harissa spice blend. If they've stopped carrying it, my life will change drastically.

Part of the stress of shopping lies in the mystery of what I may bring home with me. Not so much that I will be infected — I don't matter — but that I will inadvertently infect my daughter. She's not a child anymore, but I'm still responsible for her. It's not just me fending for myself.

It's a variation of the rescue distance: the further I venture from our safehouse, the more chance of encountering a disease vector that will lock onto me and breach our perimeter.

I bought flowers.

I got home in time to catch the last half of my workplace's guided meditation session. (What does "workplace" mean if it's not a place anymore?) I notice that I spend a lot of the time holding my breath.

I changed my pants. Real pants are overrated.

This evening I read a few more pages of Weather. The narrator (does she have a name yet?) tried a meditation class. Like me. She's cynical. She's a realist. She has garbage to take out.

My #1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

The moon will be fine

It's been twenty days of working from home. I feel flabby and sluggish. And there is too much to do.

This evening I turned my bathroom into a spa, tried to melt my muscles with epsom salts. My new work environment is clearly non-ergonomic.

I miss my commute, my reading time. A few mornings last week, I sat in my nook with my morning coffee and read. I need to reinforce this ritual.

But tonight I read in the bath. Weather, by Jenny Offill. It's off to a terrific start. It's a short book and I want to savour it. I need to slow down.

Despite not having as much time to read, I feel I've been racing to get the end of too many books lately (though, sometimes legitimately so, before my library ebooks expired into the ether).

I'm a person who likes slow things, like the boy in Lost Children Archive has reminded me to be, even if I generally manage to keep up.

The narrator said her brother "missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him." Calling to him for him to intervene? Or to succumb? I wonder if the world called to my brother too. Crazy, fucked up world.

The moon will be fine, I think. No one's worrying about the moon.

Like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives

I thought about writing stuff down in a notebook for you to read one day, but you are a bad reader still. level A or B, still read everything backward or in a mess, and I have no idea when you'll finally learn to read properly, or if you ever will. So I decided to record sound instead. Also, writing is slower and reading is slower, but at the same time listening is slower than looking, which is a contradiction that cannot be explained. Anyway, I decided to record, which was faster, although I don't mind slow things. People usually like fast things. I don't know what kind of person you will be in the future, a person who likes slow things or one who likes fast things. I kind of hope you are the type of person who likes slow things, but I can't rely on that. So I made this recording and took all those pictures.

I wonder if more books shouldn't come with instructions.

Or something like artist statements. It's a common practice at art galleries, for example, to post alongside any given piece not just the title of the work and its materials, but a note about its composition — its inspiration, intention, or context. However, I dislike the layout of many of our local galleries for positioning this supplementary material such that many people gravitate to it before they see the art. I prefer to come to art cold, try to figure how I feel about it and then check the signs, to validate my interpretation, fill in the blanks, and hopefully expand my understanding.

It's rare to have this kind of reference point for works of literature. An "exhibition catalogue" of novels might be curated by an academic expert, but to know the artists' intentions, one typically must search out several secondary sources.

Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli, includes notes on the works cited. She wants to make sure we're not reading this as idiots who think she's merely name-dropping or that the allusions are decorative — they "function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past." She goes on to explain the echoes in the novel's structure and the threads that hold it together. She's not interested in intertextuality as a performative gesture but as a method of composition.

I was readily drawn into Lost Children Archive, and this supplementary material helps me admire the skill and craft that brought this book together. But thank goodness the notes come at the end, else I would've gone into this book believing she was an annoyingly pretentious know-it-all bent on setting herself above writers who write mere stories.

Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.

The references, for the record, are many and varied, and not so obscure that I didn't recognize some, and introduced me to The Gates of Paradise, a novel about the Children's Crusade of 1212 consisting of two sentences (the second one being five words long, the first comprising the rest of the story), a copy of which I am now struggling to track down, by Jerzy Andrzejewski, whose name I've quite coincidentally encountered a couple of times this week in the context of him being a highly popular Polish post-WWII novelist who is sadly not so well recognized outside of his native country, despite having written Ashes and Diamonds, which Andrzej Wajda masterfully adapted for film.

