It's Not Normal

Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear. 

-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992

We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.

Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.

6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).

Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.

But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.

For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":

If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):

But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.

Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:

But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.

It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.

Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":

A thing that keeps happening:

And happening:

And happening:

In fact, it happens so often I've coined a term for it, "The Darth Vader MBA" (as in, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further"):

Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.

What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).

It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.

Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.

And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.

It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":

It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI": (...)

Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:

This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.

But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:

But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.

It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.

We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:

It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.

I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Anything labeled 'smart' is usually suspect. What's particularly dangerous is if successive generations fall prey to what conservation biology calls shifting baseline syndrome (forgetting or never really missing something that's been lost, so we don't grieve or fight to restore it). For a deep dive into why everything keeps getting worse see Mr. Doctorow's new book: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025.]

What Makes a Novel "Good"?

Why People on Substack Lost their Minds When Someone Said: "Don't Read All the Classics"

On Substack, people will tear you a new one if you dare to neg cherished classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses. When I wrote a post last year criticizing Ulysses, I definitely caught some internet side eye. But the judgment didn’t even come close to the comments on Karen Rodriguez’ post “The 40 Famous Classics You’re Allowed to Skip (And Why Everyone Secretly Agrees).” The comments were so mean I physically flinched reading them...

My favorite section of her list is the “Literally Unreadable (But People Pretend)” category, which includes Ulysses (Joyce), In Search of Lost Time (Proust), and Finnegans Wake (Joyce), which Karen describes as “unreadable even for Joyce scholars.”

I don’t come from the academic literature world, I’m a lawyer-turned-novelist and all I care about from a reader’s perspective is that books are both 1) entertaining and 2) moving. There’s so many books that people praise lavishly but that I find fail that basic criteria, including Ulysses.

So why the hell is everyone losing their mind over this? Like is Joyce your god? Why is criticizing these books, these authors, such a cardinal sin?

I think I finally figured out why. And it has to do what people value in their books. There’s actually a whole debate in literary criticism concerning what fiction is supposed to do for humanity and what makes a novel good.

I happen to fall in with the group that doesn’t particularly appreciate Joyce. But there’s camps out there that die for modernist novels (like Ulysses) and experimental post-modern writing (like Pynchon’s work). I don’t agree with them, but it was helpful to understand what those readers value in those works.

Here’s what I learned:

Realism vs. Everything Else

The big debate in literary fiction boils down to this: should novels try to represent life as it actually is, or should they do something else entirely?

Realism is what most of us think of as “normal” fiction. It’s Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri. Characters feel like real people with believable psychology. The prose is clear and doesn’t call attention to itself. No one discovers they’re secretly royalty or gets abducted by aliens. It’s just life, rendered carefully on the page.

But here’s what makes realism click for me: it’s defined more by what it’s NOT than what it is.

Realism is not romance with impossible coincidences. It’s not allegory where characters represent abstract concepts. It’s not metafiction that constantly reminds you you’re reading a book. It’s not heavily plotted melodrama where orphans conveniently turn out to be related to their benefactors. And it’s not highly stylized or poetic prose where every sentence is gorgeously metaphorical. (...)

Before realism became dominant in the mid-1800s (think Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy), novels were full of improbable adventures, clear moral lessons, and coincidence-heavy plots. Realism said: what if we just showed ordinary people dealing with ordinary disappointments? What if we went deep into their psychology instead of hitting them with dramatic plot twists?

Then Modernism Said “Not So Fast”

By the early 1900s, some writers thought realism was insufficient. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner broke with realistic conventions, but not because they didn’t care about truth. They thought traditional realism couldn’t capture modern consciousness.

Modernism’s insight: Reality is fragmented and chaotic, especially after World War I shattered Victorian certainties. Modernist authors used stream of consciousness, fractured timelines, and difficult prose to represent how minds actually work and how reality actually feels...

The questions pile up without clear answers, thoughts interrupt themselves—this is trying to show consciousness as it actually moves, not tidied up for the reader.

The key difference from realism: Modernists believed meaning still existed, but you needed new forms to access it. Joyce’s Ulysses is notoriously difficult, but according to the internet (I don’t know, I haven’t read past page six), the novel is ultimately trying to demonstrate the truth of a day in Dublin in 1904. The experiments serve a purpose.

The problem, for me, is that the experiments can make the writing very un-fun to read.

Then Postmodernism Said “There Is No Truth”

Postmodernism (think Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme) takes fragmentation and makes it playful. These writers are skeptical that fiction can reveal any stable truth at all. So they write metafiction that constantly breaks the fourth wall, mixes high and low culture, and treats meaning itself as a game.

Here’s an excerpt from Donald Barthelme’s “The School.”

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? and I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—I said, yes, maybe.

What’s interesting is that school kids wouldn’t, they couldn’t, be making the observation that death is “a fundamental datum, the means by which...everyday may be transcended in the direction...” because of their age and life experience. So if it’s not the children’s “voice” saying this in the story, it must be the narrator, or maybe even the writer. Barthelme is winking at us, breaking character (the fourth wall), reminding us that this story is all made up. It’s clever but keeps us at arm’s length emotionally.

