Advent 2021, Dec 19: Scott Dickensheets, This Tub is Full

  

THIS TUB IS FULL

After David Gates' "Log Man" (unavailable online; find it in The Bastard on the Couch)

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It’s early still; dawn hasn’t yet dumped its groggy light into the back yards of suburban Las Vegas, where I live, although here, in this body, where I live, things are already moving around. I woke up hours ago, once again feeling as though something is subtly askew—like my blood might be flowing backward, or my lymph nodes are synced to different time zones, or my kidney is fretting about the future of democracy. Not a pain, exactly, more a ghostly flitting, tough to pin down. Yet distinct from the normal indignities of reaching middle age so catastrophically out of shape—the mystery aches that gust daily through my limbs and thorax, then dissipate. Those I’m used to, and what do I expect, letting myself go the way I have? As it is, I’m content to skate by on the wisdom of poet Albert Goldbarth: “If the dying is slow enough, we call it living.” Works for me—most of the time. This furtive bodily unease, though, that has me a bit scrambled, which may be why I applied a verb like “dumped” to describe what will surely be a routinely beautiful desert sunrise. I mean, what kind of crank does that?

     Don’t mind the lame cocktail jazz tinkling from my wheezing iMac; it’s just a sonic berm to keep me inside my head. That Goldbarth quote, by the way, comes from a file I call “Cheap Wisdom,” in which I collect random aphorisms, bits of poetry, song lyrics, and nonsense, which I’ll be drawing from as this thing unfurls, so you have that to look forward to. For example, this mission statement from James Parker: “What is writing for if not to fling itself at the unwritable?” I ought to have that tramp-stamped on my spirit animal, or whatever it is the kool kidz are doing over on the TikTok these days.

     Dawn’s arriving now, and for once I don’t hear the neighborhood’s flock of quail speed-wobbling across my fake grass. Sorry, I’m sure this quotidian stuff isn’t the high-end content you dialed in for, even though, in the end, it’s the only stuff, if you follow. I picked up “quotidian” from critic Dave Hickey; it recurs in his writing, usually to indicate the luminous ordinariness of daily life, which almost never makes it onto the page—indeed, writing it only ends up dissolving it (Knausgaard possibly excepted). If you’re an Essay Daily regular, you probably know that Hickey, who died recently, was an essayist and art critic usually described as “contrarian.” He wrote about Vegas often and better than anyone else, and lived here for a memorable span. He once told me—I knew him, just a bit—“As a writer, I don’t organize things. Because all I care about is the flow. All I care about is the music.” Welcome to a paragraph after your own heart, Dave.

     It occurs to me that these strange humors I’m feeling might be psychosomatic, spillover from the fritzing mood centers in my brain as it absorbs the 21st century. Or maybe it’s metaphysical—is there such a thing as spiritual gout? Web MD is of surprisingly little help in these self-diagnoses. Poetry, on the other hand. “It is permeability I am fighting, / it is holes I am full of.” That’s Hilary Vaughn Dobel, from the file.

     Anyway, Hickey: “What I do as a writer, nearly always, is, I just fill up the tub. And then I don’t worry about it. What comes out is what comes out.” I trust he was being a bit glib there; no one writes that well by simply turning on the faucet. Even so, I couldn’t often match his intellectual pace: He liked to visualize his writing as a “black coupe de ville” running without lights on a long straightaway at night, and that’s me, clinging to his tailfin by my fingernails. But I never didn’t enjoy the ride, and, yes, I know that’s a double negative; feel free to speak to my manager. Hickey was the first of two writers I associate with Las Vegas to die within a few days of each other. Whereas his death prompted a flood of obits in the blue-chip media, Chip Mosher’s barely got a couple of social media mentions. He was a local alt-weekly columnist, fierce in his day, which had long passed by the time cancer got him. A high-school teacher and wearer of rumpled bucket hats, he used his column, which he immodestly titled “Socrates in Sodom,” to blister pretty much every piety in town, including the one that paid him—he was an unstinting critic of the local education-industrial complex. “Over the years, I've had several (failed, I'm happy to say) attempts to get me fired,” he wrote in the first of maybe 400 email exchanges we had during the two and a half years I edited him at that alt-weekly, now defunct. “I am, though not necessarily by choice, of the mold of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, W.C. Fields, et. al. And, oh yes, Socrates and the Greek cynics.” Buried in the metadata of that “oh yes” was his insistence, against all available evidence, that reason, employed with wit and a spirit of well-intentioned confrontation, might make this a better place, and look what that got him.

     They were vastly different guys, Dave and Chip, and very different writers—I can guess what Dave thought of Bukowski—but both were personally generous with their time and intelligence, and they each had a knack for scorning whatever orthodoxies were at hand. (“It’s usually the satire that gets me into the most trouble,” Chip wrote me.) But I’d like to think they really intersected in something Dave once told me about Dickens: “No matter how horrible the story he’s telling you, there’s this little bubble of laughter underneath it that tells you he just loves telling you this story. I would like my writing to rest on that little bubble of laughter, no matter how terrible the subject I’m writing about.” Dave and Chip each nurtured that bubble, that deep gusto for flinging their writing at the unwritable whatever the consequences, which I envied so much.

     Here’s another quote, courtesy of The Mountain Goats: “The ghosts that haunt your building are prepared to take on substance.”

     Okay, so what I’m really getting at here is that my 60th birthday is fast approaching, and now I’m mourning people I knew, and I’ve got these odd sensations wafting through my body like bad jazz. That’s it, that’s the real status update. I know, you’re like, Is that what all this is about, the cold hand of mortality, etc., etc.? Talk about your cheap wisdom! Sure, but, on the other hand, it’s not so quotidian to me. And while I’m not freaking out about it per se, it’s definitely hogging more of my bandwidth—another guy I know, an artist, passed away between the last paragraph and this one, no kidding, it’s right there on Facebook. Another great guy. How much tub’s left to fill is, I suppose, the question, and how to feel about that is another. Am I, in fact, dying slowly enough to call this living? 

      “Every hour is an eleventh hour now,” poet Gregory Crosby writes, and while he meant it in a civilizational context, I’m inclined to take it personally. So when I’m done with this, I’m going to drive over to help my mom, who’s tottering into her ninth decade on ruined knees and falls too often. After that, I’ll send a supportive text to my brother, who collapsed on Easter evening, woke up a month later, and has since shuffled through a series of hospital beds in a medicalized limbo administrated by the cruel indifference of Medicaid’s reimbursement procedures. I know, withholding that kind of information until the end is a cheesy move, as David Gates notes in “Log Man,” the essay that prompted this muddled gumbo. Agreed, but that’s just how it came out of the faucet, and it’s too late to do anything about it now: The Essay Daily people are pinging my inbox, wondering where this piece is, okay, okay, while we’re all still alive, here you go—

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This essay attempts to do in a modest, awkward way what David Gates’ “Log Man” does much more complexly: appear to move in offhand fashion around a mostly, but not entirely, obscured topic. However premeditated his piece may have been, Gates seems to be knitting “Log Man” from whatever he’s thinking, feeling, or observing at the moment of composition, each sentence alert to the nuances and implications of everything around it. As far as I can tell, the essay is not available online; it appears in the anthology The Bastard on the Couch.

*

Scott Dickensheets is the features editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, serves on the literary committee of the Las Vegas Book Festival, and has edited or contributed to eight volumes of the Las Vegas Writes anthology series.

Advent 2021, Dec 18, Lawrence Lenhart: Consider the Bat: dining comments on the eve of a pandemic

After David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" and M. K. Fisher's "Love and Death Among the Molluscs"

Port Vila, Vanuatu, December 2019

Minutes after placing my order at L’Houstalet Restaurant, chef-owner Clément Martinez visits my tableside. We are in the middle of an open-air courtyard. Its stucco walls are decorated with life-size primitivist paintings, splattered with light cast by a dozen or more red lampshades. L’Houstalet offers provincial Gallic gastronomy with a twist: it’s a farm homestay, but with the delicacies of the Pacific. I suspect Clément is on the verge of apology or congratulations. It’s either, Je suis désolé, we’ve just run out of a necessary ingredient or Félicitations, you are our one millionth customer. I watch for him to whip out a party kazoo, spray me with confetti. Instead, he cross-examines me about my entree selection, civet de roussette. 