Lost Children Archive starts with so many moments recollected to explain this beautiful thing of a family they've built, and the rest of the book is a roadtrip of a novel across its dissolution.

I had no trouble slipping into the car beside them, the tragedy of it all quite palpable.

It's about a sound documentarian (Pa) setting out for the Southwest on an Apache project, hunting for echoes, with family in tow. Ma is a more journalistic documentarist who is pursuing an migration crisis story in general while looking for a Mexican woman's two daughters in particular — young girls who were sent across the border to reunite with family. In the back of the car are the ten-year-old boy (his) and the five-year-old girl (hers), who are also witnessing their family fall apart while being part of it.

The children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They're like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, but with a touch more narcissism.

One of the lovely things about this book is that it has had, for me, the mysterious power to evoke echoes of my being, reminding me of the kind of person I once was, wanted to be, could be still. It reminded me of what it was like to be a new mother and be head over heels in love with my child, of trying to see the world through her eyes, and falling in love with the world all over again, in a grown-up way. It reminded me of Lisbon Story, which would have been my first exposure to acoustemology (my brother and I experimented with sending audio letters around the time that movie was released, but how? did we really mail each other mini cassette tapes?).

Acoustemology is a sonic way of knowing and being in the world.

Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds, which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space through the sounds overlaid about it.

This book is a composition of multiple texts, scraps, transcriptions, with photographs and lists. No sound, but a written record of echoes of sound. (I am reminded, at times, of Clarice Lispector's incantatory attempt in Agua Viva to write the way music is composed.) So the book itself is a kind of artefact while functioning as an archive, boxing the family members' experiences.

I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed. You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back. And sometimes, just sometimes, an echo does indeed return, a real reverberation of something, bouncing back with clarity when you've finally hit the right pitch and found the right surface.

Halfway, the book switches from Ma's perspective to the boy's. I did not at first warm to the boy's voice, but gradually it becomes fairytale-like as the children set out on their own, without breadcrumbs, avoiding danger and performing trials on an almost mythological quest.

They had walked, and swam, and hidden, and run. They had boarded trains and spent nights sleepless atop gondolas, looking up at the barren, godless sky. The trains, like beasts, drilled and scratched their way across jungles, across cities, across places difficult to name. Then, aboard this last train, they had come to this desert, where the incandescent light bent the sky into a full arch, and time had also bent back on itself. Time, in the desert, was an ongoing present tense.

Review
The New Yorker: Writing about writing about the border crisis

Microchemical raptures

"The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal."

This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don't remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures — little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue — that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

— from Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli.

I resisted reading this book. I hadn't liked The Story of My Teeth, despite its accolades; I assumed this Archive would be similarly overrated. But thus far (about a quarter in), I am loving it. It's touching me in all the right ways, caressing my brain and poking my heart. I want to know more about acoustemology and private languages. It makes me want to read Susan Sontag.

Those raptures for me, these days: Clarice Lispector, Olga Tokarczuk. This book too seems to be full of raptures.

Nothing but absences and holes

"What will happen?" he murmured.

"I mean, things are disappearing more quickly than they are being created, right?" I asked him.

He nodded and furrowed his brow, like someone suffering from a headache.

"What can the people on this island create?" I went on. "A few kinds of vegetables, cars that constantly break down, heavy, bulky stoves, some half-starved stock animals, oily cosmetics, babies, the occasional simple play, books no one reads... Poor, unreliable things that will never make up for those that are disappearing — and the energy that goes along with them. It's subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can't compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it's completely hollowed out, we'll all disappear without a trace. Don't you ever feel that way?"

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, is described as an Orwellian dystopia. The premise is that, in this closed island community, things — objects — are disappeared from their reality overnight. One day it's birds, another roses.

The Memory Police enforce these bans, and take away anyone found to be preserving "banned" objects. They also search out genetic anomalies, those few people that for reasons unknown retain the capability to remember things that have been disappeared.

