“I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith

At the start of a project such as this — tackling a list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die — “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith (#837) is exactly the sort of book you hope to come across. It isn’t a heavy story in any sense of the word (which makes it a bit of an odd duck on a list that includes the Bible), but it has enough charm, wit, and humor to justify its place on anybody’s list of favorites.

I found the book when I was randomly browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble. What I sometimes do is pick a random number between 1 and 1,000, find the corresponding book and author on the list, and go see if that author has any works on the shelves. It’s essentially a little game of Deal or No Deal, except the result is usually me trudging through a bookstore mumbling something akin to, “How do you not have a copy of Slaughterhouse Five? What kind of SOCIETY are we living in?”

“I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith was there, though, and a cursory glance through the first few pages told me it would probably be a book I enjoy.

It was, and during a very stressful week, if Cassandra Mortmain’s quirky little diary wasn’t exactly a balm to sooth my bitter soul, then it was certainly warming. Like soup, or a bath. Or soup in the bath. (Do you suppose anyone ever eats soup in the bath? It might be fun, but what if you spill?)

This is the Story of a Girl

The story of “I Capture the Castle” follows Cassandra and her family, who are poor and yet somehow live in a castle. (Go figure.) Her father had been a promising novelist before discovering that he maybe only had one good book in him, and yet, despite not having two pennies to rub together, nobody in the household bothers to get a day job. Why? Reasons.

So, they eat cheese and biscuits and other mousy finger foods while sitting in the sink and being quirky at one another. Cassandra watches everything that goes on and journals about it, being both intelligent and daft in equal measure, while their mother-in-law dances around naked and their father reads detective novels.

When the owner of the castle (Cassandra’s family just rents it) dies and it turns out that the heirs to the estate are a couple of young, single men, romance and drama ensue. Does Cassandra fall in love with one of these new guys, or does, perhaps, her sister Rose? What of Stephen, the handsome gardner, who not-so-subtly dotes on Cassandra at every opportunity (and is one of the only people who actually works for a living)? Will he fall in love with one of the girls?

I heard the book referred to as “Austen and Brontë fan fiction,” and it’s hard to disagree. It hits a lot of the same notes, but, having been published in 1948, with more a modern (sense and) sensibility. Young women going to parties, wondering who they’re going to marry, are they in love, yes maybe, but possibly not, and oh we’re so poor if we marry one of these young men we’ll finally have money, but is that right, is it okay to marry someone if you aren’t head-over-heels nuts for them, and what to do about Stephen, he’s like a brother, isn’t he, and what does “love” even mean? Won’t someone tell us? *Swoon*

And it works because, well, it works. Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters know how to spin a yarn, and if you use them as your jumping-off point, odds are you’re going to land somewhere close to the mark.

Telling Tales out of School

I feel similarly toward “I Capture the Castle” as I feel toward another book I recently read — “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” That might seem like a strange comparison, but my point is that both books scratch a particular itch: Instead of trying to plumb the depths of the human psyche, they’re just interesting stories that are supposed to be fun to read.

It’s a matter of reader engagement, or perhaps you might call it readability. You get the impression that Dodie Smith really liked a good story, thought Jane Austen was just the tops, and wanted to make a top story of her own. So, BAM, she wrote this. And while there are certainly themes in Castle that are worth exploring, it’s seems clear that her approach was to make something that was entertaining.

That’s not how everyone approaches fiction, as my recent forays into Dostoevsky and Woolf can verify. A lot of modernists are that way — story is secondary to style — but those modernists were reacting to authors that Dodie Smith tried to emulate.

Dodie Smith read “Pride and Prejudice” and went, “Neat!”

Virginia Woolf read it and went, “Eat SHIT Jane Austen that’s not how people really think!”

Both are valid responses.

Still, it’s always seemed a little…pointless to write a book that people aren’t going to enjoy the process of reading. Books that critics say are meant to “challenge readers’ perceptions” about various things, books with disjointed styles or syntax that’s difficult to parse or that are written in the second person.

(In a panic, I just went and checked if “The Naked Lunch” was on the list of 1,000 Books. It isn’t, thank God.)

I Capture Your Pawn

What people will remember and appreciate most about “I Capture the Castle” is probably its writing, which eloquently captures a mixture of melancholy and humor in way that makes you go, “Awwww,” at least once per chapter. You recognize how sad everything is, but at the same time Cassandra writes about it so well that you don’t mind all the gloom. That’s not an easy balance to strike.

The setting — the titular “castle” that is “captured” in Cassandra’s prose — is interesting, and the book does raise issues of class and gender, but the point is never to hit you over the head with it. The plot moves at a steady pace and there are enough turns that you never fully get a handle on what’s going to happen. Endings, in these sorts of stories, are a big deal.

For a work that tries to emulate the romance of an Austen novel, the ending is surprisingly satisfying. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t mind spoilers one bit — I usually read the end of a book first, just to see how things are going to “end up” — but I recognize that the rest of you yahoos give a hoot, so I won’t spoil it for you.) I’ll just say that’s it’s unlikely you’ll guess who ends up with whom.

I’ll also say that “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith is utterly worth your time, especially if you’ve read your classics and haven’t been able to get your 19th Century Romance fix in a while. It’ll certainly…capture your attention.

* * *

The 2003 movie adaptation isn’t terrible and is on YouTube right now.

And here’s Dodie Smith on Goodreads.

Blog: Week of Sept. 22 – Sept. 28, 2024

Every week is a “rough week” when you’re a new teacher. While I may not be “new” (I’ve been in classrooms for coming up on 15 years now), most of my years have in South Korean classrooms — this is only my 2nd year as a teacher in America. So, I still count myself amongst the ranks of people who are just figuring things out.

The biggest difference so far is that South Korean middle-schoolers are more “adult” than most of my American high-schoolers. By every measurable rubric. There’s more accountability, more empathy, more hard work. I try not to get too down on American high-schoolers because of it — I don’t think it’s their fault — but it makes my job a lot harder, and it just makes me…I don’t know. Sad.

One of my students this week got in trouble for standing up and walking out of the classroom. Where’d he go? I’m not 100%, but I suspect he went to do drugs. (Weed vapes are a big problem.) When he tried to come back into class, I sent him up to his administrator. “That’s unfair! I was just going to the bathroom!”

“Okay, but you went without asking, didn’t sign out, and you didn’t get a pass.”

“I had the pass!”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I had the pass, but [ANOTHER STUDENT] took it from me!”

“Alright, you can explain that to your administrator and we’ll sort it out.”