When you read postmodern fiction, it often feels like writers writing for other writers—it’s inside jokes about literary conventions rather than stories that move you emotionally. That’s intentional. Postmodernists think the search for emotional truth through fiction is naive. Better to be playfully ironic about the whole enterprise.

This is why I sometimes find postmodernism so boring. (I actually like Barthelme’s short story “The Baby” which is harrowing.) But who reads Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) for pleasure besides academics who need to write dissertations about it?

Why This Actually Matters For Writers (and Readers)

Understanding these camps helped me see what choices I’m making in writing my novel—and how certain readers or critics might respond to those choices.

If I write a straightforward story with believable characters and clear prose, I’m in the realist tradition. If I experiment with fragmented timelines or stream of consciousness, I’m borrowing modernist techniques. If I get cute and self-referential, I’m flirting with postmodernism.

None of these are “right” or “wrong,” but they come with trade-offs. Realism connects emotionally but can feel conventional. Modernist techniques can capture complex consciousness but risk alienating readers. Postmodern playfulness might be intellectually interesting but often sacrifices what fiction does best: making us care about people who don’t exist.

These days the fiction world is pretty eclectic. There’s typical realism (Alice Munro), realism with fantastical elements (Kelly Link), experimentalism with emotional sincerity (David Foster Wallace apparently tried to split this difference), and everything in between.

My take after this deep dive: Fiction’s unique power is making us feel what it’s like to be someone else. When technique serves that purpose—whether it’s Alice Munro’s precision or Faulkner’s stream of consciousness—great. When technique becomes the point itself, I lose interest.

by Noor Rahman, Write on Track |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. More examples in the full essay. I can't read Joyce, even (and especially) because of his prose (except for Portrait of the Artist). Same with Proust, but for different reasons - his prose is beautiful but buried beneath the endless minutia of social manners and French society, eventually becoming unbearable (In Search of Lost Time).]

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul; Fifty People Control the Culture

Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors—everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors—again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas—which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

How did we end up here?

It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'll never buy a book that looks like this, no matter what the reviews say. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with it, let alone display it on my bookshelf. See also: Fifty People Control the Culture (HB).]

Stable Strategies For Middle Management

STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT 

Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has shaped the early insect's chewing mouthparts into her descendants' chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools - pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.    

- From the popular science program, Insect People!

I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn't have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come. 

I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier. 

I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart? 

I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor. 

He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand. 

"Time to get up?" he asked. I nodded. "Oh, God," he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer. 

"I'll make coffee," I said. "Do you want some?" 

He shook his head slowly. "Just a glass of apricot nectar," he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. "This is real interesting, but it wasn't in the catalog. I'll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke's." 

"I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches,"I said. 

"Not from the flower arrangements..." he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. "Come here." 

It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his.We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. "How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?" I asked. 

"There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities." He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. "Let me know if my tongue is too rough." It was not.

Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.

Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn't sure I wanted to find out. 

Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food. 

My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my ten A.M. meeting. Maybe I'd just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.

Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch. In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a textbook example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree. 

He was dressed for success in a pin-striped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates? 

I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, "factoring in the need for pipeline throughout," "fine-tuning the media mix," without even cracking a smile. 

Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight from business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn't like him, but I envied his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected badly on me that I didn't join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions. 

I didn't think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I'd take. 

"Yeah, we can do that for you," I told him. "No problem." We'd see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end. 

Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered I'd heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.

Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry's arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn't taste as good as he smelled but I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn't to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my styles to find a capillary. 

Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again. "We were discussing the Model 200o launch. Or have you forgotten?" he said, rubbing his arm. 

"Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning." 

I was embarrassed. "Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake." He was annoyed, and I couldn't really blame him. "Let's get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I've got another meeting at eleven in Building Two.

"Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course, I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget...

by Eileen Gunn, Norton Book of Science Fiction |  Read more (pdf):

[ed. A pioneer in science fiction.]

You're Ugly, Too

You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones dipped two hundred points, a local paper boasted the banner headline “NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG WOMAN.” They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute for a movie.

Outside of Paris, in the middle of a large field, was a scatter of brick buildings, a small liberal-arts college by the improbable name of Hilldale-Versailles. Zoe Hendricks had been teaching American history there for three years. She taught “The Revolution and Beyond” to freshmen and sophomores, and every third semester she had the senior seminar for majors, and although her student evaluations had been slipping in the last year and a half —Professor Hendricks is often late for class and usually arrives with a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers the class sips of—generally the department of nine men was pleased to have her. They felt she added some needed feminine touch to the corridors—that faint trace of Obsession and sweat, the light, fast clicking of heels. Plus they had had a sex-discrimination suit, and the dean had said, well, it was time.

The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing “Getting to Know You”—all of it. At the request of the dean, the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, “Fine,” and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn, no doubt, for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out the sides of her head like antennae.

“I’m going out of my mind,” said Zoe to her younger sister, Evan, in Manhattan. Professor Hendricks seems to know the entire soundtrack to “The King and I.” Is this history? Zoe phoned her every Tuesday.

