View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Now, that is funny for sure, at least it was when M told the story at O’Brien’s taco party when each team member shared a childhood anecdote. And yet embedded in the comedy are both sadness and triumph—sadness because M was already isolated, friendless, and at odds with her family, and the ceiling debacle resulted in the dismantling of her plant system, and—when she afterward refused to eat— hospitalization and tube feeding. Triumph because now she is M!, gorgeous and sexy and well paid, and the world has bent her way. Most of the stories we tell—my fellow counters and I—have both these components, sadness and triumph, because the world has come around to us. It’s unbelievable. I still can’t believe it. And while our ranks are fortified by typicals whose adolescence may have included popularity and statistical expertise limited to sanctioned realms like baseball stats, the fact is that we are simply better at counting—we are native speakers, if you will, many of us having understood numbers before we did language.
Avery is using a code that only I and other native counters are likely to comprehend: The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite!
have to think about this more [reminds me of what's his name, the literary critic guy, franco moretti?]
What! How can so many thoughts and observations possibly have elapsed in so brief a period? An impressionist will answer along the lines of “The distortions inherent in our perception of time,” but to us counters, time is a bore— and not just because too much has been said and written about it. Time is irrelevant to math. [...]
You must be logged in to see this comment.
They’re tough customers, those two. They’ve got me doing pigtails. And buns.
Incredulous laughter. I don’t believe you, said Charlie, our oldest sister. She dragged her chair next to our father and offered him her golden hair, which fell almost to her waist. Make a bun, she dared him.
Our father gathered Charlie’s hair in his fists but seemed unsure at first what to do with it. Girls, he roused us. Get me the pins and brush.
Serious! Stickler! came the table howls.
Our father brushed Charlie’s hair until it crackled in the candlelight. Then he herded it into a shimmering bundle and looped it expertly around, pins pursed between his teeth. Silence fell on the room as everyone watched. Our father slid the pins into Charlie’s hair and anchored in place a beautiful, shining bun. It made Charlie look like a little girl,although she must have been in her twenties by then.
Laugher broke at the table, and everyone clapped.
Charlie’s eyes brimmed and overflowed. I don’t know why I’m crying, she kept saying as she flicked away the tears. But they wouldn’t stop.
We knew why. We were getting the best of him.
The river is smooth and still, pressed between walls of redwoods and so cold that their fingers throb when they dip them in. Could it harm them to submerge? Lou has heard of very cold water causing heart attacks, and feels responsible, having led everyone here. As they’re mulling over the safety of swimming, Tim Breezely suddenly strips off his clothes and dives from a log, buck-naked. The smash of cold stops his breathing; he has a brief blackout sensation of death. But when he surfaces, howling, what’s died is his gloom—he’s left it on the river bottom. Freedom! Joy! Tim Breezely will soon divorce—they’ll all divorce—everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault. Tim Breezely will become a dedicated jogger before anyone jogs who isn’t being chased. He’ll write books about exercise and mental health that will make him a household name, and will receive thousands of letters from people whose lives he has transformed, even saved.
Getting high, which is hard to accomplish through the methadone (it takes a lot, Roxy has to be careful), gives her a sensation of power and transcendent rightness beyond anything she could have imagined when she uttered those words: make my mark. Making her mark ended up not involving any of the things she’d banked on—her dancing, her beauty, her sexual confidence—in fact, all of those succumbed to it. Heroin is her great love, her life’s work, and she has given up everything for it, through renunciation or sheer neglect. No one can say she hasn’t been steady— or, rather, everyone says that, but only because they fail to grasp that her scarred arms and swollen fingers, her gray teeth and thin hair and stooped, halting gait, are testaments to her fierce devotion. She’s outlasted even Jocelyn, whom she used to nod off with at her father’s house. Jocelyn got a social work degree in her forties and settled down with a famous guitarist who’d been in love with her since high school. Not Roxy. She will depart this world empty-handed: a sacrifice that only Kiki, in the religious fervor of her girlhood, might have understood.
Dolly→Joe Jojo, that is OUT OF THE QUESTION. My part in all of it was deplorable, not to mention that I would have to revisit the boiling oil catastrophe.
