Saturday night random

I think I’m just going to take care of a lot of those smaller matters I talked about before. Let’s go.

• I just made reservations for a Sunday Roast Lunch Somewhere in the UK for a Sunday in the Future, so I’m feeling very….not in Alabama with the Garth Brooks concert going on a couple of miles away.

I once wrote a Living Faith item playing with the idea of how people with common interests do, indeed dress alike, despite our purported desire for independence. So, how can you tell who’s playing a concert later in the evening when you see:

• Bunch of boho women in big floppy hats in Chick-fil-A: Fleetwood Mac
• Scores of slouched over people (of all ages) in black on the streets: Slipknot
• Young women in oversized t-shirts, shorts and Doc Martens in the downtown burger joint: Billie Elish
• Women of all ages in shorts and cowboy boots all over downtown: Garth, of course.

• I’m also making Sichuan Chili Oil. We’ll see how that turns out.

All right: let’s turn to culture. First:

• One of my guys has watched all of the Stranger Things episode that have been released so far, and liked it. I watched the first episode last night, and was immediately distressed by the fact that the “previously on” scenes were…almost completely unfamiliar to me. I swear I watched all of season 3, but I’m starting to have my doubts, based on that. All I really remember is…the mall? Right? Yikes.

I thought it was very well done – whatever it was, but I am not sure if it’s worth more of my time. Well, it’s not as if it’s going anywhere.

• I did watch all of HBO’s Hacks, season two.

Here’s what I said about the first season, and my view is essentially unchanged: Jean Smart is a wonder, but the character of her young writing assistant, Ava, is underwhelming. She’s supposed to be invaluable and really funny, but…we just don’t see that.

I did appreciate the central throughline of the season, though: Smart’s character, stand-up comic Deborah Vance, is trying out her new act on the road. As we reached the end of last season, we saw Deborah, at Ava’s urging, trying a more confessional, less ba-dum-ba-dum Vegas style. She bombed. So now she’s on the road, fine-tuning it, trying to make it work.

And eventually she does – but how? Well, she comes to a realization – in a very good pair of episodes called Retired and The Click – in which she runs into another female comic of her generation who’s now selling shoes. Deborah was under the distinct impression that this woman’s departure from comedy was her fault – she’d done her dirty in a competition – but discovers that no, that wasn’t the case at all. The former comic was quite content with the “former” part of it all – life held more for her.

It works – very credibly and organically – that all of this helps Deborah figure out the problem. Her “confessions” weren’t really that. In her act, she was making herself out to be the perpetual victim when, of course, she was anything but. If her life fell apart around her, it’s mostly because she prioritized work above everything else – even marriage, even family. She had to own her terribleness.

Not everything in Hacks is my cup of tea. Some of it’s dumb, some it’s boring. But the central question of how to make art (sort of) out of life is a persistent one. And Jean Smart? And her Diet Cokes from the fountain? Worth it.

Oh, and Deborah’s Walk of Shame in The Click? Made me laugh out loud like hardly anything has in a while…..

• Well, BCS of course.
• I also watched 2 episodes of King of the Hill that my oldest recommended because they focused on religion. I liked them a lot, but I actually think they deserve their own post. So later on that.

Now:

• My major goal for the next few weeks is to actually finish George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. I started it months ago, but it is big and dense – although not difficult and certainly not dull – and I keep hitting roadblocks of one sort or another, which then means I have to reread – or at least skim – what I purportedly had “read” before, and over and over it goes. But you know what? I’m taking it on our trip and finishing it.

Three books I have, indeed started and finished over the past couple of weeks.

• New York, My Village by Uwen Akpan. Akpan came on a the scene as the author of a collection of short stories, Say You’re One of the Them, that won many accolades and was also noted in Catholic Lit circles because Akpan’s characters live and react quite often in a Catholic context and out of Catholic sensibilities.

Same goes for New York, My Village, Akpan’s first novel. His central character, Nigerian (and observant Catholic) editor Ekong Udousoro, wins a fellowship that brings him to work for a few months in a small New York publishing house. The gist of the novel is to explore racism and tribalism, as well as the long-term effects of trauma on individuals and a society. The book is being described as a dark, funny satire, especially of publishing and the racial divisions of American life, but I couldn’t get on board. The characters, except for Ekong himself, felt flat. The scenes that were supposed to be depicting racism – from Ekong’s New York City encounters to what he experiences in a Catholic parish in New Jersey – felt artificial to me. Let’s put it this way: I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a Nigerian family encountered racism at a white New Jersey parish, but the obviousness of it – and then resolution, which involved, for some reason protests and reconciliation back in Nigeria – was forced melodrama.

