This book is awful. When I write that I’m not speaking at all of the quality of the novel–it’s actually quite good and very entertaining. But everything about it is truly terrible. Jillian is a troublingly accurate record of life in the current late-stage neoliberal capitalist hellscape we all inhabit. As such, it’s an abyss of despair, a Nietszchean vortex, a singularly piercing examination of approaching Singularity. I laughed heartily reading it, and cringed each time I laughed, because ‘funny, not funny.’
The novel centers on two characters: Megan, a recent college grad who works in a gastroenterologist’s office. Her job is to look at images of people’s colons all day as she scans the images into their medical files. She is alienated from her labor, but also from her friends, from her boyfriend, from her family, from her society, and from herself. Marx wrote Grundrisse just for Megan. She sees how empty everything is and how difficult it will be to find meaning at all in a life doomed to this sort of work. As a result she gets smashed on canned American beer and smokes too many cigarettes while becoming more and more of an intolerable asshole. Megan is infuriated that nobody else can see how fake everything is and how their successes at their own fake shitty jobs are contemptible.
And then there is Jillian, Megan’s co-worker. Jillian is about a decade older than Megan and because unconsciously Megan sees herself becoming Jillian in ten years, still working at the doctor’s office, still cheerfully scanning poopy intestinal images, she starts to really loathe her coworker and herself. Half the novel is from Jillian’s point of view, half from Megan’s (with brief moments from the POV of a few other scattered characters, including Jillian’s son Adam and from a dog, a bird, a racoon).
Jillian is a total wreck, and drives on a suspended license because she is completely deluded about the state of her world and unable to face the realities of her situation. A single mom who got knocked up after hooking up at a club while high, she has discovered religion and has made a mess of that as well. After drifting thoughtlessly through a red light her car gets impounded, she is arrested and arraigned, and she has to rely on the kindness of a fellow church member to get her kid to daycare every day while she goes to the office. Megan sees through all of Jillian’s bullshit and it makes her totally crazy. She goes home and obsesses about Jillian to the point her boyfriend starts to get annoyed by this obsession.
Meanwhile Jillian has lied to her employer about her car and about an upcoming court date and about her fine for driving on an expired license. And to solve all her problems she adopts a dog because happy families have dogs, right? Then a painkiller addiction makes everything that much better.
In this novel we get to experience the collapse into despair of these miserably entwined people. And what makes it all worse is that Megan, despite being a terrible asshole, is actually correct about the people around her and the society she is in and about her prospects. And she is correct about Jillian and her thin cheerful veneer, the inevitable collapse of which affects not only herself but her child and her dog and Megan and the entire society they are trapped inside. And yet these are the sort of people churned out and crushed by America the Beautiful in the 21st century.
I’ve not been pushing myself to read French lately, and it is absolutely vital that I continue to work on the language so that I sound less like an adolescent speaking when I interact with locals here in the Correze and particularly with business clients who arrive from cities like Toulouse, Bourdeaux, and Lyon. When Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in 2022 I picked up a couple of her books, one of which was La Place.
Surprisingly the French is quite clear and simple-stylistically I’d compare Ernaux’s writing to Hemingway, with crisp, short declarative sentences. Technically La Place is a novel, but it is also a memoir or autobiographical novel, and her style is very objective and is comparable to Joan Didion’s dispassionate journalism. I was pleased to only need a dictionary a couple dozen times throughout, and mostly for colloquial phrases.
The idea for the novel arose when Ernaux was processing the death of her father, and focuses on him and her family in a small town in Normandy through WW2 and into the 1970s. Her father was raised working on a farm with a quite limited education and his parents were not literate. Through his hard work and survival of the war to working in a factory and rising through the ranks and eventually buying and running a small cafe/epicerie with his wife we can see how the family pulled itself up from poverty to a comfortable middle-class existence. Ernaux’s descriptions of her family’s sensitivity to class and how they tried to hide their rural hick upbringing in front of clients by changing their speech and feigning a more sophisticated vernacular were quite touching. Reflecting on the difficulties her parents faced and her father’s challenges in particular was obviously difficult for Ernaux but she never wavers from her stylistic choices to keep her emotions out of the prose. Sometimes what she describes or recounts make her involvement and her feelings evident, however–there are photographs she finds and events she narrates which are dense with the weight of emotional memory.
