Jason Frye

Ramblings of a web developer and sometimes writer

Jason Frye

Reviewing “Safety” a short story by Joan Silber

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Logged story info: https://jasonfrye.com/short_story/safety/

This story by Joan Silber has a lot of present day themes. Here’s a quick plot summary. The story tracks two friends, both girls who grow up in New York City, Brooklyn, one a Jew the other a Muslim. They become fast friends but grow apart as many due in adulthood. The narrator, the Jewish girl, becomes a lawyer and finds her way back to New York after some time outside the city. In their thirties they reunite. Yasmina has become a performer with her husband Abdul. Abdul has a Pakistani background, but is an American citizen. That doesn’t help him later in the story when he’s detained by ICE and self-deported back to Pakistani. That’s a very wide view of the story, but it gets to the crux of the piece, that injustice has been done and the world has been turned from one with clear rules to one without.

The story title and narrator’s career and life share similar thematic resonance. We consider ourselves safe if born in the US. The narrator is safe, as the final lines of the story prove. She’s able to take the same train to work, like every other day, like nothing had happened, while all this madness is going on in the world. And her safety is never under fire. In fact, she’s safe as can be in a world of political evil. She’s also a lawyer who once believed the law was a real thing, something substantial, if not messy. Now law is something that is suspect, a thing of utility for despots. So is safety a reality for all or just for some, depending on an ever-changing set of rules.

There were ties in the story to the Nazis. Anya’s origin story, who is Yasmina’s mothershowed the dark side of despots and their rule. The forced migration by Stalin of her people led to her being separated from her family. Those parallels to the current story’s situation were not lost. And it speaks to the trauma happening right here in America to our friends, community, and sometimes to our loved-ones.

A key piece of Yasmina and Abdul’s story is that they’re comedians. Comedians often have the language and cultural touchstones in places where other, regular folks do not. They can pierce to the heart of issues with cutting references and sarcastic wit. They’re also one of the first performers to be silenced by overbearing administrations, so while the story doesn’t admit this part of the equation, it does seem like the Trump ghouls might have silenced and forced out Abdul due to his jibes, especially seeing as he was from New York, a city that runs from this administration.

I thought some of the trauma of the events that unfolded were muted, maybe on purpose. For instance, we don’t really see Yasmina leaving the country to be with her husband in Pakistan. We know the narrator visits her and helps her unload copious amounts of detritus from her apartment, but we don’t really see those moments and feel the loss that Yasmina is going through. But it all happened so fast for the narrator, who at once realizes her friend is really leaving the country too. And isn’t that how this all comes to be? Before we realize it, these atrocities happen and we’re left behind picking up the pieces.

Review of Beartooth by Callan Wink

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ARC review

Thank you to NetGalley, Spiegel and Grau for the ARC of this book. It releases on February 11, 2025.

Beartooth takes place in the mountains of the same name. The story tracks Thad and Hazen, two brothers living in their inherited home and largely doing as they please in the wilds. Callan Wink focuses the narrative lens on Thad. The brothers are a good foil for each other and their interactions lead the story for much of the book.

The book opens with the brothers on a multi-day hunting excursion into the backwoods, where these two characters feel most comfortable. Later, they drift further into the wilds and we see Wink’s prose shine. He pulls us into the wooded areas and gives us clear but not flowery prose that lifts the story and sets it into this world of bears, rocky inclines, and so much wildlife. We can feel and smell the outdoors through his writing. Often with books that focus on the landscape, it can become a character. That certainly happens in Beartooth, with the landscape becoming this secretive friend to the brothers.

At roughly the halfway point, I thought the novel was leading me one way and then it took an unexpected turn. The novel misdirected and rounded back on itself. At first, I thought this was a mistake, but it was a good ruse that led me back into the story, like walking on a trail, losing it for a bit, and then finding that well-worn path.

Thad and Hazen go through a transformation in the novel’s pages. I won’t go into that in the review, but these brothers go through inner battles and we see the results of these fights on the pages. I have issues with the ending, but those are minor.

I’ll be checking out other work by Callan Wink in the future. I highly recommend this one for the masterful descriptions of the outdoors and the ease with which Wink captures the essence of these two characters.

Review of The Believers: Stories by A. K. Herman

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ARC copy

I received an ARC copy of this through NetGalley. Many thanks for the early review copy. The book will be available on October 22, 2024.

The Believers is the first published collection from A. K. Herman. The stories envelop the reader in a world where language weds culture, where the protagonist does not conform to modernity in their conduct or moral acts. There’s humanity and appalling behavior, both in violence as found in Love Story No. 8 or in the sex between the pages of the story titled Love.

The stories are set in Tobago or New York City, with some characters hailing from Trinidad. With these characters as focal perspectives, we also live their language. The first two stories, Beginning and The Believers, use the vernacular to place us in the story. At first, it’s jarring to read a line of dialogue like, “Nah, just di-exam-dem and school. And mi want to burn di light-dem wid Pastora. You still work wid her?” But as you grow accustomed to the language, it also brings you closer to the story in a way that using a more modernistic language constructs wouldn’t.

