Botheration! Middle-Aged Little Function

Not to sound belitting, but The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy is an interesting artifact. I mean, it is from like three centuries ago (1888), and a lot of old stuff is of an era, whatever era, and isn't really destined to be timeless, so . . . I don't feel bad about it.

It revolves around four young women who lose everything when their father dies and choose to make a go of it by starting a photography business, which is this crazy new technology in Victorian England. They soon find success. Things are good. It reads like a Nora Roberts book (or at least the one we read for book club, which was about four plucky young women who start a business [arch eyebrows] . . . hey, wait . . .). Then there are ups and downs and tragedies and life happens. But I guess the point is that they find a middle ground between on the one hand, independence and financial and professional respect and then on the other hand, finding a husband.

Set in Victorian England, it's amazing how "Victorian" it comes off. You're always waiting for some glimpse of a particular era that surprises you or confounds your expectations and in this case it just never comes. I'm feeling faint! Pass the smelling salts! That kind of thing.

Some of my favorite lines included these:

"I say, Gerty, all this is delightfully unchaperoned, isn't it?" [Phyllis the libertine to uptight Gertrude; next line "'Phyllis, how can you?' cried Gertrude, vexed."]

"We all know," remarked Lucy, with a twinkle in her eye, "that it is best to begin with a little aversion!" [Uh, no means no?]

"I particularly detest that sort of eye; prominent, with heavy lids, and those little puff-bags underneath." [In retrospect, this seems like a sort of foreshadowing, but it struck me at the time.]

"Botheration!" [A great word I had to look up. It's what it seems like it should be: the noun form of bother, but mostly used as an interjection. I wondered whether the noun form of bother — as in "it's not a bother to look up stupid shit online" — is a (relatively) recent thing (see here for lingo-y examples).]

"Gertrude worked like a slave that day, which, fortunately for her state of mind, turned out an unusually busy one." [I don't think you need to be particularly woke to cringe when you read "work like a slave"; there was still a lot of actual slavery going on around the world in 1888.]

"'What is this a little bird tells me, Lucy?' she cried archly, for Mrs. Pratt shared the liking of her sex for matters matrimonial." ["The liking of her sex for matters matrimonial" — makes you want to scream "ACK!"]

"It was a sober, middle-aged little function enough, and everyone was glad when it was over." [At some point it seems like Victorian era is mostly just Maggie Smith's lines on Downton Abbey.]

"Edward Marsh suffered the usual insignificance of bridegrooms; but did all that was demanded of him with exactness." [Just bridegrooms. Some things never change.]

"He had taken her in his arms, without explanation or apology, holding her to his breast as one holds a tired child." [This is when Lord Watergate snags Gertrude at the end of the book — kind of a odd scene where you're not too clear how self-aware the writing is supposed to be: is the author showing him being weirdly paternalistic (or appropriately weirdly paternalistic for the time, or remarking on the weird paternalistic, uh, paternalism of the time) or is she expressing what all people thought? It's the problem with parachuting into a text like this . . .]

[Also, I don't know why the brackets.]

Messed Around And Nearly Got A Triple Double

We read this meta-meta book for book club called Woman With a Blue Pencil by Gordon McAlpine. It's meta noir-mystery, which is interesting and whatnot: this takes place during WWII when the narrative for Japanese-Americans on the West Coast became something a lot different. McAlpine constructs this world where a Japanese-American writer submits a manuscript to a mystery editor in the days before Pearl Harbor and then the editor has to be, like, Oh, the market has changed somewhat in the days before you submitted the text. And then she has to encourage the writer to change his book from a complicated Japanese-American character to a cartoon-like Korean-
American superhero who saves days.

The conceit of Pencil is that when the author changes the story accordingly, the stranded characters are preserved in drafts and you see how, Back to the Future style, one flick of the pencil erases the identity of a character. The conceit is OK, but then they have to end it somehow, and the ending is basically OK, but whatever.

The problem is that Pencil is sort of too clever by half; the idea is inspired but there's not a lot to it beyond that. Sure, there's the twist at the end (sort of spoiler?) when the missing character resurfaces in the narrative, but at 189 pages, the book is — literally — a little thin, which is weird when the (IRL) author jumps between three separate narrative lines: a textual original story featuring the Korean-American hero, a scrapped first draft using the Japanese-American character and then a third commentary from an outside editor, the story's namesake.

Ultimately, Woman is not not cute and inspired but it's not that much more than that, either. Go figure.

And What If The Subway Turns Out To Be So Public Conveyance Not Really Worthy Of Our Mental Space

There's this collection of essays called The Subway Chronicles which includes writings by some relatively notable people and then some up-and-coming writers, or at least writers who were maybe up-and-coming around 2006, which is ten years ago now.

So the thing about the subway is while it's crazy and cool and moves a lot of people places and used to have really amazing graffiti and is one of the biggest systems in the world, it's maybe not at that interesting, in and of itself. At least, that's what you kind of walk away with after reading Chronicles.