A Line Made by Walking

I go in the back door to the kitchen. Open a cupboard, click. Take out a tin of tuna chunks and close the cupboard, thunk. Pull the ring on the can, click, again; a smaller, sharper click. Open the cutlery drawer, jangle, and select a fork, clink. Pick an ant off my sleeve and flick it down the sink. I breathe. I breathe. I breathe.

And all of this time, I am trembling.

A Line Made by Walking is apparently semi-autobiographical – like the main character, Frankie, author Sara Baume attended art school in Dublin, worked in a gallery there, and had some kind of existential/emotional breakdown – and that knowledge nudges me to tread carefully: Who am I to say that this book doesn't precisely capture the essence of a very real human experience? Here's my overthought takeaway: I really loved Baume's writing about Frankie's inner struggles and the details of how she dealt with them, and I was interested in Frankie's ideas about art and how she uses it to understand her own life, but there are formulaic devices in this book that strained my patience and drained away much of my empathy. After Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither, I wanted to love everything Baume; and I didn't love this.

When we meet Frankie, she's a twenty-five-year-old gallery worker who, after completing art school years before, lost her passion for creating art. She has some friends – or, at least, co-workers – a set routine, and a bed-sit apartment in Dublin. And then one night she realises it isn't enough – she collapses to the floor and sheds unending tears into her grimy carpet – and when she finally gathers the strength, she asks her mother to come and get her and bring her back to their village home. Because Frankie's grandmother had died a couple years earlier – and Granny's country bungalow wasn't attracting any buyers – Frankie is able to convince her parents to let her live there for a while as she figures out her life.

It wasn't my parents who annoyed me; it was the forsaken version of myself I helplessly revert to in their presence; it was the fact that my life was suddenly wide open. I had not yet, at that point, decided whether I wanted to get better or die altogether.

Frankie makes several references to “waiting to die” and not caring if she does or not, and while her mother recognises her daughter's fragility and insists she visit the family doctor before moving out to the country alone, Frankie is unimpressed that two different, harried doctors immediately wrote her a prescription; both of which Frankie refused to fill. Again, I understand that this mirrors Baume's own experience, and while I can't deny that there is an overmedicalisation in the mental health field, I don't know what to think about this: Neither doctor spends enough time with Frankie to properly diagnose her, but the reader can see that she's in trouble; yet, as a reader with no experience of mental illness, I have no idea if Frankie should be medicated (and I'll note that Frankie doesn't just seem to suffer from depression, but she describes a lifetime of OCD and serious paranoia, as well). Is this just some “quarter-life crisis” that everyone needs to wait out, as Baume apparently did? Could “wait it out” be a dangerous message for those who would benefit from medication? No clue, and I wish Frankie's mental state had been made clearer.

Because my small world is coming apart in increments, it seems fitting that the creatures should be dying too. They are being killed with me; they are being killed for me.

As to the art: Not long before Frankie's breakdown, she decides to photograph a series of found, dead animals; starting with a robin in her city garden. Each chapter is named for a type of animal (Robin, Rabbit, Rat...), and it immediately becomes clear that Frankie will eventually find a dead robin, rabbit, rat, etc. in each so-titled chapter. That was one of the devices that began to wear on me (there's nothing shocking [or artful?] or otherwise emotional about happening upon the dead frog one has been expecting), but the more wearying device was Frankie's mental “testing” of herself: She would see an object or think of a concept and then conjure from an apparently eidetic memory an art piece centered on that object/concept:

Why must I test myself? Because no one else will, not any more. Now that I am no longer a student of any kind, I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head. I must slide new drawers into chests and attach new rollers to armchairs. I must maintain the old highboys and sideboards and whatnots. Polish, patch, dust, buff. And, from scratch, I must build new frames and appendages; I must fill the drawers and roll along.

There's something ironic about this particular metaphor – taking responsibility for the furniture in her head – when Frankie can't muster the energy to take care of the furniture in her grandmother's house; no urge to sweep up the dead flies by the sitting room window; no desire to remove the desiccated slug from the bathroom mirror. To demonstrate this “testing” device, this is the book's titular example:

Works about Lower, Slower Views, I test myself: Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967. A short, straight track worn by footsteps back and forth through an expanse of grass. Long doesn't like to interfere with the landscapes through which he walks, but sometimes he builds sculptures from materials supplied by chance. Then he leaves them behind to fall apart. He specialises in barely-there art. Pieces which take up as little space in the world as possible. And which do as little damage.

I do like this example – as the artwork captures and makes visual something of Frankie's barely-there existence – but this device is used over seventy times in ten chapters, and that's too much for me; they eventually felt like filler and I grew to dread coming upon another. And it probably exposes me as a Philistine, but I couldn't engage with most of the conceptual artpieces that Frankie describes, even though she explains what's important about them (and as Baume explains in an afterword, these are only meant to be Frankie's interpretations; we are encouraged to discover ad interpret the art as we like). I was already one of the great unwashed who doesn't “get” My Bed by Tracey Emin (People were so angry over that bed; they did not realise it was the easiest piece of art in the world with which to identify), so there's not much chance that I'd see the genius in someone punching a clock-card at the strike of every hour for a year (Hsieh's One Year Performance) or the blinking lights of Creed's Work No. 227: The lights going on and off; as Baume says of the latter:

I love what it might mean. The light and dark in everything, the reaction to every action, the prodigious unpredictability of life. And I love the possibility – the audacity – that it might mean nothing at all.

And a last observation: We eventually learn the extent of Frankie's paranoia about strangers, and where it may have come from. When I read the bit about Frankie and her sister having discussed the bad guys' method of rolling an empty pram onto the road to get a car to stop, I thought there was probably something very significant about them having decided as a credo: Remember the golden rule? Always hit the baby. I thought that this – hit the baby/photograph the roadkill – was likely the nexus around which the whole narrative revolved, but there's always the possibility – the audacity – that it might mean nothing at all.