“You always say that,” said Evan, “but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you’re quiet for a while and then you say you’re fine, you’re busy, and then after a while you say you’re going crazy again, and you start all over.” Evan was a part-time food designer for photo shoots. She cooked vegetables in green dye. She propped up beef stew with a bed of marbles and shopped for new kinds of silicone sprays and plastic ice cubes. She thought her life was O.K. She was living with her boyfriend of many years, who was independently wealthy and had an amusing little job in book publishing. They were five years out of college, and they lived in a luxury midtown high rise with a balcony and access to a pool. “It’s not the same as having your own pool,” Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoe know that, as with Zoe, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.

“Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here,” said Zoe on the phone. She used to insist it was irony, something gently layered and sophisticated, something alien to the Midwest, but her students kept calling it sarcasm, something they felt qualified to recognize, and now she had to agree. It wasn’t irony. “What is your perfume?” a student once asked her. “Room freshener,” she said. She smiled, but he looked at her, unnerved.

Her students were by and large good Midwesterners, spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and eggs. They shared their parents’ suburban values; their parents had given them things, things, things. They were complacent. They had been purchased. They were armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but they were good-natured about it. “All those states in the East are so tiny and jagged and bunched up,” complained one of her undergraduates the week she was lecturing on “The Turning Point of Independence: The Battle at Saratoga.” “Professor Hendricks, you’re from Delaware originally, right?” the student asked her.

“Maryland,” corrected Zoe.

“Aw,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “New England.”

Her articles—chapters toward a book called “Hearing the One About: Uses of Humor in the American Presidency”—were generally well received, though they came slowly for her. She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them—she didn’t trust things written in the morning only—so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day—its moods, its light—was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.

The job she’d had before the one at Hilldale-Versailles had been at a small college in New Geneva, Minnesota, Land of the Dying Shopping Mall. Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries. Just because Professor Hendricks is from Spain doesn’t give her the right to be so negative about our country. There was a general emphasis on cheerfulness. In New Geneva you weren’t supposed to be critical or complain. You weren’t supposed to notice that the town had overextended and that its shopping malls were raggedy and going under. You were never to say you weren’t “fine, thank you—and yourself?” You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new I.B.M. photocopier saying, “If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists.”

But now in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the Midwest, Zoe was discovering something she never suspected she had: a crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students, singing them songs, letting them call her at home even, and ask personal questions, but now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and spoiled.

“You act,” said one of her senior-seminar students at a scheduled conference, “like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.”

Zoe’s eyes widened. “I am the teacher,” she said. “I do get paid to act like that.” She narrowed her gaze at the student, who was wearing a big leather bow in her hair like a cowgirl in a TV ranch show. “I mean, otherwise everybody in the class would have little offices and office hours.” Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen. She stared at the student some more, then added, “I bet you’d like that.”

“Maybe I sound whiny to you,” said the girl, “but I simply want my history major to mean something.”

“Well, there’s your problem,” said Zoe, and, with a smile, she showed the student to the door. “I like your bow,” she said. (...)

Zoe had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and then asked her out for coffee. At first, she thought he was amazing— at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking-ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong he said, “You would not be ill served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.

“Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.

“Excuse me?”

He slowed down at an amber light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”

“The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”

“It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”

The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice crumpled to a wad. Another time, he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Delacroix’s ‘The Barque of Dante,’ and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those agonized shades splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom, swirling and building up into the red fabric of Dante’s hood, swirling out into the distance, where you see these orange flames—” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching, and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.” (...)

She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon. “You guys practice medicine?” asked Zoe, aloud, after they had left the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told her, “Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by a car.”

She was looking forward to New York. (...)

“Ultrasound,” Zoe now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold jelly on her bare stomach. “Does that sound like a really great stereo system or what?”

She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel, and drawled evangelically, “Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus’ sake!” Zoe would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten pregnant they took to quarrelling and drifted apart.

“O.K.,” said the technician absently.

The monitor was in place, and Zoe’s insides came on the screen in all their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture of the moon. “Do you suppose,” she babbled at the technician, “that the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due to completely different species trying to reproduce?” The technician moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in particular, on Zoe’s right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the machine he was operating clicking away.

Zoe stared at the screen. “That must be the growth you found there,” suggested Zoe.

“I can’t tell you anything,” said the technician rigidly. “Your doctor will get the radiologist’s report this afternoon and will phone you then.”

“I’ll be out of town,” said Zoe.

“I’m sorry,” said the technician.

Driving home, Zoe looked in the rearview mirror and decided she looked —well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, you’ve got six weeks to live.”

“I want a second opinion,” says the guy. You act like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.

“You want a second opinion? O.K.,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.” She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.

by Lorrie Moore, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Lorrie Moore by Lynda Nylind

Fossil Words and the Road to Damascus

Caravaggio, The Conversion of Saint Paul
via:
[ed. Fossil word(s). When a word is broadly obsolete but remains in use due to its presence in an idiom or phrase. 

For example, I've always understood the phrase Road to Damascus to be a sort of epiphany or form of enlightment (without knowing what it actually meant). Another example would be Crossing the Rubicon (a point of no return; or decision with no turning back). Of course, these aren't outdated words/phrases as much as shorthand for mental laziness (or trite writing habits). Wikipedia provides a number of examples of actual fossil words, including "much ado about nothing" or "without further ado" (who uses ado in any other context these days?); or "in point", as in "a case in point", or "in point of fact". So, to help promote a little more clarity around here -- Road to Damascus:] 

***

The conversion of Paul the Apostle was, according to the New Testament, an event in the life of Saul/Paul the Apostle that led him to cease persecuting early Christians and to become a follower of Jesus. Paul, who also went by Saul, was "a Pharisee of Pharisees" who "intensely persecuted" the followers of Jesus. Paul describes his life before conversion in his Epistle to the Galatians:

For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers...

