Reading list: Harold Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

How to start: Brodkey seems to have been a controversial character, gleaning from online articles about him. Francine Prose admires the way in which he depicts “people ranting to children” which she calls one of “several notable literary examples.” About a story titled “S.L.” Prose explains: “the ranter is the title character, a self-indulgent decent man who is about to adopt the little orphan to whom he is raving. Reading S.L.’s monologues, we become intensely aware of the way that people often talk to children - as if they aren’t sentient, comprehending beings - when in fact children, like the boy in the story, know perfectly well what the adults are saying. Though S.L. wants the child to love and accept him, everything he says increases our sense of the child’s isolation, confusion, and desperation.”

Favourite quotes: (Bookkeeping) “Sometimes it horrifies me,” he said, “that we dare talk about serious subjects - the camps, love, anything. We should leave the serious subjects to poets, who will tell us how to speak of them without lowering them; we should confine ourselves to the weather and the stock market like sensible people.”

(Innocence) “I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to reenter and be riven. An acrobat after spinning through the air in a mockery of flight stands erect on his perch and mockingly takes his bow as if what he is being applauded for was easy for him and cost him nothing, although meanwhile he is covered with sweat and his smile is edged with a relief chilling to think about; he is indulging in a show-business style, he is pretending to be superhuman. I am bored with that and with where it has brought us. I admire the authority of being on one’s knees in front of the event.”

“There’s a kind of strain or intensity women are bread for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it’s in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near.”

(His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft) “The man I hugged or ran toward or ran from is not in any photograph: a photograph shows someone of whom I think, Oh, was he like that?”

(The Nurse’s Music) “I do not think memories lie for a cheap reason. It is just that memory deals in totals, in summaries, in portable forms of knowledge, so that what it dredges up are things that are like mottoes or aphorisms or apothegms rather than like real moments. And the totals are often true enough as they are pictured, even if the pictured thing never happened, but is a total, a mind thing, just as what’s in a photograph never happened but is the machine’s slice of a part of reality, which it then slides out sideways, so to speak, from the forward rush of real air. Time was never that stilled; the photograph lies; the eyelike machine slices off a thin and fixed souvenir; what gives it focus makes it untrue - no one I know was ever as still as a photograph.”

(The Boys on Their Bikes) “He’d gotten me to start to try to explain; explanations are demeaning: you’re in service to the other’s understanding you then; you’re not allowed to live but have to stand in a clear light and just explain.”

(Angel) But I imagined all that as laid aside with regret or even hatred, but since, if one lives, one will most likely be a witness from now on, what need is there for most of such aspects of will in one’s self as one has needed up until now when one was not a witness? Almost certainly, one can expect to be inspired now and protected - oh, not physically: one can be martyred, used in various ways in whatever time or timelessness there is to be now: one has a very different sort of soul - the total of one’s self now includes this occasion and one is different.”

Tangential: Harold Brodkey’s obituary in The Independent, as written by Andrew Rosenheim, makes light of the opinion that Brodkey was a narcissist: “He was, to be sure, an incurable narcissist…” but some of Brodkey’s stories describe Narcissistic Personality Disorder to a T, namely “A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” and “Largely an Oral History of my Mother”. I wish more could be written about narcissism in literature, but I do feel that this website has it right when they state: “Creating a believable narcissist for fiction ultimately requires real life experiences of living or working with a person.”

Another blanket

Just as Daylight Savings has ended, as the river ice is breaking up and making scraping sounds not unlike the swish, swish, swish of slush underfoot, as squirrels are busy everywhere with bounce-like hops across last fall’s dry leaves, I’ve finished a blanket.

This blanket stitch is old-fashioned… I spied a crochet blanket with this stitch on The Crown and felt inspired.

HangIng chair

Today we hung a chair in the living room. The space is now 20% more fun.

