Neil Serven

The store lifted away from us like a bell jar. The other players took their places on the field: tall, silent Ted Troy at first base, Peppy Gosselin at shortstop, Pudge Green in center field. As the players took shape, the racks of pink and blue dresses, the women’s and children’s clothes, fresh as sunshine, smelling of ironing and starch, rose like mist. The grass was emerald-green, measled with dandelions.

I learned of the deaths of W. P. Kinsella and Edward Albee within ten minutes of each other on Friday. Two careful writers who took the human psyche to widely disparate places.

Kinsella, of course, was known for his magical realist baseball fiction, especially Shoeless Joe, the novel that formed the basis of Field of Dreams. The reclusive Sixties author played in the film by James Earl Jones, Terrence Mann, is in the book the real-life reclusive author  J. D. Salinger, who was still very much alive when Kinsella used him as a character in the book. As a deeper homage, the name “Ray Kinsella” was borrowed from the main character in Salinger’s story “A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist At All.”

I read Kinsella in my early twenties, shortly after I read Salinger for the first time. Kinsella was Canadian, but Shoeless Joe was not his only baseball fiction set in Iowa. A fictional town called Onamota is the setting for many stories. He seemed to have had a preference for the Chicago teams. The 1919 Black Sox, of course, figure prominently in Shoeless Joe, and the legendary double-play combination of rhyme, (Joe) Tinker to (Johnny) Evers to (Frank) Chance, appear in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

In “K Mart,” included in the collection Go the Distance (1988), friends reuniting for the funeral of a woman, whom the narrator loved and treated poorly, visit the department store that now stands where their baseball field used to be. Written with simplistic grace, it’s a comical ending to a sad story that, like much of Kinsella’s fiction, celebrates the timelessness of the sport, the reliability of its structure, and the forgiveness of its myth.

They were out there, ducking in and out of rec.music.rem to show off their pistol wits as artfully as the white-dot VAX graphics allowed. He imagined, from how they strung together eloquent sentences or tucked in extensive literary .sigs, that they were English majors like he was, only they blew off their classes to read Baldwin, Nabokov, and Bertrand Russell in paperbacks with their spines broken. They spun hard-to-find seven-inch vinyl at their campus radio stations. They had outsized personas and carried pocket handkerchiefs and drank whiskey in heavy glasses and dashed off verse on cocktail napkins. They got no joy from rage. They didn’t hook up, they made love.

I’m excited to have a new story, “The Gazers,” at Pine Hills Review today. Set in the mid-1990s at a college campus, it might be the most self-indulgent story I have ever written, as it touches upon pretty much every point of angst that I could remember from my days as a spoiled college brat. I’m grateful to Daniel Nester for publishing it.

Another room at the W Boston, approximately 20 miles from Concord, and another attempt to enlighten guests with a meditation from Henry David via a jute shade. This one is from Walden (1854), to add to last year’s sampling from The Maine Woods. Our room on the 6th floor had no views of any lakes. I am now morbidly curious how many different works in the Thoreau canon are quoted throughout the rooms; if Emerson gets any love; or if they dared cut a few from Civil Disobedience.

(This is not a complete list. I’ve also been reading the Complete Novels of Jean Rhys, which I will write about as a whole, once I’m finished.)

Later the Same Day, Grace Paley. This collection was given to me some 20 years ago by the nice woman who was my internship supervisor. She was an ex-nurse who had moved into a communications and development role for the VNA. She gave me the book because she knew I was an English major and had ideas of becoming a writer. After enjoying the stories of Lucia Berlin, to whom Paley is frequently compared, I decided to crack open the delicate yellowed pages of Later the Same Day.

Paley’s characters, like those of Berlin, operate under a complicated moral code with a conniving self-interest that has evolved to adapt to their uncooperative surroundings. That’s what happens in “Anxiety,” when a woman calls out from her apartment window to criticize a young father for scolding his child:

Let’s not go too far, said the young father. She was jumping around on my poor back and hollering oink oink.

When were you angriest—when she wiggled and jumped or when she said oink?

