Eileen Maksym's Blog, page 27
May 13, 2014
May 12, 2014
On War Narratives and the Human Condition
I wrote in an earlier post about how it’s impossible to fully understand a tragedy unless you were there. I think war pretty clearly belongs in that category. Only people who have been to war can fully understand the experience.
I am fond of war narratives. One of the best books I’ve read recently is The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, a semi-autobiographical account of the Vietnam War. One of my favorite books of all time is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the satirical classic set in World War II. Both of these narratives portray war as a liminal experience, a strange jumble of contrasting superlatives. Where life is precious exactly because it is valued so little. Where moments of horror are imbued with a dark sardonic humor. Where circumstances can whiplash 180, boredom to carnage, when a slog through the jungle is pierced by a rigged artillery shell that blows a friend into the trees, when a milk run suddenly meets enemy fire and the rear gunner is gutted inside his flak suit. Where the most meaningless becomes the most meaningful: Lemon Tree and the Snowdens of Yesteryear.
War narratives are a touchstone into a world that, God willing, I will never see firsthand. However, war narratives have much to teach us, about ourselves, about others, about the very best and very worst of humanity. In particular, they have much to teach writers, since a writer is always a student of the human condition.
Try reading some war stories. The Things They Carried and Catch-22 are exceptional places to start.
May 7, 2014
Feather On The Clyde
I’ve been sick with tonsillitis, so I haven’t had the energy for my usual posts. Have a beautiful rendition of a beautiful song instead!
May 2, 2014
Life is too short for bad books
It’s pretty rare for me to abandon a book. Yet, in the past couple weeks, I’ve abandoned three. I even deleted them from my Kindle! They were that bad. So bad. Painfully bad. The dialogue was wooden, the plots were eye-rollingly unbelieveble, the descriptions were trite, cliched, hackneyed. In short, the writing was terrible. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh.
How did I encounter three books in a row that were so bad? They were “bestsellers” on Amazon. They had favorable reviews. How could they be so “nails on a chalkboard” terrible? Has the quality of literature plummeted? Were they self-published and had no, or bad, editors? Or is it that my own taste in fiction has changed?
I read slush for the horror/sci-fi/fantasy magazine Apex. (For those of you who don’t know, slush is the term for the mound of stories that are submitted to a publication. Apex, like many magazines, has a team that sorts through these stories, rejects most of them, and forwards the very best to the editor-in-chief.) We get a lot of submissions; I get at least ten stories a week to review, and there are sixteen readers on the slush team. Apex publishes three stories a month, and those stories, as well as the magazine itself, are frequently nominated for awards, so the bar is very high. It’s my job to reject every story that isn’t the very best, which means I reject almost everything. And I reject most stories after reading the first page, often after reading the first paragraph. If the story doesn’t grab me right off and compel me to keep reading, I stop reading and reject the story. If the writing isn’t exceptional in that first paragraph or first page, I stop reading and reject the story.
I suspect this has a lot to do with my emerging impatience with “bad” books. A novel has a lot more leeway than a short story when it comes to compelling the reader to continue reading: a short story should grab you with the first sentence, while a novel can usually be granted a chapter or so. If it fails that test, or if the writing isn’t exceptional, I have no patience with it. I stop reading. I reject it.
Maybe I need to stick to well-regarded fiction. Nominees and winners of awards like the Hugo, the Nebula, the Edgar, and so on. I definitely need to stop feeling guilty about abandoning books that don’t measure up to my standards. I used to recommend that writers read good stuff and bad stuff. I was wrong. Life is too short for bad books.
April 30, 2014
Does The Dog Die?
In the TV show Hannibal (which I praise at length HERE) the viewpoint character Will Graham has a habit of taking in stray dogs, and has several in his house out in the middle of nowhere. In last Friday’s episode, the dogs start barking in the middle of the night at something in the woods. When Will opens the door to take a better look, one of his dogs (Buster, as we learn when Will yells out his name), races out into the snow and woods to chase whatever it is. Instead of staying inside where it’s safe (well…safer…) or pausing to put a coat over his pajamas, he runs out after the dog through knee-deep snow with a shotgun in one hand.
Did I mention I love Will Graham?
When he finds Buster, the dog is laying whimpering in the snow, the fur of his back soaked with blood. There is something horrible in the woods with them, but Will takes the time to scoop the dog up under his other arm, slowing him down and making it impossible for him to use that shotgun. He races back through the snow toward the house, being pursued by gruesome death, and just barely makes it behind the door before the atrocity at his heels can reach him.