There's not a whole lot of plot to A Line Made by Walking, so it really comes down to what's going on in Frankie's head. Where she was dealing with what was real (her experiences, emotions, fears), I was totally engaged. But all the parts that read as little more than a catalogue of Tate Museum exhibitions felt formulaic and left me cold; not least of all because I don't feel engaged by the type of high concept art that she's describing (my own failing, I know). I understand that Baume has become motivated to take up her visual art again, and I'd be interested to see what she creates. And if I need to wait years and years before she writes another book, I'll be interested to see what she creates on the page at that time, too.

I really did like that Frankie suffers the same brand of solipsism that I did at her age -- when the universe appears to be talking to you, who wouldn't listen? -- and she is forever surprised to think of someone just before they call; or try to remember something about penguins right before catching a radio programme about them. I found it amusing to have found a Planet of the Apes reference in the last book I read (Lorrie Moore's use of  "a planet of the apings!" to describe learning to date again after divorce) because that is Dave's biggest pop reference, and then I found it doubly amusing to find a Land Before Time reference in this book -- and especially as my own soon-to-graduate-with-an-art-history-minor daughter is both a Land Before Time fan/collector and someone who is exasperated by her mother's inability to see the genius in modern conceptual art pieces; she rather likes My Bed. So for Kennedy I include:

Back in the kitchen, I see there's a leaf stuck to my sneaker. Small, yellow, sycamore, like the one which obsessed Littlefoot in The Land Before Time. The leaf of the last growing tree which kept the herbivorous dinosaurs alive. Perfectly centered on my toe, as if it was the only visible part of an invisible pattern. 

Ah, who isn't solipsistic in the face of "invisible patterns"? Although I have never before encountered Littlefoot in a work of literature, Kennedy says this will become significant only if there's an Army of Darkness reference in my next book; her sister's number one pop reference.

Bark : Stories

 

Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage. It was both the shame and the demise of them that hate like love could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shown a spotlight down for it to seize. Paper Losses

I'm the type of reader who likes to find a book's title within its pages and plumb it for deeper meaning. Lorrie Moore's Bark begins with excerpts from three poems: one that mentions a tree's bark, two about dogs (I used the images of the two alternate covers to reinforce this tree/dog ambiguity). And although there is no story within this collection with the title “Bark”, the word itself is used repeatedly: about dogs and trees; as a criticism about the way a person talks or laughs; to describe the protective cover of the brain; in the expression “sparky bark” as a nickname for weed. I suppose whether it's on a tree or brain, or issuing from a dog's muzzle, all barks are used protectively; and if there's one unifying idea the variety of characters in these stories are in need of, it's protection: from the harming world and from each other. I don't think there's one happy marriage in this collection (the narrator in Foes seems satisfied, but there are hints that his wife is less so), and while divorced parents are definitely bonded with their children, these relationships aren't necessarily healthy or enough. Moore constantly skirts the edge between tragedy and comedy – the laughs are darkly so – but while there was much that I admired in this collection, it didn't exactly wow me. Some highlights, nevertheless:

Debarking sees the narrator, Ira, starting to date again after his wife of fifteen years left him for another man. He muses:

It had been so long, the whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings! – graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was.

After Ira has sex for the first time with a woman not his wife, she asks him, “Did you get off?” and that immediately reminded him of the time he was debarking a plane and stopped on the tarmac to tie his shoe and an airport employee had asked him that exact thing, “Did you get off?” So, “debarking” seems to be reinterpreted literally; as in to remove the protective layer of bark and open yourself up to another. (I fear, but don't actually think, that I'm reading too much into that because of my habit of looking for the embedded title. And can't decide if it's too deliberate.) To return to Paper Losses and a woman who doesn't realise that her husband is about to mail her divorce papers, even as they live together as a married couple:

It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn't. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.

The Juniper Tree – replete with a variety of transplanted trees that fail to thrive in an unsuitable zone – is a mournful story involving the twilight years of those Baby Boomer women who have rejected traditional gender roles:

Every woman I knew here drank – daily. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another.

So, again, is that tree imagery too deliberate for the subject matter? Wings – a definite highlight until its corny ending – shows a middle-aged woman stuck (creatively, financially, romantically) with a man she can't quite unstick herself from:

She loved Dench. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn't preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice – and the sound of his, which was worse. The portraits of hell never ceased and sometimes were done up in raucous, gilded frames to console. Romantic hope: From where did women get it? Certainly not from men, who were walking caveat emptors. No, women got it from other women, because in the end women would rather be rid of one another than have to endure themselves on a daily basis. So they urged each other into relationships. “He loves you! You can see it in his eyes!” they lied.

And I also really liked the last story, Thank You for Having Me; about a woman raising a daughter alone after her husband left (so many husbands/fathers leave in these stories; whether dying young or climbing out a restaurant's bathroom window):

Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

I understand that this collection came fifteen years after Moore's previously lauded Birds of America, so while Bark was released in 2014, I can sort of appreciate why so many of the stories here felt slightly anachronistic; rooted in the early 2000s. Not only is Ira worried about embarking on a new relationship at the dawn of the second Iraq War (which he compulsively follows on TV), but there is mention made of Ollie North losing his senate bid, an evil conservative at a fundraiser sneers about Obama's missing birth certificate and links to old hippy terrorists before the 2008 presidential election, and a CIA spook needs to leave a Parisian love nest in order to return to America and do damage control just as the Abu Ghraib scandal is hitting CNN. I can't decide whether these references make the collection feel already dated (in the today of 2017) or if it will stand as the perfect encapsulation of the times.

I picked up this collection because I had recently been delighted by Moore's short story How to Be an Other Woman, but unfortunately, nothing in Bark approaches that story's heft or humour. Other reviewers have noted that this collection doesn't seem to be up to Moore's usual standard, so I won't feel bad awarding it a middle-of-the-road three stars.

Tree of Smoke

Uncle F.X., pillar of fire, tree of smoke, wanted to raise a great tree in his own image, a mushroom cloud – if not a real one over the rubble of Hanoi, then its dreaded possibility in the mind of Uncle Ho, the Enemy King. And who could say the delirious old warrior didn't grapple after actual truths? Intelligence, data, analysis be damned; to hell with reason, categories, synthesis, common sense. All was ideology and imagery and conjuring. Fires to light the minds and heat the acts of men. And cow their consciences. Fireworks, all of it – not just the stuff of history, but the stuff of reality itself, the thoughts of God – speechless and obvious: incandescent patterns, infinitely widening.

