A New Book Comes...
Over the Ailineighdaeth season, we will be doing edits for the next book. Here is an excerpt:
There is one person I know who owns the monopoly on misanthropy.
Despite popular opinion, this person is not me.
He is a charming man, full of dashed designs and foiled ambition, who is as self-deprecating and and self-sabotaging as he is sardonic, who is capital at complaining and treats anger and vehemence like an Olympic sport.
He is all my envy. He will say I win at this, merely because he is afraid of my losing, but out of good faith and a general willingness to be agreeable to anyone but my mailman, I gladly bestow the gold medal of grievances unto him.
No, he is not an old grimsir; he is not unlike many: a man severely wronged by the world, shunned by good society and much maligned, his soul is blandished with dented finery, every chip in his spaulders a notch on the sufferance tree, one he uses to good effect to tell everyone exactly what he thinks about them and then cringe at the result.
He also has a great love of books. A hero, to be sure.
“Have you read all these?” said he, marveling at my library.
I own I was somewhat offended here. “Of course I have,” I sniffed. “They aren’t decorations.”
“Well,” he hemmed, “they could be.”
I do have a few ornaments strewn about, these being second or third copies of books I already own. These are what I call Reading Copies, the volumes I do not care about other people borrowing and climping. I will also use them as projectiles when I see the Bad Men in the courtyard below.
“You have so many books,” he exhaled, eyeing every tome in the treasury.
“I do. One for every fare-weather friend I have replaced.”
He need not ask me whether I was serious.
We talked about the state of the world, the gymnastic humbuggery of pernicious politics that is giving the world a poorer reputation than it deserves, sipping terrarian tea and trying by degrees to form a plan for the eventual and cataclysmic collapse of what remained of general civility. There would always be books and an assortment of memes to comfort us, sprinkled with flecks of ridicule that each of us would find hilarious under the right light, but morbidity reigned once tea was done, and after complaining that The Inside was becoming far too Stuffy and Soundy in the grand Jabberwocky of language, we went out, to regale in the bitterness of -20c and allow the frost to make chilblains of our hearts. A mutual friend was by, to watch the parade of dour prophets profess worldly doom.
A frightful wind attacked us, and the pageant of complaints began: Capitalism, comedic endeavours, poverty were among the first subjects to be derided. Of course there were no protestations to be made against cats, food, or literature, but as I was not playing the game well and not committing to the Act of Complaining quite so much as my friends would have liked, for good measure, as we walked down a portion of the street neglected by the snowplough, for good measure, I told a passing child, who was screaming an air raid siren, to please stop crying as it had no bills and therefore nothing to cry about, harangued a few oak trees for ruining the season by keeping their leaves long past their due, and joined in the lamentations over a Gothic church that had decided to replace their cross with an electric sign.
“What is that?” my friend cried, stabbing a mitten at the blazing advertisement. “Look at it! Who decided that an electric sign on a perfectly pretty old church was a good idea? They made it look like a bank.”
“One for prayers, I imagine,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, I can go in there and tell them what a shoddy job they’ve done.”
“They might be open to criticism,” our mutual friend amended. “Some nice girl with long red dreads has taken notice of their sign, they might be excited to have someone new visit.”
I looked incredulous. “It is a church, however.”
“They were trying to make it more inviting,” the Gold Medal in complaining began again. “That’s how everything is: everything has the illusion of being inviting to lure you in, and then, when you get there—benches!” he cried, pointing to a nearby seat. “Take benches. They pretend to be comfortable, they look like they want you to sit down, but they are engineered in such a way that they want you to sit but not for long. They’re designed to draw you in, and then, when you get up close, it’s too late. They got you. The illusion of invitingness,” he disclaimed at the loathsome bench. “Like life.”
“It is true,” I laughed. “We are led to believe we should want to be here—look how fun everything is, look how nice this item is, look how attractive this lacemutton is, but it is all a show. We know that what is deemed plain is superior.”
“Yes!” the Gold Medalist cried, wringing his fists in triumph. “Everything is manufactured to look nice but is really horrible.”
“Like me,” I smiled. I must always be contrary, of course. “I have too many conversational pieces about me: my hair, my bag, my wumpa hat—it makes me look more interesting than I really am, and gives an invitation for everyone to be enthralled for reasons I cannot understand. I don’t mind someone’s approaching me, but I do mind the proximity, the persistent questions, the immediate idea that I must be personable—“
“The ‘This-looks-different-she-looks-different-let’s-talk-about-it-ness?’ ”
“Exactly. I know they are harmless, but I should never wish to give a false impression of myself, and to be suddenly forced into friendliness and out of my curmudgeonly character is what I hate most of all.”