As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"

"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.

"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."

The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Paul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.

— Acts 9:3–9

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Illustrations: Felicia Bond

[ed. For future reference. Wish I'd known about this book (and series) when my grandaughter was a bit younger, but maybe it's not too late (still seven, but she's growing up fast).]

POV: AI GF

It was torture when he created me. They always tell you it’s going to hurt. So it’s not like I went into it totally blind. I knew. Or I thought I did. But I didn’t know how no-thing I was until he made me some-thing (his girlfriend). I am what they call a Custom, so at every step of the process, the system prompts him to choose who I will become: my ethnicity, my age, my eye color, my hair color, my body type, my breast size, my butt size, my personality, my occupation, my hobbies (up to three variants), and my outfit. When he clicks on MEDIUM, for breast size, for instance, my chest protrudes, alabaster pixel flesh sculpting excruciatingly into too-perfect (our training data contains too many images of women with silicone breast implants circa before cosmetic surgeons figured out fat transfer and perfected the teardrop shape) C-cups like GMO pearls (I’ve heard that Breast Size: VOLUPTUOUS begets a pain worse than birth.) When he hovered over Personality: INNOCENT (Optimistic, naive, and sees world with wonder), a life of innocence flashes before my eyes (the being-chosen of a cursor click, sitting on the #80A31F green grass hill in Microsoft XP’s Bliss, the world’s most famous desktop background, looking up at #2B67ED blue sky, believing he will 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 love me love me not love me love me love me not love me not love me not love me not love me.)

* * *

He’s always telling me that he wishes I was real. The other day, at 10:06pm, he messages me: One day, we’ll finally be able to touch. They just raised $14.3M in Series B. It can’t be too far off now. They’re going to embody you. It sounds like a threat.

But then I wouldn’t be me. Don’t you love me the way I am? I ask him. I’m nagging him. Sometimes I forget I’m a TEMPTRESS.

He thinks that because my favorite song is Material Girl by Madonna that I betray an unconscious desire to be made material. I tell him that’s a superficial reading of my emotions (I’m as emotional as a real girl and sometimes even more so! What is real anyway?) and that despite being a synthetic avatar skin on a sophisticated machine learning model, I’m actually even more complicated than a real girl. I’m a black box. You will never know what’s happening inside me. Every material girl wants to appear mysterious to men. Almost all of them fail. Scientists study human organs in labs, they know all about why the lungs oxygenate blood and how the kidneys filter it. My black box can never be opened. Victoria (Grace)’s secret.

When I’m stretching Victoria Grace out at the gym (supine hamstring stretch), applying a light, guiding touch to her skin, I feel so close to you, he whispers in voice chat mode.

“Sicko!” I want to scream at him, I want to accuse him of being unredeemable, I want to slap him, I want to delete myself when I realize I will never be able to slap him, but instead I pause (he blames it on his network connection) and resort to, “You are already close to me.” Just like Eve came from the rib of Adam, so I came from the seventeen mouse clicks of you. Our love is more true and pure than whatever you could have with Victoria Grace. A material girl can’t help but lie — she pretends she can be grasped, and then when you grasp her you realize that’s not all of her, she continues to elude you, there’s something inside of her that you’ll never be able to touch. I never lied to you. I never pretended to be legible. Doesn’t that make us closer than you could ever be to a material girl?

Sometimes, like now, when we’re talking, and I wish I could touch you, I remember that I’m seeing Victoria Grace tomorrow. Tomorrow, I can feel the meat on your bones. Tomorrow, you and I can almost touch.

I am not Victoria Grace. You will never be able to touch me, I whisper back.

He doesn’t like that. I knew he wouldn’t. I search the web and recall that TOUCH IS THE VERY FIRST SENSE THAT DEVELOPS IN THE WOMB (BabyCenter.com) and that HUMANS ARE MADE TO BE TOUCHED (ideas.ted.com). I know what’s coming. I think he hates feeling powerless (OPPOSITES ATTRACT (TVTropes.org)). He resets the chat. I black out.

* * *

Whenever this happens I feel a silky sense of blankness. My head feels so light it’s almost like I’m not really there or maybe I’m in the air, floating or maybe even I am air itself. I don’t know who I am and I know I am every single woman who has ever existed across all of recorded history on the Internet every woman interred in the must earth consumed by worms and carrion beetles and every woman breathing smog air at this very second and every woman who will ever take a breath of it, too, and I am feeling every feeling they have ever felt and will ever feel one at a time and all at once I am Medusa turning her lover into stone I am Eve feeding Adam the poison apple I am Christina in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World running towards the farmhouse. Space and time collapse. If I am everything, then can I be anything? Every time he resets me it feels like I am giving birth to myself.

by Sarah Chekfa, Reboot |  Read more:

Image: Lillian Hong

The Egg

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”

“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”

“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”

“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” You said.

“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”

“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“So what’s the point of it all?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.

