Advent 2021, Dec 23, Will Slattery: Merry Christmas from Engels' Right Honorable Hedgehog

 

After Anne Carson's "Merry Christmas from Hegel"

It was another pandemic year when I found myself again bitter over healthcare housing climate and all manner of woes & catastrophes for which I am frankly too dour-minded and numerically illiterate to fantasize or conceive human solutions. I lived down south in the lower desert but drove alone up to Pinetop high in the White Mountains. Although alone I thought of many distant friends, all of whom I am terrible at keeping up with and all of whom insist they do not mind how terrible I am at keeping up. I hit my 30s, grew a mustache, and mostly lost my ability to maintain regular correspondence with anyone or anything. Third day of Fall Break I was sitting amid new and early snow on a cabin’s deck, reading a number of things by or about Marx. You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot of Marxian theory or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood him to be saying that human nature and human activity, alongside all the wild customs and conventions they produce, are not pre-determined grooves we all slot into but rather very malleable things which change, mutate, evolve, diverge, converge, recombine, and tease themselves out dynamically in relation to social conditions. New social conditions produce new ways of being in the world, a thing most of the arcane, grouchy types who describe themselves as Marxian refer to as “historical materialism”. I was comforted by this notion that our human conditions are malleable in large part because I experience a great deal of regular dread about & discomfort with my own condition in the world. I put on big boots and coat and went out to try and walk through the snow. Snow walking poses  difficulty for me, a Texan-turned-Arizonan who has spent fewer than 3 total weeks of his life in or around the stuff, and I nearly fell down several times, but I soon found a rhythm and left the row of cabins behind, marching deeper into the vast swathe of Forest Service land in which I seemed to be the only one out. Gnarled gray-green poles of pine stretched up and up while distant flashes of pencil-skinny aspen blew about in the cold with such force I thought the thin white columns might snap apart and fling themselves down into the still deepening carpet of snow underfoot. I tried to think about historical materialism & my lonesome relation to it but instead all my mind gave up was a brief biographical anecdote, the jocular fact of Engels’ pet hedgehog. The hedgehog, a recurring character in Engels’ correspondence with his dear friend Marx, was referred to with loving pomp by the latter as Right Honorable Hedgehog. Engels himself took great pleasure in occasionally getting Right Honorable Hedgehog drunk on small amounts of alcohol whenever he threw a party, and while I cannot endorse this line of behavior I understand the impulse, find it amusing, and would almost certainly have attempted it were I too a 19th Century hedgehog owner. I recalled also the fact of a dear friend’s energetic but foolish cat, named Corduroy, on whom the friend and I once bestowed the title Lieutenant. After that we updated Lt. Corduroy’s rank upwards or downwards in accordance with how amusing or annoying we found him at any given time. As I walked through the snow Lt. Corduroy and Right Honorable Hedgehog jostled together in my mind, and I realized that Marx and Engels can be thought of straightforwardly, amiably, as bros, as bros with banter and shenanigans, as not that different from my friend and I, though perhaps a little better at keeping in touch, and this amusing insight changed my entire orientation towards the day spilling out around me. I no longer saw myself as a lonesome Texan trudging alone through whistle-cold pines, and I saw instead, with joy, the edge of the Colorado Plateau I traipsed along as a giant cake decked out in white icing and tall green candles. All of this has rather little to do with historical materialism, but if I had not read Marxian theory so moodily in the first place that day I might never have worked myself up into marching out into the snow. Merry Christmas from Marx, Engels, and Right Honorable Hedgehog.

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Will Slattery helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on occasion: @wjaslattery.

