Most Useful Information July 2022
Levitating, newspaper advice, dog bites, and cock fights
Late Breaking Information!
Very soon I will be traveling. If there is any most useful information to share next month (there might not be - get ready for that eventuality) it will look pretty different from all prior most useful information (quite possibly better or quite possibly worse - get ready for that eventuality). You’ve been warned.
What’s the point?
Two months after moving to Indiana and starting graduate school I was walking on the sidewalk trying to text my friend about a movie I just watched, The Color Wheel, when two dogs - one leashed, one unleashed - ran from a front yard to my feet. The unleashed dog jumped and bit my rib. I shouted, “Oh my god!” Pretty tame language but the tone wasn’t tame. A guy standing in the yard scrambled to control his Baskerville hound. He successfully grabbed the dog’s collar and slapstick fell over. He sat silently, sulking, holding his dog, looking at the ground. I guess falling can hurt so after too much silence I said, “Are you okay?” He said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” and stomped inside with his dog. I continued down the sidewalk, pissed off and mad about it. To this day my friend probably has no idea about The Color Wheel.
Once my head cooled, I realized when dogs randomly bite people sometimes it is because they are unwell. I didn’t want to be unwell. I didn’t have health insurance. I didn’t want to go to the doctor. The next morning I returned to the scene of the crime hoping to find out the dog had its shots. No one answered the door. The dog stood in the window and barked at me, so I went to student health.
At the doctor’s office everyone treated me like I was a completely innocent person who had never done anything wrong and who had something terrible and undeserved happen. It felt cool. When taking down my information the nurse wrote the dog punctured my “left flank,” which is a medical term for making humans sound like cuts of meat. I was told dog bites are usually clean. Cat bites and human bites are messy. The nurse gave me a tetanus shot and teased me for having a farmer’s tan. That felt uncool.
The doctor tattled to animal control about my dog bite. Later that day animal control called me to tell me they would “rattle some cages.” They followed up to confirm the dog had its shots. A couple months later I got a letter in the mail informing me the owners of the dog requested my information. Since it was a matter of public record, animal control provided the dog owners my information. I thought for a minute they were going to offer to pay my $65 doctor bill. Instead I never heard from them.
A year or more later I was eating a slice of pizza in an unfashionable Bloomington pizza store and a family sat down at the table next to me. Two kids and a mother sat at the table while a father ordered pizza. When the father came to the table he told his family to move over a couple tables. I don’t know why. When I was leaving I looked at him and was certain he was the slapstick chump that fell over when his shitty dog bit me.
Maybe he recognized me or maybe he didn’t. Either way, all the books I read this month had animals in them. Enjoy.
Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West. First published in 1933 and 1939, respectively. Collected in a single volume and published by New Directions in 1962.
In The Day of the Locust Tod Hackett, a painter, moves to LA for inspiration. He pays bills painting movie sets while planning a non-movie set painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” The painting he hasn’t yet painted “definitely proved he had talent.” He’s in love with Faye Greener. There are two qualities Faye looks for in a man: wealth and the ability to advance her acting career. Tod possesses neither. Neither does Homer Simpson, another man in love with Faye Greener. Faye is only interested in Tod and Homer platonically. Tod is fond of Homer. Homer and Tod are both fond of Faye’s father, Harry, an out of work clown turned door-to-door salesman.
Tod goes to a party. He leaves the party to go to another party. Mostly he wanders looking for Faye. Tod drifts out of focus. Hollywood characters amble about. Tod leaves the second party and runs into Homer. Focus lingers on Homer. Homer is from Iowa. He was a bookkeeper in a hotel. A woman, Miss Martin, was late on rent. He went to collect rent from her. She was crying. He hugged her and paid her rent. Miss Martin left town and Homer never heard from her again. Not long after he caught cold and a doctor told him to go to California.
Harry tries to sell Homer “miracle solvent.” Harry outstays his welcome, but in doing so draws Faye over to Homer’s home. Faye and Harry become friendly with Homer. Harry gets sick. Faye goes around with a pretend cowboy named Earle Shoop. Harry dies. Faye moves in with Homer. They are platonic. Earle moves into Homer’s garage. So does Earle’s friend Miguel. The two host cock fights. Tod and his friend Abe want to see a cock fight. A bird with a cracked beak fights a bird without a cracked beak. The cracked beaked-bird is torn to shreds. Homer gets upset. Everyone gets drunk. There is another cock fight but this time with humans. The apartment gets torn to shreds. Earle and Miguel disappear. Homer wants to leave LA and Tod wants to help him, but there is a crowd and the crowd turns into a riot. Tod loses himself in the crowd. LA is torn to shreds.
