I'm not here to talk about my mother
Finland, hard sci fi, storytelling and a little basketball
Weeks ago in Wil Reidie’s The Recovering Line Cook, an excellent memoir Substack about restaurant life and family life as an Englishman in Finland, I learned that on balance, Finns (like ball) don’t lie. Specifically: “Finns refuse to make even the most innocuous promise unless they know, with certainty, they can follow through with it.” Also, that Finns won’t tell you they love you a second time, since why would they if nothing’s changed?
I appreciate this in an HTML-coding sort of way. I also appreciate the logic from the perspective of a reformed habitual liar who’s a bit obsessive about rigorous honesty as part of my AA program.
I think about this principle a lot, particularly when I’m writing fiction, which for me is kind of like scrambled memoir. If I were a famous person, I’d be asked about my writing influences, and I’d be inclined to talk about some American men (Richard Yates, Donald Barthelme, Philip Levine, James Tate) and some American women (Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Lorrie Moore, Lisa Robertson, Shirley Jackson).
But if I’m being truly honest, my writing influences are shitty hard sci fi and my mom.
My older brothers had every book from the Larry Niven “Known Space” series, the most famous being “Ringworld”. I went down a Wiki rabbit warren one night from that Known Space page, a little alarmed at the crystalline certainty of my memory of all 12+ books, ranging thousands of years in narrative.
Then I went to Half Price Books and read a few passages from of them, and they’re full of bloviating dialogue and extended explanations of how a ring around a star is a perfect compromise between a planet and a Dyson sphere for sustaining life, etc. No detail is left out in justifying the science as plausible, while also trying to sell that in the future everyone uses the curse word “Tanj”, an acronym for “There ain’t no justice”.
My mom’s less interested in overstuffing her stories with justifications, but she does just as much worldbuilding. No detail will be omitted from any story, whether the topic is sorting good from iffy Whole Foods produce on restock day, the way the toilets used to freeze up in their married student housing Quonset hut in Fargo, or a documentary about how a gluten-free diet can cure autism. There’s always a Hero’s Journey quality, where you get the travel to and from the central conflict, and there’s usually several reminders that no one is being judged. It’s absolutely the reason I love Karl Ove Knausgard’s books - why should the author filter out the details? That’s up to the reader.
Those two ingredients, to me, mean that everything’s a fractal, with infinite levels of equal detail. For example, freestyling here:
Shirt. Green shirt. Green shirt that reads “Leipzig Zoo”. Green shirt that reads “Leipzig Zoo” that was given to him by his father. Green shirt that was way too big for a six year old, so he wore it till it was too small. Green shirt that got snagged and torn by the washing machine. Green shirt that he kept until he was 11, two years after the washing machine incident.
Green shirt that he kept from his mother because his parents were divorced. Green shirt he hid because his father was an alcoholic. Green shirt he hid well because though his father was no longer an alcoholic, his mother cringed every time his name came up. Green shirt that began to fall into pieces.
Green shirt that he shredded and used in a hamster cage. Green shirt he’d hidden from his mother so long he was afraid she’d see him discard it. Green shirt that reminded him of Kronos, torn to shreds by a greater god, his mother. Green shirt that left the house quietly with the cleaning of the hamster cage. Green shirt that had been forgotten by both parents for years. Green shirt gone.
Anyway, I got in an hour at the Y tonight, first time in over a month. It was pretty quiet, but I got in some full-court 3-on-3 that none of us were in good enough shape for. I hit a couple of 18-foot jumpers right-handed from my one and only spot. I’ve been trying to retrain my right arm to shoot - it’s prone to tremors, probably due to all the alcoholism - and hit two of them, feeling like Lauri Markkanen for a moment.
Utah Lauri Markkanen, I mean; the Bulls didn’t give The Finnisher a chance.
Swish!