True Fiction by Anna Krauthamer

William Maxwell, born in 1908 in Lincoln, Illinois, was better known as the fiction editor of The New Yorker than he was as a fiction writer.  After Maxwell’s death in 2000, John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that Maxwell used “modest specifics, clearly rendered” and subdued “figurative language” to “get at the nearly unbearable heart truth,” or, in other words, to gesture toward the things that are often the most impossible to communicate, with quiet, simple language that is able to make murkiness clear.  

Maxwell’s novels are largely autobiographical, third-person narratives about people, places, and experiences he knew, but it’s in the imaginary touches he adds that we might gain more insight into his heart and mind.  So Long, See You Tomorrow, one of his later novels, mentions Freud in the first chapter: there's a murder, and the narrator says that in the story's "pre-Freudian era, people did not ask themselves" what it all meant, "but merely shuddered." But now we're in a post-Freudian era, and Maxwell's novels are very much Freudian, not necessarily within their pages but in the books' revelations about their author. Maxwell participated in psychoanalysis for years, and I would assume that, as he delved further into his unconscious, he increasingly expressed his hidden desires and regrets through his writing.  You can see this, I think, in the way his imagination works in tandem with his memory: while much of what appears in his novels are closely based on his own life, he adds imaginative touches that tell us things less tangible about Maxwell then, say, the town he grew up in or his father’s job.  It’s the most beautifully transparent fiction I’ve ever read.

What Updike called the “nearly unbearable heart truth” usually meant, for Maxwell, the death of his mother when he was ten years old.  Before her death, Maxwell grew up with his two parents and his older brother, and described his childhood as a “beautiful, imaginative, protected world.”  When his mother died suddenly of Spanish influenza, Maxwell decried that “the worst that could happen had happened” and “the shine went out of everything.”  Her death features prominently in his work, most so in They Came Like Swallows, which recreates the perspectives of Maxwell, his older brother, and his father in the time immediately surrounding his mother's death.  I read in a biography that during one analytic session, Maxwell cried out that he "can't bear it" about the loss of his mother.  Not couldn't, but can't.  This blurring of time, in his inability to ever really recover from his loss and distinguish his past from his present, occurs in They Came Like Swallows, too.  Maxwell, then a middle-aged man, wrote about his mother's death as his childhood self. He goes back in time to before his mother died, suggesting a fixation with that time period that, whether in his work or in his mind, he cannot escape.

So Long, See You Tomorrow, not just my favorite Maxwell novel but my favorite novel ever, is told in retrospect from the perspective of an older man (a man similar in age to Maxwell when he wrote the book) about his guilt over a moral failing he believes he had made in his youth. In the novel, the Smiths and the Wilsons, neighboring families who live in the farmlands right outside of Lincoln, Illinois, collide into each other only to rip themselves apart later, the implications of which are the most destructive for eleven-year-old Cletus, a son in the Smith family.  

The novel is based on real events that happened between two families in Lincoln early in the 20th century; what we read in the novel is Maxwell’s imagining of the private happenings in the families--their thoughts, their feelings, their lives--based on what little he read in newspaper clippings and hearsay.  Years after the tragedy took place, the narrator in So Long, See You Tomorrow saw Cletus once more in the hallway of a large public school they both attended.  Neither speaks to the other, and the narrator, now much older when he tells us about it, has regretted his silence for the rest of his life.  He fears Cletus might have interpreted his silence as disdain over what happened to Cletus’s family, when really, the narrator did not know what to say to a boy his own age who had experienced such trauma.

What makes So Long, See You Tomorrow seem like both memoir and fiction is the way in which it is, at some moments, committed to depicting its characters’ lives as closely as possible to who these people actually were in real life, and at other moments, content to drift into imaginative rumination.  The narrator, a stand-in for Maxwell, lost his mother to the Spanish flu, had a distant and grief-stricken father, and would read in the attic for hours trying to not think about the fact that his mother was dead--these are all true about the real Maxwell, too.  Everything we experience in So Long, See You Tomorrow that Maxwell also experienced firsthand is as close an account as possible of what things really were like.  Significantly, in Maxwell’s preface to So Long, See You Tomorrow, he tells us that in investigating what happened to the two families on whom the story is based, he "permitted" himself to imagine whatever he couldn't find from old newspapers and police records.  Hence, Maxwell took the little he knew to be true from the papers and then used his imagination to create intimate pictures of true events.  He merged imagination with reality by filling in the blanks on his own--and what he puts in the blanks is revelatory.  