He continued on this point, declaring that everyone was encouraged by the Society of Manufactured Smiles to appear happy even when miserable while arguing with all the benches we passed.
“Not all pretense is bad,” I said. “Rather like drawing rooms belonging to old ladies, those that have things that are to be looked at and not touched. I would love a room like that, where guests could come and sit and saying nothing, but look well with a tea cup and a fabulous Sunday hat.”
Mr Gold Medalist called me Miss Haversham. My vanity was never so flattered.
“A wax skeleton in a gown with servants at her command?” I said. “You compliment me.”
“Those servants were children, as I recall.”
“Come, children do need to be given something to do. Labour keeps them quiet and teaches them to work for things. A job does make them less ‘soundy’.”
He laughed, and then, after he passed a man who gave him a scathing look for laughing, lapse into lamentation again.
“Just—what is it all for? Why is there a point to anything? Don’t you ever feel that way, that everything is fake and nothing means anything?”
“I understand you,” I replied, with a coy smile. “But I think it is part of us to complain. It is how we cope with things we cannot change.”
He talked on of the great complainers of the world, and ended with, “Between all of us, who gets to own complaining? The most oppressed?”
“I do not think there is a monopoly. Some call it being negative, some call it cynicism. I call it being realistic. I am not complaining so much as I am pointing out the way things are. I am not angry about the things I cannot do anything about, but there is a comfort in complaining because it is something we all do, some confessedly more than others.”
He understood my pointed looks and shouted, “Branding! That’s what it is. It’s all branding. Everyone complains about things in a certain way, and the gestures sell it. It’s marketing!”
“A big business, indeed. The church with the porno lights would agree with you.”
“See? They made a new sign and re-branded themselves!”
“It used to be worse.”
My friend seemed bemused.
“I used to walk by that church every Monday on my way to my dance sessions. I remembered it because they used to have a neon cross hanging in the middle of the stained glass. I thought that was an eyesore on a perfectly dismal piece of Gothic architecture. I had no idea then how wrong I could be.”
Complaints and how to brand them was to be the theme of the day, and we continued on our walk, gratulating in one another’s objections, marching back to the keep, where misoxenes reigned and misarchists weltered, and my sitting room was to welcome the great Gold Medalist, a gradgrind, a pyrronist, someone who was keen to tell me, with anxious looks, “Whenever I read your books and I get stuck on a word I don’t know, I always imagine you yelling, ‘LOOK IT UP’.”
Consider it marketing for my brand of joyous disparagement.
Despite popular opinion, this person is not me.
He is a charming man, full of dashed designs and foiled ambition, who is as self-deprecating and and self-sabotaging as he is sardonic, who is capital at complaining and treats anger and vehemence like an Olympic sport.
He is all my envy. He will say I win at this, merely because he is afraid of my losing, but out of good faith and a general willingness to be agreeable to anyone but my mailman, I gladly bestow the gold medal of grievances unto him.
No, he is not an old grimsir; he is not unlike many: a man severely wronged by the world, shunned by good society and much maligned, his soul is blandished with dented finery, every chip in his spaulders a notch on the sufferance tree, one he uses to good effect to tell everyone exactly what he thinks about them and then cringe at the result.
He also has a great love of books. A hero, to be sure.
“Have you read all these?” said he, marveling at my library.
I own I was somewhat offended here. “Of course I have,” I sniffed. “They aren’t decorations.”
“Well,” he hemmed, “they could be.”
I do have a few ornaments strewn about, these being second or third copies of books I already own. These are what I call Reading Copies, the volumes I do not care about other people borrowing and climping. I will also use them as projectiles when I see the Bad Men in the courtyard below.
“You have so many books,” he exhaled, eyeing every tome in the treasury.
“I do. One for every fare-weather friend I have replaced.”
He need not ask me whether I was serious.
We talked about the state of the world, the gymnastic humbuggery of pernicious politics that is giving the world a poorer reputation than it deserves, sipping terrarian tea and trying by degrees to form a plan for the eventual and cataclysmic collapse of what remained of general civility. There would always be books and an assortment of memes to comfort us, sprinkled with flecks of ridicule that each of us would find hilarious under the right light, but morbidity reigned once tea was done, and after complaining that The Inside was becoming far too Stuffy and Soundy in the grand Jabberwocky of language, we went out, to regale in the bitterness of -20c and allow the frost to make chilblains of our hearts. A mutual friend was by, to watch the parade of dour prophets profess worldly doom.