Ernaux’s father is never called by his name, only by “him” or “he.” He is adamant that Ernaux continue her education but at the same time he can’t resist pointing out that her life in books is not the real life he lives with his hands in the dirt of the garden or in the till of his business. He is however enormously proud of her accomplishments when she becomes a professor and moves away to start a family of her own. Ernaux winning the Nobel Prize is even more remarkable given the family history recounted here. I look forward to reading more of her work.
Melville first entered my consciousness the way much of history and culture did when I was a wee tot–via cartoons. I think my first encounter was a Tom and Jerry cartoon featuring Moby Dick but renamed Dicky Moe? And of course I likely encountered the film version directed by John Huston in a butchered and pan-and-scanned version on television.
I did not read Melville until much later. I recall in 8th or 9th grade English class that there were twin girls whose grandparents owned a sailboat, and that after a summer floating around the Chesapeake Bay the girls returned, one having read Omoo and the other Typee while sailing. They dutifully presented book reports to the class with accompanying illustrations. I remember one of the twins declaring in her report that Melville was mostly known during his lifetime for writing adventure novels, but that later he morphed into a creator of SERIOUS LITERATURE.
As an undergrad at Loyola College in Baltimore I was assigned Billy Budd, Sailor and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We had a most excellent discussion of its merits and its Biblical allusions in class, but also a rowdy debate about the ethics of military justice and Billy Budd’s sad fate. Then in grad school I was assigned Bartleby, the Scrivener. I was confounded by that tale, and saw immediately the SERIOUS LITERATURE of which Melville was capable. I reread Billy Budd and Bartleby several times and eventually taught both stories to Freshmen and Juniors in different courses at Towson University.
Then, I resolved despite having heard that it was a brutal slog, to read Moby-Dick, or The Whale. Contrary to rumor the novel proved endlessly entertaining and quite breezy despite its psychological depth and dense symbolism. I in fact had recently resolved to re-read it when I noticed Redburn, His First Voyage on the shelf and took it down on a whim. After a cursory skim of the first page I found myself fully engaged and could not put it down.
Redburn is a poor chap from a once wealthy and influential family. His father was a businessman engaged in international trade before the family went bankrupt, and young Redburn’s imagination was fired by journals and books about his father’s travels. As a result, he signed up as a novice sailor on a boat headed for Liverpool, and we accompany the young naif on his journey “there and back again.”
The cast of characters is large and each is ably portrayed with wit and charm. Redburn’s experiences are vividly and expertly recounted by Melville who of course was himself a similar young chap setting out on the sea at one point. I thought the book as good as anything by Dickens, in particular the scenes of squalor in Liverpool which brought to mind many pathetic and pitiable characters in the works of Charles D.
If you are considering testing the waters of Melville, but you are perhaps not ready for the full-on engagement of Moby-Dick, Redburn might be the place to start your voyage.
I made another trip down to the public events space in our building where most of my books are currently housed and pulled a half-dozen unread titles off the shelves. The book I intended to read first I placed on the coffee table, then went off to complete some errands and returned to find my wife 10 pages in and engrossed. So I grabbed another off the pile.
Exit Ghost is the last of Roth’s Zuckerman novels. Nathan has lost his mojo literally after a bout with prostate cancer. Impotent and incontinent, he has retreated to the Berkshires and lived in isolation for 11 years–part of this history was recounted in The Human Stain. While living in his cabin by a swampy pond Zuckerman has focused entirely on his work and further cemented his reputation as a literary master. He doesn’t watch the news, doesn’t read the paper, doesn’t use the internet–he’s become completely detached from the world. But the promise of a medical procedure which might fix his urinary incontinence draws him back to the New York he’d abandoned. A chance encounter with a woman he knew briefly decades before, compounded by the mistake of buying the current New York Review of Books and seeing an intriguing advert in the the Classifieds section threatens to involve Zuckerman in a literary controversy involving his favorite writer. After more than a decade out of the game, Zuckerman finds himself unwillingly pulled back into an imbroglio.
Like Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, Exit Ghost is an exploration of history and memory. What should be recorded for posterity, and what can remain unsaid and unmemorialized? Who is a reliable recorder of events? How fallable exactly is memory and how biased? And as one ages, these questions become more immediate and profound.