Joe→Dolly Are you not the one who first explained to me that Americans love redemption stories precisely because they are so irrevocably tainted by original sin?
Dolly→Joe This isn’t a redemption story! It’s a story about how I sank so low that I took a job camouflaging the atrocities of a genocidal dictator!
lol but tbh i also love a redemption story
[...] those two years of graduate school, of writing workshops and literature classes, had been the happiest of his life. He’d hauled boxes for a moving company, read two books a week, and begun the novel that Athena and some others, too, had liked. Alone by choice on Saturday nights, writing by an open window in his studio apartment, Gregory had experienced a kind of euphoria: a swelling, bursting, yearning hunger that had something in common with lust but included everyone, from the revelers outside his window to the carousers down the hall. He was where he wanted to be, and needed nothing else.
You must be logged in to see this comment.
Astute readers will immediately be struck by how many of the stories collected here are about dreamers, and it is perhaps for this reason that it’s hard to read them outside the context of that most famous American Dream story, The Great Gatsby. Yates admired no author more than Fitzgerald, as the writer-dreamer Jack Fields, the protagonist of Yates’s autobiographical story “Saying Goodbye to Sally” suggests. Comparing Yates’s dreamers to Fitzgerald’s is immediately instructive. Gatsby, of course, is not so much the story of a great man as of an ordinary man with a great dream. Jimmy Gatz is determined not just to become rich and win Daisy Buchanan but, more audaciously, to negate the past and reinvent himself, even reshape the world, if need be. Fitzgerald set his novel in a world that is superficially similar to that of Yates’s stories. In both cases, a world war had just concluded and America was victorious. Everything seemed possible except failure. But there were significant differences too. Perhaps because they have vivid memories not just of the war but also the Great Depression that preceded it, Yates’s dreamers are less audacious, more cautious. They want things as badly as Jimmy Gatz, but they have less in the way of expectation. Living all but invisible lives, they’re wary, unsure how much they have a right to hope for. Betty Meyers, a young mother and Navy wife with three kids, “trapped” on the Côte d’Azur, wants desperately to return home to Bayonne, New Jersey, a heartbreakingly modest and totally unironic ambition. In “A Wrestler with Sharks,” Leon Sobel, who’s written (but not published) nine books, wants a column and byline in a tiny trade union newspaper. Indeed, Yates wants us to understand, it may be the very modesty of such desires (for the little house, not the big one) that disguises their potential for life’s most demoralizing failures. Yates understood that while we risk disappointment when we set for ourselves an ambitious goal and fail to achieve it, the challenge, in a sense, insulates us from the worst humiliation. Dream big and we’re expected to fail. About the worst that can happen (Gatsby to the contrary notwithstanding) is that we’ll be applauded for our pluck. Dream small, Yates seems to suggest, and we’re expected to succeed. As a result, failure ensures not just disappointment, but humiliation, anguish, and, most dangerous of all, the impulse to dream smaller next time, thereby risking even greater failure. The characters we meet in Yates’s stories are often already the victims of diminished expectation. Ken Platt, in “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” assumes that when he and his best pal, Carson Wyler, meet two girls on the beach, he’ll get the less attractive one, the “cute, freckled good-sport of a girl whose every cheerful glance and gesture showed she was used to taking second best.”
This time they all swung around to stare at once, which caused him to duck his head slightly and shift his weight from one buttock to the other. Ordinarily, the fact of someone’s coming from New York might have held a certain prestige, for to most of the children the city was an awesome, adult place that swallowed up their fathers every day, and which they themselves were permitted to visit only rarely, in their best clothes, as a treat. But anyone could see at a glance that Vincent Sabella had nothing whatever to do with skyscrapers. Even if you could ignore his tangled black hair and gray skin, his clothes would have given him away: absurdly new corduroys, absurdly old sneakers and a yellow sweatshirt, much too small, with the shredded remains of a Mickey Mouse design stamped on its chest. Clearly, he was from the part of New York that you had to pass through on the train to Grand Central—the part where people hung bedding over their windowsills and leaned out on it all day in a trance of boredom, and where you got vistas of straight, deep streets, one after another, all alike in the clutter of their sidewalks and all swarming with gray boys at play in some desperate kind of ball game.