Spotlight on … Diane Williams Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (2012)

 

‘Diane Williams’ collection of stories, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, is a slender volume, whose small width, girth, and abundant white space would lure even the most timid reader. Weary of long-term commitments? By all appearances, Williams’s book beckons and says enter. Come sit with stories that begin halfway down the page and run over to the next, and seldom stretch beyond that. The author greets the reader before the stories begin, not with a quote to demonstrate erudition, but rather with a signal that all’s clear: “Perfectly safe; go ahead.”

‘This is the first hint that something is off kilter. If you abide by the tropes of American horror film, this is the cue to shut the cover and run for the hills. But, of course, from a reader’s perspective, the implication that things may get hairy only heightens the intrigue. Williams’ book, like her stories, aren’t obvious. Had she written, “Danger ahead!” her point would be overstated. Instead we’re given the hint that we’re entering territory where the ground might unexpectedly shift, where anything might occur.

‘Williams’ stories are sly little creatures who thrive in domestic settings; they are fixated on food, fucks, illness, and death, and the peculiarities of social interaction. The characters who inhabit these stories often appear curiously, media res. Introductions include a woman admitting she’s fallen in love with her neighbor, a mother accusing her daughter of thinking herself a do-gooder, a crestfallen man searching for a better belt buckle, a woman seeking the services of a man with a habit of sharpening knives. And while these acts sound fairly insignificant when rattled off like this in a list, in Williams’ stories the significance of each action is anchored and amplified. That neighbor? Neither woman can get his penis to do anything. “Do-gooder” becomes a slur in the mother’s mouth. The man who sharpens knives? Despite his humility (about the superior state of his lawn), and his kindness (leaving Band-aids with the knives he services), he dies. With these contortions, Williams reveals the essential strangeness in the the everyday.

‘Getting one’s nails done or running into a recently divorced acquaintance at the grocery store provide windows that open to a larger world of human desire, disappointment, and misunderstanding. The recent divorcee is recognized with delay — “They had been the Crossticks!” — the narrator suddenly realizes, as if she’d know him in an instant, if he were with his wife. The encounters are estranged from their everyday backdrops, and this perspective sears through habituation. It’s a wake-up call to the way we accrue so many details that blunt our recognition of the peculiarities of existence. In life we often hit cruise control to make sure we arrive at to our next destination. This might make us more functional human beings, but it also dulls our perception.

‘We can’t escape eccentricity, but we can become habituated to it, which is one of Michael Martone’s points in his introductory essay to Not Normal, Illinois, a collection edited by Martone that features stories written by native midwesterners, including Rikki Ducornet, Laird Hunt, Ander Monson, Deb Olin Unferth, Steve Tomasula, and Diane Williams. How bizarre that the state of Illinois, and specifically a city named Normal, home to Illinois State University, has been such a hotbed of experimental and avant-garde fiction. Both The Dalkey Archive and FC2 presses have at some point called Normal home. David Foster Wallace taught at Illinois State, and former FC2 managing director Curtis White still does. Is this merely happenstance? Martone says no, and pinpoints this prolific outpouring as a distinctly regional reaction to the “normalcy” of midwestern culture. He states, “The midwesterners have been normal for so long that it seems normal that they are this way, and the details of normalcy, the construction of what is normal, becomes so, well, normal as to be a cunning transparent disguise. These stories are designed, then, to defamiliarize us to us. By design, they are made to make you see, really see, the things you take for granted all the time for the very first time again.”

‘Diane Williams is definitely an author who, as a good Russian Formalist might say, defamiliarizes. Her stories are distorted mirrors of domesticity, not because they skew the world but because they provide a magnified lens through which we can see what’s always been present but generally escapes notice. This happens quite literally, in the story “This Has to Be the Best.” The narrator goes to a sex shop, greets a familiar saleswoman, but the saleswoman exclaims, “I have never seen you before in my life!” The narrator dismisses this lack of recognition as a result of poor lighting. Does she truly not look herself? Does the saleswoman suffer from prosopagnosia? Is there some ulterior motive? We’re left to wonder. And yet, we’ve all been on one side of this kind of interaction, either failing to remember a face, or encountering an acquaintance who has no recollection of meeting us before.