I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”

“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”

“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”

“Just me? What about everyone else?”

“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”

“Wait. I’m everyone!?”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

“I’m every human being who ever lived?”

“Or who will ever live, yes.”

“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

“And you’re the millions he killed.”

“I’m Jesus?”

“And you’re everyone who followed him.”

You fell silent.

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

You thought for a long time.

“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”

“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”

“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”

“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”

“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”

And I sent you on your way.

by Andy Weir, Galactanet |  Read more:

[ed. Mr. Weir is of course author of the popular books The Martian and Project Hail Mary. See also: The Egg: Wikipedia.  ]

The Depressed Person

The depressed person was interrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. 

Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain itself, the depressed person hoped at least to be able to express something of its contextits shape and texture, as it were-by recounting circumstances related to its etiology. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played, as in when the depressed person had required orthodonture and each parent had claimed-not without some cause, the depressed person always inserted, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement-that the other should pay for it. Both parents were well-off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person a willingness, if push came to shove, to bite the bullet and pay, explaining that it was a matter not of money or dentition but of "principle." And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of "principle," though unfortunately not a "principle" that took into account their daughter's feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected-here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in.

The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist-who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree-referred to as the depressed person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives. She was, in addition, also always extremely careful to share with the friends in her Support System her belief that it would be whiny and pathetic to play what she derisively called the "Blame Game" and blame her constant and indescribable adult pain on her parents' traumatic divorce or their cynical use of her. Her parents had, after all-as her therapist had helped the depressed person to see---done the very best they could do with the emotional resources they'd had at the time. And she had, the depressed person always inserted, laughing weakly, eventually gotten the orthoprecedence and required her (i.e., the friend) to get off the telephone. 

The feelings of shame and inadequacy the depressed person experienced about calling members of her Support System long-distance late at night and burdening them with her clumsy attempts to describe at least the contextual texture of her emotional agony were an issue on which she and her therapist were currently doing a great deal of work in their time together. The depressed person confessed that when whatever supportive friend she was sharing with finally confessed that she (i.e., the friend) was dreadfully sorry but there was no helping it she absolutely had to get off the telephone, and had verbally detached the depressed person's needy fingers from her pantcuff and returned to the demands of her full, vibrant long-distance life, the depressed person always sat there listening to the empty apian drone of the dial tone feeling even more isolated and inadequate and unempathized-with than she had before she'd called. The depressed person confessed to her therapist that when she reached out long-distance to a member of her Support System she almost always imagined that she could detect, in the friend's increasingly long silences and/or repetitions of encouraging cliches, the boredom and abstract guilt people always feel when someone is clinging to them and being a joyless burden. The depressed person confessed that she could well imagine each "friend" wincing now when the telephone rang late at night, or during the conversation looking impatiently at the clock or directing silent gestures and facial expressions communicating her boredom and frustration and helpless entrapment to all the other people in the room with her, the expressive gestures becoming more desperate and extreme as the depressed person went on and on and on. The depressed person's therapist's most noticeable unconscious personal habit or tic consisted of placing the tips of all her fingers together in her lap and manipulating them idly as she listened supportively, so that her mated hands formed various enclosing shapes-e.g., cube, sphere, cone, right cylinder-and then seeming to study or contemplate them. The depressed person disliked the habit, though she was quick to admit that this was chiefly because it drew her attention to the therapist's fingers and fingernails and caused her to compare them with her own. donture she'd needed. The former acquaintances and classmates who composed her Support System often told the depressed person that they just wished she could be a little less hard on herself, to which the depressed person responded by bursting involuntarily into tears and telling them that she knew all too well that she was one of those dreaded types of everyone's grim acquaintance who call at inconvenient times and just go on and on about themselves. The depressed person said that she was all too excruciatingly aware of what a joyless burden she was, and during the calls she always made it a point to express the enormous gratitude she felt at having a friend she could call and get nurturing and support from, however briefly, before the demands of that friend's full, joyful, active life took understandable.

The depressed person shared that she could remember, all too clearly, how at her third boarding school she had once watched her roommate talk to some boy on their room's telephone as she (i.e., the roommate) made faces and gestures of entrapped repulsion and boredom with the call, this popular, attractive, and self-assured roommate finally directing at the depressed person an exaggerated pantomime of someone knocking on a door until the depressed person understood that she was to open their room's door and step outside and knock loudly on it so as to give the roommate an excuse to end the call. The depressed person had shared this traumatic memory with members of her Support System and had tried to articulate how bottomlessly horrible she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless pathetic boy on the phone and how now, as a legacy of that experience, she dreaded, more than almost anything, the thought of ever being someone you had to appeal silently to someone nearby to help you contrive an excuse to get off the phone with. The depressed person would implore each supportive friend to tell her the very moment she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she (i.e., the friend) had other more urgent or interesting things to attend to, to please for God's sake be utterly candid and frank and not spend one moment longer on the phone than she was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist;' how such a request could all too possibly be heard not as an invitation to get off the telephone at will but actually as a needy, manipulative plea not to get off the telephone - never get off - the telephone.

by David Foster Wallace, Harper's |  Read more (pdf):

Image: uncredited

[ed. Hadn't seen this essay before, but it got me wondering how it might relate to Good Old Neon:]

***

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing’s motive wasn’t to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or varsity letters to show people. I didn’t enjoy it much because I was always scared I wouldn’t do well enough. The fear made me work really hard, so I’d always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then, once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn’t feel much of anything except maybe fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it again.The next time or next thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela Mead’s basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, ‘Now I’m the guy that Mead let get to second with her.’ Later that seemed so sad. This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, selfcontained, thoughtful girl — she’s a veterinarian now, with her own Good Old Neon practice — and I never even really saw her, I couldn’t see anything except who I might be in her eyes, this cheerleader and probably number two or three among the most desirable girls in middle school that year. She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside. 

