W.D. Clarke

The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in the right.

She was appallingly narrow, but her consciousness of wider things gave to her narrowness a pathetic charm.

…all night long

The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in the right.

She was appallingly narrow, but her consciousness of wider things gave to her narrowness a pathetic charm.

…all night long […she dreamed of] a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended. When she woke up she knew that it had been [her English home] Sawston.

’If you condemn him for that, you'll condemn the whole lot.'
'I condemn the whole lot.'
'And the French as well?'
'And the French as well.'_
[...]
[...]
[several pages more]
‘I don't care for the lot of you. I'm English...’

As she spoke she seemed to be transfigured, and to have indeed no part with refinement or unrefinement any longer. Out of this wreck there was revealed to him something in- destructible - something which she, who had given it, could never take away.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty's confidence. This tiny theatre of Monteriano spraddled and swaggered with the best of them, and these ladies with their clock would have nodded to the young men on the ceiling of the Sistine.
[…]
Lucia began to sing, and there was a moment's silence. She was stout and ugly; but her voice was still beautiful, and as she sang the theatre murmured like a hive of happy bees.

The tourist may be intelligent, warm-hearted and alert, and I think I was that much, but he has to go back every evening to his hotel or pension, and he can know very little of the class-structure of the country he is visiting, or of its economic problems. My limitations were grave. Fortunately I was unaware of them, and plunged ahead. Where Angels Fear to Tread rests on a piece of effrontery. In a hotel lounge one day - at Siena or that sort of place - overheard an English lady talking to another English lady about a third English lady who had married an Italian far beneath her socially and also much younger, and how most unfortunate it was. This sorry bit of twaddle stuck in my mind. I worked at it until it became alive and grew into a novel of contrasts.

I too would like to have a talk, and can't get what I want to say on paper. You can gather however that I know I am not a real artist, and at the same time am fearfully serious over my work and willing to sweat at atmosphere if it helps me to \[achieve? ?] what I want. What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track - cannot explain myself properly, for you must remember (I forget it myself) that though 'clever' I have a small and cloudy brain, and cannot clear it by talking or reading philosophy. In fact my equipment is frightfully limited but so good in parts that I want to do with it what I can.

Interviewer: Oscar Wilde believed that no man is truthful. Give him a mask, he said, and he will tell you the truth. Do you think we can be truthful to ourselves without masks? Difficult but doable, if anyone is asking Meiselman.

[…] there is a footno

Interviewer: Oscar Wilde believed that no man is truthful. Give him a mask, he said, and he will tell you the truth. Do you think we can be truthful to ourselves without masks? Difficult but doable, if anyone is asking Meiselman.

[…] there is a footnote to explain the archaic English. The next line, however, “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” is one he has no trouble understanding.

Favorite quote: “If you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” - Gandhi, Gandhi.

But only in the movies does a thirty-six-year-old man change. In real life, a man with his back against the wall can only double down.

[…] the hopelessness of his situation. If her husband respects the library’s mission and allows Shenkenberg to speak unopposed they, the community, will stigmatize Meiselman as a cancer spreader, infection grower, fever elevator. On the other hand, is he willing to go up on the stake to defend fundamental beliefs? To expect martyrdom in this day and age is archaic, barbaric. This is New Niles in the new millennium. Protests are futile, intransigence slows nothing down. Everyone is replaceable with a click of a mouse. Skipping town and starting anew must have seemed the perfect solution to Deena. So his ever-impulsive wife dialed the listed broker, and while on hold, she may have fantasized about the four-bedroom country house in the UP […]

