The Sunday Salon: Genetics
May
'08
Tonight I read under a full moon with two candles sharing their scents of “beach sand,” or so the packaging said. To me, it smelled very similar to nailpolish, but then I thought how appropriate that seemed; the few times I’ve been to the beach in my life, my mother would often be caught painting her nails under the bright, warm sun, while I huddled on a towel careful to avoid making contact with the sand.
Tonight I read the second story in Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg. I’ve more or less decided that I like the idea of plowing through my short story collections with this Sunday Salon thing. I don’t often like writing mini “side” reviews of books I am reading and intend to review on my website, but I also don’t always like having one huge comprehensive post detailing my thoughts on a collection of different ideas. I would do well to write a small entry on each story, each experience, rather than taking out bits and pieces of certain chapters and sharing my thoughts without context.
This, called “Some Other, Better Otto,” was much better received than the first. I finished that sometime during the week - also outside, curled up between two director’s chairs with candlelight guiding my senses - but found it to be snippy and unengaging. Otto, however, stressed me out with his thoughts, his concern for his mentally incapable sister, and his unnerving lack of concern for everyone else.
I kept thinking, while reading, that this would be a good story to mention for this week’s Weekly Geeks challenge, if I were participating and if my topic was gay/lesbian relationships. Otto is with William; he seems distanced but at the same time clingy, while William forgives and forgets almost too quickly. Upstairs, Margaret and Naomi are returning from China with their adopted daughter, Molly. Tension is apparent, but as these characters are simply introduced and then dropped off, after the “issue” is mentioned, the cause is unclear.
This story was swarming with genetics, but only briefly did the characters touch on the subject. It was mentioned, scarcely discussed, then they moved on. Will an insane mother produce an insane child? Do we feel connection to our blood relatives, though we are estranged from them? Does having an insane sister mean that you are secretly insane? Are humans genetically inclined to procreate? (Am I genetically inclined to read?)
” ‘Hardwired.’ You know, that’s a term I’ve really come to loathe! It explains nothing, it justifies anything; you might as well say, ‘Humans have children because the Great Moth in the Sky wants them to.’ Or, ‘Humans have children because humans have children.’ ‘Hardwired,’ please! It’s lazy, it’s specious, it’s perfunctionory, and it’s utterly without depth.”
“Why does it have to have depth?” William said. “It refers to depth. It’s good, clean science.”
“It’s not science at all, it’s a cliche. It’s redundancy.”
“Otto, why do you always scoff at me when I raise a scientific point?”
“I don’t! I don’t scoff at you. I certainly don’t mean to. It’s just that this particular phrase, used in this particular way, isn’t very interesting. I mean, you’re telling me that something is biologically inherent in human experience, but you’re not telling me anything about human experience.”
“I wasn’t intending to,” William said. “I wasn’t trying to. If you want to talk about human experience, then let’s talk about it.”
“All right,” Otto said. It was painful, of course, to see William irritated, but almost a relief to know that it could actually happen. “Let’s then, by all means.”
“So?”
“Well?”
“Any particular issues?” William said. “Any questions?”
Any! Billions. But that was always just the problem: how to disentangle one; how to pluck it up and clothe it in presentable words? Otto stared, concentrating. Questions were roiling in the pit of his mind like serpents, now a head rising up from the seething mass, now a rattling tail… He closed his eyes. If only he could get his brain to relax… Relax, relax… Relax, relax, relax… “Oh, you know, William - is there anything at home to eat? Believe it or not, I’m starving again.”
So I read this story straight through in the chill of tonight’s weather. Despite a long work week, I made it through without resting my eyes, without getting distracted by other thoughts or ideas. I was never one to enjoy short stories, thinking that they always ended too soon on subjects that could have been expanded, but I’m starting to appreciate the short, succinct nature of getting an idea across and saying nothing more. That’s what these stories have done - they describe a brief moment in time; they are short, dedicated thoughts from strangers who have something to say. Or maybe they don’t, but they exist, and isn’t that what really matters?
This week: I’ve still been reading George MacDonald’s collection of fairy tales. I want to give each tale its due justice; there’s no need to rush through them. I’ve recently acquired a book compiling Japanese folk stories and fairy tales, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, and Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill in hardback. I don’t normally like hardbacks, but the colored illuminations and illustrations of this book caught my eye and indeed sparked an interest in any of Cahill’s other “Hinges of History” books. I look forward to reading this one soon enough. It sometimes strikes me as odd that I have well over 1,000 books in my library, the majority of which are unread, and yet I continually find new books that I’d like to read before those.
Ah, well. Unitl next Sunday.
2 people found this entry interesting.
Leave A Reply
It sometimes strikes me as odd that I have well over 1,000 books in my library, the majority of which are unread, and yet I continually find new books that I’d like to read before those.
Oh! I wrote about this problem for a Sunday Salon recently… well, my version of it anyway, which is that I had all these books I hadn’t read, and didn’t really want to read but couldn’t admit that, and so all the new books I bought (which moreover still had that zing of excitement) definitely took precedence.
I don’t know if I wrote as much as I wanted about it though! Maybe there’s still more to come out.
This is my first time here and I love your prose, and especially your remark about short stories. I have always struggled with them because… well I guess for the same reason that I struggled to read a lot of my unread books. That feeling, before starting something totally new, of taking a cold plunge. With short story collections there are so many cold plunges in one book! And, also, I think it’s like poetry: the stuff they’re writing about is more concentrated somehow, so if the material is icky in some way it becomes CONCENTRATED ick. But on the other hand, I love it when they just capture a moment or an idea perfectly, and I like the variety and the way writers can use them to explore…. Maybe as I deal with the cold plunge thing, I’ll come around to reading more short stories
May
'08
yikes, really?
after I posted that I saw that it says, in enormous bold letters, NO ONE FOUND THIS ENTRY INTERESTING.
I think it’s its way of saying “there are no comments on this post.” But how terrifying! And then on the other hand, that is EXACTLY how I feel about it when no one comments on my posts!
May
'08