a fragment then a piece

"...what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more."
-Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Hug Your Spouse for Me

In my last post I made a reference to there being no happy marriages in literature. Isn't that weird? I kind of think it's weird. There are books that end with what we assume will be a happy marriage, and yet the ones in the other books that are on their way out refer to an early time when it seemed nothing could go wrong. This leads me to surmise that the books that end in happy weddings eventually become the other kind. It's interesting, is all I'm saying.

Discussion question number 1: Why are happy marriages boring?

While you're thinking about that one, let's talk about short stories. Short stories, are, by their nature, not long. Long stories I think are called novellas because usually any story longer than a novella we call a novel or a trilogy or (even) a series. Now take that list of increasingly long stories and reverse it and we're now looking at general trends in sales numbers.

Discussion question number 2: Why do we want to read series when they are objectively dumb?

Follow-up question: Why does everything have to be a trilogy when they are almost always one story split up into three books with a lot of filler and no real ending to books one or two?

A statement: I read Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore.

Follow-up statement: Most of these stories are available online for free but I got it at the library so it was better than reading them on a computer screen though I am not the type who is snobbish about a book needing pages because I think words are words and e-readers are light and I don't have a lot of muscle mass.

Now that you've been thinking about question 1, there is one story about a happy marriage in Bark: Stories (there are 8 stories in Bark: Stories). I found it rather lovely. There are a lot of the other kind. I would give them mixed reviews.

There are fine quotes:

“Tears, she had once been told, were designed to eliminate toxins, and they poured down her face and slimed her neck and gathered in the recesses of her collarbones and she had to be careful never to lie back and let them get into her ears, which might cause the toxins to return and start over. Of course, the rumor of toxins turned out not to be true. Tears were quite pure.”

Trite ones that you have almost certainly heard at church:

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.”

But mostly there are these smug ones. The characters in these stories are often so devastatingly wry in a way that makes them interchangeable.

“Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it!”

Many characters in these stories are just so bemused. They get it and everyone else who disagrees is unworthy of analysis. In real life I meet these people in coffee shops busy not having jobs.

I liked this collection of mostly free short stories, but didn't love it. I left wanting to read more from this author, but with trepidation. I love fiction for its ability to let me see the world through someone's eyes, but if those eyes are this jaundiced with loathing of general humanity, I'm not sure if I'm getting much.

We're basically born thinking we're the best baby in the nursery. That the other babies just don't get it. Somehow we came into this world the only one who sees through the tricky obfuscations of the world, refusing to be tricked. "I Don't Trust the Liberal Media", a sticker on one baby's crib says. "When Did Jesus Become Pro-Rich, Pro-War, and Only Pro-American?" a bespectacled infant retorts. One's says "Just Ledoux it" and "Git 'r Done" but we don't really talk to that baby because what is that even.

You know what else babies do? That's right. They poop their pants. But they also explore. They examine and taste and feel everything they can, they obsessively probe. At some point most of us stop doing the first thing, and that's good, but if we stop doing the second, well that's a shame. The self-congratulatory critic of general humanity has stopped exploring.

Discussion question number 3: Why?

Please Don't Feel Sorry For Me

“Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.”

Hey guys, it's me. I took a break from the endless run of books starring very flawed people who do very flawed things and no marriage is happy and no child loves their mother and read Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

It was a treat, you guys. A treat I deserved because I'm worth it. And don't think for one second that I'm diminishing what Kaling has done here. In her own words: “This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.” It doesn't all have to be literature, folks.

I've never really read these kinds of books. I like comedy, and I like a lot of comedians, but usually when they come out with a book I assume it's some kind of necessary rite of passage on one's career path that I could skip, no problem. Then I remind myself how many comic books I read. And then I remind myself what a dreary world this place can be if we don't read some jokes now and then.

Did you guys know that a lot of people are mourning right now? People I know closely, also people I hardly know, but still understand what it's like to lose a loved one. I don't know about you guys, but there's a lot of sadness surrounding me right now, though not directly affecting me aside from the pains of empathy when I watch loved ones suffer. People are scared, or sad, or despondent, and it is just hitting me really hard right now.

Listen, this is a pretty good spot to be in, all told. Like, I had this terrible day in the field yesterday. Hiking horrible terrain, ran out of food, ran out of water, sunburned, tired, light-headed. Just the pits. The weather was OK, that's about all I have to say about it that wasn't garbage. It wasn't even that pretty of a place.

Look at this bullcrap

At one point I thought I was almost finished and realized no, I actually had several hours to go. I got so mad. Like shouting swear words at nobody mad. Mad enough that having a great-horned owl land close to me and just hanging out didn't help. Mad enough that I barely appreciated the baby hummingbird chilling out by my brightly colored flagging tape.

But flash-forward to that evening, when I'd showered, eaten, changed into comfy clothes, and taken some Tylenol. Aside from lingering shoulder pain from my pack, things were pretty good. Yet the people I know who were suffering that morning were still suffering that evening.

I was lucky enough that every one of my problems could be solved with food, hot water, comfort, and medicine (and a backrub). Which was all readily available in my house. That's a pretty good spot to be in, actually.

Anyway, back to Mindy Kaling and her refreshingly funny book. I just love her. Before I read her book, I liked her. Mostly I knew her from The Office. But getting a little more time in that head of hers was really nice and pleasant and I can't wait to read her next book.

“Why didn’t you talk about whether women are funny or not?

I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tacit approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn’t.”

What if we all had a book? And we could tell our stories and what was going on in our heads when we messed up and how hard we worked for the accomplishments other people seem to think we didn't earn? Where we were sometimes tough and sometimes vulnerable and worried about the future. What if when you meet someone new and think, this is someone I would like to know better and they handed you a book, like a business card, and said this is me. Understand me. What if we understood each other?