Alternate title: When one thing isn’t substantial enough for an entire blog post, mash a few things together. A dinner of side dishes, all nutrients covered!

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I.

Pettiness level: Calling someone by the wrong nickname

Pettiness level: Taking a picture of the hair clogging the drain every time you clean the shower catcher before showering

Pettiness level: Taking your mail out of the mailbox and shutting the door on everyone else’s

Pettiness level: Spreading your washcloth out across more than half of the rail in the bathroom

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II.

Clumsiness level: Hitting your head on the faucet when you sneeze over the sink

Clumsiness level: Purse strap getting snagged on the door handle

Clumsiness level: Accidentally airborne off the lip of the steps to the kitchen when wearing slippery socks

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III.

Techster level: “Inventing” soylent and ignoring the long-time existence of poi

Techster level: Going so far in the direction of private rides that you circle back and think you’ve invented buses

Techster level: Stealing “dopamine fasting” from the Amish and meditation practitioners

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The Lost Man, by Jane Harper: It probably wasn’t the most restrained or prudent to read all three of a new-to-you author’s books in one week. Now I have nothing! But I assume Harper will be writing for decades to come, and if she, Laura Lippman, and Tana French can each publish a book every two years or so…well, it won’t be enough, but it will be something. This departed from the first two Harper books, which featured the same detective, but was tonally very similar. With Tana French’s books, I feel like I have fairly strong feelings about which are my favorites (at least the top four- The Likeness, The Secret Place, Witch Elm, and In the Woods), but I don’t know if I could say among Harper’s three.

Who Says You’re Dead? by Jacob M. Appel, MD: I was expecting the entirety of this book to focus on end-of-life/definition-of-alive dilemmas, and (for no particularly well-founded reason) thought it was going to be several in-depth case studies. Instead it’s very scant scenarios (from all areas of medical ethics, not just end-of-life) followed by a few paragraphs of discussing weighing the possible options. Something about it just felt very rote and cursory, although it was still a semi-interesting read.

The Collected Schizophrenias, by Esme Weijun Wang: I was waiting for a few holds at the library that arrived so slowly it seemed they must have taken a canoe down the Gowanus Canal to get to my branch. I read almost the entire collection of essays on a bus to Maryland, engaged and interested. I was expecting them to be more formally experimental (not because of the subject but because that’s what I associate with Graywolf Press, whether that’s completely accurate or not), but while they are more straightforward, they build on each other in interesting ways as the book progresses.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong: I keep thinking of an anecdote I read on Twitter about a bookstore patron who was looking for this book but couldn’t remember the title and asked for the book about “how for a minute we are beautiful” (and that’s not even what they said but my attempt to remember what they said…a double misremembrance). The writing and structure of this book are not briefly but enduringly gorgeous. I stayed up far too late reading the middle part of this one night – until 2 am – because I was so happy in a cave of blankets, wearing black fleece tights and a long-sleeved black shirt like a cozy ninja, the book just poking out so that the page was lit enough to read. I was so happy doing it that I did it again last night, waking up tired and addressing that by staying in bed to finish the book. Gorgeous.

The Great Pretender, by Susanna Cahalan: I don’t understand how I’d never heard of the events narrated in this book before. A psychiatrist sends eight “sane” (the book does a great job interrogating the idea of sanity and mental health/mental illness) people into various psychiatric hospitals, and they’re almost all diagnosed with schizophrenia. And then there are twists upon twists. The book’s title ends up resonating in multiple different ways. I read Cahalan’s Brain on Fire when it came out (or a few years later? It doesn’t feel like it could have been that long) and it was interesting to see how similarly they read (in the most positive sense!) – in her memoir, she’s not only personal but also relentlessly inquisitive and journalistic, and in this book, she doesn’t lose her voice in the facts and details, even though she’s (largely – her reporting is narrated) absent from them.

