It’s extraordinary what you find out if you idly google someone. I didn’t know anything about Deborah Eisenberg so I did just that and was most surpriIt’s extraordinary what you find out if you idly google someone. I didn’t know anything about Deborah Eisenberg so I did just that and was most surprised to find that this cool clear creator of these seven sedulous studies of self-sabotaging, psychological faultlines and minor life disasters is married to none other than Mr Hall, the wry and much put-upon teacher in Clueless
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I liked these short stories but only loved one, “Rafe’s Coat” – the one about the very brittle 33 year old arts foundation board member who’s crushing badly on her friend Rafe whose latest girlfriend is in a soap opera called This Brief Candle. She has a withering view of humanity. On the subject of divorce, for instance :
John and I parceled out our holdings and made our adieus and slogged through whatever contractual and emotional dreariness was necessitated by going on with life.
It has been a quiet week in Winesburg, Ohio, the little town that time forgot, and not without reason. The apple harvest was pretty good this year, mo It has been a quiet week in Winesburg, Ohio, the little town that time forgot, and not without reason. The apple harvest was pretty good this year, mostly all the good apples have been picked, but you can find those small gnarled forgotten apples that are kind of twisted into the grotesque shapes of men’s foul sickening hearts right there in the grass if you look. And they taste so sweet. So sweet. This last week Seth Richmond strangled a couple of people and Kate Swift was found praying naked in the street again but heck you should see what happens in Indiana. Lot worse than that. Some of our reverends have got a few unreverent hobbies and I could name one or two falling down drunks and practically every other person swears they are going to get out of Winesburg on the next bus or hop a freight if they have to but mostly they don’t.
Well, that’s the news from Winesburg Ohio, where all the men are weird, all the women are a lot weirder, and all the children just plain creepy.
1. Yes, it is true that none of these nine stories made it onto the P Bryant List of All Time Favourite Stories, but Nathan Ballingrad shouldn’t feel 1. Yes, it is true that none of these nine stories made it onto the P Bryant List of All Time Favourite Stories, but Nathan Ballingrad shouldn’t feel disconsolate. Droves of famous authors have banged at the gates of that List and been turned away.
2. This was one of those collections where the whole thing evoked this very cool unexpected gruesome original vibe. Vibe is not a word I normally throw around but here it is inescapable. This book is vibey, vibacious, vibalicious.
3. These days, after everything that’s happened, you know, everything, horror stories must be tough to write without sounding silly. Mr Ballingrad is not just not silly, he is elegant, which is the opposite.
4. I like that he takes some modern urban story, like a guy just out of prison after a six year stretch trying to get back together with his wife, and smashes something weird into the middle of it, like an angel or a lake monster, which never get any explanation. I guess these creatures could be symbols or sumpin but let’s not go down that dreary road. I want a dying angel in a story to be a dying angel!
5. There’s only one single lake monster in this book, so if you don’t like lake monster stories that shouldn’t put you off....more
As I never get tired of repeating, because it is so deliciously offensive to modern ears, Jane Bowles humorous self-invented nickname was Crippie the As I never get tired of repeating, because it is so deliciously offensive to modern ears, Jane Bowles humorous self-invented nickname was Crippie the Kike Dyke, due to the fact that she had a tubercular leg that they had to fuse (don’t ask) so it didn’t bend. That was the Crippie bit, the rest of it is self-explanatory.
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She wrote very little, probably not surprising, as she lived with her gay husband mostly in Morocco amidst clouds of kif, drinking gallons of gin, conducting many affairs and braving blizzards of psychological and physical health problems, such as strokes. And plus, she found writing to be a torture.
These stories, as everyone will tell you, are strange. I found them frustrating. She constructs intricate intimate worlds of borderline lunacy and just as you’re steeling yourself for the big dénouement you get left dangling. You want more in almost all these stories. But you don’t get it. One of them, “Camp Cataract” I was sure was going to become one of my all time favourites, and then – Jane, don’t leave me this way! Again! So I wasn’t sure I understood why JB is so rated by some critics (“one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language” – John Ashberry; “she is a neglected genius” – New Yorker; “a major talent with a minor readership” – Guardian).
But I will be reading her apparently even stranger novel Two Serious Ladies later this year, which I am calling The Year Of Short Novels. (Long novels are okay, but they sure do take a long time to read. It has taken me years to realise this.)
