newyorkette

^{The New Yorker’s “Online Only” is only available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

This week I’ve discovered The New Yorker’s Hard Drive, a collection of “Online Only” TNY pieces.

After reading the “Letter from Washington: The Hidden Power,” by Jane Mayer, I was very happy to let the Online Only’s Q & A (questions posed this week by Blake Eskin, and answered by Jane Mayer, in Q. & A.: Cheney’s Cheney) make explicit all the questions that had been fluttering aimlessly through my mind for the duration of my subway reading from 157th street to my train change at Times Square.

Eleven pages to read provides me with plenty of opportunities to lose track of those questions, since I tend to want to keep forging through. To aggravate matters, five years of reading Proust, Latin, and Medieval French manuscripts (don’t ask!) have burned my attention span to a crisp (or should I say, to crambles?), reducing me to the treachery of skipping entire paragraphs, scanning them for key words as I fly over them, returning only for reconnaissance flights if I find myself in completely unfamiliar territory.

So imagine how pleased I was that TNY Online Only’s “Q & A: Cheney’s Cheney” conveniently separates the questions from the answers with bold type and plain type (instead of with the opening and closing of a subway door, as in most cases for me). For example, it asks this question (in bold type), which by had been going through my mind somewhere between 145th street and 113th street on the 1 train:

How did David Addington get to know Vice-President Cheney, and how long have they worked together?

And it is answered directly by Jane Mayer herself, immediately, without flourish, exactly the way I wanted it, as follows (just an exerpt):

They met on Capitol Hill in the mid-eighties, when Cheney was a Republican congressman from Wyoming and Addington was a young staff lawyer working for the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. So they have worked together for about two decades. Their partnership was cemented when they worked together on the Minority Report on the Iran-Contra affair. Both Addington and Cheney took the idiosyncratic position that it was Congress, not President Reagan, that was in the wrong. This view reflected the opinion, held by both men, that the executive branch should run foreign policy, to a great extent unimpeded by Congress. It’s a recurring theme—pushing the limits of executive power and sidestepping Congress—in their partnership. One example is their position that the President, as Commander-in-Chief in times of war, had the inherent authority to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in an effort to make sure that Presidents don’t violate citizens’ right to privacy by spying on them without warrants.

Click here to read more from the Q & A. To see what else is on the Hard Drive, click here. It’s a bit like finding an hidden drawer in your roll-top desk, full of goodies, as well as intriguing, beribboned batches of correspondence, conversations and moments you didn’t know had occured while you were reading your paper magazine, such as “A Laughing Matter,” featuring Andy Borowitz on the “boundaries of humor,” or “Your Caption Here,” with Bob Mankoff, in which the cartoon caption contest is dissected to your heart’s content.

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

This week’s TNY fiction piece, Accident Brief, by Karen Russel, is something like Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, crossed with Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I know that’s a rather rough-hewn comparison, but you’ll see what I mean when you read it.

I didn’t mean to do so much research and de-coding (I didn’t realize there was anything to de-code!), but the culture described in the story mystified me (Polynesian sounding names, snow and glaciers all around?), so I indulged in what I’d meant to be a perfunctory little google. I could not find any information about the “Moa” civilisation, finding only this website through a Google search. A quick browse of it reveals that MOA’s goal is to save the world, through what reads to me like something similar to “permaculture,” or sustainable ways of maintaining our civilisation. A search for “Weitiki Valley” prompted Google to patronize me by asking, “Did you mean: Waitaki Valley?” So I’m assuming the place and civilisation evoke purely fictional and exaggerated versions of the typical histories of the overunning of one “primitive” civilisation by another more destructive and technologically advanced one.

Rangi (an anagram of “grain”?), the mute Moa boy, is the savage child whose desire to return to the womb of nature will be the undoing of the interestingly named teenaged “Tek,” (as in Tekserve? Or for non-Apple readers, as in “Tekkie”?), who is hoping his transponder will save him from the Lord of the Flies situation he’s been thrown into when their plane crashes into the glaciers. It seems (duh!) that technology only serves us as long as it’s used properly: the pilot forgot to put in his contact lenses, the plane crashes, and then the plane slides into a crevasse as the injured survivors watch. Rangi throws his transponder away, and runs from the rescue helicopter. See what I mean? Transponders are meant to be worn, in the “on” mode, and rescue helipcopters only work if one does not flee them.