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After my apartment became an OSHA violation – as in, that same day, about eight hours later – the dryer tried to set my clothes on fire. This wasn’t surprising in general, because the washer and dryer have been in the apartment far longer than I have and, to my knowledge, no one has ever serviced them (yes, this is a failure on my part. I know. I understand that avoiding eye contact with people is one thing and avoiding considering the amount of lint that has built up in your laundry machine – or where exactly it vents, because it doesn’t seem to be outside – is another, stupider thing). At this point they’re probably 15 years old. That said, the attempted self-arson of my dryer was surprising in its specifics because I was drying a small load of clothing on the lowest temperature setting.

We have exactly one modern appliance in our apartment: the stove the landlord purchased after he sent someone to “fix” our old stove and that resulted in, um, a gas leak. Everything else is some double digit number of years old. As a result, none of our appliances sing to us the way other people’s dishwashers or combo washer/dryers do (really, why do they do that? If there’s a jingle, something should pop out at the end of the song. I would have no objection to my boyfriend’s machine doodly-doodly-dooing if it subsequently shot all of his clean clothes out into the apartment afterward). We can’t read the dial on the toaster oven, my air conditioner is a bit lacking, et cetera. None of this is particularly problematic, but burning clothes require a different level of concern. That is, they require something other than “Well, our rent is pretty low, and it’s still functional, so…”

I was confused when I heard the smoke alarm go off because…going back to what I said about owning no appliances that serenade you, I suppose we do have three: the carbon monoxide detector and two smoke alarms. But usually the smoke detector in the kitchen is the one going off, and although it’s identical to the one closer to the dryer, apparently they sing completely different warning songs. So I thought it was the carbon monoxide detector. I did figure the dryer was the issue, though, since it was the only thing running, and opening it confirmed that it was the source of everything smelling like ashes. No actual fire, and nothing was actually burnt, but it did require another cycle through the washer – followed by being hung to dry, obviously – to get rid of the smokiness.

My main point is that I need to take better care of the devices I’ve inherited, but my secondary point is thus: On multiple occasions in the past, I’ve had people use “she wouldn’t let us leave the dryer running when we left the house/apartment/airbnb” as ammunition for an argument on the order of “Claire is an enemy of fun.” Not to say that I’m not sometimes an enemy of fun! I have occasionally had that thought about my own self while at parties. But no one is allowed to use this particular thing as “evidence” for it ever again. Turn off your dryer when you leave the house, people.

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As much as my OCD has been mitigated by Zoloft and therapy, contamination fears still do their worst with me from time to time.

Today the landlord sent someone to replace light bulbs that were too high for us to reach without a proper ladder, and in the course of his doing so two of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs that had been in there broke, scattering little pieces of glass AND ALSO MERCURY OH DEAR GOD I’M GOING TO DIE MERCURY across the floor in our living room. I know the relative risks and how small they are…logically. But my faculties of logic typically recuse themselves in the face of environmental, airborne, or ingestible contaminants. In their absence, in rush the forces of emotionally-based panic!

So I canceled my drum lesson this afternoon because I figured it was decent to offer my teacher the chance to avoid my living room for today, although this started me thinking about how, if you’re in a profession where you go to other people’s homes (cleaner, music teacher, tutor…) you have very little control over your environment, and you (me) are more accurately seeking the illusion of control. For all I know, each of my students could have crushed a few CFL bulbs at the kitchen table right before I showed up to discuss geometry.

I think less than the exposure itself – I’m trying to comfort myself, also, with the fact that as a vegetarian I don’t have any mercury exposure from fish – because it’s done and (ha) dusted and can’t be rewound, I’m hung up on the idea of “best practices.”