On this side of vegetarianism (way lapsed), I’ve ingested bull testicles, tuna eyeballs, pufferfish livers, fried tarantulas, and maybe, one night in Cambodia, dog meat. (Some pranks never quite resolve.) Put another way, a tourist leads a dreadful, but exciting life, opting for a lusty bit of nourishment over items more obviously designed to sate. 

Until now, the only fauna I’ve refused to taste is the turtle. Despite gourmands’ insistence that it’s the sweetest protein you’ll ever press to your palate, I need to believe at least one animal is too sacred to consume. I think I’d sooner eat a filet of human flesh than a spoonful of turtle soup. Tonight, though, I’m beginning to think the same deference should have been applied to Chiroptera before placing my order. 

“Are you certain about the bat?” he asks, hand on his aproned hip. “The waitress said you ordered the bat.” 

It’s as if the documents before me do not amount to a menu, but a multiple-choice exam, and I am on the brink of failure. 

“I think I was certain,” I say. 

Described as a “nuggety, bouncy figure” by one leisure writer, Clément has pitched eyebrows and an abiding smile, even now as he confronts me. Perhaps he’s doubling back for the young Francophone waitress who seemed nonplussed by my attempt at a French accent. My nasally r’s and narrow u’s were likely more caricature than communication. 

“Is there a problem?” I ask. “Are there no bats in the kitchen tonight?” 

It wouldn’t be the first time in recent days I ordered something from a menu, only to watch the chef bound across the street to procure the missing ingredient from a nearby food stall. In the case of the flying fox (Pteropus anetianus), one need only fire into the fronds, fell it to the street, stuff its adorable carcass into a vat of boiling water. Or perhaps Clément procures his bats from a local wet market, the likes of which will become infamous in China in a few months’ time. 

“Non, non. We have the bat,” he says. 

Apparently, L’Houstalet sells a few each evening to boring hedonists like me. I keep trying to read between his lines. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he means: Have you fully reckoned with the essence of this animal you intend to eat? The thing is, one person’s meat might be another person’s poison. In the case of the bat, one’s mind must be open wide as their mouth. For it has been called the bird of the Devil, even an incarnation of the Devil itself. Isaiah lists it among unclean birds [sic], a detestable reremouse unfit for supper. In the Bible, the bat roosts in caves among abandoned idols. See the figures of Ba’al forged of gold, silver, bronze, cedar, cypress, oak, and stone, all covered in bat guano. Maligned from antiquity to the present, the bat is in desperate need of a new PR manager. 

“You know it’s gamey,” he says. I provide an assenting nod. “Have you ever had venison?”

I keep on nodding. 

“Civet de roussette is not a quick dish to prepare. You’re okay with the wait?” 

I nod some more. So he’s being preemptive, running diagnostics on my temperament. It seems he’s a chef who, after a spate of harsh reviews on TripAdvisor, is simply doing triage. 

“Very good. And you have read how it’s prepared?”

“Red wine,” I say. “Garlic marinade?”

“Non,” he says, shaking his head, turning the menu over to a reprint of an Australian food critic’s column about the dish. 

Just then, five serveurs bring me linen napkins and silverware, a basket of crostini, carafe of white wine, crock of coconut crab stew, and garlic snails with a set of tongs that resemble a gynecologist’s speculum. 

“Bon appétit,” Clément says, backing away to the kitchen, presumably to prepare my bat. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he means: Listen here, you Bourdain wannabe. There are easier ways to get some attention on your holiday. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he means: How will you go on living after your first bite of bat? What will you do with the memory of its flavor? What will you do with the knowledge of the jaw-force needed to shred its meat? What if, from now on, when you see small bones accumulating on a plate— chicken wingettes snapped off the drumette, gnawed clean—you can only think of bat? What will it feel like to be driving home from work, passing by all those chain restaurants and drive-thru lanes, only to realize a sudden craving for a dish that can only be gotten in distant Melanesia? 

From the looks of it, L’Houstalet is for lovers. Most tables are set for two with couples scooted close enough to share a menu, lock fingers, spoon-feed each other crème brûlée, whisper everything as if it’s a secret. Their flirtation is beginning to make me feel inexplicably insecure—like we’ve just played a children’s game where, when the music stops, everyone is meant to pair off, and I’m the odd man out. 

The uncollected menu on my table allows me to convince myself my wife will yet sit down beside me. I imagine our conversation turning to one of our earliest dates, c. 2012, when we parked the car, and I led her down a path to a dry river wash adjacent to the fancy gastropub. It was sunset, about the time thousands of bats streamed from the maternity colony clustered on the underside of a Tucson bridge. They erupted from the trusses, beelined for the suburbs where they feasted on a buffet of desert bugs. The shape of their flight against the late desert sun, the pointillism of their silhouettes, created the illusion of collimation; it was enough to dream on for months. 

I turn my attention back to the menu, which touts L’Houstalet’s modest role in facilitating independence in Vanuatu, something about Clément serving up forty bowls of French onion soup at midnight to dignitaries as they drafted the nation’s constitution. Elsewhere in the menu is a reprinted restaurant review by Bob Hart whose attempt at writing the French accent is worse than my attempt at speaking it. To Hart, Clément might as well be Pépé Le Pew. While it may very well be verbatim, the use of the letter zed is downright hyperbolic: “I use zee gertz of zee flying fox. I take zem out, I wash zem, I chop zem up, add zee ‘erbs, and I put zem back. Ees very good, non?” 

I can stomach offal. It calls to mind the sheep pluck and cow tripe I’ve savored in haggis and menudo. But this ostentation—eating a mammal’s organs in situ—might be too boorish even for me. As I gnash the last of the snails, slurp at the aromatic dregs of the coconut crab soup, I sense Clément on the other side of the wall, trussing the bat’s wings, now scrubbing the innards with rock salt, now glazing the carcass in syrupy red wine reduction. 

Before Andie and I left the wash, we crouched over a dead bat, stick-flipped it by its elastin wings. I rolled her few ounces to the edge of the dust. This was the one who didn’t get away. A woman approached us, bandana covering her mouth. She urged us to cover up: “¡Pulmón! ¡Pulmón!” She clutched at her chest dramatically. Beside her boots, a trowel stuck into a pail of guano. It seemed overcautious then to think that one should have to wear a mask due to one wee bat. 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which he might have meant: Are you not wary of the optics? A tourist towering over a plate of exotic meat when he could have ordered the chicken instead? Is it appropriate or is it appropriation? When Cyclone Pam razed Vanuatu in 2015, destroying the cane-framed and palm-thatched huts, citizens bunkered in concrete schoolhouses and starved. With their crops ruined, men crafted javelins and launched them high into fronds, puncturing the megabats in their dog-like faces, knocking them to soaking earth. For many, the flying fox was a primary source of calories until relief rations arrived. 

A small family seated near the restroom dallies after their meal. An Aussie brother and sister pretend to be bats—screeching as they run in circles round the table, wild displays of double-jointed flapping, and incestuous bloodsucking that ends in electric giggles that embarrass the parents enough to make them empty their wallets and vamoose. 

We dressed our son as a bat for his first Halloween, adorable wings and a cap with ears perked with wire. I carefully grasped him by his calves, upending him as if to roost. I wondered then, as I do know: do bats sometimes poop upside down, like right onto their noses? At his nine-month checkup, the pediatrician watched as he teethed on the head of a large plush bat puppet. “Little Ozzy,” the doctor said as he pressed the diaphragm of the stethoscope to his chest. 

We’ve got bats on our linocut prints, in our popup books, on the patterns of our PJs. There’s even one sunk in the frogs’ tank: a rubber figurine knocking against a shoot of bamboo. In the very fabric of our family lore, one can find Chiroptera galore. 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: What would your family say? 