Clothes

In the evening, when it is dark and cold outside, my daughter and I spend a few minutes before her bedtime reading a chapter from a book in English. (We’re read through lots of recommendations from Gretchen Rubin’s list of 81 Kid Lit / YA books) Curled up on the couch, we recently read this passage in Anne of Green Gables: “It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable. At least, it is easier for me. I suppose it doesn’t make such a difference to naturally good people.” She goes on to describe her coat and compliment her friend’s hat and concludes: “Do you suppose it’s wrong for us to think so much about our clothes? Marilla says it is very sinful. But it is such an interesting subject, isn’t it?”

I grew up with a mother who, reacting to her own childhood, scarred by other experiences, and fully committed to conservative Catholicism, dressed me in modest cleanliness from my birth to adulthood. When I left home, I had to learn how to figure out my own style. Sometimes the thought this exercise required and the shame it exposed made me feel resentful. I think that is why I find Anne’s quote so interesting, because once I could stop worrying so much about what I wore, there was space to concentrate on other things.

Growing up, clothes were humiliating, because I felt they set me apart when I wanted instead to fit in. Obsessively attributing the day’s good turnout or bad turnout based on what I was wearing felt silly even as I did it throughout high school. Clothing, I was supposed to understand, was a frivolous thing, much like Anne’s obsession over puffed sleeves. Thinking about it was impossible to justify. And yet, it was the clumsy handling, growing up, of “what is important” that still nags at me today. In the place of my mother, I’ve taken to books like Parisian Chic, Women in Clothes and The Sartorialist. They’ve shown me how clothes are “such an interesting subject.”

Texture

Today, all I have to offer are the things I took from the morning’s walk… the textures of tree bark, the patterns made by the melt and freezing of snow, the shape of branches, the colour of dogwood…

Collage

I often get the feeling that I am just collaging ideas together here, scraps gathered from one area and then another, brought here, and taped together with a capital and a period. It’s not art, I keep thinking… but it’s fun.

Take Sam Anderson’s mini essay from his New Sentences series, this one on Nassar Hussain’s ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’. Anderson writes of Hussain’s poem: “It is powerful to see these foundational myths reconstituted out of bureaucratic mundanity — like a model of the human genome built out of Legos.”

And then look here: Jason Kottke’s: “Four Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish” includes, “This Lego bonsai tree is ‘a mindful build’ designed for adults.”

Is there a point to this assemblage? No. It’s like what the kids and I do sometimes after school… I didn’t notice this creativity was missing until I unrolled a filled-up roll of paper from an IKEA easel we’d set up last year at this time for school-at-home. The roll had journal sentences, announcements, explanatory drawings, and just-for-fun drawings. We stopped using it, and I’d regretfully put it away, until I realized, having unrolled the old roll, that the creativity inside was in fact a back-and-forth between the kids and I. We gave each other ideas and sparked artistic tangents for no other reason than because the white space invited us to.

A poem being described with a Lego metaphor - the Lego there being an allusion to what is clunky and heavy, versus the image, offered by the Lego company itself, of a use that aspires to lightness and intricacy - a bonsai tree, mindfulness - is delightful when paired together, don’t you think?

Humility - again

I wrote a blog post commenting on this idea of humility, which, from my understanding, is a theme in Adam Grant’s book Think Again. His book and his ideas have been bouncing around the cluster of podcasts I listen to, and I suppose that is why I am revisiting the idea. Humility itself is interesting. I think it is vaguely amusing that I reactively dismiss the promotional urgency to read the book based on what I feel I already know. However, Adam Grant recently released a podcast episode that combined two interviews he’d done with Malcolm Gladwell and this latter gets at a point that reflects my feeling. Here is my (lightly edited) transcript of their conversation:

Malcolm Gladwell: I’m always very attracted to religious themes in things, particularly if they’re slightly sublimated. But it always struck me that there was some kind of moral case being made in your books, that maybe you weren’t making explicitly but that there was something about reading your books that felt very comfortable to someone who is used to thinking about the world in terms of character, ethics, morality, those kinds of things. Like if I (I was thinking) if I had a Bible study of Evangelicals and I said ‘this week we’re not reading the New Testament, we’re gonna read the works of Adam Grant’ I think actually people with that kind of worldview would be very at home with the arguments that you’re making. 