A more truthful title for this collection would be Really Quite Odd Not Exactly Pleasures....more
1. Flannery. Kind of a pretty odd name. Some writers get them, don’t they – Edwidge, Somerset, Rudyard, Three strange things about Flannery O’Connor :
1. Flannery. Kind of a pretty odd name. Some writers get them, don’t they – Edwidge, Somerset, Rudyard, Rider, Tennessee. Never heard of nobody else called no Flannery.
2. What links these celebs with our author : Selina Gomez, Lady Gaga and Ferdinand Marcos. Answer : lupus. An auto-immune disease.
3. Grace. Apparently either a lot or all of Flannery’s stories are about grace. This is a Christian concept defined as "the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not necessarily because of anything we have done to earn it". The good cop side of God, in other words. (Day of Judgement will be the Bad Cop, I assume.) But as a non-Christian, I could not understand this aspect of these stories at all. Seemed to me we were introduced to various unpleasantly smug individuals who then got met with unexpected and serious acts of violence. The love and mercy was in real short supply, far as I could see. But that was okay, I didn’t need it. ...more
They'd written their own vows, promising to be "intensely honest" with each other. They had not specifically said that they would hold up each other'sThey'd written their own vows, promising to be "intensely honest" with each other. They had not specifically said that they would hold up each other's flaws to the most rigorous scrutiny, calling out each other's smallest mistakes, like fact checkers, believing, perhaps, that the marriage would thrive only if all personal errors and misdeeds were rooted out of it. This mission had gone unstated.
Ouch. That is from "Cold Little Bird" by Ben Marcus - he nearly makes up for the horrible Flame Alphabet novel I tried to read and failed. Here he takes the idea of the weird unloveable kid - we have met them before in The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing (very bad) and of course We Need to Talk About The Weirdo by Lionel Shriver (not so good) - but this time it's done right and wow, I needed another 50 pages of that one, but cruel Ben Marcus left me dangling.
There was also "The Flower" by Louise Erdrich - what a fabulous style, must get more of her - but otherwise as usual, alas, too many stories that people who don't like short stories are going to jump on say see, that's why I don't like short stories, they're these strange little fragments that start anywhere and go nowhere....more
This book seems to have a bit of a food obsession.
I watched the waitresses move around gingerly with their round black tTHERE’S NOTHING QUITE LIKE IT
This book seems to have a bit of a food obsession.
I watched the waitresses move around gingerly with their round black trays of coloured cocktails and small plates of bread and bowls of olives p11
Food, glorious food! Hot sausage and mustard! While we're in the mood -- Cold jelly and custard!
He ate a soup made of mutton and spicy peppers. He shovelled the rice into his mouth like a peasant, let it fall all over his lap and onto the floor p31
Peas pudding and saveloys What next is the question? Rich gentlemen have it, boys -- indigestion!
He rarely left the living room and liked to order in large Mexican dinners or whole pizzas. He was always eating something and dumping out the colostomy bag right afterward. P39
Just picture a great big steak Fried, roasted, or stewed Oh food! magical food! wonderful food! marvelous food!
We got up and ate the food she had made : spaghetti and meatballs and chocolate pudding. Then I threw up and said goodbye. P51
Food, glorious food! What is there more handsome? Gulped, swallowed or chewed -- Still worth a king's ransom.
I brought all my favourite things to eat and ate them almost immediately upon arrival : cornichons, smoked trout, rye crackers, sheep feta, cured olived, dried cherries, coconut-covered dates, Toblerone. P74
What is it we dream about? What brings on a sigh? Piled peaches and cream , about Six feet high!
I also bought a six-pack of beer, a family-sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and a pound of Twizzlers from the gas station p77
Food, glorious food! Don't care what it looks like -- Burned! Underdone! Crude! Don't care what the cook's like.
The fattest people on earth could be found buzzing around in electronic wheelchairs, trailing huge carts full of hamburger meat and cake mix and jugs of vegetable oil and pillow-size bags of chips p112
Just thinking of growing fat -- Our senses go reeling One moment of knowing that Full-up feeling!
