Briane Pagel's Blog: Thinking The Lions, page 39

10 Minutes About Sad Science Fiction

I just finished reading CivilWarLand In Bad Decline by George Saunders and it might have been the saddest book I ever read and definitely included one of the saddest stories I think could ever exist, "The 400 Pound CEO." I read that story while I was sitting at a table next to the Milwaukee River, taking a lunch break, last week. It was sunny and windy and after I read the terrible (great but so sad) ending to the story I had to just sit and stare at the ducks for a while until I felt like I could stand up.

You don't read many sad scifi stories, and CivilWarLand In Bad Decline is full of scifi stories that are at the least speculative fiction and at the most full-on scifi with mutants and ghosts and stolen memories via mechanical devices and the things. As I read them, one a day only because too much of them would wear me down further (and I was already very down last week) I wondered now and then why it is that you don't see so many sad science fiction, or sad speculative fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote very very sad stories.  I read most of his books one summer when I lived in Milwaukee, over two decades ago. It was the summer I worked at the Grant Theater and at Subway, and I was a sophomore or junior in college, living in a studio apartment on 22nd and Clybourn, near where one day Bill Clinton would stop at a diner. He didn't go there until 1996, when I was already living in Madison and going to law school, and I never went to the diner that he would later visit; back then I was poor enough that I had to work at Subway, because one of my meals each day was the free meal I would get eating at Subway. I ate a sub sandwich a day for nearly two years. Not that I was complaining, although I was very poor.

I would go get my books at the used bookstore near the Grand Theater, picking up paperbacks for a dollar.  It's funny; I realize now that I walked by the library nearly every day and yet I never went there to get books, even though I was so poor.

I read all the Kurt Vonnegut books that summer, working 60+ hours a week and not getting more than two days off the entire summer, and by the end of summer I was pretty depressed.  I always attributed it to reading so much Vonnegut, but now I see maybe it was just that I worked a lot and didn't make a lot of money and didn't have very many friends, and wasn't really sure where I was going in life.

But the Vonnegut didn't help.

Reading George Saunders was different.  I've got a really full life now, and even though last week wasn't great, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as when I was in my 20s and reading all that Vonnegut and walking nearly everywhere because bus fare was expensive.  But still, the stories were very depressing -- albeit, as I've said, great, well worth reading.  Maybe that's why I remember that summer so much, out of all the summers (46, now!) of my life: because of the sadness that stuck with me through the memories of Vonnegut.

David Sedaris wrote, in Leviathan, about remembering sad things:

Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

He was talking about how his memories of sad times stick to him, even in the  midst of good times.  Science fiction tends to be an optimistic field: the future, even when its an apocalyptic scenario, ends up being so bright we have to wear shades. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, inventions make lives better.  I think even Blade Runner had a kind of happy ending, although Phillip K. Dick could vie with Vonnegut and Saunders for the saddest writers around.

There's a place for sadness.  I used to like to listen to sad songs when I was down, letting the songs pull the emotions out of me, shape them into something.  Now, I sometimes use stories to do that -- my own stories, in part.  Over the last year, as I wrote a lot of short short stories, many of them came out sad.  Not all of them, but many of them.  Who could blame me? I had a lot going on last year: my dad got sick, I saw the end to 14 years of building a law firm, we had a lot of stresses going on.  Taking any stress, any sadness, any worries, and putting them into the mouths of robots and cowboys and dinosaurs, is a form of control.  I think that's what reading sad stories does now, too: it helps take an emotion that's too immediate and distance it a bit.  Oh that sadness, that's just from the story, I can think, and blame Vonnegut or Saunders or Dick and then later, from a safer distance, examine it and take it apart and put it back together.

That's 10 minutes.

Today we went and made pirate craft things at the library

And I took this picture afterwards when we went walking



It was a pretty fun day.

Here are some pictures of bugs I took the other day.

This spider was about 1/2" long. It was crawling along near the river and when I put the camera down in front of it to take a picture it reared up in an effort to frighten or attack me.

10 (more) Minutes About "The City And The City"

I finished The City And The City the other day and I was sort of a little disappointed [SPOILER ALERT!] by who one of the bad guys turned out to be.  It's really a very very good mystery story, but in the end the revelation of who is behind some of the killings and mysterious doings came kind of out of left field.

