2013 – Page 439

A Flair For Evil Genius

Shirley Jackson lived a life fraught with paranoia, alienation, and cruelty – experiences she was able to channel into her fiction:

The six novels she wrote, and the attendant short story collections, all shared the same theme, Jackson said, “an insistence on the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behaviour.” She excelled at writing narrative that went through the looking glass and found beyond it not simply absurdity but malevolence. The switch happened in an instant, a lightning strike that turned a colour image into its negative. “It was Shirley’s genius,” [biographer] Judy Oppenheimer claims, “to be able to paint homey, familiar scenes … and then imbue them with evil – or, more correctly, allow a reader to see the evil that had been obvious to her all along.”

Her most famous story, “The Lottery,” is the most perfect example.

It tells the story of ordinary townspeople gathering together to draw lots according to a long-held tradition. When one housewife holds up the piece of paper with the single black spot, her neighbours, with deliberate and eager intent, turn upon her and stone her to death. The story created outrage on publication in 1948 in The New Yorker, described in letters to the magazine office as “gruesome” and “a new low in human viciousness.” But Jackson preferred to quote the letters she received from readers who “wanted to know where the lotteries were being held, and if they could go watch.”

Jackson’s audacity was to suggest that the terrifying face of evil was part of ordinary people and small town life. She knew what she was saying: “everything I write,” she told her publisher, was concerned with “the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction.” Her advice to writers that “so long as you write it away regularly, nothing can hurt you,” makes it likely she knew whereof she spoke.

The New Yorker has published a previously unreleased story by Jackson, “Paranoia,” available here (subscription required), along with an interview with her son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, who offers a glimpse into her sillier side:

In real life Shirley had a wonderful sense of humor, and had a jovial laugh she got from her father, counter-balanced by the polite, proper persona she learned from her mother. There were always jokes in our house, especially at meals, where we each had to tell one. Both my parents were great jokesters. They would leave funny notes and drawings around the house, literary puzzles, playful poems on doors.

Broadcasting Bereavement

Mother cries Help Me at 2;30. Been holding her like a baby since. She's asleep now. All I can do is hold on to her.

— Scott Simon (@nprscottsimon) July 29, 2013

Starting July 21, when his mother entered the ICU of a Chicago area hospital, until she died eight days later, NPR’s Scott Simon live-tweeted her passing to his 1.3 million followers. Meghan O’Rourke believes the outpouring of interest in the public grieving “suggests a hunger on the part of Americans for a way to integrate death and mourning into our lives—a hunger that is being met by social media”:

Simon’s Twitter feed was not an imposition of his mourning on others, not some kind of gruesome exhibitionism. It was simply a modern version of what has always existed: a platform for shared grief where the immediate loss suffered by one member of a community becomes an opportunity for communal reckoning and mourning. As the novelist Marilynne Robinson once said, suffering is a human privilege. Grief is the flip side of love. Mourning has become an all too isolated experience—but Facebook and Twitter have become a place (strange as it may seem) where the bereaved can find community, a minyan of strangers to share their prayers. Yes, it might seem strange to stumble upon announcements of death or the intimate details of dying amidst updates about summer trips to Costa Rica, Anthony Weiner’s escapades, and the arrival of a new puppy. But this strangeness is the strangeness of the real.

Will more and more people tweet from hospital rooms? It’s possible. It’s already common on Facebook, where people often announce that a loved one is in the hospital or has died. While some have bemoaned this—the Social Q’s column, in my recollection, once pronounced that Facebook was not the place to announce a death—it doesn’t feel morbid or inappropriate to me. It’s our equivalent of the ringing of church bells in the town square, for better or for worse.

Dreher, who blogged his sister’s Ruther’s fight with cancer, and then wrote with brutal honesty about their relationship in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, wonders when a writer who deals with such intimate matters crosses the line into “mawkish exhibitionism”:

I don’t think Simon crossed the line — I loved his tweets, actually, and think they honored his mother artfully and compassionately. I hope I didn’t cross the line either, but it’s a hard line to discern, especially when you are in the middle of intense emotions. This is a particular risk for writers and journalists, like Simon and me, who tend to process experience through writing. Often I don’t know what I think about something until I have written it down. If a tree falls in the woods and I fail to write about it, at some level I think it hasn’t happened.