When another carafe of wine shows up at my table, I don’t wave it off. Instead, I carry it with me like a goblet, drinking from it directly as I make way for the perimeter of the courtyard toward the paintings, hung in a grid, warmly spotlit. All are originals by the “Picasso of the Pacific,” Aloi Pilioko. Most of his canvases are full of blue sky and chartreuse foliage. Banana leaves stand as tall as the human figures that populate the paintings. The centered subjects are brushed sienna, ochre, and plum, carrying out daily rituals that shape life in Vanuatu. They are inscribed with scenes of worship, kastom, and black magic—chiefs at the nakamal, tribesmen in the bush, untraceable displays of alchemy. There are parrots and pythons, a clowder of anthropomorphized alleycats. Another depicts the well-known feat of Nanggol (land-diving) in which young men cuff their ankles with a vine and freefall twenty-nine meters from a thirty-meter tower, rebounding just before the earth splits open their skulls. 

I am biding my time, not working up an appetite as much as my appetite is beginning to work me up. When the waitstaff next exits the kitchen, I glimpse the door, rocking on its hinges. Clément is stripping leaves from woody sprigs, sprinkling them into the skillet. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he meant: Have you really considered the bat? Like Fisher considered the oyster: those wayward spats, androgynous hermaphrodites, with their cold guts, gills, and crinkly fringes? Or like Wallace considered the lobster: how its chitin turns scarlet after the boil melts away all other pigments?  

Have I even once considered the bat’s perplexing immune system, most of which is found in the “gertz”? The way it enjoys immunity, passing viral particulate, bacterial culture, mold spores through its bowels, light as coils of dust, ready to lift off with a mild wind into the lungs of a warm-blooded host? Have I thought once about the deaths of so many South Pacific islanders who were kidnapped by blackbirders, sold to haciendas, and deployed to scrape the caves clean of guano? Death by histoplasmosis, a.k.a. “bat shit lungs.” ¡Pulmón! Have I reminded myself of the bat as a vector of so many other emerging diseases: Ebola and Hanta, Hendra and Nipah, Influenza A and Manangle, rabies and Rift Valley, MERS-CoV and SARS CoV-1? 

What, at the time, felt like a whimsical thing to do, a lame party trick—me responding to nobody’s dare at all: Do you have the gertz to eat a bat?—will soon be a source of ignominy. I can still hear my pinched singsong order: Civet de roussette, s'il vous plaît. 

No. I’d say I haven’t much considered the bat at all. 

I’m most transfixed by a Pilioko painting in the corner. A man grips two bats by their ankles. They dangle at his sides, upside-down as if roosting from his palms. They are drawn to-scale, tall as his torso. Clearly, they will be eaten, but for now their eyes match the man’s navel: bright red dots, flickering sources of life. Their mouths and genitals are red ovoids as well. The couple seated nearest to me has stopped conversing; instead, they study me at the altar of this painting. 

“Are you certain?” By which, perhaps, he meant certain, derived from the Latin verb for “discriminate” (e.g., “of discriminating taste”), whose root krei- means “to sieve,” like the mesh utensil used to separate desired morsels of food from the rest. Bat pulp and bat fibers. Bat collagen and bat follicles. I hope Clément’s sifting is less clumsy than mine. 

The couple has shifted in their seats so as to give me some privacy before the paintings of the bats. It has been years since I sat across from my wife in that way: away from our home continent, children figmented by a generous distance. The couple eyes the wine menu. I want to buy them their next bottle, but I’m fearful they have expensive taste. 

The door swings open again, and I see Clément pouring wine into the skillet, chattering with the sous-chef as my meal simmers and steams. I empty my own carafe into my throat and ditch it on an empty table nearby. 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Are you aware of the bat’s place on the food supply chain? Better than ruminant cows, better than chicken, better than wild-caught fish, farmed fish, even better than nut trees, which produce negative greenhouse gases. A steady diet of bat could turn the Keeling Curve into a parabola by next Earth Day. 

My father—and probably your father too, if you were raised as boy—motivated my carnivorism with the promise of a hairy chest. What if he had instead said, Take this bite and you can change the world: tailspin the economy, forestall the daily commute, cause a record fall in fossil fuel emissions, keep large groups away from precious wildlife habitat?

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Has the time finally come to put your bat where your mouth is? You have affected misanthropy for too long, quoting that eco-depth chart ad nauseum like a would-be-eco-serial-killer, posturing yourself as “abysmally deep,” advocating for humans to aim for their own extinction. “Abysmally deep—,” the chart reads, “a quick annihilation is too good for humans. A horrible, fatal illness... is only fair.” 

Tracing the pathogenesis of SARS CoV-2 (a.k.a. Covid-19, a.k.a. the coronavirus) is approximate. It likely began within a week, if not day, if not hour, if not instant I uttered civet de roussette. 

Do I mistake the “abysmally deep” for the superficies of deep thinking? Or do I really believe, like Mephistophales, there’s no good in this endless [pro]creating, that it’s really time we get to the annihilating? 

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Would you, if you could, be patient zero? From your sickness, a thousand germs could break forth and grow. Do you fancy yourself a climate martyr? Can I bind you in that contract? From deep-down depths, a spring flows in all directions. Let me prick your thumb, slick the menu with juice of rarest quality. 

Who would say ‘yes’ to such a murderous proposition? A utilitarian might argue that when working on a global scale, trading off one pan- for another, it’s the balance (and not the size) of the numbers that matters. Sure, a pandemic could take a few million lives, but a climate panacea could save a billion. It’s the mass transit of trolley problems. 

My waitress greets me at the painting, ushers me back to my seat. “We are ready to present your meal,” she says.

Bat appétit!  

On the plate, the flying fox resembles slow-roasted rabbit, but with fewer bones. It’s unpleasantly bitter, so between bites, I lash it with my own red wine. The emulsion puddled in the center cavity includes particles of the bat’s once large heart, which used to beat 100-400 times per minute. There are carrots stacked sadly on the edge of the plate, nothing more than a pop of color. An afterthought. 

I sense the serveurs huddle in a corner behind my left shoulder, turning me into spectacle.

Jonathan Swift once plagiarized, “It was a bold man that first ate an oyster.” 

I take each bite with gusto. Let there be no mistake that (I think) I am bold too.

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: You do know that “delicacy” is a euphemism—that delicacy means delicate, that delicate means vulnerable, that on some Melanesian islands, the flying fox is not just vulnerable but endangered, even critically endangered? You’d think they’d be required to print that on the menu by now, but non, I am here to deliver the news. 

Within weeks, videos will surface online of wet markets and food stalls—bats for sale and bats for dinner. A host of a Chinese travel show visits Palau, dramatically hoists a fruit bat from a bowl of broth to her lipstick. At the intersection of epidemiology and conspiracy, people with no expertise at all declare her patient zero despite the fact it was filmed in 2016. She apologizes, takes down the video. Bat-munching videos viralize. Comments multiply. Xenophobia is one way to simplify the convoluted story of a global pandemic. As the “Wuhan virus” catches on, nobody takes notice when I post my stupid pic of civet de roussette on Instagram. My transgression doesn’t court the Sinophobes.

“Are you certain?” Clément had asked. By which, perhaps, he meant: Do I really have to put on my apron for you, you dime-a-dozen tourist? There’s nobody else in the kitchen tonight permitted to cook this particular protein. Won’t you please spare me? 

I see Clément on my way back to the street. He is seated at a table with stacks of receipts, typing at his calculator. 

“Compliments!” I shout into his hovel.

“Est-tu bon?” he asks.

“Oui, bon,” I say as if I’ve been a brave boy. I linger like a child waits for his pediatrician to cover him with stickers. 

I walk away, not yet stricken with tomorrow’s dreadfully exciting illness, a week-long malady that overcomes me just before I board the flight to Singapore with passengers who, the Scoot stewardess notes, have connections to Kunming, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, Hangzhou, Tianjin, Suzhou, Qingdao, Nanjing, and Wuhan. 

Don’t think me delusional, reader. I’m not claiming to be patient zero, just wondering if I should have been. 

*

Lawrence Lenhart studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. His essay collections include The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage (Outpost19) Backvalley Ferrets (University of Georgia), and Of No Ground (West Virginia University). With Will Cordeiro, he is the author of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury). His prose appears in Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Passages North, and Prairie Schooner. He is Associate Chair of English at Northern Arizona University where he teaches fiction, nonfiction, and climate science narratives. Lenhart is reviews editor at DIAGRAM and founding editor of Carbon Copy.

