March linkies
Weird ones
Hands down my favorite thing I read this month was Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.
The protagonist is an eccentric middle-aged female who lives alone somewhere remote. This might be a bit of a trope, particularly in the post-Olive Kitteridge era, but Bennett’s protagonist nonetheless feels very real. I think the reason is love.
The book is about the strangeness of intimacy, how people can become close and then just drift away. The protagonist recounts a few past relationships, affairs, and trysts, sounding interchangeably warm, prickly, lost, and, let’s just say, breathless. As a reader, you’re immersed in her stream of consciousness, but to me it also felt like sitting beside her, maybe at a bar, and listening to her talk over a long afternoon pint.
Here’s a good example of why I fell in love her:
In the end I don’t care too much about getting carried away and making a fool of myself. The alternative is be genial and pass the time, the alternative is to take a spoon to my brain and scoop it out, the alternative is to drink too much and become taciturn and twisted, the alternative is to not show up at all, and I’ve done all those things and getting carried away and making a fool of myself from time to time is, in the end, so much easier to bear. - Claire-Louise Bennett
I also loved Bennett’s debut Pond a few years ago, which features another eccentric female loner in the Irish countryside (what can I say, I have a type). I figured that if a writer can repeatedly create characters that I find endearing, then she herself would also be endearing, so I looked up interviews with Bennett. I was not disappointed. Here she is via the Louisiana Channel:
Whatever is weird about you and weird about your way of seeing things and doing things is probably the thing you should be doing. But you have to do it more. Because if you do it more it becomes something. - Claire-Louise Bennett
Weirdness certainly does shine through in her writing. The protagonist in Pond is concerned on behalf of a pond because she believes that a sign that labels it prevents it from speaking for itself. In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, the narrator hosts a party and becomes very bothered when one of her guests starts to touch a beloved fern. She has to leave the room.
This kind of weirdness is small and quiet, but that’s what makes it feel real, human, and tender.
Lately, I’ve been feeling weird. I’ve found myself more inclined to do things for fun or curiosity than to not do them out of embarrassment. I attribute this to a few things:
Having a child means less time to worry how others perceive me and more time to be silly.
I’m turning 40 soon, so my YOLO senses are tingling.
If AI is coming for my livelihood, then all I have left is my precious humanity, aka my weirdness.
Every world/business leader was named in the Epstein files. But I feel too ashamed to do something a little bit out there?
So I recently went live in my pajamas and talked about writing and recovery. That was weird.
The other day I passed by a neighbor’s house and noticed this colorful doodad in her garden. I’ve complimented this neighbor on her flowers many times, so I just said “lovely doodad” and took a picture.
Then, after hearing this cover at a birthday party, I played it on loop while watching the sunrise, folding laundry, and doing as much rhythmic swaying as a woman of a certain age can reasonably do in her pajamas on her front porch before full daylight.
Like in Bennett’s books, my weirdness is pretty small and quiet.
But, I don’t know, maybe that’s big. For a while now, the title of the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem “Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)” has been ringing in my head like an uninvited mantra. I first came across this poem in high school, a time when most people are at least a little bit plagued by fears of looking absurd. But I’d never really thought about it until recently, in my extremely late-blooming era of finally getting over (some of) my self-consciousness.
Revisiting the poem, I noticed that in its body, the full phrase is
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
Yikes, that’s serious, particularly for a poem about what it means to be a poet, which I can imagine some people think of as an extremely silly profession, just arranging words prettily on a page.
But it is serious, isn’t it? Imagine going through life not indulging in some weirdness out of anxiety over looking dumb. It would be like choosing to swear off love and relationships for fear of losing people and winding up alone. You’d end up with a life totally devoid of joy, which in its way would be death.
Here’s one more thing I read this month that relates. It’s not about being weird, but it’s about finding the love, joy, and humanity in small and quiet moments. I recently discovered Christine Tyler Hill’s Cloud Report project through this interview with her on Creative Fuel with Anna Brones. I think this quote is a good note to end on: