Once you think of Larry David as a schlemiel, the cases of "unwritten rules" start to pile up:
-The cutoff. You may not call another adult after 10 pm. That's "the cutoff." (But some think it's 10:30, and others, with kids, 9:30. I have a colleague who routinely texts me after 10 pm, so I especially enjoyed this episode.)
-Appropriate dinner table conversation. "Larry, my daughter is allowed to be at this dinner party. She is an adult." Fair enough, but when you start to tell a dirty joke, the daughter is--suddenly--no longer an "adult."
-How we treat children. In one egregious moment, Susie's talentless daughter presents, as a "gift" to Mary Steenburgen, a dreadful rendition of "I Love You, Baby," from "Jersey Boys." (The choice of song is especially delicious. You can imagine the parents in this wealthy home playing the soundtrack, reliving their childhood, over and over, and you can imagine the daughter drinking it in. Just brilliant.) Larry gives the daughter a lifelong present by cutting her off, though of course the gesture isn't perceived as such, in the moment.
-The etiquette surrounding picking up a check. Larry's insistence on paying for Rosie O'Donnell begins to seem like an anti-feminist gesture and, in a brilliant bit of theater-of-the-absurd, David takes the standard phenomenon of check-bickering to its most dramatic conclusion. (A full-out brawl.)
-When to voice objections. It's perhaps a universal phenomenon to feel repelled by a man's hairy bare legs on an airplane. But to voice that reaction? Unacceptable. And yet--the show asks--why must this unwritten rule have such authority?
-Don't talk about certain scenarios. Is it wholly implausible that someone might occasionally wonder exactly how wheelchair-bound people fornicate? What that fornication looks like? And is it--de facto, de jure--unacceptable to raise the question? Why must asking the question automatically brand "the asker" as insensitive?
-You must hold the door for a young woman, and then you must allow her to cut you in line. Again, the genius of the show is to traffic in gray areas: Tracy from "Hairspray" doesn't *overtly* cut, but clearly her actions amount to deliberate (subtextual) cutting. To see so much aggression in small, odd moments--this is David's genius. In "Seinfeldia," someone reports that David, during the "Seinfeld" days, had a certain manner of operating: You'd say something to David, and he'd quietly assess you, as if trying to determine whether or not there was maybe an undercurrent of hostility (or passive aggression) in your remark. And then he'd proceed accordingly. You can imagine David doing this, the minute you start watching "Curb."
My own way of operating in the social realm is so drastically different from David's, I find these old episodes like a kind of "wish fulfillment." Larry David invites us to dream! Which is something more than a small contribution to our world.
***
Here’s the start of one of Raymond Carver’s most famous stories:
My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa--Terri, we called her--and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.
There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years in his life.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, 'I love you, I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that?”
The story is “What We Talk about when We Talk about Love.” There are some subtle tricks; it’s Carver, after all! The characters all “were from somewhere else.” We lived “in Albuquerque then.” So there’s a fairy-tale element: This Albuquerque phase is like an oasis. It won’t last. Past lives pop up like ghosts. Mel’s seminary years make an appearance. Terri can’t help but evoke memories of her former man, who “loved her so much he tried to kill her.”
The opening lines have a whiff of Jane Austen-ish irony; “he was talking. He was a cardiologist, and sometimes that gave him the right.” Is the narrator suggesting that Mel is a self-righteous blowhard? No one has the right to be a bore. The suggestion is planted, then the narrator moves on to other matters.
The ice bucket and gin also seem to have mystical powers; they coax love-talk out of the four flawed protagonists. My impression is that love is always on everyone’s tongue; it’s “the central mystery.” You just have to get that gin and tonic water “going around.”
And then another mine in the minefield: How will Mel react to Terri’s dredging up images of the former lover? (And is there a better snapshot of the Divided Self than “I love you, I love you, you bitch”--?) The reader might think of “Boxes,” where another woman has the ghost of a former life following her, a life in which a man took his car and drove himself off a high, high bridge. The insurance company charged the woman for the damage to the bridge.
Human frailty, unarticulated tension, lives in transition--and we are off to the races. Welcome to the world of Raymond Carver!