Adam Grant: That’s interesting! I love it when ancient wisdom matches up with modern science. And I think, where the ancient wisdom often leaves me short is around … for me at least, a lot of the principles and recommendations that comes out of religious traditions are missing the nuance about ‘how do you actually do this in life’. So yeah, of course you want to be a generous person, but how do you give to others in a way that prevents you or protects you from burning out or just getting burned by the most selfish takers around. Yes, I want to be humble, but I don’t want to become meek, or lack confidence and so I think, I guess what I want to do in a lot of my work is try to use evidence to pick up where, where these higher principles leave off, and ask, ok, what does it mean to do this without sacrificing you know, our ambitions.

 M.G.: Yeah, yeah. But even that, I mean, that’s why Christians have Bible studies, and that’s why Jews study Torah, because the original texts, they are only the beginning, they require additional interpretation and understanding. They’re not sufficient on their own, otherwise you wouldn’t need to study them.

A.G.: When it comes to having those conversations about the ideas in those texts, I just, I happen to love the tools of the scientific method as a way to figure out what’s gonna be effective for more of the people more of the time.

I think Malcolm Gladwell highlights what it is in Adam Grant’s latest book that makes me feel like his theme is a familiar one.

Community

A promotional magazine arrived in our mailbox last week, all about moving to a rural community in the Southeast region. The first article’s title reads “Five Great Reasons to Get Out of the City” which lists short commutes, amenities, savings, and, at number four, “Everyone Knows Everyone”.

I take that as a negative.

But wait, this nameless writer argues. “There is a long-standing myth that living in a small town means everyone knows everyone else’s business. There may be a kernel of truth to this, but there’s another way to look at it: small towns are infamous for their neighbourly outreach.”

I am unconvinced. I’ll take a cabin over a rural development any day, thanks.

Then I happened to be listening to Terri Gross’s interview with James McBride on Fresh Air. They’re discussing the setting of his most recent novel, Deacon King Kong, and McBride explains how, throughout his childhood, he would leave Queens and spend summers in Red Hook. “There was a freedom in Red Hook that I didn’t experience in Queens. The church was there. My godparents were strict but they were fun. There was just a freedom there that I didn’t really feel anywhere else. There was also a sense of community that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere.”

When Terri Gross asked how you could feel a sense of freedom in a neighbourhood reputed for its crime, McBride elaborated. “Because you know who everybody is. You know who not to mess with, you know [who not to fool with, who’s in a bad mood because bad news, who’s trustworthy, what someone’s mother is like,] it was the sense of being in a village, a sense of ‘us against the world,’ (…) a sense of ‘we are kinda together here’. Now, granted, (…) you kinda have to remember (…) to let people have their own space, so you just ignore things you just don’t want to see. You see someone doing something wrong, you see someone dating someone they shouldn’t be, you just kinda look past it because everyone deserves their own space. But there is a togetherness that comes with that.”

I think that what McBride does is relay an experience that is both unique and convincing because it has soul. The promotional article has no soul. I mean, that’s normal, it’s to be expected, but still… I like feeling!

Crochet

The other day at the dog park, a retired person asked another retired person if they had hobbies. “No, not really” the latter answered, saying that they had worked so much, that adopting a hobby now felt like more work. A hobby-less life seems gloomy to me and I am forever grateful to my aunt who showed me how to crochet some 17 years ago. Like her, I usually crochet while watching tv, but lately, crochet has also come in handy during social Zoom calls.

This is a two-sided blanket made from wool. The puppy chewed a hole in it, and it required some repairing.