If you google “what to do if a CFL bulb breaks,” you’ll get an expected mix of “abandon all hope” from way-out-there sites and “aim to follow these steps:” from the EPA website and the like. My problem is that the disclaimer of “Even if you broke a bulb in the past and just vacuumed it up and didn’t follow any of these steps, you are fine – these are just the best practices” only makes me more rabid about needing to follow the best practices. So I opened the windows, turned off the heat, provided stiff cardboard for cleanup and followed it with wet paper towels after the glass bits were gone. I don’t know what I would have done if a bulb had broken over the carpet, because it seems like “best practices” would have been “dispose of the carpet in an enormous, sealed glass jar and take the jar to a hazardous waste facility.”

I think leaving the windows open for a few hours and going over the floor once more with wet paper towels is all I can do, but it’s hard to keep from imagining that when I first walked into the kitchen and saw the glass, I got mercury dust on the bottoms of my socks (I did throw the socks out), and then tracked it into my room…and then will continue to track it elsewhere as if I’m painting a radioactive stripe everywhere I go (and yes, this type of mercury is not radioactive, but I was talking about Marie Curie and the radium girls last night so glowing trails are on my mind…). It’s difficult not to want to follow every last best practice, to aim for a total purity that doesn’t exist, to be perfectly safe. But I know my time is better spent doing what I can and working on how to cope with that being enough. Illogically, the incident has made the unbroken CFL bulbs I have waiting for a recycling event seem like little grenades sitting in my room waiting to explode, so now they’re in bubble wrap ready to be taken to Home Depot.

And “Marie Curie” really sounds like mercury.

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The Day the Sun Died, by Yan Lianke: I was initially distracted by some stylistic devices that never ended up working for me (repetition, ironic insertion of the author/his other works into the story). The repetition and some of the other verbal tics may be mainly a translation issue – not an issue with the translator but an issue inherent in translation – but my Mandarin is nowhere near good enough to say, even if I had access to the original (my Mandarin is, in fact, only almost good enough to read 3/4 of a tweet posted in Mandarin by a poet the other day, which ultimately read “You can get lost from me” (the character for the verb “get lost” was not in my repertoire). Per the introduction to the novel, one doesn’t have to know Yan’s other works in order to enjoy this one or understand the references, but the description of those other works made me want to put down this book and find those…I was somewhat more invested in the story as it progressed, but the repetition really never worked for me.

The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami: I moved this to the top of the stack after getting a notification from the Brooklyn Public Library that it was due in three days. Three days? It’s already been a week and a half? And…it’s on hold by approximately one million people, so I can’t renew it. The same timeline happened with Marlon James, but I got lucky and was able to renew even though I think I remember that book having an almost as long wait list. I didn’t attempt to read this in three days – I only had…zero days once I finished The Day the Sun Died, which I was in the middle of when I got the notice. The daily fine for a book is 15 cents, and the library is a good place to donate to. When it was finally time to open the book, a receipt from the previous reader fell out – apparently they accrued $1.35 while finishing The Other Americans, which cheered me. I really enjoyed this, in particular the setting. Multiple-viewpoint novels can be tricky to pull off, but this one works – maintaining one main character while focusing enough on the others that they feel worthy of their own narration, even though for a few characters it’s only one or two short chapters.

Sabrina and Corina, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine: My feelings toward this gorgeous collection might be epitomized by me telling my boyfriend, by way of description, “I love EVERYTHING about this book except that the cadence of the title means I have the Bananas in Pajamas song in my head now.” “I don’t know what that is,” he replied. “I’ll spare you,” I said. Love, everybody! I’ll take the bananas and their pajamas coming down the stairs, chasing teddy bears, whatever, if that’s the price of admission for this book. I’ve really loved collections bound together by place recently (these are set in and around Denver), and although there are no links between or among any of the stories, they feel very cohesive (which is not necessarily even something I require in a story collection, but it adds to the magic of this one). I read it really quickly and probably would have read it again if it weren’t due back at the library…