Or possibly it did.  One problem with reading as slowly as I do is that it can be hard to keep track of stories after a while.  I used to reThe City And The City I read even more slowly than that.  So it's possible that early on in the book there were enough clues that one of the culprits was involved and more careful/quicker readers might not have been disappointed by the feeling like this part of the conspiracy was sort of pulled out of China Mieville's butt.
ad much more quickly, but these days I'm often so tired, as a result of raising the boys or my job or my asthma or all three combined, that it's hard to focus on stuff that's dense or requires a lot of thinking.  So I read books more slowly and books like

The thing about mysteries is that you have to give the readers the clues to solve them, even if I, personally, never can solve them.  I admit I am an annoying person to watch a cop show or mystery with, or read a mystery book with (as Sweetie and I do in our private book club.)  I always suspect everyone.  I am naturally suspicious anyway and kind of paranoid, and when you tell me that there is a murder or something and that someone (even a fictional someone committing a fictional something) did it, I trust nobody.

Which means two things, here.  First, I naturally assume everyone who appears in a story is the killer.  And then I suspect the person least likely to be the killer, like the protagonist, or his elderly mom, or whoever.  Then I suspect the person most likely to be the killer on the grounds that I'm reading too much into this and obviously the person who is obviously the killer is, well, obviously the killer.

So there's that.  But there's also then the fact that if we make it to the end of the mystery, as I did with The City And The City, and the bad guy is revealed, and I'm saying Huh? Who's that? then the person was too hidden, because I'm not that clueless, to have forgotten a major part of the story.

So the killer and his or her henchman have to be revealed at some point in the story and made just a big enough deal of that you could have, if you wanted to, figured it out.  You can't just have the main character brush by a guy in a hat or something on page one and on page 457 say It was the hat guy all along.

NOTE: There are no hat guys in The City And The City. I'm way past the spoilers.

So that was how I felt when a part of the mystery was revealed: a bit cheaped out, like the time I watched The Bone Collector and you had to pay attention to the opening credits to know who the killer was.  WHO WATCHES THE OPENING CREDITS? NOBODY. Not me.

The rest of the book, though, was incredible. The concept ended up being far less sci-fi and far more fantastic or speculative fiction. In fact, I wouldn't call it scifi at all, and I think the people over at IO9 or whoever made the list I saw it on (I got it from a list of scifi books that people who don't like scifi should read) were wrong.  Calling the book scifi makes you think there'll be aliens or spaceships or time travel or something.  There was none of that, and the idea that the book was scifi made me sort of expect that Breach (which is a sort of superpolice in the book) might be aliens, and I entertained many similar theories about what was going on -- when, had you told me the book was merely speculative fiction instead of scifi I would've been just fine with it.  The book was not scifi, at all; it was instead a superclever story about two cities that co-exist in and around each other, with people living in each forbidden to know anything about the other, so they 'unsee' the other city all the time, and the way that concept plays out in the book made what would've been a pretty good mystery story into a phenomenal one.

That's 10 minutes.

Here's Where I Stopped Reading This "New Yorker" Article About "Bibliotherapy."

I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist, Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before, even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my life. I love to gorge on books over long breaks—I’ll pack more books than clothes, I told Berthoud. I confided my dirty little secret, which is that I don’t like buying or owning books, and always prefer to get them from the library (which, as I am a writer, does not bring me very good book-sales karma). In response to the question “What is preoccupying you at the moment?,” I was surprised by what I wanted to confess: I am worried about having no spiritual resources to shore myself up against the inevitable future grief of losing somebody I love, I wrote.  

Last Thursday, Mr F woke up at midnight and didn't go back to sleep all night long. I had to sit downstairs with him to keep an eye on him so he didn't get into trouble wandering around the house in the middle of the night. When it hit 6 a.m. I got off the couch to go get ready to go to work, at the new job I started in January which is essentially a brand-new business that requires me to retrain a bunch of lawyers in my area of law, while also trying to build a business from scratch, something I did once before only to have incompetent people destroy it.

That day, Friday, I was going to court to sue a bank that had improperly and illegally tried to repossess our client's car, sending repo men to her house several times. She needs the car, of course, to get to and from work.  Now it's my job to save her car, and if we win I get paid. When that hearing was over I had to sit in an hour-long traffic jam on my way to a meeting with some clients who are in danger of losing their house.

