Elizabeth Minkel

[“Take a short story and carve it on a bullet and just fire it into my skull.”]

I’ve got a new piece up at The Millions: 

George Saunders and the Question of Greatness

It actually began as a little tumblr post—reactions to Saunders’s appearance on Colbert shortly after “Tenth of December” came out in January, and then a reading he gave at Greenlight, and then (finally) attempting to read the book. I was going to post it here, but it kept spinning into something longer, so off it went to The Millions. Here’s the paragraph about Greenlight—I think it encapsulates a lot of the feelings:

It must have been a week or so before that, when my friends and I were huddled in the very back corner of Greenlight Bookstore here in the middle of Brooklyn, just a few feet from the stockroom, so many shelf-lined antechambers away from the man that we may as well have been in a different city, listening to him read a teasing bit of “Escape from Spiderhead” and answer questions over the PA system, and the first one was that old chestnut, where’s the novel we’ve all been waiting for?, and after he said that he lacked the momentum to “accrue pages”—“I think of my stories as kind of like those little toys and you wind ’em up and put it on the floor and it goes under the couch”—the guy beside me let out this soft, disappointed sigh, like he’d just learned exactly why his child had been sent to the principal’s office, or he was watching the scene in a movie where two lovers fated to die come this close to finding each other—but not quite.

The tire blew out somewhere just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge, southbound on I-87. We were in a comically old green minivan, one I’ve never ridden in without receiving some sort of disclaimer about the car being as old as time itself, or, at the very least, as old as its owner’s son—a person just about to graduate from college. A quick visit to said son was the reason for our journey upstate; I was tagging along, happy to for an excuse and the means to get out of New York City on a spring day. Things went well—nearly perfectly—until we felt the car lurching beneath our feet less than an hour from our homes in Brooklyn. We were in the left-middle lane; she could only pull over to the shoulder-less median, hugging the concrete barrier. It was firmly nighttime; the only light came from the steady stream of cars whipping past, shaking the van as they barely swerved around us. Basically, terrifying.

It wasn’t my first breakdown, but for a person that only sits in a non-cab car a few times a year, they seem to be happening with alarming frequency. The first and last, prior to yesterday, had been a whole other terrifying set of circumstances: in a rental car with a friend in rural Wales in mid-December, tired and muddy and damp from a walk during which we were hailed on three times in an hour, when we simultaneously heard and felt the tire pop and she swiftly pulled into the “Gower Heritage Centre,” an entry fee of £5.95 and a collection of animatronic mill workers toiling at looms separating us from the warm tea room. So we spent four hours waiting in the useless car in the rain, occasionally traipsing back inside to borrow a phone and make futile calls, to AA and Enterprise car rentals up and down the length of South Wales. Of course, the sun had fully set by 4:30 p.m. There was a sense, sitting in the darkened car park, watching every other vehicle leave until we were truly alone, that we would be stranded there forever.

Our blowout in the Gower was problematic, too, because it knocked down the starting domino into a long chain of careful travel plans—we spent most of our time in that car trying to figure out how to return the goddamned vehicle to literally any Enterprise location—my friend battled with Cardiff Centre and Cardiff Airport and Swansea, the closest city—before they all closed at 6. Once we were safely delivered to Swansea by a pitying AA man, dropping our wounded car in a Mercedes dealership car park with a “note on the dash,” we talked our way onto the next train to London, the last leaving that day—ours had long-since departed. Perhaps it was the painfully late arrival that night the led us to a frantic dash down the Old Brompton Road the next morning, missing the bus to the airport by five minutes at most, but by then it must have been sheer bad luck when our cab was ensnarled in standstill traffic on the M23, the legacy of a fatal pileup. We made it to the check-in counters at Gatwick—we were flying to Amman—with seconds to spare.

The sheer danger of our precarious position last night cast this incident, my second and last breakdown, in a different light. ‘Should I call 911?’ I asked her as she called AAA; at first, I felt skeptical, and then, as the weight of the situation set in and adrenaline ramped up, I knew I had to. I’ve never done it before. The second I got on the line, I turned into a nervous wreck, like I had to convince him that this was worth his time, an event just short of witnessing a murder. But he took it in stride, patching me to the Thruway Authority in seconds. It took them 15 minutes to find us—they kept asking for mile markers, impossible to read from the far left edge of a four-lane highway—but when they did, it was the state, not AAA, barricading us with a bright, hulking vehicle, jacking the car and replacing the tire with astounding efficiency. ‘Be careful!’ my friend shouted as one of them walked along the right-hand-side of the car. He brushed her off with a kind of wry seriousness. All in a day’s work.

The temporary tire gave out just before the exit for Hunt’s Point, in the South Bronx. I said there was no way we were pulling over, not unless the car physically would not move, and my friend soldiered on with remarkable skill, flashers blinking all along the BQE, as drivers careened around us with angry honks. Stepping out of the car and onto Court Street was like dry land after being caught in a hurricane at sea; I walked back to my house unsteadily, each step forward a little jolt of surprise, at the solidity beneath my feet.

