Most Useful Information February 2023
Abercrombie auras, scared parents, disappearing teens, and going fucking bananas
Pre-Useful Information
We made it to February, everyone. No one thought we’d make it. No one believed we could do it. Boy howdy, we proved them wrong. Pat your back!
As usual, if you’d like a print edition of Most Useful Information send an address to berge(dot)timothy(at)gmail(dot)com.
Also, there’ll be bonus information landing later this month. Get pumped!
What’s the point?
A couple weeks around the holidays I didn’t have to work. With my free time I took a morning “strength and conditioning” class. Before class started the instructor was talking about holidays and gifts. Her in-laws had given her kids a year’s membership to the local science museum. Another guy in the class said it’s always a great gift for grandparents to give because kids love the science museum. Agreeing, the instructor said she went with her kids recently. As soon as her kids entered the building they went “fucking bananas.” One kid ran around trying to join other families.
At the end of a semester as an undergraduate my friends and I all pitched in to get a room at the Best Western. As a kid sometimes friends would have birthday parties at the Best Western. We’d swim and eat pizza. It’s imprinted on our brains that the Best Western is the premier place for fun forms of celebration. A woman we knew from high school worked at the front desk and asked why we were getting a room when we lived three blocks away. We said we wanted to swim. She said it was an expensive swim and the pool had already closed for the night. We shrugged. She gave us a bunch of coupons.
Our room was on the second floor. It overlooked the swimming pool. As soon as we walked inside our room we went “fucking bananas.” Jumping between beds. Throwing towels on the floor. Turning on the shower. Pooping in the toilet. Not flushing. Lots of shouting. Someone microwaved the telephone. Sparks flew. The bed collapsed. The phone didn’t work anymore. We unplugged it and when our friend from high school wasn’t around, switched our phone with the front desk phone. No consequences.
The pool was closed. We took bedsheets off the bed, tied them together, opened the window, tossed the bedsheets out the window, and climbed down into the pool room. We did somersaults in the water. Sat in the sauna. The next morning we breakfasted at the hotel restaurant with our coupons. Even with coupons the meal was overpriced and gross.
A few years after the hotel my family was in Norway. We were staying at my cousin’s house in Bergen. My cousin was at work for the local news, so her husband, Ronald, was hosting us. Early in the evening we walked with Ronald from his apartment to a neighborhood grocery store where he bought necessary supplies for dinner. Ronald talked about training to run a half marathon. He also talked about movies. For dinner Ronald prepared slices of bread and various things to smear on slices of bread. Cheese, jam, nutella, cured meats, liverpaste, escargot that squirts out of little toothpaste tubes, shrimp mayonnaise, whatever. When everything was set out on the table Ronald gestured with both arms open toward the table and searching for the English phrase, “dig in” or perhaps “help yourselves.” Instead he said, “go bananas!”
I bring all this up because there are a million different ways to go bananas. Every book this month has folks going fucking bananas in their own way. Enjoy!
A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. First published by Norton in 2020.
First, a vacation. A few families, varying degrees of wealthy, rent a house on a lake. The parents are friends. The kids are strangers. Twelve kids, mostly teenagers. A few younger. They play a game where no one tells which kids belong to which parents. The parents dance to “old-time music” (The Ramones, lol). Kids look on in disgust and embarrassment. The kids know they won’t stay young forever, but they can’t believe they will ever be like their pathetic parents. “Had they goals once? A simple sense of self-respect? They shamed us. They were a cautionary tale.”
Second, a hurricane. Climate change caused it. According to the kids, parents caused climate change. “We knew who was responsible, of course: it had been a deal before we were born.” The parents blame capitalism.
Power outage. Parents drink, smoke, take drugs, dance, and fuck. Kids need more productivity, more action. Nine-year-old Jack is given a children’s bible. He takes it seriously and starts collecting two of each animal. A treehouse is his ark. All the kids move into the treehouse. The vacation house is too fucked and the parents too useless. The kids take a boat to a farm.