While I love the idea of this book, I found this to be an incredibly frustrating read. I haven't read Ogawa before. This is one of her earlier novels (1994) only just recently translated into English; I can only hope her writing has matured since then.

Neither the reason behind or the mechanism for the disappearances is ever explained. Why one thing and not another? There is no warning or proclamation (although the narrator later claims to have premonitions). Citizens simply wake up and know what it is that's being removed from their lives. They don't need instructions; they simply dispose of those things. I don't mind a bit a magic hand-waving, but it doesn't hold internal consistency.

For example, in the past, boats and ferries disappeared but the physical objects remained — only the concept was undone. These masses continued to exist at the river's edge (the old man lives on his stalled ferry), but the idea that they could be used as transport or floating recreation is gone. By contrast, calendars later disappear, and the island inhabitants duly dispose of the their agendas and desk props, yet people continue to track time and mark days (if a little less precisely).

How does the narrator remember things well enough to write about them disappearing? Though the novel starts with her memory of her mother, who preserved lost objects and clearly wanted to convey their importance to her daughter, it took me a few chapters to understand that the narrator was not one of the gifted (perhaps using a third-person omniscient narrator would've made this clearer). Fruit disappears but they persist in images and in her descriptions.

It's suggested that when we run out of memories, we will have nothing left to talk about. Is that all that connects us? A common past? A commonly agreed-upon past?

And why doesn't the old man have a name? Even the dog has name. The neighbour has a name. Is this a commentary on the namelessness of the things closest to us? That a name can't contain what he was? But, "the old man" is also an inadequate label that becomes cumbersome and even silly.

Officials are, unsurprisingly, privileged. One bureaucrat serves our narrator a strange, bitter tea that keeps her awake that night — for some reason he has access to coffee, which has apparently vanished. But at the end of the novel, it seems they too may be subject to the laws behind the disappearances.

Then there's the matter of R.

"He's my editor. The first person who reads my work. He's the friend who knows the self that I put in my novels better than anyone else."

It's deeply unsettling that she should build a secret room in her house, where he's meant to stay forever. There are indications that he is capable of remembering, but why is the need she feels to protect R so deep? Does he ask for help? No, in fact, he's confused by it. Why does he suddenly change his mind and decide to leave his pregnant wife. Her argument was not particularly compelling. Her motivation, to keep him as her editor, is entirely selfish. And why is the planned disappearance so elaborate? Could they not simply have had a collegial meeting from which he never returned? And despite the sudden raids the Memory Police are known to make, it seems unnecessary to confine him to the room at all times.

She is clearly in love with him. His editing abilities are a pretext for this kidnapping. Unless, knowing it's impossible to hold on to forgotten objects or to remember them, she feels the next best thing is to hold on to someone who can.

Her treatment of him is cruel and unusual. When his baby is born, she withholds the news for hours. Yet I have the distinct sense that we are supposed to feel sympathetic toward her, even to cheer on the possibility of romance. I can't tell if that's masterly writing or simply chaotic.

Her manuscript in progress is also disturbing, and it is in many ways the opposite of her lived reality. The novel is about woman who loses her voice and resorts to typing to communicate with her lover, who was her typing teacher.

For a long time I have wanted to watch him in the act of typing. It must be very beautiful to see. The glittering, carefully maintained machine, the snow-white paper, his perfectly straight back, his expertly placed fingers. The very thought of it makes me sigh. But I've never seen him type. Even now that we have become lovers. He never types in front of other people.

Eventually her typewriter breaks; he tricks her and keeps her captive. He absorbed her voice, and later the rest of her fades away.

Writing becomes particularly difficult for our narrator when novels are disappeared. The manuscript, even when her writing is stalled, is a creation out of nothing. The opposite of disappearing.

"How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?"

"That's a difficult question," he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.

"I'd imagine you'd be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things."

"No, that's not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense."

Everything that disappears is burned or goes into the sea. Not much is created to replace what's lost. Except snow. It seems the snow will never disappear. The snow is one big blanket of forgetting. It also feels like a metaphor for something.