Sex was present in almost all the stories, if not overtly, then through the hormonal actions of some of the characters. All of the sex scenes were vividly done, with Love having the most evocative scenes. But none of them were over the top or too lustful and they never carried on for too long.

The stories paced well and kept the reader’s attention. Even as I struggled with the cultural language in the early stories, I came to expect it in the later ones.

The characters stood out beyond their use of Tobago slang. These were humans in all their oddities and morally ambiguous acts. In the title story, The Believers, we come to know a couple who have a beautiful daughter, of which the story becomes centered even though we never hear from her directly. Mostly we experience the tale from the father’s perspective. The pastor of his church in New York is asking for his daughter to be married to a man in their congregation. This creates a rift between the family and the church that culminates in an evocative scene at the end of the story. As the main character struggles with the burden, we see a multi-faceted approach to religion and how it drives wedges and opens doors in some cases, but asks too much in others.

There are plenty of cultural references and social issues throughout the stories, especially when it comes to class, marriage, and relationships. But none of these themes override the story to the point of exhaustion. Instead, they weave themselves naturally into the characters and their experiences, which are very human and organic.

The stories have a bit of everything: amazing dialogue, captivating descriptions of the setting and people, excellent pacing, and minus a few exceptions, good payoffs at the end of the stories. It’s a short collection, but the meat is there and the bones make these stand apart from other collections. Keep an eye on Herman, as I imagine we’ll see more from them in the future.

The Believers: Stories rating

★★★★★

So I Built a Time Machine

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I know what you’re thinking, “No, you did not!” And you’d be right, but I did find a way to return to 2010 in spirit.

In 2009 my daughter was born, but that’s not what this is about. Around that time, my brother had bought an iPhone. I remember seeing him looking down in the pose of the modern thinker, staring at it while we talked with our parents. “Hello, we’re all sitting right here.” What could be more important than talking with your aging parents? I soon found out.

In 2010, I also bought one. I wanted a better camera. I had a baby, and the camera was going to capture memories of her for the future. I didn’t go with an iPhone at first. I wasn’t a fanboy back then. Instead, I opted for an Android, and one of the early photos from that phone still sits as my Google profile picture. A year later, I bought a Windows phone. The display was edge-to-edge and the most beautiful on the market. I disliked Windows since they didn’t have default social media applications, so the next year, I bought an iPhone 4. I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem since, and the cameras have been good.

The metallic, glass-surfaced rectangle became like a second appendage.

My screen time over those years has exceeded even my wildest expectations, but not in a good way. In early June of this year, my daily screen time average sat around six and a half hours, an incredible amount of time. So I started paying attention to my device usage. Around that same time, I started listening to Cal Newport, an expert on productivity, digital minimalism, and doing deep work.

My day began with checking Reddit, showering, eating (watching some TikTok videos), and sitting at my desk to work (checking Robinhood). At intervals during that first hour, I would reach for my phone due to notifications; these would alert me to breaking news from the NYTimes, fasting updates from Zero (a fasting app), and a buddy finishing a book on Goodreads, among dozens of others. And that was only the first hour or two of my day.

I started by tuning my focus settings and removing notifications. That worked for a bit, but I was still reading my phone at all possible times: eating, watching TV, bathroom breaks, during lulls in conversations, at stoplights, and brushing my teeth. What was I learning, other than performing my own Skinner box experiment?

So, two weeks ago, I decided to make a change. I watched a video about the harms of social media and how it shifts our thinking toward dopamine mining on our phones. We’re these scavengers searching for the next fix by flicking a thumb on the endless scroll adventure. I started with social media. And what a great time to give up social media, with the Presidential election coming. I highly recommend it.

I stopped cold turkey. At first, it was hard. I had to move my phone to the kitchen during work hours. I put it in a drawer during lunch. I took a magazine to the bathroom. But it worked. In a few days, I didn’t even miss the endless scrolling. Instead, I’d found lost time (hence the title). Buckets of time. Six and a half hours mostly comprised of social media gave back a lot of time and produced a lot of boredom.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve felt that nagging boredom for the first time in a long time. A very, long time. I don’t even recall being bored in the last decade. My dopamine pickaxe was sharpened and able to mine in even some of the dullest moments of my life.

Boredom also brought rewards. I was able to focus more. I read a book, then another, and another, and one more. I read magazine articles, dove into the backlog of short stories, and New Yorker magazines towering in my office.

For the books alone, I finished:

  • The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
  • The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson
  • Babel by R.F. Kuang
  • East of Eden by John Steinbeck
  • So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
  • Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

I was on vacation for a week and read most of those during that break and the subsequent July 4th holiday. But my days no longer revolved around my phone, giving me ample opportunity to read, as you can see. I found my attention to a task could be stretched longer and longer the further from the screen I went.

