Great Things I Read in February, 2017 Edition

This is a few days late, isn't it? I had to postpone a little for my Mock Oscars, covering Logan, and a certain wonderful event in my family. I'll share that last good news with you in my next post, but for now, I want to share some amazing stories and journalism. It includes not one, but two Science Fictional stories of birds that just happen to be true.

As always, everything listed here is free to read with no paywall. I've linked directly to each piece. If you like what you read, consider grabbing a subscription to the publisher or dropping money into an author's Patreon.

Short Stories and Flash Fiction

"The Unknown God" by Ann Leckie at Uncanny Magazine

Such a thoroughly charming story from its first chatter between a frog and a mighty god about all the weird things the local atheists believe. There's quirky personality to its very eschatology, bouncing between personal lives and grand stakes. It's a chatty story, but the dialogue makes lightness of such heavy matters, and gives the motion of the story life, all the way to crystallizing its conclusion. There's wisdom here.

Walking through a nursing home after hours

Walking through a nursing home after hours, the halls are empty but full of our sounds: generators, air pumps, washers. It's a symphony exclusively associated with human presence. Disorients when it all plays in absence of voices, footfalls and clothes swishing. This is probably what so many Horror movies/games/books strive for in mood, and I can see how it might be creepy, but it's not. It's a tickle, like my brain is waiting for society to load in with the rest of this setting.

#bestreads2013 - Favorite Short Stories and Essays Edition

In compiling my list for #bestreads2013, I came up with five short stories and essays that didn’t feel right to put beside all the novels on my list. My list of most affecting books will still go live on the 28th. Yet they absolutely deserve at least a paragraph praise. So for this Sunday I’m going to rant just a little bit at you about the essays that confronted me like no other, the fiction that opened my mind, and that one story that actually took my breath away. That doesn’t happen often enough.

And in all of it, I won’t ramble about how great Richard Matheson’s “Duel” is, even though I re-read it for the twentieth time this year and still find it hilariously paranoia-inducing.

So, five short pieces presented with hierarchy:

Roger Zelazny’s “Divine Madness”

A very short story, only perhaps 2,500 words, about a man living his life backwards. It’s not traditional time travel, as why he’s experiencing everything backwards is never explained or exploited; he can’t take advantage or change anything, either. Instead he hurtles across weeks of absurd reverse-time humor and his own bad decisions, culminating in a last line that actually left me breathless. Its payoff is simultaneously hopeful, clever and wrenchingly sad in a manner I refuse to spoil. Do yourself the favor of spending a few minutes reading this. It’s in several collections.

Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners”

The most poignant fiction bout fandom I’ve ever read. Another short story available in multiple collections (at least in Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters), it’s about a teenaged nerd in a small cluster of friends who all love a fictional TV show called The Library. They watch it at all hours, cosplay it, hypothesize how the heroes live, love, and could escape certain death, all while avoiding the unknowable complexities of their own lives. It’s much easier to figure out why the Librarian is played by a different actor in each episode than to discern the many and painful mixed signals about whether his parents are getting divorced, or why he’s been written into his father’s novel only to meet an awful fate. Here escapism is both positive and negative, getting kids to know each other and perhaps fall in love while also giving them other things to discuss so they can avoid admitting, acting or exploring it. It takes someone like Link to make this all work.

David Foster Wallace’s “McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”

My first exposure to Wallace and I was already enamored. Here is a long-form piece of journalism during McCain’s first real run at the presidency in 2000, when he lost the nomination to George W. Bush. It’s incredibly chewy journalism as it refuses to settle on one idea of McCain: he was a war hero who refused to leave his fellow captives, but also a screw-up and horn-dog; he took big money as he pursued legislation to shut big money out of politics; he was candid and self-effacing in ways that only built up his prestige. The easy way out is to call him a liar or fraud, but there are too many cases where he was actually honest. Wallace’s conclusion is antithetical to where bipartisan politics have gone: that McCain was shades of everything we saw, not wholly any one of them, both a role model seeking national change and a scoundrel who’d use a little kid’s grief for his own political gain.

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “The Logic of Stupid Poor People”

I can’t say I agreed with all of it, or even liked it, but it’s the finest essay of its kind I’ve read. We live in a culture where you are at every disadvantage if you cannot blend in with people who have much more than you. Cottom baldly tackles some of the reasons why someone behind on the rent and with no dinner would spend everything on a luxury item. On first reading, I resisted the essay to the point where I literally dug my heels into my carpet. The tone, and the notion that these might all be defensible decisions, put me against what is an exercise in releasing harmful judgment for empathy. It’s a valuable confrontation. Cottom’s blog is right here. 

Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

Mesmerizing prose that reads perhaps too much like fiction. Her rolling opening about notions of California would never have clued me into the murder case she was about to profile, and the way she captured circumstantial evidence never let me anticipate that the murder was a real life contrivance fit for CSI.

There are two key successes in the piece. The first is that Didion so rapidly captures the feeling of one side, until it must be right, only to then upturn it with evidence and another perspective.

The other success is language remixing cultural observation like this: "The graft took incurious ways.  This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew.  This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.  This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school."

