Wednesday reading--wildly disparate!

[asakiyume]

I'm nearly done with Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which continues to be delightful. It's not just that the things the girls get up to are both very believable and amusing, but also the way it's told, the way Maud Hart Lovelace lets in the parents' perspective or the baby siblings', and how events flow one into the next kind of like a picaresque novel, but they're not traveling; they're just living their lives.

They want to cut off locks of hair to give to each other as keepsakes in case one of them dies--which nearly happens! Tacy gets diphtheria! But they end up cutting huge hanks of hair off, not single locks, which means they end up needing haircuts. And then they make a club focused on being good, but they're so intrigued by the penance they invent for if they do bad things that it doesn't work out as planned. I read sections of that out to Wakanomori, it was so funny.

And there was a description of Tib that stuck with me:

Tib was tiny but she was never scared.
"Come on," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of." And she flew ahead like a little yellow feather.

That: like a little yellow feather.

And then I read another short story in the next issue of my gift subscription to the Sun, "Longshanks" by Samuel Jensen.

The narrator of the story, a guy at loose ends, is in a car crash out in the southwestern desert. The guy who crashed into him was ejected from the car, and when the narrator goes to help him, he sees the guy's dressed as an elf. Renaissance fair fliers flutter about, and with probably his dying breath, the guy worries about his bag. So our narrator takes it upon himself to take the bag to the fair and to convey the sad new about "the elf," as he thinks of the guy. He thinks to himself that the elf is very tall and beautiful, and the main point of the story seems to be to set up a contrast between the narrator's dramatic/romantic ideas of how things will go and the very ordinary reality of a very ordinary Ren fair:

The elf's last words had been toward this place. Out of respect, all modern English should be banned here. Flowers in your hair should be mandatory, and the only music should be made by wood and wire. Wasn't the whole point to put the modern shit away and attune to what's underneath? There are dads here pushing double-decker strollers. The elf must have hated that.

The narrator imagines that the elf must be a pillar of the Ren fair community, but in fact he turns out to have been a creep whom women avoided. Finally the narrator is goaded into opening the elf's bag, which up to now he hasn't done, annnnnd....

I burst out laughing. Because it contained... well, you guess:


(a) girls' panties
(b) a hand transcribed copy of The Lord of the Rings, written in tengwar
(c) an M4 carbine and other supplies for a mass shooting










If you guessed c, you are right.

It felt as I was reading as if the author, having set up the contrast between the head-in-the-clouds narrator and the dusty, sweaty real-world Ren fair, wasn't sure where to go and decided to add the mass shooting angle because hey! Everything tastes better with a mass shooting! It's like serial killers, only less stale! It was so over the top. But actually, thinking about it more, it seems possible the author started with the notion of the elf as a mass shooter and then worked backward to construct the story. If the former, he seems not in super control of his storytelling; if the latter, he seems somehow ... jaded?

It's all very litfic. But it *was* well written, and for all my criticisms, I enjoyed reading it.

Comments

[sartorias]

I think I'd rather reread Lovelace. (Which I should!. I too adore that little yellow feather)

[asakiyume]

I agree; she's much more congenial! Though I did like the clueless narrator in the other story. If only it hadn't taken that dramatic swerve!

[sovay]

And she flew ahead like a little yellow feather.

I like that very much.

(c) an M4 carbine and other supplies for a mass shooting

I do not like that at all! That is the least interesting twist with which to cap the narrator's disillusion about the person he never knew in life at all! It would have been sufficient for the bag to contain something totally banal or normally embarrassing or just inexplicable because the only person for whom it held meaning is dead back on the road. I am glad you enjoyed the language.

[asakiyume]

It felt, frankly, silly. A cop-out, a deus ex machina. Unless he *started* with that notion, in which case, I'm just mad, because what's he saying? What's he doing? If mass shooter is his starting point, then the story feels inadequate--this is what you want to say? Or like a kind of a crass ha-ha gotcha.

[sovay]

Or like a kind of a crass ha-ha gotcha.

