silencing the bell
Monday, 7 July 2025
Cassandra at the Wedding (offload 15)
Wednesday, 2 July 2025
Reviews in Reverse (14 days to Offload) - Okay is Underrated
'The Emperor of Gladness' by Ocean Vuong is already late back to the library and a queue of people are waiting impatiently to read it, so I am starting with the most recently read from the book pile. It was read mostly back and forth on the train to Devon, but not much while I was there because Claire and I were too busy pottering about and pretending to be retired (well I was pretending, she is semi-retired).
I love this kind of story; people going through some kind of crisis find each other, and go through their crisis together. It's not all neat and happy ending, just human beings muddling along and making what they can of life. Hai is at the end of his tether. He is grieving. He has lied to his mum, and not just about the little things. Grazina has spotted him on the bridge, and is pretending (it turns out) to be trying to hang out laundry. The elderly frail Lithuanian is having trouble keeping her carers and after she has offered some words of solace and advice she invites him to stay. She thinks his name is Hello, so she calls him Labas, which means hello in Lithuanian. So for a while they muddle along together, her with a meagre pension and him working at HomeMarket with his cousin Sony, and Hai creating an alternate reality where he is rescuing her from the Nazis when Grazina's dementia episodes leave her huddled and terrified.
"He stood watching Grazina sleep under the photo of herself half a century ago, her face, the only part of her that wasn't covered, grey and compressed and smeared with strawberry jam. What did he know about her illness, after all, other than that four of the thirteen pills she took each day were supposed to 'subdue' it, like some sort of criminal in her head? How could he have known that her brain was actually collapsing slowly inside her skull, how this made little holes, which then made new neural connections and scrambled old ones? It must be like water, he thought, as the morning rose up around them. It must be like the lake she talked about. Diving under the surface until everything was muted and gauzed but still there. He listened to her wheezy breaths, and imagined a tiny fire scratching inside her. A little torch that forgot it was not supposed to burn underwater. Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering. The idea made him sick. And without knowledge of his own legs moving beneath him, he crossed the hall to his bedroom, fished the contact lens case from his jacket pocket, and , having been sober for forty-seven days, tossed the Perc and codeines back in one gulp, then returned to where Grazina lay slumped in the jeep." (p.110)
As much as he saves her, she also saves him. She is just a person with no expectations, and so he never fears disappointing her. Here he finally tells her about Noah:
"He told her of their friendship, of the days driving aimlessly in a truck through a town far, far away from Europe, from Germany, called East Gladness. How they'd walk for hours through the pines, the back lots of that rusted strip of earth, singing in adolescent voices that crackled like wartime radios. About the pools of clear water that rose over the cattails and sweetgrass in the junkyards after a storm, how once they swam in a shallow tub made from the rainwater collected in a dent in the roof of an old school bus. And the water was so clear, so sweet, your skin looked truer that it did on the surface, warped and magnified by the tiny current they made from their scavenged laughter. He told of Noah's barn, where they knew the wrong inside them was the only thing that made sense of where they grew up, where the gods, after flipping the tables from losing their bets, left them alone to make a fugitive life. That a boy beside a boy could form an island of 'okayness.' 'With him,' he said, 'it wasn't that I was happy - but that I was okay. And okay is even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.' He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. 'Okay is underrated...' " (p.315)
The cast of characters at HomeMarket also have their own issues but equally they provide caring for each other: the manager BJ who is a part-time wrestler, Hai's cousin Sony who is obsessed with the Civil War, Wayne, Maureen and even the unnamed washing up girl. Here, surreally, they borrow a van to go to the site of Sony's father's untimely death on a roadside in Vermont:
"Hai could tell, from the faint throb in Sony's neck, that the boy was trying hard to hold it in. BJ's shadow slid across the dried leaves and covered Sony like a cape. She cupped the boy's head with her hand, as if to hold him in place, before reaching down to hug him. He turned into her embrace as Maureen took the headrest into her arms bouncing it like a living baby. Hai came forward, his mouth partly open, and threw his arms around the huddled group, his face buried in BJ's enormous back as the branches clicked above them in a spring gale. These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained into the psyche from hours of periphery manoeuvring through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other's coughs and exhales better that those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy's hallowed loss - on the clock." (p.366)
After a visit to Lucas, Grazina's son, who turns out to be real and not imagined as Hai had wondered, their ramshackle existence is threatened by his plan to move his mother and sell her house. They try to stave off the inevitable, inevitably.