So, what exactly is this story about? Nature versus civilisation? The occasion the story is centered around is the traditional “Avalanche” ceremony, which culminates with the boys’ choir causing an avalanche with their voices (in a song about conquering the Moa), commemorating the “original Avalanche” as well as the original rape of the Moa Civilisation. But the avalanche is always guaranteed by a little pre-concert ice hatcheting in the right places, creating a false impression of domination over Nature (and perhaps a false impression of the conquering of the “savages”). Rangi’s revenge is perhaps also Nature’s revenge for being set up to play someone’s fool.

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

Well, someone pinched my Fiction Issue. And then someone bought me David Remnick’s “Reporting: writings from The New Yorker,” at the Spring Books Party at the Housing Works Used Books Café the other night. I haven’t had a spare subway moment to read anything else since. So this weekend reader is going to introduce you, if you haven’t already met, to David Remnick.

But first, let me introduce you to Paul, the bra salesman I ran into today, who I knew from my days fitting at Warnaco. He asked me how the cartoon business was treating me, and I asked him if he hadn’t seen my last cartoon a couple of weeks ago. He said, “Nah, I don’t read The New Yorker, it’s too high-brow for a guy like me.” I’ve double-checked my copy of Reporting, and found that the only high-brow aspect of it is it’s connection to The New Yorker (which, well, people do think is high-brow).

And maybe TNY is a bit high-brow. But Remnick’s essays are a smooth read, with only the occasional need for a dictionary (always worth it), and written in a style that I can only compare to a long drink of water. Hardly a hitch, you just keep reading, because it’s easier to keep reading than to stop. If you doubt me, just give it a try. The only reason I’m insisting is because on the subway today, I found myself wishing the history books I barely read in High School had been as easy and pleasurable to read as the articles in this book. I might have learned something about History! Or at least wanted to learn something! Click on the link at the end of this post for a sample.

Reporting is a compilation of essays Remnick has written for The New Yorker over the years, starting, in the first section, with the recent past, with the second section appearing to be a “best of” of previous years, and the third section being devoted to his boxing articles, which seems appropriately situated at the end, mirroring the way the sports appears at the end of the nightly news on TV.

The first section, for anyone who reads The New Yorker regularly, is an experience akin to watching your favorite old movies on video. If you ever wanted to read those articles again and couldn’t remember which issue they were in, or were so buried in unread issues that they were impossible to find, Reporting is where you’ll be able to savour “The Wilderness Campaign: Al Gore” again. It came out not long after Al appeared on Saturday Night Live, in which his self-effacing sense of humor and lack of self-consciousness (or shame, for that matter) frankly blew my mind. Once content to vote for him on the basis of competence (rather than personality), Al’s appearance on SNL is possibly the one thing he did to endear himself to me as a human being and make me wonder, “who is this man?” Remnick’s piece on him is a sparkling portrait of a man who none of us particularly wanted to know before.

A good chaser to the Al Gore piece is, of course, “The Masochism Campaign: Tony Blair.” I wondered why it didn’t appear immediately after the Al Gore piece, but perhaps that would’ve been too obvious, a little too neat, like wearing matching shoes and handbag (which I’d never do). Also, the Mrs. Graham article, an education for people of my generation who took the Pentagon Papers and Watergate for granted (or as a bit of pop culture), as well as an education for anyone who ever thought being a woman before the seventies was an excuse for anything, also works well to clean your palate and prepare you for Tony. You’ll need it. Tony’s portrait is excruciating, not because it’s particularly unmerciful, but because just observing the truth seems to be cruel enough. “The punishment is daily and takes many forms.” And that’s all there is to it. There’s no exaggeration, no need for it. Is there any need to embellish the sound of fingernails being dragged across a blackboard? Read it and realize how lucky you are not to be Tony Blair.

