Encounters with books

I found a thread with the OP (Original Post):
Philosophers that grounded your thinking

A timelog on the posts indicated the thread had been running for 3 hours and 35 minutes. (A thread is the original posts + the sequence of responses to it.) The responses were generally short and to the point. The names mentioned were:

Descartes
100% Skeptic
Dugin
Thomas Hobbes
Cesare Beccaria
The Lord Jesus Christ
The Bogdanovs
Yuudkowsky
Ligotti
Mishima
Gnosticism
Stirner
Nietzsche
Charles Darwin
St. Benedict von Nurcia
José Ortega y Gasset.
Montaigne
Calvin (image of portrait posted, but not named)
and the comment “The real irony is to have your entire life work ridiculed and associated with a certain particular comment, made by someone using your portrait as an avatar on a porn site, three centuries and a half after your death.”

This thread appeared in amongst the vilest cesspit-level racist and misogynistic threads before it and after it. It’s impossible to know to what extent an individual poster believes in the material he/she posts. It’s equally impossible to know if the responders to the philosophical thread are the same people posting in the other threads.

But judging by the names so casually dropped, there are a lot of well-read and independent thinkers lurking on these boards. Meanwhile the typical Sunday newspaper essays are declining in quality to become clickbait opinion pieces.
The world is getting stranger.

As the introduction suggests, the Unthology series is excellent at publishing those short stories that do what only short stories can do. There’s an air of exhilaration and daring to these anthologies. The editors have broad-ranging tastes – the intro talks about how they also wanted to finish each book with a ‘naughty step’, an outrageous story that wouldn’t fit comfortably anywhere.
Unthology 7, as I mentioned previously, was the best anthology I had read in a long long time, beating lots of “Best of” anthologies. Number 8 is still growing on me.

It’s a pleasing balance of stories which might be described as realistic in ambition, and those which are not. The latter includes those which play with an idea and even one or two which could be accused of ‘showing off’. But if the story is fun, what’s wrong with that? Is authentic soul-enhancing fiction the only way for fiction to be serious?

Kit Caless’ Not Drowning but Saving is a clever satire on the motivations of humanitarian volunteers. There are not enough disasters happening to give meaning to the lives of all the thousands craving to be needed. They gaze at their TV screens waiting for a newsflash announcing an earthquake or tsunami.
Those suffering from withdrawal join together in a support group …. there are some dark insights into here.

Damon King’s piece is a concise look at that perennial source of argument: to cut the sandwiches in rectangles or triangles. The setting for this deadpan re-enactment is a prison, which gives a hint as to what way the argument might end.

Andre van Loon’s story takes a nicely distance perspective of the two main characters – a young man and woman, who don’t seem to be bothered by any material concerns, encounter a hiccup in their relationship. The reader is left free to regard them as a bit vacuous.

Recent months have been fraught with an atmosphere of anxiety about gender differences. One manifestation of this was a number of Twitter spats about whether men can write from a woman’s perspective and vice-versa. “If women wrote men the way men wrote women” etc. Lots of heat and little light. For better or for worse this was at the back of my mind, and the portrayal of the main male character in Lara Williams struck me as astonishingly perceptive. I keep going back to this story: there’s something enigmatic about it. It’s a fairly simple story about an ordinary (read ‘middle class’) guy who falls in love with a posh sexy girl. The writing is luminous. To give a maybe awkward example: the groom is told his wife is in the bathroom and wants to see him urgently. He goes to the bathroom door.

‘Knock, knock,’ he ventured, tapping at the door

Why doesn’t he just knock? Or call out her name? There’s something annoying about the way he says the words ‘knock knock’. Maybe the reader will begin to understand why his girlfriend says, apparently without reason, Don’t be so fucking pathetic, at different points in the story.
It’s a weird story. I think it’s a brilliant one, but I can’t fathom the author’s aims in writing it.

David Frankel’s story is a fictionalized bio of the artist Edvard Munch. Related in snapshots over the decades, it blurs the lines between biography and fiction. It feels complete and satisfying in itself, though it is an unusual genre: biography in a short story. Here’s to more in the form.

Clare Fisher‘s story is one of my favourites. It’s a day-in-the-life of a young woman who works in Tasty’s Chicken related with an exuberant immediacy and arbitrariness. She can’t help thinking back to moments in her life when she failed to show courage, but also a time as a teenager when she was nicknamed ‘The Guts’ for her legendary fearlessness. And so the title How to Get Back Your Guts.
The hectic pace gives this piece a upbeat feel, and yet it is an authentic depiction of a life stuck in a low-paid job. There’s loneliness, grime, and exploitation – but Tess has faith that getting back her guts will save her.

Lots of good stuff, Victoria Briggs‘ story also impressed me, and I loved Laura Darling‘s 10,000 Tiny Pieces.
Martin Monahan’s The Toasted Cheese Sandwich of Babel reads like a 20th century novel of ideas from Central Europe. The actions spans continents and decades, professors engaged in secret research, the CIA, connections with world leaders, CERN laboratory, crimes of passion. It’s a lot to have in a short story. Sounds like Monahan needs to get a novel going, and I’d be keen to read it.

The opening story is about text bullying among teenage schoolgirls. The title What Rose Did, has an ominous ring. Rose Carney, we soon learn, hung herself from the branch of a tree. The story is related by Tracy, the mother of teenager Leanne. At first Tracy attempts to comfort Leanne, thinking she must be upset by the news. The family’s domestic routines are described, but as in the best horror movies, our perceptions have been subtly shifted and there is no comfort this familiarity.
“Saturday morning the boys were back playing the game Santa had brought them. I was in the utility room, sorting clothes by the washing machine. I could hear them arguing and, when it turned nasty, I found them rolling about on the floor, boxing, grabbing at hair, the game over.”
Harmless roughhousing, part of growing up? Or a hint of the darker side of human nature that cannot be eradicated?

Suspicions begin to grow around the role of the daughter, Leanne. It’s remarkable how depictions of the teenage girl lounging on her bed can seem so eerie. Her father seems to have a better intuition of what might have happened – but what kind of father is it who can so readily suspect his daughter of wishing someone dead? This is murky stuff indeed and the scene where the father tries to wrestle the incriminating mobile phone from Leanne makes for uncomfortable reading.

There’s a tension in many of these stories, a hint of dread. There’s also a lot a lot of soul – many of them have the impact of a ballad: there’s no startling twist but the emotive power catches you by surprise.

Guys and the Way they Might Look at You is about a couple whose marriage has grown cold; the man’s libido is apparently flagging. They remain remarkably civil to each other. They have children at university, yet they seem quite sporty, go to the gym, use the internet, and are in every way ‘modern’ for want of a better word. I liked the portrayal of this couple, who feel familiar to me, and yet they are not pinned to any familiar notions of Irishness as mediated to us. They hook up with a couple from Kerry, who likewise are presented just as themselves, and could be from anywhere.
This story was my favourite in the collection. It had a constant tension and also a hard-to-define atmosphere of unreality. If these people come across as unauthentic (though perhaps only to me), it’s not because they are not out there in the real world, it’s because they have never achieved authenticity in their lives.

In the best of O’Reilly’s stories there is no sense of artifice, the reader doesn’t ever think this is someone making things up. We are faced directly to reality. The writer Philip O’Casey makes an astute observation in his blurb when he says “some of them could be from today’s headlines.” And just as with many a newspaper story, you might well ask yourself “is this what the world’s coming to?”

The title story is another good one, with Irish men on the tear in Amsterdam.

Why didn’t social media tell me O’Reilly was this good?

PS Yes it feels odd to write about O’Reilly