A frightful wind attacked us, and the pageant of complaints began: Capitalism, comedic endeavours, poverty were among the first subjects to be derided. Of course there were no protestations to be made against cats, food, or literature, but as I was not playing the game well and not committing to the Act of Complaining quite so much as my friends would have liked, for good measure, as we walked down a portion of the street neglected by the snowplough, for good measure, I told a passing child, who was screaming an air raid siren, to please stop crying as it had no bills and therefore nothing to cry about, harangued a few oak trees for ruining the season by keeping their leaves long past their due, and joined in the lamentations over a Gothic church that had decided to replace their cross with an electric sign.
“What is that?” my friend cried, stabbing a mitten at the blazing advertisement. “Look at it! Who decided that an electric sign on a perfectly pretty old church was a good idea? They made it look like a bank.”
“One for prayers, I imagine,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, I can go in there and tell them what a shoddy job they’ve done.”
“They might be open to criticism,” our mutual friend amended. “Some nice girl with long red dreads has taken notice of their sign, they might be excited to have someone new visit.”
I looked incredulous. “It is a church, however.”
“They were trying to make it more inviting,” the Gold Medal in complaining began again. “That’s how everything is: everything has the illusion of being inviting to lure you in, and then, when you get there—benches!” he cried, pointing to a nearby seat. “Take benches. They pretend to be comfortable, they look like they want you to sit down, but they are engineered in such a way that they want you to sit but not for long. They’re designed to draw you in, and then, when you get up close, it’s too late. They got you. The illusion of invitingness,” he disclaimed at the loathsome bench. “Like life.”
“It is true,” I laughed. “We are led to believe we should want to be here—look how fun everything is, look how nice this item is, look how attractive this lacemutton is, but it is all a show. We know that what is deemed plain is superior.”
“Yes!” the Gold Medalist cried, wringing his fists in triumph. “Everything is manufactured to look nice but is really horrible.”
“Like me,” I smiled. I must always be contrary, of course. “I have too many conversational pieces about me: my hair, my bag, my wumpa hat—it makes me look more interesting than I really am, and gives an invitation for everyone to be enthralled for reasons I cannot understand. I don’t mind someone’s approaching me, but I do mind the proximity, the persistent questions, the immediate idea that I must be personable—“
“The ‘This-looks-different-she-looks-different-let’s-talk-about-it-ness?’ ”
“Exactly. I know they are harmless, but I should never wish to give a false impression of myself, and to be suddenly forced into friendliness and out of my curmudgeonly character is what I hate most of all.”
He continued on this point, declaring that everyone was encouraged by the Society of Manufactured Smiles to appear happy even when miserable while arguing with all the benches we passed.
“Not all pretense is bad,” I said. “Rather like drawing rooms belonging to old ladies, those that have things that are to be looked at and not touched. I would love a room like that, where guests could come and sit and saying nothing, but look well with a tea cup and a fabulous Sunday hat.”
Mr Gold Medalist called me Miss Haversham. My vanity was never so flattered.
“A wax skeleton in a gown with servants at her command?” I said. “You compliment me.”
“Those servants were children, as I recall.”
“Come, children do need to be given something to do. Labour keeps them quiet and teaches them to work for things. A job does make them less ‘soundy’.”
He laughed, and then, after he passed a man who gave him a scathing look for laughing, lapse into lamentation again.
“Just—what is it all for? Why is there a point to anything? Don’t you ever feel that way, that everything is fake and nothing means anything?”
“I understand you,” I replied, with a coy smile. “But I think it is part of us to complain. It is how we cope with things we cannot change.”
He talked on of the great complainers of the world, and ended with, “Between all of us, who gets to own complaining? The most oppressed?”
“I do not think there is a monopoly. Some call it being negative, some call it cynicism. I call it being realistic. I am not complaining so much as I am pointing out the way things are. I am not angry about the things I cannot do anything about, but there is a comfort in complaining because it is something we all do, some confessedly more than others.”
He understood my pointed looks and shouted, “Branding! That’s what it is. It’s all branding. Everyone complains about things in a certain way, and the gestures sell it. It’s marketing!”
“A big business, indeed. The church with the porno lights would agree with you.”
“See? They made a new sign and re-branded themselves!”
“It used to be worse.”
My friend seemed bemused.
“I used to walk by that church every Monday on my way to my dance sessions. I remembered it because they used to have a neon cross hanging in the middle of the stained glass. I thought that was an eyesore on a perfectly dismal piece of Gothic architecture. I had no idea then how wrong I could be.”
Complaints and how to brand them was to be the theme of the day, and we continued on our walk, gratulating in one another’s objections, marching back to the keep, where misoxenes reigned and misarchists weltered, and my sitting room was to welcome the great Gold Medalist, a gradgrind, a pyrronist, someone who was keen to tell me, with anxious looks, “Whenever I read your books and I get stuck on a word I don’t know, I always imagine you yelling, ‘LOOK IT UP’.”
Consider it marketing for my brand of joyous disparagement.
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