‘Williams is also masterful at orchestrating exquisite contrasts, such as in the story “Glee.” If one forgets for a moment the popular television show, the title conjures good feeling, and begins: “We have a drink of coffee and a Danish and it has this, what we call — grandmother cough-up — a bright yellow filling. The project is to resurrect glee. This is the explicit reason I get on a bus and go to an area where I do this and have a black coffee.” It’s not joy, but glee that the narrator has lost and seeks to recapture, by way of coffee and a danish with custard like cough-up and conversation with this friend. Williams strings words in a way that thrills the ear. The syntactic play within the sentences shouldn’t be underestimated in providing their own form of readerly delight. Here the sentence riffs on the repetition of the hard “e” combined with the resonance of coffee and cough-up. And yet disgust is served alongside this happiness, a joyful meeting over grandmother’s cough-up?

‘Such specificity brings forth abstracted feelings. When the narrator in “Glee” later turns on the television, and watches a show where a suitor proposes marriage and is turned down, the narrator thinks, “when something momentous occurs, I am glad to say there is a sense of crisis.” The sense of catharsis received from watching someone else’s staged tragedy heightens a sense that something of significance is occurring even if this isn’t the case, and Williams captures this sentiment oh so succinctly. As readers we are twice removed, making this a meta-commentary on the role that stories play in our own lives.

‘Throughout Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, there’s a pervasive fear of disappearance and self-ablation; a character fears being forgotten, a daughter and husband disappear, and yet another character cancels her own appearance. We exit, however, with an awareness of Williams’ authorial wand waving over the dark linguistic matter as she acts as the conduit through which these words and images appear: “The star! The cross! The Square! A single sign shows the tendency. Can people avoid disaster? Yes. I leave my readers to draw their own conclusions.” Williams’ endings often leave the reader with more questions than conclusions, and yet it’s this openness that allows her stories to inhabit dimensions of experience far vaster than their petite packaging would suggest. Even without the cameo appearances by the character “Diane Williams,” it’s unlikely that anyone who’s attempted to tease apart a handful of Williams’ stories will forget her linguistic precision, the ways she whittles sentences into solid gems, or her wonderfully strange way of seeing.’ — Anne K. Yoder, The Millions

 

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Further

Diane Williams @ goodreads
Book Notes – Diane Williams – “Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty” @ largehearted boy
How to read Vicky Swanky: A Baffled Person’s Guide to Diane Williams
A Dreamy Look: A Review of Diane Williams’s Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty
Queen of the Liminal
Five Very Short Stories by Diane Williams
Three Stories by Diane Williams
“BANG BANG ON THE STAIR”
Diane Williams interviewed @ Dalkey Archive
Misunderstandings in miniature
“Beauty, Love and Vanity Itself”
Now Find a Free Mind: A Brief Interview with Diane Williams
BEST BOOK OF 1921: THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON, by Diane Williams
WITCHCRAFT TODAY, by Diane Williams
THE BEAUTY AND THE BAT, by Diane Williams
The L Mag Questionnaire for Writer Types: Diane Williams
COMMON STRANGE
A fine look at love by Diane Williams
Pathos: Diane Williams
Buy ‘Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty’

 

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Extras

Diane Williams @ Franklin Park Reading Series

Celebrating NOON’s 15th anniversary

 

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Interview

 

THE WHITE REVIEW — How do you strike a balance between capturing the freedom of the spoken sentence while honing the craft of writing a sentence?

DIANE WILLIAMS — Often the spoken sentence is filled with remarkable poetry. This is especially the case if the speaker is passionate about her subject. One is lucky to have access to a trove of voices – to listen in to oneself and to others during these inspired moments and to remember! More often, I must manufacture text. And that is the task of being a writer – composition.

THE WHITE REVIEW — This intimacy between the words in the sentences you create is most definitely present, but your characters’ pursuit of intimacy is persistently challenged and subverted. What does intimacy mean to you?

DIANE WILLIAMS — The pursuit of intimacy is relatively hopeless in life and is also dangerous. But, I think in literature, as in all art, there is the opportunity to be deeply in life. I am always dreaming of the ideal fiction. In this free realm any subject can be addressed. Shame must not intrude.

THE WHITE REVIEW — Many of your characters feel as though they can’t necessarily fully express themselves, alienated in these domestic settings that you put them in.