I always feel the need to explain myself for context when I review an American-centric book like Tree of Smoke, so here goes again: As a Canadian, the Vietnam War hasn't bound me to my fellow citizens with communal psychic scars – I didn't lose an older brother to the VC, I don't have a crazy and legless Uncle-Lieutenant-Dan, I was raised in the smug knowledge that we didn't get involved in the Asian quagmire; that, rather, Canada provided safe haven for the teenage American draft dodger with the unlucky lottery number – so while I'm not uninterested in stories about Vietnam, they're no more personal to me than stories about the Irish Troubles or the Third Balkan War, both of which I also lived through; it can all be fascinating history, certainly worthy of literary treatment, but it's not particularly my own intimately felt history. I also lived through the Iran-Contra Affair, the training of the Afghan Mujahideen, and Saddam Hussein's missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, so I'm unsurprised by a storyline involving covert CIA operations and how their intelligence-gathering influences American policy; or how this preordained policy influences the intelligence that's gathered. So, really, a book like this comes down to the writing for me, and overall, that was an uneven experience: some parts I loved, some parts were dull, and while its six hundred+ pages felt like far too much in the moment, I was more melancholy than relieved to have finished it. 

Other readers seem to be of two minds as well: the top Goodreads review gives Tree of Smoke one star (followed by a string of fours and fives), and the experts are also divided, with Jim Lewis writing in The New York Times: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop. And by contrast, B. R. Meyers wrote in The Atlantic: One closes the book only with a renewed sense of the decline of American literary standards. It would be foolish to demand another Tolstoy, but shouldn’t we expect someone writing about the Vietnam War to have more sense and eloquence than the politicians who prosecuted it? I feel really wishy-washy in the face of so much passion to award three stars, but I wasn't excited into either love or hate territory by Tree of Smoke; I can neither defend nor condemn it winning the National Book Award for 2007.

Tree of Smoke is told from several rotating points-of-view – covering the years of 1963-1970, with a coda from 1983 – but it is primarily focussed on William “Skip” Sands; a rookie CIA agent covertly stationed in Vietnam (“I'm from Del Monte”) under the nebulous command of his uncle – a WWII war hero, early Psy-Ops agent, currently a civilian operating under the honorific “Colonel” who can commandeer a platoon and a helicopter and a mountaintop, yet of unspecified authority – and while Skip thinks he would love to get close to the action, Uncle Francis has him compiling and cross-referencing a secret filing system. I really liked that we watch Skip change through the years – him becoming more cynical in his jungle villa as the tumblers of Bushmills and servant-cooked Beef Noodle Soup makes his regular uniform of bathing trunks and boxcut dress shirt grow ever tighter – and his remove from both the fighting and the experience back home feels a fresh slant on the war:

Martin Luther King had been killed. Robert Kennedy had been killed. The North Koreans still held an American naval vessel and her crew. The Marines besieged at Khe Sanh, the infantry slaughtering the whole village of My Lai, hirsute, self-righteous idiots marching in the streets of Chicago. Among the hairy ones the bloody failure of January's Tet Offensive had resounded as a spiritual victory. And then in May a second country-wide push, feebler, but nearly as resonant. He devoured Time and Newsweek and found it all written down there, yet these events seemed improbable, fictitious. In six or seven months the homeland from which he was exiled had sunk in the ocean of its future history.

I was led to Denis Johnson by his short story Dirty Wedding (which I discovered and loved in My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead), and it was the gritty realism of the experience of the underclass that wowed me in that story, so it's unsurprising that he includes here the war experience of a pair of brothers from the poor side of Phoenix – both of whom joined up underage to escape their final, futile year of high school – and I could almost argue that their unglamourous and pointless war stories (Bill Houston was discharged from the Navy for fighting and desertion and his younger brother James committed speed-fueled, blood-soaked Recon with the Infantry) and their States-side aftermath is the real heart of the book. We also follow some Vietnamese nationals: a businessman who decides to help the Americans with a view to getting out of Vietnam; his nephew who flies the Colonel's helicopter and who is just trying to survive; and the businessman's old friend – a disillusioned Communist who decides to turn on the Vietcong, and whom the Colonel wants to exploit as a double agent and send back north (in a "Tree of Smoke" psy-ops scheme). There is a German assassin and a Philippino mercenary and we also meet Kathy Jones: the Canadian wife of a murdered Missionary who stays on in the country to provide aid to orphans with her nursing skills. Kathy also hooks us with Skip a few times over the years, and is sanguine about the attitudes of the American soldiers she meets:

Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You're sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don't do the women, you don't kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don't care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don't care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.

And there is the storyline of the Colonel's aide, Jimmy Storm. Storm is a bit of a madman – like he's tripping on acid, constantly looking for ephemeral sensations and hidden connections – and when he learns in 1983 that the Colonel might still be alive and living in Thailand (the Colonel was said to have died during the war – of a heart attack? Of an assassin's blade? Maybe he faked his death to infiltrate the north?), he begins a very Search-for-Kurtz quest that culminates in Storm volunteering for a primitive soul-losing ritual (the horror!):

From the trees all around came the waterfall sound of scrabbling claws and the curses of demons driven into the void. More women screamed. The men howled. The jungle itself screamed like a mosque. Storm lay naked on his back and watched the upward-rushing mist and smoke in the colossal firelight and waited for the clear light, for the peaceful deities, the face of the father-mother, the light from the six worlds, the dawning of hell's smoky light and the white light of the second god, the hungry ghosts wandering in ravenous desire, the gods of knowledge and the wrathful gods, the judgment of the lord of death before the mirror of karma, the punishments of the demons, and the flight to refuge in the cave of the womb that would bear him back into this world.