Bathroom Monologue: Coldblooded Body Image Redux

“I try not to talk about it because it's unfashionable for men to have body image issues. Society is acutely aware of how unrealistic their demands are on women's appearances, but you never think how much pressure you put on a man. I spend hours in aerobics classes, arms behind my back and undulating on my belly. I've paid thousands for skin creams and mud treatments without a single scale to show for it. There's a surgery to bifurcate your tongue if you want to half-ass it. Truth is, science won't ever give you a reptilian mouth. The funding isn't there. It isn’t profitable enough. Now you're going to tell me I'm silly, that I'm too hard on myself, that nobody expects me to become a snake. Ride the rails in my shoes for just one day. How they stare at me while I’m trying to coil in my chair. They're all thinking, "What a worthless cobra he makes." But none of them are willing to help me become whole!”

Bathroom Monologue: Riverbrook Station, Redux

Riverbrook never had a station before so they had to improvise as it went along. They used confident bidders, domestic steel and concrete to erect a long platform. They screened all their conductors thoroughly, even though the railway provided them. They made the right deals with Amtrak and some stations to the north to assure reliable service.

And then on opening day a little boy leaned over the platform to watch the train come. His mother was preoccupied with The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The boy did not pull back soon enough – which is to say, he didn’t pull back at all. It was a miracle he wasn’t killed. He was thrown thirty yards and was distinctly unaware of any miracles when he landed in poison sumac.

It was a horrible thing for Riverbrook. They apologized, made settlements and cleaned. They mourned, even though the boy was alive and from out of town.

Riverbrook put down bumpy yellow plastic to guide people away from the edge of the platform thereafter.

Plenty of people came to take the next train. They had lives. They rushed aboard, and teenage vacationer fell in the gap between the platform and the door. It took half an hour to get her leg free.

They wrote along the yellow bumpy plastic for people to “MIND THE GAP.” The station manager announced the same for the PA before every train.

Apparently this one girl from Florida missed the message and didn’t hear him. She was busy on her cell. She explained such as the station crew pried her knee from the gap.

So for the next day the station manager wandered the platform, explaining that some people had troubles boarding and to be very careful. Elderly patrons appreciated the attention, but some of the younger ones thought he was crazy and disregarded the message. One of them was threatening to sue twenty minutes later when he fell in all the way to the waist.

So the station manager and every free person on staff wandered the platform afterwards, making certain every single person had a thorough lecture on how to board a train. No one was allowed to board before they had all been lectured. It held up the rail schedule terribly. It also took so long that people who had been lectured grew impatient, missed some crucial step in the instructions, and three people stumbled into the gap that afternoon.

Conductors were ordered to carry everyone onto the train, as passengers clearly couldn’t be trusted with this kind of responsibility. But as Wesley Morgan carried his third passenger on board his back went out and he staggered backwards through the door. You can guess where his left foot went. He was the most pleasant of the gap-victims, though; he was looking forward to suing someone, and possibly retiring early.

The Riverbrook Station saw so many accidents that they were still unsafe by the time particle teleporters were introduced. The station manager happily handed over the keys to a physicist. He babbled warnings about queuing order how a size ten shoe can pass through a three inch space. The physicist shrugged him off and invited his first passenger. That was the first time any teleporter commuter ever lost a foot.

Bathroom Monologue: Edgiest Hero

No scarred personality. He’ll be fighting for truth and justice simply because it’s the right thing to do. It’ll be about civic responsibility at titanic scales. I’m thinking we bring him from the Midwest, the Heartland, and give him a lot of that boyscout virtue we’re afraid NRA-types are losing. Guns will be both useless against him and deplored by him.

In fact, he’ll deplore all violence. When he has to hit you, you’ll go through a wall, and he’ll be somber, even saddened that he’s had to strike. He thinks you should have been better, and he’s an example of your failure to be better.

That’s the thing: rather than being broken, his presence will show how everyone else is broken. The corruption of businessmen, the cynicism of reporters, the implicit cruelty of military – he’ll force you to change. He’s the one who doesn’t change just because the world’s hard.

We’ll run counter to the leather aesthetic. He loves capes, and spandex, and underwear on the outside of his pants. A brightly colored costume, a garish logo, something that looks gaudy in daylight. If professional wrestlers actually fought crime. Put him in a line-up of body armor and black trench coats, and he’ll be the one everyone remembers. He’ll be different from every other hero.

He’ll be super, man.

#NaNoReMo Update #1

So February has started and we all had our first weekend reading our classics. There's still time to hop on if you have a classic you've been putting off too long.

My pick last year was Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, which didn't go as well as I'd hoped. This year it's Middlemarch by Mary Anne Evans (as "George Eliot"). It was was originally a serial, a novel in eight released Books. I finished Book One this weekend and am a healthy way into Book Two, wherein we're still meeting the cast. It's so enormous that I'm keeping a list to keep them straight. Recent health problems have demanded I spend more time than usual sitting still, which has afforded me extra time to attack my classic.