Maxwell also says in the preface that after publishing So Long, See You Tomorrow he often “wondered if the boy (now, of course, an elderly man) would read it."  Maxwell wondered if he'd hear from the boy.  In his present day, Maxwell regretted, decades later, not saying anything to the other boy, on whom the character of Cletus was based, he passed silently in a hallway long ago.  Maxwell’s admission in the preface that he thought frequently of the boy confirms that the narrator’s guilt was also his own guilt.  Maxwell wrote a novel that imagines the lives of characters based on people whom he only knew indirectly.  I wonder if that choice, to immerse himself with reimagining the tragic events that had damaged the real life Cletus, was somehow redemptive, or an effort to assuage his decades-old guilt. Maxwell was afraid that his silence that day in the hallway reflected judgment, fear, or disgust over what had happened to the boy and his family.  So Long, See You Tomorrow empathizes with the families, in the care and attention it gives to an intimate, fictional portrayal of their lives.  The compassion he shows to the real life Cletus years later by writing So Long, See You Tomorrow could in someway undo Maxwell’s youthful mistake; it could soothe the wound Maxwell feared he inflicted.  Maybe, even, it was not only after publishing the novel, as he says in the preface, that Maxwell wondered if there’d be contact. Maybe he wondered about that possibility before he ever wrote the book.  

Because he blended imagination and memory, we can perhaps discover things about Maxwell based on what he lets himself imagine.  In So Long, See You Tomorrow, it’s that his time spent with Cletus Smith and his family possibly is a means of redemption for Maxwell.  They Came Like Swallows, which depicts and thus preserves the time right before Maxwell’s mother died, could reveal much about Maxwell’s inner life: maybe at its most elemental it’s reflective of his longing for his mother as he brings her back to life through fiction.  We come to understand his world filtered through his desires and regrets, thus unraveling what Maxwell might have wished was more real than it actually was, and, of course, what he might have wished was only imaginary.  

Airtight: Decline to Recline by Anna Krauthamer

It was perfect.  When I checked in at Heathrow, the man working at the gate told me that as of then, I had my entire row to myself.  I asked him if he could keep it like that, he laughed, I laughed, I got my boarding pass.  When I got to my window seat a few hours later I waited, but nobody sat down next to me.  The man had actually, inexplicably, given me an entire row in an otherwise completely packed plane.  The pilot made an announcement: apparently when passengers switch their seats around it “unbalances the plane.”  I had never felt such passion for flight safety before.  Like I’ve said, it was perfect.  But as they do say, things are oft too good to be true, what goes up must go down, etc.  It all changed, so quickly.  The person in front of me reclined.

The most frequently cited arguments for reclining one’s seat are that it’s a right, that the recline button is there for a reason, and that I paid for my seat, and I’m going to recline it!  The  validity of these arguments?  Questionable, at best.  

According to Wikipedia, a constitutional right is a legal right of its citizens (and possibly others within its jurisdiction) protected by a sovereignty’s constitution.  Our sovereignty’s constitution protects our rights to be rude to waitstaff, not to call our mothers back, and to make severely pregnant women stand on the subway.  Also according to Wikipedia, the United States Constitution has “several articles and amendments” that establish constitutional rights.  As grateful as we all surely are to our Founding Fathers, we need not exercise our constitutional rights at all time if they mean doing something shitty.  

In a similar vein, the recline button’s presence perhaps does not require its usage.  The reason the recline button exists is not because you must use it; it’s so that the seat can recline.  This is a fine but essential distinction.  Passengers have agency.  They can opt out of reclining for grander reasons, and the recline button does not compel but merely offers.  

The argument with the most logical and moral flaws is the one that rests on paying for your seat.  Everyone else on the plane paid for their seat too, of course.  Thus, to defend your individual decision on grounds that pretend to be similarly individualistic but are in fact totally uniform is illegitimate.  Arguments like these aim to disguise what happens when you recline: you chose your own superficial comfort over someone else’s.  Because the person who suffers when you recline is, literally, at the back of your mind, you can ignore the fact that you’re putting yourself before others.  While you’re stretching out as far as your seat will take you, the people behind you are hating their lives a little bit as they awkwardly maneuver their cramped bodies over the stranger sitting next to them every single time they need to get up to go to the bathroom.

Let’s pull some numbers.  Some background information: seat pitch is the distance between a given point on one seat and the identical point on the seat in front.  The inches of decline are, well, the amount of inches the seat reclines.  The source I’ve consulted, American Airline’s fleet statistics, also list stats for seat width, which seems relevant, because it helps us paint a picture of the overall level of discomfort with which we’re working.