DIANE WILLIAMS — You’re right, it’s exhausting to mask and to mute ourselves.

THE WHITE REVIEW — Most of your stories are based in domestic locations – what’s so attractive about such a setting?

DIANE WILLIAMS — I am usually in a domestic setting – sitting here doing my work. I should get out more. It’s also my own insufficiency; I’m not good with maps or finding my way around. I guess I reside in my mind most of the time – it’s just my temperament.

THE WHITE REVIEW — There is a line from a story in SOME SEXUAL SUCCESS STORIES – ‘This is when Nature itself has been stripped bare of its cosy personality and we all feel homeless in our own natures as well.’ I think this accurately summarises one of the prevailing aspects of your stories: despite most of the action being set in domestic spaces most of the time, your subjects never feel quite ‘at home’.

DIANE WILLIAMS — I don’t think I’d be happy if I were clear about everything that ends up on the page. I’d like to get beyond what I know as far as I can. I have a sentimental idea of home – it’s friendly and familiar. In my fiction I like to provide some mystery, a place to meditate, where I might be nearing a new insight, if in fact I haven’t reached it.

THE WHITE REVIEW — Infidelity is a recurring theme in your stories – particularly in the novella ON SEXUAL STRENGTH – and I find it interesting that in ‘Adultery’, Laura Kipnis says, ‘It means imagining – as adulterers so often do – that you can do it differently, that you can engineer through sheer will, a different moral and affective universe.’

DIANE WILLIAMS — Infidelity has been an inescapable subject for me. The fantasy of security is difficult to relinquish, as are the notions of invincibility and recklessness.

THE WHITE REVIEW — The physical movements, positioning and intricacies of the culturally and morally assumed ‘private parts’ of the body are frequently explored in your stories – bowel movements, vaginas that can talk, dogs wearing condoms, penises that women wish were in them all of the time. What draws you to these details?

DIANE WILLIAMS — I write about what I can’t speak about.

THE WHITE REVIEW — There is a recurring fluidity between objects and subjects in your stories that I am very interested in – husbands going through the laundry to find their wives, children needing to be chopped down like branches from a tree and clouds being full of pride. How do you view these relationships in your stories?

DIANE WILLIAMS — You’re right, there is blurring. I remember very early in life going forward toward a chair like this easy chair (she pats the chair she is sitting on), putting my face into it, and embracing it, and getting the kind of consolation that a person might expect in a parent’s embrace – my chair, my mother. The confusion prevails in our speech, too – I have to get my coffee. I want my mother. People and things are being scrambled. My mind’s quite messy.

THE WHITE REVIEW — In some of your stories you also turn to dogs and animals, the best example being the stories ‘The Dog’, followed by ‘The Man’. What kind of role do animals play in your stories?

DIANE WILLIAMS — Well, I may not know too much about that. I like those two stories you cite very much, and have often read the pair of them publicly. I did have a dear pet when I was girl… I admired him so much – his out-sized zest and craziness that I didn’t see advanced by anyone else.

THE WHITE REVIEW — Does consumer culture have an influence on how you present the subject to the reader?

DIANE WILLIAMS — Yes, but I wouldn’t want to imply that the influence is entirely negative. Objects can save us. I might need a certain trinket, for instance, and it may save me for a day, a month… Objects obviously have power.

THE WHITE REVIEW — How do you feel about this sense of ‘zooming out’, this acknowledgement of the bigger picture, the world outside the characters’ window? How important is it to you to create a sense of elsewhere?

DIANE WILLIAMS — I’d like to go back and forth in time and place and thought – to change perspectives, but, nonetheless, maintain coherence. I try.

THE WHITE REVIEW — Use of the negative also creates the sense of a bigger picture. By listing aspects that are not present the reader is forced to imagine these aspects existing elsewhere – just not where we are right now. Would you say that a presence of absence is integral to your stories?

DIANE WILLIAMS — This is and was a tactic of mine, to refute or to undo the given. Let’s just see what this is like.

THE WHITE REVIEW — Where does your fascination with language, particularly rhyme, stem from and what do you think it achieves?

DIANE WILLIAMS — What it achieves? It’s pleasurable. It’s human nature, I think, to enjoy echoes and refrains.