Advent 2021, Dec 22: Ander Monson: 150 Random Things About Me Too

   

After Matias Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too 

*

          I

1. I should say up front I wrote this while my daughter was at karate.
2. I dislike writing longhand but it was all I had so I went for it.
3. I’m already uncomfortable about how I feature prominently in this story about my life, as I always seem to.
4. I’ve been feeling lately like my introduction to Renee Gladman was the wrong one, or perhaps just at the wrong time.
5. All of a sudden Gladman is popping up in everything good I’m reading which usually means I need to reencounter her.
6. The issue with longhand at night in the car during karate is that I’m writing into shadow, the car light being blocked out by my hand as I write toward the right margin.
7. I don’t like not being able to see what I’m writing. It’s a control thing I suppose.
8. I’m worried about _________.
9. Really I’m worried about _________.
10. But really my worry is about myself.
11. There's a lot I'm not going to tell you about my family situation.
12. At least not publicly.
13. You can read my other essays for more of that. Or other writers for even more. I'm not your go-to for that kind of material, at least not at this point in the essay!
14. Let me say I have a lot of voicemails saved on my phone from _________, so many that I keep getting notifications that my voicemail box is nearly full. They're pretty wild.
15. I mean isn't it weird that a voicemail box can be full in this era of unlimited cloud storage?
16. When I had a digital answering machine in college and after, people often left me messages there.
17. They’ve now been deleted for years, but I wish I still had them. 
18. It’s amazing how permanent an answering machine message seemed then, but, the digital one especially, if it lost power for a moment it erased. 
19. Didn’t it?
20. I mean, it must have had a battery backup I'm pretty sure, but when the battery ran down it would just die out, and all those messages would die with it. 
21. It made it tricky to move the machine. I don't remember how many hours you had of battery power, but if it didn't get connected again to power, it would erase.
22. Actually maybe it'd be better if everything did this so we didn't have to be bound to them.
23. I don’t like beginning with _________ especially when they've made demands that I don't write about them.
24. This is a demand _________ cannot of course make.
25. Also demanding that I not write about _________ only makes me want to write about _________ more.
    
    
    II
    
    
26. I should tell you up front I borrowed this form.
27. I mean what form isn't borrowed, but this one's directly borrowed from Matias Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too.
28. I think about his book often.
29. Viegener borrowed his form too.
30. It's a book made from a Facebook meme (list 25 random things about you and tag x # of friends) repeated to exhaustion.
31. He did that once, then did it again, then 98 more times, and boom he had a book.
32. It's more complicated than that, though, obviously.
33. But the iterative process starts to pull things out of you that you wouldn't otherwise have written about.
34. Like _________
35. Like how _________ is not a benign presence in my life. 
36. Like don't tell me to not write about you. Like once _________ told me to write about _________, but didn't like the way I wrote about them.
37. Obviously.
38. Like if you don’t want a writer to write about you being an asshole, don’t be an asshole is what I want to tell _________, but I also don’t want to talk to _________ at all.
39. After I switched pens writing this got easier.
40. It’s because my other pen was dying that I really was having to push hard to make a mark.
41. I really dislike when a pen seems to still have ink—you can see it in the cartridge or whatever you call it—it’s definitely not empty—but stops writing, or takes a painful amount of pressure to get anything down.
42. [Joke about erectile dysfunction]
43. [Very Thalia Field from her newest book]
44. Pump bottles of lotion where you can’t get the last 20% out drive me NUTS for the same reason.
45. Every bottle feels like I’m being had by the capitalist machine—just a little bit, I know, but it hurts.
46. This is not a metaphor for _________, but due to their proximity in this essay they become at least a little bit intertwined.
47. I write too much about thaumatropes, which I’m now obliged to explain.
48. A thaumatrope is a two-sided disc or card on a string or stick, with two separate images on each side, and when spun, they appear superimposed.
49. Spun, a bird and an empty cage become a bird in a cage.
50. It’s amazing how easily our minds can be tricked, or perform this trick.
    