He left in a huff, throwing that day’s assignment on the ground — a gesture that somehow lost its meaning when you consider that he hadn’t yet done any work on the assignment. Matter of fact, this student hasn’t turned in a single assignment all year.

His administrator listened to the student and called me to confirm the story. “[STUDENT] says you sent him to me for going to the bathroom. Is that true?”

“He left class without permission and without a pass. I don’t know where he went.”

“So he’s lying when he says he had a pass?”

“Yes.”

I heard the student in the background practically crying about what a liar I was. A bold move considering our security cameras clearly showed him leaving class without a pass. Even when that was explained to him — even when he was shown the security footage — he still maintained that he’d left with a pass.

I should point out that, while I was talking to the student and his administrator, 34 other students were waiting for class to continue. Class sizes in most American schools are ridiculous and, frankly, untenable. There should be, at most, 20 students per teacher. Our school usually does 35. (One of my classes has 36, even though there are only 35 desks. It’s a trivial problem considering there hasn’t been a single day when every student has been in class, but still.)

And many people might say, “What’s the big deal? If the student had to go to the bathroom and went to the bathroom, he shouldn’t be punished for that. Stop micromanaging!” I can see why some people might think that — it’s because they are idiots who haven’t spent any time at a school in the last 20 years.

The problem isn’t that he went to the bathroom, it’s that he left class and nobody knew where he went. Why is that such a big deal? Safety. For one, unsupervised students sometimes fight each other in hallways, brutally, and for two: In the event of a fire or, you know, an active shooter, you need to know where everyone is.

The fact that this student lies and behaves like a petulant child isn’t surprising; he is a petulant child, and likely a petulant child being raised by a petulant child — but what is surprising is that we’re expecting him to improve while stuffing him in a classroom filled with 30+ students who also have behavior issues, students who have learning disabilities, and students who lost out on years of socialization because of COVID.

I’ve spent several hours after school this week talking with counselors, administrators, and making phone calls to parents. Not just about this one student, but about him and dozens of others. When I get home, I haven’t been in a “reading” mood.

Mostly what I want to do is sleep.

I have made some progress on “I Capture the Castle,” which is light-hearted and just as sweet as box of lady fingers — by I’ve fallen awfully short of my reading goal. I’m almost finished, though!

This is turning into one of those “should I post this?” posts that I ultimately end up deleting because this is supposed to be a blog about books and I want it to be a positive one. Ultimately, though, my job drastically impacts my reading habits. And it’s probably cathartic to let all this stuff out.

I should point out that I have a few exchange students from South Korea in my homeroom. We spent part of yesterday looking at where we used to live in Seoul on Google Maps while lamenting how much we miss things like Isaac Toast. It was a fun, if not bittersweet trip down memory lane.

I’ve been dreaming about South Korea a lot recently. It’d be an understatement to say I miss it there, but it’s true. I miss the students, the food, the people I used to work with. It’s not a perfect place, but they care about education in a way that most Americans can’t fathom.

And I frankly can’t imagine what it’s like for a South Korean student to transfer here to America. I mean, I’m sure they have a lot more free time without after-school academies, and the workload is probably trivial for them, but the culture shock must be huge.

“Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector

Brazil has apparently been sleeping on one hell of a writer and refusing to let the rest of the world know about her. Well, I’ve got some choice words for you, Brazil:

Share the wealth! There’s no reason for you to actively hide a writer from the rest of us for entire decades all while secretly giggling with each other in your beach-side bairros while sipping on Brahma.

In actuality, the United States is fairly notorious for excluding literature from other countries when it comes to “bestseller lists,” so it’s no wonder a writer like Clarice Lispector, whose career spanned 38 years, never really achieved mainstream success in North America. She wrote in Portuguese, not English.

However, and quite thankfully, “Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector is #565 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I’ve had a chance to spend a few days with these stories, and I have been nothing but impressed.

Lost in Translation

It is exceedingly rare for a translated work to “make it” in America, but even so it is strange that Lispector’s work only ever caught on in literary circles. She started publishing at the age of 18 (in 1938) and kept writing until her death one day before her 57th birthday. In that time, she published 9 novels and 8 short story collections. All of these works with successful with Portuguese readers, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that she started gaining much traction stateside and started really selling.

“But those are just numbers,” you might say. What was it that made her popular enough that Brazil has erected not one but two statues in her honor?

*A math teacher once tried to bury that dog.*

She was one of the first female authors to bring the modernist movement to Brazilian readers. Modernists, you might recall, have a penchant for exploring the psychological workings of their characters and using new narrative forms such as stream of consciousness. Two of Lispector’s English-language influences were Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, so that ought to give you some idea of the style she was bringing to the Portuguese language.

Not to imply that she doesn’t stand on her own! Based on the stories I’ve read over the last few days, Lispector strikes me as substantially more accessible than Woolf or Joyce. Her stories have a dream-like quality that couple the mundanities of life with profound psychological revelation. They examine how simple events — like a chicken running away before being killed and cooked — can drastically impact a household.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer

Psychologists have long understood that language impacts thought; the language in which we speak dictates the thoughts we think. There’s that urban legend going around that Eskimos have 40 words for snow, which is a huge oversimplification, but the point holds true: We can only think about things we have words for.

This, I think, is what gives translated works like Lispectors’ such a dream-like quality and makes them seem so other-worldly: The authors, in their native language, are often using words and ideas that don’t have a direct English corollary. In the hands of a bad translator, this can make the stories seem clunky or dull. In a good translation, however, they can capture a poetic sort of magic that’s lacking in works that were written originally in English.

We literally get to see the world through a different set of eyes.

*And those eyes are lookin’ at you, Rio!*

What a Body

There are a few authors who put their work out there in “complete” editions (Ginsberg, Dickenson, and now Lispector), creating some absolute bricks that would strain any shelf. I have the same problem with these that I have with plays — they aren’t books.

I mean. Physically, yes, they are books, but they aren’t meant to be read all at once. I can’t imagine anyone who would want to sit down and read every short story that Clarice Lispector ever wrote all in an afternoon.

I have a certain philosophy when it comes to the lengths of these works and how much time you should spend on them. Let me put it in food terms:

Poems are a quick snack.

Short stories are a single meal.

And novels are a trip to the grocery store.

To read the entirety of Lispector’s work all-at-once would be akin to sitting down at Chili’s and ordering one of everything. Even if the meals are good — even if some of them are the best meals you’ve ever had — they will ultimately be lost in the mix and you’re going to come away feeling like you’re A) bloated, or B) dying. Probably both.