He scratched his wonderful head of dark well-cut hair. I guess when she said oink.

Have you ever said oink oink? Think carefully. Years ago, perhaps?

In “Somewhere Else,” we follow an American tour group in China. Their travel guide accuses them of taking photographs of the peasants without permission. “We hoped we were not about to suffer socialist injustice,” Paley’s narrator says, “because we loved socialism.” They put their cameras away, reluctantly: “Still, I know that any non-Hispanic white man with a camera looks like a narc.”

Many of the stories revisit the same character, the somewhat oxymoronically named Faith Darwin, who appeared in two of Paley’s earlier books, The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Faith is divorced (her ex-husband is an explorer), a mother of two, a New Yorker, and an observer informed by her anxieties regarding these things.

The business of the domestic, its errand-based rituals and fires (especially those of other people) to put out, occupy the pages of Paley’s fiction, much like Berlin. This is no more apparent than in “Friends,” a story of visiting an older friend with cancer. They see her wobbling, bumping around in her room, steadying herself. Selena’s daughter, present in photos in her room, has died. Deferring a question about her own son, Faith narrates, “It was only politeness, I think, not to pour my boy’s light, noisy face into that dark afternoon.” Then, as the visiting friends set to leave their ailing friend, guiltily and helplessly: “We had a long journey ahead of us and had expected a little more comforting before we set off.”

You Are Having a Good Time, Amie Barrodale. Picked up this new collection on a whim at Longfellow’s Books in Portland, Maine, after happening to read a couple of positive tweets about it that morning. The relationships in You Are Having a Good Time are deliciously complicated, with lines many times crossed and stepped over; there is enough bad behavior to give off a very bright Mary Gaitskill vibe (and Gaitskill gives a blurb on the back on the book). A common thread is women seeking the wrong answers from, or being led astray by, male authority figures who do not have their best interests at heart. “Frank Advice for Fat Women” is as audacious (in the sense of sheer audacity) as its title suggests: a mother ostensibly concerned with her daughter’s depression and weight gain sets her up with a therapist as a way of spying on her, and the doctor leverages each one against the other as a way of exerting control over both.

There is also some loose interconnectedness at play. In the second story, “Animals,” an actress works under a demanding and abusive director, to whom she is attracted, on a film called “The Imp”; “The Imp” also happens to be the title of the third story, about a failing marriage. And while impishness suggests a playful innocence that drags one away from the seriousness of life’s decisions (echoed in the book’s title), there is also the suggestion of forces of destruction at work for the better, much like the damage caused by a sprite or gnome.

They Could Live With Themselves, Jodi Paloni. I know Paloni from her work with the Brattleboro Literary Festival and purchased her book after hearing her read at World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield. This collection of eleven linked stories are set in the fictional town of Stark Run, Vermont, and much like Karl Taro Greenfeld’s Triburbia, features connected characters weaving in and out of each story, but with a small-town sensibility appropriate for New England. Among them are art teacher Meredith; her former student, Sky, who lingers in the neighborhood and gets paid for odd jobs; grocery store manager Wren; and Molly, Sky’s mother, who is best friends with Wren.

The filaments of the web are sketched in, and as characters grapple with broken dreams and cluttered pasts, and the younger characters like Sky seek paths to meaningful futures, a complex portrait of Stark Run and its limitations—both social and geographic—are finely rendered. If there is an emotional center to the book, it might reside in Meredith, whose relationship to Sky is tense, visceral, and complicated and who is ambivalent about settling in Stark Run after a career as a New York artist:

He picked up the top sheet from the pile of the figure sketches she had made earlier in the week and appeared to be reading the notes in the margins, measurements and letter codes about points and angles that only she could decipher. She bit a flap of skin from a thin blister on her index finger, nervous about his actual body, located so near to the wire figures, nervous he’d call her out.

…

He stretched his arm in a gesture that swept the space above the pile of jumbled wire forms. “All of this looks super cool.”

He didn’t seem to realize they were miniatures of him, but still, Meredith felt odd to have him probing her design process. Her work hadn’t always been so private, but now it came out of loss, a study of how one lives in a body and then leaves a body.