So his ever-impulsive wife dialed the listed broker, and while on hold, she may have fantasized about the four-bedroom country house in the UP Meiselman showed her earlier at breakfast. Four hundred miles north of Chicago, I will start a new life with Meisie. Cradling our morning mugs of coffee on the bedroom balcony, we spot deer darting across our land. Right there, Meisie, behind the pond. Are those wild turkeys? Quick kiss because we are living a dream. Oh, Meisie, I call to him, the great room’s cathedral ceiling carrying my voice to the kitchen where he is spreading mayonnaise on our roast beef sandwiches, high-cholesterol no longer a concern in this rural existence. . Later that night, the window shades open, not a neighbor in sight, we wrestle on the couch, each trying to strip the clothes off the other. To the hot tub. Knock flutes of champagne because we are in love. Randy lifts his leg out of the water, showing off his lateral movement. Meiselman tries forcing Randy out of Deena’s fantasy but all he can do to knock Deena’s fantasy dead is to think of the pink-haired girl’s hair touching his hand.

Deena’s middling reaction to the real estate section was most probably her finally having tired of his weekly joke of moving to one of the coldest parts of the country. Do White Sox games even transmit that far north?

If Deena returns home in the next fifteen minutes, which he is confident she will because these lunches must mean the world to her as well, they will still have enough time to eat before the first pitch. But he will have to have the meal prepared, not only to save time, but so that when Deena comes through the front door, winded and tripping over her shopping bags and excuses, she will set her eyes on the table set for two, cut sandwiches on each plate, glasses filled to the brim with orange juice and will coo, What do I do to deserve you? Leave her fretting over her tardiness, leave her questioning whether she reciprocates equally.

Still no sign of Deena. Should he not be home in case the hospital calls looking for consent? Out carousing with motorcycle maniac Randy, therapist and patient sang along to the car radio, a song they shared during sessions in the Center’s workout room. Deena began mocking Randy’s falsetto sound. Horseplay ensued, fingers tussling in front of the radio’s tuner. Deena rammed the car into a blue U.S. mailbox, the front of the car crumpling like a balled sheet of paper. Consent for surgery, a no brainer. Consent to keep her plugged in? Quality of life issues for Deena, quality of life issues for Meiselman, too. At first, the community will hail Meiselman’s devotion to his vegetable wife, gossiping to one another about his daily visits and willingness to change bedpans. The gossiping, however, will take a perverse turn, and soon rumors will start spreading about Meiselman’s involvement with an older woman, nobody giving him the benefit of the doubt, nobody wanting to hear about a friendship struck up in the hospital waiting room, the mother of Deena’s companion, who sadly did not make it out alive. He fell for her simplicity, the toothpick-thin cross, peach cardigans, and dirty blonde ponytail. In consideration of Deena, just hands, no mouths.

If the doctor comes out and says, I’m sorry, your wife did not pull through, Meiselman can expect the generosity of the community to overwhelm him. For the week of mourning he will feast on chicken, salads, candy platters, and kugels, lots of kugels. How fortunate there are no children, community members will whisper to one another. Ethel will pay a condolence call, offering classy air kisses at her arrival and departure. He will want to collapse his head into her beefy chest for a good cry. The mourning period over, Ethel will suggest getting lost in work is the best way to cope.

All he wants to do is touch Deena, now that it is forbidden and he has nothing to offer verbally. Every month after she starts bleeding, he questions why he did not take enough advantage of the weeks she was clean. Every night they should have. He has tried describing the pain of not being able to touch, but she responds to the flattery by relaying what she learned in the family purity classes she took before they married.

[…]and saw a man splitting at the seams, everything turning shaky, a man who has seen things he should not have seen, a man dealing with matters beyond his scope, a man taking liberties he would not normally have taken.

The doctor will throw out a slew of predictable theories to explain the [childhood] bedroom [in his parents’ home]’s intactness. You want to remain a little boy. Your mother wants you to remain a little boy. You and your mother want you to remain her little boy. Your mother harbors the fantasy you will return home. You harbor the fantasy you will return home. You see these relics as infected, and you are scared of transferring the infection into your new home. The sight of them takes you back to times you don’t care to revisit. It’s as if you cannot commit to this new life with your wife. Is this the same reason you are failing to empower your sperm? If the doctor, for once, keeps them on topic, Meiselman will tell her how his mother implores Deena to help Meiselman clear out his bedroom, take whatever he wants next door, and box up the rest for Amvets.

