Anthropology….
I have been traveling a lot lately and despite 2,000,000+ miles in the air I am not a good frequent flyer. I don’t want to add to anyone else’s fears, but I think flight phobia is a misnomer: I think anxiety over being seat-belted onto a flammable pop can hurtling through the stratosphere at 500 miles an hour is a rational response to an unnatural situation. but I digress…
I recently discovered a temporary cure for in-flight panic: Anthropology by Dan Rhodes. I bought it in Beijing because it contained 101 extremely short works. You see, since I usually re-read (80-100 times) the first paragraph in traditional story collections–in between guesses about the glide ratio of a 757 (about the same as a rock)–during turbulence; I thought a group of one-paragraph tales would be a perfect buy. And so it was.
Anthropology is a collection of fantastic tales about girlfriends real and imagined; micro fiction (10-300 or so words long) that makes breakneck turns from comedy to tragedy and all the way back in a sigh or a chortle; all of them land somewhere in that delightful place between the sad last questions of Pablo Neruda and the joyful madess of Garcia-Marquez’s melancholoy whores.
For once I am delighted to read and re-read pieces like this:
I loved an anthropologist. She went to Mongolia to study the gays. At first she kept their culture at arm’s length, but eventually she decided that her fieldwork would benefit from some assimilation. she worked hard to become as much like them as possible and gradually was accepted. After a while she ended our romance by letter. It breaks my heart to think of her herding those yaks in the freezing hills, the peak of her leather cap shielding her eyes from the driving wind, her wrist dangling away, and nothing but a handlebar mustache to keep her top lip warm.
Hey, do read them: they are lots cheaper than anti-anxiety meds and refills are free.