I think it’s very interesting how we react to animals in peril in fiction. Will’s care for and protection of the dogs that he takes in is incredibly endearing. We are meant to like Will Graham, to feel for him (so that the show can tear out our hearts and grind them into the dirt when horrifying things happen to him) and his kindness to animals is an effective way of securing our affection and loyalty (almost too effective, edging into manipulation territory). And I find myself more emotionally invested when an animal is in peril. I was more worried about whether Buster would make it through than whether Will Graham would be torn to pieces. And this in a show that is all about murder, mutilation and cannibalism! Feed a guy his own legs and I’m fine. Threaten a dog and I’m shouting “No!” at the screen.
I know I’m not alone in this reaction. There is a website called doesthedogdie.com where you can look up a movie and find out if a pet is injured or killed. Why do we have these reactions? Are we just built to want to protect the helpless and/or the cute? What horrors of humanity do we turn away from while raging against the same horror in an animal? And what does that say about us, as individuals, as a society, as a species?
April 28, 2014
You had to be there
The picture above is a satellite image of Tuscaloosa, AL. ��See that jagged brown scar sliced diagonally across it? ��That’s the path of destruction, visible from space,��left by the EF4 tornado that tore through on April 27th, 2011.
I suspect that 4/27/11 is for Tuscaloosa natives a lot like 9/11/01 is for New Yorkers. ��You don’t have to have been living in New York the day the Towers came down, or in Tuscaloosa when the tornado ripped through, to be horrified by the tragedy. ��But you also will not,��cannot, fully understand what it was like to be there. ��What it is like to��have been there. To have your own life in peril. ��To recognize your own city streets buried beneath rubble. To lose��your friend, your spouse, your parent, your child, that day.
I am an outsider to both tragedies, although much��closer to��9/11. I had a lot of friends in New York,��had spent a fair amount of time there, and my husband Pete had lived in the city��just a year before 9/11 (you could look down his street and see the WTC, and the copy of��Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that we read out loud together was bought from the Barnes and Noble in the WTC mall).
I had no personal connection to Tuscaloosa until Pete got a job at the University of Alabama, over a year after the tornado, so my own experience of 4/27/11 can only be through the echoes. ��The stories of friends who were there. ��The sight of that path slicing through places I now know�� The reactions people have to bad weather. For instance, the kids’ school dismissed students an hour early today due to the possibility of inclement weather this afternoon and evening. ��This is a common occurrence. ��At one point I joked about it to a friend who worked for federal emergency management in Jackson, Mississippi:
“Jeez, haven’t they ever seen a thunderstorm before?”
“Dude, they had an EF4 tornado a couple years ago.”
I wasn’t thinking. ��I wasn’t there.
April 25, 2014
Gift From God – Part 3
Our 19 year old cat Jane died last Saturday. This is part 3 of the story of her place in our lives for the last 16 years.
Jane was 17 years old when we moved to Tuscaloosa, AL, in June of 2012. It was the first big move in seven years, and I had some concern that she might not take to it as well as she had before. She didn’t complain like she had in the past, remaining silent on our two day drive south from Illinois. Her quiet worried me; I wondered if she didn’t have the energy to protest like she had before. I also started to wonder what would happen after Pete’s three year post doc was over and we had to move again in the summer of 2015. Jane would be 20. Would she be able to survive the move then?
She made it to Tuscaloosa, though, and seemed to be adjusting well, even after we added a dog to the family (another rescue animal). That December, though, she started not being able to make it to the litter box, so we set her up with food, water, a bed, and her litter box in the kids’ bathroom. We’d take her out when we could be with her and make sure she got to the box when she needed to.
Six months later she started having seizures. One night Pete and I were jolted out of sleep by the sound of something heavy being smashed. We ran to the bathroom and found Jane twitching on the floor next to the shards of her ceramic water dish. When she had another seizure the next night, we took her to the vet. Blood tests suggested that her kidneys weren’t working at full capacity, but only just, and the vet wasn’t convinced that was causing the seizures. He recommended against more invasive tests, though, since Jane was 18. We switched her food to something that was particularly easy on kidneys, made sure she had enough water, and stayed with her whenever we heard her having a seizure.