On the farm the kids start a self-sustaining utopia. Some hiking hippies show up and teach everyone poetry and which plants are safe to eat. Psycho survivalists arrive. They take supplies, imprison the kids, and torture a hippie. A teenage girl gives birth. Most kids refuse to call parents for help. One kid calls parents for help. The others are annoyed. Parents arrive to save the day and are immediately imprisoned by the psycho survivalists.
A shameless deus ex machina happens. God is an elderly woman with personal mercenaries. The machine is a helicopter. Everyone is safe. Parents and kids go to a mansion in upstate New York. The kids restart a self-sustaining utopia. The parents feel like there’s no need for them and disappear.
It would be easy and uninteresting to read A Children’s Bible as a parable about climate change. It’d be easy and uninteresting to say A Children’s Bible is about the generational politics surrounding present day climate activism. So I won’t.
Instead I’ll say that Millet uses a climate disaster to get at the tragic inevitably of growing apart from people you love, such as, or specifically, parents. Kids depend on parents. When they are angsty teens held hostage by violent survivalists they turn to their parents for help. Parents obviously don’t know and can’t do everything, like save their kids from violent survivalists. Kids are aware but still depend on and love parents. Also, parents depend on kids. Being called to the rescue is the only time the parents act with certainty and sense of purpose. They need to be needed. When kids grow up, dependency diminishes.
“We felt a kind of desperation, then. For as much as we’d long felt harassed and condescended to by them, as much as we reviled them and all they’d failed to stand up for and against, we’d come to rely on their consistency. For our whole lives, we’d been so used to them. But they were slowly detaching.”
Parents lose their purpose. In exchange they’re given a freedom, but without a purpose they don’t know what to do with freedom. Or they don’t want it. A Children’s Bible is about how eventually parents disappear. In our real world it might still be possible to stop climate change (or maybe not, I don’t know anything), but there’s no stopping growing up, apart, and away from people you love. Once they are gone, like the environment, they don’t return.
P.S. Boys on a yacht with loads of medical marijuana are described as having an “abercrombie aura.” Worth it just for that phrase. You wouldn’t know from what I wrote, but this book is very funny.
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. First published by Chatto and Windus in 1929.
First, an earthquake. Margaret could smell it coming. The kids go fucking bananas. Emily dances in a fugue. John too. Emily mounts a horse and rides it into the ocean barking like a dog. The earthquake ends. The kids compose themselves. Emily is changed. Life loses meaning. “For there was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it… Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen to her anything so dangerous, so sublime.”
Second, a hurricane. It destroys the house. Kids, parents, and hired help hide in the cellar. The family cat runs outside and is torn apart either by winds or pumas. Emily is bored. The next day the parents freak and put their kids on a boat to England where the weather is civilized.
The boat is overtaken by pirates. The pirates take the kids onto their pirate ship. The pirates threaten to kill the children if the ship captain doesn’t tell where his treasure is hidden. The ship captain squeals and sails off before the pirates can return the children. The ship captain sends a lying letter to the parents to say all their kids are dead from pirates. Meanwhile the pirates turn into reluctant babysitters. The kids are unfazed. “It takes experience before one can realize what is catastrophe and what is not.”
The kids go fucking bananas on the boat. Not Emily. Still bored. On an island John dies. Drunk on the boat, the pirate captain sexually advances Emily. She bites him. He flees. Emily kills another pirate. Margaret loses sanity. The pirates are terrified of and fed up with the children. They pass them off. Emily squeals and the pirates are arrested. Kids are reunited with parents. Emily is totally normal.
So many distinctions between adults and children, between children and babies, between children and animals, between innocence and experience, between nature and civilization. It’d be easy and uninteresting to say the novel is about growing up, moving through life from child, adult, human, from uncivilized to civilized and the accompanying pain and horror. So I won’t.