Advent 2021, Dec 17: Sara Campbell, In Office (with apologies to Joan Didion)

 

After Joan Didion's "In Bed" [link]

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IN OFFICE

(With Apologies to Joan Didion)

*

 

Three, four, sometimes seven days a month, I spend my life in a PMS haze, hyper-sensitive to the world around me. Almost every day of every month, between these attacks, I feel the sudden irritation and the flush of black mood and brain fog, which remind me that PMS lies in wait for me, and I take certain drugs to prolong its arrival. If I did not take the drugs, I would be able to function normally perhaps one week in four. The physiological horror called PMS is, in brief, central to the given of my life. When I was 15, 16, even 25, I used to think that I could rid myself of this error by simply denying it, character over chemistry. “Do you suffer PMS sometimes? frequently? never?” no application form asked, ever, though certain doctors would inquire. “Tell me about it.” Wary of going down this road again, but wanting only to somehow make the case that I wasn’t simply balls out crazy, I would elaborate. “It’s killing me,” I would say. “It’s like during that time period, the regular me, the me that knows how to get through life, sometimes even skillfully, ceases to exist.” “Hmmm,” they’ll say, marking something down on a chart and maybe suggesting vitamins. That in fact I spent one week a month in an impossible mental state seemed a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.

     For I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing “wrong” with me at all: I simply had severe PMS, or PMDD, and severe PMS was, as everyone who does not have it knows, imaginary. I fought PMS then, ignored the warnings it sent, went to school and later to work in spite of it, sat through lectures in American History and presentations to clients with alternating thoughts of panic, sadness and the deepest fury, cried inconsolably in washrooms, stumbled home by instinct, emptied bottles of wine into huge glasses trying to halt the maelstrom in my mind, wished only for an internist who would do a hysterectomy on house call, and cursed my anatomy. 

     It was a long time before I began thinking mechanistically enough to accept PMS for what it was: something with which I would be living, the way some people live with diabetes. PMS is something more than the fancy of a neurotic imagination. It is an essentially hereditary complex of systems, the most frequently noted but by no means the most unpleasant of which is an uncontrollable tetchiness, suffered by God knows how many women, by no men at all (the motherfuckers), and by some unfortunate girls as young as nine years old. (I had my first when I was thirteen. It came on during study hall at Peachtree Junior High in Dunwoody, Georgia. I told no one but instead sat quietly and began assembling a catalog of punishing ruminations that I would return to for the duration of my life. No one prescribed anything.) Almost anything can exacerbate my monthly attack of PMS: stress, allergy, a cold, an unfair deadline, a bad meal. An errant remark. A wrong turn. One inherits, of course, only the predisposition. In other words I spent yesterday incapable of getting a single drop of work done not merely because of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers and wrong-think, but because both my grandmothers had PMS, my mother has PMS and my sisters have PMS. 

     No one knows precisely what it is that is inherited. The chemistry of PMS, however, seems to have some connection with the naturally occurring neurotransmitter serotonin, which is believed to be a contributor to feelings of well-being and happiness. The amount of serotonin in the blood falls sharply at the onset of PMS, and one PMS drug, fluoxetine, or Prozac (sometimes marketed in a pink package as “Sarafem”), seems to have some effect on serotonin. Fluoxetine is what they call a “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor,” and it delays the brain’s reabsorption of the chemical. Side effects include anorexia, impotence, anxiety, insomnia, abnormal dreams, dry mouth, dyspepsia, diarrhea, nausea, nervousness and many more, yet it is prescribed constantly, for all types of ailments, because no one is actually sure of how it works or what it even does. Fluoxetine, when it is prescribed, is taken daily, as a preventative; another preventative which works for some people is old-fashioned exercise and a “balanced” diet, whatever that means. 

     Once an attack is underway, however, no drug touches it. PMS gives some people mild depression, temporarily incapacitates others, shows up not only as irritability but as a gastrointestinal disturbance, a painful sensitivity to all sensory stimuli, an abrupt overpowering fatigue, absentmindedness, and a crippling inability to make even the most routine decisions. When I am in the heart of PMS (for some people this lasts a day, for others several), I will drive through red lights, forget my passwords, spill whatever I am holding, lose the ability to crack jokes or write coherent sentences, and generally give the appearance of being out to lunch. PMS is, of course, a prelude to menstruation, which, when it comes, brings with it bleeding, cramps, bloat, exhaustion and a lassitude that seems to stretch the very limits of endurance. That no one dies of the whole business seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing. 

     I do not have a husband but if I did he would not suffer from PMS, which is fortunate for him but unfortunate for me: perhaps nothing so tends to prolong an attack as the accusing eye of someone who has never experienced a full menstrual cycle. “Why not take a couple of ibuprofen,” the unafflicted offer, unbidden, or “I’d feel despondent, too, stewing over every imagined slight that comes my way.” All of us who have PMS suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking the mental high road, that we are making ourselves miserable, that we “bring it on ourselves.” And in the most immediate sense, the sense of why we have PMS this week and not last week, that is, of course, absurd. If there is a “PMS personality,” no one has ever told me about it to my face, but lifelong observation would suggest that that personality tends to be bitchy, unreasonable, unpredictable, whiny, weepy and prone to blowing things way out of proportion. (One might just call this the “female” personality.) “You’re different from most women,” a man once said to me. “So rational. Like you don’t freak out about things that don’t really matter.” Actually my emotional response to any given situation far outweighs whatever logic I’ve applied to it, but the man was right nonetheless: I have learned to bury my propensity to flip out under a blanket of stoicism that allows me to function in the everyday world. PMS stretches that blanket very, very thin. 

     But not all females have severe PMS, and not all sufferers of severe PMS have “female” personalities. We do not escape heredity. I have tried in most of the available ways to escape my own premenstrual heredity (on multiple occasions I eliminated all potential dietary triggers, including caffeine, sugar, dairy, alcohol and grains, even though the diet itself made my social life so miserable I had to cease it entirely), but I still have PMS. And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to deal with it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as an opportunity to test my survival skills. We have reached a certain understanding, my PMS and I. It comes like clockwork. Tell me that I’ve been fired, my dog has run off, that there is gun fighting in the streets and panic in the banks, and I will grit my teeth and add this grief like a new log on an already roaring fire. It comes, too, when I am fighting not an open but a guerilla war with my own life, during weeks of small work-related aggravations, unanswered emails, looming invoices, canceled dates, on days when I slog through cardio and I fail to call my mother and the wind is coming up. On days like that it laughs as if to say, “Oh, you think your life is relatively under control, do you?” 

     And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I don’t have the luxury of lying around and waiting for it to pass, so I go on with life. Every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the blood comes, and I know that means the ordeal is nearly over. Right there is the usefulness of PMS, there in that forced suffering, the monthly confrontation with mortality. For when it recedes, five to seven days later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the pointless anxieties. The PMS has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is an immense euphoric relief. I leave the office on time and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the singular joy of feeling like my life is fine just as it is. I count my blessings.

*

There were a couple of years during my early 30s where I read the essays in Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album over and over. I am far from the first person to say so, but she captured something visceral about the experience of being a young(ish), struggling woman in Southern California that still rang true nearly 50 years later. "In Bed" was a favorite because Didion's experience of migraines so closely matched up with my experience of PMS—a phenomenon that many (if not most) people do not think is real but that has a tremendous impact on my existence nonetheless. Years later, the science has not advanced all that much, as far as I can tell; there's still a lot we don't understand about both ailments. And while you might find more people who are sympathetic to their sufferers, they still seem to fall into the category of dubious claims made by suspect people. Covering this essay is my attempt to own it. Maybe I am a headcase—what of it?

*

Sara Campbell writes Tiny Revolutions, an email newsletter about becoming who you are. Rooted in her practice of Zen Buddhism, it’s a personal exploration of how to be more awake, alive, and connected to the truth of your life—and to the world around you. Her writing has appeared in diverse outlets including Every, The RS 500, Barrelhouse, The Oxford American, The Hairpin, The Rumpus, and Salon.com. She lives in Los Angeles but does various things on the Internet to pay the bills. You can find her clowning around on Twitter @janedonuts. 