    
    III
    
    
51. You see anything can be superimposed with anything by proximity and repetition.
52. The car door next to me just opened and out poured a cloud of cigarette smoke. 
53. It’s awful. 
54. I hate smoke.
55. Does anyone like smoke? Do smokers?
56. But I love fire. So I mean I hate cigarette smoke. Smoking them and the smoke it produces.
57. I’m choking on it some as I write.
58. The other car on my right is rattling off a combination of facts—personal and not: Aaron Rodgers got Covid; another NFL guy whose name I missed drove drunk and hit and killed a girl and also her dog. And so on.
59. One function of writing these like this is that some of the interesting facts come in from the world unbidden. 
60. You can’t even keep them out, or at least I’m not trying to.
61. It’s like that other Thalia Field essay.
62. I think about it a lot but I haven’t reread it recently.
63. I do love a steno book.
64. I particularly love this brand in particular; it reads on the front STENO and then it reads NOTES.
65. Do they know that these two words are anagrams? I hope so.
66. As a result I keep buying more. 
67. They are otherwise unfancy steno pads. 
68. The woman in the car on the right is listening to something very derivative of Prince.
69. Possibly it is Prince; I just can’t hear it well enough to tell.
70. Prince rules. This is not a surprising fact.
71. There’s too much noise to make out the signal clearly. 
72. But man, the karate parents are a piece of work. 
73. I like to think of these hours of downtime as opportunities for encounter or intimacy, but fuck, sometimes I really don’t want to encounter much of the world.
74. They are happy to encounter me, however. Last time I heard this woman just screaming at her 7-year-old.
75. That was brutal, not just the screaming, but the not caring that anybody could hear. I was just sitting in my car listening, unsure what, if anything to do.
    
    
    IV
    
    
76. I guess I put it in here is what I did. It was a fact. It is a fact. It remains a fact.
77. That’s doing something.
78. All parents are pieces of work. We just don’t say it too loudly.
79. We shouldn’t say it too loudly. It’s hard work being a parent.
80. I used to find it tedious when people wrote about their kids. Why?
81. I think it was just a pose; me flexing on something to myself for reasons.
82. I remember a panel at AWP some years back discussing this very issue. I felt some unease when a poet acknowledged that her young kids couldn’t consent to showing up in her work. 
83. I mean, I wouldn’t particularly like—I don’t think—showing up in someone else’s work.
84. Some people like any kind of attention.
85. Evelyn Waugh said you could do what you wanted writing real people in stories. His secret was to represent them however he wanted; he just also added that they were great in bed. They never complained, he says.
86. This doesn’t work so well when it comes to one’s family.
87. I took a lot of notes earlier listening to Lucy Corin talk this morning in MFA Colloquium and want to include some here. 
88. This is not really a random fact. 
89. This is the lie of the title. 
90. What's random, really? We want a little of the illusion of randomness but not the real thing. 
91. The mind couldn't come up with a truly random fact even if it wanted to.
92. Same for Viegener. What makes the book work is how his mind starts developing these different threads.
93. And those build narratively.
94. Content warning: sad stuff about the death of his dog.
95. And then a lot of good stuff about Kathy Acker too.
96. That's what also makes the book good: it has real meat.
97. Maybe unlike this one.
98. Here's a random fact though: around the time I first watched Tron (which is still great) as a kid, I came up with a name for the act of digitally scanning an item (or a person) and then recomposing that scan as a material body, which they kind of do in the movie: omnigrating.
99. I still think it’s a good name.
100. The movie I think just calls it digitizing. The central difference is that now of course digitizing just means rendering analog data as digital. Not effectively disintegrating and then reintegrating something digitally (and then potentially back to analog).
     