Anyway, there were aspects of the novel I liked – learning about life in Nigeria, including Catholic life. Getting insight into the immigrant experience. Going down a rabbit hole about skin-whitening. The reflections on inherited trauma. The bed bugs – wow. I mean – I can’t say I liked the extended battle with bed bugs, but it was certainly vivid (reflecting Akpan’s own experience) and an apt extended metaphor. I confess to being confused, despite my probably-not-best efforts, by the politics and history Ekong is dealing with. So I’ll take responsibility for my glazed eyes in respect to that part of the narrative. But I do think he could have tightened and clarified his treatment of that conflict and its weight on those who lived with it. I was a little comforted by going to Goodreads and seeing the number of people who wrote a variation on “Yeah, I skimmed the last seventy pages. I mean – it was pretty good, but…….”

If I’d say one thing – no, this is not “riotous” or sharply satirical. Interesting and compelling in some ways, but also suffering from a lack of subtlety both in characterization and dialogue.

All right, what’s next:

• The Sea Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard. It’s getting late, so I’ll do the lazy thing:

Fourteen years after her death, the ghost of their baby daughter, Sarah, haunts world-famous playwright Emmanuel Joyce and his fragile, embittered wife, Lillian. They have each learned to cope in their own way: Emmanuel seduces his secretaries and Lillian keeps photos of her lost child on the dressing table of every hotel they visit. They’re always on the move as they travel from city to city accompanied by Emmanuel’s orphaned, hero-worshipping manager, Jimmy. But now a minor crisis looms: Emmanuel’s latest secretary has taken a near-lethal dose of drugs on the eve of the Joyces’ departure for New York to cast his new play. They need to hire a replacement immediately. Enter stage right: Alberta Young.

A clergyman’s daughter from Dorset, Alberta arrives for the interview clutching a copy of Middlemarch. She is unlike anyone Emmanuel, Lillian, or Jimmy has ever known. And little by little, she will transform all their lives.

Narrated by four main characters, The Sea Change moves from London to New York to Athens and, finally, to the Greek island of Hydra. The bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles delivers a novel about learning to move beyond the past without giving up our memories, and how we can change and grow.

My reading of this book was hampered, I think, by the fact that I read it via the Internet Archive on my Ipad. More and more, I am needing the solidity of physical books to retain what I’ve read. The stupid tablet reading experience does a couple of things to me: it discourages me from flipping back and forth and revisiting what I’ve read, and secondly, I think it moves me to read even faster than I usually do.

I enjoyed this book, although it, too, could have been tightened – the inner musings and angst got a bit much at times. The interesting thing that I’m still trying to figure out is this: as the summary says, the novel is told from four points of view – Emmanuel, Lillian, Jimmy and Alberta. But there’s a difference – Lillian, Jimmy and Alberta’s chapters are all in first person, while Emmanuel – the playwright’s – chapters are in third person. There’s a point to that, but I am not sure of it as yet.

Anyway, the writing was beautiful, with great insight into human motivation. Some interesting twists and turns. And some quite effective descriptions of the creative process, as Emmanuel is struggling to come up with an idea for a new play. This captures the ah-ha moment about as well as I’ve ever seen it:

At this moment, like the faint movement of air before a warm wind, the shut red knowledge of the sun through the eyelids, like the sudden stroking of a shadow, this kaleidoscopic collection of fact, invention, instinct and heart, shivered, shook itself, and fell into a beautiful pattern which filled and spread to the edges of his mind. Not to touch or test it — not to move any of his formidable machinery near it — but simply to let it lie there printing itself was like the motionless effort of a time exposure, and at the end of it he was matchwood and water. He got out of the taxi shaking, and so cold that it took him minutes to find the change.

• And then finally, today – it’s very short – Small Things Like These – by Claire Keegan

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Of course, it’s about the Magdalen laundries, and the weaving of Bill’s story – and his backstory – with what he senses about the convent, and then what he finally does – make a good little story, almost a parable. But it’s just that, and honestly, does not feel like a 1985 story at all. It seem highly unlikely that the convent Keegan describes existed in Ireland in 1985, with girls (spoiler alert) being shut up in the convent’s coal shed. Eh.

Oh, here’s the chili oil: