Neil Serven

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

To prepare for a trip to Iceland—a country noted for, among other things, its literary culture, boasting the greatest number of books published per capita—I picked up a title by the country’s sole Nobel laureate, Halldór Laxness. There are six titles currently in print that have been translated into English (all but one by Magnus Magnusson). The Fish Can Sing (published in 1957 as Brekkukotsannáll, or “Annals of Brekkukot”) seemed one of the more accessible.

Laxness was born Halldór Guðjónsson in 1902 and took his name from Laxnes, the homestead in Mosfellsdalur where he grew up. Lax in Icelandic means ‘salmon’; nes means “cape, promontory, headland.” I am making the educated guess that Laxnes means something along the lines of “salmon cape,” i.e., a port at which salmon is caught. He did not spend his entire life in the country. By the 1920s he was in the United States, living mostly in Hollywood; he spent much of the 1930s in the Soviet Union. By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1955, he was one of Iceland’s most famous and cosmopolitan citizens.

The narrator of the The Fish Can Sing, Álfgrímur, is an adult looking back on his orphaned childhood, living in the fishing village of Brekkukot. His grandfather is a fisherman and it is expected that Álfgrímur will follow in that tradition. Thirty years before the emergence of Björk, the most famous person from Iceland is also a world-famous singer: this time, a male opera singer named Garðar Hólm. When Garðar returns to his homeland, he strikes up a friendship with Álfgrímur, and attempts to cultivate the boy’s talent as a singer in his own right, thereby setting up a tension between the traditions of the homeland and a yearn to set out to test one’s limits.

The Fish Can Sing paints a portrait of a country aware of its smallness and coming to terms with its place in the world at large, and this is conveyed through the village’s ambivalence with which it receives Garðar. The reflective narrative feels apt to the Icelandic saga tradition. It feels as though Laxness wrote the book expecting—perhaps due to sheer dearth of countrymen—that most of the people who would read it would be those who had never lived in Iceland and would seek explanations for why and how things were done. And there is a wryness layered throughout the book, not only to allow the village to celebrate its eccentrics, but also, much like Garrison Keillor’s tales of Woebegone and its residents’ sturdy Lutheran un-apology, to position the tale as a nostalgia of the folly of national youth and parochialism:

The word “love” was never heard in our house either, except if some inebriate or a particularly stupid maidservant from the country happened to recite a verse by a modern poet; and moreover, the vocabulary of poems like these was such that if ever we heard them, cold shivers ran down our spines, and my grandfather would seat himself on his hands, sometimes out on the garden wall, and would grimace and jerk his shoulders and writhe as if he had lice and say, “Tut tut!” and “Really!” On the whole, modern poetry had the same effect on us as canvas being scratched.

Susan Sontag wrote about Halldór Laxness in one of her final essays before she died in 2005, focusing on another novel, Under the Glacier (Kristnihald undir Jökli, 1968), which she credited for its seamless spanning of multiple genres (science fiction, allegory, philosophical, visionary, fantasy) and its positioning as an epical response to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Imagining the exceptional, which is often understood as the miraculous, the magical or the supernatural, is a perennial job of storytelling. One tradition proposes a physical place of entry — a cave or a tunnel or a hole -which leads to a freakish or enchanted kingdom with an alternative normality. In Laxness’s story, a sojourn near Snaefells does not call for the derring-do of a descent, a penetration, since, as Icelanders who inhabit the region know, the glacier itself is the center of the universe. The supernatural — the center — is present on the surface, in the costume of everyday life in a village whose errant pastor has ceased to conduct services or baptize children or bury the dead. Christianity — Iceland’s confession is Evangelical Lutheran — is the name of what is normal, historical, local. (The agricultural Viking island converted to Christianity on a single day at the Althing, the world’s oldest national parliament, in 999.) But what is happening in remote Snaefells is abnormal, cosmic, global.

On the occasion of the death last week of Italian author Umberto Eco, the New York Review of Books shared his 1985 essay on two institutions of American childhood, Krazy Kat and Peanuts.

They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence.

British writer Margaret Forster, who wrote the novel Georgy Girl and collaborated on the screenplay for the 1966 film with Peter Nichols, died on Monday at age 77.

Her New York Times obituary calls Georgy, played by Lynn Redgrave, “a precursor of Bridget Jones … big, plain and saddled with an annoyingly pretty roommate.”

I haven’t read the book, but the film struck me as having deeper moral questions than its swingy London setting and whistly theme song gave it credit for. There is the dark class commentary from the outset–Georgy is disappointed at her parents for settling to work as servants to a millionaire named Leamington, who then selects Georgy as his mistress, to the point of drawing up legal documents, as well as the shadow cast by roommate Meredith’s hedonistic lifestyle. After becoming pregnant, Meredith tells her lover, Jos, that she’s aborted two of his children previously and practically shrugs at the decision to keep the third. There is Georgy, in spite of her parents’ work, essentially volunteering herself as a servant to Jos and Meredith and nanny to their unwanted child, and ending up as the object of Jos’s seduction while Meredith is giving birth.

The behaviors are abominable, and there is no believable love in the story at all, except Georgy’s for the child in her care. And when she ultimately runs away with the newly-widowed millionaire Leamington with the infant that they’ve all but adopted, there’s a sense that the message of the movie is how conveniently people can get used as means to an end. The lyrics to the radio-friendly theme song turn deeply cynical for the end scene, and the Seekers come off as an Oompa-Loompaish Greek Chorus:

Who needs a perfect lover
When you’re a mother at heart?
Isn’t that all you wanted right from the start?
(Well didn’t you?)

Hey there, Georgy girl
Now that you’re no longer on the shelf
Better try to smile and tell yourself
That you got your way
(You’ve made it!)

Hey there, Georgy girl
Now you’ve got a future planned for you
Though it’s not a dream come true
At least he’s a millionaire
So don’t despair!
You’re rich, Georgy Girl!
You’re rich, Georgy Girl!
You’re rich, Georgy Girl!