     
     V
     
     
101. Tron was a Disney movie. It’s easy to forget how many really intense and cool movies Disney made before they got Disneyfied. I’d also recommend The Black Hole which is really dark and weird, with the exception of the dumb robots. 
102. It’s got a really batshit ending, which was batshit then and is definitely batshit now.
103. I’ve spent so much of my life with digital media I forget sometimes that it’s really not possible to get everything analog in digital form. That you’re always stripping something out when you encode or digitize it.
104. I’m not a big dork for lossless compression on my music; that’s for people with a lot more means and/or better ears than me.
105. But a digital text is not the same. An mp3 just isn’t the same as a track on a vinyl record or even the unloved medium of the CD.
106. The reason our voices still sound weird on phones is because phones strip out most of the high and low frequencies—which aren’t that important, I guess, for understandability—to make the resulting data much smaller.
107. So those voicemails that got left are at best a diminished record of what was really said by a human body.
108. As humans we’re so centered on our own limitations—the frequencies we can hear and the wavelengths we can see—it took elephant researchers hundreds of years to figure out that elephants actually communicate with each other across large distances with very low frequency sounds. We just can’t hear them, so we assume they don’t matter or exist.
109. Lucy Corin: “I collected things from the world…I’d try to collect them and keep the good things and bring them into the book.”
110. Some of those good things are sentences. Good sentences are maybe among the very best things I can think of.
111. Kate Bernheimer: “Part of the process of writing a novel is figuring out how the disparate parts go together.”
112. One of the things I loved about Lucy Corin’s talk was how much it collided with my thinking about collections and how they inform or come together into books (or essays).
113. This kind of list project is self-evidently granular: a collection.
114. It’s not easy to decide what constitutes a discrete item on these lists; I think I’m probably overflowing from one random thing into the next a lot more often than I think I am.
115. I mean, when I shift directions, from the personal to the aesthetic, they feel somewhat more disparate, but because they’re scavenged from interior and exterior by the same I we still end up following it down to the same root.
116. I’m going to try to do one of these lists that’s more random, or at least swerves more between the items.
117. I do think writing is essentially collection. I actually wrote a whole chapter on this for a forthcoming guide to writing that I think is being published first in Australia. 
118. Really I should have put my money where my mouth was and had that whole chapter be collaged.
119. Walk the walk, motherfucker!
120. Like Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Anxiety of Influence” or David Shields’ bumper sticker essay.
121. All these boys all doing their fine-ass literary tricks!
122. Maybe there's something to just doing someone else's literary tricks.
123. Give up the anxiety of influence: just let the influence influence, dude.
124. That's what influences are supposed to do.
125. Go buy Viegener's book then while we're talking about it.
     