I’ve also done the following during these two weeks:

  • Written more than 5,000 words toward new and old short stories
  • Three different writing exercises amounting to around 2,500 words
  • Journaled and began a commonplace notebook to capture any rogue ideas that popped into my head
  • Walked for a half-hour most days
  • Wrote a critique of someone else’s writing on Scribophile
  • Programmed several features for a friend’s web project
  • Cooked and spent more time with my daughter

I also gave up video games during this time. That at least bought an hour each day, as I would regularly spend from 7-8 pm playing a game, sometimes longer. I watched some TV during this time, usually an episode a night. I finished Sugar on Apple TV and watched a few episodes of The Boys on Prime.

My screen time average over the past week was 1 hour 26 minutes, and that’s not completely accurate. One day my messages app was reading over two hours in a row, setting that day’s peak for the week at around 2 hours and 30 minutes. Clearly, I didn’t read messages for two hours straight, so my average for last week should have been below an hour each day and likely was much lower than that.

I’ve noticed Apple counts standby mode as screen time. I have a charger stand that my phone sits on while I work, showing me weather and time info, but if I use that, then my screen time goes to nine or ten hours a day, so I didn’t use it this past week. I hope they fix this in a future update.

Do I think this is sustainable?

I can continue living like this. As I mentioned earlier, Cal Newport talks about slow productivity in his latest book. The idea is to make small increases over time as someone working their way through a school curriculum would. I’ve intuitively been doing this with programming for years. I’m applying that to my writing now. I’m doing this now because I’m off my phone, living in the real world.

I’ll go back to playing video games at scheduled times. Emphasis on scheduled. I’ll likely not be going back to multiplayer or MMOs though. Games that can be paused. That’s the criteria.

Reading has always been a part of my life, but now I have a daily goal: read an essay, a short story, a poem, and fifty pages in a book. All told that takes about an hour and a half to two hours of my time — time I used to spend endlessly scrolling.

I’m going on a long vacation in the next few days. I worry I’ll break the positive flow I have going now. But I have a plan laid out. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Until then, gain back some of your time. I know I will be.

Control

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On the video, the creator talked in a muffled voice, so much so that she had trouble understanding the ingredient list. She spent a few minutes replaying it until Ray walked down the stairs. Then she muted her phone, placed it back on the counter, and waited.

“Any idea when this’ll be ready,” he asked as he entered the kitchen waving his hand towards the stove.

“Shouldn’t be long now.”

She heard him mimic her tone of voice and wished she could hop into the boiling water, take herself down the bones, and shuck all this aside.

Instead, she slipped several ears of corn into the boiling water, watching as they bobbed and flipped and skidded across the top of the water.

“Make sure mine doesn’t have any of that corn hair.” He stood off to her side, looking out the window above the sink into the backyard, where the shed door slumped open against the concrete pad. Beyond that, a few trees, then a bean field ready for harvest.

“You hear me?”

“I heard. Already scraped clean.” She kept watching as the bubbles seemed to submerge the yellow shafts.

“Better have.” And then he was out of the kitchen, rummaging in the living room, probably looking for the remote she thought. She was sure it was on the TV tray next to his recliner. It always was.

She looked at her phone again, and onto the next video, since the phone was muted this creator showed her the way without words but by his split-second edits. She wanted the seasoning for the burgers. Ray hated her way. He wanted something more than salt and pepper. She’d tried a few different things, but he always complained. She could see that this flashy creator had dribbled juice from pepperoncini into the burger meat, mixing it with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

She looked in the fridge and found a jar of pepperoncini, half-used. The sliced peppers floated in the juice, and she could see that this would make a delicious seasoning for the beef. She twisted at the jar lid, but it held fast. Stuck tight. She pulled the jar close to her body, into her gut, wrenching at the lid. In the other room, she heard Ray yelling for the remote, sending what sounded like magazines fluttering around the room. Her hand was aching. It wouldn’t budge.

“It’s next to the chair, Ray. On the TV tray.” He grunted in response, and she heard the news a few moments later. She opened a drawer where she kept towels and sifted through the contents until she found a small square of rubbery paper meant for the bottom of a drawer. It was soft but sticky. She covered the lid with this and used the better grip to pry the jar lid open with a pop. She spilled a little juice on the front of her shirt but didn’t care. She felt a burst of excitement like flying fast on ice skates and nailing a corner. 

She went over to the glass bowl where she had the pound of burger meat waiting and she doused the top with juice from the jar, added the other spices, and then mixed it, adding a little more juice for good measure. She molded the burger meat into four separate patties, then fried them in a skillet. The smell sang with the seasoning.

Later after Ray had enjoyed the burger, she made a mental note to go back and write a comment on the creator’s page, thanking them for the recipe.

“What was the seasoning,” he asked her after shoving the last fry in his mouth.

“I put in some pepperoncini juice.”

He laughed then and asked how she was able to open the jar. “I tightened that son of a bitch so tight it became a virgin.” And he laughed and laughed, slapping a hand on the table as he stood.

She picked their plates up and took them to the sink where she thought about her mother and her advice that some men have hateful humor, in that way, they’re like troubled children. As she drowned each plate in the soapy water, she wished her husband would grow up.