Whether Johnson is a “true American artist” or proof of “the decline of American literary standards” seems beyond my ken. I can only evaluate my own experience – and I hope that by the inclusion of such long quotes I have given a sense of that experience – and I arrive at the wishy-washy: Tree of Smoke neither blew my mind nor bored me to tears. It felt too long, but I liked the sentences; I didn't really learn anything, but it didn't belabour the familiar; I'm not unhappy to have read it, but I didn't really need to read it. Three noncommittal stars.

Tunesday : Our House

This is the current Google Streetview of our old house, not quite the same as when we lived there but I can't find a pic

Our House

(Smyth/Foreman/Woodgate/McPherson/Thompson/Bedford/Barson) Performed by Madness

Father wears his Sunday best

Mother's tired, she needs a rest

The kids are playing up downstairs

Sister's sighing in her sleep

Brother's got a date to keep he can't hang around

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our

Our house it has a crowd

There's always something happening

And it's usually quite loud

Our mum she's so house-proud

Nothing ever slows her down and a mess is not allowed

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our (something tells you that you've got to get away from it)

Father gets up late for work

Mother has to iron his shirt

Then she sends the kids to school

Sees them off with a small kiss

She's the one they're going to miss in lots of ways

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our

I remember way back then when everything was true and when

We would have such a very good time such a fine time

Such a happy time

And I remember how we'd play, simply waste the day away

Then we'd say nothing would come between us

Two dreamers

Father wears his Sunday best

Mother's tired, she needs a rest

The kids are playing up downstairs

Sister's sighing in her sleep

Brother's got a date to keep he can't hang around

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our

Our house, was our castle and our keep

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, that was where we used to sleep

Our house, in the middle of our street

Our house, in the middle of our street, our house

This week's song is a totally literal choice because I want to write about the first house Dave and I bought -- and I know that Our House is from ten years earlier than what I'm talking about, but I always liked this song and it totally captures the idea of the home we intended to create when we laid out our down payment.

I wrote before about the house that Dave and I were renting when we got married, and I'll just note that that place had a basement suite. First Dave's friend Paul lived in the basement, and then Delight's friend Cuzzy did, and not long before we moved, my friend Curtis moved from our guest room down into the basement. So when we started looking for a place to buy, we felt responsible for Curtis, too, and looked for something with a separate area for him. And I'll also add a note about our limited budget: This was probably 1992, and with interest rates at over 8%, we couldn't afford to borrow very much. Dave's family had always banked with Canada Trust, so we went there first to apply for a mortgage. Because in those days CT also had a real estate brokerage, when we went to the bank we were told that we could borrow however much, but only if we used one of their real estate agents for the house purchase. We hadn't hired an agent yet, so although we knew this didn't sound right, they made us feel like they were doing us a favour by loaning us any money, so we didn't resist.

The agent we were assigned was young and slick, and looking at the amount we were preapproved for, he said we could probably only afford a condo. We didn't want a condo, and told him so. The house we had been renting was just north of Edmonton's downtown, and as we liked the area, and as we knew that houses in the area tended to sell within our budget, we told him that's where we wanted to look. He sighed and printed off some options. And another note: Buying a house was so much harder before MLS listings on the internet; we were totally at the agent's mercy regarding what he wanted to show us.

The agent took us to look at a handful of places -- and a couple of them were gorgeous; century homes that looked beautifully renovated but which we feared were hiding expensive problems because of the low prices -- and after dampening our excitement, telling us we probably would never find what we were looking for at our pricepoint, we eventually found one house that we really liked: a small and solid box on a really large yard, nicely renovated, basement suite, within budget. We were excited enough to say that we wanted to put in an offer right away (a Saturday afternoon), the agent said we could do the paperwork on the following Monday, and when Monday came, he called to say the house had sold over the weekend. This guy acted like our business was beneath him, and he just lost our business.

During this same period, our friends Steve and Libby bought a beautiful old house in our desired neighbourhood -- a house we were never even shown -- and they had liked their agent so much that we decided to give her a call. This agent, Carla, had an in with the Royal Bank, and when we went to meet with her friend there, this bank that we had never before dealt with preapproved us for an even larger mortgage than did Dave's lifelong bank. At that moment, Canada Trust lost all of our business forever. 

Carla had a much better understanding of what we were looking for -- and didn't act like our dreams were petty -- and she showed us a few decent options before showing us the one. The house we eventually bought had originally been a rooming house, and we loved the quirkiness of all its little rooms. From the front door you entered a closed-off breezeway -- perfect for Edmonton winters -- and then through another door, you entered a just-big-enough living room (it held a couch, a chair, a TV and a coffee table), off to the left was a little room (could have been a bedroom, but we called it the "music room" and set it up with our wall unit, stereo, loveseat, and Nintendo), the living room gave way to a small dining room, which led to the kitchen. I don't know why the kitchen was in two parts, but the first room had the stove and sink, and through a doorway, you got to the fridge and cupboards (Dave would eventually knock down that wall to make it one big room, despite a contractor warning him that "it might not be load-bearing, but in a house this old, all walls are load-bearing"). This floor had a full bathroom with a shower, for the convenience of the person in the basement suite (which was just a big basement-sized bedroom). There were stairs going up off a long corridor on the main floor which could be locked off from the rest of the house if you wanted to rent out either the up or the down as an apartment, so the upstairs was just as quirky. There was a big bathroom with a shower and an original clawfoot tub, a tiny bedroom right across from it (that Dave called his office and just barely fit his large desk and chair), another smallish bedroom with a sink in it (could be set up as a kitchen, but as my mother said at the time, the sink made it perfect for use as a nursery eventually; as it did), there was a large sitting room (where my bookshelves eventually went), and across the front of the house were two same-sized bedrooms, neither of which would hold our bed and both of our dressers (Dave's went in the spare room). We were on a corner lot -- which was not great when it was time to shovel snow from all that sidewalk -- and we had beautiful big trees (the leaves we had to rake!), a big deck, a vegetable garden (which was planted and left for us to harvest come fall), a fence too high for our big dog, Mo, to jump over, and oddly, a housefront variety store next door that we didn't buy from as much as you might think. We were within blocks of the Edmonton Eskimos football stadium, so while we were amused by the neighbours who would sell parking on their lawns during events, we totally enjoyed sitting out on the deck and listening whenever a band we liked would be performing there; we listened to Pink Floyd and the Stones out in the open air of our own yard. 