The seat pitch in first class for international flights is usually 62 inches; for domestic, first class lies at around 42 inches.  For economy, though, the seat pitch is consistently between 30 and 36 inches, whether it’s an international or domestic flight.  So you never get that much room, whether you’re flying to Florida or to Paris.  Except for some seats in some first class flights that can recline to complete horizontal, all other seats, first class and economy alike, recline to 6 inches.  When you recline in economy, you’re reducing the person behind you’s space by up to 20%. The space that person now has to extend their legs, store their bags, and get in and out of their seat is shorter in length than the average size of a five year old child.This means that when you recline in economy, you feel like you’re in first class, but your victim, suffice it to say, does not feel the same.  

It is true that the person behind you can recline. So can the next person, and the next, and the next, until you get to that very last guy, sitting in the back row, whose seat probably doesn’t even have a recline button because there’d be no point.  Some might say that this unlucky, unwitting flyer should have to suffer so that all before him can recline; he’s lost to a cause for the greater good.  I disagree.  The utilitarianism employed in the “it’s either him or me” argument just quells that twinge of guilt I believe one must feel as their seat begins to descend.  A strong statement, but one I think is true: to ignore that person in the back is to say that your comfort is more important that his or hers.  Whether or not to recline turns into whether or not to be compassionate.  And after all, he paid just as much for his ticket as you did for yours.

An airplane’s a small and surprising stage for such big themes, but that’s why, I think, those who recline can live with themselves (too far?): they’re able to disconnect their action from its implications because we don’t often think of sitting upright on an airplane as a way to be compassionate.  If you feel like you must recline, still, then so it will be.  Know that you’re making at least one person’s (the martyr’s in the back) life a bit more miserable than it already may be.  And then recline, sip on the airplane’s cheap boxed wine, pop a Valium, do whatever you want to do to make yourself comfortable.  You can’t see me, sitting behind you, but I can see you.  I can see you.

Comunidades

Nathalie Davidson

Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

I grew up using the word “favela” to describe the run down neighborhoods I would see in São Paulo. “Favela” as a term does a great job in enforcing the division between good and bad, us and them.  We would pass the “favelas” and my Brazilian mother would tell me not to look. Like most middle-class families, our car had tinted windows to protect us from the outside. Although no one could see us, my mother kept me away from the windows telling me it was rude to stare.    

One of my first lessons in Portuguese class was on the politically correct way to say “favela.” People who live in these neighborhoods prefer to call them comunidades. The direct translation for “favela” is a slum, a word filled with negative connotations and violent implications. Comunidades directly translates to communities; a positive word that recalls images of happy families coexisting in a neighborhood. “Favela” has now become a loaded term recalling images of anger, drug violence, and poverty.  “Favela” is different from derogatory terms that people know they’re not supposed to use. The move away from the word is a relatively recent idea spurred by the people from the communities. Like any other derogatory term, it’s probably going to be a while before people understand why the word should not be used.  

Class distinction plays a far bigger role in Brazil than race distinction. Hearing wealthier people or people who don’t belong to these communities call them “favelas” was my entire life until I went to Brazil after I turned 21. We left São Paulo when I was 5 and moved to Uruguay because of my father’s job. It wasn’t until I was 9 that we left South America to fulfill our American dreams in Miami. I wanted to study abroad in Rio de Janeiro because the only version of Brazil I knew was through the tinted windows of my childhood in São Paulo. The only time we would pass these communities in Sao Paulo was when we would drive to the airport. The people with the best views of these communities are those who live on the top floors of the highest buildings. The class lines are never quite as striking as when you’re in the penthouse of a fancy apartment and look out to see flickering lights of the people below you. 

There’s a stronger divide between communities and neighborhoods in São Paulo than Rio de Janeiro. The design of Rio is vastly different. The communities are still on the edge of the city but they developed on the hillsides of Rio’s mountains, bringing them closer to well-to-do neighborhoods and making them harder to avoid. You can’t just look away from these communities when you’re in a car or pretend they’re flickering lights from your penthouse. They are these massive entities, forming their own neighborhoods, filled with culture, art, music, and hardworking, fun loving, people.