It made me want to return to “Mrs. Graham,” and I did. For some reason I’d missed “Mrs. Graham,” (possibly having snubbed the magazine for one week for not containing one of my cartoons?) After the deaths of Wendy Wasserstein and Betty Friedan this year, Katherine Graham’s personal history (so well put in her autobiography, “Personal History,” is the story of a woman’s coming of age in middle age, after breaking out of the “little woman” mold she hadn’t realized had shaped her till the Washington Post was deposited into her inexperienced hands. Her autobiography, cited often in the piece, is the expression of a woman who understood her limits and her challenges, and apparently blames no one but herself for being duped by the preconceptions and expectations imposed on her by society. She seems to have prefered to admit her error rather than bitch about the unfairness of it all, and I don’t believe I saw the word “feminist” in the piece (correct me if I’m wrong). And if I’m not wrong I’m glad of it. Mrs. Graham was a human being that anyone, man or woman, would not do badly to emulate.

I’m still in the middle of the Post-Imperial Blues: Vladimir Putin, in which I’m learning all about the news that I didn’t pay attention to during the last part of the last century. And I’ll tell you my secret to this ignorant bliss. When I was about eleven, I saw a hostage get shot on TV. I’d thought I was watching a movie, but then the anchorman came on and apologized to the family of the shot hostage, followed by the “You heard it here first” and station identification. I was so disgusted that I swore not to watch the news ever again. And I didn’t. I only started watching the news again when I came back to the USA. To see what everyone was believing. When everyone says the same things, and talks about the same news, you have to see for yourself where they’re getting their information.

For years I only got my news from watching muppet, or French cartoonist’s versions of it. “Les Guignols de l’Info,“ “Spitting Image,” SNL’s “Weekend Update” were all I watched. I eventually dipped into the newspapers, and got hooked on the AP website for a while, but nothing beats a Remnick article to bring history, the history that’s going on around you right now, into limpid focus.

For a sample, click here: All Things Considered (NPR)

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

This week’s fiction in The New Yorker, Dimension, by Alice Munro, swallows the reader into the heart of another victim of abuse and stigma. Her heart is dead, as if it’s stopped cold. And the lead-up to the ending is analagous to the simultaneously brief and excruciatingly long amount of time a person can reasonably lay lifeless with a stopped heart and yet still be ressuscitated.

Oddly, I was able to forgive a rather forumulaic, verging on Highway to Heaven-like, redemptive ending. Why? I’m not usually so indulgent about redemptive endings. First of all, it may be formulaic by coincidence, like anything simple is. There are some things that there’s only one way to make. Like a boiled egg*. Perhaps it was the combination of pristine writing and the ability to describe intimately, and with such deft and simple strokes, the thoughts of a woman who for some reason submits, almost as if to a cult leader, to an abusive man. Most women have had, in varying degrees of extremity, at least one such manipulator in their lives. At best one learns one’s lesson, and never again. At the very worst, one meets something like Doree’s fate.

If you’re a woman, you’ll probably understand in a visceral way where this story is leading. If you’re a man, this story is a lesson in the kind of deadly weapon unlimited power can become when placed in the hands of a fragile man. (Or maybe vice versa too, why be sexist about it?)

Will you cry? It’s a tried and true, ever so simple and effective formula: I’d worry if you didn’t. Don’t worry, it’ll be like condensation beading and rolling down the side of a cold glass of water on a hot day. You won’t need a whole box of Kleenex, or embarrass yourself on the subway. I promise.

*I love boiled eggs, by the way. The comparison is neutral to complimentary.

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

A sweet three pages (something of a literary milk n’ cookies) in The New Yorker this week, Henry Roth’s God The Novelist, is a segment “adapted from the almost two-thousand-page unedited novel manuscript that Roth was working on in the early nineteen-nineties.” Its opening paragraphs were particularly a propos for my travels this week. A sample:

“(...) don’t tell ’em about the bedbugs. It distracts ’em. That’s the landlord’s business.”
“Bedboogs,” I mocked. “There’s no such word.”

(Yes, I did dutifully lift the mattress at the Meridien Hotel to check for bedbug droppings.) (No, I didn’t find any, contrary to what trends predicted.)

God The Novelist is simultaneously fresh and old-fashioned (it takes place in May 1939). At some moments I imagined everything in sepia tones. Such as this marriage proposal:

She had been typing somebody’s master’s thesis on a portable—to earn extra cash. And when I said I was in love with her, and asked her to marry me, she replied, “I’m sorry. You’re out of luck,” and apparently agitated over a typing error, she slapped at the portable.