Dave and I were in our mid-twenties when we bought that house and we felt that by doing so, we were taking the first step towards building a family. This may be old-fashioned thinking, but I look at the price of houses today (the average for our city is currently over 500k), and even with the low interest rates persisting, I have no idea how my own kids will afford to buy their first homes; maybe they'll be happy with condos; maybe they won't equate "house" with "home" like we did, or maybe I'm as wrong as our first real estate agent in thinking that they won't be able to afford a house that they'll love. Because this is true: that first house may have been weird or even shabby in the eyes of others, but we loved it and everything it represented in our lives: laying down roots; acting like adults; grasping at permanence and stability as the foundation for a family.

I remember way back then when everything was true and when

We would have such a very good time such a fine time

Such a happy time

And I remember how we'd play, simply waste the day away

Then we'd say nothing would come between us

Two dreamers 

The First Bad Man

“I'm the first man,” she said.
“The one in denim?”
“The first bad man.”
It was the way she was standing when she said it – her feet planted wide, her big hands waiting in the air. Just like a bad man, the kind that comes to a sleepy town and makes all kinds of trouble before galloping off again. She wasn't the first bad man ever but the first I'd ever met who had long blond hair and pink velour pants. She snapped her gum impatiently.

This was my first reaction upon finishing The First Bad Man, and it bears repeating: “I smiled and winced through the whole thing and then ended it in tears.” It would be patronising and dismissive to call this book merely “quirky” or “kinky” (but it is both), and Miranda July – award-winning filmmaker and short-story-writer, performance artist, and first-time novelist – is presumably too busy and too thoughtful to waste her time writing a book that can be dismissed that easily. I don't think July wrote a shocking book for shock's sake, or reached for the ludicrous just to be funny (but it is both shocking and terribly funny), but in a way that reminded me somewhat of the classic-of-the-absurd A Confederacy of Dunces, she created a character so outside the bounds of reality that she opened a window upon the hearts of all of us; Cheryl Glickman is the exception that proves the rules for this messy human project. This wasn't a passive reading experience – I had physical reactions, smiling and wincing, on every page – and I can't help but admire any book that pulls that out of me. Let's meet Cheryl Glickman:

I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching – windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel. When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda?

Who is she? Cheryl is a frumpy forty-three-year-old single woman (her best physical features are her shell-like ears, so she tends to enter rooms ear-first) who lives alone (with a bizarre system of housekeeping rules meant to stave off decrepitude), who remote-manages a women's self-defense centre (Open Palm) that has transitioned over the years into selling self-defense-as-fitness DVDs, and who has a vivid and long-running sexual fantasy involving a sixty-five-year-old board member, Phillip; a wrinkled, balding jerk who thinks it's funny to grab Cheryl by her chunky necklace and lead her around the office (but as this is the only action Cheryl gets, she's willing to laugh along as though Phillip is just making fun of the kind of jerk who might actually do something like that unironically). As the novel begins, two situations arise that rattle Cheryl's smooth-edged equilibrium: Phillip has fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old, and through a series of crude texts (he describes his “stiff member” and how he wants to “cream” on the girl's “jugs”), he asks Cheryl's blessing before bedding the girl; and Cheryl's bosses ask her to allow their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Clee, to temporarily move in with her. Cheryl is so passive and uncomplaining that she neither balks at Phillip as he downgrades her from potential partner to asexual arbiter, nor at Clee as she refuses to follow the household rules, looming large and beautiful, stinking of foot rot. 

Cheryl unintentionally begins therapy at this time, and for the first time ever, has someone to talk to. Putting aside the fact that the therapist invites Cheryl to pee in empty Chinese food takeout containers behind a ripped paper screen in the corner of her office if she needs to use the facilities, Cheryl finds the experience enlightening; and especially when Dr. Tibbetts shares the fact the she and the colour therapist she shares the office with like to engage in “adult games” involving fantasy and role-playing. Cheryl is able to use this idea of game-playing to reinterpret (and gain power in) her relationships with both Phillip and Clee. When Clee becomes physically abusive, Cheryl reacts with the popping and butterflying of Open Palm's old self-defense videos, and once Clee recognises the moves and the scenarios that Cheryl starts intentionally setting up, she responds in kind and the pair begin wrestling around the house like a cross between Fight Club and Cato jumping out of the shadows at Inspector Clouseau. It's creepy enough to have Clee reciting “Yum yum yum” from the bushes as Cheryl approaches to unlock the front door, but what the young woman doesn't know is that on the inside, Cheryl is imagining that she has a “stiff member” that can't wait to “cream” on Clee's “jugs”. And while the game-playing does allow Cheryl to overcome her lifelong impotence, her therapist recognises that Cheryl has begun to dehumanise everyone around her; turning them into pawns for her fantasies. And then things happen and stuff changes and Cheryl finds love in an unexpected place.

Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.

I liked that we don't learn anything about Cheryl's childhood that might explain the why of her strange existence – other than the time that she intensely bonded with a visiting infant when she was nine; an event that caused Cheryl to seek out a psychic connection with every baby she sees for the rest of her life – and meeting her in middle age, it was touching to watch as Cheryl transforms from someone with a wholly fantasy-based life to one who has a physical presence in the world. The ending was earned but not predictable, and as I opened with, I was in tears by the time I closed the book's covers. Loved it.

The Obelisk Gate

The Obelisk Gate amplifies energies both physical and arcane. No single point of surface venting produces these energies in sufficient quantity. The Rift is a reliable, high-volume source.