As I do with any big collection, it’s better to read them a little bit at a time, every once in a while, just when the mood strikes you. Bearing that in mind, I didn’t read the whole thing — I read (and listened to the audio versions of) about 15 of these. I will, however, wind up reading them all.

Lispector’s are stories I’d pick up and read on a spring morning when the weather has just become pleasant enough — still crisp, but pleasant — to open a window and let nature take over the room. The unique feel of this new, purer kind of air would make me notice things in minute detail, like the way my pencil hangs off the edge of my desk, as if that particular placement were somehow profound.

And it would be, simply for my thinking it so.

*You should bring a pencil everywhere you go.*

The Self on a Shelf

Sarah and I have a . . . confusing shelving system. We have a couple thousand books between us — me being an English teacher and she a librarian — and while our system makes sense to us, I imagine any other bibliophile would recoil in Dewey horror.

It’s organized loosely by genre, but mostly by feel. Alphabetizing has absolutely nothing to do with it, and it’s not uncommon to find scary books at a lower level than humorous books. Why? Because they deserve it.

Anywho, I’m probably going to put “Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector on the shelf with the poetry books I take down and look at when the mood strikes me. Emily Dickinson is up there, along with Walt Whitman, Robert Pinsky, and a few others that I read at certain times of year.

“Chicken” just strikes me as a story that I’ll want to read again, and there are a few others that I’m sure will stick with me. “Love.” And the one about the math teacher unburying the dog.

I’m also going to be on the lookout for a few of her novels — it’ll give me an excuse to hit up one of the few used bookstores that survive in this midwest literary hellscape.

*An accurate depiction of the state of bookstores in the midwest.*

* * *

Here’s Clarice Lispector on Goodreads.

Blog: Week of Sept. 15 – Sept. 21, 2024

I gave in this week and finally paid for a subscription to MidJourney, the AI-powered image generator.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of AI art. I agree with most artists when they say that we should use AI to do the mundane tasks while humans get to make the art; but the side of me that’s into computer science finds this technology too fascinating not to play with.

While I’m curious about how the “algorithm” generates images (amongst other media), I recognize that most of what AI generates is hot garbage.

(Although, I will say that Obscurest Vinyl over on the YouTube has AI bumping out some real bangers.)

Imagine That

My initial plan for incorporating AI art into this blog was simple: I needed to generate dumb little images that would break up the text to fit with the particular voice I’m trying to cultivate: Using the visual elements of click-bait articles while having well-written, punchy paragraphs. Something snarky that people wouldn’t mind reading on a phone or a computer screen.

Like if Kurt Vonnegut wrote for Buzzfeed.

Heidi-ho!

*Vonnegut did all his best writing at Starbags.*

I’m no Vonnegut, and I would hazard a guess that most Buzzfeed writers can sling together a snappier blog post than I can, but it’s good to have goals.

Anywho, when this whole AI art thing started popping off a few years ago, it caught my attention because of what it was doing algorithmically. For years and years, getting a computer to parse language was a bit of a holy grail. Then, BAM, all of a sudden not only can computers parse language, they can generate visual images from it!

Holy shit!

Even if you think these AI image generators are stealing from artists, which is a fair point, that is an astounding leap in software technology. And it only gets cooler the deeper into it you dig.

The old adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out” immediately sprang to my mind, and I wondered what these generators would do if they were given a bunch of nonsense.

What, for example, would they make of the first stanza of “Jabberwocky?“

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe...

The answer, according to Stable Diffusion, is this:

All I did was copy the first stanza, paste it into the prompt box, and hit “Generate.” The above image is what came out. And it’s dazzling! Every bit as nonsensical as the poem itself, but for entirely different reasons.

Even the people who wrote the software can’t explain how or why a computer spit out that particular image when given words like “brillig” and “gimble in the wabe.” In a sense that is almost too real to be comfortable, that image is based on the hallucinations of a machine.

That is astounding. And maybe a little unnerving.

Still, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Even if you’re an artist, you should think of this whole AI thing as little more than a fad, because that’s ultimately what it is. We’re a long way from having AI generate anything of actual, lasting beauty (if that’ll ever happen at all) and there will always be a demand for good, human-made art.

Paragraphs as Prompts

The images I’ve been generating have mostly been inspired by Stephen Gammell, the artist who drew all the illustrations for the classic, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” series. (And who has other cool art available for purchase.) This is mostly due to nostalgia, but it’s also because I don’t want to pick a color scheme, so black and white images work well.

Ultimately, though, what I want to do is plug in entire paragraphs from books and stories to see what kinds of images applications like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion will dream up.

Let’s give it a try, shall we? Using a paragraph from the author I’m currently reading — Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian short story author whose “Collected Stories” is an absolute blast.

Here’s a paragraph from her 1952 story, “Love.”

And, if she had passed through love and its hell, she was now combing her hair before the mirror, for an instant with no world at all in her heart. Before going to bed, as if putting out a candle, she blew out the little flame of the day.

Here’s what Stable Diffusion, run on my own computer, makes of that:

*I’m getting some “The Ring” vibes from this one.*

And don’t forget this zinger:

The problem with Stable Diffusion is that it’s pretty dumb. As you can see by that last image, it latched onto some of the nouns and just . . . didn’t know what to make of them. Is she wearing a candle as a hat? And is she rubbing . . . wax on her face?

Stable Diffusion also makes everyone have eyes like a stroke victim and can’t draw hands.

Here’s the same Clarice Lispector prompt put into MidJourney:

I feel like that one actually captures the spirit of the paragraph. Somewhat pensive, exhausted; no physical candle present but definitely showing a metaphorical “blowing out the day.”

And this one…

…depicts a witch literally trying blow out the little flame of the day?

Beats me.

Whatever the case, MidJourney definitely produces better results than Stable Diffusion. And it does so without making my computer run hotter than a firecracker.

Looking Ahead

I’ve got several books picked out for the next week and beyond. Clarice Lispector is first, followed by Dodie Smith and a few “classics” I was able to borrow from my school.

I also just got done updating the 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die page! The list is complete and organized and I’ve underlined everything I’ve already read already.

Oh, and I’m on BlueSky now. Follow me if you’d like to hear more about what I’m reading or to see pictures of my cat.

