Our woman suffers from a certain snobbery. Of the educated. It needs to be made clear that this is not class snobbery since hers is squarely, squarely and firmly, working. Her grandfather and great-grandfather being stove fitters.

That is a lie. Her great-grandfather was a stove fitter. Her grandfather, a mere scoundrel. Shiftless and mostly absent. A bad man. But stove fitter (stover fitter!) bolsters her own tradition (entirely spiritual) of working-class fons gushing black grease and chapped hands. A rough nobility there. Respectable if grubby.

Before the grandfathers, respectable and unrespectable, came land peasants. Famine. A boat to a real winter place. Far from Hibernia and its occasional bucolic snowflake. Also discrimination. A run of drunks. No mirth. Then her mother who married respectably but struggled with drunkenness anyway. Its legacy, its hooks-in-you.

No, our woman’s snobbery comes down exactly to the feeble high tensile thread of education. Too much book learning and a narrative arc whose murky charm is all backstory. Such that when the writer of studious bent splits his infinitives she tisks prescriptively and even shudders a little. His habit of inserting a negative particle between the two elements of the infinitive particularly vexing. To not do will not do, she thinks. She knows there are better things to think, but on the subject of infinitives she is entrenched AND defenseless. Beset by grammatical orthodoxy. The snobbery of education. Its primness.

Further, she harbours suspicions about gender and allowances. Allowing, for example, the writer of studious bent to claim wankery as innovation. Mind-blowing cleverness. Genius even. And this she cannot bear. Manhood exempting one from sense. In any case, she needn’t read him after Story Yak, and so she won’t. She has decided.

Story Yak yakety-yaks craft matters biweekly. A group of urban writers with self-facing irony selects and inspects a single story. Her last pick almost broke the Yak, or so said the Yak’s bearded founder who exhibited literary cretin impatience with Claire-Louise Bennett’s “The Lady of The House.” Despite good intentions, the Yak devolves, like most conversation, into unsupported opinion. Conversation lacking rigour.

°

If the writer of studious bent had touched her. If he had troubled himself to step beyond irksome spectacle of non sequiturs and other circus acts. Troubled himself to move her. If he had reached inside what is human. Put aside his flashy insecure moves. His preoccupation with the weird. With arachnids, for Christ’s sake. She could have met him there. But his ilk always left her out. Cold.

°

No, she’ll have no truck with the writer of studious bent after the Yak. She’ll stick to her modernists after the Yak. Their newfangled founded on something she recognizes. Something classical (viz. chiastic), Hellenic something. By which, something that adheres to beauty— even domestic beauty as found, say, in the trochaic rhythm of dryer tumbling bathmat. Its plumped-up warmth against one’s cheek and under one’s feet at the end-of-cycle beep. A vast intimate heat. Captured by Bennett – who, so our woman believes, takes up the modernist project afresh – without resorting to bizzarro genus of killer arachnid. Without cold, carnivalesque eye, or shock of an italicized face insanely frightened. Captured, yes, with occasionally misanthropic bonhomie, but no grotesque mask. No icepick gaze. No cock-out vulgarity.

And this is precisely what she cannot countenance in the writer of studious bent. His penetrating lack of decorum. Praised for risk taking – raw truth and footnotes. Gasp! Yawn. To her, his is another papier-mâché gaze, rough with hatred. A gaze glazed in woman hating. Therefore tedious.

Is a mother seen by the writer of studious bent? She is scorned for vanity. Mocked by the long ice of his pointing pointing POINTING finger. Its deictic misogyny and coarse half-truth.

Now, our woman contends squarely, squarely and firmly, that when the writer hates his subject, we have a problem. Not an issue or a challenge, an actual problem. The trouble is communal. Our problem. Our problem has a clear suspect. So, heap accolades? Were we are we afraid of him? The studiously bent writer. That would be the point. Our woman thinks. What a bully. And shakes her head.

Together with snobbery gotten at the BOGO event known as Advanced Degrees in Academia, our woman suffers from a certain pettiness. A charge of Schadenfreude could be levelled. She scoffs the studious bender’s unbroken block of text. She is smug on his refusal to wield paragraphs or yield a fraction of white space. His text a single justified unjustifiable block. On her most vituperative reading, the block betrays a Neanderthal philosophy. A club-wielding intellectual swagger. She calls him puerile and remains unpersuaded.

Until. Until, in the skipping glance of a nanosecond, she reviews the block and detects a kind of masonry there: the block not a block but a wythe. A text wall. A fortification and fear of chinks, of cracks emitting horror, one’s actual self. Block this. Grout that. Tuckpoint the lot with distracting grotesquery. Don’t show. Don’t show. Don’t show.

°

Eight years ago, late on a Friday, our woman went to the dentist with toothache escalated from nuisance to existential crisis. The dentist discovering a surface crack, removed an old filling from second bicuspid number 29, and resealed the cavity with an impervious composite resin. But the dentist, mind already on deep-fried mushroom caps and happy hour with slinky new hygienist, missed a whit of rot in the hole, so that by Saturday morning our woman’s cheek had puffed up, disfiguring her face. And soul. There in the mirror: Schrecken und Not.[1] Horrified to find herself outmatched by tawdry agony. Pain she could not transcend by literary means. No verse nor sentence turn in the world to assuage the horror. Her soul bristled darkly with the disfigurement.