Harpur Palate, Summer & Fall 2015. This issue includes the winner of the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction, “Hourglass” by Sam Keck Scott, about a young man recalling the troublesome actions of his late older brother. While I enjoyed the issue, I am at a loss to explain why the pieces were arranged alphabetically by author. This seems a random and careless way to present a journal. It means that Scott’s piece doesn’t appear until two-thirds of the way through the issue, and even though the pages are highlighted with a green border stripe, it violates the principle of putting a store’s best merchandise where it can be found.

Carrie Messenger’s essay “My Soviet Shadow” is a fascinating account of the author’s being selected, with a group of classmates, to appear on a Russian quiz show about a year before the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian contestants with which they are paired as teammates are regulars on the show, and it is apparent that there is a cultural contrast being sold as part of the deal: “These Russians are our essences, what we would be if you strip away our accessories, our slang, our pop music, our jeans, our ironies.” The American kids are taken under the wings of the Russian parents; the kids swap mix tapes; and friendships take time to build as they hop over the language barrier, riddled with codes and sarcasm that doesn’t translate:

Tanya keeps making everyone laugh in Russian, but tells me she can’t translate it. It’s the fundamental problem of my building a friendship with Tanya—our best selves are rooted in our languages. The parts of ourselves we don’t care about, the parts that say banal, everyday things about weather, asking and answering if we are cold, is what we have to offer each other. What we have to offer each other is kindness. All my interest is in wit. I can’t understand why Tanya would like me if we can’t follow each other into slang.

The loss in translation affects not only relationships, but the decisions of the producers, who make the kids dress in literary-themed costumes and don’t open up the avenues for understanding that Messenger seeks:

The boys are wearing partially unraveling straw hats and overalls with patches. The patches are fresh. They are there not to cover holes, but to create the Huck image. Ilya chews a piece of straw. Scott decides to mirror him. The band is dressed in leather with cowboy hats. The women in the band are wearing leather skirts with square cut out of the pattern. They’ve been given holes to approximate some kind of image of daring cowgirls. Chenel says, “Where did they get the idea that is ever okay fashion?”

The Russian judge with the attitude no longer cares if we don’t understand suffering. He doesn’t see Jim at the heart of the book. The band plays twangy bluegrass for the second dancing competition, the hoe-down. Nobody knows how to dance to it.

I want to talk about the end of Huckleberry Finn, about Huck’s decision to light out to the territory. I’m at an age where I think heading off to the college will be my way to light out. But being in Moscow makes me wonder if there is any territory to go to. Identification is easy—you learn new street names, new food. It’s the big questions that follow you around, history, fate, and suffering.

“Poor devils, you’re going to the crematory.”

He seemed to be telling the truth. Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load – little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it – saw it with my own eyes…those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.)

So this is where we were going. A little farther on was another ditch for adults.
I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare….Soon I should wake with a start, my heart pounding, and find myself back in the bedroom of my childhood, among my books….

My father’s voice drew me from my thoughts:

“It’s a shame….a shame that you couldn’t have gone with your mother….I saw several boys of your age going with their mothers…..”

His voice was terribly sad. I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son.

My forehead was bathed in cold sweat. But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it….

“Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today, anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories…..”

Elie Wiesel found a weapon in the first person singular. I read Night for a history class in eleventh grade. It was the first horror novel I ever read.

In childhood, the humor that results from your actions—making a NO SMOKING sign that looks like NOSMO KING, or singing about the dawnzer lee light instead of the dawn’s early light, or getting burrs stuck in your hair and not wanting to explain why you put them on your head—is very often the result of your best efforts to get along in the world as you understand it. If people laugh, it can step on your dignity a bit. Ramona bore these slights sometimes with reserve and sometimes with indignation.

At The New Yorker, Sarah Larson celebrates Beverly Cleary on the author’s 100th birthday.