-The cutoff. You may not call another adult after 10 pm. That's "the cutoff." (But some think it's 10:30, and others, with kids, 9:30. I have a colleague who routinely texts me after 10 pm, so I especially enjoyed this episode.)
-Appropriate dinner table conversation. "Larry, my daughter is allowed to be at this dinner party. She is an adult." Fair enough, but when you start to tell a dirty joke, the daughter is--suddenly--no longer an "adult."
-How we treat children. In one egregious moment, Susie's talentless daughter presents, as a "gift" to Mary Steenburgen, a dreadful rendition of "I Love You, Baby," from "Jersey Boys." (The choice of song is especially delicious. You can imagine the parents in this wealthy home playing the soundtrack, reliving their childhood, over and over, and you can imagine the daughter drinking it in. Just brilliant.) Larry gives the daughter a lifelong present by cutting her off, though of course the gesture isn't perceived as such, in the moment.
-The etiquette surrounding picking up a check. Larry's insistence on paying for Rosie O'Donnell begins to seem like an anti-feminist gesture and, in a brilliant bit of theater-of-the-absurd, David takes the standard phenomenon of check-bickering to its most dramatic conclusion. (A full-out brawl.)
-When to voice objections. It's perhaps a universal phenomenon to feel repelled by a man's hairy bare legs on an airplane. But to voice that reaction? Unacceptable. And yet--the show asks--why must this unwritten rule have such authority?
-Don't talk about certain scenarios. Is it wholly implausible that someone might occasionally wonder exactly how wheelchair-bound people fornicate? What that fornication looks like? And is it--de facto, de jure--unacceptable to raise the question? Why must asking the question automatically brand "the asker" as insensitive?
-You must hold the door for a young woman, and then you must allow her to cut you in line. Again, the genius of the show is to traffic in gray areas: Tracy from "Hairspray" doesn't *overtly* cut, but clearly her actions amount to deliberate (subtextual) cutting. To see so much aggression in small, odd moments--this is David's genius. In "Seinfeldia," someone reports that David, during the "Seinfeld" days, had a certain manner of operating: You'd say something to David, and he'd quietly assess you, as if trying to determine whether or not there was maybe an undercurrent of hostility (or passive aggression) in your remark. And then he'd proceed accordingly. You can imagine David doing this, the minute you start watching "Curb."
My own way of operating in the social realm is so drastically different from David's, I find these old episodes like a kind of "wish fulfillment." Larry David invites us to dream! Which is something more than a small contribution to our world.
***
Here’s the start of one of Raymond Carver’s most famous stories:
My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa--Terri, we called her--and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.
There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years in his life.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terri said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, 'I love you, I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that?”
The story is “What We Talk about when We Talk about Love.” There are some subtle tricks; it’s Carver, after all! The characters all “were from somewhere else.” We lived “in Albuquerque then.” So there’s a fairy-tale element: This Albuquerque phase is like an oasis. It won’t last. Past lives pop up like ghosts. Mel’s seminary years make an appearance. Terri can’t help but evoke memories of her former man, who “loved her so much he tried to kill her.”
The opening lines have a whiff of Jane Austen-ish irony; “he was talking. He was a cardiologist, and sometimes that gave him the right.” Is the narrator suggesting that Mel is a self-righteous blowhard? No one has the right to be a bore. The suggestion is planted, then the narrator moves on to other matters.
The ice bucket and gin also seem to have mystical powers; they coax love-talk out of the four flawed protagonists. My impression is that love is always on everyone’s tongue; it’s “the central mystery.” You just have to get that gin and tonic water “going around.”
And then another mine in the minefield: How will Mel react to Terri’s dredging up images of the former lover? (And is there a better snapshot of the Divided Self than “I love you, I love you, you bitch”--?) The reader might think of “Boxes,” where another woman has the ghost of a former life following her, a life in which a man took his car and drove himself off a high, high bridge. The insurance company charged the woman for the damage to the bridge.
Human frailty, unarticulated tension, lives in transition--and we are off to the races. Welcome to the world of Raymond Carver!
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