“Notes From Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Note: This is based on the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

By the end of “Notes From Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, #285 on the list of Books to Read Before You Die, I’d gone from thinking, “This book is an absolute waste of time,” to thinking it really was essential reading. There were also lyrics to a Tool song going around and around in my head. The lyrics go like this:

Disembodied voices deepen my
Suspicious tendencies
Conversations we’ve never had,
Imagined interplay…

It took a while to get into, but by the time I reached the end of this novella penned by the guy who wrote books notorious for being some of the longest books ever, I had a pretty clear understanding of where Dostoevsky was going — it’s a character study of a man who takes a natural tendency to an absolute extreme, resulting in his self-isolation.

*“I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man.”*

Existentially Speaking

Fyodor Dostoevsky led a difficult life. That sounds like I’m about to write a floppy research report on the guy, but it’d honestly take too long to get into all of it — people write books about the subject. Still, it’s good to know some basics:

Born into a somewhat wealthy family in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was exposed to literature at an early age and worked as a translator before joining literary circles and beginning to publish his own work. His association with those same literary circles resulted in his being exiled to Siberia and then being forced into military service.

If all of that sounds miserable, you’re right, and the difficulties he faced no doubt contributed to his particular style of writing, which would charitably be called “depressing” and accurately referred to as “essentially Russian.“

“Notes From Underground” was published in 1864 and is widely considered to be one of the first examples of existentialist literature.

*“Two heads? Yes, I noticed, but I’m trying not to freak out about it.”*

Existentialists look at the world through the lens of the individual and his search for meaning in a world that is often cruel and absurd. Other popular existentialists include Sartre, Camus, and Kafka — three people who, if they were playing a round of golf together, wouldn’t finish the first hole because they’d be too busy arguing about why they had to use clubs.

The way I think about it is this: You can’t spend years and years in Siberian exile without wondering if there’s a purpose to all this. Dostoevsky wanted to explore man’s search for meaning in his writing, which meant forgoing certain tropes you might find in earlier literature — heroes, plot, catharsis — and creating works that delved (too?) deeply into characters and their relationships.

The unnamed narrator of “Notes From Underground” is a man (widely referred to as “Underground Man“) who is so neurotic that he can’t do . . . anything. He can’t really work, he can’t form relationships, he can’t communicate with anyone. He tries, but he overthinks every aspect of every relationship and ultimately screws it up. All that’s left for him to do is live (literally) underground and isolate himself from everyone and everything.

I Think You Ought to Know I’m Feeling Very Depressed

In the first half of the novella, Underground Man talks directly to his readers about what is wrong with him and what is wrong with the world, but readers will agree with almost none of his observations — nearly every statement he makes is contradicted by another. At one moment, he calls himself “wicked,” and in the next he is “noble.” He hates love and loves hate, resents everything but blames himself, and cannot seem to stick with any decision he makes without second-guessing.

This is where the song lyrics I mentioned earlier started to go through my mind in a loop — Underground Man isn’t actually talking to anyone. He’s talking to himself. The “gentlemen” he continually addresses, as if the book were written for someone, don’t exist — the book itself is part of his downward spiral.

*“And he’s a real sonofabitch for writing it!”*

We all imagine conversations. You think about what you’d like to say to your boss, or what you’d tell the guy who just cut you off on your way to Chick-Fil-A, or how you’d win over that girl at work you’ve had a crush on for six months. In your own head, you’re a hero, you’re noble, you know just what to say.

Of course, we never say those things. Or, at least, we rarely do. And we very often feel guilty about not being able to be the person we think we ought to be, the person we imagine we are.

Underground Man takes that self-talk to an absolute extreme — it is the only kind of talking he does. The whole book is him speaking to himself in this way.

He thinks about what he’d like to say, what he’d like to do, he realizes he can never do or say those things, and then he beats himself up for his cowardice.

*“I’m sinking and I frankly deserve it!”*

I Resent the Implication

The second half of the novella sees the Underground Man discussing some of the things that have gone wrong in his life. It’s basically him mucking up relationships with old schoolmates and then hollering at a prostitute one night when he’s really drunk.

It’s clear that, while he blames himself for his wickedness, he also resents everyone else for not being as messed up as he is. Can’t anyone see? Doesn’t anyone realize how terrible it all is? Of course they don’t; they’re all fools. But if only he could connect with them, then maybe he’d be able to turn his life around.

He is very nearly able to make some kind of “real” connection with the prostitute (Liza) that he hollered at, but he ruins it, of course, by vacillating between wanting to “save” her and calling her a fool for thinking she can be saved.

Underground Man ultimately breaks down briefly and hits upon one of the truest moments in his entire existence when he says, crying,

“They won’t let me . . . I can’t be . . . good!”

It’s All Good

If you’ve never felt that way, then existentialist literature might not be your bag. Odds are, though, that you can sympathize at least a little with Underground Man. Like it or not, most of us search for meaning in life. We want there to be an answer, and for a lot of us that answer is that we want to be “good” people.

But what if you were never able to figure out what it meant to be “good?” What if that meaning eluded you, or if you felt like you could never achieve it because society wouldn’t let you?

There aren’t a lot of books on this list from which I can glean some kind of practical moral, but “Notes From Underground” does provide some semblance of a lesson: Don’t talk to yourself the way Underground Man does.

Modern psychology calls this negative self-talk and its characteristics are a list of issues that the narrator faces: catastrophizing, mind-reading (supposing the thoughts of others), blaming yourself for things outside your control, and approaching life as an all-or-nothing event.

I’m certainly guilty of all of these things, and reading Notes puts a lot of those thought processes into sharp relief. So, even if you find the Underground Man to be utterly reprehensible and you struggle to finish the book because he’s just so thoroughly dislikeable, there’s still value to be found.

Psychopathy
Misleading me over and over
Psychopathy
Misleading me over and over and over
Don’t you dare point that at me

* * *

Here’s a biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky from Britannica.

“Notes From Underground” on Goodreads.

Here’s that Tool song (Culling Voices):

(Watch out: It’s over 10 minutes long. (Insufferable.))

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson, #869 on the list of Books to Read Before You Die, has been a welcome respite from the literary labyrinth I’ve recently been trudging through.

Chased not so much by a Minotaur as by a Woolf, I’ve been far off the well-worn path, in the deep woods, surrounded by sky-high hedges and tormented by a distant howl.

I’ve escaped, though, and I wanted something a little less literary for my next book, so I figured an old fashioned adventure story would fit the bill.

*“Hey there I write stories.” – Robert L. Stevenson, esq.*

Robert Louis Stevenson is one of those authors whose works are regarded as “classics” by nearly everyone who can read. Any list of popular books will feature one of his works — his most famous are probably “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped,” but Jekyll and Hyde also shares a secure place in the literary canon. And, despite being mostly aimed at children, his books are enjoyed by people of all ages.

