Tag Archives: Ottessa Moshfegh

End or Beginning? (2018 Recap)

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Shit!! I made it through another year!! Barely, on fumes, with my low fuel warning light flashing on my figurative dashboard. But, I’m here at the end of another romp through the Gregorian 12-step.

I’m edging closer to pulling up alongside yet another sad anniversary of losing my only son, maybe the best person I’ve ever known or ever will know. I don’t expect to meet anyone like him again and that’s something impossible to ignore.

Riding shotgun on a two-member team that’s managed to make it through the worst of stretches a life can parcel out, I’ve also weathered abandonment, lies, and the usual failings that humans are genetically predisposed to deliver. Fuck it, though! There’s something celebratory in all this darkness and mourning. At least approaching it in the spirit of the age-old wisdom that co-worker Wilma Delay dispensed back in my Westville Correctional Center days: she told me, “Baumer, sometimes you gotta’ laugh to keep from crying.” I sometimes wonder what became of ole’ Wilma. She always made more work for me with her predisposition to never moving off her sit-stool and more-often-than-not assigning herself the task of setting up the evening’s prisoner’s meds, which meant she had to do little else. Her co-workers picked up the slack. But I believe her heart was in the right place.

I remain flummoxed by the speed that grief allows a grieving person to spiral downward. One minute, you are coping with the shitty stick you’ve been handed and the next, you are contemplating a painless way to end it all. I’m not messing with you. It’s that fucked-up at times. I don’t anticipate it will ever get too much better than that in all honesty.

But again, here we are—another new year goading us into resolutions and pronouncements, sent out into the great unknown. What’s one to do, save for going along, with some remote hope of getting along.

Wrapping up 2018, here are the things and people that helped bring the year to a tolerable close:

  • Books and writers
  • Music
  • A new understanding of family
  • A few true/blue friends
  • Better physical health and the return of some measure of fitness
  • A sense that despite all of the brokenness and tears, Mark’s parents are doing the best we can be doing in terms of honoring his memory.

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In Praise of Short Stories

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The short story has been a neglected writing style in my reading. This summer, I made a point of addressing it when I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s excellent collection, Homesick For Another World. After I finished, I vowed to read more similar collections.

A perk of working with high school-age youth is having the chance to revisit writers and writing that you were equally clueless about when you were the same age as these young charges assigned to you.

Of course, being a tutor, sometimes you must scramble in reacquainting yourself with said writing from the past. A few of those writers? Try James Thurber, J.D. Salinger, George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson. Orwell and Salinger haven’t been tough. I read The Catcher in the Rye last year and have read it several times over the last decade. Ditto for Orwell, and in fact, I made a habit of annually rereading 1984 during the 2000s and the Bush presidency. Thurber and Jackson are less familiar.

A week ago, I was time-traveling back to Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat,” and dull little (or so we think!) Mr. Martin. Admittedly, I have never loved Thurber like some literary types have.

On Sunday, I was co-reading Shirley Jackson’s short story, “Charles,” and helping a student craft a paragraph about parents not recognizing flaws in a child. The discussion that ensued was meaningful to me on several levels.

Shirley Jackson, American writer (seen in this April 16, 1951 AP photo)

Save for “The Lottery,” few people who travel in non-literary circles know Jackson’s work. This New Yorker article is worth reading if you’d like to know more about a wonderfully (weird) and “haunted” writer.

“Charles” wasn’t particularly strange or odd. It was a story that had humor and was what might be called an “unsentimental” look at life as a mother during a particular time in America. In Jackson’s case, this would be the 1940s, a very different time period than our own. As a writer, Jackson shaped it with sly parental incredulity and humor, too.

Apparently, the story was published in Mademoiselle and later, was included in her collection, The Lottery/The Adventures of James Harris.

It begins thus:

The day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a long-trousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me. . . . 

Like the parents Jackson is writing about, most think their child is the best. Love compels you to want to feel this way. This also opens the door to the possibility that you’ll overreach and have unrealistic expectations, too.

Of course, it’s special when parents of a child get to witness an adult who validates the faith they had in him or her.

Failures of Kindness

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I’m reading a book of short stories by George Saunders. The librarian that checked it out for me waxed effusive about Saunders. His stories are good, although they fall short of another book of short stories I just finished by Ottessa Moshfegh.

I picked up Moshfegh’s book because I got a Google alert and discovered something she shared about Mark in an interview for Vulture, including one of his 50-books-in-a-year as one of 10 works she’d take with her to a desert island. I’d never read anything by her. She was in his MFA cohort at Brown:

We lost this brave genius last year, and the books he gifted us while he lived are so wonderfully strange and honest and beautiful, I can’t believe he even existed. He was more than a poet or performance artist — Baumer’s life itself was a work of art. He was truly radical, and the most openhearted, unjaded human I’ve ever met.

That was kind of her. Continue reading →