She had another seizure last week on Tuesday night. On Wednesday I noticed she was having trouble jumping up onto the counter where her bed and food were. When I put her up there, she walked right off the edge, dropping into a pile of tangled limbs on the floor. I took her out and kept an eye on her. By that evening her back legs weren’t working right, and she kept walking right off the edge of the bed and the couch. I stayed up with her that night, and watched as she got weaker and weaker. By Thursday she was in a coma. I stayed home with her, holding her in my lap, sure she was going to die right then and there. When Pete came home from work, we tried giving her some sugar water. She woke up. I thought maybe she could pull through this, so I took her to the vet the next day. He gave her subcutaneous fluids and some vitamins and steroids, and told me that it was the best we could do to give her a fighting chance. I would know by the next day if she was going to pull through.
Jane seemed perkier for a little while after I brought her home from the vet, but it didn’t last. Soon she was limply on her side again, her breathing labored. She was purring and kneading her paws, both self-comforting actions. We continued to give her water and a calorie heavy gel as the vet had recommended, and kept her in bed with us that night.
The next day I brought her with me into the living room to be with all of us, and that afternoon she died, in my arms and being petted by Pete and the kids. We buried her in the backyard. We put a cement block over her grave to discourage animals from trying to dig her up, and my daughter covered it with flowers.
The name Jane means “gift from God.” And she was that. She was a companion during some of my darkest times, a constant as our lives were repeatedly uprooted, and taught us the value of caring for someone we love, even to the very end. I tell my kids that we should try to focus on cherishing the time we had with her rather than mourning her loss. I struggle to take my own advice. I miss her, very much. She was a rescue cat, but she rescued me, so many times and in so many ways.
April 23, 2014
Gift From God – Part 2
My 19 year old cat Jane died last Saturday. This week I’m writing about the 16 years she spent with us. Part 1 can be found here.
Most cats don’t do well with moving from place to place. Jane was different. I, and later we, moved from place to place in pursuit of degrees and jobs, and Jane came with us. It was the one non-negotiable: any apartment we rented had to allow cats. Jane was family, and I refused to leave her behind.
After I graduated from Yale in the spring of 2000, I moved up to Massachusetts to take a job at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. We lived in a tiny basement apartment that was about as big as the living room of the house I live in now. At first it was just Jane and I; a couple months later my then-boyfriend (now-husband) Pete unofficially moved in after leaving his job in New York City to take a job in Cambridge. After a year in Salem, we lived in Arlington, MA, for a year, then moved to Cambridge, MA, so I could go to grad school. Place to place, Jane was a constant.
Other parts of our life changed, though. Pete and I got married in the summer of 2002. That fall we helped a friend by taking in his wiry black cat named Babs (the cats hated each other, but eventually learned to co-exist). My son was born in August 2004, and Jane proved to be sweet and patient with him. Summer of 2005, we moved to Evanston, IL, where we would live for seven years while Pete worked toward a PhD in astrophysics at Northwestern. My daughter was born there in December of 2006; again Jane was sweet and patient, nuzzling and at times licking her.
In our first year in Evanston, I noticed that Jane was having trouble chewing her food. I took her to the vet, and they extracted the teeth from the top left hand side of her jaw. The vet was suspicious of how easily the teeth came out, so she did a biopsy. It came back positive for squamous cell carcinoma. The vet told me they could do surgery, and chemo, but that it would be expensive and only extend her life a little. If I did nothing, Jane would die in six months. I was heartbroken, and prepared myself to lose her.
Six months came and went. Jane didn’t get sick. At all. Babs, on the other hand, started having kidney issues, and died two years later.
In 2011, it looked like Pete might take a position in Germany. Once again, taking Jane with us was non-negotiable, so I started preparing necessary paperwork. Jane needed an ident chip and a bunch of shots, so I took her to the vets’ office that had removed her teeth and given her a death sentence. A different vet saw her. When he walked in, he had her file in his hand, and looked suitably shocked.
“This is Jane?”
“Yep.”
“The same Jane that had some teeth removed five years ago?”
“Yep.”
“The same Jane that had cancer?”
“Yep.”
She was 16 years old, and perfectly healthy. The vet speculated that the diagnosis was a mistake, that the person who did the biopsy screwed up. “We’re not infallible,” he said.
Maybe. Maybe she was just a tough cat. Regardless, she was alive, healthy, still with us, and coming with us to Germany.
At least, she would have, had the opportunity in Germany not fallen through. As it was, we stayed in Evanston for another year, then all of us moved to Tuscaloosa, AL, in the summer of 2012.
Coming up in Part 3: Growing old, last days, and reflections on rescue.