Words like “caterwauling,” eptithets like, “rummy bastard,” and “why, you horse’s neck,” and of course the reference to a typewriter provide the Norman Rockwell-ish colors and strokes. Other scenes could be taking place anytime today:

And at Forty-fourth Street, where there was a construction job for a new building going on, He (...) rolled a cigarette out of Bull Durham and admired the excavation that opened below: the wall of rock had just recently been blasted out for foundation, rock in which the long drill grooves still remained. Mica schist, He thought, Manhattan mica schist. Ah, the pristine, naked, sparkling purity of it, come to light after aeons, as if awakening.

If you’re an out of work artist and take pleasure in seeing your seedy but sublime life beneath the point of someone else’s poetic pen, or if you’re lucky enough to be happily and gainfully employed and wonder what it’s like on that romantic other side of the fence, have a look at New York through the eyes of God The Novelist.

May I also suggest Thomas Mallon’s piece on Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Big Bird, which confirms many suspicions about the work and the movie I never dared breach, since I, like everyone else who’s attended junior high school, have been indoctrinated to revere both as sacred Americana.

And anyone interested in birding or bird watching, have a look at John Seabrook’s “Ruffled Feathers,” about the “secret deceptions of a bird-world hero.” It’s a bit like an episode of CSI: Special Ornithology Unit. Page 50 of the paper version of the magazine, not online.

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

Welcome to the real world. Lara Vapnyar’s Cinderella School appears to be the story of an immigrant’s quest for social insertion, but in fact it’s the story of anyone who’s ever tried to make it in New York. The story of your first rise and fall that nobody even noticed (lucky you!) since it all took place even further away from the big city than your place of residence…

A sort of “coming of age” for hapless adults, the story is worth reading if only to remind yourself how it feels to get a bogus job on bogus credentials, then actually begin to believe in it out of desperation just long enough to feel humiliated when it’s all taken away from you in that unjust moment when you get fired. It’s happened to the best of us, hopefully only once, but sometimes more often.

My favorite scene of course is the overheard hypnotherapy session for the sexually disadvantaged, which reads like a metaphor for every sales job I’ve ever had.

When I headed for the door, I heard a muffled conversation coming from Dr. Solomon’s office. “Your penis becomes big and hard . . . and stays that way,” he was saying. “You’re strong. You’re powerful. Nothing frightens you. Nothing intimidates you.” I stood and listened, hardly breathing, until Adella broke the spell.
“Come tomorrow at ten,” she said. “I hope to get more people for you.”

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine, by Matthew Klam. Not for the lily-livered. Serves as an interesting foil to the fascinating and well-illustrated New York Times article, One thing they aren’t: maternal, about “bad mothers’’ in nature, in its Science Times section this week.

Mother-to-be, Julia, who smells like custard and breaks her water with a vibrator after watching a Brad Pitt movie, isn’t exactly the kind of cockles-of-the-heart-warming example of maternity Al Jolson would sing “Mammy” to on Mother’s Day. I may find the idea of pregnancy with its incumbent gestation, lactation, and drooling, incontinent infants to be the ultimate birth-control, but still, I believe if you’re gonna do it, do it right! Right? Well, apparently it doesn’t come naturally to all of us. “Get it out of me,” as Julia says, is a phrase I’ve heard before. Luckily it came from a woman who turned out to be a great mother. She was just a little tired of the whole prenatal shebang.

Kevin, the father who has already grown to hate his wife after being forced into the role of stud (the requisite screwing, the livestock feeling of it, the injunction against fiddling with himself),and she into pure baby-making machine (the menstrual cycle on the refrigerator, the shots he gave her—big injections in her ass, little ones in her stomach. The pills she shoved in her pussy to make the lining more hospitable) begins naturally to explore the complications of getting rid of his wife while preserving the life of the baby. Naturally? If the main goal of their relationship has become baby-manufacturing, she is on the verge of becoming useless.

Explicit mention is made of the high murder rate of pregnant women by their mates. And yet once the baby is born, the predator in him intersects with the visceral, innate father and protector he apparently is, even beyond his own understanding. He is at once repulsed (She was entirely fishlike and more purple than Kevin had feared, her tiny private parts swollen, her eyes sealed shut, and they wiped her face off as she tried to grab and hug the air in front of her) and moved to tears. His ambivalence is summed up in these words: Oh, God, he thought as she screamed. Now there are two of them.