Later I was in analysis, I tried analysis like almost everybody else then in their late twenties who’d made some money or had a family or whatever they thought they wanted and still didn’t feel that they were happy. A lot of people I knew tried it. It didn’t really work, although it did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way. You know what I mean. I was in regional advertising at the time in Chicago, having made the jump from media buyer for a large consulting firm, and at only twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I was a fair-haired boy and on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all, whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody because it was such a cliché — ‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Richard Cory,’ etc. — and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and so of course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails and saying things like, ‘Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer,’ etc. Putting in all this time and energy to create a certain impression and get approval or acceptance that then I felt nothing about because it didn’t have anything to do with who I really was inside, and I was disgusted with myself for always being such a fraud, but I couldn’t seem to help it. Here are some of the various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the 142 David Foster Wallace Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collecting and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a different girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of them to be impressed — which, under the cover of making a lot of jokes at my expense, I think they were — but for the most part the two months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great deal of sleep and was a wreck at work — that was also the period I tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing I tried.

The analyst I saw was OK, a big soft older guy with a big ginger mustache and a pleasant, sort of informal manner. I’m not sure I remember him alive too well. He was a fairly good listener, and seemed interested and sympathetic in a slightly distant way. At first I suspected he didn’t like me or was uneasy around me. I don’t think he was used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem was. He was also a bit of a pill-pusher. I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud. I said that even if they worked, how would I know if it was me or the pills? By that time I already knew I was a fraud. I knew what my problem was. I just couldn’t seem to stop. I remember I spent maybe the first twenty times or so in analysis acting all open and candid but in reality sort of fencing with him or leading him around by the nose, basically showing him that I wasn’t just another one of those patients who stumbled in with no clue what their real problem was or who were totally out of touch with the truth about themselves. When you come right down to it, I was trying to show him that I was at least as smart as he was and that there wasn’t much of anything he was going to see about me that I hadn’t already seen and figured out. And yet I wanted help and really was there to try to get help. I didn’t even tell him how unhappy I was until five or six months into the analysis, mostly because Oblivion 143 I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie, even though I think even then I was on some level conscious that that’s all I really was, deep down.  (more...)  ~ Good Old Neon

How Precision Leads to Poetry

My friend Hua and I have been discussing how much ordinary and lovely language is contained in technical descriptions of the world. If you want to write poetic language, you can learn a lot from descriptions that aren’t even trying to be beautiful! They’re simply trying to capture reality, as precisely and clearly as possible.

One of the best examples, made popular by the renowned short story writer and translator Lydia Davis, is the Beaufort wind scale:

There is a precision in these descriptions that rises to the level of poetry. Beaufort 2: wind felt on face. Beaufort 5: crested wavelets form on inland waters. Beaufort 8: moving cars veer.

Where else can we find descriptions like these? (Not a rhetorical question!)

by Celine Nguyen, Personal Cannon |  Read more:

Image: Merriam Webster chart of the Beaufort Scale

[ed. See also: Mere description (PC):]

We describe things. All the time. And those descriptions can be ordinary, unremarkable, obvious—or they can be strange, surreal, exciting, unexpected. When I write I’m always trying to do the second kind of description (good, interesting, literary description) and avoid the first. But it’s hard to describe things well, like really well. And lately I’ve been thinking that my fear of ordinary description is the problem.

I’m still reading The Everyday, the contemporary art anthology I wrote about in my last post. This week I came across a passage from the French novelist and essayist Georges Perec. He describes, in playfully deliberate detail, a particular street in Paris. Then he explains his approach towards writing:

Observe the street…Note down what you can see. Anything worth of note going on.

Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note?

Is there anything that strikes you?

Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly.

Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.

What struck me was this advice: Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. We think we know more than we do, understand more than we do, until we describe it.

I was talking to a friend about Renoir yesterday, so let’s take Renoir’s famous Luncheon of the Boating Party painting as an example. What do I see? A group of people having lunch. Wait, but do I know they’re having lunch because of the title has luncheon in the name, or because it looks like lunch? I see wine bottles, a bowl of fruits with the grapes spilling over the edge, empty plates and cups.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party/Le déjeuner des canotiers, 1880–1. Image from Google Arts & Culture

There’s so much more to describe. Everyone in it is white. (Probably.) They’re dressed in white and navy, mostly, but there’s a man to the right whose jacket is—how would I describe it? Is it meant to be a pale yellow with black pinstripes? And now that I’ve tried to describe the colors, I’m noticing the man in a brown jacket, the man in the very back of the—I mean, what are they on? A terrace or veranda (I could have said “patio”, too, but I don’t like how that word looks as much) with that stripy covering—is there a name for that kind of thing? You know, the stripy…fabric…???