The best experience while abroad in Rio was befriending the kids from the Tabajaras community. The kids and adults from the Tabajaras hill would come down to our office, located right by their community, and we would teach English. In return, they taught us a lot about Brazilian culture in Rio de Janeiro. We helped them build their costumes for carnival and they taught us how to samba, a feat I have yet to conquer. When they deemed us gringos worthy of dancing with them, we danced all night at their carnival parade – we ended up winning the competition and this carnival season, Tabajaras has the opportunity to make it to the biggest carnival competition in Rio. The families and taught English to would always invite us to their homes, their local church for a Sunday service, and any type of event happening up on their hillside. I wanted to visit these communities while I was abroad because I wanted to prove my mother wrong; these aren’t people you can just ignore.

My mother’s friends from Brazil were shocked when I told them I became friends with local kids and visited their homes. The prince would never befriend the pauper in Brazil. There’s a huge stigma associated with the communities in Brazil, it’s unheard for Brazilians who live in better neighborhoods to visit or befriend people who live on the hills. I’m afraid that this stigma that is so prevalent in popular media in Brazil is already becoming the norm in global media.  There’s a lot of tension surrounding these communities as Brazil is put under the media’s microscope. American and British newspapers are sounding more and more like fraternity brothers as they freely speak about the communities in Brazil and group all the people living in these neighborhoods with drug lords and thieves. It would be completely foolish of me to try to say that all of the communities are pacified. Certain areas of Brazil are still incredibly dangerous and I’m genuinely concerned for the welfare of the country during the World Cup and the Olympics.  Many of Brazil’s population including myself took to the streets to protest the events in June. The media is focusing on the issues of the stadiums not being built and the crime rate against foreigners instead of focusing on the real issues at hand: the failing education system, the crumbling infrastructure in communities, and the lack of health care.

The communities have become a huge draw for foreign tourists because of the fascination of the drug culture portrayed in movies like City of God as well as the astonishing views from the top of the mountains. From this fascination grew “favela” tours, as if the people in these communities were animals at a zoo – solely there for entertainment and humiliation. Only gringas and gringos participate in these tours, they’re often under the impression that the money they paid for the tour will be donated to helping these communities improve their situation. There’s this underlying belief that the observer is superior and has a moral responsibility of saving this “favela.”  The tour can be motivated by the desire to do good and learn but there is always the added bonus of taking a great photo to brag to friends later.  

The people in Brazil who live in these communities are trying hard to get rid of the word. One example is Complexo do Alemao, one of the biggest communities of Rio de Janeiro. The Complexo became popular after one of the Brazilian novellas began filming there. Favela tours became wide spread for those interested in the thrill of visiting a supposedly dangerous neighborhood. With so much attention people placed on this community, the people began a newspaper to report on daily activities specifically focused on police brutality and gang violence.  They were quick to use their popularity to better their situation by getting the government’s attention and asking for help. The newspaper is called Voz da Comunidade – the voice of the community. They never refer to themselves as living in the “favela.” The term is an insult for these communities who are working hard to improve their living situations.

Sensational newspaper headlines, hysterical news reports, and mass produced Hollywood films belittle these communities filled with real people who call these “slums,” home. We begin seeing these people because we’re fascinated, but not necessarily because we’re invested in change. You stop thinking of the individual people inside the favela but instead of collective trash, as if they are part of Brazil’s problem that the country is trying to hide under the rug. 

The Stigma of Adolescence

Young Adult literature, otherwise known as YA lit.  Many, when they think of the genre, immediately think of books like  Twilight, and Gossip Girl, or other series that have been turned into wildly popular television shows and movies (I’m looking at you, Pretty Little Liars and The Mortal Instruments.) And they also probably don’t think very good things about these books.  There’s a popular notion of the YA novel as trashy, typically age-appropriate fluff, and aimed at airhead teenage girls, but this is usually the perception of someone who had never really read a YA novel, at least not recently. Yes, books like Twilight—books written for a mass audience whose writing seems to have been motivated more by satisfying their readers’ desire to know what happens next—exist, but they’re not the only YA fiction available. What’s more important, perhaps, is that even though they do exist, these particular, “non-challenging” YA novels follow important facets of the category, guidelines that are seen in more comprehensive, fleshed-out books, of varying genres. 

YA fiction does have literary merit, and its stigmatization is unfair. It is wrong to assume that a book in the YA category is written for a female audience only, and an unintelligent one at that. Doing so robs young women of the agency they have in choosing what to read for themselves, and implies that they cannot read “real” books. Additionally, this further stigmatizes the young men who read an YA novel, whether or not that particular book is deemed “girly.” It is vital that society realizes YA isn’t just for teenage girls, and has equal importance for teenage boys. The lack of recognition of YA novels that appeal to young men is part of the problem, suggesting that “boys don’t read” or if they do they’re not reading the same “low-quality” books young women read.