Who am I kidding? It’s mostly old people at this point. The “Fourth Wing” crowd aren’t getting their rocks off to “Treasure Island.”

Sick! Sick! Sick! Don’t Resist!

Published in 1886, Jekyll and Hyde was one of several famous Stevenson works that were written while he was bedridden in a seaside town in the south of England, doing a whole bunch of laudanum and writing writing writing — in every sense of the word — feverishly. (My sort of vacation!) Thus adding to my anecdotal theory that all the best books are written by people who either A) Aren’t writers, or B) Are in some way sick.

*“Fetch me the laudanum, Timmy! My bones are atremble.”*

A Proper Toad’s Proper Grandmother

I read Jekyll and Hyde for the first time after my Proper Grandmother took me aside to say, “When I was a little girl, I had nightmares that Mr. Hyde was at my window.”

This meant something coming from her. She talked about her emotions in the Minnesotan Episcopal fashion — begrudgingly, and only ever in places where no one could overhear.

So, naturally, I found a copy and read it right away, thinking this Jekyll and Hyde thing must have been truly horrific.

It wasn’t. Not the tiniest bit. Even as a 12 year-old I could see that the horror genre had grown by leaps and bounds since Proper Grandmother had read whatever quaint little novellas she’d been able to smuggle into her central-European hovel and fawn over by candlelight.

I was coming from a background of not only Stephen King, but A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th and Hellraiser. A British doctor with a split personality didn’t exactly pump my horror-loving nads, and having grown up thinking Cenobites were hiding under my bed, I wasn’t too worried about some dandy and his fancy ego-bending concoctions.

I had real worries: Guys with bloody lines all over their faces.

A Double Existence

Modern retelling of the Jekyll/Hyde story have seen the character of Mr. Hyde ballooned into something of an Incredible Hulk, which might be more exciting, but is wildly off base. The actual story sees a prim-and-proper doctor develop a potion that makes him smaller in stature, not some hulking monstrosity. The horror is that he’s an entirely different person; a person who gives in to and revels in his darkest desires.

The idea being that every person has these two sides. One presentable, stable, and of good social standing. The other hideous, heinous, and capable of committing the kinds of atrocities of which our “normal selves” can only daydream.

If you could become a different person, would you? To switch not only bodies but desires and purpose? Become a person who could drink or gamble or screw their way across town, a person who could get in fights, a person who could murder the guy you don’t like rather than just grumble about him when you’re all alone on a stairwell?

Bear in mind that you WOULD BE a different person — such are the workings of Jekyll’s potion. When you switched back (by consuming the same potion), you’d look entirely different and, presumably, would never be punished for your wrongdoings. The other you — the evil you — would simply vanish.

I’m guessing a lot of us would consider it and consider it strongly.

*“Hey, it’s my turn to use the body today.”*

Concocting a Metaphor

I’ve often wondered if Proper Grandmother saw the image of Mr. Hyde in someone she knew. That is to say, was there a person in her life that had a double, a more sinister counterpart?

The effect of the potion the titular doctor drinks isn’t all that different than the effects of alcohol or other drugs (laudanum, perhaps?), and I feel safe in assuming it is some kind of metaphor for the “double life” a lot of addicts lead. I honestly don’t know if Proper Grandmother had someone like that in her life, but it certainly isn’t outside the realm of possibility. Hell, maybe she led a double life.

I’ve definitely felt that “call of darkness” Dr. Jekyll feels.

Once, in Ubud, on the island of Bali in Indonesia, I tried in a drunken state to convince several compatriots to pile four bodies onto a tiny motorized scooter and drive through the rice fields during a torrential downpour so we could get hamburgers. The road on which we would have traveled looked like this:

“We’ll crash in the storm!” I told everyone. “We’ll absolutely crash and it’ll be ABSOLUTELY GLORIOUS. And if we DON’T, we’ll get HAMBURGERS.”

Calmer heads prevailed that night, thankfully, and to this day I have no idea why I felt the desire I did — a desire, almost a need, to crash a scooter into a rice field during a tropical storm. It was like that feeling you get when you imagine driving your car off the road: “The Call of the Void.” Only I was absolutely, completely, 100% ready to do it. It wasn’t hypothetical; I hoped it would happen.

I was afraid, maybe — those roads are narrow and horrifying — and wanted to face that fear head-on. Not just face it, but embrace it, revel in it. Enjoy the experience! Why dread these things? Why be afraid of pain and anguish? Can’t we embrace our tragedies and meet them as friends?

I may have been a fool to think so. Or, as I prefer to believe, my love of those rice fields was a pure and tragic sort of love that could only ever end in pain.

Doublethink

If I were a betting man, I’d suppose that the laudanum Robert Louis Stevenson was taking at the time he wrote Jekyll and Hyde had put into his mind this dual-consciousness many people espouse when they are inebriated. Anybody who’s been drunk knows what it’s like to feel like a different person, and while I’ve never done laudanum, it’s a pretty safe bet that it whacks you out of your gourd.

I think this impacted the style of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” It’s less a horror story or adventure than it is a mystery, with the “twist” (everyone knows Jekyll and Hyde are the same guy now, but they didn’t when it first came out) being the revelation of who the murderer actually was.

What’s really wacky to me is trying to imagine what it would have been like to first realize that Jekyll and Hyde were the same guy. It must have been like the first time everyone saw Fight Club! I bet a bunch of twats met up at the pub afterwards to brag about how “they knew they were the same guy the whole time no really I did I saw the subliminal flashes and I figured it out.”

*“And I figured it out before I even saw the trailer!”*

But the lasting impact of this tiny little book isn’t the mystery aspect — there are better, tighter mysteries out there — or even the glorified Hulkamaniac that Mr. Hyde has become in modern media, but rather the notion that you might not be who you think you are. “Know thyself,” says the Oracle to Neo, but is that really possible?

Or is there, in some shape or form, hidden in a cabinet in some dingy doctor’s office, a phial of liquid that’ll release all those thoughts and desires you’ve been too afraid to look at?

Can you imagine something, anything, that would make you crash your proverbial scooter into the rice fields of Ubud?

And can you then imagine a way back?

* * *

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson is available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Robert Louis Stevenson on Goodreads.

“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf

After reading “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I thought it would be FUN to read a little bit of the beast herself. So, I took a trip to a used bookstore and found a copy of “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf which is #987 on the list of Books to Read Before You Die.

It was cheap.