On the left is a circle-scarf, made using a free pattern from All About Ami. On the right is a scarf I made using a basket-weave type stitch.

These are blankets for the boys’ bedroom, made in their favourite colours, during Covid-19. It was something to do when school-at-home required availability and denied me concentration for anything else.

Pet dogs

My mother-in-law remarked, the other day, that “dans le temps” (the French equivalent to ‘back in the day’) city people didn’t own so many dogs. St-Boniface in her time was the 1940’s and 1950’s. I can imagine fewer families owning dogs. I can imagine that now, we are a society that abounds in domestic pets. In fact, that was part of the reason I didn’t want to have a dog… so many people already had dogs and I was reluctant to join the society of people who obligingly carried poop bags with them. But I also wonder if it’s true, what she says as an observation.

Today, we took the dog to a dog park for the first time. We unleashed the puppy in the puppy pen and soon a husky joined in and I chatted with the retired couple while this beagle of ours held his own against the larger dog and chased it and howled at it for being unable to catch up. Other dogs joined and our hound smelled treats and jumped after other dog owners, determined to get their treats. To some degree, dog ownership is not unlike parenthood in that it drops you into this new category of people and expands your language and familiarity with behaviours heretofore ignored.

In 2019 the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI) published a report indicating that the dog population increased from 7.6 to 8.2 million in 2016, nearly equaling the cat population for the first time since statistics were kept by the institution in 2004. (via)

In 2015, Philip Howell published a book titled At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog and Victorian Britain. In it, Howell set about studying the dog’s place in Victorian society and writes that “the Victorians may plausibly have invented the modern dog.” To this effect, he quotes James Rubin who “writes that ‘the spread of pet- keeping to the middle classes and its association with emotional wholesomeness is a modern phenomenon.’ And the case can be made that it is in the Victorian period specifically that the practice of keeping dogs as pets—with all its repercussions—developed most meaningfully.”

Howell’s introduction exposes how recently the study of pets has become a legitimate area of research, noting how the field was barely a generation old at the time of publication: “The historical study of animals has reached a maturity and acceptance that could barely be imagined only a few decades ago, when the idea was nothing more than a source of amusement, a satire on the faddishness of social history.”

See, the point of this is to say that it is only a matter of asking a question. The search for an objective answer can lead to worlds of discovery. Of course, I haven’t been able to resolve whether or not there are more dogs now in Winnipeg than there were in 1950, but a few minutes research has offered two clues: dogs as domestic pets seems to have originated in Victorian England, and secondly, the dog population in Canada has increased since 2004.

Today's walk

It feels extra-adventurous when the dog and I slip away from the usual pathways to walk instead along the riverbank. The mud looks shiny-wet in the morning, but it’s still frozen from the overnight lows.

Crevices make the dirt look rock-like. Rain ran here in rivulets anxious to regain the river.

Winter’s palette is full of blues and grays, browns and golds.

Across the river, the University campus has finished its second phase of riverbank stabilization. The rocks are huge and grate against the metal of the heavy equipment, cumbersome to move into place, their sound ricocheting through the air.

And then we’re home! The dog insists on bringing back a stick almost too big for him to handle.

Perspective

I often make things bigger than they are. A job is life-defining. Self-worth hinges on a task. Someone’s e-mail could read as disapproval.

Noelle Stevenson commented, on Slate’s Working podcast: “I think the hardest thing about creating something is just believing you can do it. Personally, I need to trick myself into that a lot because the second I start thinking: ‘This isn’t good enough, this is not what they’re gonna want, someone else is gonna do a better job at this,’ that’s when I start losing my vision. (…) That’s when fear starts getting the better of me; it’s just not as real, not as from-the-heart, it’s stilted. I just think it’s one of the biggest obstacles to overcome.”