Perhaps I didn't approach this book with the right state of mind. I typically embrace ambiguity and surreal effects, but this novel's construction feels haphazard.

We shouldn't have to destroy the old to make way for the new. Body parts begin to disappear. What purpose does that serve? What does it make room for?

"If we do remember something," said the old man, struggling to find words, "what do we do then?"

"Nothing in particular. We're all free to do as we choose with our own memories," R said.

"I suppose memories live here and there in the body," the old man said, moving his hand from his chest to the top of his head. "But they're invisible, aren't they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed."

I struggle also to understand why it's so wrong to relinquish the past, particularly in its material aspects. Why not live entirely in the now?

Excerpts
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

The tears you couldn't waste time crying before

The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, "You're her now, it's all right," and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that's happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.

Last week I read The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. It's a good book.

I had little interest in it in the lead up to publication — I was dytopiaed out, having finished watching the related TV series. But I was curious how Atwood would treat a sequel — in what timeframe and through which characters would she continue her story?

On publication day, a copy made its way into my house (a gift), and while I wasn't ready to read it yet, I read a review. I learned that this was Aunt Lydia's story. And then I read an excerpt, and thought twice before setting it aside.

I don't need to tell you to read this novel. You will or you won't. You know that it can't live up to its predecessor. You know that you can't come to this novel cold — you already know too much.

You know that, no matter what Atwood wrote, we won't know how the story ends until it ends. You know. The real story happening around us.

The Testaments is not a great work of Literature. It is not deeply philosophical. My daughter had The Handmaid's Tale as assigned reading last summer (going into grade 11), and I will encourage her to read the follow-up. It's a thriller with great characters (some greater than others). And it's important for other reasons.

Unlike the television show, it doesn't make you want to slit your wrists. It shows a way out.

It's also Atwood taking back her story, her characters, and having the final word, to say what she wants to say. Queen!

#fuckthepatriarchy

The spaces inside women

Bun in the Oven, ©Amelia Biewald

Do you know what carrying a child inside you does to your idea of space, of what you own? Even the poorest man takes for granted that he holds clear title to the space inside his skin. Oh, but ask a man about a woman, and he'll tell you that her body is so very different from his, that it holds empty spaces that stretch and hold mysteries, that measure time with strange and bloody clocks — whose empty spacer are those? Who holds their precious title? Ask a man again, and he'll argue that the case is not so simple when the sex is switched. The mere pockets of air inside men that erupt in belches and farts are of little account, but the spaces inside women are meant by God for so much more that women's ownership of them is clearly only ever provisional. Those empty spaces cannot be left unoccupied for no reason — they are intended to be penetrated, colonized, stuffed to bursting. The rule of men: all spaces must be filled.

— from Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, by Dexter Palmer.

Saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one

The dictionary tells us that to be interested by someone is to feel "attentive, concerned, or curious." Curiosity is a friendly emotion and even a moral position. Those whom we make the objects of our curiosity we don't prejudge or condemn. We don't fear and loathe them. My therapist, in our time together, often urged me to "stay curious" and it was a nice thing for him to try and make me do, unsuccessful as he was, because curious is a nice way to feel.

I'm not very good at psychotherapy.

I thought I was going to be the sort of person who goes to psychotherapy, and says things like, "My therapist says [insert something enlightening here]." Instead, I'm the kind of person who dreads going to a session because I have nothing to talk about, and afterward dissects it with friends, making snide comments like, "You wouldn't believe what my therapist said." Skip the session and go straight to the drinks, I say.