Advent 2021, Dec 16, Thomas Mira y Lopez: José J. Veiga's "Professor Pulquério"

After José J. Veiga's "Professor Pulquério" & Alejandro Zambra's "Multiple Choice"

When I was a boy and lived in a 1) _____ in the interior, I watched 2) ______ strange episode involving a professor and his family. Although many years have passed since then, the details of what happened still live on in my memory, at least those details that made the strongest impression on me. As no one alive during that time seems to remember the events, and many even doubt that such things happened—the professor’s own daughter, for instance, whom I saw running around in 3) _____, crying and begging for help, looked at me in 4) _____ and swore she didn’t remember anything when I spoke to her about the subject two or three years ago—I’ve resolved to put into writing everything I remember, before my own memory begins to 5) _____ as well. If my testimony one day falls into the hands of some patient investigator, it’s possible that the occurrence, already so old and, in my view, so completely forgotten except by my 6) _____, will be disinterred, discussed, and at last 7) _____.

1)  a. town
     b. village
     c. city
     d. settlement

2)  a. an exceedingly
     b. a rather
     c. quite a
     d. a considerably

3)  a. _________
     b. ________________
     c. _____
     d. ____________

4)  a. 
     b. 
     c. 
     d. 

5)  a. falter
     b. fade
     c. wane
     d. slip

6) Please rank the Narrator’s reliability on a scale of 1-5, where 1 is “least reliable” and 5 is “most reliable”:

     < ---- 1 ---- 2 ---- 3 ---- 4 ---- 5 ---- >

7) Please circle what you think will happen in this story:

     a. The Professor will disappear down a well.
     b. The Professor will turn into a snake.
     c. The Professor will vanish into the air.
     d. The Professor will travel in time.
     e. The Narrator is the Professor.

On the translation:

The text above is a translation of the opening paragraph from “Professor Pulquério,” a short story by José J. Veiga, the 20th century Brazilian novelist and fiction writer. “Professor Pulquério” appears in Veiga’s first book, Os Cavalinhos de Platiplanto, a collection of stories published in 1959 when Veiga was 43. The translation, however, is modeled after Alejandro Zambra’s 2014 novel Multiple Choice, a text whose prose takes the structure of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, an exam used to determine university entrance. The omittance or inclusion of words from the translation—i.e. the blank spaces and corresponding questions—is not present in Veiga’s original story. The idea here is a translation that covers Veiga’s content and Zambra’s form.

In general, I love covers, and I’m tempted, as with the term essay, to call many things covers that aren’t strictly so. A translation is a cover. Or, a translation can function as a cover, and thus ask us to consider the distortions and influences a translation is subject to. When I say the translation above omits or includes certain words due to Zambra’s influence, I’m telling the truth but also furthering an illusion. Aside from the cognate professor, it would be more accurate for me to say that the translation omits every single word of Veiga’s Portuguese and that, instead, every single word included is the translation’s—is my—own. Of course, that’s not to say I thought of all those words on my own. And when I claim I modeled my translation after Zambra’s novel, what I really mean is that I modeled my translation after Megan McDowell’s translation of Zambra’s novel. And, what’s more, both the novel and its translation are based upon the author(s) of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, who are unknown. The plot of “Professor Pulquério” concerns a failed academic, who writes niche articles nobody reads and drives himself crazy looking for a treasure that most likely isn’t actually there.

By calling a translation a cover, I would like to give the reader a brief sense of decisions the translator faces. In a New Yorker interview with Deborah Treisman about Multiple Choice, Zambra said he believes his book “as a whole [argues] against the illusion of a single right answer,” while still being “about the wish for that answer, the naïve or visceral desire for there to be a truth.” This reads like a neat summation of the translator’s dilemma. Every word is different from the original, yet carried out so that the original’s spirit—whatever that means—remains the same. You need to get it right, yet you’re also supposed to pretend you’re not there. In providing the reader a choice around the translation, my hope is that we might consider the multiplicity of translation, while having, on our screens, multiple translations. Each of us will read the text in multiple ways, just as you and I right now are reading these words differently.

I also wanted the reader to develop their own sense of the text, leading them to their own decisions about how to read it. The above result, however, wasn’t what I expected. Multiple choice leads to less choice, in its way—for example, the reader is more likely to find the narrator unreliable in this version, precisely because of the imposed form’s implicit and explicit mentions of reliability. By the end of the text, the form becomes so intrusive the reader is not able to complete its reading on their own. The translator makes themselves known, yet perhaps only as a nuisance.

The answer, by the way, is a)—the Professor always disappears down a well.

*

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press). He has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona, and is pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.

Advent 2021, Dec 15, Darcy Jay Gagnon: Mr. Weschler’s Cabinet of Wonder

After Lawrence Weschler’s “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder.”

Cranes (grues) take their name from the murmuring sound they make. Cranes are continuously at war with the race of Pygmies, hostilities cease only when the cranes leave. During flight, cranes attain unusual heights and unlike other birds, they fly both night and day. When the cranes are about to leave Thrace, they assemble in rank and order. Before the flock finally leaves, the oldest of the cranes flies about in a circle three times, after which he falls down and dies of exhaustion, to be buried by the others. After this ceremony, the rest take flight toward Africa to spend the winter. M. Martial and Falvius Cassiodorus (bizarre name!) both affirm that the entire Greek alphabet was obtained from the flight of cranes.

And the leader of the company compelleth the company to fly aright, crying as it were blaming with his voice. And if it hap that he wax hoarse, then another crane cometh after him, and taketh the same office. And after they fall to the earth crying, for to rest, and when they sit on the ground, to keep and save them, they ordain watches that they may rest the more surely, and the wakers stand upon one foot, and each of them holdeth a little stone in the other foot, high from the earth, that they may be waked by falling of the stone, if it hap that they sleep.

-Batholomaeus Anglicus (13th century CE), De proprietatibus rerum, Book 12.

J.F.M. Hoeniger (General Microbiology 32:30, 1965) suggests that the explanation for the practice of administering ants eggs to one afflicted with (and designing to fall out of) love lies in the chemical composition of ants eggs or more precisely ant pupae. The sack or membranous tissue, which encloses the pupae, contains measurable quantities of the naloxone hydrochloride that exhibits marked anendorphic (endorphin inhibiting) qualities by effectively blocking the opioid receptor site in the brain without producing the agonististic response (cell excitation), which typically results from the endorphin bond with the receptor sites produced in the “love” or other endorphin producing states.

A dog cures its own wounds by licking, and a young dog bound to a patient cures internal wounds.

The dog of a condemned prisoner that refused to leave its master tried to put food in the dead man’s mouth, and when the corpse was thrown in the river, tried to keep it afloat.

When a man was murdered and there were no witnesses to say who did it, the man’s dog pointed out the slayer in the crowd.

A dog will always return to its vomit and a dog that crosses a hyena’s shadow will lose its voice.

These are just some of the many facts you can explore at The Museum of Jurassic Technology, a small building of dark brick that looks out of place among the light tans and otherwise chromatic structures that occupy much of Los Angeles, even out in Culver City, where the museum is located— a suburban sprawl adjacent to the boutique-filled Venice Beach and about 20 minutes south of most of the tourist destinations in Hollywood.

As is the case in most of Los Angeles, the museum shares the corner of its block with a yoga studio, and across the street there is a bookstore that specializes in the romance genre called The Ripped Bodice. There is a bus stop directly in front of the museum and an In-and-Out Burger further up the block.

As you open the heavy, sturdy door to the museum, there is an immediate feeling of voyeurism, as the darkly lit room on the other side causes one to second guess whether the museum is open or closed. It is in fact, open, and you enter into a gift shop that is well stocked if not a bit claustrophobic (which perhaps mirrors a sense of the museum to come). The museum clerk—a late 20-something man, very academic-looking with oval spectacles, who is most likely a writer like me and probably gay— confirms the reservation for my boyfriend (Tommy) and me, accepts our fee (10 dollars or something), and requests no photography as he ushers us into the museum with a smile that seems to hide a secret.