I play this trick on myself too. Once, I pretended I was no more than a person walking a dog that a train driver saw while rumbling through a European town. On a cloudy day, I pretended I was an old woman, not yet retired, who had a fireplace in her home - like in those artistic videos full of atmosphere - and that on that day she had a few students to counsel on writing… I was surprised how comforting it felt.

I didn’t have a single creative thought yesterday.

Not while walking the dog in the cold morning air.
Not while hurriedly brewing tea.
Not while advising a student to organize their thoughts like knives, forks and spoons for Kondo-style joy.
Not while delaying lunch to add up last month’s expenses.
Not while eating two eggs, basted, with toast.
Not while training the dog.
Not while grumpily answering the phone.
Not while following a recipe, or making broth.
Not while exercising on the stationary bike.
Not while eating Cheerios on the couch in front of Superstore on tv.
Not while back at my desk, finishing sums.
Not while washing my face and brushing my teeth.
Not while in bed, falling asleep.

Self-conscious

Sometimes I regret not taking pictures. Sometimes I wonder about the regret. Yesterday I went to Value Village, dropping off the results of a de-cluttering in the basement and stopping in the store, just to look. “I should take a picture” I thought, of things I saw that I liked but would not buy… Dainty earrings, intriguing necklaces, a gold picture frame, mugs from Niagara Falls. But I thought “no, just enjoy the experience of looking and wandering…” and I didn’t take out my phone. Pictures would have been more clutter. They would have been a different form of possession, a thing that said “look at me, looking at what I saw”. I felt self-conscious.

I found a plaid skirt and two merino-wool sweaters. At the checkout, the cashier had chipped black nail polish and a gold ring for each finger of his right hand. I often debate with myself whether or not I should voice my thoughts and decided to compliment the wearer’s rings. They clenched their hand into fists so I could see the rings better and I said they formed a nice collection. They smiled. Today, I still picture the dainty earrings, the picture frame, the gold rings. I liked them even better when shown me, when their wearer smiled.

I think self-consciousness too often holds me back. I was at Value Village for a change of scenery, to be reminded, as Liang writes, to “be generous to the strange, be open to difference, cross-pollinate freely” (via Brain Pickings.) It is like what Marilla says to Anne when the latter is fretting about leaving a good impression as a guest to tea: “The trouble with you, Anne, is that you’re thinking too much about yourself. You should just think of Mrs. Allan and what would be nicest and most agreeable for her.” (Anne of Green Gables, p. 213)

Next time, I’ll take pictures.

Humility

Somewhat hilariously, I’ve been listening to a CBC podcast based on an American podcast’s recommendation, as if things, before they should reach my ears, must be American-approved. Have you ever noticed that? Those little moments that force you to rethink things? I’ve heard so much about Adam Grant’s latest book Think Again and I think fussily, like a person who has too many jotted-down titles of books they should read, whether it is really necessary to read this author’s take on something I suspect I already know?

The other day for example, I was in Wal-Mart and I passed two women who were considering a mass-produced painting of a Parisian street with the vague outline of the Eiffel Tower in the background. “I don’t know what it is, but I love this painting” the one was saying to the other. I inwardly scoffed. How can you fall in love with a fake-as-heck piece of reproduction art? What about supporting local artists, eh? But the next aisle over I chastised myself for the unkindness and remembered what my mother-in-law has often repeated: “tastes cannot be argued” (Les goûts ne se discutent pas!). Then, while looking for a lucite organizer tray, I came across stark white canvases with flower outlines in gold and imagined how nicely the frame would look against our slate-blue wall and protectively tucked this rectangle piece of decor under my arm all the way to the self-checkout.

I’m pretty sure that to be interested in history is to engage in a flexible state of mind. I grew up not caring about Canada’s problem with its Indigenous Peoples, but a few courses in to a history degree will force any student to re-think. I’m listening to CBC’s Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo, thanks to a recommendation from the Longford podcast. It’s well-produced. It’s also devastating. It reminds me of reading Halfbreed by Maria Campbell.