Nathan Zuckerman of course served as the fictional alter-ego to Roth through several novels across several decades. The early works were full of intense and zesty voice and delighted in experience and the savors of life. The later works develop in craft and profundity and seriousness and serve as powerful documents and indictments of various eras in US political and cultural history.
Exit Ghost is not Roth at the height of his powers. He is putting to rest and tying up the world his alter-ego inhabits, and giving us a glimpse of his own writerly process along the way, as Zuckerman notes his own rapidly failing memory and tries desperately to record his conversations and then to create fictional dialogues using them. An author renowned for his breathless writing about sex and desire finds himself droopily noodling around young women he can no longer seduce because of his age and decaying physique.
I enjoyed the novel a great deal mostly because I could see a lot of myself in its pages. I’ve stopped reading news almost entirely after a life devoted to being informed. I’ve become cantankerous about the internet and social media and refuse to use AI programs (though I’m aware AI is now powering and manipulating other platforms I’ve used for years). I live in an old factory in a rural area and hope to have time at some point to do more reading and writing and serious study. After decades of glorious city living I find cities exhausting for more than a day or two, and prefer a quiet sedate life to the continuous glamor of going out multiple times a week. Hopefully I avoid the other problems Zuckerman experiences, but as my mother says when I tell her about knee or neck or back problems: “All of that just gets worse.”
Another enjoyable aspect of the novel is to read Zuckerman/Roth thinking about writers who were important: Dostoevsky, Hardy, the Bronte sisters, Conrad, Plimpton, Mailer. Zuckerman and some older characters bemoan the state of the world for mercilessly finding fault with Faulkner and Hemingway and banishing their work from the canon for personal failings. Young characters are keen to find those faults in previous generations and expose their sins. Zuckerman exits an exasperated ghost indeed.
Somewhere in the books of Colin Wilson I recall him mentioning the phenomenon of “library faeries.” These creatures mysteriously put books into your path at just the right moment. As I was reading Emma Jung’s analysis of the Arthurian legends I stumbled upon Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. I won’t really explain why or how as doing so might destroy the reader’s discovery, but this small novel inhabits and extends somewhat the Arthurian universe.
I’d read and loved three previous novels by Ishiguro, most recently Klara and the Sun, which hammered me with its profoundly sad portrait of an exploited lab-created being. Easily the best novel of its kind since the original masterpiece by Mary Shelley!
Here Ishiguro tries his hand at fable and fantasy. We meet an elderly couple named Axl and Beatrice, who live in a warren community and suffer a hardscrabble existence. They decide to make a journey to a nearby village to visit their son. On their journey they realize that something is mysteriously preventing clear memories of their past–and they realize this problem is universal. Britons and Saxons live together in an unstable harmony following the Battle of Badon and its associated slaughters. The couple encounter a Saxon knight named Wistan and a young boy who has been bit by an ogre and outcast from his home village. This band of adventurers sets upon on a quest, but each has an individual agenda which is hidden in the misty haze which drapes the land in a spell of forgetfulness.
Like in his previous novel The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro explores here how revisiting the past has consequences. Axl and Beatrice have been happy together despite their harsh life. The Saxons and Britons have coexisted in peace. Their quest may disrupt what cloaks the memories of all, with dire consequences. As glimpses of what lies buried emerge, Axl and Beatrice begin to worry: Should the past remain forgotten, or must it be rediscovered and dealt with?
The Boatman warns them, to no avail.
I loved this little allegory a great deal, and continue to admire how Ishiguro writes such ostensibly clear and simple novels which have layers and layers of elaborate meaning. Check it out!
Back before Halloween I bumped into a list of recommended recent horror–probably on the NYTimes website. Of the 7 or 8 titles listed I chose a couple to add to my To Read pile.
