“They could put it on his gravestone: he tried to be of use” – Lydia Millet, ‘Dinosaurs’
Hey, do you have hope lately? It’s spring, so during last Saturday’s nice weather, we drove down to McKinley Park to kick it with our friends the San Juans. There was a moment when Kevin and I were shepherding some chicken wings and zucchini on the grill, our basically-same-age kids were running around the backyard, Mal and Kate were inside with the younger San Juan kid, and if we didn’t look beyond that single property lot, all would be perfect in the world. Then Kevin turned to me and asked if I had hope lately, and I’ll admit: I had the hardest time answering that question that I’ve had since I quit drinking.1
Despair is what the fascists want, though. The book I read this week is something of a helpful story, in the sense that it feels like the characters are going through the same bullshit and handling things as best they can. This is the rare book I’d recommend my parents’ book club and to all of my literary friends and to anyone who maybe doesn’t read a lot, but wants to read something based in the same reality we live in (as opposed to the reality the fascists are trying to wishcast, where burning fossil fuels is good for the Earth and mass deportations bring about a happy culture).
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
I had a Nick Hornby phase near the end of high school/beginning of college. I loved (still love, though I haven’t read the books since then) High Fidelity and About A Boy. Shoutout Nicholas Hoult, shoutout Toni Collette, shoutout yr man Heretic. I really enjoyed A Long Way Down, and genuinely wonder how I’d feel about it now that I’m not 17-19. Then I read How To Be Good, and I found it so irritating, cynical, and resigned that I stopped reading Hornby altogether. That’s unfair. Probably had more to do with the fact that I was starting to take writing workshops and reading contemporary writers that seemed cooler than Nick Hornby (ie, their books hadn’t been made into movies my parents also enjoyed). I know that if I re-read those first three books, I’d have a good time. However, Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet is the book I wish How To Be Good was.
Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet: I love this book. The economy of style and clutterless discussion of Real Big Issues reminded me favorably of The Trees by Percival Everett. Millet is very much a nature novelist, if such a thing exists (I feel like something of a nature poet, and want to explore this idea of a nature novelist). But the drama is all human. Our main character is Gil, a humble trust fund recipient who begins the book by getting broken up with, selling all his stuff, and walking from Manhattan to Phoenix, where he makes friends with a family of four next door.
I realize that’s a hell of a sentence. Gil is a humble trust fund recipient, though. He’s an orphan who was raised by his grandmother until she died when he was a teenager and he was shuttled through various wards. He grew up eating peanut butter sandwiches and getting little for Christmas. Then when he’s 18, he learns that actually, no, he doesn’t have to work for a living. What he does instead is volunteer for upwards of 50-60 hours a week and play pickup basketball (talk about a good life). When he gets to Arizona, he helps babysit the 10-year-old next door, while making fast friends with the parents. There isn’t the kind of “and then the wife and him start an affair” or “and then the husband and him have a midlife crisis together” that I feel like I’ve been conditioned to expect, which was refreshing. Show me all the werewolf and vampire gore you want, show me a text about Kashmir’s loss of innocence, show me a haunted house story that begins with a paramilitary massacre—all that I can handle. Bedroom farces, though? I gotta read peeking through my fingertips.
The conflict here comes from a bunch of shit that you and I probably already feel powerless about. Volunteer at all the women’s shelters you want, men still do violence towards women. Send money to the drunk driver who killed your parents because he’s spent his life in prison or addicted but he’s trying to make good and you feel sympathy, but it won’t stop him drinking til his liver explodes. Have you gotten into birding? Some Arizona gun nut is shooting birds—including birds of prey—under cover of night just to leave their corpses lying around. Oh, it’s illegal to kill birds of prey? Fuck you, it’s the Trump Era, laws are only real if you have money, you naïve motherfucker. Millet handles all this with some combination of Aimee Bender’s airy prose and Percival Everett’s blunt frankness. Chapters are like 20 pages long, but sections within the chapters are sometimes as short as one paragraph. The effect is that the prose kinda mimics that disorienting nature of, say, scrolling a social media feed, though that’s not an explicit goal of Millet’s. It’s comfortable, being around Gil and the family next door, and the woman Gil eventually starts dating. It’s not without interpersonal drama—families and lives never are—but there’s this feeling, kinda similar to the movie end of About A Boy, that the best you can do is find your people. Try to do some good where you can, and don’t let it get you down that you can’t save the world. Try to be of use, as the epigraph says.
Will it all ultimately be worth it? Who cares. The real question is: can you afford not to try to be of use?
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? A warm weather jam I’ve been re-introducing to the rotation is lophiile’s The Good Days Between. Put that record on feel at peace. Put that record on and no one can touch you. Here’s “In Some Way,” the only song off that record I can find on YouTube, for some reason.
“The Tugwort” by in Nightmare
Rep. Jim McGovern called for Democrats to focus on climate action, green job creation, expanding healthcare benefits, and lower-priced prescription drugs, according to a Daily Hampshire Gazette article by Erin-Leigh Hoffman. That article doesn’t mention this, but he also proposed a general strike. We know this because A More Perfect Union posted video on Bluesky. On the one hand, it’s super exciting that an elected Dem is talking about a general strike. On the other hand, I am haunted by memories of kente cloth fixing policing. If there’s gonna be a general strike, we need to do it right. We need to make the fascists and the oligarchs hurt.
“They Bought A House” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu in Nightmare
“Most Men Don’t Want To Be Heroes” by Toby Buckle in Liberal Currents
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. As Jesus said, the awful customers will always be amongst you. Stay strong, do what you can.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
quitting drinking makes you feel like you can fuckin FLY. There’s nothing like it. I can’t recommend it enough. There’s also a reason they say not to make any major life decisions in the first year after you get sober, lol.