Instead I’ll say it’s a book about how difficult it is as a person to understand another person. And not being able to understand another person can make that person terrifying and dangerous. The parents think their children love them more than anything in the world. In truth, the children love their cat more than anything in the world. The children think their captors are just normal sailors hired to take care of them. In truth, they are pirates who don’t care too much whether the children live or die. The pirates think the children are harmless and innocent. In truth, they are rambunctious, violent, uncivilized animals who are impossible to control and impossible to understand. Everyone is wrong about everyone else.
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. First published by Penguin in 1967.
First, a picnic. On Saint Valentine’s Day students of Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies accompanied by teachers and chauffeur take a three hour carriage ride to Hanging Rock, a geographical marvel somewhere in Australia. They arrive around noon. All watches break. They decide to leave around four o’clock without having any way to know when it’s four o’clock. Students and chaperones eat, read, draw, nap and clearly don’t belong in the wilderness. “Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.”
The clothes they wear, much like the school they attend, are markers of the British empire and its colonial project. Clothes and social niceties prevent the students from engaging with and understanding the natural world around them. British culture has no business in the Australian wilderness.
There are a few other people at the rock on Valentine’s Day. Mike, from England, is visiting his aunt and uncle. Along with hired hand, Albert, they picnic at Hanging Rock. Mike thinks Australia is exciting. Anything can happen in the wild and Australia is wild.
Second, a disappearance. Four students (Miranda, Marion, Edith, Irma) wander off. They fall asleep and are bit by ants. Edith wanders back. The others disappear. The math teacher, Greta McCraw, also wanders off, takes off her clothes, and disappears forever. “A knowledge of arithmetic don’t help much in the bush.”
As the students walk they leave behind any signs of civilization, “There are no tracks on this part of the Rock. Or if there ever have been tracks, they are long since obliterated. It is a long long time since any living creature other than an occasional rabbit or wallaby trespassed upon its arid breast.” The four girls are leaving their world of boarding schools, teapots, and corsets and entering a world untouched by humans. The further they move from the picnic, the more enticing nature becomes, “At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenelated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mountain of laurel glossy above the dogwood’s dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace.” When picnicking there were not a part of the landscape. Now hiking up the mountain, shedding clothes they become entranced by the landscape. Their disappearance could be nothing more than abjuring human civilization and fully integrating into the natural landscape. Anyone still clinging to the foolish mores of civil society cannot find the girls.
The girls are never found. Most of the novel follows the ripple effects of the disappearance. Mike and Albert go looking for the girls. They find Irma. Mike and Irma romance, but Mike’s not into it. Parents take their kids out of the school. It isn’t safe. Employees leave the school and die in a house fire. Other employees leave the school and don’t die in a house fire. Mrs. Appleyard drinks heavily. Mrs. Appleyard faces financial ruin. A student, Sara, was not allowed to picnic at Hanging Rock because she didn’t memorize the right poems. She memorized her own poems instead. Since Sara is not given the opportunity to disappear into the natural environment with her friends, she must find her own escape from the oppression foisted by polite society. She jumps out a window and dies.
It’s not easy to say what Picnic at Hanging Rock is about, so I won’t. At the start there are stark contrasts between nature and civilization. After the disappearance of the girls the contrasts disappear. There’s no real protagonist. The narrative focus shifts from person to person throughout the novel. Kind of like Middlemarch and also The Virgin Suicides. The impression is town gossip. Nobody knows what really happened at Hanging Rock, not a character, the narrator, not the reader. Everything is obscure, mystery. Speculation is the best we have. Nature can’t be known. Girls at a boarding school can’t be known. Teachers can’t be known. Parents can’t be known. Existence can’t be known. Disappearance can’t be known. Experience can’t be known. Novels can’t be known.
The focus ends on Mrs. Appleyard. Her school closes. She goes to Hanging Rock. She takes off her clothes. Her feet touch earth for the first time in decades. She climbs the Rock. She jumps off and dies. There are a lot of different ways to go bananas.