I notice in these moments how the book, or podcast, or documentary, or university course, provides a vantage-point with which to view the tiny space I occupy. It is humbling. It is also a source of pride. Like a person who has travelled to a new country and now brags of their visit there, I have gained some partial understanding of a minorities’ situation. I feel this as a kind of paradox. Learning more about Indigenous People is a good thing, it is one of the goals of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It’s also uncomfortable and I think the discomfort prompts the mind to race toward anything that might alleviate the discomfort. I’ve found myself thinking: “I should enlighten people with what I’ve learned!” But I’ve also found myself (I blush to write this), wishing I could express my admiration for the survivors whose stories I’ve heard, at great remove from them.

I think what is needed though, is humility. Humility is a fickle quality because once it is declared, it ceases to exist, much like when one observes happiness, it too can fly away. But it is worth pursuing in tangible ways… Humility, like Mother Teresa once said, can be found in being quiet about oneself, in keeping busy with your own things, in not wanting to organize other people’s lives. It can be found in not getting mad about minor things or pointing out other people’s flaws. I think that if humility is appreciated and cultivated, it doesn’t become too hard to re-think big things.

Enthusiasm!

I love witnessing enthusiasm! Lately two podcast hosts interviewed two enthusiasts: Debbie Millman interviewed Adam Grant on Design Matters and second, Steven Levitt interviewed Joshua Jay on People I Mostly Admire.

When Debbie Millman asked Adam Grant about the speed with which he completed his graduate degree, he answered that while he had an enormous headstart, “at the time I subscribed to the When Harry Met Sally philosophy of career and life decision-making (….). I’ve always thought of it as that line where in the movie, I think it’s Billy Crystal who says ‘when you know what you want for the rest of your life, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.’ I didn’t go to grad school to be a grad student. Yes, of course I wanted to gain all this knowledge and build my skills, that was intrinsically interesting to me, but I wanted to share my knowledge, I wanted to teach!”

On Dan Levitt’s podcast, Joshua Jay expresses SO MUCH enthusiasm for magic, I regret my near-dismissal of the subject. Dan Levitt concludes the podcast: “Young people are often told they should find something they love and pursue it with everything they have - I’ve never really liked that advice… The problem is, when you’re just getting started with something, whether it’s magic or economics or even a new relationship, you just don’t know very much about the object you’ve fallen in love with and, as you get to know it better, what you initially loved often proves illusory or fades in importance. I mean, I still pursue the thing I love over something more practical every time. It’s a great place to start, but it’s only a start. To crate a lasting love of something, you have to make it your own, or as Joshua says, make it three dimensional.”

Local news

There is much discussion about the death of local news. I checked Google just to make sure I wasn’t making that up based on American headlines, but no, it’s true. There’s an article about it in The Walrus. (Seeing The Walrus website makes me feel bad for not consulting it more often. Looks like a cool place…)

Anyways. Local News. Do you know what there used to be in local news? Right now I’m going through the archives of French papers La Liberté and Le Patriote from 1913 to now. A small town called Aubigny is the subject of my master’s thesis and so combing through archives provides me with a feeling of the life that went on there. In the 60’s a church group called Catholic Women’s League formed a press committee and submitted short articles about what was going on in the town. There were hockey match results, and birth and death announcements. When a couple got married, the author would sometimes plunge into details about what the bride wore: “gorgeous in her ivory brocade dress which ended with a graceful train. Her short veil was fastened with a delicate diadem. She held a bouquet of white orchids.” Bridesmaids were also named and described: “they wore identical dresses in gold brocade. A golden rose adorned their hair.” Even the couple’s mothers’ attire was described: “the two mothers (…) chose brown ensembles with brown accessories and their corsages were orchids.”

Trips were also noted: people visiting family, going away on holiday, attending a retreat. Accidents were recorded, minor ones eliciting prayers or sympathy, major ones eliciting their own separate headlines to mark the tragedy. Church meetings were summarized and gatherings were described. The latter included card games, holiday concerts, children’s groups, wedding anniversaries, and teas.