     
     VI
     
     
126. I figured out this week that one of my advanced fiction workshop students clearly did not write the story she turned in for workshop.
127. Why, for instance, was a white 24 year old in Arizona setting her folk tale, clearly indebted to a tradition of African folk tales, in Rwanda, a place that she almost certainly had never been and probably—I’m guessing here—could not identify on a map?
128. You know, I should ask her to do that in person and see what happens.
129. I was trying to figure out how to talk about the story in class—at the least we’d have to get into some shit about cultural appropriation which is complicated to discuss with UGs, who just want RULES about what’s allowed and what’s not.
130. There are of course no hard rules to anything in art. It’s what you can make work. It’s what you can get away with. You’re always in conversation with the readers of your time. 
131. It can be frustrating to have to be in conversation with the readers of our time.
132. Twitter accelerates this process quite a bit.
133. (I do like Twitter, but it makes me tired.)
134. Why put that in parentheses? In a random list, aren’t all of these kind of in parentheses, each seemingly inflecting the previous item? Aren’t they all delivered sotto voce?
135. But the more I thought about it the less it made sense my student wrote the story at all. It didn’t sound anything like her other work. 
136. It was probably plagiarized, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I asked Kate Bernheimer, since fairy and folk tales are her territory, and I thought maybe it had been composed for one of her classes? That might explain things a bit.
137. She couldn’t find it anywhere either, and had never had the student in class, but was also increasingly convinced there was no way my student wrote this story. 
138. I mean, it’s not that a white girl from Arizona can’t write into and out of an African folk tale tradition, but it’s pretty unlikely, especially considering her other work.
139. The story in question is at least on the surface level in the tradition of African folk tales about Ogres, is set in Kigali, and is really committed to its African names, but at no point is it obvious why it’s set in Rwanda.
140. A lot of the names don’t really make sense, as Kate pointed out: they’re African, but not Rwandan, and not routinely anything, really: kind of a mishmash of African and kinda African names. The story also fell apart the more we read it. 
141. I think Kate and I both enjoyed playing detective. (Detective is definitely fun to play.)
142. I asked my student what was the germination of this story, asked her for some more context around its composition or idea, if just to better be able to angle the workshop conversation so that it would be useful to her (and not just her getting torched for cultural appropriation and general bad writing by students she’d already pissed off).
143. She wrote me a note back saying some blah blah blah and right below the note she wrote was another note, evidently pasted in from another email from obviously the original author of the story, someone who presumably essay-milled this story out, probably, if I had to guess, someone of African descent, telling her “here’s what you tell your professor,” colon, then telling me what my student had just told me above.
144. I mean my student kept that note in the email she sent me by way of explanation. 
145. How dumb can you be? The answer is pretty dumb. Perhaps not unrelated, this student is also “one of those Covid skeptics” and someone who announced to my class she’d had a positive Covid test and then in the same class took her mask off to sneeze. This went over poorly with my students. 
146. I haven’t decided what to do about this student yet. 
147. Up next week my students are writing cover stories already, so we’ll be talking about originality and appropriation either way.
148. It’s academic dishonesty for sure, and pretty much a slam dunk if I want to bother to pursue it. (Do I want to bother? I’m not sure how much it’s worth my time.) She missed class today for reasons that I also have no reason to believe are real, but wants to be there for her workshop of this story next week. 
149. I think I’m going to invite her to workshop it, but only if her collaborator, the actual author, can also be present (if just on zoom) as the artistic force behind the story to answer questions and get feedback on it, and if both of them allow me to record the workshop conversation, and if Kate can also be present as an Appropriation Expert (which she is, and also part of the forensic team investigating this matter), and if both she and her collaborator allow Kate and I to collaboratively write an essay about appropriation and composition in fiction using them and their really bad story “written” for my workshop as a primary source. 
150. We’ll offer them full credit as coauthors if they want to do it, but I think we all know what the answer to this question will be.

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I'm not sure if a borrowed form (like The Malcontent, I don't love the term hermit crab for this kind of writing) is a cover or not. 

In many ways I don't think it is. But when the form, like Viegener's, is so procedural and essential to how the project thinks and works I think using it gets pretty close to a cover, even if the product ends up being quite a bit different. 

I assigned some of 2500 Random Things About Me Too to my grad workshop this semester, and of course we practiced doing the thing. One or two of us, myself included, found it really useful and oddly freeing to use. So we kept on writing them. Or I did anyhow. I'm over 500 at this point. The more I kept writing them the more I started to feel indebted. To Viegener yes, but also to whoever came up with this Facebook meme. I've never been on Facebook so it's still a novel form to me. And to Joe Brainard, whose iterative work feeds into Viegener's. 

Even though my life is way different from Viegener's, the activity of doing the same thing over and over and over gave me a good sense of its freedoms and limitations. Each list has to have some of its own energy and integrity. Each needs to throw a ball or two in the air that gets caught by the end of that 25. Then each list also needs to throw some balls in the air that get caught in a subsequent list. Each list can also pick up some of the balls previously thrown and still hanging somewhere int he air. This is how the mind works, after all. Viegener's book ends up being more narrative, more thoughtful, and more powerful than mine is so far, but then again I'm only a fifth as deep as he was. 

I wrote these lists above a few weeks back (you'll see some news items from November in there) and reproduced them without too much editing. I did make some redactions and delete a few items, trim others, adding more, riffing longer on Viegener for you, the Essay Daily reader. But I tried to keep as much as possible of the original movement of the mind that appeared here so that the improvisatory action of the drafting felt alive. That felt true to Viegener's book, which he claims was not revised very much at all. That may be a lie. I feel like it has to be, but then if you give a really thoughtful and lively mind a toy like this meme thing to do, it's already doing a lot of work before he writes each item on the list, so maybe not. Maybe that's the key takeaway: that the toy (really it's a tool: I don't want to denigrate what we're up to here) is as good as the mind that uses it. The only way to find out is to try it. So give it a go in 2022 and see if it opens things up for you?