(Side note: three of the National Book Award finalists – Sabrina and Corina, The Other Americans, and Disappearing Earth – are either story collections or novels without a singular narrator…just an interesting note!)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James: The only troubles with this book were: 1. it was nearly overdue by the time I started it; 2. it is 600 pages long. That was problematic not so much for my library fines as for the book’s weight, which made it a less than ideal candidate for a subway read. Then, truth be told, I was distracted by The Dry for a day and have only just begun this. More to come when I finish…

The Dry, by Jane Harper: I started this before Black Leopard, Red Wolf, because I had it in eBook form and my Kindle weighs almost nothing (it’s slightly alarming to me still how light both Kindle and MacBook Air are; I am always certain I’ve left one or the other somewhere when they’re actually right in my purse). I first heard of Harper on a Twitter thread, where someone compared her to Tana French but in Australia/Laura Lippman but in Australia, and that was enough for me to seek out all three of her books. And lo! They do fill the French/Lippman void, and now there are two more Harper novels out there for me to read after this one. Harper-Lippman-French is a great triumvirate of brilliant female mystery writers (I tried to come up with a way to not make that sound reductive – because so often assigning a genre beyond fiction carries the whiff of “but not literary,” yet going out of your way to note that a book is literary can sound as if you weren’t expecting it to be – but they are all mysteries).

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I’ll go on the record stating that the most important all-purpose ingredient for a Halloween costume is dental floss.

Floss has many excellent qualities: you probably already own some (convenience!), it’s cheap, it’s strong. It’s almost certainly a better plan to use dental floss to hang something around your neck or dangle it from your wrist than it is to attempt shenanigans with tape, glue, or safety pins.

The first time I discovered the critical importance of floss was when I dressed up as the tooth fairy for Halloween back in…maybe 2008? It was primarily thematic until I discovered how practical it was for hanging a cardboard tooth around my neck. Floss is easy to tie in knots and unlikely to break; it’s smooth and thin enough to make its way through tiny holes without tearing something like, say, saran wrap, which I may be wearing later as part of a fake window.

I wasn’t going to dress up – I’m an adult, it’s been a long week, today is Thursday, it’s raining, etc. But at this point in my Halloween career I have a costume box that lives in my closet year round, so when I decided to attempt a party after work tonight I lifted it down from the top shelf (out fell a llama onesie, which was soft, and a pointy crown, which was not) and rummaged through. The window – left over from a stained glass window costume, subsequently used as part of a last-minute “bug smashed against a screen” costume in conjunction with a pair of orange wings that have served me well but are now quite droopy – needed a new sheath of saran wrap because the floss had ripped a path through it (nobody’s perfect), but seems like it will hold – and anyway, it’s part of a thunderstorm costume, so it’s just verisimilitude if it’s broken. The wind was too powerful!

I’ve been a storm before – 2014 – and yes, it does feel like cheating to repeat…but only in the same way that having a signature karaoke song feels like cheating, in that it’s something I tried to avoid until I realized how convenient it was. The previous iteration didn’t include the window, and I have some items in my bag (yellow plastic folder, multicolored scarf, tinfoil) for potential transformation into lightning bolts, clouds, and a rainbow, so at least I hope to be singing in a different style. I’ve retired the necklace of birds and lightning bolt earrings from the previous storm, though the base of the costume remains largely unchanged.

Now if I can find some blue streamers so that I have fake rain as well as all of NYC’s real rain tonight, I’ll be set.

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Questions: Which of the apps that I use actually accomplish what they purport to do, and which apps don’t claim to advance a user’s skills in any particular way but actually do?

Considering the first question…

Duolingo:

The premise: advance your knowledge of a language or learn a new one.

The process: short lessons comprised of a mix of vocabulary, forming sentences using a word bank, translating written sentences into English, and transcribing spoke sentences into the language you’re studying.

Does it work?