[…] she will find the story edifying, utilizing the next pause to recall Meiselman’s initial reason for coming to her during the transition years.

“Not nudes,” Meiselman will have to correct the doctor’s recollection of the photographs. “And I didn’t know she was my grandmother. For me, it was all about the bathing suit, the pinup pose.”

“Your mind, on some level, must have noticed the resemblance?

Meiselman was fed up, literally and figuratively, with everyone putting their dirty paws on him. This would be the moment when he would stop taking it from the Shenkenbergs, the Betsy Rosses, and the Mitchells of the world. After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point.

[…] is it a fortune cookie quote, or something he read in the newspaper in connection to the two wars, or a theory produced around the time when he had the misunderstanding with \[visiting author] Shenkenberg? Whatever its origin, its truth is undeniable. Every story that begins in humiliation must end in humiliation.

Above all, though, the artist’s quest must include that open-endedness to life and her own art, which she will navigate together with those other mysterious, treasured, or inadequate aspects of herself, as she moves forward into that art which, though her untimely death, Rachel herself is, alas, denied, but exemplifies so well:

[…] on the whole, a live if unformed human being, experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments, but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling […]

‘She seems vague, but she’s a will of her own’ [….]

— ‘the most important aspect of a new technology isn’t what the machine does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to’.

— ‘Never forget that you aren’t the target for AI hype (investors are)’

— ‘the Byzantine premium’: ‘the extra value that investors place on an asset that they don’t understand’

— ‘day-old donuts’: AI tools we civilians can use are a money-losing sideshow to AI investors and pitch-men alike, function only to hype a social consensus that the ‘I’ in AI is a real thing, that ‘there’s a “there” there’

— ‘Centaur’ = human workers empowered to use technologies at their own discretion, to make their work (and work lives) better

— ‘Reverse Centaur’ = human workers serve needs of automated machines, reduced to ‘human in the loop’ status’

— ‘innovation’ is usually just ‘disruption’ (sold to companies as ways to reduce human labour costs)

— ‘automation blindness’: human workers subjected to automated processes eventually lose the cognitive skills needed to assess their outputs (to be that human-in-the-loop)

— ‘accountability sink’: when reverse centaurs/humans-in-the-loop are blamed for AI failures, rather than the AI or executives who purchased/implemented AI solutions

— ‘vocational awe’: ‘the process by which employers exploit their workers’ sense of duty to the people they serve to get them to accept brutal working conditions’.

— ‘GIGO’ (‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’): Errors in computer output remoreselessly rise with errors of inputs (‘ the coprophagic AI problem: when you feed a bot on botshit, you get something AI researchers call “model collapse,” a dramatic reduction in the quality of the guesses the bot makes’)

— ‘personalized pricing’: ‘Weaponized spying’ (‘when it’s done to fix the price of goods, it’s called “surveillance pricing.” When it’s done to fix the price of wages, it’s called “algorithmic wage discrimination”.’)

— ‘normal technology’: ‘A thing that creative people and others use, sometimes, when it makes sense, with mixed results, but sometimes good ones.’ (What AI could one day be if burst the economic bubble/drop the terminology hype)

Art: ‘what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who experience their art’.

...she was, as always, locked in cultural exchange with herself

...she was, as always, locked in cultural exchange with herself

Yes, the room at Eugene and Nicole’s was full of New York’s most famous and well-regarded artists, who were failures, just as Eugene and Nicole were failures. They had wildly successful careers and yet they were complete artistic failures and it made me feel sick with regret, sick with embarrassment, that when I had first been an adult in New York I had held these people in such high esteem

I really needed to leave this apartment before I drove myself insane on the hamster wheel of detesting them, then feeling sorry for them, then feeling remorseful both about detesting them and feeling sorry for them. How boring.