Calvin Trillin’s poem in the April 4 issue of The New Yorker, titled “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?,” did not go over well on the Internet. It is a strange attempt at light verse expressing an elder person’s bafflement with modern food trends and a culture that refuses to cooperate with one’s western sensibilities by remaining comfortably static. Trillin is a house name at The New Yorker, and indeed the poem reads like something the magazine would only publish because it refused to turn down one of its own. Defenders say it’s making fun of foodies, but to our sensitive cosmopolitan ears, it doesn’t warp itself enough for satire. It’s racist, the kind of racism we too often ignore because it comes out of the mouths of our uncles, whom we don’t expect to know better. In The New Republic, Timothy Yu writes that the poem “comes out of a long tradition of white writers praising Chinese culture while ignoring Chinese people.”

Another aspect that seems to be generating resentment is Trillin’s use of rhyme, which sounds like something more likely to be found in the older version of The Baffler (“Then respect was a fraction of meagre / For those eaters who’d not eaten Uighur.”)

If there is a place for rhyme in twenty-first century poetry, this piece of crap didn’t do anything to help carve out the real estate. The practice does have its defenders. I think back to the earnest laments of Nicholson Baker, in the voice of his protagonist Paul Chowder, in The Anthologist:

Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We’ve got to face that. And if that’s true, do we want to give drugs so that people won’t weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It’s like chain-smoking—you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a pling, and you want a fring. You propose a plong, and you want a frong. You’re in suspense. You are solving a puzzle.

…

Rhyming in the genius’s version of the crossword puzzle—when it’s good. When it’s bad it’s intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented. But when it’s good, it’s great. It’s no coincidence that Auden was a compulsive doer of crossword puzzles, and a rhymer, and a depressive, and a smoker, and a drinker, and a man who shuffled into Louise Bogan’s memorial service in his bedroom slippers.

A Heart Beating Hard, Lauren Foss Goodman. Heard the author read from this book at Conversations & Connections in Washington, DC, in 2015. A Heart Beating Hard is divided into chapters alternately assigned to “Marge,” “Margie,” and “Marjorie,” and, much like Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, at first it’s not clear whether or not these names refer to the same person, or different people, or aspects of the same person, or different ways the same person is viewed by different people.

So the reader must turn to externalities to make distinctions among the three: we learn about Marjorie through her job as a greeter in a big-box retail store, her conversations with her therapist, Dr. Goodwin, and the people at the fraternal organization where she is a regular and drinks Shirley Temples. Margie, seemingly younger than Marjorie, is in early adolescence and lives in an apartment above her friend Lucy. Our only images of Marge come by way of the drunk stepfather who is doing horrible things to her.

It’s difficult to describe this book in a way that doesn’t reveal its secret, but it’s apparent that Goodman is trying to depict the paths that a life of abuse can take—the compartmentalizations, the memories we return to, the small obsessions. The language effectively conveys the fear, restricting itself to a frightened, internal simplicity:

Lucy did the talking that Margie did not like to do. She knew all the words. Lucy could fit her body into spaces much smaller than where Margie could go. She would lie down low against the wall and squint through the grass and tell Margie what was going on down there, in there. Lucy had all the words and Lucy could see all sorts of things that Margie could not.

There’s a small hat. A very small hat. Like a boy’s hat. And I see a tiny pink dress too. Definitely a small dress, with straps, and a big bottom part, like a ballerina, like a ballerina’s dress. I can see them for sure, Margie. But no small people. I don’t see the small people but I can tell that they’re there. They’re back there, I think. Behind those dandelions, see? The grass is moving a little and I know they’re in there. The boy and the girl, and she doesn’t even have her dress on. They’re naked in there. Do you see, Margie?

Margie held herself up on her elbows and knees and tried to see what Lucy saw.

I don’t see.

You know what they’re doing in there, Margie? Do you know?

I don’t see. I don’t know.

Glaciers, Alexis M. Smith. Glaciers is a slim, exquisite story that achieves a great deal through slightness of style and patient storytelling. It has a young heroine who lives a simple life in Portland, Oregon, where she works at a library. Isabel grew up in Alaska and, at many points in the book, flashes back to her youth.