I don't know what to do with it. I couldn't figure out what to do with it after reading the story. Okay, so the beautiful is not always the good. The narrator is chronically wrong about the kind of story he's in, but so are a lot of people. I feel there must be a clue in the title, but beyond Benny being tall, I couldn't make anything click.

[asakiyume]

That too! What is the significance of that title? I felt moment by moment there was so much that was well observed and memorable--the glass in the guy's hands, the whole fortune teller scene, BUT for what? For what? To end with the narrator to be told to fuck off? Like that feels like the author just got sick of writing, and his character said, yeah, I hear you man.

[marycatelli]

It's so important to stick the ending.

(To be sure, being a creep around women does not rule you out from being one of the -- ehem -- Fair Folk.)

[asakiyume]

Very true! Though in the stories it seems like the Fair Folk's glamour often makes the creeping successful! It's only afterward that the women have regrets.

[rachelmanija]

LOLOLOLOL WTF.

I love "like a little yellow feather."

[asakiyume]

It was TOTALLY something that would have felt right at home in some of your more gonzo reads.

[kore]

Because it contained... well, you guess:


(a) girls' panties
(b) a hand transcribed copy of The Lord of the Rings, written in tengwar
(c) an M4 carbine and other supplies for a mass shooting

I somehow misread this as he had ALL these things in his elf bag.

[asakiyume]

That would have been better!

I am mundanely troubled

[amaebi]

Did the protagonist of Longshanks just leave the corpse out there in the desert without *telling* anyone?

Re: I am mundanely troubled

[asakiyume]

Oh no no--the EMTs arrived before he expired. In fact, I wasn't quite sure why the narrator was so sure he had died--people can survive a lot of things. But the story resolutely insisted that he had died. He was described as lying still on the stretcher (but I mean... you lie still when you're unconscious, too, so...)

Re: I am mundanely troubled

[amaebi]

And yet he wasn’t tied up with legal authorities, and was able just to waltz off with the bag?

I am not very prone to address fiction from a stance of “real life,” but I feel like a hog farmer facing “pig milking time” in a story.

Re: I am mundanely troubled

[asakiyume]

You're quite right--at that point in the story I was like, Hmmmm. He doesn't need to give a statement? The authorities don't collect the bag? There are no cops, only EMTs? So yeah.

[amaebi]

As a devotee of Tib you really need to read all the way to the end of the series. :)

[asakiyume]

Oh I like all the girls! I just liked that particular description. But you know, maybe I do like Tib, because I liked her bravery in the flying episode and her pointing out bald realities always makes me laugh.

[amaebi]

I like all the girls, too, and how different they are from each other, and how equitably they all get along.

Tib is so sort-of self-contained that we never really get enough of her, in my view. She’s so indomitable and so capable.

Motif spoiler: the equitability continues and is expanded in the high school books, providing an amazingly attractive community portrait [without any people of color]. (There are some people of color in Emily of Sweet Valley.)

[asakiyume]

No worries about spoilers ^_^ I'm along for the experience, not the surprise. I've already read all of osprey_archer's posts about the books, and she goes into key moments, themes, etc.

[osprey_archer]

MASS SHOOTING RENFAIRE ELF, omg. What an ending! (Also weird that the elf wants to be sure his mass-shooting bag makes it to the Ren Faire when he will not be there to shoot anyone with it.)

I love the part where Betsy, Tacy, and Tib decide to cut off locks of their hair, only to way way waaaaay overestimate how much hair the actually need to cut for a locket. It's just so perfectly age appropriate. And the club for being good that actually makes them behave worse, because it's so much fun to do penance!

[asakiyume]

With the elf, he didn't actually ask for the bag to get to the Ren fair, it was just that he was concerned over it ("my bag, my bag" type thing) and then the narrator just up and assumes he should bring it to the fair.

Yes! I remembered your writing about the club--I thought it sounded appealing then, and lo and behold, it truly was!

[med_cat]

An interesting duo of stories, to be sure :)

[asakiyume]

I'm laughing, because they couldn't be more dissimilar! Joined only by the fact that I was reading both of them this past week.

[med_cat]

Indeed ;)