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Ander Monson's next book is Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession. Graywolf will publish it in September 2022.

Advent 2021, Dec 21 Patrick Madden: On a Pleasing Encounter without a Pickpocket

after Louise Imogen Guiney's "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket"

"It struck me that the sweet symmetry of the thing ought not to be spoiled; that I was serving a new use and approximating a new experience; that it would be a stroke of genius, in short, almost equal to the king pickpocket's own, to make love to the inevitable."

This essay is a cover in the prewriting primarily, in the doing more than in the reporting. In other words, I may not talk the talk, but I did walk the walk. (Yes, I am happy with this slight inversion of the cliched phrase, but not proud. I'm sure this particular reversal has been done before ["Woo hoo hoo!" sing the Barenaked Ladies in their song attesting to this truth, and I always imagine them performing on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, with David Duchovny accompanying on a shaker-egg (more or less) in time and singing along]. But perhaps a pilgrimage to that "lonely street corner [still] not adorned by a gas-lamp" is a thing unique in the footnotes of the annals of literary history.

An explanation is in order. I was attending the AWP Conference (weren't we all?) in Boston in March of 2013 (a month before the Marathon bombings, as it turned out, and in the same vicinity). The Hynes Convention Center where it was held was only a few blocks away from the corner immortalized in Louise Imogen Guiney's lamentably unknown essay "On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket." I knew this not from the essay itself, which is appropriately vague about its exact location, but from a letter the author wrote the day after the fateful titular event (which, felicitously, occurred exactly 129 years before today, on December 21, 1892). There, writing to her friend Sonny Day, whom she owed money (which she could no longer repay, now that she'd been robbed), she pinpoints the location as "Berkeley St at the corner of Chandler St, between the grain elevator and the vacant lots."

I was off, in the keen winter air, toward who knew what, but with a fire of enthusiasm for the comewhatmay. Not a block from the center, striding confidently off a curb, I stepped in a mound of what I thought was snow, and found myself shin-deep in slush, liquid freeze slurping over the edge of my boot and sliding in, soaking my sock. "Propitious!" I thought, and kept on marching toward destiny.

Twenty-odd minutes of purposeful striding, with appropriate pauses for automobiles and zigs and zags for subsequent mounds, and I had arrived. Five-story buildings met the sidewalk on each corner, to my right a smattering of street-level shops, to my left nondescript walls of stone and glass. No granary, no vacant lots, no "coal-sheds and broken tins" anywhere in sight. Nor any people. Nonetheless, I strategically placed a dollar in my left jacket pocket. I crossed on the WALK light. Wandered around, waiting for someone, anyone. There was no one. It was too cold. Perhaps too early. I would not be pickpocketed today.

Unless...I tugged at the dollar (yes, it occurred to me that I was being far too cheap in my experiment, but the budget for essays had recently been cut), pulling it half out of my pocket. If no "tiger-lily of the genus 'tough'" were available to help me fulfil my mission, perhaps the whipping wind would. I peeked out from the shelter of a windward edifice and stepped into the gusts.

Really!? I'm subjecting myself to this suffering so I can say that the wind took my dollar? And of course, it didn't, either. The bill remained firmly in the pocket, delicately stirring but unremoved by the buffetings. I want to say that I was always self-aware enough to laugh at the ridiculousness of my quest, but especially once, in the absence of the possibility of a "real" pickpocketing, I turned mystical. I mean, how would I have written that? And what was this whole enterprise, anyway? Homage to a beloved essayist? Essayistic thrill-seeking? A record of my contemporaneous sensations? I had begun the day expecting something to work out, as it always does, creditable or the reverse, and if "nothing had happened" as yet, perhaps it would. Or it wouldn't. I suspected that the answer to this dilemma lay not so much in the external world, but in my openness to it, my perceptiveness and willingness to understand and to connect. I might trust, still, that something would become clear, or that I would make things clear. That things would work out. That the universe would provide.