He lit the stove, melted the margarine, poured the popcorn in, and stood over the pot with his eyes closed p167
Food, glorious food! What wouldn't we give for That extra bit more -- That's all that we live for
I lived off powdered cinnamon doughnuts and orange soda, fries from Astro Burger, and occasional joints rolled with stale weed p 188
Why should we be fated to Do nothing but brood On food
“Now here, eat this.” She returned with a dinner plate piled high with meat loaf… “That is kasha,” she said, pointing to a boiling pot on the stove. “I would offer you some but you’ll hate it. It tastes like cats…” p201
Magical food, Wonderful food
I lay on my bed digesting the mound of schnitzel and boxed mashed potatoes and JELL-O she’d prepared herself p204
Marvellous food, Fabulous FOOOOOOD
THE SHORT STORY THING
David Foster wallace talking about The Pale King (an unfinished novel):
It’s a series of set-ups for things to happen but nothing ever happens
This is some people’s idea of what short stories in general are. I would struggle violently to tell everyone that no, that’s not what they are, and things do happen in a short story. But Ottessa Moshfegh is here to pull the rug from under my thrashings and embarrassing armwavings and babblings because here are 14 stories which are exactly set-ups for things to happen but nothing ever happens. Including one story called “Nothing Ever Happens Here”. I see what she did there…...more
Horrible stories full of muscular acronyms and bitter anguish, some from inside the killing zone that was Fallujah, some from the deeply uncomfortableHorrible stories full of muscular acronyms and bitter anguish, some from inside the killing zone that was Fallujah, some from the deeply uncomfortable phantom zone of attempted reintegration into civilian life. The author does not pull any punches about military life – all its profound ugliness is displayed here.
Phil Klay has a tough but tender style and this is all good stuff and I recommend this book but alas, I have to make a complaint. As usual with fiction or documentary from the soldier’s ground-level-view there is no context. Questions about what are we doing here, what is the objective, what are our war aims, is this the wrong war – these are never addressed, or only alluded to in an eye-rolling way, if some dippy civilian mentions politics. In this book the Marines have become kind of holy to the rest of America, like saints. They don’t ask why, they love their fellow Marines and they follow orders and there’s no perspective, they have neither the time or the inclination. These Marines suffer and die & this suffering and dying makes their actions unimpeachable, and this makes the thoughtful surviving Marines like our author even more disturbed by their terrible experiences.
It’s a kind of claustrophobia. The Marines don't question the war and no American would dream of questioning the Marines and so the suffering of the Marines throws up an invisible protective screen round the politicians.
They were told (we were told) that they, the American soldiers, were fighting for “freedom” – the war was officially named Operation Iraqi Freedom. But – to quote from another of my own reviews - if your country has been invaded and occupied by a foreign army, then maybe, fighting to get rid of the foreign army is, for you, fighting for freedom. In the case of Iraq, if you thought that, you would be wrong and the American soldiers were going to shoot you if you thought that. But maybe, for an uneducated population, that was an easy mistake to make.
I would like to read a collection of fictions from the Iraqi point of view, but I doubt if one exists (let me know if I’m wrong)....more
Joyce Carol Oates says (in a review in the New York Times)
no postwar and posthumous literary reputation of the twentieth century, with the notable excJoyce Carol Oates says (in a review in the New York Times)
no postwar and posthumous literary reputation of the twentieth century, with the notable exception of Sylvia Plath, has grown more rapidly and dramatically than that of Flannery O’Connor, whose work has acquired a canonical status since her death in 1964.
And she compares Flannery’s rep with that of Carson McCullers and Truman Capote who, sez Joyce, have gone down.
Which surprised me. I mean, no one could dispute The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or Breakfast at Tiffany’s or In Cold Blood, but plenty of people might like to quibble with Wise Blood and its crazy ass ilk.
Gee, I wish they’d publish the Authors Hot 100 every year so we could see whose reputations have gone up and whose have gone down. That would be fun. As to what makes them go up and down, I guess that’s a secret sauce. Likes of us don’t get to know.
Well, anyhow. I should tell you that I’m in a bit of a quandary here, in this review.
With Flannery O’Connor I’m in the most uncomfortable position of greatly enjoying and admiring a writer who I know absolutely I don’t understand, and further, that if I did, I wouldn’t like any part of what she was telling me. This is because she was a consciously Christian writer, and Catholic to boot. Many, maybe all, of these stories are like – or actually are – parables. Sometimes they become explicitly mystical :
He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.