Isabel is a keen noticer, and there are numerous celebrations of artifacts and preservation: she mends old books at the library, haunts thrift shops, and ruminates over a collection of old photographs. She lives on the top floor of a ninety-year-old house, where her collected antiquities “do not look out of place” but Isabel “realizes that these things were all new, once.” Photographs turn up in the book in other ways, too: the Seattle ferry is full of “the kind of loose-minded travelers who pointed and photographed without really seeing.”

About midway through the book, we find a target toward which to build momentum: that is Spoke, a soldier returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, now an I.T. technician at the library where Isabel works, and with whom she becomes smitten.

The slightness of plot is an asset as it allows a more acute focus on the quirks of the book’s characters, appropriate for a story that seems to fetishize observation. There are moments when Glaciers feels like a mumblecore film, particularly in its insistence on reconciling the lead character’s dream with the interference of minor buzzing realities. In this case, Isabel’s dream is to visit Amsterdam:

Walking home, she thinks Amsterdam must be a lot like Portland. A slick fog of a city in the winter, drenched in itself. In the spring and summer: leafy, undulating green, humming with bicycles, breeze-borne seeds whirling by like tiny white galaxies. And in the early glorious days of fall, she thinks, looking around her, chill mist in the mornings, bright sunshine and halos of gold and amber for every tree.

Parcel, Fall/Winter 2014; Summer 2015. I loved the artwork in these issues, by Chyrum Lambert and Juliana Romano, respectively. The piece “Tampax Pearl Active Soccer Girl” by Meagan Cass eludes classification, speaking in clever, pointed language to the pain of a childhood spent trying to live up to expectations:

Tampax Pearl Active Soccer Girl, have you ever blacked out during a game ,the ninety minutes a blur of rage and fear and red and yellow cards? Did your father tell you you’d played like a bitch? Like a whore? Did he say he was mistaken, he thought you were someone else, a different kind of girl, a golden girl, a magic girl, a girl who was not a girl at all?

At the Hawthorne Diner, eating cheese fries with Debbie Costello, did you admit how you sometimes dreamed of quitting, how the game felt like a too-small aquarium? Did part of you hate the moon that was the pearl that was the ball? One afternoon in Pelham, a week of out of ACL rehab, did you ruin your left knee for good, nothing left for the surgeon to graft? Did relief and dread move through you in waves? Did your whole body flicker and go dark?

Any Deadly Thing, Roy Kesey. Another book picked up from Conversations & Connections. I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Kesey twice. The stories in Any Deadly Thing are unafraid to go places—stories are set in Peru, Uruguay, China, and even a fictional part of what sounds like northern Oceania. While these are not war zones, the pressured environments take their toll on Kesey’s characters, who have a tendency to respond to the stress of being out of their element with contentiousness and aggression. As characters wrestle with their demons, antagonists lurk. In the case of the first story, the deadly things are rattlers:

He killed thirty-one last year. He used to skin the biggest ones and tan the hides, but never really found any use. For a while he kept all the rattles, still has a box up in the rafters somewhere, a hundred at least, maybe five years’ worth. He’s heard there’s dust inside that if it gets in your eyes will blind you, and he wonders if it’s true.

In other stories, like “Wall,” the deadly thing resides inside the soul, demonstrated when a married couple tries to rebound when their anniversary plans go awry in Guatemala. These characters, as do others in the collection, are strapped with a quick rage and astonishing lack of ability to make decisions benefiting the bigger picture.

All That Is, James Salter. This is the third Salter book that I have read, and while it is just as sensual as A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, it is more scattered, seemingly unsure of where its center is. I was astonished to see that it was published only in 2013 and was Salter’s last novel, because the book feels much, much older, with a midcentury aesthetic, employing language of tender patience and amusing things to say about the book publishing industry.

The life it depicts is a full one: Philip Bowman fights the Japanese on an American battleship in World War II, then returns home, goes to college, and begins a career as an editor at a New York publishing house. He marries a woman named Vivian, divorces her, and dips in and out of uncertain love. But the book also follows down the roads of the people in Philip’s life, such as his colleague, Neil Eddins, and his lover, Christine, and her daughter, Anet, who later works for Philip and becomes another of his lovers.