Upon the first chapters, I feared this would be another Austen adventure. The scenes are primarily domestic or at someone else's house, and the dialogue is overwhelmingly gossip about someone's life or direction. Early chapters especially have the clash of men and women as prospects for each other, though there are always sparks of more going on. Further, Evans was every bit the whit that Austen was, with cutting lines and turn-arounds in conversation, though many more applied to the wry and detached narrator. I struggle to pick a favorite line or passage, but this is the most recent nest of thoughts to tickle my brain:

 "Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, 

but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions,

bring their provisions to a common table and mess together,

feeding out of the common store according to their appetite."

It's perhaps double the cast of Pride & Prejudice, but tenfold the content of personality, including women who are interested not just in marriage, but education, politics, religion, literature, foreign language and a deal more. A few characters are driven into romance, and to my eye, at least as keenly as Austen, but only a minority are defined by it. There is also at least one made a fool by the preoccupation, which lends necessary variety to the execution. The best effect is that I'm actually rooting for a few of these people to find happy endings, though that's dangerous in a satire.

It's also splendid to read a little reference-comedy about John Milton. It felt like someone was letting a little air of class into my room.

The most striking element thus far is the range of themes Evans/Eliot tackles. Scenes and chapters seem to almost deliberately disagree in their approaches, or someone’s opinions will fly against the narrator. Dorothea is introduced to us with almost too much “telling,” about her life, opinions, looks and behaviors, heaped upon in narration and then dialogue. A Book later, an artist deems her too complex to capture in art. It’s partially my bias to seeing the novel as an artform, but this artist is condemning the ability of the arts to capture life, which the narrator seems to think he/she is doing constantly.

How is everyone else doing with their books?

Bathroom Monologue: Retweet This

RETWEETs are perfect. There has never been a better form of communication, and never phrased better, or I would have written it. Instead I clicked RETWEET and my work is done. The world is mended.

I believe every single word and the implicit meaning behind every single image attached to whatever I RETWEET. Its politics are mine. Its opinions are law. The only thing I would change is making it my work.

I have never RETWEETed something by accident.

My Twitter clients have never malfunctioned and RETWEETed something without my consent.

I have never RETWEETed something so my peers would like me better. I have never done anything so my peers would like me better. I think ties have unmatched utility.

I have never RETWEETed something I disagreed with to show what the opposition thinks. In all those cases, I have never tweeted shortly before or after that, granting the RETWEET context. Every RETWEET is its own island of unquestioning support.

RETWEET this.

“Would you drink apple juice if you knew a sterilized cockroach had touched it?” –Everyone, paraphrasing Jonathan Haidt

One of the questions Jonathan Haidt asked people for his book, The Righteous Mind, was if they would drink a glass of apple juice if a sterilized cockroach had been dipped into it. Haidt explains that the cockroach has absolutely no disease or hazardous particles on it; it does not affect the juice in any tangible way. So would you sip?

The press’s response has largely been that this question belongs at a slumber party, not academic work, but it got me thinking. My snap reaction is that I wouldn’t, because that’s gross. As an adult I’m supposed to pretend I have deliberated responses, but I know and want to out snap-reaction thinking.

A few seconds later I thought about sitting at a table with some squeamish friends. I envisioned that all of these friends (not naming names) would refuse and squirm in their chairs. And my contrarian nature would seize on the harmlessness of the juice, compelling me to drink it just to tease them. Removed from the circumstances, I realize I’d gleefully haze my friends for the same inhibition that I’d otherwise have.

Then I thought of those times when I couldn’t afford food. Would I drink it then? You bet your food stamps I would.

Right now I have food in my house, but no fruit or juice. Might I supplement my vitamin intake tonight with this cockroach-touched juice? It’s quite possible, especially if it wasn’t apple juice. I don’t like apple juice.

Or if I’ve just read one of those reports about how juice is sugar-heavy without the digestible fiber to offset it? I’m a sucker for those, affecting my drinking choices for short periods of time afterward.

And what am I getting out of the deal? Does a doctor offer me five bucks to drink a glass of sterile-cockroach-touched juice? In that instance I think I wouldn’t, believing there’s no way a doctor would pay me money for something that didn’t have a secretly questionable chemical in it.

But if the doctors swore upon pain of litigation that the juice was clean? Then I’d probably take the fiver.

What about days when I’m feeling sicker, when the syndrome is heavier, and my thinking slows and I get generally cranky? I’d be much less receptive to the roach-juice, just as I’m less receptive to trying anything new in those periods.

Never mind the setting, circumstances or who made the offer (if Dick Cheney dipped it, you’re looking at a different outcome than if my germophobe sister did). I couldn’t help thinking about personal circumstances, things like mood or recent personal issues that could sway me in that case, and that do routinely sway my behavior. Had I not been in a receptive mood when I first heard about Haidt’s book, I probably wouldn’t have looked it up and have added it to my next buying list. I believe most human beings are arbitrary like me in these regards. We’re not randomly capricious, but we bring more into situations than absolutist answers account for.

You, dear reader, have factors that would influence how you’d respond to this post today as opposed to next week, and next month, and while you have the worst flu of your life, and right after you get the best hummer of your life. What mood are you in?