The first I read from the list was barely OK. Too derivative of a Stephen King novel, and too many clichés from current horror movies (unnatural smiling, kids crawling on the ceiling, animals behaving strangely like humans–yawn). The writing lacked King’s folksy warmth and humor as well, and was more like Tom Clancy’s stiff and uninteresting prose. The characters were not atypical of genre fiction–types rather than people, and the dialogue reminded me of the old Superfriends cartoons popular when I was a kid, where the superheroes would explain what they were doing while doing it as if the audience were too stupid to see what was happening (example: Aquaman would have circles shooting out of his forehead and would intone “I’m using my powers to summon fish friends,” and Superman would have red beams coming out of his eyes while saying “I’m using my infrared heat vision to burn the villain’s shoes off.”). I read Mean Spirited on a flight from Paris to the US and it whiled away the time, but I prefer more profound fare. The ending had an unexpected twist which nearly made it worth getting through.
But the second I read from the list was a knock-out. I’ve seen many zombie films, and have been an enthusiastic fan of the genre since I fist saw Romero’s initial trilogy back in the day. What I like about zombie stuff is how the genre moved from its racist origins to really incisive and often quite witty social commentary.
Fever House is the first zombie novel I’ve read–and it is excellent. There are actual fleshed-out and fully developed human beings involved, and I was on the edge of my seat as the familiar tropes of the zombie apocalypse were delivered with a new and clever backstory. I’d love to go into detail about the novel’s critiques of the hypercapitalist USA and its intelligence apparatus and the military industrial complex, but inevitably I would spoil the experience of finding out for yourself.
Rosson can write–which is atypical of authors in modern horror. Ramsey Campbell is by far the most literary and stylish current writer in the genre, but Rosson can craft sentences and structure a novel at an exceptionally high level. This book is a Slayer album redone as literary fiction. I burned through it in a day and half, and now must give myself a break from the walking dead before jumping into the second volume of the duology.
Here’s another novel from the recent NY Times List of “Greatest Books of the 21st Century.” It’s almost 600 pages long, and, given how weighty and dense and serious it is as a work of fiction I was surprised to find the writing quite breezy. I laughed heartily several times and regretted my decision 20-odd years ago to classify Jonathan Franzen as merely one of a crop of young writers at the time whose voices and themes and styles all seemed indistinguishable to me: Safran-Foer, Lethem, Chabon, Schteyngart, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed The Corrections.
I must however admit that the family at the center of the novel is deeply troubling. Most of the characters are eminently likeable and relatable–I found much in the family interactions which was all-too-familiar from my own experiences. And yet every character does hateful, despicable, awful things. Again, pretty typical of my experience not only of my own family but also of others I know well. This is where the sophistication of the book lies: documenting a time period in US/world history via the lives of a single midwestern family teetering on the brink of total and utter disarray and giving us a full picture of why across three generations. Franzen’s book shows us lovable people who we want to care for despite how truly terribly they behave–and given where American society has gone since its publication there is a bit of prescience in his vision. The entire nation these days feels like a dysfunctional family full of badly behaving people who are at heart decent and reasonable but whose unpredictable, selfish, and greedy behavior makes them despicable.
This morning I read an essay by Wallace Shawn in the NY Review of Books. The essay, called The End of a Village, will serve as the introduction to a newly re-issued book about the Vietnam War. Shawn was a college pal of the author Jonathan Schell, and manages to paint an evocative portrait of his friend and what he hoped to achieve through reporting on The Village of Ben Suc. Schell observed the complete and utter destruction of a peasant village by US forces, and tried to portray both the victims of this assault and the perpetrators with as much objectivity as he could muster. Having just finished The Corrections, I was struck when Shawn wrote this about Schell: “He generally seemed to like the military men he encountered. It’s just that what they were doing was appalling.”
This of course leads us to Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker 50-some years ago and her “banality of evil” (Wallace Shawn’s dad was managing editor of The New Yorker at the time). Shawn makes the connection, stating “If one accepts the idea that the ugliest of crimes can by perpetrated by people who aren’t ugly criminals, then the possibility seems to arise that even reasonably nice people might be at times involved in evil.”
The characters in The Corrections do horrible things as their family dangles by a frayed thread over the abyss of the 21st century. But at different parts of the novel, told from their different perspectives, I found myself rooting for each of them and caring deeply about their situations despite the decisions they made. And if individuals can do horrible things despite being “good” people, then so of course can societies and nations.