Stay safe. Be kind. Read some really good writing.
Thursday, 19 June 2025
The Echoes, or Literary Responsibilities (13th)
Wednesday, 18 June 2025
Day 12 : Rivers in the Sky
Thursday, 12 June 2025
Days of audiobooks : day eleven
Listening to audiobooks in my 'office' and doing puzzles has been my relaxation for some weeks. 'Bird Life' by Anna Smaill was a delight; curious and turned into something unexpected, it tells about the friendship between a New Zealand young woman teaching english in Japan, and mourning her brother, and a Japanese woman, also a teacher and also mourning a loss. Here just a lovely moment (that I had to take down like dictation so I may have the punctuation wrong):
"Dinah placed the carrier bag on the table, she cleared the pile of advertising circulars, the place from this morning's breakfast, the new letter that had been misdirected, sent to a different prefecture, finally redirected to the correct address, finally out the carrier bag on the cleared table and reached inside. It held a box made of thick quality cardboard, white as snow, white as bedlinen, folded along pre-scored lines. Inside the box she felt something shift, heavy and unevenly weighted, it slid. she put the box down in order to delay the moment of opening. She went to the bathroom, studied her face in the mirror, her heart was beating. she washed her hands and face, removed her makeup. She drew the curtains so she could see the light outside, then she walked back to the table and opened the lid. Inside was a pie. It was the pie from Shinjuku, the one that she had not bought. She sat down. Had anything before ever been so beautiful? It was unlikely. The pastry was crisp and fragile, like a bank of fine, sunny, buttery sand. The apples and sweet potato were so thinly sliced they were transparent, glimpses of the apple's perfect pink skin shone through the caramel glaze like flowers caught under rice. It was a fairy tale of a pie, a platonic vision of a pie, it was a pie you might find cooling on a windowsill with a red gingham cloth beneath. she folded the lid to prop up the interior so that the box sat on the table like an expensive display case. Then she took a knife from the drawer and cut herself a thin slice. She took a clean plate from the cupboard and returned top the table, placed the thin slice of pie on the middle of the plate. She sat down. Outside it had started to rain slightly and the sky was a vessel slowly filling with dark resonance. There must be a hole in it somewhere, something leaking. She thought about that bit of lore, was it true? that if you were in a car accident and the car was submerged, that you had to wait until the vehicle filled up with water, until the pressure of inside and outside equalised, then, and only then, you push the door open, and swum out.What strange beauty there must be in that darkness, she thought, the car's headlights illuminating the silt world of the water. You would not need to surface then, you would be able to swim forever. She looked at the piece of pie on the plate, then she took a fork and ate the first mouthful."
Also 'When We Were Bad' by Charlotte Mendelson, that I may have started previously and then abandoned as it felt familiar. A lovely family saga, guaranteed to make you feel like your own family is nice and normal and well adjusted, and a wonderful window into reform Judaism. The fallout of the decision by Leo to walk away from his wedding echoes through the family and the community and seems to allow his siblings to face up to how much they are living their lives for others. I love a good story examining close family relationships.
Currently listening to 'The Way Home' by Mark Boyle, about his experiment living without money ...
Stay safe. Be kind. Listening to audiobooks is reading.
Sunday, 8 June 2025
10th (yes I know it's the eighth today) : radical honesty
You know how hard it is to tell people what you really think. So as soon as Duffy walked in to work yesterday I told him that his wedging the packets into boxes, stacking packets up and wedging everything onto the shelves was driving me round the bend ... being the person who mainly has to remove items from the shelves. I have told him this several time before. I said it was nicely as I could and made light of it. But it is very annoying. Other human beings are so annoying. I regularly walk around the office muttering to myself about the idiots that I have to work with.
A few months ago a young woman came in for her package. She apologised as she scrolled through her phone looking for her tracking number. I said 'It's ok, I just die a little every day watching people scroll through their phones', and then smiled at her.
Stay safe. Be kind. Maybe see you tomorrow.
Saturday, 31 May 2025
the ninth : work stuff