Saturday, December 19, 2015

The Bonsai Tree.


It started with a riff off an Althouse post on the Man Booker Prize, where the award-winning author was berating the 'older-white-woman-looks-back-on-her-life' formula.

I wrote:

"What if the older wife is reflecting on how much better her life would have been if she had been strong enough to face Oppression and had married that black guy she longed for back in her youth?

Of course, you would have to add depth and nuance to it: it just can't be about her missing the Black Cock."


As is probably obvious, I have been enjoying writing the characters of Miss Sarah and Mandingo (tags have now been added to these). The format is obvious, too: anachronistically viewing the world through characters in another time period -- in this case, 1957 in small-town Madison County, where Mandingo is the lone Negro in town, having an affair with the young respectable (white) townswoman Miss Sarah.

The subject matter viewed through this dynamic has been wonderful to work with: racism, feminism, capitalism, religion, abortion, police abuse of authority, gossip, hypocrisy, the male/female relationship in an imbalance of power, and their fear and wonder of a Future that we live in but they can only guess. All of this spurred by the relevant Althouse post.

Yeah, really: all that has been in there. And, of course, jokes. Satire.

Mainly, I think the pieces have been funny. Sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes slapstick. Furthermore, I have been pleased to layer subtext through the pieces if people wish to think about them, and I have tried to keep the focus character-driven -- not to interject an obviously partisan viewpoint but to let it come together holistically, even though I hate the word 'holistically' and the people who use it, of which I am now one.

There are words used then that we just don't say anymore, thoughts that we supposedly don't think anymore. And Our Future would certainly be a shock to them, but not necessarily because we have everything figured out: the furniture is newer and has been rearranged, but the chair is still recognizable as a chair.

Furthermore, this all takes place in the reminisces of the modern Sarah, graduate of an elite New England College, wife of a Jewish Dentist, in a winter home in Connecticut. Heck, she might even be a Professor at a liberal College, now.

Which brings me to the Professor at a Liberal College: Althouse.

So far three of these pieces haven't made it through moderation, all of late vintage. One of the interesting things with 'moderation' is you never know exactly why something got proactively deleted. Certain words? Certain topics? Method? Just considered not funny? Not worthy of parsing to see if perhaps something was missed?

Of course, if it is just 'not funny' there are plenty of Althouse readers that would agree, etc etc etc.

It seems like Althouse is slowly shaping her comments sections like a bonsai tree, methodically adding a more linear sense of effect. This is -- of course -- her right, and as far as the aesthetics of such go, this very well may be the right call: to the creator goes the vision.

I do find it curious that a piece like ""So you thought you could take me on?" she said, her voice a shrill whisper with the trace of vodka on her breath." makes it through, with its image of a pulp-fiction Hillary sodomizing Bernie Sanders with a gun, while ""God might as well forgive a dog for being a dog."" about gossip and hypocrisy, does not.

It turns out I DO need a Weatherman to see which way the Wind Blows.

I am Laslo.

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