With languages I already knew (Spanish, Latin), the lessons were great for refreshing my vocabulary and refamiliarizing myself with grammatical concepts, although to get an explanation of any concept one has to go to the Duolingo website – there’s no explicit instruction within the app itself. In one sense, it’s useful to learn inductively and come to your own conclusions about why the preterite tense is used in one case and the imperfect tense in another. However, it’s easy to feel lost without concrete explanations, and sometimes an increase in correct answers doesn’t reflect a better understanding of the language but simply an understanding of specific, repeated questions.

The lessons suffer, too, from their focus on a particular tense or concept. If I’m completing a lesson called “subjunctive mood,” I’m not being asked to distinguish between situations that call for the indicative and those that require the subjunctive (the hardest part!) – all I need is to have the subjunctive endings memorized, and I don’t even really need that, because there will likely be several examples in the first few questions from the lesson. I only need to remember them from there.

With languages I had a small amount of familiarity with (Russian via friends, Mandarin after studying it my freshman year of college), the results were both better and worse. I can read Cyrillic fluently now even if I don’t know what the words mean, and I can pull up a number of useful Mandarin phrases (“I don’t understand,” “What is that?” “Where is the bathroom?”). And much of the Russian that I can read I can also understand, or at least get the gist of. But I can’t generate my own sentences and thoughts, and if you put me in a room with a group of Russian or Mandarin speakers – even if they made an effort to speak slowly – I would have a hard time conversing spontaneously

Rhythm Trainer:

The premise: “Master essential rhythmic skills” by using the app for 15 minutes a day, tapping a finger on your phone’s screen in perfect time with the patterns given to you.

The process: The app plays a sequence of beats – in 3/4  or 4/4 time – while a metronome chirps in the background, and then the user attempts to mimic the sequence perfectly. The metronome continues and the pattern of notes remains on screen; the user’s taps appear below the original sequence in green (if the tap is close enough to being exactly on beat) or red (if it’s too far off). Getting a sequence right triggers a new sequence to appear, while getting it wrong requires repeated it at least twice correctly. If the user misses a particular pattern too many times, the tempo is lowered.

Does it work?

I will confess I typically don’t use Rhythm trainer under the conditions it requires for optimal success: I don’t always use headphones, I sometimes try to do my ten minutes (you only get ten minutes a day with the free version of the app, though it ends up being 11 or 12) on the subway or in a café with music blasting, rationalizing this as an effective way to learn to block out distractions, and I definitely don’t place my entire forearm on a table or other flat surface to tap out the beats. As such, I may not be the ideal case study. Also, I ran through all of the exercises pretty quickly and am now simply repeating them and attempting to stay at 80 bpm, the maximum tempo. The fact that I don’t think it would necessarily be worth it to purchase the app and access more time per day/additional exercises gives away my conclusion: it’s fun, and it probably does improve one’s overall sense of rhythm, but when I’m playing drums – with or without other musicians – two things I don’t have are 1) a metronome; 2) the beats in written form in front of me.

Pomodoro:

The premise: Work for a fixed amount of time, then take a break.

The process: 25 minutes is the default for the “work” period, which is followed by a five-minute break. After four cycles of this, you get a longer, 25-minute break. The name “pomodoro” comes from the analog version of the timer, which is shaped like a tomato, though it doesn’t seem an official “Pomodoro” app exists; the one I use is called “Focus Keeper” and although it clearly seeks to mimic pomodoros (tomato icon, red background for the timer), it isn’t officially associated. Some of the other members of my writing group use the pomodoro method, but with their kitchen timers or iPhones. It seems that “Pomodoro” has joined Band-Aid and Kleenex in the pantheon of brand names that have become stand-ins for the generic item.

Does it work?

It definitely makes sitting down to work – or standing up to fold laundry, or doing any task you’d rather avoid – less intimidating. I use it for writing, practicing music, meditating, and responding to work emails. For writing, I use it more or less as it’s intended, but not as much as intended. That is, my writing muscle is weak right now and I do one pomodoro (“one tomato” is what I log on my writing group’s Slack channel, in the form of the tomato emoji) a day, so the 5-minute break afterward is unnecessary. If I do two, though, I follow the pattern. When I meditate I reset to one of the five-minute breaks, and when I practice music I just blast right through the break and into the next work period. It’s easy to adjust the length of the pomodoro, but for some reason I persist in doing a 25-minute work period,  working through the break, and continuing into the next 25-minute period, having to do math to gauge how long I’ve actually been playing.