By “cheap” I mean the bookstore paid me to take it. They seemed happy to see it go. “Finally,” the cashier mumbled, reaching into her pocket and tossing a pinch of confetti onto the counter by way of celebration.

Since finishing the book, I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to talk about it in a positive way. I don’t think I’ve landed on the perfect “format” for a blog like this, but one thing I don’t want is for this to be the sort of thing that rips books apart for their perceived failings. I’d rather it be something that focuses on the positive. A “Ted Lasso” sort of book blog, even if I constantly struggle to maintain that positivity.

Let Me Think About It

Honestly, though, I did not enjoy “To the Lighthouse.” Reading it was more work than my actual job, and I kept losing the thread and having to back up a page or so to reread parts. Was I distracted by how stressed I am due to work and personal stuff? Sure. But, based on what I’ve read, I’m not alone in finding my mind wandering when reading Virginia Woolf.

The issue is that Woolf is a Modernist author who is most famous for exploring “stream of consciousness” writing. Born in London in 1882, Woolf was raised in a wealthy family and began writing at the age of 18. Her first book was published in 1915 and she continued writing nearly until her death in 1941. “To the Lighthouse” was published in 1927 and examined one large family’s attempt to … visit a nearby lighthouse?

That’s actually the plot?

Anyways. This part of thee early 20th century was Prime Time for Modernists, who reacted to the literary establishment by testing out new forms and narrative styles. A whole slew of young authors seemed to collectively rise up and shout, “F you, Dickens! We’ll do was we damned well please!” I’m sure it didn’t hurt matters that Woolf was wealthy enough to start her own publishing company, Hogarth Press.

Essentially, Woolf wanted to try new things, so she got all caught up in trying to write in a way that captured the inner workings of her characters. I heard that she used to sit around and think about thinking — metacognitive reflection — and would use that in her writing.

Marcel Proust probably did the same thing, but he did it in bed while thinking about his mom.

*“I don’t WANNA get up and YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.”*

You Got Psyched Out

Was Woolf taking an important step in the development of modern literature? Absolutely. In a sense, “stream of consciousness” is an attempt to marry literature and psychology. Woolf literally tried to get into the heads of her characters, embracing the difficulty of it and the way thoughts seem to form as if out of thin air, inexplicable and confounding.

There are two problems with this, in my opinion.

First, you can’t ever accurately capture a person’s thoughts. (I’m secretly solipsistic, it turns out.) Virginia Woolf didn’t know that, of course, and it shouldn’t have stopped her from trying, but the fact of the matter is that our experiences are our own and understanding — truly understanding — the perspective of another person is nearly impossible.

What we’re getting in Lighthouse is how Virginia Woolf thinks people think, and that is represented in the printed word, which doesn’t ever accurately portray its subject matter. It’s a fallacy within a fallacy, a wheel within a wheel.

The second problem with stream of consciousness is that it’s just bad writing.

*“HOW DARE YOU!?! **WARGARHARBLARGH**!”*

Before you get up in arms at my disparaging a literary titan, let me explain what I mean; stream of consciousness is often riddled with run-on sentences. It’s one nonsensical aspect of trying to capture “consciousness” that a lot of Modernists fall into.

Check out this monstrosity:

“Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul.”

I just typed all that and I still feel like I’m not understanding the thought process that’s going on. I mean, if you get it, great. Maybe it resonates with some people. But it’s work to read, and literary diarrhea like that is half the reason I lean towards minimalism.

It reminds me of the parable of the avant-garde violinist.

*“Get ready to have your ASSES BLOWN OUT.”*

Once Upon A Time…

…there was a violinist whose skill and knowledge of the violin surpassed all others. He lived and breathed his instrument; when he slept, he kept it clutched to his chest; when he ate, he wiped crumbs off its lacquered surface; even when he bathed, the violin was not far from his reach.

Nobody, the violinist figured, had ever truly explored the sounds of which his instrument was capable. So, he began composing.

Typical music notation was of no use to him — the violin, he knew, could play notes between the notes — and the blazing speed and languid slowness of which it was capable could not be expressed on paper. No pen could write the sound of his nails scratching the wood or the creaking of the violin’s neck as it was brought close to snapping. You could not write the sound of a pen knife slowly cutting through the strings. No; his compositions could only ever exist in his mind, and there they burned.

The songs he composed tested the limits of not only music theory but the tensile strengths of wood and gut. He played notes higher than any you’d ever heard, and notes so low that fog horns grew envious. He played notes that droned on and on for weeks, and some notes that were over so quickly you weren’t sure if you’d heard anything at all. He tapped on the violin’s back with a hammer and slapped the instrument into shallow water, creating sounds no one had ever dreamt of.

One evening, he put on a concert that was to be the grandest performance of the violin ever to grace a stage. In the audience were countless celebrities & politicians, along with world-famous musicians & composers. Bach was there, along with Chopin, and Beethoven too. Impossible! you say?That’s just how unique this violinist was.

The violinist soared that night. He leapt and he twirled and from the violin issued an unimaginable cacophony. When he was finished, he was covered in sweat, tears, and not just a little blood. The violin lay in ruin at his feet like the body of a conquered enemy.

And when the last note echoed through the concert hall and out across the open sea, nobody clapped. Nobody cheered and nobody cried “Bravo!”

Because, as technically masterful as it might have been, in the end it was just two hours violent noise that nobody could understand.

The point, of course, is that the avant-garde might be appreciated by some, but even if you’re the absolute BEST at what you do, the end result might not be appreciated.

Did Virginia Woolf achieve something by trying to get into the heads of her characters using stream of consciousness? Sure she did, but to a lot of us it sounds like a madman whacking a violin with a hammer while mumbling, “Listen to how unique it sounds!”

When sometimes all you want is a song you can dance to.

Here’s Virginia Woolf on Goodreads.

Blog: Week of Sept. 8 – Sept 14, 2024

It’s been a rough week for reading. Both forms of school (the classes I teach and the classes I’m taking online) are taking up my time, Virginia Woolf isn’t the easiest read in the world, and there have been some … occurrences that have put everyone on edge and have me feeling on the verge of panic a lot more often than usual.

Earlier this week a victim of bullying brought a gun to a school in my district and, when confronted by his bully, shot the other student in the torso. The student had a history of being bullied — it’s likely why he brought the gun in the first place; he wanted to protect himself.

I am sorry for nearly everyone involved. The student who thought he had no other choice than to resort to bringing a gun to school; the student who didn’t wake up that morning thinking he’d end up in intensive care; all the other students who had to deal with the terror and uncertainty of a lockdown; and all the parents and families who joined the ranks of thousands of Americans who have faced similar horrors, who have gotten in their car and rushed to school to pick up a child they hope, hope, hope is okay.

