Things I do not want for Valentine's Day.

This bird and this turtle are . . . in love? And being assaulted by red hearts.

Before you buy this for your teacher, remember that it's just a mold of sugar that's worth nothing because you can't actually eat it.

Hmmm . . . no, not really.

Because a poor-quality midi file says I love you (in a burning sort of way).

They let the children with bad handwriting make this lollipop because it was going straight to the Dollar Tree.


Well, okay, I do want this, but only if the claw will let you have it.

And then what? It can't stand up on its own, and if you try to stir drinks with it, the stem will break and you will swallow glass shards. I love you, indeed.

Short Story: "Symbols and Signs"

My freshman year at BYU, I had aspirations to graduate with honors, which . . . didn't so much happen, but that first semester I signed up for an Honors class called 203H - Studies in Literature. It was back when we didn't use computers for registration, but a touch-tone phone, and chose classes from the newsprint catalog, and it had no description beyond the Russian last name of the professor. When I walked into the classroom, stadium-style, half-circle tables with chairs attached, it was clear that the 20 or so people in the room were well beyond their freshman year. I didn't really start to freak out until I was sitting and people all around were having conversations in Russian. Dr. Julia Nemirovskaya, in very competent but heavy-accented English, passed out the syllabus and introduced the subject matter, which apparently everyone else had already figured out: the works of Leo Tolstoy.

Needless to say, this was not what I was expecting from a 200-level class, but was way too embarrassed to leave, even though I was horribly out of place. Then I got some arrogance and thought myself totally equal to the task of reading hundreds of pages of War & Peace each night, and stuck it out for the sake of having done it. I will confess that there were 50-page chunks of War & Peace that I clean skipped over, because there are thousands upon thousands of words of war planning inside Napoleon's head, and I wouldn't say I possessed the maturity at age 18 to appreciate it. I know I didn't appreciate her particular expertise in the subject. Despite feeling unnecessarily proud for having done it (I mean, I did get an A), I didn't really enjoy the novels very much (with the exception of Resurrection) and I think it colored my appreciation for all the Russians, who any writer worth anything will tell you have influenced people's good writing for many decades since.

This particular short story is not by Tolstoy, but by Vladimir Nabokov. It was published in the New Yorker in 1948, and somehow the name was changed from "Signs and Symbols" to "Symbols and Signs" but apparently Nabokov was never really happy about that decision. (I learned that from the New Yorker Fiction podcast, where Mary Gaitskill reads the story beautifully.) Whatever its title, this story will most decidedly call you to repentance about not respecting the Russians; it's a marvel.

The characters are an elderly couple with a teenage or young adult son "who was incurably deranged in his mind," and living away from them in a mental institution, a fair distance from their tenement apartment. They are immigrants, living in New York, but dependent on the husband's brother and faced every day with the possibility of receiving the news that their only son has committed suicide because of his extreme paranoia, in a case so severe and perplexing that his doctor had published a paper.

The prose is incredibly spare and tight. Each place the couple goes in the course of the day is described with few details, but they are visceral and piercing, and build together a world generally bleak, gray, and with unpleasant smells. It is raining, the subway malfunctions, the sanatorium is understaffed and confused, and they are told that their child has tried, again, to take his life by a nurse none of them likes. There is a dying bird, the "hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate" worn by the husband, and pale and soft food for supper. The flat is quiet, compared to the cacophony of their previous stops, but it is haunted by the ghosts of their past, pored over in photographs by the wife, and with a looming sense of present failure.

In the course of the few pages, this family is brilliantly, tragically sketched, and the ending is hauntingly ambiguous. We are left not knowing exactly what happened, with a vision of "luminous yellow, green, and red little jars" of jelly they had planned to take to their son, for his birthday.

A thing and its corresponding lesson

There are those indie rock songs you hear and it's love at first listen, right? Like if there was a soundtrack to your life, that would be playing during the scene where you're driving, plaintively, with a sunset in the background. Last early Saturday morning, driving back from the airport with the benefit of XMU (please don't make me say SiriusXMU), Bon Iver's soon-to-be-released "Blood Bank" comes on, and whammo. I'm hooked. I listened to the 30 seconds on Amazon for awhile and then forgot until yesterday, when I went to CD Alley (cutest Ryan was working) and got my hands on the EP.

It's a good, mournful, repetetive, reverb-y indie rock story song, plaintive guitars, Justin Vernon's falsetto voice dubbed in many echo-y, harmonious parts . . . in other words, the exact formula that makes me fall madly in love. I had heard that he recorded the album almost exclusively in a remote cabin in the Wisconsin woods in the middle of winter, which, despite being just so hipster artist as a story goes, still produced this result, so I can't hold on to that too long. Then there's a little note in the liner that it was partially recorded somewhere in Raleigh, so that seemed good - maybe he's a North Carolina boy? Bonus.