The overwhelming majority of the world isn’t like that, and finds that sort of thing weird and alien. As my wife often reminds me, for writers, everything is material, but it’s not like that for most. Truman Capote was genuinely shocked when his closest friends dropped him after he repeated, under a veil of fiction as thin as onion skin, scandalous gossip he’d heard over lunch. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t realize that he was a writer, and this was material for him. That was inhuman of Capote, but I understand his confusion, and have to fight it in myself. Perhaps I don’t fight it enough, I dunno.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

The Internet Is Flat

Noah Berlatsky considers what it’s like to discover a new musician or artist in the age of endless, easily accessible info:

Music used to be a secret, hidden by the barriers of nation and region and history, and you could prove that you could feel a sense of knowledge or at least discovery by finding out what was on the other side of that (not necessarily large) hillock over there. Now all the hillocks are leveled, or at least the internet elevates us so that we can look over them anytime we want. In some sense that makes us more cosmopolitan. We can listen to more content from more places. But when you can see over every hillock, the grass there stops looking greener and starts looking just like your grass.

Sure, the old-style sense of exoticism–feeling like you have special access to another culture because you picked up a bargain CD–is creepy. But the modern sense of media where every culture is spread out in an instantly accessible smorgasbord for consumption has its disturbing aspects as well. The cultural imperialism of appropriating someone else’s cultural realness has transformed into a cultural imperialism where there is no other culture to appropriate — just a single, flat, internet-mediated mono-world. You don’t need to condescendingly anthropologize Robert Johnson any more; he’s always already been blandly digitized.

The Bogglesphere

Julia Turner argues that the game Boggle vastly outclasses the more popular Scrabble and thus deserves its own gaming circuit:

Scrabble is all about constraints; you trickle out one mingy word per turn. Boggle begets a deluge, with bits of the language bobbing from your eye to your mind to the page. Part of the fun is the challenge of seeing the words on the board, looking for promising groupings (an ED, say, or an ING) and then manipulating the surrounding letters in your mind until you find words that work. [Scrabble champion Will] Anderson also pointed out another mental skill required by Boggle that has no analogue in Scrabble, something he calls the “mental queue.”

Often, an ace Boggler will see a bunch of words at once and must hold them in his head until he can record them all with his pen (or keyboard)—all while his eyes are roving on to hunt out the next word. All that mental activity feels strangely serene when you get the rhythm right. Scratching words out on paper, keeping a keen ear to the pace of your rivals’ scribbling, finding the next run of related words—DINTED, DENTED, MINTED, DEMENTED—these are sensations of pure joy. …

It’s time to demand that Hasbro—or Winning Moves, or someone!—reissue the classic implementation of the game. It’s time to launch a competitive Boggle circuit so that expert Bogglers can get their due. And, most of all, it’s time to stop cowering before our Scrabble-mad peers.

Update from a confident reader:

I am ready for the game (and myself, in tandem) to ascend. I have no idea what qualities of the mind are specific to Boggle, but apparently finding word strings in a fixed grid is the chief gift I was given by providence. Mere mention of the game in my circle of friends starts a cascade of reminiscences about my freakish ability. (Mind you, this group includes a former National Merit Scholar and a Harvard linguist who got a perfect score on his SAT.) We all knew something was up when, the first time six of us sat down to play, I cancelled out all but a few of everyone’s words (only words unique to the group’s combined list score) while filling a page with enough of my own to reach the agreed-upon winning score. Favorite word string: estivate (d), (s), (ing). Longest word I remember finding: interrogatory (ies).

Let there but be a substantive surge in the game’s popularity and I may finally escape my anonymity. Game on!

Previous Dish on Scrabble and its discontents here.

(Photo by Mike Ambs)

The Western Is Undead, Ctd

A reader writes:

Michael Agresta is missing one form of media that boasts a relatively recent blockbuster example of the Western: video games. Mention “Red Dead Redemption” (2010) in pretty much any gaming forum and you will witness an explosion of nostalgia, as well as something much more unusual: young men, not so young men, and adolescents admitting to shedding tears over a story. That scene [above] brought tears to my eyes. My wife sat down to watch me play through the final scenes and ended up sobbing. There’s some power in the Western genre yet.

To Paul Cantor’s point, Rock Star (the studio that developed and published the Red Dead Redemption) sits alongside Matt Stone and Trey Parker in my book: Rock Star didn’t shy away from American Indian or Mexican story lines, but they didn’t pander, either. They played up the funny, sinister, noble, and criminal elements of the characters in all cases, treating them with some depth. They also acknowledged the prejudice and tired tropes plaguing those characters, accomplishing this through satire, sarcasm, and general wittiness.

I’m sure others among your readership enjoyed the game, so I just wanted to send the tidbit your way.

