Part I . . . Notes, References, and Shoutouts (Chapters 11-15)
(BbU Supplement #3)
Chapter 11. This Is Only Temporary
The personalities and antics of the “quartet of eighties girls” are loosely based on the occupants of the group house I lived in for a short spell after graduate school, with lots of poetic license thrown in. The desperation and denial were very real though.
Chapter 12. Stuck in the Humdrum
Nurse Jean Ronnell appears both here, in Beautiful but Unlikely, and roughly five years later in The Water Is So Wide (as Aunt Jean in Chapter 9). She is the only character present in both stories.
Chapter 13. Beautiful but Unlikely
The novel’s title, as well as this chapter’s, were inspired by the inside cover art of Radiohead’s EP Airbag/How Am I Driving? Donwood&Chocolate, 1998. ‘Your fantasies are unlikely. But beautiful.’
My life was so changed that stormy afternoon that I did not find it fantastic to be wandering around alone on the empty icy streets in the middle of a Nor’easter, but wondered instead at the traffic lights routinely blinking in the wailing blackness and the snowplows doing their usual gargantuan duty as if the landscape had not been irrecoverably upheaved.
In “The Last Days of John Brown,” Henry Thoreau so well expressed his surprise at the ordinary world not reflecting his ongoing internal passions, that I wanted to write a similarly constructed thought.
“I was so absorbed in him [John Brown] as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.” “The Last Days of John Brown,” by Henry Thoreau, 1860. In The Portable Thoreau. Revised Edition. Carl Bode (ed.), New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
Chapter 14. Love on the #86 Bus
I bought a tape player at the Yale Co-op, and like a child entering a fairyland, stepped inside Cutler’s Record Shop.
The late, great record store located on the Yale campus near The Yale Bookstore. Sadly closed its doors in 2012 after 64 years in business.
Chapter 15. Fortune and Fantasy
“And yet others argue that accountability comes along with these rights," the host countered. "You don’t think, for example, that a convicted murderer has given up any claim to these rights?”
The first voice again. “No.” The strength of the speaker’s conviction sank in with this simple answer. Most people shouted and strained on the air, desperate to get their point across. This man evidently understood the power of silence.
The effect of brevity and silence was drawn, in this instance, from the following quote:
“At one high school assembly, an exceedingly bright and articulate student stood up and delivered a short speech in favor of capital punishment. Then he asked: ‘Doesn’t a person forfeit his right to life when he murders someone?’ And Healey replied: ‘No.’ Then he let the silence sink in.” Former executive director of Amnesty International USA, Jack Healey, quoted in “Keeper of the Flame,” by Renee Loth. The Boston Globe Magazine, March 13, 1988.
Top image: Home away from home. Source: Google.