Finally: Which apps are not intended as dating apps but are misused as such?

All of them. Words With Friends is a particularly egregious example. You expect this with social media, but not crosswords.

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This time I’m ready with tab open for writing down all of Olly’s puns (I’m…fighting an impulse here. You can fill in the blanks, I’m sure) and probably even inventing some where they don’t exist! (Such as: yesterday the other commentator, Dr. Lisa Gannon, referred to a male gymnast’s dismount as “the culmination” of his high bar routine, and I was certain she was hiding a pun on “Kolman-ation” in there (Kolman is a very difficult but fairly common release move, and there had indeed been one in the routine…)

Today we have the women’s vault and uneven bars, and the men’s floor and…um…oh! Pommel horse and rings. The less interesting ones, although pommel horse is sort of the men’s beam equivalent and does at least lead to falls that result in the athlete standing atop the horse as if he’s lost, and rings has a whole set of elements that are not included in the actual score but which are for cool points only, namely opening one’s palms to show that you’re so strong you don’t even need all of your fingers and giving a quick nod of the chin to show that you aren’t screaming in agony inside and have energy left to demonstrate your chill.

So my attempted difficulty was 5.4, but in reality I watched all of the day 1 event finals from bed, without typing, and then fell asleep during the rings final. So I lost all of my difficulty but had a good Z score. But – highlights: Simone nearly sticking her Amanar. Sunisa winning bronze on bars. The whole bars final was pretty impressive, with only one fall. Pommel horse had the medal stand right but in the wrong order. And Yulo Yolo-ed all over floor for Phillipines’ first gold medal in gymnastics ever. Can we petition – er, inquire – for YULO to stand for You Ultimately Live Once? Usually? Uber-ly?

Special award: The interaction between David Beliavsky and his left hand when it forsook him and slid right off the pommel horse. Definitely the look of a man who suspects alien hand syndrome.

Day 2:

This day I had to watch in shifts. I slept through the entirety of the competition, actually, because I thought it started at 10 EST like Saturday’s. I had an hour to watch the men’s vault “Watch me descend like a cannonball from the sky” final and women’s beam before going to work. SIMONE. Breaks the record for most medals won at world championships, of all time, male or female (noteworthy because the men have six apparatuses – apparati? Apparatchiks? – and thus two more changes for medals ever year), and breaks a score of 15 for the first time this year (I think. I’m approaching these statistics with the same approach the men’s vault finalists take, that is, fling yourself as hard as you can and pray).

Then I had four hours of work followed by a break to watch men’s parallel bars, an event I had to strenuously avoid working into my discussion of geometry with a ninth-grade student. It’s also an event for which the men have their own personalized upper-arm guards, because that’s where they’ll be landing. Sun Wei of China has a pair with cartoon chickens draw on them (by member of the Chinese women’s team, Chen Yile, I hear). Only one tenth of a point separated the top 5 finishers on parallel bars, which meant my personal favorite Ferhat Arican of Turkey missed out on a medal, but I can’t help loving it when the gold medalist doesn’t quite expect it and cries happy tears, so I was glad that Joe Fraser of Great Britain ended up on top, and I was sad for Lukas Dauser who ended up on top of the bars and at the bottom of the standings in front of his home crowd.

Can we discuss the choices of music on women’s floor? Since the quadrennium beginning in 2008, “vocalization” has been permitted in floor music, even though music with lyrics is still prohibited. In practice this means that a gymnast can compete to a background of a man basically singing the text of “Jabberwocky,” as long as it sounds like nonsense, or that we’re treated to Lilia Akhaimova (RUS) dancing to the strains of a woman who sounds like she’s being held at gunpoint and forced to endure key changes until she’s screaming.