Another tidbit:

Considering the topic of this thread, you will be interested to know that Rock Star released a downloadable content extension to the game called “Undead Nightmare“.

The View From Your Window

Athens, Greece, 8.54 am

E-Reading In Afghanistan

An expat describes how she finally broke down and parted with her print-only loyalism:

I felt dirty watching the download bar turn blue, but once I began, I found I didn’t know how to stop. First came Alice Munro. The verisimilitude between Munro’s Southern Ontario and the Kabul expatriate community was striking. Both were a whorl of gossip. Both involved dinners parties made from canned provisions. Both were rife with what Munro called the “great shock of pleasure” that life affords you sometimes. And both were populated by the “wrecked survivors of the female life,” girls who grew up to be dissatisfied women, who found ways of negotiating with the rough terrain of an inherently male landscape. The small humiliations, the minutiae of everyday existence, the intensity of the social gaze—farm towns of rural Canada have much in common with this war zone capital.

Next came Junot Díaz’s short stories, then Zadie Smith’s novel, then George Saunders’ latest. I rationed out these texts as if they were wartime succor. Not only does downloading take a long time, spending $10 to $15 per book seemed slightly insane in a country where that amounted to an average worker’s weekly pay.

Once I tried explaining the concept of ebooks—that they cost more than three watermelons and cannot be lent to someone—to an Afghan friend and was swiftly ridiculed for my vanity. He never said as much, of course. But he did give me a look that Afghans often give me: a look that seemed to say, “Youuu eeeeediot.”

A Sea In The Sahara

Frank Jacobs shares the story of François Élie Roudaire, a French Army captain who led the failed colonial campaign to create an inland sea in the Algerian desert. Roudaire proposed the project in 1874, after he came across upon a dry salt-lake bed, Chott el-Mehrir, that seemed strangely familiar:

Knowing his classics, Roudaire couldn’t help thinking that this submarine salt plain might once have been part of the fabled Bay of Triton. Described by Herodotus but unknown to modernity, the lake’s debatable existence and location constituted an Atlantis-type mystery popular among geographers. Could Chott el-Mehrir be contiguous with other chotts [dry lake beds] towards the Tunisian coast, forming the ghostly imprint of a former sea inlet? And could this semi-mythical body of water be resurrected?

With the blessing of Suez Canal engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, Roudaire developed a plan to construct a 78-foot-deep, 3,100-square-mile inland sea. The project would cost a fraction of France’s Suez Canal venture, he assured investors:

The price tag [was] a mere 25 million francs. A small investment with a large return: the proof of France’s enlightened policies, progressive intentions and beneficial results in North Africa. “The Sahara is the cancer eating away at Africa,” Roudaire wrote. “We can’t cure it; therefore, we must drown it.”

But nothing came of the plan except dreams:

The London Times said that the plan “dazzles the imagination, yet it has a sufficiently substantial basis to satisfy several shrewd traders in African commerce and some distinguished engineers.” … This new sea “is sure to be frequented by trading vessels,” reported the British magazine All the Year Round, “to carry off the produce of its banks, which will eventually be dotted with groves of date and coconut palms. … Hotels, perhaps towns, will spring up on picturesque and eligible sites; luxurious house-boats will float in its most sheltered and shady creeks.”

(Image: Map of the planned sea. Note that Lake Geneva is offered for scale in lower right-hand corner.)

A Poem For Saturday

When Alice Quinn started with the Dish as poetry editor last July, we began our collaboration by posting “All the Activity There Is,” from Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems. So this weekend, the Dish commemorates the year with three poems from Mary’s new volume Trances of the Blast, just published by Wave Books. Here’s “Spider”:

The spider can barely walk, his legs are so scared—
he’s got to get from the bar of soap to the uppermost
showerstall tile that is his home, and he has suffered
a betrayal so great he’s lost in his own neighborhood,
crawling on his hands and knees, so to speak, in and out
of the shadows of other tiles he’s passed before but
barely recognizes, given his state of shock and disbelief.
Spiders don’t hear very well—he can’t hear the rain
as it falls and cools his flaming legs, the distant screams
of another’s crisis mean nothing to him, he can’t hear
his own heartbeat, an alarm casting his skeleton straight
into hell, his blood ignited by the bellows of loss.
If the gods implore him to hold his saliva, he doesn’t
hear them, he goes on crawling toward the one safe spot,
which has become, in his mind, the destination of his life
and this night rolled into one, a wet bag at the bottom
of which, were it to fall, would lie his demise—
too awful to discuss.