Yesterday, I had planned to start up my walking again. It's the only exercise I can really manage, with my asthma, and I haven't been able to do it in the last three weeks because I've had such trouble breathing.  But after taking the boys to the free day at the Children's Museum -- we're reluctant to spend the regular admission at such places because if the boys get upset or scared right away (as Mr F did) then we might have to leave early, wasting the money -- I was too worn out to go walking.

I'd like to have the luxury of worrying about someday not being able to grieve properly.  But I've got real worries.

The Madison Children's Museum Can Be Kind Of Creepy

The Pumpkins Are Growing

I checked today. They're growing:

10 Minutes About Michael Cunningham Talking About Denis Johnson

I was listening to the New Yorker fiction podcast, where writers read their favorite short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker. This week was Michael Cunningham, who I feel like I recognize his name but I have no idea why.

Michael Cunningham was going to read Harold Brodkey's Dumbness Is Everything, but before he read the story he was talking about why he liked Harold Brodkey and he mentioned his use of language, which he (Michael Cunningham) found difficult to copy.  He mentioned that lots of writers mimic lots of other writers and specifically used the phrase You see a lot of fake Denis Johnsons out there.

Denis Johnson, you may or may not know, wrote the story Emergency, which is an amazing short story that you should read.  (You can read it here.)  Some Guy At Work told me about Emergency, and I listened to the New Yorker podcast of that story and was enthralled.  I eventually borrowed Johnson's Jesus' Son collection of short stories on audiobook, and was even more enthralled.  I would drive around listening to them last year, late at night when I took Mr F for his nightly rides to try to get him to sleep, while I was planning on leaving the law firm that was crumbling around me and hoping to make it through the end of the year without anything too terrible happening, and Johnson's stories about losers and thugs and lowlifes and poor people and the like just cut right into me, in a good way -- the way I guess an amputation of a leg might be a good thing, if you were going to lose it anyway, or the way I felt after I had the heart attack a few years ago and they took me in for surgery and patched me up.  Terrible to go through but worth it to get to the other side.

I was so caught up by the stories that I wanted to try to write my own Denis Johnson-esque stories, and I did, I think.  I wrote one about a third-shift cook in a diner in the middle of nowhere, and one about a guy who robs a bank, and a couple of others.  Most of them are awaiting publication in one form or another and eventually I'll probably have them out there to be read.

The thing that got me is, is it so bad that there are fake Denis Johnson stories? Or fake anyone stories?  Sometimes, when I read an author I like, like Nick Harkaway or China Mieville, I am just in awe of how good they are and I sort of mentally shake my head and think Oh man I could never do that, like watching that guy walk between those two buildings in Chicago last year.

Other times, I read a Denis Johnson or Philip K. Dick or Stephen King story or We Are Become Friends, this one story by the people who used to write A Softer World, and I think Neat, I'd like to try that. And is it wrong to try to work out what another author did and see if you can adapt it to your own?

I don't mean I'm just writing a story pretending to be Denis Johnson. I mean I like the feel of it and the look of it and the sound of it, and so I try to see how my own stories might work if filtered through that kind of lens instead of something else.  I think it makes me a better writer, and I cringe at the idea that writers are saying fake Denis Johnson about people like me, people that try out different voices and styles.

That's ten minutes.

Playlist For Thinking Deep (?) Thoughts

I have a lot to ponder this week and to distract myself from the serious things I have to think about that actually affect my real life and the real world and the real people in it, I'm going to think about some stuff that doesn't really matter unless it really matters a lot.

Stuff like Is the rule that 'rules are meant to be broken' meant to be broken?



The maxim that 'rules are meant to be broken' and its corollary that the exception proves the rule are used over and over and misused every time.  The exception that proves the rule doesn't mean "the exception that makes the rule true," but uses 'proves' in the old-fashioned sense of tests: the exception tests the rule to see if it is, in fact, a rule.  If it doesn't apply in every situation, then it's not a rule. There are rules like mathematical concepts like that one that says A+B=B+A or whatever. That's a rule. There is no exception to it.

Similarly if rules are meant to be broken then we do not mean them to be rules at all.  I can't think of a single rule it would be a good idea to break.  The saying isn't used in situations where we mean an unjust rule; nobody seems to say it about things like 'separate but equal,' which would be a rule that was meant to be broken.  Instead, we use it to justify antisocial behavior that benefits us at the expense of society.  Think of everytime you've heard someone say "Rules are meant to be broken" or something like that. They're about to do something that makes them kind of a jerk, aren't they?