The way Julia wants the baby “out of her,” while the man wants the woman out of his life, imagining how he might be able to murder her while preserving the life of the baby reminded me of this article in The Onion, about the “anti-abortion pill,” that kills the mother while preserving the fetus. And the scene of carnage which is Julia’s cesarean fully illuminates the point Nicole Loraux makes about the Ancient Greek word for the blood of childbirth (mysarós) being related simultaneously to the noble blood of warfare, the deeply staining blood of particularly abominable murders, and filth.

For those of us who need a moral to the story, this story is a parable for those who feel ambivalent about reproducing. It’s to baby-making what Eric Schlosser’s new book “Everything you didn’t want to know about fast food” is to MacDonald’s.

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

The New Yorker seems to have a thread of bizzaro running through it this week, with the incongruous cohabitating with the probable in the Fiction, the Shouts and Murmurs, the Letter from Libya to name a few.

Even the reviews of two books on the role black slaves and their pursuit of freedom played in the Revolutionary War contains facts that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have admired, such as the self-renamed slave called “British Freedom.” It’s well worth a read if you ever wondered what runaway black slaves were actually doing while Jefferson, Franklin and King George were pontificating (or quibbling) over their right to freedom. Some were garbage-collecting soldiers for the King, while others were trying to start countries of their own. Read it online: Goodbye Columbus, by Jill Lepore.

And now, for something completely different:

From: The Dormitory of D.R.
To: Miss Y [DESTROY AFTER READING]
Your notice of resignation as my current primary affection supplier is hereby accepted. Please return all correspondence over my signature A.S.A.P., plus the photos of me in Superman costume. I enclose a bill for expenses incurred in both the initial romantic-mode campaign and the subsequent romance-enhancement mission, now aborted.
As you know, the ring was a loan and should be returned.
P.S.: “Asshole” is one word.
cc: Miss X.

Read more of “Rummy in love,” by Bruce McCall, here.

TNY’s fiction this week is a little sad and nostalgic, but offers a portrait of immigrants from an unexpected point of view: that of Indian immigrants who remained in America observing that their Indian friends who had returned to India only to return once again to America, seem to have become more American during their sojourn in Bombay. It’s online this week: Once in a lifetime, by Jhumpa Lahiri.

But my favorite read was the black horse of the week. I’d originally looked at it, counted the number of pages, and said: The hell with this. But then I started reading it. Andrew Solomon’s, Circle of Fire, about Libya’s “Leader”, and “The Principal,” otherwise known as Muammar Qaddafi and his son, Seif el-Islam al-Qaddafi, is not online, but I’ll gladly type out a few lines from it to give you a taste.

For example, the gems in this piece include the definition of a common acronym used in Libya as an answer to difficult questions: I.B.M., which stands for Inshallah, bokra, moumken, or “With the will of God, tomorrow, maybe.” I will be using this phrase rather frequently in the future, so get familiar with it.

Solomon’s sugar bowl incident reads like a scene out of Get Smart:

When we had finished our meal, the waiter cleared all our dishes, then came back and redeposited the sugar bowl.
“What’s with the sugar?” I asked the bureaucrat.
He gave me a bleakly mischievous look. “The other one ran out of tape,” he replied.

Libya, seen through Solomon’s eyes, was a trip Through the Looking Glass, with Qaddafi playing the Red Queen, and his prime minister the White Rabbit, administering a country that hasn’t quite decided whether it’s going to be a theocracy, a secular democracy, a third-world country or the next Dubai, or everything all at once.

And a professor beaming over the good news that he’d been given a job in the ministry elicits suprise from Solomon, who wonders why he was “so eager to join a regime that he loathed. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it also happens to be the only game in town.’”

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

If you haven’t read anything but the cartoons yet in The New Yorker, there’s some reading to get done this weekend. This week’s fiction, An Afternoon, plays devil’s advocate by exploring the desire of the pedophile’s victim. Read the rest of this entry »

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

Martin Amis’ The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, The New Yorker’s Fiction in the Journey’s issue this week, will make sure you never think of Muhammed Atta’s pelvic saddle, scrotum, or “breath that smells like a blighted river” the same way.
Ever.
Again.