Because the dentist’s emergency hotline went straight to voicemail, our woman, her face, and very soul remained disfigured by pain through the weekend. Her partner could not understand why she lay huddled in the dark of their bedroom under a great-grandmother’s patchwork quilt. Quilt fit for a stove fitter if not his good-for-nothing son. Why she lay huddled under patches dating to The Great Hunger: diasporic-grey linen; yellow-smocked bib of stillborn layette; wedding satin moldered with blight. I don’t see why you are so insanely frightened. It’s just a toothache, her partner had said and closed the door. 

At the root canal, the specialist dug out the impervious composite resin with a fine stainless steel tool made especially for such excavations. From the cavity putrefaction. Green stench rising like hell’s guts from witch’s caldron. And our woman struck with fresh horror. This rot had come from inside her. Fons et origo. Inside her it had festered. Had it always been there? Down through the grandfathers? The boat? Rotten patriarchal allele. Skip-a-generation scoundrel.

And as if this Joycean shabby epiphany (hell’s guts emanating) weren’t enough, the specialist – his middle-aged ease entirely sponsored by such procedures – reveals to her that no, nothing will flow through this canal. No, her tooth is not in fact healed by this canal. Rather, her mouth is become landfill, a tooth graveyard with porcelain headstone. The rot will show in a thin grey seam. A patchwork thread stitching original tooth to gleaming white crown. But she will feel nothing. The specialist assures her. Of this she remains unconvinced. Phantom pain flares up. Angst. Rot wriggled down into jawbone. Rot come ultimately, she knows, from the same blight that sent her honest scraping ancestors on their luckless voyage.

The specialist walks our woman and her chart to reception with a pat and a chuckle. Lucky you’re insured, he says pointing to the bottom line.

°

True. About the insurance and the ancestors. Our women’s land peasant ancestors stuffed their ragged trouser pockets full of tubers for the journey. Tubers infected with Phytophthora Infestans. Commonly known as the late blight fungus. Not a true fungus at all. More closely related to kelp and brown algae. Taxonomically, classified as follows: Kingdom Chromista, Phylum Oomycota, Order Peronosporales, Family Peronosporaceae, Genus Phytophthora. Only recently scientists have begun to understand the full genetic diversity and adaptability of this prolific and highly adaptable pathogen. A review of late blight history may put this in perspective.[2]

Late blight history my arse. Thinks our woman in the language of her ancestors. Youse’v got to be kidding me. And develops a weird preoccupation with P. Infestans.

P for phyto-phthora. Greek compound:  τό φῠτόν, that which has grown with destruction, ἡ φθορά. Infestans from Latin: infestare, to attack, trouble, molest, disturb (mostly post-Augustan, so not classical at all). Most unbeautiful etymology.

And the potato it attacked? A Lumper: An historic heirloom potato variety introduced in the U.K. around 1806. An inconsistently round-oval, sometimes knobby, white-skinned variety with deep eyes [of a scoundrel]. Flesh is white and waxy [i.e., craven], but taste is poor and culinary use[-fulness] is limited. Grown widely in Ireland before the 1845-50 famine because it was prolific and [un]reliable [as expected of scoundrels]. Nearly wiped out by Phytophthora infestans. Brought to North America by Irish immigrants. Today, rarely grown, but kept for posterity in several genebanks.[3]

Despite the ill-gotten snobbery, our woman is not immune to a larf. She recognizes a fair summation. She’s a lumper straight down to her genebanks. Airborne, pestiferous, [un]reliable.

In the end, also absentminded and still possessed of weird preoccupations – a fungus more akin to kelp – she misses the Yak. Where whatever debate, whatever yakety-yak is had on the writer of studious bent goes unheard by our woman. Whether their bearded founder championed the writer or criticized his Rabelaisian pugilistic piss and vinegar, whether the Yak remarked on his oppressive wall of text, its chinks and horror, the writer’s way of masking our tragic and persistent unbelonging in flashy grotesquery, whether rot came into it, in full genetic diversity, whether connections were made between highly adaptable pathogens and killer arachnids, our woman will never know. For she lies still under the quilt. Huddled. Fresh out of storied pomp. Yearning to breathe and exhausted by her own mask made of book learning and snobbery and all the vicious little judgements masquerading as good taste, correctness, and even truth. And under the tent of patchwork quilt – fragile shelter of her past and all our pasts – she remembers a picture she saw once of the writer in his bandana and is flooded with metonymic sorrow, of symbols covering what is most vulnerable. How they point to what we don’t show. Don’t show. Don’t show.   

[1] Detect language: German. https://translate.google.ca/

[2] Richard E. Tucker, A Potato Glossary, 2016. Our woman’s emphasis.

[3] Ibidem

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Eleanor Fuller won The Malahat’s 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist in The Fiddlehead’s 2023 fiction contest and the 2024 Cambridge Short Story Prize. Her stories appear in The Moth, The Manchester Review, Split Lip and elsewhere. A 2024 Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence, she lives in Toronto. Twitter: @_Eleanor_Fuller ; BlueSky: @eleanorfuller.bsky.social