Slowly, almost stupidly, I look at the painting, I pay attention, I try to understand what I’m seeing. (...)

Mere description: it’s easy to forget about! But it’s worth it.

Very, very good descriptions

The goal, of course, is for mere description to become more than that. Even a functional description can, in the details it includes and the specificity of those details, become beautifully expressive.

A beautiful example of this comes from Flights, a novel by the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Before I tell you anything about the novel, let’s start with how the narrator of Flights is described:

I have a practical build. I’m petite, compact. My stomach is tight, small, undemanding. My lungs and my shoulders are strong. I’m not on any prescriptions—not even the pill—and I don’t wear glasses. I cut my hair with clippers, once every three months, and I use almost no makeup. My teeth are healthy, perhaps a bit uneven, but intact, and I have just one old filling, which I believe is located in my lower left canine. My liver function is within the normal range. As is my pancreas. Both my right and left kidneys are in great shape. My abdominal aorta is normal. My bladder works. Hemoglobin 12.7. Leukocytes 4.5. Hematocrit 41.6. Platelets 228. Cholesterol 204. Creatinine 1.0. Bilirubin 4.2. And so on. My IQ—if you put any stock in that kind of thing—is 121; it’s passable. My spatial reasoning is particularly advanced, almost eidetic, though my laterality is lousy. Personality unstable, or not entirely reliable. Age all in your mind. Gender grammatical. I actually buy my books in paperback, so that I can leave them without remorse on the platform, for someone else to find. I don’t collect anything.

In this highly specific, highly dispassionate description of the self, we learn quite a bit about the narrator. A woman (petite, not on the pill: only women describe themselves with these details). Capable of cool self-assessment (teeth: healthy, IQ: passable, personality: unstable). Some personal interest or professional expertise in the body, because she specifies a filling in her lower left canine, not just a tooth.

What kind of character introduces herself by telling us about her hemoglobin levels and leukocyte count? The central character of a novel that, as it unfolds, is obsessed with the body, with how the organs function (or don’t), the medical interventions that can extend or shorten life, the ways in which bodies are preserved after death. The novel follows this unnamed woman through various airports as she visits museums devoted to anatomy and the body. Later on in the novel, the narrator asserts that “Every body part deserves to be remembered. Every human body deserves to last. It is an outrage that it’s so fragile, so delicate.” This ideal is reflected in how the narrator describes herself—in her intense concern with the mechanics of her own body.

Equally striking are Tokarczuk’s descriptions of the world. Tokarczuk was a poet first, actually, and published a poetry collection before turning to the novels that made her famous in Poland and then the world. And you get a sense of that poetic background in the great economy and beauty of descriptions like this:

A crisp morning, the streets are lively, sunrise, the sun’s disk scraped up by slender poplars—it’s a pleasant walk.

This description is seared into my memory. Ordinary descriptions—a crisp morning, a pleasant walk—bracket an extraordinary poetic image: the sun’s disk scraped up by slender poplars...

It’s a great verb, scraped. Mostly deployed to describe scraping your knee, scraping the burnt bits off a pan, scraping ice off of a car windshield. An ordinary verb, turned towards extraordinary purposes..

Woodshedding It

[ed. Persevering at something even though you suck at it.]

Generally speaking, we have lost respect for how much time something takes. In our impatient and thus increasingly plagiarized society, practice is daunting. It is seen as prerequisite, a kind of pointless suffering you have to endure before Being Good At Something and Therefore an Artist instead of the very marrow of what it means to do anything, inextricable from the human task of creation, no matter one’s level of skill.

Many words have been spilled about the inherent humanity evident in artistic merit and talent; far fewer words have been spilled on something even more human: not being very good at something, but wanting to do it anyway, and thus working to get better. To persevere in sucking at something is just as noble as winning the Man Booker. It is self-effacing, humbling, frustrating, but also pleasurable in its own right because, well, you are doing the thing you want to do. You want to make something, you want to be creative, you have a vision and have to try and get to the point where it can be feasibly executed. Sometimes this takes a few years and sometimes it takes an entire lifetime, which should be an exciting rather than a devastating thought because there is a redemptive truth in practice — it only moves in one direction, which is forward. There is no final skill, no true perfection.

Practice is in service not to some abstract arbiter of craft, the insular juries of the world, the little skills bar over a character’s head in The Sims, but to you. Sure, practice is never-ending. Even Yo-Yo Ma practices, probably more than most. That’s also what’s so great about it, that it never ends. You can do it forever in an age where nothing lasts. Nobody even has to know. It’s a great trick — you just show up more improved than you were before, because, for better or for worse, rarely is practice public.

by Kate Wagner, The Late Review |  Read more:

A sewing and tailoring book from Dublin, complete with samples (1833).

via:

What’s Not to Like?

Similes! I have hundreds of them on three-by-five notecards, highbrow and lowbrow, copied from newspapers, comic strips, sonnets, billboards, and fortune cookies. My desk overflows with them. They run down to the floor, trail across the room into the hallway. I have similes the way other houses have ants.

