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I thought I had it hard in school. This is The Smiths boarding house level of student abuse.

Okay, if you read this and don't like it, I don't know if we can be friends anymore.

Man, I love the digressions.

And we end the collection with, guess what? Yes! Another story about a strange community, "The Column Dwellers in our Town". I rather liked this slightly-surreal take on a town where some inhabitants choose to live a solitary life atop a high rock or cement column (not to exceed 140', per code). It does cause one to think hard about asceticism and social pressure in new ways. I quite liked this strange "story".

Millhauser's experimental piece, "He Takes, She Takes" jockeys back and forth using the simple phrase: "He takes the (insert thing here, she takes the (insert other thing here)". It is tediously repetitive, but between this iterative bouncing back-and-forth, a story actually seems to emerge, though it is up to the reader whether this is a story of two individuals or the story of all couples.

A disruption of a far more disturbing kind takes place in "The Change," a modern re-telling of the myth of Daphne, the nymph who turns into a tree to avoid the unwanted sexual advances of Apollo. But this is no myth, it's a frankly horrifying story of what it means to be a young woman in a world of hypercharged sexuality and the rule of testosterone that mirrors the rule of the jungle. This needs a trigger warning!

Steven embraces outright surrealism in his story "A Common Predicament," which is anything but common. The narrator's strange relationship with a woman whom he loves (and who loves him) never faces him. Ever. The speculations as to why she exhibits this behavior haunt him, but he accommodates this strange quirk for the sake of their love. Definitely a story worthy of the label "disruption".

Proof that your adult kid loves you: He buys you a copy of Metal Hurlant for Father's Day. I raised that kid right.

"Kafka in High School, 1959" gives us snippets of Kafka (yes, thatKafka) as an awkward nerd going through the clumsy growing pains of a teenager. It's all too normal of an alternate history, bland, with sideways glimpses of how this teenager could turn into the author we know. One can see how the awkwardness could be magnified into the bleak work we already know. And in the end, things do go strangely.

Not done with this story yet, but had to capture this fragment: " . . . the dreadful freedom of someone who has jumped from a building and changed his mind.".

Ironically, I may be dead before my Latin is good enough to fully understand this. And yet, I persist.

Beginning my second reading of this classic. It's been, what, twenty years?

These Roman kids are spoiled brats.

The residents of a small town all fall asleep for three days in "A Tired Town". The narrator struggles to stay awake and, in so doing, experiences a silent moment on the cusp of something indescribable, but then succumbs to slumber. He awakens to the "cleanup" afterword with a sense that he somehow missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but he's not sure what it was. Serves as a reflection on busy-ness and calm.

Phone-tree hell is portrayed quite vividly in "Thank You For Your Patience". The person listening to the annoying repeated messages while waiting to speak to a human being shows her patience, even gives a practical sermon on her experiences with patience, revealing secrets to an uncaring machine. It's a sick twist on the tale of the suburban housewife, sick because it reveals just how pathetic some peoples lives are.

The communal theme continues with "Green" where changing fashions in landscaping (or the destruction thereof) swing wildly, with neighbors making bizarre changes to "keep up with the Jones's" in a strange display of conspicuous consumption. If you love to look good to everyone around you by following the latest trends, regardless of their utility or even sanity, well, this story is for you.

"The Circle of Punishment" begs comparison to the short fiction of Borges, Kafka, and Calvino. But Millhauser here turns "kafkaism" inside out while pushing "kafkaism" even deeper into the soul in such a way that the reader is unsure whether to be relieved or even more disturbed. I've coming away thinking far too much about the interiority of social prisons, punishment we impose on ourselves, deserved or not.

One thing Millhauser does really well is magic realism. "The Summer of Ladders" is a great example of this. The population of a town become obsessed with climbing ladders, with results that affect all the inhabitants, directly or indirectly. And an apotheosis might have happened. Maybe, just maybe. Or a disappearing act? As with most magic realism, it's so hard to tell. And in that ambiguity lies the magic.

"A Haunted House Story" channels Robert Aickman in all the right ways. haunters and the haunted are indistinguishable, and a view of utter happiness brings on a dark gloom of despair. This story will affect you, deeply, and you will not even understand quite why. But it burrows into you. And it stays. It's terrifying by not being terrifying at all . . . until it's over.

Roman medical practice = not great.

"The Fight" reminds us that coming of age stories can be fraught with fear and testosterone, when the fight or flight response is being honed in at such a visceral level that we don't even realize what is happening and the line between fact and fantasy blurs both for our relationships with others and for our image of our selves. Moving into proto-adulthood is no easy transition.

Recently picked up a Latin to English dictionary, which is really handy for knowing if I am understanding words correctly when trying to contextually determine meanings. The timing has dovetail nicely with my current reading. Just got to the dictionary section about body parts, and what am I reading about in Lingua Latine? Body parts!

In "Theater of Shadows," we continue with the theme of community, but this time, a community that embraces darkness and find themselves, purely by their desires and choices, in a liminal state somewhere between shadow and light. We refer to this state (though Millhauser does not) as a "Twilight Zone," and for good reason. This story is reflective (pardon the pun) of the best of Rod Serling's masterpieces.