Now, a day later, the high has faded, and it all feels a little silly, or maybe the right word is ‘ridiculous’, but that’s not far from the truth. While we were waiting there, sitting ducks, holding our breath for the car that would cut just too close, that would swipe the side of the van, that would ram us from behind at 75 mph, full impact, my friend had announced that after all of this, the car was history. Back on the road, temporary tire chugging along, she was singing the van’s praises. ‘That was all for your benefit,’ she informed me. I made her promise to stick to the quiet streets of Brooklyn from now on.

millionsmillions:

Good morning, Tumblr. Nice to you see you here.

If you’re reading this, it means you’re either awake and on Tumblr at 6 a.m. EST, or you’ve just clicked into The Millions’s new series tab: #TumblrIndex. Going forward, this series will occasionally highlight lists of 4-5 Tumblr pages worth following. In the past, we’ve organized three gigantic, humongous, tremendous monster lists to get literary and artistic folks up to speed on the Tumblr community. But now, with the Tumblr Index series, we’ll be able to keep readers clued into new developments in this community as they happen, and we’ll be able to better explain what it is about each blog that we really enjoy.

Hope to see you around in the future!

Take note!

(and let us acknowledge that I was not awake at 6 a.m. EST)

Over at The Millions today, I’m one of six staff writers who contributed to a piece called “I Read About It: Music, Food, Poetry, and Lifestyle Suggestions We’ve Taken from Literature,” in which Janet Potter asked us: “What works of art have you been introduced to by other works of art?” I’m deeply susceptible to certain references in books—the most notable trigger these days is people drinking tea, or more often, people making tea, like to the point where I find myself suddenly hovering over the kettle with no knowledge of travelling into the kitchen. There are more dangerous habits, I suppose.

My blurb here, though, is a little twisty: in my freshman year of college, obsessed with jazz, I bought a book about it, Geoff Dyer’s “But Beautiful,” and by the time I’d finished with it, I’d all but given up the music—I’d turned back to books, wholeheartedly. Geoff Dyer does that to people. It was the Lester Young chapter that did me in. That’s him, up there. Fading away.

[image source]

I have feelings about this VIDA awfulness, how the 2012 stats are out and the pie charts look worse than ever but, well (I am calling the pie charts awful, not VIDA. They seem solid). It’s a shitty and complicated situation. Better things than that could be/should be/have been said about it. But I was looking through a thread on Facebook about this and gender/byline iniquities a few days ago and someone linked to this writing “gender guesser”, where you paste in your text and it guesses the gender of the writer. I just finished a short story; I was curious. The site says something like “make sure you put in at least 300 words for more accurate results” so I pasted the entirety of my 9,000-word story into the box. Behold, the results.

It’s nice to be misleading/confusing but maybe this is also just right. “Informal” means blogs and chat logs and “formal” means fiction and nonfiction, and about 98% of this story is dialogue between a man and a woman. A British man and a British woman. (!) “Weak emphasis could indicate European.” I thought I was being insulted but maybe they’re telling me I did it correctly.

Right now I’m reading “Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain” by Robert Winder. It’s the sort of book I often absently pick up because I like the subject and then never read because, hey, 500 dense pages of nonfiction on the subway: not appealing. But I’m glad I started with this one, because it’s wonderful, brisk and funny but still managing a great deal of depth. 

I mention it here because Winder mostly sticks to movements of people, by which I mean group migrations, large and small. But sometimes I think he can’t help himself, and finds a single immigrant who’s just so fucking awesome that he or she gets a whole paragraph. So here, in the mid-eighteenth century, I give you: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont, portrait above:

The licence to be dandyish attracted one of the century’s oddest immigrants: Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée D’Eon de Beaumont. The unusual mixture of masculine and feminine names was neither an accident nor a sentimental whim: the child, born in Burgundy in 1728, was of uncertain sex. In a bizarre compromise he was baptised as a boy, dressed as a girl and dedicated to the Virgin Mary as both. From the age of seven he/she was educated as a boy, eventually graduating as a doctor of law. A use was then found for the ambiguity of her/his appearance; she was sent to St Petersburg on a secret mission to the Empress Elizabeth disguised as a woman. When he returned to France, it was as a captain of dragoons. He came to London in 1762, where he lived lavishly and in public as a man. Challenged by the Count de Guerchy to prove that he was not a woman in man’s clothing, he refused to satisfy the curiosity of the authorities. The public, too, was anxious to know the truth, and there was heavy gambling on the subject. In 1774 the case was resolved against him, and he was ordered to wear women’s clothing. A subsequent case was brought by an incensed (and out-of-pocket) gambler. Again the jury decided that Beaumont was a woman. She cut quite a dash, no doubt, in her ringlets and perfume, though she had not forsworn macho adventures: in 1787 she fought a duel, with swords, in her women’s costume. This earned her some useful celebrity, and for a while afterwards she gave fencing lessons. In 1796 she was wounded and retired, but she survived until 1810. She had spent the last thirty-six years of her life as a woman, so it was something of a shock when it was discovered, on her death, that she had been a man all along. The examining doctor admitted that her throat was ‘by no means masculine’ and that her breast was ‘remarkably full’, but there was no mistaking the more obvious evidence: ‘The male organ’, he said, was ‘in every respect perfectly formed’. He was buried in St Pancras. He had been painted twice: once in a dress, once in military uniform. In 1868 his gravestone was lost during the construction of a railway line out of north London.

[image source]