So we all make poor decisions and we all allow questionable motivations to drive us now and again. But how do we fix things after? When we go catastrophically awry and cause catastrophe, what is the means of repair? The word corrections has a lush ambiguity because the word has so many applications. A teacher corrects her student’s work. Parents correct their children (well, ideally). Some behavior is considered correct, and society drills us in the niceties of acceptable interactions. A captain who discovers her ship is off course will make corrections, a market which is overheated will face an inevitable correction. All of these senses of the word have a similar basis but different nuances. Every generation goes through a reaction to what was considered correct by the previous, now aging members of a family or civilization. So what is correct can be in flux, and those doing the correcting can be wrong or misled or mal-informed. When everything is called into question, when religion, government, the media, when public institutions previously held in high regard, when family itself all face skeptical and factual analysis and are thereby doubted and eventually shorn of their importance, and when much of the traditional underpinnings of a society and its very history are demonstrated as false and hypocritical, what is left? Where can we turn for guidance and support? How do we rebuild? I guess we’ll find out together.
I read a lot of Roth back in the ’90s, to the point where I found myself Zuckered out. When The Human Stain arrived I bought it in hardcover but never got around to reading it (my copy still has a “Borders Books 30% off sticker” on the cover, LOL). Recently the NY Times released their Best Books of the Century list; the novel’s inclusion sent me downstairs to dig it out.
The Human Stain is third in a trilogy of novels (the previous two are American Pastoral and I Married a Communist). There’s a twenty-some year gap between my readings of Volume 2 and Volume 3!
Roth is typically strong at recreating a time period of American political and cultural absurdities, which he’d done in the previous novels in the trilogy for earlier eras. As the title and timing of the novel might indicate, we’re in the era of Bill Clinton and Monica’s stained blue dress. What a terrible time to be alive and American! Moralizing hypocrites unbound, a sleazy and easily manipulated Chief Executive who fell for a honey trap even the bait didn’t understand, the rise of sensationalist and salacious cable ‘news’ coverage, etc. Out of that mess came an extreme and reactionary right-wing movement angry that Clinton out-triangulated them and co-opted their economic wish list to the point where he hammered through the final achievements of the Reagan Revolution. As the Democrats moved right wing economically the Republicans went wholly off the rails. A Democratic Party beholden to Wall St and corporate interests emerged, leaving the political left in the US nobody to support except for the occasional quaint New Deal Dem who got smoked in the primaries or a third-party candidate. What a joke all that was, and yet the consequences were dire and are yet to be resolved in the USA.
The Human Stain centers around (SPOILER ALERT) a Black academic who chose to pass for white and Jewish and pulled it off, who is fired from his position of Dean for using a racist expression while teaching at a small elite liberal arts college in the wilds of New England. But the slur was not necessarily a slur given its ambiguities and the context, and perhaps the firing was an unreasonable rush to judgment (Roth perceived the emerging phenomenon of cancel culture?). Nathan Zuckerman, who befriends the fired prof and former Dean central to the story, sets out to untangle the events leading up to the situation and to write a book.
My favorite Roth novels feature a manic, hilarious, and zesty narrator. If you’ve read Sabbath’s Theater or Portnoy’s Complaint you know what I mean. Those novels breeze by in a vortex of delicious voice, and the reader is ensconced enchantingly in the conscience of a pervert who participates vividly in experience and has things to think about. But this novel (like The Plot Against America) succeeds on its level of refined craft. It brings up big themes, big ideas, big hypocrisies, and the reader is forced to examine her own beliefs and assumptions.
I bought this Bantam mass market paperback at the B. Dalton Booksellers shop in Hunt Valley Mall, probably around 1985 or ’86. At the time I’d read a lot of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy but I was beginning to push out and explore other stuff. Not that the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy weren’t satisfying, but I wanted something else. The reason for this was due partially to reading a bit of Dickens, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Harper Lee, William Golding, and Hemingway in school. What mostly made me crave more ‘literary’ fare was Samuel R. Delany and his novel Dhalgren.
Dhalgren is supposed to be a sci-fi novel, and it is, but it was actually the first absolutely confounding and densely packed work of serious artistic and philosophic intention (what would later be called a “Post-Modern novel”) that I’d ever read. I had a couple different jobs at the time and I used my money to buy records and books (I should have bought shares in Apple, but WTFK back then?). I was drawn to Dhalgren by its spectacular cover and its length–I’d recently finished a couple Dostoevsky novels and this one was like Bros. K long; and that first sentence!
to wound the autumnal city.