Early on in the novel we are told “few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.” Every character in this book is monstrous or sad or both. The focus shifts from person to person because the protagonist isn’t an individual. The protagonist is the sad monstrosity of Hollywood. The Day of the Locust catalogs and strings together different monstrosities and sadnesses. All the sad, monstrous individuals converge and turn into a crowd, or riot, or swarm, or whatever.
***
A guy known only as Miss Lonelyhearts writes an advice column in a newspaper. His boss, Shrike, calls him Christ because he is saving people’s lives with advice. More importantly he is growing newspaper subscriptions. The column started as a joke for him, his boss, and his colleagues. It remains a joke for his boss and his colleagues, but “the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice… they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. [Miss Lonelyhearts] also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.” The burden gives Miss Lonelyhearts depression and a Christ complex.
As a child at church Miss Lonelyhearts found screaming Christ’s name woke “something secret and enormously powerful” inside him. He names it hysteria. To suppress hysteria he avoids God. As an adult drinking, bar fighting, ridiculing old men in a toilet are some ways Miss Lonelyhearts avoids God. They don’t much work. Leaving the city with a former fiance, Betty, to spend time at her aunt’s farm and eventually sleeping with her, sleeping with Shrike’s wife, and sleeping with Mrs. Doyle, a woman who wrote him a letter asking for advice regarding her unhappy marriage to a man named Peter Doyle are other ways he fights off God. They don’t much work.
He dreams about mercy killing a lamb. He develops a fever. In fever he gives up avoiding God, “he was conscious of two rhythms that were slowly becoming one. When they became one, his identification with God was complete. His heart was the one heart, the heart of God. And his brain was likewise God’s.” He embraces hysteria. He embraces God. At the same time Peter comes to kill Miss Lonelyhearts for sleeping with his wife. Miss Lonelyhearts meets him on the stairs, Betty walks in, the gun explodes and both men fall down the stairs.
The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts have men alienated from their work and the people around them. The alienation stems from looking at the world, despising it, and refusing to be a part of it. They intentionally keep a distance from everyone they know because everyone they know is a monster. Both novels end with the protagonists giving in to the pressures around them and letting go of the boundaries instilled between themselves, the world and other people. Doing so puts both men in physical, bodily harm. Tod Hackett becomes another jaded and trampled Hollywood locust while Miss Lonelyhearts allows himself things like humility and vulnerability. Both give in to a form of hysteria. Tod loses his mind, screaming like a police siren in the back of a police car. Miss Lonelyhearts dies.
A stranger in a coffee shop saw me reading and said, “That’s one of the top five most soul crushing books I’ve ever read.” It would have been smart to ask what the other five were, but I didn’t. It would have been smart to ask if he meant Miss Lonelyhearts or The Day of the Locust, but I didn’t. When I finished The Day of the Locust I thought to myself “is this the most soul crushing book?” When I finished Miss Lonelyhearts I thought to myself, “Do I have a soul?”
Please help me figure out if I have a soul. Recommend me the most soul crushing book you’ve read.
The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns. First published in 1959.
The Vet’s Daughter is also guilty of crushing - body and soul.
Alice has a father who is a vet. She has a mother who is married to a vet. Their house is connected to the vet clinic. Animals are everywhere. Alice’s father mostly ignores Alice and mostly abuses Alice’s mother. Alice sometimes walks dogs so to get away from the house. They live with a noisy parrot. Alice’s mother gets sick and laments life in London, longing for her childhood on a farm. “It’s sour, the soil in London, and so is the life I’ve led. Oh, Alice, you have missed so much here! I had such a happy girlhood on the farm.” A classic British the city and the country divide. Alice’s mother admits life on the farm was difficult, but in a good bad not evil way, “Farm life is often hard on animals, but not cruel.” The sick and injured animals in the vet clinic live cruel, painful lives. The women who live in the vet’s house live cruel, painful lives.
