Short-a-Day: Daniel Mason's "The Miraculous Discovery of Psammetichus I"

Originally published in Harper's, March 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 92.

In each issue of The New Yorker, there's a one-page section called "Shouts & Murmurs," in which a comic writer attempts, through exaggeration, to mock some bit of recent news or a cultural norm/stereotype. It's rarely any good, so imagine my surprise to find that Mason had written a decent four-page story in this style, opening by paraphrasing the truthfully ridiculous linguistic experiment of Psammetichus (as recorded by Herodotus and translated by G. Rawlinson in 1858), and then going on to imagine more ludicrous extensions of said experiment. The structure is solid, as are the jokes:

He selected a pair of newborn children from two fisherwomen and gave them to his aviarist to raise amongst his flocks with these instructions: No one was to utter a word in the children's presence; they should be given birdseed for their hunger and perches for their sleep, and so be raised to think that they were fowl. .... [After three-and-a-half years] they were brought before him and he inquired, What now do the birds speak of? The boys crouched and blinked, and one licked a flea from his armpit, and the other scraped his teeth back and forth against the floor. Whereupon Psammetichus asked again, and the boys replied that the song sparrows spoke nostalgically of the berries in Ethiopia, and the peacocks of their own beauty, and the parrots of what the aviarist did with the queen. From this Psammetichus learned of memory and vanity and not to trust Lydian wives, nor aviarists from Krokodilopolis.
This is generally held to be a lesser discovery than the first, but one with more practical application.

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Short-a-Day: Ben Marcus's "Rollingwood"

Originally published in The New Yorker, Mar. 21, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 51.

It must suck to be the one guy in the room who actually cares. The story opens with  "It's still dark when the weeping erupts, so Mather knows it's early," so right from the start, we can see how calm and rational our protagonist is. He'll need such cool, for the story consists of the world slowly but consistently screwing him with dispassion and incompetence: his ex-wife saddles him with their fussy, asthmatic one-and-a-half-year-old so that she can start a new life with her boyfriend (pretending that she'll just be gone for a few days); the nursery at work inexplicably closes; instead of telling Mather's boss that he's taken a personal day, she reports that he has quit his job; his car pool just stops picking him up; he always misses the bus by a minute; it's winter. We get things like this: "Mather demonstrates the ventilator to the sitter, but it clear that she has already decided that it is too complicated for her to operate."

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Short-a-Day: Haruki Murakami's "U.F.O. In Kushiro"

Originally published in The New Yorker, Mar. 19, 2001. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 8.

[Translated, from the Japanese, by Jay Rubin.]

A bit of an opportunistic reprint, here, by The New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman, an openly empty story (though I feel -- or rather don't feel -- that about most of Murakami's writing) that just happens to be loosely related to the 1995 earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan. In a series of tangents and anecdotes, Komura's wife grows obsessed with disaster footage and leaves him; an aimless, grieving Komura agrees to deliver something for his co-worker, flying all the way from Tokyo to Hokkaido to do so; while there, the friend of the person he's delivering the package to, Shimao, seduces him with the telling of a personal story involving sex in a bear-populated forest; finally, the story ends with Shimao pointing out, "But really, you're just at the beginning."

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Short-a-Day: Saïd Sayafiezadeh's "Paranoia"

Originally published in The New Yorker, Feb. 28, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 93. 

"Why aren't you eating?" he asked.
"I saw a fly land on it," I admitted.
With irritation he said, "You are opulent," and he took the sandwich from me and bit into it, a huge, obvious bite, so that I could see the food in his mouth. "And I am indigent."
Which was true. I'd had a DVD player for ten years.

How silly all the terrible, unbearable things in life are, things we cannot imagine and yet which others undergo on a continual basis. We argue about an undercooked dish and send it back, and millions starve. We complain about a leaky faucet while countries deal with a lack of running water or, worse, actual flooding. And in America itself, we snipe at illegal aliens for the "damage" they do to this country -- without admitting that they are often the only ones willing to do the things that we, inanely, will not. Has it come to this? That we would pass up a sandwich because, at one time, a fly landed on it? That's the difference between Roberto, who at seventeen, refused to follow his family home, and Dean, a relaxed white dude who once played football, but now has what his former teammates call an "essential" job. Although these two can be friends, and although Dean can hang with Troy and Quincy down in the otherwise no-(white)-man's-land of Maple Tree Heights, they're worlds apart, and though the title of this story is ostensibly about the coming war that America is gearing up for, it's really about the paranoia Roberto lives with -- when will the INS come and ruin his life?

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THEATER: Kin

We first meet Anna (Kristen Bush) as she, a stony and/or stoic adjunct, is being dumped by an older professor, Simon (Matthew Rauch), who we will never see again. That's fine: in the next hundred minutes of Bathsheba Doran's Kin, nearly a decade of similar moments -- both crucial and tangential to Anna's life -- fly by, ultimately illustrating, under Sam Gold's brilliant direction, how "seemingly insignificant details indicate beauty" (the central thesis of Anna's esoteric book about Keats's punctuation). Very little happens in the final scene, a wedding between Anna and the Irish personal trainer Sean (Patch Darragh), and yet it oozes significance: Anna's artsy best friend, Helena (Laura Heisler), gives a speech that is informed by her own chance connection with a wild bear; Anna's father, Adam (Cotter Smith), has successfully re-entered his daughter's life (after a disastrous Christmas); and Sean's mother, Linda (Suzanne Bertish), has come to see them off, a decision made all the more momentous due to her agoraphobia -- and the fact that the wedding is taking place on the foggy cliffs where she was raped so many years ago. It is a scene dripping with history, or moments, and isn't that, after all, what connects us? What really allows us not only to know one another, but to call each other kin?

Doran's relaxed dialogue -- which has very little urgency behind it -- is reminiscent of Annie Baker's hyperrealism, and is well-suited to Gold's light touch, which uses Paul Steinberg's rectangular prism of a set to essentially "frame" each scene as a photograph (which one might then insert into, say, a memory palace). Only rarely are these moments out of focus, though the jumps between time and character make it hard to get a bead on people like Kay (Kit Flanagan). More often, the scenes are crisp and precise: Rachel (Molly Ward) only shows up once, but in that moment, we understand both why Sean longs for her, his former flame, and why things between them -- she was a bottle-a-day alcoholic -- fizzled out. Moments like those serve as hinges for the play's drama, showing us not only the possibilities, but the realities; they allow Doran to easily shift between showing us the fully in love Anna and her counterpart, a panic-attacked girl with second thoughts, without the table-setting scenes that a drama usually uses to segue between these points.

Kin resembles a highlights reel assembled by someone who wasn't always watching the game: Rachel Getting Married, say, but over the course of ten years. It's a humble and quiet play that manages to scream the magnificent beauty of life to its audience, and despite a few garbled moments, we get the picture, loud and clear.