Speaking of jerks,

Who Is Eilert Lovborg Anyway?



Did you listen to that first song? Or at least read the title? I love songs that are about people I've never heard of, and then going to find out what the deal was with those people.

Eilert Lovberg is a character in the play Hedda Gabler. Hedda and her husband George are academics, middling along in their life and struggling to make a go of it. George wants a professorship, but then Eilert shows up.  Eilert turns out to be not only Hedda's ex-lover but a recovering alcoholic and the author of a best-selling work in the same field as George. George and Hedda, already worried about going broke, fear Eilert will get the professorship that George wants.  Eilert doesn't want that job, though: He's got a new girl, Thea, and he and his gal are working on a sequel to the bestseller.

Hedda, now jealous of Thea, encourages Eilert to go to a party with George. Eilert relapses, gets drunk, and loses his manuscript for the sequel.  George finds the manuscript but doesn't tell anyone.  Eilert tells Hedda about losing the manuscript, but Hedda, instead of saying it was found, encourages Eilert to kill himself.  She also burns the manuscript.

That escalated quickly!

Eilert commits suicide, and George and Hedda set out to reconstruct the sequel from Eilert's notes.

Hedda's role in Eilert's suicide is discovered; there are hints of blackmail, and so Hedda kills herself.

Hedda Gabler is often thought to be the first 'neurotic' character in literature -- meaning that she doesn't act rationally, and doesn't act randomly, but rather acts according to a hidden set of goals that only she understands, and which she finds more important than public, rational goals society claims to have.

Society's weird, though, and we form constructs about our very constructs, distancing ourselves from the things we say we want, or trying to impose on them an order that doesn't exist. I mean, for example:
Why is love the only emotion we are unsure of?



This has long been a pet peeve of mine.  Have you ever heard someone say "I think I'm in [any emotion other than love]"? No, you haven't.  There's never been a time that someone cut you off for a parking spot or you got fired or your kid did something funny and you responded "I think I'm angry/sad/happy." 

But love? We tell people they're not really in love, and we question whether we are in love, and we talk about how we didn't really know about love ever before this moment.

Maybe we do that because we are afraid of what love might make us do?

There was a stir a while back when an author looked at a 1997 study of closeness and made the rather bold claim that you can make someone fall in love with you just by asking (and answering) 36 questions.  She didn't seem to think love was so mysterious: "Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be." 

Reducing love to nothing more than a job interview doesn't seem so romantic, but I'm not sure that saying nobody really knows what it is or can be sure they are in it is so romantic, either.

Lightening up a bit, here, let's think about other things we say about the things we use. Like

 What are you supposed to call a book when it doesn't have any kind of physical form any more?


I often find myself thinking about the words we use for stuff we use.  Automobile, and the shorter auto, seems pretty self-explanatory, as are both film and movie.  And those words seems like they'll stick around even as those things change.  The self-driving car I wish existed RIGHT NOW FOR ME will be even of a more automatic mobile than the one I drive myself around in now.  A movie will always move.

But I say watch TV when I mean look at a movie on my laptop (although more and more I say watch Netflix or something like that); that's still pretty accurate, though -- the word "television," used to describe the console and the generally broadcast things on it, means "vision at a distance".

Every definition of the word "book" refers to the physical creation we think of as a book: pages, covers, etc.  The word still might apply just fine for ebooks; there are (e)pages and a physical casing for that book, still.  But what about audiobooks? I download an audiobook onto my phone and listen to it. No pages, no cover (unless I guess I count the phone?)

I suppose book has come to encompass the ideas within the book, a generic term for 'this set of words that tells you something,' rather than the physical thing people still like to carry around for some reason (I caught Sweetie reading one the other day!).

But that doesn't stop me from feeling awkward about audiobooks. I can't say I read a book when I listened to it and if someone says "Hey, did you like the book The Passage?" I feel dumb saying "Oh, yeah, I listened to that it was great."


And finally How come he's the 'waiter' when I am the one who is required to sit for a period of time before getting to do the thing I'm here for?




This one's kind of easy, though actually: originally, the term was used for servants to wait by the table to fetch stuff for their masters.

I was just thinking...

It's the second-last week of school, and this week the school took the boys on field trips to the local Splash Park, and to the nature trails where I always go walking with Mr F and Mr Bunches.

But they sent home a math packet for Mr Bunches to work on at home with the help of his parents.

So effectively, the teachers have traded roles with me this week.