Not Feeling So “Peppy”

My high school has been blessedly free of gun violence, but it’s easy to see that everyone is thinking about it. We get reminders to keep our doors locked and never, never, never open them for people we don’t know. There’s been an increased presence of school resource officers as a just-in-case measure, but seeing three guys in body armor outside a pep rally doesn’t make anybody feel better.

At the football game last Friday, a rumor spread through the crowd that someone had come with a weapon, which caused people to run away in fear. No one was hurt and the rumors turned out to be baseless, but it goes to show how worried people are.

I always try to tell students that it is gun violence in schools is a tragedy, but it is a relatively rare tragedy and that they shouldn’t dwell on it. But, well. When the guy you’re standing next to gets struck by lightning, it’s hard not to keep your eyes on the clouds.

The Man, the Mythulu

In an attempt not to focus on all the horrible things that are happening: Sarah and I went out to get “sushi” on Friday — put in “quotes” because we had California Rolls and a bunch of other deep fried cream cheese cylinders that Americans call “sushi” — and had a few bottles of hot sake for good measure. (I’m not knocking this cuisine. It’s delicious, but only very charitably referred to as “sushi.”)

When we got home, we played some Mythulu.

If you aren’t familiar, Mythulu is a card game that helps you generate ideas for stories. You have a deck of cards that are split into six categories — Traits, Elements, Habitats, Characters, Textures, and Relationships — that represent tropes in storytelling, which you can draw in certain combinations to create new ideas.

For example, you might draw “Sky,” “Ash,” and “Memory.” You put those three together to get a roving cloud of ash, perhaps spread from a crematorium smokestack, that implants memories of the dead into anyone who is overtaken by the cloud.

There are no wrong ideas. You just draw the cards and let your imagination run wild. These cards are FANTASTIC for developing story ideas or parts of a story. Sarah and I often play it when we’ve had a few drinks; not because we’re actively working on a writing project together, rather just because it’s fun to talk about.

We decided we’d draw cards to create a monster that we could use in a fantasy story.

*“Don’t **dwell**, children. It won’t do to **dwell**.”*

As we were drawing, we brainstormed what we thought the cards meant.

“It’s a creature, right? And it lives in the ground. It grows really slowly and … and here’s the thing … when people see it, they want to take care of it. Like, like it release a chemical or something that triggers maternal instinct.“

“People want to take it home and look after it.”

“Right! They want to take it home and feed it and love it and they’ll often times just sit and look at it. That’s how magical it is. People put this monster in their house and just look at it and adore it and want to keep it alive.”

“It tricks them. It bamboozles them.”

“Yeah! It plays the long con. It’s completely helpless unless it can find someone to take it home and give it everything it needs. But … but the people who are being conned, they don’t even mind it.”

“They’re excited! They’re excited to have it. They tell all their friends about it and go on the internet to do research about how to best take care of this little monster. They take pictures of it and share them.”

“And it never stops! For their whole life, these poor suckers are dedicated to caring for this monster that’s latched onto their lives. Some people even have more than one. They fill their whole house up with them, and taking care of these damned things becomes their entire existence!“

We’d been drinking, so it took us a little longer than it should have to realize that we were describing houseplants. In our attempt to create a new, fantastical monster, we created ferns.

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

There is a long and detailed history of books about war that stretches back just about as far as the written word; name a big war in the past 3,000 years and it’s likely you can find a book that someone wrote about it. Sure, books like “The Iliad” or “The Histories” or “The Art of War” aren’t novels, but they do show that readers have always had an absolute fascination with fighting and death.

It’s hard to say what effect “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien has on readers today. The Vietnam war was looked at differently 30 years ago when the book was published, and people my age — children, then — would have grown up hearing stories about it from relatives, making it fresher than it seems now. (Most of my students today wouldn’t be able to find Vietnam on a map, let alone discuss its psychological impact.)

Does “The Things They Carried” transport you to the jungles of Vietnam; does it let you feel the mosquito bites, the dampness in your socks, or the burn of chlamydia? Maybe not. But there are some absolute gut punches in here that are revealed as if in slow motion, showing Tim O’Brien’s understanding of how the literary conversation was evolving at the time.

*“Hello? Jungle? I heard there would be fun and games.”*

You Can’t Ever Really Know Anything, Man

And of course the book doesn’t transport you there. One of the themes is that memory is fallible; we can’t trust what we put down on paper. It’s technically “fiction,” after all. Even if there are real people in it doing real things, it still carries that label — Tim O’Brien chooses to call it a work of fiction rather than a memoir. (Hearkening after Norman MacLean, maybe?)

In a postmodern sense, you can’t understand anything at all by reading a book.

Want to know what war is like? Join the army. Want to experience Vietnam? Buy a plane ticket. The only thing we’ll possibly be able to understand by reading “The Things They Carried” is what Tim O’Brien felt like when he was sitting at his typewriter, and we’ll only get a partial understanding of that.

You might disagree with it, but I bet Tim O’Brien agrees with me.

*Just as he’ll agree this portrait is 100% accurate.*

Don’t Drink The Milk

There are a few books that I’m not worried about “spoiling,” and “The Things They Carried” is one of them. It’s non-linear and only a breath away from being a short story collection, so telling you what’s happening on the last few pages won’t ruin anyone’s experience.

The reason I want to talk about the ending is this: O’Brien is right on the cutoff point for what I would consider to be a “current” author. I’m showing my age by saying so, but anything published before 1990 isn’t current — sorry “A Farewell to Arms” and “Catch-22,” you’ve been relegated to the realm of the “Classic.” “The Things They Carried,” though, is still quite sensible as a “modern” war novel (postmodern, really), and it has a particular effect upon modern readers.

A part of that is related to the ending, which flashes back to when the narrator was 9 and he had his first encounter with death — a girl he was “in love with” died of brain cancer, and the last chapter is an exploration of how dreams keep that little girl (and all his war buddies) alive in his mind. It’s an emotional twist of an ending considering the number of people who explode in the story.

Death and Dreams

As you get closer to the final pages, you expect there to be some sort of violent climax. It’s a war novel, after all. Certainly there could be an action-packed thrill ride of an ending. People get shot and step on landmines and have their legs blown off and there must be a bridge somewhere that needs exploding — but the actual climax is this subtle little story about a girl who wears a red hat to cover her bald head and how little Timmy O’Brien hears on the playground one day that his girlfriend “kicked the bucket.”