To the vacant air I sang out my silliness, then decided to return the way I had come.

All the way I walked (squish, step, squish, step; my left foot still wet and cold) with the abstracted Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, whom I knew only in the vaguest sense, but whom I expected might have some wisdom for me were I to consult him. I have done so now, at long last, with the help of an interpreter, George Long:

"To be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature." (II.16)

"Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around." (II.7)

"Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment." (II.17)

"Either it is a well-arranged universe or a chaos huddled together, but still a universe." (IV.27)

That afternoon, I attended conference panels asserting the importance of essays that essay, celebrating essays that flash (into, out of, around existence), that think on themselves self-referentially. Other than my still-soaked sock and shriveled toes, there was no record, were no lasting effects from my excursion. The thousands of people milling about me were completely unaffected by my pilgrimage. No matter.

"Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe." (IV.23)

Later that evening, on my way to who remembers where, I gave the dollar to a stranger singing in the cold on another street corner, less lonely, quite adorned (still no gas lamp). The next day, upon retrieving a bag of chips from a vending machine and scooping up my change, I discovered four quarters too many. When I returned to my office the next Monday I found, pinned to the cork board outside my door, a crumpled dollar bill.

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Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

Advent 2021, Dec 20, Marcia Aldrich: Men and Marriage and Me

After Sei Shônagon’s The Pillow Book

They take the last ice cube and don’t refill the tray.

Is a run-on sentence;

They leave their glasses, shoes, and belts around the house for the imaginary maid to pick up.

Is a life-long lesson in the definition of terms;

They do not eat leftovers.

Is an ode to ringtones, Freud, and the fullness of safety;

They walk out of the kitchen without turning off the burner.

Is a creation myth;

They do not put napkins in the wash even when they blow their noses with them.

Is someone insistently asking what you are thinking about;

They find houseplants an affront and knock them over as often as possible.

Is a recipe for lingering doubts and insomnia;

They do not read washing instructions. They do not sort. They dry everything on sturdy.

Is a zone of mercy;

They trim their beards over the sink and leave the hair.

Is a flow chart for the end of hope;

They do not empty the trash even when overflowing. They just keep pushing more in.

Is a museum piece with an installed couple sitting behind thick protective glass;

They spill something and rub it with their shoe into the carpet. 

Is walking on a beach littered with broken shells;

They are incapable of closing things they’ve opened—a drawer, a window, an argument.

Is the fruitless search for the unbroken one;

They do not send birthday cards or presents. They do not thank people.

Is a thin sheet of flame folding in upon itself;

They think flowers are weeds.

Is the late sky and the morning air;

They put silverware crusted with food into the dishwasher where it hardens into rust.

Is the thing before and the thing after and the pause in-between;

They wait until the grass is too long and wet to cut, and break the mower.

Is what we talk about when we’re not talking about love;

They break things. Little remains whole in their presence.

Is a horse entering a well-lit room;

They pretend they can’t hear you when asked a simple question.

Is a sestina using these six words: blind, disappear, order, again, tears, once;

When you think of them, words like shovel, wrench, door-stopper, brick come to mind.

Is thinner than the night before;

They act as if they were born from the mouth of a river.

Is the same piece of luggage come around and round on the conveyer belt;

They don’t say what you need to hear.

Is a tiny theater where plays a tragedy that begins and ends the same way each time;

They believe most women are highly sensitive like it is a disease.

Is the stain on silence;

They are like bruises on the back of a woman’s legs.

Is a four- volume meditation on the color beige;

They do not hear what isn’t being said.

Is when you know less than you knew before;

They are poor at waiting and even worse at following.

Is an insistence on we;

They will not know what you want even when you tell them.

Is a person saying I really do not understand;

They threaten to quit you many times, but they never do.

Is the sweet smell of daffodils in the beginning, and the smell of earth at the end. 

*

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 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)

*

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—

*

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)

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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.

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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?

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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.