I went all-in. The plot? Simple. Guy walks around a post-apocalyptic urban hell-scape. Keeps a notebook, writes poetry. Gets laid a lot, men and women. There are parties and things are collapsed but people still host dinners in their apartments. But inside the text are other texts inserted in strange places, and featuring different events and characters and settings than the novel narrative itself. But, since these were also in the novel narrative, despite being kind of asides and or comments or edits or revisions or re-imaginings of the primary action, I assumed they must be important also. Were these excerpts from the protagonist’s notebook? Who knew for sure, but probably. At one point the narrator sees himself in the mirror and describes what he sees and what he describes is the author of the novel, and my mind just went soaring. I read all the Delany novels I could get–Babel-17, Nova, Triton, The Einstein Intersection. But then I got to the Tales of Neveryon series and couldn’t cut it. I saw Stars in My Pocket when it came out and bought it, thinking I’d read it in 1986 0r 1987. And now in France I pulled that same mass market off my bookshelves and read it after nearly 40 years. When was the last time I read a mass market paperback?! LOL the text is so tiny. And of course due to age the book was yellowed and crumbly despite being unread.
I really liked it a lot. There are similarities to Dhalgren and the novel has aged well. I mean here in the early 80s Delany has imagined the Web, and called it the Web, and there are many interesting questions raised about what constitutes gender and who is really male and female despite their genitalia, and there are difficulties with meaning and visual representation of language and how gestures and utterances between species and races become confused for multiple reasons. It’s a surprising series of accurate predictions of the near-future from the perspective of the 1980s but imagined FAR in the future. Again, like in Dhalgren, there is not much plot, but there is a lot of meat packed onto this skeleton. It starts off with a kind of reverse Frederick Douglass–a kid on the fringes who undergoes a treatment to render him “less anxious” and a bit incapacitated intellectually, knowing that following this treatment he will become a slave. But he undergoes the treatment and we join him as he is exploited but doesn’t really care because his brain has been altered. But a set of special finger rings attached to a Web database, provided by a female kidnapper who uses him for sex, give him a taste of what he’s missed and then the story takes off.
I’d recommend it, but not as the first Delany you read. Get to know him first!
These past two months have been a bit exhausting. We’ve hosted an open mic night with a full band, a harp concert, several workshops and a dance performance, as well as the usual run of weekly classes and ateliers. All of this on top of the two rental apartments ramping up into tourist season, the crush of garden maintenance, a quick five-day vacation in Spain AND working at the local street food festival, electrical and plumbing challenges, renovations, etc, etc.
We’ve also adopted a French bulldog, two baby goats, and four songbirds. I’ve put in at least 50 hours on fencing alone over the past three months–building the goat enclosure, then expanding it, adapting it as needed, and repairing it several times as the goats found weaknesses and pushed through.
And with all this work going on I’ve allowed some major milestones to pass unacknowledged here.
The Milestones
As of June 2024 it has been 6 years since we moved out of the USA. We left behind an elaborate social calendar, a Victorian rowhome filled with art and objects, political and business connections, the best next-door neighbors ever, our pet dove Godzilla (RIP), and a city with which we were infinitely familiar, where we’d carefully developed an intricate network of deep involvements over the years. And, of course we left behind beloved family members and dear friends.
But, I regret nothing. All of the challenges and myriad difficulties of being voluntary immigrants were worth the sacrifices. I was looking for a new push, a new means of developing skills and becoming a stronger and better version of myself, and moving abroad definitely pushed all my faculties to the brink on multiple occasions. I often thought about involuntary immigrants, those who have no choice but to migrate, and considered how my difficulties paled in comparison (while the privileges granted by my paleness greased many wheels for us). Our experiences in Panama–living in luxurious high-rises by the ocean, pushing ourselves professionally in a completely different environment than the Baltimore City Public School System at a swank international school, making friendships with locals and other expats from around the world, going routinely to beaches on two oceans, going into the mountains, rainforests, cloud forests, jungles, seeing wild animals, getting the most out of our crippled Spanish–we loved it all. Further, there is nothing more liberating (after the trauma subsides) of getting rid of all the stuff Americans accumulate over decades. So many possessions! It was a lot to let go but we learned how to do that.