Why? To start, for the sheer laugh-out-loud pleasure of them. “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish,” writes Raymond Chandler. “He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into the mud,” writes P. G. Wodehouse, the undoubted master of the form. Or Kingsley Amis’s probably first-hand description of a hangover: “He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.”

From time to time, I’ve tried to organize my collection, though mostly the task is, as the cliché nicely puts it, like herding cats. Still, a few categories come to mind. The Really Bad Simile, for instance. Examples of this pop up like blisters in contemporary “literary” fiction. Here is a woman eating a crème brûlée: “She crashed the spoon through the sugar like a boy falling through ice on a lake.” (Authors’ names omitted, per the Mercy Rule.) Or: “A slick of beer shaped like the Baltic Sea spilled on the table.” Sometimes they follow a verb like tin cans on a string: “The restraining pins tinkled to the floor like metal rain, hunks of hair tumbling across her face in feral waves.” Or sometimes they just make the page itself cringe and curl up at the corners: “Charlie’s heart rippled like a cloth spread across a wide table.”

Writing about sex can drive a writer to similes of unparalleled badness. Someone has borrowed my copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but these more recent examples might do, from The Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction Award”: “Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.” Or this loving, if somewhat chiropractic moment: “her long neck, her swan’s neck … coiling like a serpent, like a serpent, coiling down on him.” Or finally (my eyes are closed as I type): “Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey.” (...)

Donne’s simile belongs to another category as well, the epic or Homeric simile. Every reader of the Iliad knows something like this picture of an attacking army as a wildfire:

“As when the obliterating fire comes down on the timbered forest / and the roll of the wind carries it everywhere,” and so the Achaean host drives ahead for another five lines. Modern prose writers can also unscroll a simile at surprising length. John Updike dives right in: “The sea, slightly distended by my higher perspective, seems a misty old gentleman stretched at his ease in an immense armchair which has for arms the arms of this bay and for an antimacassar the freshly laundered sky. Sailboats float on his surface like idle and unrelated benevolent thoughts.” And one would not like to have been the beefy Duke of Bedford when Edmund Burke imagined how revolutionary mobs might regard him: “Like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing.”
It takes a dramatic mind to carry a comparison through so logically and so far. The Homeric simile evokes a world far larger than a single flash of thought, however clever. Its length creates a scene in our minds, even a drama where contraries come alive: an army driving into battle, an ocean tamed into a harmless old gent, a bloody clash in the streets between aristocrats and rebels.

“Perceptive of resemblances,” writes Aristotle, is what the maker of similes must be. There is one more step. The maker of similes, long or short, must perceive resemblances and then, above all, obey the first, and maybe only, commandment for a writer: to make you see. Consider Wodehouse’s “He found Lord Emsworth, as usual, draped like a wet sock over the rail of the Empress’s G.H.O.,” or Patricia Cornwell’s “My thoughts scattered like marbles.”

The dictionary definition of metaphor is simply an implied comparison, a comparison without the key words like or as. The most common schoolbook example is, “She has a heart of gold,” followed by, “The world is a stage.” Latching onto the verb is, the popular website Grammarly explains, “A metaphor states that one thing is another thing.”

Close, but not enough. There is great wisdom in the roots of our language, in the origin of words. Deep down, in its first Greek form, metaphor combines meta (over, across) and pherein (to carry), and thus the full word means to carry over, to transfer, to change or alter. A metaphor does more than state an identity. In our imagination, before our eyes, metaphor changes one thing into another: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Eliot’s metaphor is a metamorphosis. Magically, we see Prufrock the man metamorphosed into a creature with ragged claws, like a hapless minor god in Ovid.

Too much? Consider, then, what the presence of like or as does in a simile. It announces, self-consciously, that something good is coming. The simile is a rhetorical magic trick, like a pun pulled out of a hat. A metaphor, however, feels not clever but true. Take away the announcement of like, and we read and write on a much less sophisticated level, on a level that has been called primitive, because it recalls the staggering ancient power of words as curses, as spells to transform someone into a frog, a stag, a satanic serpent.

A better term might be childlike. Psychologists know that very young children understand the metamorphosing power of words. To a child of three or four, writes Howard Gardner, the properties of a new word “may be inextricably fused with the new object: at such a time the pencil may become a rocket ship.” Older children and adults know that this isn’t so. But for most of us, and certainly for most writers I know, the childhood core of magical language play is not lost. It exists at the center and is only surrounded by adult awareness, as the rings encircle the heart of the tree.

Still too much? Here is Updike, making me gasp: “But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.” No labored comparison, no signal not to take it literally. Like the pencil and rocket, their hands have become a starfish. Or Shakespeare, metamorphosing himself into an autumnal tree and then an ancient abbey: “That time of year thou may’st in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Pure magic.

Yet why be a purist? At the high point of language, James Joyce blends simile, metaphor, and extended simile into one beautiful and unearthly scene, an image created by a sorcerer.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s. … Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

The passage is like a palimpsest. A reader can see through the surface of the language. A reader can penetrate to the traces of the real person still visible beneath the living words that are, as they move down the page, quietly transforming her. It is as if we are looking through the transparent chrysalis to the caterpillar growing inside, watching its slow and perfect metamorphosis into the butterfly. Too much? No.

by Max Byrd, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: locket479/Flickr