There is a thread of unsettlement running through the book, even though (for the most part) it never leaves New York, and Philip’s career is never threatened. It treats him and the other characters too gently as they shift and adjust their pursuits, but none of them ever seem pleased enough to lock themselves down. Even the title suggests a diminishment: is that all there is?

Willow Springs #77, Spring 2016. A sharp-looking issue, with a new redesign. I really liked James Kimbrell’s poem “Elegy for My Mother’s Ex-Boyfriend,” which remembers a man admired by the young narrator: “Let it be said / that Tim’s year was divided / into two seasons: sneakers / and flip flops.” The image of this heavy, lunking person occupying space and mind is weighted by well-selected, thunking nouns: “…and in / the mornings when I tiptoed / past him on my way / to school, his jowls / fat as a catcher’s mitt, I never cracked / an empty bottle across that space / where his front teeth / rotted out.”

Nick Fuller Goggins has a story called “Honeymoon Bandits” that begins, “Those of us present at the first holdup in January couldn’t let the fact be forgotten.” It’s the story of a Bonnie and Clyde-like couple who robs banks in a small town on Cape Cod, and the fascination that the community develops with them. Their intentions, it turns out, are political: they are environmental activists looking to fund their operations.

There is a delightfully calm distance in the narration, as though we are being told the story by an amused elder historian who has had time the process and put away an event that up front should seem traumatic. It also means we never get too close to the robbers themselves: we never learn their names, and the narrator only identifies them by the eccentricities that remain in his memory:

Once it became clear they weren’t leaving, we took stock of their character. We compared eyewitness accounts, noticing that they dressed sensibly. Heavy flannel shirts, wool caps, mittens, boots: signs that they respected both the winter and themselves. The girl had an athletic build, as though she’d once enjoyed competitive swimming. She did not display any unnecessary skin. Nor did she seem to apply makeup (perhaps her mask provided all the concealer she needed). She wore her dark hair in two braids that fell over her shoulders. She did have a tattoo that peeked out whenever she rolled up her sleeves, but it was modest enough: a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace tendriled around her forearm.

…

The couple wore no jewelry, only matching loops of purple thread on their ring fingers. Recently married—we suspected—saving up for proper rings. Then we laughed, for if anyone could afford genuine wedding bands, it was our Honeymoon Bandits. Yet they kept their word, or at least maintained their appearance of doing so: despite their withdrawals, they wore no glittering rings or fur coats or any such extravagances, a testament to their thrift. We examined how we ourselves might cut back. We urged our husbands to repair broken chairs rather than hauling them to the dump. We asked our wives to rig their sewing machines and mend our torn jackets. We brainstormed new ways to chip away at our credit card payments and took up the old habit of clipping coupons, unable to fathom why we’d ever stopped.

The choice of Cape Cod as a setting is astute—it is both a provincial and transient place that would seem to lock onto strangers rather quickly, and so it’s appropriate for Fuller Goggins to have his characters respond with flattery, amusement, and judgment, as well as the queer pride that small-towners adopt when they have their routines interrupted.

INTERVIEWER

You have a ritualistic way of going about things, don’t you?

HARRISON

It’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it? One night in my cabin I saw a flash of light and thought somebody was entering my driveway. I was so angry that I jumped out of bed and hit my head on the iron chandelier. I heard this horrible howling and yowling and I smashed through the back door to look for the car, but it was just a lightning storm. I was covered with sweat and my nose was distended, and I had long teeth and there was hair all over me. Obviously a little attack of lycanthropy, see? My dog wouldn’t speak to me for two days. Perhaps it was all the anger finally coming out of me because I’d heard a wolf down in the delta, and three days later I saw the wolf right on my two track. Two days later, I dreamed I found the wolf on the road and her back was broken, and I hugged her and she went all the way into me, and I remember thinking humorously in the dream: God, I’ve been trying to lose weight all summer and now I have to carry this she-wolf around in my body. How can I ever hope to lose weight? But she didn’t seem too heavy.

–Jim Harrison (1937-2016), from The Art of Fiction #104, Summer 1988