THE WHITE REVIEW — You often use idiomatic phrasing in your stories, for example, ‘for all intents and purposes’, ‘I’m going to give credit where credit is due’, ‘I lay no claim’. Can you tell me a little more about this fascination with habitual language?

DIANE WILLIAMS — Ah, clichés. I try to be vigilant, to police for these. I hope there’s a fresh context, when they invade. On the other hand such phrases as ‘let me tell you’ and ‘at any rate’ and ‘at length she’… I love these. While moving along new terrain, it’s nice to have comforting pauses along the way and to hear a kind voice – ‘Don’t worry. I think you’ve been here before. You’ll be able to manage.’

THE WHITE REVIEW — How important is it for you to make yourself known as the writer in your stories?

DIANE WILLIAMS — If I introduce my own name, this raises the stakes for me, causes a shudder. It’s frightening. Fright can be very productive. I work harder.

THE WHITE REVIEW — For a more experimental writer such as yourself, how do you find the current literary climate in America?

DIANE WILLIAMS — Marketers, sadly, need categories. I never use the term ‘experimental.’ I hate it. Literary art needs a more substantial welcome and protection in contemporary America. I founded the fiction annual NOON in 2000 to support serious writers. NOON is now flourishing and I am delighted.

 

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Book

Diane Williams Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty
McSweeneys

‘In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams’s unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman’s sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire—are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence.

‘These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling—the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams’ position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.’ — McSweeneys

 

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Excerpts

THE DUCK

It was too early to fuck. This is such a disappointment, so I drank the milk. I finished the milk quickly, and then took a low dosage of the tea—tipping tea out of pot. I lit a lamp, shoved my lips up, nearly blushed in the company of myself.

With this sort of blow to my existence I thought of an unrealistic plan of such charm and such honesty—if you don’t mind my saying so, as it were.

If you will, I am very unpleasant, frankly. Delmore and Constantine know how unpleasant I am. End my ways? Is it change my ways?

Pretty serious balloons were on the floor and stuck behind the divan and through the window I saw a belt of trees.

I readied the table to take it back up the stairs. I normally display figurines on it—a bear holding a staff; a man holding a house; a man holding a house standing on another man he’s vanquished—you know, how birds sit on each other.

Constantine—one of the finest men I’ll ever know—walked in my direction like a duck who’s wrung himself out. My recommendation to the duck would have been—don’t fly alone and why fly so high. Do the other ducks know you’re out here on your own? Do you even know where the other fucks are? Are you looking for the other fucks?

Constantine told me he wanted to repay me for my loving care.

 

BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND 6 AM

Women were not a major ingredient in my thinking at that time.

She was blonde, very small, and if I remember right she had big breasts. Uh, Arthur was sleeping on a couch in the living room so I can imagine there was traipsing going on. Mother had her bedroom next to the kitchen. The girl had to go through the apartment in order to get to the bathroom.
I spent the night on the stairs, not dozing off.

She was a bankrupt.

As for me, I could have put more into this. Mother wants her sons to get ahead.

It must have been very soon after that that Mother said, “Ohhhh, Ka-a-a-a-a-y!”

We loved Kay better than we loved our mother. But by glancing back, as I approach middle age, the scale of things quite slowly, calmly, becomes a peep-show.

And everybody had to share. And there was a sliding glass door into the breakfast nook—so there was a curtain over it.

I met with some success. I took a job as a chemical mix-man—to store, order, and prepare wet and dry chemicals.

O Kay!

I’m only warming up. Most of my work is routine labor. There’s an element of physical danger. It is not easy to have this job. I’m not the outdoors type.

Today I got the temperature level too high in the chemical levels in the glass plate processing room and had to get buckets of ice.
Sometimes I’m over a barrel—my wife and I agree.

To get anywhere in my life at this time!—rather, to get anywhere near my wife at this time!—that can take days. I have to go through the kitchen, the laundry—I have to go through hell! Not entirely true.

I ate by myself.

I went to our bedroom with a glass of water for her in the hopes of hearing her cheery cry.

She’s so warm—she’s kind and she’ll likely say, “Hi!”

Her hands were folded behind her head. She whispered, modestly.

This will pep me up.

From all outward appearances, there was substantial risk for lack of concentration, overenthusiastic response, unrealistic desires, emotional craving, weak discipline, pettiness, a tendency to show off, and temporary stops to take a breath.