In case of overdose, go straight for the antidote: Jonathan Stern’s Shouts & Murmurs piece, “The Lonely Planet Guide To My Apartment.”
Here’s a small sample, taken from “Local Customs”:

The population of My Apartment has a daily ritual of bitching, which occurs at the end of the workday and prior to ordering in food. Usually, meals are taken during reruns of “Stargate Atlantis.” Don’t be put off by impulsive sobbing or unprovoked rages. These traits have been passed down through generations and are part of the colorful heritage of My Apartment’s people. The annual Birthday Meltdown (see “Festivals”) is a tour de force of recrimination and self-loathing, highlighted by fanciful stilt-walkers and dancers wearing hand-sewn headdresses.

And to balance yourself with a dose of reality after this fanciful traipse through a New Yorker’s life, read David Remnick’s review of Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in “Ozone Man.”

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online, too! (image: carolita johnson)}

The Trojan Sofa, by Bernard Maclaverty: a cross between a James Joycean Dubliners episode and a chapter out of Huckeberry Finn. Who amongst us hasn’t as a child desired to mail ourselves to Timbuktu, sneak into the ventilation system to spy on other apartments, or be staple-gunned into a sofa with a ham sandwich and snuck into a stranger’s house on a Robin Hood mission?

Eleven year-old Nially, or “Skinny-ma-link” as his “da” calls him is the smartest boy in his class in Northern Ireland, and a willing accomplice in series of cat-burglaries worthy of the Pink Panther. His “da” simply packages him into the interior of an antique sofa delivered to owners who will own it only till they leave their home empty when they go to work the next morning. Nially must remain silent during the installation’s bumping and heaving, and then, once the movers leave, be still during “tea,” during the news and/or comedy shows, occasionally during sofa-sex, and pee into a plastic baggy during the night while everyone is asleep. And most importantly of all, he must remember not to snore if he falls asleep.

The Trojan Sofa will not fail to enchant. It’s one of those rare accounts of the making of a legend that leaves you incredulous but wanting to believe. And this week you can read it online.

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

This week’s fiction in TNY, “In the reign of Harad IV” by Steven Millhauser is a story that will ring true for those of us who have known the tragic but boring insanity (should I say tragically boring?) of the paranoid genius. The King’s maker of miniatures is continually seized by a restlessness he can’t exhaust except temporarily, by creating miniatures exponentially smaller and smaller until they become invisible to the naked eye. And yet he must surpass himself. His work becomes visible only in his imagination.

The story is a parable and applies very well to real life.

For example, the real life king’s magician I once knew was writing a book on Tate’s theory of knots and it’s relation to Lacan’s psychoanalytical practices. (Feel free to wolf-whistle or guffaw or smoke a pipe.) He became increasingly resentful, feeling that he was “giving away” equations and solutions he’d labored so hard for years to understand himself. He proceeded to alter the manuscript I’d typed into his computer (as his apprentice), throwing mathematical falsities into equations and explanations until his work became so obscure that he lost the book deal, his friends, his girlfriend, and took to the bottle. He continues his work in Beverly Hills, conducting an invisible seminar with rich misfits, drawing knots after hours in an empty classroom belonging to an English School for Japanese businessmen.

So very like the the maker of miniatures, who is visited by his abandoned apprentices curious to see what he’s been working on behind closed doors for so long. He shows them his latest and most brilliant work, and :

” knowing that they had seen nothing, that their words were hollow, and that they would never visit him again, returned with some impatience to his work; and as he sank below the crust of the visible world, into his dazzling kingdom, he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.”

Millhauser’s story perfectly recreates this gradual spiralling through the “floor” of the visible into the world of the invisible. He describes this descent from the tiny to the tinier to the invisible so well that I had the impression, while reading, that the story itself was getting smaller and smaller, and harder to read, till it became just a strange diamond shaped spot that looked like this:

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

This week’s fiction in TNY, A Better Angel, by Chris Adrian, reverses last week’s trend in my tear ducts and serotonin uptake. The further I wandered fascinated and transfixed into it, the more I suspected this story was the metaphor of every attempt at domestic intimacy I’d ever recoiled disgusted from. The fetid stink emanating from the angel’s wings reminded me of under-the-sheet farts of deeply-loved, burrito-nourished boyfriends.