[I attended only three sessions, not counting the appointment I made for me and my ex when our marriage was falling apart, only it wasn't supposed to be about our marriage, it was supposed to address his anger and his drinking, but then he bailed at the last minute; I went anyway — it was an opportunity to vent, which I needed, and I came away feeling like I knew what I was doing, which maybe I didn't. That was a cognitive-behavioural therapist, and I wonder if it makes a difference. I know CBT is a form of psychotherapy, at least, so claims the current psychotherapist whom I'm no longer seeing. But I still don't have a grasp of what kind of help would benefit me, and the only clarity she offered is that "it's all psychotherapy — all therapists, counsellors, psychologists engage in some kind of psychotherapy..." Anyway, the first session was underwhelming, predictable the way her eyes lit up when I told her my father died when I was seven. The second session was a little more emotional and made me feel inadequate as a parent. But the third session was deflated, like we didn't know what to talk about, I just rambled on about my recent vacation.]

One thing about psychotherapy: it made me feel kind of stupid, that I wasn't careful with my words, that my definitions of things like, say, emotions was a little sideways, which is quite possibly true but a dangerous hole in my ego to pick at when I make my living from words — people pay me to pay attention to them and fix them and make them better. But maybe I've been doing it all wrong. 

To David, love meant declaration. Wasn't that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn't that the whole point?

Reading Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, is a lot like psychotherapy, and a bit of a trust exercise in itself, one which didn't really pay off for me. I just couldn't bring myself to care about it. Maybe if I tried harder I could find something meaningful, significant, worthy of my worry, but I just didn't care. 

(The book is described as being set in the early 80s, but I think that's a bit early for the Morrissey t-shirts and Sade references.)

It did lead me to reminisce about high-school drama club, and all the drama that went along with it. I was surprised to find that most of my class were overthinking, Smiths-listening introverts like me, only a couple attention-seekers among us. The drama teacher, Billy, insisted we call him Billy. He wrote that play we put on about teenage pregnancy, very eye-rollingly after-school special. I remember the cast party where I made out with that guy I didn't even like and got very drunk. The star, Billy's pet, what was her name? I heard later that they'd been having an affair, but then she dropped out of school and married Billy's student intern from the university.

Trust Exercise is kind of like that too; when you're a teenager everything seems boring and exciting at the same time. Exaggeratedly so. Then there are the teenagers who turn into adults who haven't ever gotten over high school.

It's a #metoo kind of book, but I don't think it has anything important to add to the conversation, and I'm surprised by the accolades it's received.

Whom do you trust? Trust the teacher, your friends, witnesses? Trust your memory, trust in yourself? Why should you trust the author? The novel has three distinct parts that tell the same story through a different filter. They can't all be true, not in the same way.

Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you're saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won't get its goddamn grubby mitts off you. At best therapy demands uncomfortable humility from the person with total recall, and at worst it can remind me of my mother — the difference being that therapy wants the emotional truth, while my mother runs screaming from any emotion or truth that's not hers.

What is the truth? Does it even matter? I don't care.

Excerpt.

Culture as class performance

From Normal People, by Sally Rooney.

On readings:

A couple of weeks ago Connell attended a reading by a writer who was visiting the college. He sat at the back of the lecture hall on his own, self-conscious because the reading was sparsely attended and everyone else was sitting in groups. It was one of the big windowless halls in the Arts Block, with fold-out tables attached to the seats. One of his lecturers gave a short and sycophantic overview of the writer's work, and then the man himself, a youngish guy around thirty, stood at the lectern and thanked the college for the invitation. By then Connell regretted his decision to attend. Everything about the event was staid and formulaic, sapped of energy. He didn't know why he had come. He had read the writer's collection and found it uneven, but sensitive in places, perceptive. Now, he thought, even that effect was spoiled by seeing the writer in this environment, hemmed off from anything spontaneous, reciting aloud from his own book to an audience who'd already read it. The stiffness of this performance made the observations in the book seem false, separating the writer from the people he wrote about, as if he'd observed them only for the benefit of talking about them to Trinity students. Connell couldn't think of any reason why these literary events took place, what they contributed to anything, what they meant. They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them.

And later, at the pub:

Connell's initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.

See also The cult of Sally Rooney.

A final depth of debasement

But here is what you need to understand — here is why you are in danger. Here is why you must speak, and why you must not allow us to speak for you. Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone.