I didn't have the highest of hopes for The Obelisk Gate – as the middle volume of a trilogy, I expected it to feel more like a placeholder than a complete work of its own – and it ultimately satisfied my (lowered) expectations. After Fifth Season ended on a bit of a cliffhanger – Tell me, have you ever heard of something called a moon? – this book sees Alabaster explaining that cryptic question within its first hundred or so pages, and then we follow Essun (in the underground geode comm of Castrima) and her lost daughter Nassun (in the far-flung comm of Jekity and its quasi-Fulcrum), observe their deepening understandings and mounting powers for about a year, and then in the book's last fifty pages, the narrative rejoins the trilogy's overarching plot. Not much of real importance happens in this book compared to the first – it lacks the initial wonder of world-building (because the world is now familiar), there's less narrative tension (because the core mysteries have been revealed), and there's no literary twist (because that had been resolved) – but I still trust N. K. Jemisin to pull it all together in the end; this wasn't a waste of time, but didn't blow my mind. Spoilery from here.

Alabaster has learned what caused the Shattering that initiated the first of the humanity-crushing Fifth Seasons, and while his efforts so far to fix the problem is killing him, he has come to find Essun in order to teach her how to finish the job for him. Because a major theme of this series is the fear-based bigotry that the “stills” display towards the “roggas”, I really liked the irony of Alabaster having discovered that it was, indeed, the orogenes who first broke the world; that in order to fix it, 'Baster had to create the Rift that is currently killing off humanity. I had really enjoyed the conceit that orogenes are able to harness and redirect the energies of the Earth – the plausible explanation for the how behind the Fantasy – so I was annoyed when Alabaster revealed that this Earth-based stuff was just a power-limiting distraction imposed on orogenes by the Fulcrum; that their true strength lay in harnessing the silvery filaments of magic inherent in everything. I appreciate that the Earth of these books is our own planet, and that by using the word “magic” Jemisin is further tying her world to our own, but she could have introduced this greater power and called it anything but “magic” and I would have been on board. Now the Fantasy is just fantasy.

Over the course of the year within The Obelisk Gate, we watch Essun get involved with the politics of the comm that took her in, find out a bit more about the stone-eaters, and watch as she learns to harness the power of the obelisks. And again, I loved the irony of watching Essun transform into the monster that she spent an entire life protesting she could never be; the monster that the stills all knew she was capable of becoming.

“Not one more child!” You can sess the ones nearest you – the other council members, the screaming drunk, Penty and her girls, Hjarka and the rest, all of them. Everyone in Castrima. They trod upon the filaments of your nerves, tapping and jittering and they are Jija. You focus on the drunk woman and it is almost instinctual, the urge to begin squeezing the movement and life out of her and replacing that with whatever the by-product of magical reactions really is, the stuff that looks like stone. This stuff that is killing Alabaster, the father of your other dead child, NOT ONE MORE RUSTING CHILD. For how many centuries has the world killed rogga children so that everyone else's children can sleep easy? Everyone is Jija, the whole damn world is Schaffa, Castrima is Tirimo is the Fulcrum NOT ONE MORE and you turn with the obelisk torrenting its power through you to begin killing everyone within and beyond your sight.

Meanwhile, we also see Nassun falling under Schaffa's control in Jekity, and while it's understandable that a little girl in her position would be grasping for love and approval anywhere she could find it, I never understood just what is going on with Schaffa's transformation (and not in a delightful frisson of narrative tension, but in an annoyed who-is-this-guy kind of way). By showing Nassun's mounting powers, her willingness to become a bit monstrous herself, her manipulation by both Schaffa and a stone-eater ally, and her inability to understand or forgive her mother, it would seem that Nassun and Essun will be on opposite sides during the final volume of the trilogy (or will they?).

The way of the world isn't the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too. Then it's all broken hands and silver threads woven like ropes, and mothers who move the earth to destroy their enemies but cannot save one little boy.
(Girl.)

So, not enough really happened in this book – a lot about Castrima, that doesn't matter in the end; frequent brief scenes with minor characters (like Binof or Lerna or various stone-eaters) so they can be brought along to the finale – and I didn't get the further insight into the main characters or into the true history of the Earth that I would have liked. I do now understand(ish) where the stone-eaters came from and their ambivalent position in the behind-the-scenes war for control of the planet, but that didn't take much to explain. But again, not a waste of time, and I'm still looking forward to learning how it'll all conclude.

Tunesday : Freedom! '90

Freedom! '90

(Hooper/Law/Michael/Beresford/Wheeler) Performed by George Michael

I won't let you down
I will not give you up
Gotta have some faith in the sound
It's the one good thing that I've got
I won't let you down
So please don't give me up
‘Cause I would really, really love to stick around, oh yeah

Heaven knows I was just a young boy
Didn't know what I wanted to be
I was every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy
And I guess it was enough for me
To win the race? A prettier face!
Brand new clothes and a big fat place
On your rock and roll TV
But today the way I play the game is not the same
No way
Think I'm gonna get myself happy

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I told you so
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone else I've got to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Take back your singing in the rain
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me yea yea
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take

Heaven knows we sure had some fun boy
What a kick just a buddy and me
We had every big shot good-time band on the run boy
We were living in a fantasy
We won the race
Got out of the place
I went back home got a brand new face
For the boys on MTV
But today the way I play the game has got to change
Oh yeah
Now I'm gonna get myself happy

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I stopped the show
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone I forgot to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Don't think that I'll be back again
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me, yea yea
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
You've gotta give for what you take

Well it looks like the road to heaven
But it feels like the road to hell
When I knew which side my bread was buttered
I took the knife as well
Posing for another picture
Everybody's got to sell
But when you shake your ass
They notice fast
And some mistakes were built to last

That's what you get
That's what you get
That's what you get
I say that's what you get
That's what you get for changing your mind
That's what you get for changing your mind

That's what you get
That's what you get
And after all this time
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes
Do not make the man

All we have to do now is take these lies
And make them true somehow
All we have to see is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me yea yea
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
You've got to give for what you take
Freedom
Freedom
Freedom
You've got to give for what you take
Yea you've got to give for what you, give for what you give

May not be what you want from me
Just the way it's got to be
Lose the face now
I've got to live I've got to live

I had forgotten that Dave graduated university in 1990 - making this song the perfect anthem for that happy occasion - and as it all dovetails with the things that are on my mind today, this feels like an appropriate time to add Freedom! '90 to my personal discography. As a song about staying true to yourself in the face of outside expectations, it says everything I'm currently thinking of.

