In the privacy of notebooks, lists live a different life. Some exist largely as traces of the act of attention, the conceptual material of their connection having eroded away. Absent a centre of gravity, they are hardly lists at all. Intention and occasion are exposed as ephemeral, and what the purpose of these lists may have been no longer matters. Liberated from project, they have been spared the fate of becoming content. They have eluded expectation and, thus, disappointment. Only curiosity remains, both before and after the fact. These lists are little anarchic wastes of time. Valueless in terms of product, they remind me of the higher value of pointless acts of attention, and to love what is incomplete.
A bald eagle visits me every day. I have learned to recognize his voice as he approaches, a querulous complaint against the crows that usually accompany him like a desperate ring of courtiers vying for his attention. To people who will listen, I have mentioned that to be an eagle is to be harassed from sunup to sundown. If the crows leave him alone for a moment, their place is taken by herring gulls cursing his existence. No one likes an eagle except other eagles, it seems, and the eagle shrinks down when the birds dive at him, this bandit among the large pines. Half amused, half ashamed of his bulk and thieving nature, he settles on the topmost rim of branches, a Billy Budd foretopman, his eyes scanning the cold waters of the Pennamaquan River as it merges with Cobscook Bay.
Don’t Make Me Laugh is, at its most straightforward, a robustly funny and fleetingly soulful revenge caper, set in a comedy world that’s about to have its (long-overdue) #MeToo moment, but Raeside’s freewheeling style – a perfect match for lonely, lackadaisically flawed Ali – allows her to edge into some discomfiting, provocatively grey areas. Because while Bonatti is clearly a dangerous creep, it’s a certain type of self-styled “good guy” that the author dares to expose here.
For all the rhapsodizing about candy, she is smart, witty and philosophical on the nature of time, memory, grief, poverty vs. affluence, exploitation and sexism. Mix in a vein of child psychology.