It took a few chapters for me to warm to this book. While not exactly Dickensian, it's weighted with a cast of colourful characters, social inequalities, and 18th-century thinking. Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, by Dexter Palmer, feels claustrophobic, but ultimately that adds to the experience. I love this book.

It's the age of progress and of backward medicine. It's the Age of Reason, but very few people are actually enlightened, and fewer still care enough to struggle to achieve that state. Much is made of the village's surgeon diligently working his way through John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The story revolves around Mary Toft, an actual historical figure who allegedly gave birth to seventeen rabbits, albeit dead, partial, and dismembered. (Yes, it was a hoax.)

The book is not really about that. It's about the people who believed her.

Dr John Howard is the attending physician, the man midwife, who struggles to reconcile what he sees with own eyes with what he know to be possible. Young apprentice Zachary is confused, but he respects his elders and generally keeps silent while he observes and grows into his courage. His father is a man of the cloth who is also called on to witness the abomination and can offer no insight into the strange workings of his God.

The Atlantic calls it a novel tailor-made for the scam era: why would anyone believe the unbelievable? What profound evidence would bring a person to disregard common sense? It's as if strength of one's conviction is directly proportional to the humiliation that would be suffered by revoking it. As Dr Howard surmises, perhaps the only difference between a hoax and a miracle is the number of people who believe in it. When we find we our not alone in our belief, no matter how peculiar, when it is shared, the belief is shored up.

But the heart, no, the guts of the story, behind the willingness to believe, or to hope, is humanity's depravity. What depths of perversion are people capable of devising?

"If I were to use a woman's mouth as a chamber pot — and you would be surprised how little money it takes to acquire this service, if one has agents in the proper quarters: the money I paid her was replaced in my coffers in the time it took me to finish pissing — then we would both be aware that the perversion was one that required human inventions, and so the woman would believe she was a lesser person than I am, but she would still consider herself a person. To do what she did was humiliating, without doubt, but it is not a thing an animal would do. Slaves, I imagine, must think the same way, when they see that their chains are forged by human hands, that their freedoms are circumscribed by human laws. They may view themselves as lesser people, which would please me, but they would still view themselves as people, which is not entirely satisfying. Such a transaction of humanity favors me, but it is not quite as favorable as I would wish: I want a better bargain, and I know I can drive one.

"What I want, Zachary, and what I have yet to see thus far, is to witness a human not merely humiliating himself but doing a thing that he knows only an animal would do, not a human. A final depth of debasement from which one could not return. Do you understand?"

Lord M expounds to Zachary on the "value" of his finances as a preamble to a freakshow's main attraction and the theory of the cat. The lords for some years have been conducting a social experiment, establishing a betting pool of sorts, to determine how much money would induce a man to eat a cat, alive. Without implements of human inventions, without preparation, such that the cat dies in the process of being eaten.

But only a human would draw up a trial such as this, and no animal would be motivated by money, so Lord M's net gain remains somewhat muddled. Zachary is horrified, no less by the entertainment than by his companions' enjoyment of it.

I find myself thinking a lot about this book long after turning the final page. (I am continually astounded to discover people's limits or lack thereof, by which I am learning to define my own boundaries, in matters of all nature, but especially those that are usually hidden and sexual — sex is after all a very human act.)

"Cities are complicated," said John. "They can be both the beautiful thing you believed them to be and the dark think you did not imagine they could be. The one does not obscure the other."

Zachary was silent.

"People, too," said John more quietly.

Palmer succeeds in making everything about this novel oppressive — from Mary's domestic circumstances and her cramped birthing chamber overflowing with medical professionals to the bustling markets and gin bars of London. At the end of it, one craves the fresh air of Enlightenment.

About Mary Toft
Atlas Obscura: Why Historians Are Reexamining the Case of the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
The Paris Review: An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits
OMG Facts: This Woman Made Doctors Believe She Gave Birth To Rabbits
US National Library of Medicine: The Doctors in Labour; or a New Whim Wham from Guildford

Excerpts
Chapter III: A Concerned Husband
Chapter IV: A Birth