The relationship between the normal and the abnormal is a fruitful theme for comic fiction, because it captures two mutually antagonizing blind spots. The abnormal has no idea that it’s abnormal, and the normal has no idea that it’s bizarre. More often than not, after all, the difference between the normal and the abnormal is a matter of point of view. We all seem “normal” to ourselves, because we are the fixed points in our own daily lives. The people who strike us as the most surreally eccentric will see themselves, more often than not, as completely ordinary—and more than that, they will tend (but how dare they!) to see us as the really strange ones.
The novelist Charles Portis, who died in February at the age of 86, was one of the great American chroniclers of the 20th-century bizarre, but what makes his books so funny and wise is that his “normals” are every bit as particular and odd as his “abnormals.” He understands that weirdness begins at home. More than that, he understands that weirdness isn’t really weirdness; the perception of weirdness is only a sign that the world is larger and more varied than any one person’s ability to understand it. Portis loves to take people who, for one reason or another, are highly committed to their own way of seeing things, then send them on journeys just over the horizon of what their expectations can accommodate. His novels are marvelous odysseys into the dark heart of WTF.
These new sounds and silences are so affecting because cities have long been defined by their din: by the density and variety of human voices and animal sounds; the clamor of wheels on cobblestones; the mechanical clangs, electrical hums, and radio babble; the branded ringtones and anti-loitering alarms. Most hearing people are adept at interpreting the cacophony. We know which of the sounds within our radius need attention and which can be ignored. At times of crisis or change, our senses are heightened, recalibrated. As we adjust to new spatial confines, to an altered sense of time, we also retune our hearing. Seismologists, for instance, have registered the Covid-19 shutdowns as a quietness that helps them perceive tectonic movements.
But contextual shifts are not always as sudden as a viral pandemic. We are constantly revising the way we listen to the city, and for at least a century our aural capacities have been growing in the direction of urban surveillance and public health. With technology, we track sounds over greater distances, at different timescales and intervals, discerning patterns and aberrations that are often encoded as symptoms, so that we (or our public officials) can diagnose problems and apply cures. Indeed, many of the modern technologies used to sound out the city are inspired by diagnostic tools from medicine and psychology. Through these soundings, we grasp the city’s internal mechanics, assess the materiality of its parts, analyze its rhythms. And those two domains, surveillance and health, are increasingly entwined with a third, machine intelligence.
One day, Michael Shattuck started to run. He liked it, so he ran longer, sometimes for as many as 65 hours each week. He never wanted to stop. What was he running from?
“This is running heaven out here,” says Michael Shattuck. It’s a late-summer morning in Wisconsin’s rural heartland. Emerald green dairy farms roll into wetland marshes, the landscape punctuated with small-town eccentricities, like the statue of a human-size mouse wearing a University of Wisconsin-Madison tank top perched on the roof of a limestone-quarry business. There are plenty of distractions, which is a good thing, because the 42-year-old Shattuck, who was born and raised in Ripon, 90 miles northwest of Milwaukee, plans to run a marathon here every day for the rest of his life.
“Are you trying to remember things or are you trying to be remembered?”
This question arrives early in Michael J. Seidlinger’s new novel Dreams of Being and is quickly revealed to be the book’s central inquiring obsession. Asked of the novel’s narrator by a mysterious, failed nonagenarian sushi chef named Jiro, the narrator is slow to respond, but finally answers:
“I want to be remembered.”
We could all use a trip to the Caribbean right about now, and Gaige’s treacherous passage gives us plenty to discuss along the way, including ethical dilemmas, complicated family dynamics and the nature of forgiveness. And the views are breathtaking.
I need sarson da saag,
nothing else will satisfy me,
and hot makki di roti
with butter melting over it.
This time I won’t say, little kangaroo because this kangaroo is swole as fuck.