It’s like that “My Girl” movie or one of those other horrible tales that only exist to make children confront death before they really need to.

More than the stories of his buddies drowning in a shit river, that last chapter about the girl in the red hat clings to you, especially if you’ve experienced that kind of significant loss. We all have those dreams, and they stick around for years and years and years. Enough to make you wonder if they ever really go away.

I still have dreams in which my mother is alive. Instead of being dead and cremated and poured into a box buried on a hillside, she’s instead “retired” from life and now lives in a facility somewhere. Like a facility for “dead” people; a post-hospice hospice. The same way cops turn in their badge and gun and uniform when they retire, Ellen has turned in her friends, her home, and her family. Death isn’t the end of existence, just the end of that existence.

In my dream, that’s what happens to old people. Instead of dying, a bunch of guys in white coats come get them and take them somewhere else. A retirement village for the dead. She has her own little room with a single bed and a TV with 13 channels.

She doesn’t have what you’d call a “life,” this woman. She follows a schedule that’s “the best thing for her, really.” She’s a shell of her former self, and all of us survivors — the men in her life who are still clinging to all this absurd bullshit we bumble through every day — are supposed to just let her exist in some sort of half-life of field trips and cafeteria meals and plastic bowling balls being rolled down long, carpeted hallways.

Every now and then, we run into her in the wild, out on the street. Like we’ll see her getting off a bus and heading into a museum with the rest of the “retired from life” folks. The same way you might see a group of students getting off a big, yellow school bus. I stop whatever I’m doing, I run over, I grab her by the shoulders and say, “What are you doing here? Why would you rather do … this than be a part of our lives? You’re being led around like a geriatric elephant that gets to go see all the other zoo animals!”

And someone, an orderly, a tough guy, will pull me aside and say, “Leave her alone. That’s just the way it is man. People gotta retire. And you gotta let ‘em alone.”

She looks at me and she sees me and she knows me but it doesn’t matter anymore. She’s moved on to a new phase of existence. This is her life now, and all of us are no longer a part of it. The whole world stands on a sidewalk in the sunshine and shrugs.

*Hop aboard!* *We’re headed off to our impending doom.*

It’s odd for a war story to make you think about these things — dreams you have of dead people. People who didn’t blow up or get shot; people who disappeared in more common, even mundane ways. I don’t think even Hemingway would have had the balls to end a war novel like that. Joseph Heller might have, and Vonnegut probably thought Tim O’Brien was a-okay. But it hits you, that ending. All of it hits you, and even if it doesn’t really capture WAR, it captures something.

Me? I just wish I had different dreams. Better dreams.

Christ, I couldn’t dream her onto a beach or something? Texas, at least?

Blog: Week of Sept. 1 – Sept 7, 2024

The midwest summer is finally starting to show signs of abating as cooler temperatures begin to meekly eek their way into existence. Thursday was the first day I felt the need to wear a sweater when the sun went down, even though there was a high of around 80 in the afternoon.

I’m getting strength and resilience built up in my legs and feet. I’ve felt the start-of-the-year aches and pains more acutely than I have in the past, probably because I’m getting older and probably because I hadn’t been exercising as much as I should have during the summer. Shoes are the important thing. One of the best bits of advice I’ve ever heard is this: “Don’t buy the cheap version of anything that comes between you and the ground.” Beds, tires, sleeping bags, tents, rugs. Anything that’s meant to be between you and mother earth ought to be of some quality.

This goes double for shoes. I made the mistake at the start of the year of buying some cheap Nikes to serve as my “school shoes.” I thought, like a dummy, that Nike made a quality product that couldn’t possibly let me down. (Or, more accurately, I thought, “Nike is surely good enough.”) I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only do my new shoes make a nonsensical clicking sound when you walk, the insoles are woefully under-padded.

I’ve switched back to last year’s pair — Sketchers with Memory Foam insoles. Even though they’re a little run down and starting to show wear and tear, at least I’m not limping slightly at the end of each day.

*“Well why can’t they make them COMFORTABLE!?”*

“Middle-Age Man Gripes About Shoes.” More at 11.

My reading has been going well. I’ve hit my goal of at least 100 pages each day, even though a lot of those were pages of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” some of which only had a total of 30 words on them. (Plays read quickly.) The real challenge this week has been anxiety.

I’ve made a point of talking a bit more with the teacher who sits next to me at the plan center. He’s fresh out of college and this is his first year teaching. After he missed a day due to illness, I noticed that he seemed to be as stressed out as one could possibly get, grumbling over papers and second-guessing things he was doing. I’ve been there. The signs are easy to recognize.

If you’ve never been a teacher or worked with kids in any way, this might be difficult to understand, but teaching wears you down. As a professional, you want to do well — not only for yourself but because children are depending on you to do so. You are working without a net and largely without support and you’ll just come to feel like you’re carrying around a terrible weight that you just can’t put down.

I made a point of talking to my plan center neighbor a bit more to let him know that this stress is normal. “I feel like I’m having a panic attack nearly every day,” I said. “Right when I wake up, BAM, my heart is racing and my thoughts are circling the drain.”

He nodded vigorously. “Yeah,” he said.

I told him that I suspected almost every teacher in the building was going through it in one way or another, that we’re all overworked, and that I’ve been told (and believe) it takes around 5 years of teaching a new subject to be “comfortable” with it.

He seemed relieved to hear it. “It’s good to know I’m not the only one.”

Mourning in the Morning

I don’t know what’s causing me to feel so anxious in the morning. I don’t drink very much, my eating habits aren’t terrible, and I have been getting between 12,500 and 15,000 steps each day (that’s just how much I walk while I’m teaching), so a lack of exercise isn’t the problem. I also try to get around 8 hours of sleep each night, which is only ever interrupted when I come awake at 3:30 AM feeling like I’m about to die.

The racing heart and sense of impending doom aren’t the worst part of it, though — the worst part is climbing into bed each night knowing that it’s going to happen. It’s like Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill pondering that goddamned rock.

It’s one of life’s cruel ironies that people with depression are often sad about being depressed and people with anxiety are often nervous of their anxiety symptoms. The only thing you can do about it, though, is just start doing stuff.

“The opposite of anxiety is action.”

So, I get up, I read, I type stuff. I put prompts into Stable Diffusion and marvel at how wildly inaccurate they are.

*This is supposed to be “A man looking at a large, round boulder.” #spoton*

The sun is rising and my cat has the zoomies and it feels like Fall is almost here.