As of the first half of June 2024 we’ve lived in France for 2 years. Our French expat experience has been much different from the Panamanian, and for beyond the expected reasons of climate, geography, culture, history, language, as well as living in a decolonized nation versus living in a former colonial power. In Panama we had jobs and an employer with lawyers and an HR department who handled the heavy lifting for us. For the move to France we did much of our own heavy lifting, with the help of an excellent hand-holding service based in Paris. And we had no employer, instead we started our own business, which I suppose counts as another milestone (In June 2024 we marked the two year anniversary of not working for The Manand became ‘self-employed‘).
Our humble abode from an island in the Vezere River: Moulin Sage
We are loving the Correze region of France. The village of Treignac has proved to be everything we hoped when we chose it after touring dozens of small medieval towns across France as we researched moving here. Many people in and around Treignac have helped and supported us as we work toward our goal of creating an event space/concert venue/professional development center/arts and crafts atelier/pop-up cafe/retreat center/eco resort/organic farm/anarchist commune/naturalist resort/vinyard/exposition space. Yeah, we live in a run-down apartment in a largely decrepit old factory building, but it’s the best life! People come here for concerts and shit, which amuses me no end (our first concert was a gathering of about 30 people to hear ellen cherry). People we need seem to arise by magic at the exact moment we need them–could we host yoga classes here? A yoga teacher appears. Can we find a contractor willing to use recycled or repurposed materials found in the mill to create new useful spaces? Tom puts a home-made flier in our mailbox. It’s been a blast, and quite exhausting at times. But it’s different working hard for yourselves and your clients and not for somebody else.
We earn about 8% of the income we had when we had jobs. But our stress and anxiety is way down, and we can afford to live a quality life here on a small income.
Our growing menagerie of small mammals: Cornichon, Capri, and Bou-Bou the Frenchie
On May 13th, I turned 55 years old
So being in my mid-fifties is pretty much the same as every other age I’ve been. Differences? My collection of unguents and gels has grown, my toes suddenly look like my grandfather’s toes, and I go to bed before 10pm every day. 85% of the time I feel physically like I’m in my early 30s–in fact, due to Tai Chi I often feel more limber than I did back then. But the other 15% of the time is where mid-fifties life gets interesting: 5% of the time I feel exactly my age, 5% of the time I feel like I’m in my 70s, and the last 5% of the time I’m stiff and sore and feel at least 90 years old. I can do renovation projects and work in the garden cutting and stacking and digging like a maniac no problem, and then get injured standing up from the couch or opening a pickle jar.
The biggest realization over the first half of this decade? Shut the fuck up. Keep your opinions to yourself, listen to what others have to say and shut the fuck up. Don’t participate in or encourage gossip of any kind. Petty annoyances and grievances? Let that shit go. This is the time to work on the inner self and start preparing for the next stages. What books to read, what books to re-read, what places to visit or revisit?–all of these questions become more delicate and nuanced. Typically American dudes live to be 75. Maybe I’ll get there, maybe not–maybe I’ll go beyond? But it’s time to start considering the fact that you’ve got a couple strong decades left, and how to spend them is a key consideration.
As of June 11, 2024, we’ve been married 30 years. How does this happen? In the blink of an eye we’ve been married 30 years. It really seems like our 20th anniversary party was just a few years ago. It’s been a true pleasure seeing my wife bloom since we moved abroad–unfettered by an employer she’s just madly arranging events and ateliers and adding more and more artists and craftspeople and creatives to her roster. But as my Baltimore 8th graders used to say, “she do too much.” Sometimes I get completely wiped out trying to run logistics and preparing for all the gazillion things she’s got going on, and yet she continues adding more and trying more. We have this amazing piece of garden and an old stone building and sometimes I’d like to rest on my laurels and set a spell in a hammock by the river. Patricia tells me “you have to schedule some days off when you’re self-employed or you’ll burn out,” and then she adds two more retreats and another workshop to the calendar and buys some massive thing on FB Marketplace that I have heft downstairs. But it’s all about the love, and there’s nobody I’d rather spend 24/7 with as a business partner and life partner and lover and animal co-parent. She is a dynamo with a world-changing mission and has no interest in slowing down a bit, and I could not be luckier to see it all up close.
Mysterium Coniunctionis 