It's a cliché to say that girls grow up to marry their fathers, and when Dave and I got married a year after he graduated, he was an unemployed actor; the furthest thing possible in my mind from the high-powered executive that my Dad had become. When Dad retired, he was the president of a multinational pork processor, and Dave is currently...the vice-president of a different multinational pork processor. Dagblammit! How does something like that even happen?

When Dave discovered acting in high school, it was a blessing and a redemption. Never having done well throughout school (because of undiagnosed dyslexia), the first time Dave hit the stage he was a success and a star; he had found his calling. Throughout his high school years, Dave appeared in plays (both in school and in the community) and got some film credits, too. Knowing that he could use his acting skills to pursue further education at a university level, Dave really tried in his coursework for the first time in his life, and although he had always felt dumb in school, although he had been called dumb and lazy by teachers in school, he had the grades by the end of high school to attend his choice of schools; ending up at the University of Guelph, with an eye to transferring to an actual acting school.

After two years at Guelph, Dave auditioned to both the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the National Theater School in Montreal, and was offered a spot in each. Dave tells me that these were considered the two top schools for acting in Canada - with the edge given to one or the other year to year - and mostly because he couldn't speak French, he decided on Edmonton. The training was intense at the U of A - he took everything from Stage Combat to Dance - and as that's when I met him, I saw Dave shine on stage in many excellent productions. After three years of this intense education, Dave received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting...and never performed again.

When he first graduated, Dave went on one audition and came home deflated. He felt he had lost his spark. The past three years had compartamentalised, "boxed up", everything inside him, and he could no longer access what had made him naturally shine; he no longer loved the stage; he no longer even wanted to act. Happily, I was working at the bar at the time, making more money than even we could waste, and I told him to take all the time he needed to figure out what he actually wanted to do with his life. When his friend Steven (who was working as the General Manager of a small theatre) offered Dave a job as the theatre's Front of House Manager, he took it (even though Dave knew that Steven was probably just going to use him as his mouthpiece in front of the Board). It was this job that gave Dave the confidence to pursue other management positions; his acting skills coming into constant play whether he's in front of a customer, his boss, or the Board.  Nearly thirty years later, Dave is a confident, competent, successful man - his elementary school teachers would have never foreseen this, and if he hadn't discovered acting, Dave himself would have probably never seen a way to go to university and find his road to this form of success. (Dave is a smart, hard-working man and would have succeeded at anything he tried.)

Fast forward to 2017 and our older daughter, Kennedy, is about to graduate with a degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Guelph. She is a gifted actor, like her Dad, and has our full support to follow her dreams wherever they may lead her. Just before Christmas, a curious thing happened: a representative of a small local theatre came to one of her classes, and based on a recommendation from one of Kennedy's professors, she was approached and offered an internship as that theatre's Dramaturge. Kennedy does have an interest in and some experience with Dramaturgy, and this representative explained to Kennedy that this position could be considered a foot in the door to being groomed into a position of greater responsibility in the theatre's management structure. Theatre management as her first job out of university, just like her Dad. If it's a cliché to say that girls grow up to marry their fathers, what does it say when they grow up to become their fathers?

For her entire last year of school, people have been asking Kennedy, "What are you going to do when you graduate? Do you have a job lined up?" That's a lot of pressure to put on someone with an acting degree, and Kennedy resents even being asked. She is interested in the Dramaturge position (I think primarily so she has an answer to the questions), but she is also going into Toronto on an audition this afternoon. Awesome. 

I think when Dave graduated and then didn't pursue acting, that was confusing, probably disappointing, to his parents (and especially his own father in the picture up there, who is a lifelong movie fanatic; the man did dream). As Dave is now successful and obviously pleased with what he has achieved, I know that he has shown his parents that there can be a crooked path to happiness and they are obviously proud of him (as are my own parents; as am I). All we can offer Kennedy is the opportunity to find her own path; all we can offer is support and Freedom!

Freedom!
Freedom! (my freedom)
You've gotta give for what you take
Give for what you, give for what you take yeah
Yeah, you've got to give for what you, give for what you, give

May not be what you want from me
Just the way it's got to be
Lose the face now
I've got to live, I've got to live, I've got to live

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims – these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

In his Introduction, Jeffrey Eugenides provides the above definition for what he was looking for when he set out to collect his favourite love stories of the preceding 120 years. As a result, this anthology contains tales at once more bleak and more revelatory than one would expect to find in the Romance section of the local bookshop, and that was apparently Eugenides' goal: these are not romances, not happily-ever-after fairytales, not likely to make one gasp with empathetic tears. As the great preponderance of the twenty-seven stories were written by white men – as was the ancient Latin poem from which Eugenides took the anthology's title – My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead offers a narrow slice of the experience of love (presumably that with which Eugenides himself could identify); yet as this narrow slice is likely underrepresented in the Romance section of the local bookshop, it's as valid a focus as any for a collection of short stories. As with any anthology, I had an uneven reading experience – some stories I loved, others bored me; some authors were excitingly new to me, others were cosily familiar – and I was happy to slog through the dross to find the gold. 

By focussing on the experiences of the white male, predictable themes emerge: the desperation of the unconsummated teenage relationship; the businesslike approach to choosing a suitable wife; the emotional trap of extramarital affairs. I was surprised, however, how many stories revealed the violence that male characters are suppressing as they attempt to possess and control their women. James Joyce springs it on us in The Dead, as does Milan Kundera in his outstanding The Hitchhiking Game. In The Bad Thing by David Gates, when a pregnant woman gets drunk, and as a result her husband calls her a whore before threatening to strike her, she is at first confused:

I wasn't angry. Or frightened, really, even though I cringed to appease him. He would never be a hitter. That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, only hurting himself. I saw it all happening, then it really did happen. But I didn't understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.