 

RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR

“You think you are a do-gooder,” Mother said, “don’t you? You’re a do-gooder.”

After a minute, no more, a newcomer looked toward me, a toddler with her mother, I’d bet.

“These type of people,” Mother said.

“See that large bird?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Mother said.

The toddler acted as if she knew me.

It’s so interesting when a little person is so clearly distinguished. I can tell—by the superciliary arches above her eyes, the ultra-tiny hands. I regard this visitant as unreal.

 

THE NEWLY MADE SUPPER

The guest’s only wish is to see anyone who looks like Betsy, to put his hands around this Betsy’s waist, on her breasts. He’s just lost a Betsy. He followed Betsy.

In front of Betsy, who supports on her knees her dinner dish, you can see the guest approach.

“You got your supper?” he says, “Betsy?”

And Betsy says, “Who’s that in the purple shirt?”

“That’s not purple. You say purple?” says the guest.

“What color would you say that is?” says Betsy.

“That’s magenta.”

“I have to look that up. Magenta!” says Betsy.

“That’s magenta,” says the guest.

“That’s lavender,” says another woman who’s a better Betsy.

 

A MAN, AN ANIMAL

At the cinema I watched closely the camels, the horses, the young actor taking his stance for the sexual act.

He started up with a pretty girl we had a general view of.

I felt the girl’s pallor stick into me.

Another girl, in pink swirls alternating with yellow swirls, intruded.

The girls were like the women who will one day have to have round-the-clock duty at weddings, at birthdays, at days for the feasts.

Unaccountably, I hesitated on the last step of the cinema’s escalator when we were on our way out, and several persons bumped into me.

An ugly day today—I didn’t mention that, with fifty mile per hour winds.

But here is one of the more fortunate facts: We were Mr. and Mrs. Gray heading home.

It has been said—the doors of a house should always swing into a room. They should open easily to give the impression to those entering that everything experienced inside will be just as easy.

A servant girl was whipping something up when we arrived, and she carried around the bowl with her head bowed.

We’ve been told not to grab at breasts.

Before leaving for Indiana in the morning—where I had to clean up arrangements for a convention—I stood near my wife to hear her speak. So, who is she and what can I expect further from her?

What she did, what she said in the next days, weeks and years, addresses the questions Americans are insistently, even obsessively asking—but what sorts of pains in the neck have I got?

Please forgive our confusion and our failures. We make our petitions—say our prayers. It’s like our falling against a wall, in a sense.

On a recent day, my wife gave me a new scarf to wear as a present. It’s chrome green. Her mother Della, on that same day, had helped her to adjust to her hatred of me.