Alice’s mother dies. Her father takes up with a younger woman, Miss Rosa Fisher. Miss Fisher is rumored to have questionable scruples. She doesn’t like Alice or the parrot. The parrot is forced to a downstairs bathroom. The parrot is unhappy. Alice is unhappy. Miss Fisher tries to arrange a suitor for Alice. If Alice gets married she’ll be gone forever. A dream come true for Miss Fisher. Miss Fisher takes Alice to meet a man. The man attacks and tries to force himself on Alice. She gets away, tells her dad, and Miss Fisher is gone.
Alice levitates but can’t tell if it is real or dreamed.
There is another, younger vet named Mr. Peebles. Alice calls him Blinkers. They are friendly, but Alice cannot convince herself to be in love with him. Blinkers arranges for Alice to stay with his aging mother out in the country. At Mrs. Peebles home there is a couple, the Gowleys, who housekeep and cook for Mrs. Peebles. Alice calls them trolls. Mrs. Peebles is sad and withdrawn but gets along okay with Alice.
Alice levitates again and is sure she isn’t dreaming. She ice skates with a handsome man. Things in the country go well for Alice and it appears her mother was correct. The city is sour and the country is sweet. Alice’s suitor leaves for a while. When he returns it’s with a fiancé. Alice is unhappy. The Gowleys rob Mrs. Peebles and disappear. The country, turns out, is sour too.
Mrs. Peebles dies and Alice has to go back to live with her father. Miss Fisher is back. The parrot is gone. During a nasty confrontation she levitates in front of her dad. All of a sudden he is nice to her. Miss Fisher doesn’t like it. Alice walks dogs like she used to. Her dad gets some friends together to make money off Alice levitating. They plan a big event. A lot of people come. They go bonkers and stampede. They trample and crush Alice dead. The city and the country are both sour.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. First published in 1937.
Janie is back in town. She’s been away for years. Her marriage appears over and Pheoby wants the details.
Janie’s grandmother, who raised her, sees Janie kissing a boy and doesn’t like it. Grandma arrange marries Janie to Logan. Logan has the means to care for Janie after grandma dies, which is pretty much right away. Before marriage Janie thinks, “There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.” There’s a world outside and a world inside. To take the inside and put it outside Janie needs to translate feelings into thoughts, thoughts into words, words into sounds and the sounds have to reach other folks’ ears. But there are some feelings inside not even Janie can access. As long as she’s married to Logan her feelings remain formless.
Janie doesn’t like Logan and runs off with Joe. She calls him Jody. They get married and move to a small town where Joe sets up a general store and becomes mayor. Joe is more fun than Logan. Janie loves Joe and Joe loves Janie. Janie helps at the store and isn’t allowed much else. She’s not supposed to laugh with the men who sit out front drinking beer and joking late into the night. Joe isn’t mean to Janie, but he doesn’t want her to do much because he doesn’t believe women aren’t supposed to do much.
Joe dies and all the men in town want to marry Janie. Partly because they think she’s pretty and partly because they think she’s rich. Instead Janie marries Tea Cake and all the men that wanted to marry her think she’s getting married too soon. Janie is being disrespectful to Joe’s memory.
After Joe’s death, Janie, “found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” Maybe Joe helped Janie access her formless feelings, but Janie didn’t want to share those feelings with Joe.
Janie and Tea Cake move to the everglades and pick beans in the muck. They love it. Janie has money from the general store saved in a bank. She carries a couple hundred with her as well. Tea Cake finds the couple hundred and gambles it away and gambles it back. A storm hurricanes through Florida. Everyone evacuates except Tea Cake and Janie. The storm gets worse and they try to evacuate on foot. A dog bites Tea Cake. They survive the storm. The dog had rabies. Tea Cake gets out of his mind. He tries to kill Janie but she kills him first. There is a trial for the murder of Tea Cake, but thanks to the help of a doctor who knew Tea Cake had rabies and a few others Janie is exonerated. She moves back home and tells her friend Pheoby the details.
With Tea Cake Janie accesses her feelings and chooses to share them. Together Tea Cake and Janie had freedom and love, providing space to access formless feelings and motivation to share. Janie needed someone she wanted to share her inside, locked away thoughts and feelings with in order to even access those thoughts and feelings. Freedom, love, thoughts, and feelings stay with Janie post-Tea Cake, “Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.”