What defines young adult literature? Books that are written about people ages thirteen to eighteen and that are also aimed at them. An obvious criterion maybe, but an important one to keep in mind, particularly when examining the subject matter in YA literature. This can range from a romantic or sexual awakening or experiences, dysfunctionality in some form—most often in the family life of the protagonist, or a conflict with an authority figure. Most commonly and importantly, however there is a discovery or quest for discovery of self. Believe it or not, when examining books like Twilight and its sequels, you will see these aspects of YA there: Bella is an awkward teenage girl who has never had a boyfriend before she falls in love with a vampire who’s adopted, and together they rebel against the ruling vampire government, finally giving Bella a place where she fits in.

As I’ve said earlier, YA is not limited to books with entertaining but societally –deemed psychologicaland irrelevant content.  There are young adult novels that have much more breadth and deal more deeply with issues such as drug use, homosexuality, suicide and death, and divorce, to name a few. And while the popularity of YA novels seems to be a recent trend, it’s actually not. Go Ask Alice, published in 1971, Catcher in the Rye in 1951, and The Outsiders in 1983, are all young adult novels. This suggests a need for young adult literature, at least in the twentieth century. YA is important because part of being a teenager is feeling isolated, as if there is no one, or almost no one who understands you, at least in the real world. But pick up a YA novel, and you will find yourself confronted with a character who likely feels just as isolated, if not more so than you. Even outside the realm of reality-based YA fiction, moving into genres such as fantasy or dystopian, characters teenagers can relate to exist within their pages.  Isn’t finding your own truth in someone else’s words one of the most beloved pleasures of reading, no matter the genre? More importantly, not only teenagers relate to characters in YA stories. Adults who choose to read young adult fiction are not indulging in immaturity or a lack of challenge, but choosing to experience raw, relatable storylines.

Take Veronica Roth’s Divergent, for example. Even in a world where society is split into five factions based on ruling values, and each sixteen year-old is given an aptitude test which tells them which faction they belong in, the main character, Beatrice struggles with her identity. She can’t be placed in her aptitude test, which makes her dangerous and a threat to the structure of the society. Beatrice makes the decision to leave her family behind and join the most fearless of the factions, keeping her status as a divergent a secret, falling in love with one of her tutors and getting caught up in a sinister coup d’etat. “It’s important for teens to have something that matters, ” YA author Maggie Stievfater says, rather than something that’s theirs. While perhaps not every teenager can relate to being a part of a government conspiracy, surely anyone can relate to feeling, somehow, like they’re not fitting in.

Additionally, YA novels have gained relevancy even beyond their pages. The interaction between the authors and their readers is one that has been expanded with increased use of social media. Perhaps the most well known example of this is with popular YA author, John Green. Green, who has written several novels, most notably The Fault in Our Stars and Looking For Alaska, has an incredibly huge fan base, in part due to the Youtube channel with his brother. The Green brothers make videos, directed towards each other, but with topics and questions that they direct that their viewers, a community that has grown and is known as Nerdfighteria, with its members called Nerdfighters, who do not fight nerds, but rather are made of awesome. This community is made up of teens and adults, and they not only pose questions to the brothers and watch their Youtube videos, but also interact with other Nerdfighters in the comments sections, on Tumblr, and in forums on other various websites. It is important to note that this community is not built around Green’s books, but rather that his books drew in many of the people who make up the community, and that it has grown far beyond his books. These connections that Green has facilitated weave a web of human strands that move beyond his books’ stories and into the real world.

Other authors, such as Rainbow Rowell (Eleanor & Park, Fangirl) use their own life experiences to touch on difficult themes such as poverty or body issues, but in a way that promotes connectivity, and share these experiences with their audience through discussions and readings as well as through social media, giving fans the ability to connect in a way that feels authentic. The authors write YA novels that, in a sense, help teenagers learn how to be adolescents, and remind adults what it was like, maybe not so long ago. Authors that move beyond the pages of their work further facilitate these experiences are working to strengthen the credibility of the genre in the eyes of those who write it off.

In short, young adult literature is not something that can be easily written off as flighty or insignificant. It is a medium that allows for real conversations and relationships to develop around topics and feelings that everyone experiences at one of the most turbulent, transitory times in their lives.

Sonic Youth?

Just a small act of evangalism on a Sunday morning. "Teenage Riot" is one of the best college radio songs of the eighties. The soundscapes, the noise, the songs making themselves up out of scraps and bits. Bonus points if you know whose painting graces the cover of Daydream Nation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKMD8vI1MaM&feature=kp