I’d have to say, I’ve given my wife a few very pleasant shocks, too.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Steevee, Hi. Thank you about the apartment thing. Me too, Jesus. I definitely need to get rid of the snowballing stress and time consuming home hunt asap. Nice about the potential cinematographer. Do you know and like her work? Excellent about Chris! Fingers crossed, man. Huh, ‘Rock and Rule’. There’s a movie about to open here called ‘Rock and Roll’, but I think it’s something else unless Johnny Holliday has a huge part in the one you’re talking about. I’ll look for the ‘Rule one. If Robin Zander’s in it, that’s a draw for me. No, I don’t know that Disney book, but, yes, you’re right about it seeming to exist within my alley. I’ll investigate. Thanks very much for the tip. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick. Great, thank you so much! If you have any questions or anything in the meantime, obviously just ask. Thanks a lot about the GIF work. I appreciate it! ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, thank you! ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. Oh, man, you’re in Japan! Envy city. Why are you in Kyoto in particular? Such a lovely city. ‘The Ventriloquists Convention’ is playing in Kyoto and Tokyo in May, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to go, but I fear Zac and I will be headlong into editing our film at that time. Enjoy everything! ** H, Hi, h. Oh, thank you very much! Yes, the apartment search continues ever more frantically. I’m looking at a yet another place this morning. I do like Julien Grace, yes. Funny, Jeff Jackson and I talked about him just the other day as he’s about to start a Gracq novel, I can’t remember which one. I’ve been in the mood to read another book by him lately. Interesting. I find Virginie Despentes’ work interesting, yes. I know her writing better than I know her films. I wasn’t crazy about the film ‘Baise-moi’, but I liked the novel pretty well. I think the only other film by her I’ve seen is ‘Mutantes (Féminisme Porno Punk)’, which I remember being sort of impressed by. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! Thanks about the the gif work, pal! The actor we want to play Tim wants to do it, but he’s not sure if he can spare the time away from school. We’re meeting with our producer today to try to begin to figure out the exact shooting schedule so we can figure out exctly how long we would need Tim to be there. He would be one of the main characters, so he would need to be there a while. I hope we can make it work. We really want him to play the part. Like I think I said, we wrote the part for him. Organizing the shoot is very complicated, yes, wow. Yay, so exciting about the the ease and force of your writing on the future book! That’s like the best feeling ever. I guess it’s not a big surprise that the first meeting felt like a shaky preface. It’s natural. All of the participants’ pleasure with how it went is why it will grow productively. Cool! My weekend was okay. A bunch of work and progress on the film with Zac. We have auditions and a meeting with the producer today. And I used the weekend to do a bit of chilling, which I need. Had a great Skype with my old friend Lee whom I reconnected with recently, and talked a bunch with my writer/artist/model friend John who’s staying at my LA apartment off and on. There’s a scene in Zac’s and my film were one of the characters comes across one of those spontaneous shrines people build on the street at the spot where someone died, and John is going to ‘play’ the young guy who’s being memorialized, so we were figuring out that too. Good enough weekend. I hope Monday continues your current streak of excellent days. Did it, and how? ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks Ben. Really nice and interesting of you to say. I had to make a pointed decision about whether to keep ET out of my trailer or not, and I went for no ET. I think a good idea. Too loaded. I love your young drawing of ET. Awesome! ** New Juche, Hi, Joe. Thanks about the gif work, and ha ha. Oh, well, then I sure wish I could see your talk(s). Super interesting. I loved ‘Cemetery of Splendour’ a lot. I’m a big fan of his work. Kiddiepunk is in the early stages of doing a book with him, which is obviouskly very exciting. Postal address: If you can send it straight away, my current address will work. It’s Dennis Cooper, 32 rue St. Antoine, #8, 75004, Paris, France. Thank you, man! ** Jon Reiss, Hey, Jon! How great to see you! Very interesting. Yeah, the Gosch story/thing is fascinating. I did a post about that here ages ago that I should restore. I’m really looking forward to your book! That’s really exciting! I hope everything is great with you! Hugs from Paris. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Thanks, man. I think you’re right about that one gif, cool. Glad you’re better, duh. Wow about the tornado! That’s crazy! I’m going to see if there are any videos or anything. Obviously very happy that Mother Nature avoided you. ** MANCY, Hi, Steven! Oh, thank you so much for saying that. Honestly I was thinking about that way in which they formed a whole, or going for that kind of connectiveness, so that’s really heartening and reassuring to hear. I think it’s true that as I become more comfortable with the exacting kind of construction that the gif works require, and more playful as a result, they more clearly connect with my written fiction, so, again, I’m so happy you saw that. You made my day, my friend! How are you? What’s going on? ** James Nulick, Hi, James. That’s funny, I was just talking kind of about what you’re saying about the advancing in the gif works with MANCY. Yes, I think you’re right, and I’m very happy that you saw that. Cool. Thank you! Christ, man, you are in a rough patch with death. What an amazing and emotionally rich/intense story about your friend. At least you have your amazing abilities as a scribe to process and make terrible beauty of the situation. I’m so sorry. Thank you for sharing that, James. It went so incredibly not to waste. Love, me. ** Bernard, Ha, thank you. I agree with you 100% about recent ‘serious’ sci-fi. I haven’t seen ‘Arrival’ yet, but I thought ‘The Martian’ and ‘Interstellar’, for instance, were utterly gruesome. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Thanks, man. 800 pages of almost anything is too much of almost anything. ‘The Brothers Karamazov’! Well, if nothing else, you’ll be reading a fuck of an excellent writer working his magic. At least there’s that, even if you don’t finish the trek. Thanks too about the apartment stuff. It’s kind of dire, but it has to work out because there’s literally no other choice. ** Right. I focused on the wonderful Diane Williams today, and I hope you find stuff of pleasureable use therein. See you tomorrow.