Take a deep breath and say hello to the person to your left and right,
I feel like November swept in and utterly eliminated October. There’s the briefest pause for breath before we catapult into the Holidays and then 2024 already! I’m taking this week for a little look-around at the season of giving, starting with Halloween candy.
This Halloween was so odd - the trend in New York City is that loads of people still want to give out candy (and the generosity of everyone is over the top - tons of full-sized candy bars and deep buckets, allowing handfuls of candy to be taken)
Those of us who hand out candy like to see the little kids in costumes — but very few kids were out! I heard this from across the country from friends—the good people of America are givers but no one knows how to graciously receive anymore. Is this a symptom that we have become such a consumer culture that we reject things we didn’t choose ourselves? Yet the gift-giving continues—ruined by the fact that gifts are now laden with obligations.
People ask for example “how much they should spend” at a wedding. Creation of your own gift list on Amazon is common: I choose, you pay. Some nonprofits — not Pen Parentis—will not allow you to attend events without giving their suggested donation. If you can’t attend without giving the suggested donation, the donation is not a gift and the suggestion is actually a demand. (I think this verbiage should only be allowed if the person also has the option to walk in for free to see the event.)
Watch for resentment on both sides at upcoming secret Santa exchanges: the enforced giving is often strongly resented but the receiving is even worse. People are sick of having to take things they do not want—have you been to a book festival lately and seen the sad tables where authors are unable to give away their signed book? For free?
I saw a speaker talk about the state of the world last week or possibly the week before (I’m such a consumer of words that I no longer can properly quote my sources - it is a tragedy of the digital age that we are given more input than we can adequately file away properly) and in this lecture Phil Jackson coined a term to explain the exhaustion we feel at the end of each day — he said today’s society was extractive.
Extractive: we are not giving of ourselves willingly, instead things are being taken from us without our consent. Time. Money. Attention.
The example that was given was a Zoom call—how it brings people into your house that you would never invite over.
You have the option of curating your space (the way you do your hair and clothes), or you can deal with the emotional repercussions of unasked-for judgement on your most intimate spaces (How many of us zoom in our bedrooms? How can this perpetual lack of privacy be healthy?)
In any event, that was just one example.
Extraction is happening constantly. The end of every single day leaves us feeling that things have been taken from us without our permission—and without ability for recourse. This week I paid an Uber bill with a “traffic surcharge” — and believe me there was no traffic at that hour. I paid an electricity bill for our building’s common spaces where I get no input to how the electricity is used—or wasted by leaving lights on or doors open. I blocked off an hour of time for an interview that got canceled at the last minute. I got on a train that did not leave the station for ten minutes (stealing my time). Most of every single workday is spent recovering passwords or searching for my phone so I can input the code that was texted to me before I can get on a website - all costing me time and energy I had not expected to give.
The point is that humans get enervated by all this extraction. It is remarkable how hard it is to get over someone taking anything from you that was not freely given.
And now, as I mentioned earlier, even gifts have become an obligation. Halloween is one of the few holidays where the giving is not proscribed by a religion tradition or a relative’s insistence that “this is how we do things.” Now that tricks are frowned-upon, there’s no repercussion to being the only dark quiet house on the street—but the receiving is now the issue.
Parents don’t want buckets of candy in their toddler’s bedroom. They drag their kids up and down to hit every store but then they spend huge amounts of energy trying to take away the loot!
Most of the trick or treaters who stopped by my apartment on Tuesday seemed forced to come by their parents—the littlest ones were overwhelmed and confused, the older ones who traveled alone were interested mostly in the experience of opening our door (my kids and I had music and candles and a flying bat and costumes—giving an experience for which the candy was less important than the sensory overload).
But one of the 9 yr olds was already jaded.
“Oh yeah, I remember this apartment from last year,” he told his companions with an eye roll, “They always do something.”
In a society that constantly extracts your attention, money, and time, it is not surprising that kids are losing the ability to graciously receive that which is freely given.
Have we eliminated gifts from our lexicon altogether, to be replaced by transactions seeking a cash return, a gift of equal value or an uptick in followers. Must all gifts inherently hold some sort of public acknowledgment?
Where does the space of personal choice live in a world that makes so many demands of us?
Writing News:
YOU GUYS!!
My story collection was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews! I was nervous - it is terrifying to read an anonymous review, FYI - but I needn’t have been worried! The Kirkus review starts: “Ominous, masterfully conceived psychological fiction.”
Read the rest by clicking here!
Other inspiring moments were hearing my friend Ben Francisco read at Randee Dawn’s Brooklyn Books and Boooooooze (get it, for Halloween?) at Barrow’s Intense Ginger (His glamorous costume was rain! and his story was a knockout.)
I also attended the European Literature Night at The Ukrainian Institute of America (where my friend Laima Vince was reading her new translation of a very interesting Jewish-Lithuanian girl’s memoirs and poetry). There were some excellent panels that highlighted how difficult it is to moderate a panel of intelligent writers eager to talk about their own work, and also showed the impossibility of national-identity in a global world (these were both an unintentional consequence, but I spent a lot of time thinking about these ideas)
And I wrote a little piece on Frankenstein and how a passage in the classic novel opened my eyes to something completely missing in my daughter’s college search.
Random Final Thought
While at European Literature Night, I was surprised that large nations like Italy, Spain, and France were not represented, while two of the three Baltics were.
If you had to host a “Contemporary American Literature night” in Europe and could only choose authors from eight of the fifty states to put on the panels to represent America, which eight states would you choose and why?
You have put your finger on something. Gifts sadly don't mean anything if you buy whatever you want, whenever you want it, and you merely let someone else drive the car for a day while you navigated. Then, if it's not something that you would have obtained on your own, the reaction can be, "I didn't want this, anyway. I don't want to spend time with this. This is a gain in money, but a loss in time." So gifts lose meaning if the recipient is neither needy or open-minded.
A broader question is how and if we can help each other. I have long been skeptical of "help." When people are going through tough times, they are often offered help. But help is usually not something that can be summoned on command. It takes thoughtfulness, and there are limited opportunities. Gifts, to me, seem like this desire for easy help. They seem to symbolize that. But value is too precious to just created by snapping one's fingers, or by giving something (including money).
Congratulations on the Kirkus review! It must be like getting one's PhD. But my general impression of PhDs is that one's committee generally makes one feel like they granted it under duress, while this was totally a positive review.
I also was struck by the themes of motherhood and parenthood in your work. I was surprised at your book reading when you said that only one of your stories was about being a mother. I thought that if ever a work qualified as one that should be read at a Pen Parentis salon, yours was it. You wrote about so many facets of parenthood, but in a smooth way, without straining and hitting your reader over the head with the theme. It just felt like parenthood infused your work. As always, I could be off-base.
so great about Kirkus!
as for gifts, I can't stand being told what to give someone!