I was immediately struck by the inventiveness of the writing in Innocence by Harold Brodkey. Describing the inherent inequality displayed by one young woman's beauty, he writes, “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” (Loved that line.) After four years of college, the narrator is finally able to bed the beautiful Orra (Wiley is self-aware that he is conquest-driven), and when he discovers that she's never had an orgasm, protests that she isn't interested in having one, he still makes it his mission to bring her there. And again, this is about control. Although Orra continues to protest, twenty of the thirty-six pages of this short story involve the details of one later lovemaking session, and although I might have balked at the ambiguity of her frequent protests – Is a woman still in control if her lover knowingly makes her lose control? What does this mean in a “No means no” world? – Wiley is constantly evaluating Orra's responses and considering the effects of stopping or continuing at every point. So, despite him patronisingly acting like only he knows what's best for Orra, I was forced to accept this as a considered male perspective and not be offended on her behalf. And then the writing as Wiley watches her growing and unfurling wings:

It was as if something unbelievably strange and fierce – like the holy temper – lifted her to where she could not breathe or walk: she choked in the ether, a scrambling seraph, tumbling and aflame and alien, powerful beyond belief, hideous and frightening and beautiful beyond the reach of the human. A screaming child, an angel howling in the Godly sphere: she churned without delicacy, as wild as an angel bearing threats; her body lifted from the sheets, fell back, lifted again; her hands beat on the bed; she made very loud hoarse tearing noises – I was frightened for her: this was her first time after six years of playing around with her body. It hurt her; her face looked like something made of stone, a monstrous carving; only her body was alive; her arms and legs were outspread and tensed and they beat or they were weak and fluttering. She was an angel as brilliant as a beautiful insect infinitely enlarged and irrevocably foreign: she was unlike me: she was a girl making rattling, astonished, uncontrolled, unhappy noises, a girl looking shocked and intent and harassed by the variety and viciousness of the sensations, including relief, that attacked her.

In the end, I couldn't think of that as violence, and as I flipped back to see who the author was, that's when I realised that Eugenides had started the collection with another of Brodkey's stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, and then I had even more respect for the author: in this story about a teenage boy being raised in a family with a single mother and an older sister, Brodkey totally captured a credible feminine atmosphere of love and longing. (And when I later read that the Orra character features in several of Brodkey's stories, and that she's based on his first wife, the lovemaking seemed like more of a partnership than a subjugation in retrospect.)

I loved the frequent ironic asides that the narrator makes to the reader in Gilbert Sorrentino's The Moon in Its Flight, and thought this a fitting conclusion after the protagonist sees his first love again after a decade apart:

You are perfectly justified in scoffing at the outrageous transparency of it if I tell you that his wife said that he was so pale that he looked as if he had seen a ghost, but that is, indeed, what she said. Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

And I found Lorrie Moore to be frequently, heart-breakingly, funny in How to Be an Other Woman:

When you were young you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but it essentially means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

I was blown away by the gritty realism in Dirty Wedding by Denis Johnson, Something That Needs Nothing by Miranda July, and Fireworks by Richard Ford; I had never before read Johnson or July and enjoyed their styles so much that I have already ordered books by them both (as well as a memoir of Harold Brodkey's dying days). Jon by George Saunders was as futuristic-weird as any of his other stories I've read, and there are, naturally, stories in this anthology that I have read and enjoyed before: Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Chechov's The Lady With the Little Dog, Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . And yet, although new to me and seemingly universally praised, neither Faulkner's A Rose for Emily nor Nabokov's Spring in Fialta really touched me. 

Like I said, anthologies are usually uneven reading experiences; I'm pretty sure each of us would have a different list of the love stories that we admire. And a note: despite my rambling, I haven't referenced all the stories in this collection; but uncited doesn't necessarily mean unenjoyed. Even the stories that did bore me gave me something to think about, so this was never a waste of time. And insofar as I discovered some new voices, it was time well spent.

I was talking to my little brother, Kyler, years ago, and I don't remember what prompted it, but he started talking about his friend, Hoss. Kye said:

You know that Tragically Hip song, "Thirty -six years old, never kissed a girl..."? Well, that's Hoss. I'm serious. Thirty-six and never been kissed. Sweet guy, makes money, but he's, like, three hundred pounds and shy around women, and unless he's paid for it, he has never so much as kissed a woman. And I look at him and I wonder what it's like to be in Hoss' mind, you know? Like the violence that must be in there every time he sees a girl. Because this is what you'll never know: Me? I'm happily married, I will never cheat on my wife -- that's something I know because that's something I can control -- but when I see a really good-looking woman walking around with an average-looking guy, it makes me mad. Like, why is she with him and not with me? So when I think of Hoss, just what's it like when he sees that woman with that average guy? If I'm mad, how does he feel? And, in a way, it makes me understand why there is violence against women. Like, you can't understand the control it takes not to act on these feelings. 

I was, naturally, shocked by this monologue; assumed this isn't how all men think; surely this isn't how my husband thinks? So it was kind of doubly shocking to see this theme -- this repression of violence even by otherwise loving partners -- being written about over and over. And why don't I think I've read this before? (Kyler also once said to me, "Here's something you don't know: over every urinal in every bar, there's a collection of boogers from guys who pick their noses while pissing and who then smear it on the wall in front of them. You look at a guy while he's doing that and he doesn't even care, it's just automatic, his face almost bored." I don't need to know everything about the male experience. Let's preserve some mystery, Kye.)

And another, unrelated, note: After reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, I looked it up on the internet; mostly to confirm which character it was that Michael Keaton's character was playing in the play-within-the-movie in Birdman. SparkNotes told me that Raymond Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, revealed after the author's death, "that he edited Carver’s work so heavily that he should be considered a coauthor of the stories", and then I read this article in Forbes, that explains how Birdman "betrayed" the spirit of Carver's story. And then I read Carver's original story in The New Yorker (released after Carver's death by his wife to protest Lish's meddling), and couldn't believe how different it was from the version included in the book -- and have to concede that Lish's editing made the story much tighter and more meaningful than Carver had originally set out. As that Forbes article laments that Birdman doesn't adhere to Carver's intent, yet is referring to the version of the story that Carver's wife said didn't adhere to Carver's original intent, I wonder if Eugenides ever had a moment of conflict, wondering which version to include in his anthology?