Inside, the museum is labyrinthine, with tight walls and no clear pattern. The rooms are separated by exhibit— some longstanding and some rotating. At the moment, two of rotating exhibits are dioramas of campers (the vehicle/house kind) and the history of Cat’s Cradle. Here are some of the things you might encounter immediately, however, which I will try to recall from memory (since photography is not allowed):

A brass machine, about 3 feet high, that to me looks like a steampunk version of a moonshine still, except that its only current function seems to be that of a little hammer, which lightly bashes against a marble-sized sphere every second or so.

A mounted beetle carapace, next to which is telephone receiver-like apparatus that looks like it belongs to a much older museum. If you lift it, a buzzing sound that could be a recording of the mounted beetle in front of you or is maybe just someone going bzzzzzzz.

A vitrine with three madeleine cookies in them, one of which has a bite taken out of it. In this vitrine there are also three tubes that lead to three holes covered by a thin, quarter-sized sheet of metal, with a button below each that seemed to do nothing when we pressed it. For about a minute, Tommy and I tampered with the thin covering, moving it aside while looking over our shoulder, not sure if we were dismantling the case or using it as intended, and once more pressed the button to receive nothing more than a pneumatic puff of air.

An aquarium-sized vitrine containing a serious-looking apparatus, crouched over several hovering platforms with tiny mounds of powder perched on microscope glass. The five platforms are labeled “Possession, “Delusion,” “Paranoaia,” “Schizophrenia,” and “Reason,” though the platform labeled “Reason” looks as if the apparatus has smashed into it and there lies a combination of glass and dust at the bottom of the vitrine. Unlike many of the previous displays, this one comes with a small sign that simply says “out of order.”

“By this time, you too may be starting to feel a bit out of order, all shards and powder,” writes Lawrence Weschler in his book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, and sure enough, Tommy and I were giving each other “umm, what exactly is this place” glances.

Weschler’s book profiles David Wilson, the co-founder of the museum (with his wife), who he claims had found a way with the Museum of Jurassic Technology to induce a sense of fascination paired with “a distinct undercurrent of perturbation.”

Of course, not having yet read the book, I was not aware of this when we visited the museum that day. In fact, we had only planned to because Tommy and I had both received separate recommendations from colleagues to visit it, but neither one of us were given context as to why or what exactly “Jurassic Technology” is [1].

So, when the clerk recommended that we watch an instructional slideshow just beyond the entrance, we didn’t think to question that decision, despite the old-timey video technology being “Jurassic” in the sense of the term we had misunderstood (and still fail to understand, it seems).

In the original sense, the term ‘museum’ meant a spot dedicated to the Muses—'a place where man’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs.’ By far the most important museum of antiquity was the great institution at Alexandria founded by Ptolemy Philadelphius in the third century before Christ (an endeavor supported by a grant from the Treasury). And no treatment of the museum would be complete without mention of Noah’s Ark in which we find the most complete Museum of Natural History the world has ever seen.

For the next five minutes or so, we were barraged with this history and philosophy of the museum, which Weschler describes as “at times stupefyingly specific, at other times maddeningly vague.” Indeed, there was an unspoken sense of conflict occurring in both of us at that moment, as we wondered if we accidently walked past the slideshow that actually explained what this museum is, if this was supposed to be some kind of joke that we weren’t getting, or if this was simply a test of our patience and fast-food culture of instant gratification.

And this would be a theme to come, not just for us, but I imagine for many of the other museum-goers, who moved about the small dark rooms in whispers, not quite laughing (or knowing if they were allowed to laugh), and not exactly sure how to interact with the museum’s descriptions or exhibits, whether to treat them as serious or silly, each probably having their own internal tug of wars with their sense of irony.

“Part of the assigned task is to reintegrate people to wonder,” Wilson says in Cabinet, which is what this format continues to do today as we are lifted out of our comfort zone, without handholding, and forced to question the legitimacy of anything we see or read and to further question that desire to question.

“It’s like a museum, a critique of museums, and a celebration of museums—all rolled into one,” said Marcia Tucker, the former Director of the New Museum in New York. Others related it to performance art. Though, through Weschler’s profile, we learn that the museum’s curator is mostly interested in a sense of earnestness, which is reinforced after Weschler spends too much time trying to track down some of the museum’s more improbable and aloof claims to find them grounded in some arcane text or equally eccentric source.

Weschler’s discussion of the museum focuses on this goal of reintegrating people to wonder, and how that sense of wonder throughout time has led to many of the ideas presented in the museum itself. However, visiting the museum at the end of the year 2021—knowing that there is a 26-year-old book written about it that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and knowing that there is apparently significant word-of-mouth about the museum based on how we arrived there—I was mostly shocked that the museum has not only kept this sense of wonder alive, but authentically so.

In other words, the fact that something so endeared for so long can still leave one surprised is so rare these days, and the fact that, even still, the museum stands true to never breaking form, or as Weschler calls it, “breaking from irony.” Sure, the gift shop is a bit more filled out. There are certainly more than the one or two other museum-goers that Weschler described in 1995, and the price has jumped from $4.50 to $10, but on the whole, there is still no handholding, no gimmicks, no obnoxious marketing campaign. Just like 1995, the museum feels unapologetic in a world where authentic experiences are quickly capitalized upon and exploited, especially when it comes to art.

And perhaps an apt example occurred fifteen minutes before Tommy and I stepped into the museum at all, when, arriving a bit earlier than expected for our reserved timeslot, we decided to pick up lunch from the nearby In-N-Out Burger, one of those LA gemstones that’s mythos has been reinforced by the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Gordan Ramsey, and the Coen Brothers, only to find that the drive-thru line wrapped around the block and employees had set up ordering stations along the customized traffic pattern through the parking lot. Especially coming from a city (though not this city), it made me wonder if there are truly any authentic experiences left if even fast-food has been memed into tourist culture, a kind of culture-death.

So as much as the Museum of Jurassic Technology seems to be testing the lifespan of wonder, we can also look at it as testing the lifespan of authenticity. And of earnestness. And though you, reader, may now never enter the museum without context and be able to experience the legitimate WTF-is-this mentality (I have ruined that for you sorry), there is at least something to experience in the shock of being able to be shocked at all anymore.

So, go figure [2].

[1] “I think it’s, like, technology that used to be used for something but is now interestingly out of date,” we theorized to each other in the car on the way to the museum, which is somewhat true if not a bit of a simplification.

[2] And I did, as I break now from the prompt to juxtapose my In-N-Out anecdote with a different kind of tale, but also from the same day. For dinner, Tommy and I want to LA’s Korea Town, which, after a dinner of noodles, stepped next door for a second dinner, seeing that a small, hole-in-the-wall Korean restaurant specialized in raw, marinated crab, a dish we had both heard about but is hard to find on the east coast, probably because it requires a live kind of Charybdis crab native to southern Korea, but of a genus known throughout the Indo-Pacific region and from the Straight of Messina off of the coast of Sicily, where Charybdis, the sea creature whose ancestor is Poseidon, lives in a whirlpool created by voracious thirst.

Record of the dish originates as early as the 17th century and is mentioned for its ability to drive away fever due to its “cold” property by the Korean scholar Jeong Yak-jong (정약전) in his book “Fishes of the Huksan Island,” one of the 500 or so volumes he, after returning from exile, wrote in a room he called “Sauijae,” or the room of four obligations, which were: clear thinking, serious appearance, quiet talking, and sincere actions. Yak-jong was also responsible for popularizing a resurgence of tea drinking in Korea.

Marinated raw crab is sometimes nicknamed bapdoduk, or "a rice thief" due to its filling flavor, which is exactly how I felt experiencing ultra-savory tomalley inside the crab, which we call the “mustard” in my native Maryland, where the local and daring eat this hepatopancreas ooze that intermingles with all the other questionable guts and has the kind of roundness of flavor you might expect from liver.