And the dead-cat slippers:

“The angel paced in the confines of the room, the cats going squish and squash as she stepped (...)”

are of course my own yucky, twenty year-old slippers whose unsanitary qualities boyfriends have hinted at with eloquent stares. The angel’s puzzlingly inconstant beauty shifts during the narrator’s ordinary or un-drugged moments into the kind of ugliness that recalls the esthetic of swollen red blotches left behind after squeezing forehead pimples before bedtime, bad breath in the morning, or the baggy underwear of one’s now long-unceremonious lover at breakfast, the sound of crunching cereal amplified through his skull.

Adrian seems hell-bent to evoke the horror of love you’re addicted to, stuck with forever, whether it’s your unloving father or your really burdensome guardian angel. The unbearable love you desire so very much but wish were more beautiful sometimes. Or at least not so ugly. It’s no wonder the narrator is constantly taking hits of his father’s death-bed morphine, even giving him water instead so that he can have more for himself as he waits for him to die, not so much refusing as not deciding to “reach out” with the curing touch the angel believes he can somehow muster.

And yet, like your boyfriend or your wife, or your mucous-encrusted child or little brother with the skidmarks in his underpants, it all seems nonetheless magical, and all that sordid ordinariness worth living through again and again, and even worth—I can’t believe I’m saying it, me, ever the Atalanta—cherishing.

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

If you haven’t got around to a thorough reading of this week’s The New Yorker yet, it’s time to go straight to the fiction (because most of the GOAT is already past due). Gary Shteyngart’s “A Love Letter,” which I can’t post a link to here since it’s not available on TNY’s website, should be begun on the subway or train ride home (not at the driver’s seat of your car or truck), and finished at home, at the laundromat (like me), or at one of your favorite Tables for One.

I hope it’s intellectual-propertiedly okay for me to type out a few morcels to whet your appetite:

The narrator (300-pound Russian-Jew Misha “Snack-Daddy” Vainberg) making plans to become a Belgian by subterfuge, pictures himself:

“[...] sitting at a zippy Belgian café watching a multicultural woman in a thong eating a frankfurter. Did such things happen in Brussels? In New York they happened all the time.”

A dream sequence you’ll taste in your own mouth, as the narrator literally drools with anticipation about his future:

“I stuck my hand inside my heart and took out precisely eight U.S. dollars, which I gave to her. Our hands barely touched. “What’s going to make you love me again?” I asked.

“Take a bite,” she said. The apple flooded my mouth with freshness, as if I were biting the color green. I tasted pear, as promised, but also rosewater and white wine and my beautiful dead mother’s sweet cheek. The roof of my mouth froze in wonder, as if stroked by an invisible ice cube. I tried to speak, but only gurgling came out. I wanted to hug Rouenna, but she lifted up her hand to stop me.
“Be a man,” she said.
I gurgled some more, flapping my arms in front of me.
“Make me proud.”

Then, when civil war breaks out in Absurdistan (yes, Absurdistan), the descriptions of perplexity, perception and action come giddily together with cinematic clarity:

I was looking at a convoy of stubby Caterpillars outfitted with battering rams, which I realized were Soviet T-62 tanks [...].
The sound of heavy machine-gun fire reverberated throughout the city. It was time to do something important, and manly and American. “Go, go, go motherfucker!” I yelled to Sakha. The jeep’s alarm was blaring and a rear window had been partly smashed, but the imperious Hyatt logo had apparently scared off the thieving locals.
A passing T-62 had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends. “Drive!” I shouted to Sakha.

At first, I thought I wasn’t going to like this story. I had a suspicion Shteyngart was trying to gratuitously palm off the kind of flippant metaphors and outlandish expressions that I’d found annoying in my first Salman Rushdie experience. But the more I read, the more I liked. By the time “Snack Daddy” arrives in Absurdistan, you’ll be hooked, if not before. I realized I’d been seduced me the moment “Snack Daddy” notices that the T-62 “had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends.”

I won’t tell you the ending, but I’ll tell you it’s the typical trade-off of one’s desire for one’s humanity, complete with the “and then just as he had everything in his grasp it all slipped away” ending we’re used to these days. And yet you’re left wanting a “to be continued…”

Which may be exactly what is hoped for, since presumably this has all been a mere exerpt of his book, “Absurdistan,” which will be published in May.