Also, please no string quartet versions of Ed Sheeran. I’ll take back Melnikova’s somber “Despacito” cover over this.

The floor final was really lovely overall. No one had a mistake bigger than a step out of bounds, and most of the finalists were artistic in their own ways. And, of course, Simone’s fifth gold medal of the championships.

This ceased to be a live blog at some point.

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Conversations With Friends, by Sally Rooney: It’s sometimes hard to read a book objectively when it’s been so widely discussed/acclaimed (I haven’t researched too deeply, but my assumption is that Sally Rooney’s other book, Normal People, is much more recent and came out to huge praise, and that that caused everyone to go back and read this first one (or I’ve been living in a tiny hole far away from the rest of the reading world, but it definitely seems like everyone has been talking about Sally Rooney in the latter half of 2019, not years ago). Most of what I’d heard about Conversations With Friends was “it’s amazing” and “how did she write this at 26”? I’ve heard it compared to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be. The former comparison seems like it’s based more on content (two friends, one brasher, the other a writer) than writing or plot, though there’s something similar in the directness of the writing. The Heti comparison I don’t see at all, but then I didn’t connect with How Should a Person Be (but loved all of Ferrante). As with virtually any hyper-successful novel, I’ve also heard the resulting backlash, “it’s just a romance,” “I don’t get the hype,” etc. I have to say I found it pretty extraordinarily well done – it’s only “ordinary” in the sense that the characters are incredibly realistic. They aren’t realistic or ordinary in a generic way – they’re all really specific. And that, I think, is much harder than writing a larger-than-life character. It reminds me of seeing one actor in different movies in which the characters are nominally the same/have the same characteristics/don’t have anything dramatic happening to them – but feel and behave entirely differently. That’s talent.

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews: I had a hard time keeping the characters straight for the first 50 pages. I also kept stopping to think about how many books I’ve read recently have eschewed question marks for dialogue. Why is that? It does have the effect of making the reader feel like she’s farther enclosed in the world of the book, ears plugged to the outside world, and it’s not new, but it does seem to be in fashion of late. It gives the sense, also, that the words are being set on the page more gently. Somehow, even with exclamation marks and italics or capitals, it doesn’t feel like anyone is being loud if there are no quotation marks. The critique I’d heard going into this was: Why does it need to be framed by the perspective of a male narrator? And this is valid…even if, in the interest of verisimilitude, the author didn’t want to have a close third or omniscient narrator (because the Mennonite women can’t read or write and so can’t narrate the events?), it felt more at times like the women and the events of the novel were the framework for August’s story, not the other way around.

Normal People, by Sally Rooney: Going into this, I was most curious to see if Rooney pulled off what I suspected she was capable of (that is, creating characters that are “ordinary” but not generic, that are fully realized without relying on dramatics, and doing so in two different novels with characters that don’t feel like echoes of one another). She does, pretty unequivocally, though you could say one of the main characters in Normal People is more extreme – as a movie role, it might not be unfair to call it “Oscar bait” – but at the same time, she’s so interior that it would have taken a real deftness to write her. Not spoiling anything, the depiction of abuse here is really chilling, and the book is pretty bleak overall. I’m curious if the ending was intended to be a small triumph or despondent – really, I’m not sure. In both this and Conversations With Friends there’s a serious vein of existential emptiness running through, which isn’t merely alluded to yet is never a focal point. That I found particularly interesting (and it would make me more likely to compare these books to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels). Final thought: it’s not a critique per se, but it frustrates me beyond coherence when characters constantly misunderstand one another because each refuses to say what she means and instead says what she thinks the other person wants to hear. I understand that these characters are very young and the whole point is that they’re misaligned in communication, but I wanted to shake the book hard enough to force the real words out of them and onto the page as dialogue (though there is no conversational punctuation in Normal People, furthering my conjecture that lack of quotation marks is a trend), instead of leaving them as internal dialogue.