This is a legendary dish, and one crab is basically all you need to feel full (“rice thief”…), which we plucked and slurped and savored over for almost 45 minutes at a restaurant where we were one of a handful of patrons, seated immediately, served just as quick, paid cash, went home with the earthy flavor of several centuries on our tongues.

*

Darcy Jay Gagnon is a writer based out of Washington D.C., an MFA graduate from George Mason University, and a nonfiction features editor at The Rumpus. He is presently working on a lyric biography of Matsuo Basho, but also writes about music and birds. You can find his other work at The Rumpus, Entropy, and here.

Advent 2021, Dec 14, Marcia Aldrich: One Dozen Vegetarian Sorry Not Sorries

After “Self-Portrait in Apologies” by Sarah Einstein

For Clare

1.
It is considered that a difficult woman ought to apologize. And it doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman.

As far back as I can remember, I have been apologizing for difficulties. No matter what I was or what I felt or did, it was not the right thing, and its not being the right thing was so intensely felt that it colored me beyond my childhood, reaching so far down into the soil that I haven’t managed to root it out. I feel an element of dissent in everything I do.

My eating predilections, for example—which my parents judged an overidentification with animals—have been apologized for. Sometimes in silence. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say about what I loved or hated foodwise, or loved and hated, and what I did about my automuting is far from simple. I’m just beginning to tell the story, piece by piece. One piece is why I don’t eat meat.

2.
I’ve often been asked to give the history of my being or becoming a vegetarian (let’s reserve for the moment the difference), to provide a rationale for my stance. The question, really a demand, is never merely curious. That’s because the questioner feels that the eating of meat is itself being questioned. And perhaps it is. Perhaps there’s an apology in the air. Yet I don’t try to stir the waters of polite discourse—far from it. I don’t tar others’ way of eating, don’t demand they speak to their reasons. Meat eaters may see what they do as what has always been done, requiring no explanation, as if they were Bengal tigers.

3.
Like any good bistro philosopher, I say being vegetarian because that is a good description of my history, or where I started. Being a vegetarian was always a part of me. I visualize this predisposition, really, as a small child nestled inside me, the child within the child. I became a vegetarian as I grew and gained the freedom to decide what to eat. I didn’t have a name for what I felt or the power to say no. I had to eat what I was served, and I was served meat for dinner most nights, even for lunch, in the form of something called lunch meats. The meal grid working in my family’s home in Allentown, Pennsylvania, dictated a dinner of meat as the centerpiece, a vegetable, rice or potatoes, maybe rolls, maybe a salad, and a glass of whole milk. This meal plan was unapologetically presented as universal.

4.
I was called a “picky” eater. And it wasn’t a good thing to be. How many vegetarians-to-be were similarly labeled? My pickiness was one of my first acts of resistance, most of which, at least for women, begin in the domestic. I was instinctually charting my own relationship to food, to what I wanted to eat, and those desires were contrary to the world I found myself in. But I didn’t have the understanding or vocabulary at age six or eight to explain, even to myself.

This was before I knew meatless diets also have a history. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras gave us the term “Pythagorean diet”; the poet Shelley named it a “natural diet.” The word “vegetarian” emerged in 1877 in England when the first vegetarian society was formed. I didn’t know that prominent figures like Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Leonardo da Vinci, and Mr. Rogers were vegetarians!

If I had said to my mother something sophisticated, like I don’t feel an affinity for the way you eat, I would have been sent to my room. My parents would have viewed me as strange, perhaps even dangerous, a threat to their way of life. My parents slipped into defensive stances laced with hostility when they encountered such threats. No way were they going to be sorry.

5.
A few years ago my husband and I moved to Bainbridge Island, a new opportunity to negotiate with people. This change has reminded me of what a difficult person a vegetarian is. Invited for dinner, I’m asked politely about dietary restrictions. I say, and there comes the familiar pause and strained recovery. At the gathering itself I feel the questions coming from a long way off. At every dinner my husband and I are the only vegetarians. The other guests relish meat, can’t imagine giving it up. That much is usually blurted out after whatever I’ve weakly managed to utter on diets. I try to end the conversation because nothing good can come from it. I’m good at showing no expression, although lately my composure is beginning to crack.

One such taciturn meal was at a charming farmhouse that served foods grown or raised on the spot. Our two companions ordered pork chops, which I have avoided since my mother served them. Fat, bloody, they required vigorous cutting and chewing. It was an athletic event, and not a sprint. There was no place to look away. My companions were unaware of my difficulty because I’m practiced at disguise. In sum, I was sorry and they were not.

6.
When the host of a meal worries that I won’t have enough to eat, I reassure her. I won’t starve because I don’t touch the turkey. On the contrary, the side dishes make a feast! But sometimes she cannot accept that I have plenty. The abundance of food becomes a critique rather than a statement of fact. I live in a socioeconomic class that prepares more than we need, an excess, a waste.

The dinner guests and the hosts are perturbed by a plate without a slab of turkey. They carry on as best they can, but they are accommodating me. Being accommodated is one of the main ways women are difficult, and for that I must apologize.

7.
I never raise the topic of cruelty, the question of ethical treatment, the environmental havoc. I know better than to go there. Unpleasant conversation over, say, French cuisine turns the emotional temperature up too high. Friendships char. Nevertheless, a woman sometimes looks right at me—a sorry not sorry glare—and says she has seen the videos about creatures raised for slaughter. I know that she isn’t serious about quitting meat—the protein, you know. She only wants to entertain the possibility. My role to pretend she is serious, part of the social contract at dinner parties. My role is not to create a tiff. But every so often I venture a fact on sourcing. Right on cue her husband says, Just don’t watch those films and the problem is solved! Better to live with one’s eyes wide open, I say. A difficult woman.

8.
Early on in my public vegetarian stance, friends from Pomona College organized a visit to our former professor on Lopez Island, where he owned a farm. We ferried over to Lopez, where Steve graciously housed us for the night. I rode horses with his daughter down to the Sound, through fields studded with deer. But then dinner came. What was on the menu? Venison. When I announced that I was a vegetarian, Steve unleashed a professorial lecture about the deer’s natural life on its home range. He killed what he ate, with no middleman. I was his guest, and he was feeding me. Who was I to create difficulty about the deer?

Why did I feel apologetic? Why did he hold all the authority? I was his former student and a guest who was asking to be accommodated. He, on the other hand, was my professor, my host and chef. He was defending his position, rehearsing all the reasons it was superior.

He couldn’t allow me my view, shrug and let it go. He fought with all he had, and he won. I ate the venison, and thought about the tawny coats and pointy heads I had so recently seen, how my life was intertwined with theirs, and vowed never to be shamed into eating meat again.

9.
A very different response when I visited my friend in Paris two years ago. She knew I had been vegetarian since college. Her husband, Don, is in charge of the food, and he prepared meatless meals during my stay. After one wonderful meal, I thanked him for the care he had taken and apologized for the difficulty. He looked me in the eye and said, “No, we should apologize to you.” It was the first time the tables had been turned.

10.
I am writing a manifesto of sorts. About how I eat, what I eat, and why. But also about my refusal to be sorry for my choices. I’m throwing off the long-held belief that I owe everyone an apology, embracing my status as difficult. So be it. We should be encouraged to think about rather than fall into a way of living. How we eat is complicated and has consequences for others, not just ourselves. I still don’t say forthrightly to companions that I wish people would stop eating meat, that the environment and animal world would be better off. Instead I silently collude with the idea that everyone has a right to eat as they want even if it does harm. If I spoke up, I’d say, Do no harm.

11.
My daughter has become a strict vegan. This is part of the story. She thinks about creating a farm sanctuary and posts disturbing stories about animal cruelty on Instagram. She is crossing a line—she’s making people uncomfortable. Is that so bad?

Last spring she participated in a Rescue the Animals event in Seattle, showing footage of the practices of animal agriculture. Some of the passers-by were angry about the horrible footage, about the presence of children. She asked, If it’s not okay for children to see it, why is it okay to eat it? She admits that the videos are traumatizing, but adds that what we do to animals is far more traumatizing. If children were shown the truth, they would choose not to participate.