But there were articles prior to the 60’s, and the Catholic Women’s League press committee, with town news. They were often more sporadic and the subject matter varied from year to year. A farmer, it was noted in 1915, had a bumper crop of wheat. Conversely, the parish priest submitted a question about why his harvest was so low. Student grades were listed! I could, if I wanted, find out what my mother-in-law received in French as a young girl.

As a historian-in-the-making, I enjoy all this detail. However, I have trouble imagining that I would enjoy being the subject of these articles. On the other hand, you could argue that social media accounts provide heaps of information in comparison. Maybe it’s the ownership of the information? While others commented on what went on in the village, providing this comfortable sense of community, I am loathe to have anyone report on my goings on, even though I am fine with describing them myself. I think the feeling could be expounded because it reflects some generational gap; perhaps a divergence between a feeling of community and a growing sense of individualism.

Paralysis

It’s very hard being an adult when you were once a child that made herself quiet, that folded in her thoughts and waited for the occasion to express what she guessed the adult might want to hear.

It’s very hard to carelessly put words down when you were once the child of a person who found comfort in imagining importance in false-mystical interpretations (to which you did not detain the code) because banality contained for them too many occasions for pain.

It’s very hard to believe that the practice you invest in yourself is worth any time and any justification, when once you were the daughter of someone whom you could not convince of being worthy of love.

Scenes of parenting overwhelm

I always feel like cringing when I read or watch a scene of parental overwhelm. I was reminded of this while listening to the Rage Against the Minivan in audiobook format. Kristen Howerton describes a scene wherein her son accidentally rides his bike through dog poop on the way to the beach and how things devolve from there in a “this, then this, then this” reminiscent of Uma Thurman in the movie Motherhood.

I don’t know why this type of story makes me want to hide. Is it because I can always imagine worse? Is it because a feeling of compulsive organization creeps up on me and finds the ways in which the particular situation could have been averted, or rectified? Is it because the scenes are so typically framed within narrow cultural biases? Is it because the elements of the scene are too similar to sarcastic humour in that they are a kind of race to the bottom, where one mom tries to outdo another in what are very personal catastrophes?

Maybe it’s a writing problem, because when I think of the particular challenges of parenthood and how they are depicted, I think of Karl Ove Knausgard. His writing in My Struggle Book 2 for example is so searing that I don’t think of what the events are, but instead feel exactly the emotion it elicits. The fact that he is a male author makes no difference because of the trueness of the description.

I don’t want to criticize Howerton’s book because it undoubtedly fits an appreciative niche audience. After all, her description of visiting a therapist and finding out that her conflicting desire to parent lovingly and her own need for quiet was not a flaw but a feature of being an introvert, made me nod in self-recognition. I’m with you there! Now can we have more fun?

In praise of TikTok

Until December of 2020 I had not given TikTok two minutes thought outside a cursory glance to the news stories it was the subject of. Then arrived an issue of McKinley Valentine’s newsletter The Whippet in my inbox with this delightful intro:

I suspect the majority of readers will be like me, in that for TikTok they were like “nup, I’ve reached my limit of new social media things I can be bothered understanding. The kids can have TikTok for themselves.” 

But I’m a new convert and I love it so I’m gonna tell you what the deal is with TikTok.

Her arguments for TikTok compelled me to download the app. Like Deb Perelman, I can say “it’s become my favourite time suck”. There is so much I enjoy! Recipes, mountain skiing, dancing, sea shanties, dog training, mini adventures, and on and on… I enjoyed discovering TikTok so much that I convinced my siblings to join, just so I could send them funny videos. I enjoy TikTok so much that in this season of repentance, I’ve made a sacrifice of it and content myself with the inferior Instagram.

If we were friends, I’d give McKinley Valentine a hug for introducing me to something so fun.