I'm late to the Bon Iver worship service, because now he's been in the New Yorker and on Rolling Stone's list of whatever, but no matter. It's still nice to know some things, such as he is not a North Carolina boy, but an Eau Claire, Wisconsin boy, and was in Raleigh for awhile experimenting in other bands, getting his heart broken, and getting mono that did something to his liver.

When I first saw Bon Iver on the artist name display, I had the following thought process: 1) Either he spelled the French hiver wrong, or it's a similar word in another language who also has bon as good; 2) Man, that reminds me of the fabulous Northern Exposure episode when the Cicelians wish each other "Bon Hiver!" (Good Winter!) at the first snow, which I don't happen to agree with; 3) Man, it really bugs me that it's spelled wrong; 4) This is a really great song.

Turns out that Justin Vernon also watched Northern Exposure because of the liver thing, and changed the hiver spelling because it reminded him of liver. Which . . . you're that kind of dude, but whatever, I forgive you. I'm sure it was a bad time for you. There's more to know about Justin Vernon, and it's worth knowing, but I am trying to get around to my point, which is this: I really wanted to tell someone this story. I've told the internet, now, in the guise of making a point, so that's kind of cheating the lesson, but what I mean to say is that I had this weird revelation that this right here is why people partner up in life. This pretty flimsy and boring story of silly connections (" . . . and then I thought this, and it reminded me of this") is a lot how I see the world; I like it when things remind me of other things, especially things I remember with fondness. I like when people look like other people I've known in other places, I like it when short stories remind me of movies or scenes from a car window remind me of home. But even your best people don't want to hear about that junk all the time. I had this vision that if you have a spouse who is more or less interested in how your mind works, you could call him whenever and tell this story and he would care. Or at least, he would know that it's the kind of thing you would be dumping in his lap from time to time, for the rest of his life, and he was fine with it.

It's things like this caption that send me on a short trip to Crazytown

Short Story: "The Ceiling"

I was driving tonight as a storm was rolling in with some venom, and there was this moment where the sky seemed to be slowly pressing down. I may be reading too much into the metaphor, given my current state of mind, but when I took this photo, I was reminded of a truly marvelous short story: "The Ceiling," by Kevin Brockmeier. It was originally published in McSweeney's and then anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards in 2002, which is where I read it. It is also published in its entirety here, but I can't recommend reading a short story on the internet in a skinny column in Times New Roman when you could have a musty library book or a crinkly magazine instead. It is, nonetheless, worth your 20 minutes.

It also reminded me that, though I like to keep the 4th wall intact and not discuss my blog on my blog, I had been meaning to start a regular -- maybe weekly? -- review of a short story, mostly to remind myself that I once went to college, and because the short story remains my favorite form. If this seems dubious and boring, well, I won't pretend to understand, but I will forgive you, my legion of fan, if you opt to skip them.

My goal is to discuss why something is awesome without revealing anything that would spoil it; that may or may not end up being unbearably pretentious. We'll see.

"The Ceiling" begins, like so many great ones before it, with a tranquil scene of domestic pleasure; a group of family and friends enjoying a backyard birthday party. But it only takes until the second paragraph to introduce, ever so subtly, the first inkling of dread. Dread, and the disruption of pleasantness, are the makings of the best short stories for me. I don't mean postmodern existential angst or full-blown tragedy, but I look for a shivery moment of knowing that something is coming, and it will be unsettling and profound without pedantry or sensationalism.

He writes in simple, tight prose, and his story is quiet and slow, which is perfectly appropriate and mimics the pace of the omnipresent titular "ceiling." In true contemporary fashion, the domestic happiness is quickly turned on its head, but Brockmeier manages to give both its undoing and the "ceiling" equal and appropriate weight without settling for melodrama. In this way, it possess another of my favorite fictional approaches: real, prosaic happenstance co-mingled with hyper-realistic elements.

In this way, hyper-realism in fiction is not unlike what I appreciate about abstract art. I wrote last year about something the abstract painter Barnett Newman said about his particular style of work, controversial in a world of still-lifes and portraits, and it bears repeating: ". . .the feeling is that you're here and out there is chaos, so that what you have is a sense of yourself. The feeling is instantaneous, complete, and you can't ever wipe it out of your mind."

I think the best short stories possess a hearty helping of chaos, and yet it remains tightly controlled within their walls. "The Ceiling" is based around a conceit that will ultimately affect every character both named and unnamed in the story, and its conclusion will leave you chilled and horrified, but deeply satisfied.

Gathering Storm, Old Greensboro Highway