Lately I’ve been rethinking how I bury my own feelings so others don’t feel uncomfortable. Clare is losing her ability to divide the way we eat from our character and social relations. Our choices about what we eat make the core of who we are.

12.
I’m sorry, is she wrong? I don’t think so.

*

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her website: marciaaldrich.com.

Advent 2021, Dec 13, Chris Daley: Hateful Things: Los Angeles 2021

After “Hateful Things,” an essay from The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon (c. 966–1017),

which chronicles daily life in the court of Empress Consort Teishi.

One learns of a recent article about Los Angeles written in New York and prepares for the distasteful clichés that are forthcoming: traffic, hiking, astrology, athletic wear, eternal sunshine, celebrities, palm trees, smog, avocado toast. Hateful.

One is in a hurry to arrive, but the automobile’s navigation robot has failed to account for the congestion on both freeways and surface streets. One is trapped in the middle lane behind a luxury sports utility vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads “Too dumb for New York City. Too ugly for L.A.” Loathsome.

One finds that one’s new upstairs neighbor has acquired an exercise contraption seemingly comprised of a mallet that pounds incessantly against the wall for one hour. After several mornings of being woken at dawn, one is forced to confront the neighbor who claims that she assumed one would have left for work—even though one’s single previous conversation with the neighbor had consisted solely of what it’s like to work from home. Oh, how hateful!

Very hateful is a fat, bossy squirrel that blocks the sidewalk when one tries to walk to the supermarket to buy tomatoes.

One finds oneself in a global pandemic. Epically hateful.

One walks to the local coffee emporium and only upon arrival does one realize that one has not remembered material with which to cover one’s potentially viral face. Hateful indeed.

One walks to another local coffee emporium where one immediately recognizes the handsome star of a recent Oscar-nominated film. The star meets one’s eyes, and one is forced to say hello to the stranger in an awkward, stilted fashion. When one attempts to then gaze at the star, from a distance after some time has passed, the star insists on making eye contact again. Rude and hateful.

A man with whom one is having an affair has no gainful employment but travels often away from Los Angeles. On a day that he reports having worked for the first time in eighteen months, one remarks on his fortuitous upcoming vacation. He does not contact one again. 

Many years later, one still recalls a former lover’s hateful observation that one would not be considered “indie.” 

One is telling a story of woe and a certain lady must double the amount of woe she is offering in order to minimize both one’s woe and the solace of that woe.

One must stay inside one’s home for weeks on end, and all the entertainment one wants to consume requires multiple streaming service subscriptions. Intolerable.

One becomes obsessed with television that is filmed in the United Kingdom because the production decisions have made the setting appear enviable and the characters more “real” than actual people in Los Angeles. (One hates the quotes around the word real.) 

On a hot day, one’s leggings cover too much of one’s limbs but one’s shorts do not cover enough. Vile.

After weeks of relentless sun and accumulated dust, one spends an hour at the car wash, waiting for one’s hand-dried automobile to be released, and before one has even returned home, it begins to rain. Hateful.

A close neighbor’s pandemic project is to learn how to play the drums. Beastly.

News from around the world shows people in lockdown in various locations banging on kitchenware to celebrate frontline workers. People in Los Angeles attempt to replicate this commemoration and the noise carries perhaps half a block through the hateful sprawl. 

At one’s local lunch establishment, the previously attentive owner suddenly gives one the cold shoulder. One wonders what one could have done, having no recollection of any uncomfortable incident or conversation. For weeks, one is anxious about what one should do in this unusual social situation—when one is no longer proficient in usual social situations—until one day, the owner treats one as he has been accustomed, making no reference to the recent estrangement. One is hatefully perplexed.

One orders a glass of wine during one’s first time at a restaurant in months, and the bartender contemptuously measures no more than five ounces.

One is dining outdoors when one recognizes an acquaintance one cannot place. After a hateful amount of time is spent trying to identify the acquaintance, one realizes the petite woman eating a salad plays the corpulent officemate on a popular television series. So objectionable!

In a rush to pay for items with a banking card, when presented with tip options, one mistakenly chooses “No Tip.” One must then make another purchase to correct the error. 

Hateful are people who wear the face covering meant to stop contagion over their chin or mouth only, causing one to call out in the street, “Cover your nose, sir!”

People whose eyes flicker over one’s shoulder, scanning the room for someone more impressive, until a target has been located and they swiftly depart. Hateful.

People who can clearly see that a strip of curb has been carefully measured to accommodate two vehicles and park as if there were only enough space for one.

After an evening of legendary winds, one is forced to drive to an appointment slowly and carefully around fallen palm fronds littering the boulevard, as if designed to make one appear tardy and feckless.

One has never had good news that one can’t share online. Hateful indeed.

At a long-delayed gathering, a family acquaintance who has known one for a quarter century remarks with great surprise, “You’re a writer?” 

One hikes to the top of a mountain to photograph the horizon. Where the sky meets the city, a repulsive strip of yellow pollution appears in every picture, which one cannot remove with any Instagram filter except the monochrome options. 

One decides to foster a cat in order to test whether one’s allergic reaction would be prohibitively hateful. One falls in love and immediately adopts the creature. After two years, the cat develops a mysterious allergy that requires her to wear a horrid inflatable collar almost all of the time. One is again hatefully perplexed.

A certain gentleman behaves very much like a Scorpio (hateful) and upon being asked for the date of his birth, he reveals that it falls on the cusp between Libra and Scorpio. When one asks for the time of his birth, the gentleman claims ignorance. 

The avocado is not ripe for several days and within a few hours, it has become rotten. Revolting.

One has formed hateful opinions about certain acquaintances. Sometimes the judgment is justified, and sometimes one can trace the disdain of several people to one intolerant companion.

One has paid several hundred dollars a month for years and one’s student loan balance has not decreased by a single penny. Intolerable!

One searches for homes within one’s zip code that cost less than half a million dollars, and the filter returns a single abhorrent property that is one pest invasion or earthquake away from condemnation. 

A certain gentleman in the neighborhood, whom one had previously found attractive until he refused consistently to acknowledge one’s existence, travels away from his own domicile to stand in front of one’s window to smoke his cigarettes. Odious behavior.

One is told throughout one’s female life that inevitably, at a certain age, one will become a crone who is invisible to all men of all ages. One is told this circumstance is especially prevalent in Los Angeles. One inevitably reaches a certain age and learns one is only invisible to men who have reached the same age! Most distasteful.

One is shamed for being single, as if an unwelcome yoke is preferable to one’s own company. Hateful.

More hateful is seeking one’s lovers through dating applications. One finds it insufferable in the extreme to attempt conversation with men who respond to queries in monosyllables and preemptively ask “What are you looking for?” as if one has been discovered in the forest with a flashlight.

Most hateful is encountering a lover to whom your last communication was sent, acknowledged as “read,” and flouted a year before, making one feel as if a spectral presence had absconded.

A good lover will behave as elegantly online as at any other time. He does not mistakenly send a video text meant for another, or call a lady by a name not her own, like Nicole. The lady urges him on: "Come, my friend, let’s meet in the world. You don't want anyone to find you here." He responds, “Deep sigh,” as if to say that the world is cursed but also full of possibility and that it is agony to learn which shall prevail. 

Once met, the lover does not instantly offend. Instead, he comes close to the lady and whispers whatever was left unsaid in the chat. Even when he is near, he still lingers, vaguely pretending to examine her earring. 

Presently he calls for a Lyft, and the two lovers stand together on the sidewalk while he tells her how he dreads the coming day, which will keep them apart; then he greets his driver and rides away. The lady watches him go, and this moment of parting will remain among her most charming memories. Indeed, one's attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.

When he neglects to make contact the following day, fails to respond to the lady’s cleverly worded and widely vetted missive, never pursues a subsequent assignation, but insists on viewing every Instagram story the lady posts for the foreseeable future—one really begins to hate him.

*

Chris Daley’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light Magazine, The Collagist, Alta: Journal of Alta California, Los Angeles Review of Books, Unfortunately Literary Magazine, and other venues. She considers this cover essay to be a companion to her essay “How to Love Los Angeles,” previously published in Angels Flight • literary west. One can follow Chris on most platforms at @escapegrace.