Blacklight, by Kimberly King Parsons: Kim was a year ahead of me in my MFA program. This collection of stories is phenomenal on both the idea level and the sentence level. Just after I went to Kim’s NYC reading, bought the book, had her sign it, and went to her book party, National Book Award long list nominations came out, and this was on it. I had only read the first story by that point, but I wasn’t surprised, and now I’ve read all of the stories. In addition to being complete gems individually, the stories in Blacklight are really a cohesive collection (like Barry Hannah’s Airships, as opposed to something like Barry Hannah’s Bats Out of Hell, which is longer than airships and thus contains more amazing stories but feels like an anthology or a retrospective – maybe it is, now that I think about it – more than like a collection).

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, by Charles Blow: I can’t remember where I saw this recommended. O Magazine? The prose in this memoir shades purple at times, but the story is compelling. His descriptions and commentary on fraternity hazing could have used…more reflection and unpacking.

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Or more accurately, the ballad for Judy Loman. Most accurately, it wasn’t a ballad; it was a piece commissioned by – who? I can’t find it online. It’s probably in a paper program somewhere deep in a box, part of my relentless archives.

Some websites say Loman retired in 1991 – she would have been in her mid-fifties. Other sources say she was the principal harpist for the Toronto Symphony until 2002 – mid-sixties. I heard her play live only once, at the American Harp Society conference in Cincinnati in 2000. I was about to be a senior in high school and was applying to conservatories, but I had gotten a late start – fourteen, after six years of piano lessons – and was still behind.

Loman gave the first performance ever of a piece commissioned specifically for the conference – at least, I’m fairly sure that’s accurate; there are no YouTube videos from 2000, and the American Harp Society’s website only has programs for the events going back to 2002. But I remember sitting in the auditorium – a familiar one for me, where I’d played in the Cincinnati Youth Wind Ensemble under the direction of a gentle young conductor and where I’d performed disastrously in a piano concerto competition – waiting for Loman’s performance, then watching her fingers fly across the strings until suddenly her hands came to rest in her lap. She quickly raised them again, and I would not have been able to tell you that anything had gone wrong until the second time she stopped. This time, she shook her head and said, “Well, it happens.” She explained calmly that she was going to go and get the music, because it was a premiere of the piece and she wanted to do it justice. Then she disappeared from the stage and returned with a music stand and a handful of sheets.

I don’t remember whether she started the piece over from the beginning again, or what the reaction of the audience was. I want to say that there was wild applause when she finished, but that’s little more than conjecture, because I spent the rest of the performance in a state of admiration and fear. Here was one of the most treasured living harpists, a professional of at least 40 years, and she, too, could forget the notes? There was a clear positive takeaway dangling in front of me: we are all humans, perfection is to be expected from no one, and an illustrious career will not be torpedoed by one slip of memory. But my conclusion at the time was that even if I became a professional harpist (I would not), even if I performed in opera houses and concert halls worldwide and made such an impression that pieces were commissioned for me, I wouldn’t be somehow separated from failure, on a higher plane where it couldn’t reach me. Essentially: I could never let my guard down.

The idea that professional musicians ever let their guards down was a naive one, but even as an adult I find myself thinking that those at the very tops of their fields must reside in some sort of protective bubble that failure can’t penetrate. The idea that that isn’t so is alternately terrifying and buoying.

I know I’ve written about this incident before, probably on this blog. But I don’t think I used Loman’s name, and there’s not a way (that I know of?) to hit control-F on an entire website, even your own. Or have I not actually written about this before? I’ve thought about it before, many times. But how do I find out? My memories aren’t searchable even when they’re in writing. Putting them on a page is a false sense of security, as if you can never forget, as if you’ve ascended to the rank of artist and will never miss a note again.

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