Say what? What was that again?
So when I find myself loving these strange, menacing, hilarious stories with their deliciously dozy characters and bent-backwards dialogue, the Christian message about sin and redemption and grace and so forth just goes whizzing right over my head.
It’s rather like buying Playboy for the pictures of the naked ladies and not bothering to read any of the terrific articles at all....more
Today there was a fire at London Zoo. The BBC newsreader solemnly informed us that one person was taken to hospital for smoke inhalation and several mToday there was a fire at London Zoo. The BBC newsreader solemnly informed us that one person was taken to hospital for smoke inhalation and several more staff members were treated on site. Then she said “An aardvark is presumed dead and five meerkats are currently unaccounted for”. Miranda July would have loved the strange, poignant appearance of an aardvark in the hourly BBC news reports; it was at the same time very funny and intensely sad. Which is what Miranda July is all about in her lovely film and weird but splendid novel.
So I can enthusiastically recommend her film Me and You and Everyone we Know, and also her novel The First Bad Man. But not these short stories. They’re just too short, and also too arch, which the dictionary defines as marked by a deliberate and often forced playfulness, irony, or impudence .
And yes, Miranda July might be accused of impudence in thinking these slight wisps are worth some of our hard-earned conscious moments but it’s the forced playfulness which got on my nerves.
The BBC said the aardvark’s name was Misha. The zoo will not be releasing the names of the missing meerkats until relatives have been informed.
Almost terrific collection of five stories which begins in light obvious not that funny satire and ends in a pall of thick dread. On the way, Tom RachAlmost terrific collection of five stories which begins in light obvious not that funny satire and ends in a pall of thick dread. On the way, Tom Rachman invents a great idea for a whole novel which he then tosses away barely used.
The great idea is so blindingly simple it almost hurts. He calls it Leakzilla.
Hackers breached all the main email providers – Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, iCloud, everything – and downloaded each personal email ever archived, posting the whole lot online. For a while the authorities battled to take it down. But the data dump kept appearing elsewhere. Log on to any of the mirrored sites, type in a name, and you could pore over the most intimate emails, be they from Bob Dylan or Kellyanne Conway or The Queen.
He points out straight away that a few categories of people were spared this public humiliation – the very young who don’t use email; the old who never learned how to (I would include The Queen in that group!); the very poor who never had internet access; and the paranoid, who were right all along. Some famous people, it turned out, never used email : Trump, Putin, Julian Assange. Everyone else’s most shameful emails were these to read for the whole world.
Well, the amount of unexploded ordnance this situation creates is mindblowing. Marriages doomed. Of course. Politicians ruined, of course. Could businesses continue to function, with all their trade secrets revealed? It would have been such fun to see this worked out – a whole different kind of apocalypse – but Tom uses it to mess slightly with his characters and inflict a few satirical swipes in one story only, and then moves on. Tom! That is apocalypto interruptus! Very frustrating!
So the stories are, mostly lightly satirical and interwoven and very moreish, I read this in one day,
but it is very short, so short they have to print the type like
this with twice the space between lines
than there is in a normal book so it looks like a book for very
young readers.
The last story “How the End Begins” is the best, a real chiller with a sudden fantasy element – a website appears which will tell you the cause of anyone’s death, yourself, your family, your children, the President, anyone. The woman in this story, like most people, fools around with it and dismisses it as a hoax, and then finds out it’s completely accurate. Best horror story I have read in a long while.
This book’s title and marketing do it a disservice, it’s better than that. The Trump Generation-related satire is really sub-Tom Wolfe and not that great, but the whole thing speeds by so merrily and has this one great idea and then boffs you on the head with the last 40 pages so yeah, four stars....more
There are enough albums I have bought only to find that the track I already knew and liked is the only track I like.
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"Portable Library", the fiThere are enough albums I have bought only to find that the track I already knew and liked is the only track I like.
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"Portable Library", the first story here, is that track. It’s brilliant, all about this gay black teenager in the Bronx perpetually poised between being despised and being ecstatic. One of my favourite stories! Really perfect!
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The rest of these sad tales of black teenagers (don’t look for anything jolly here) are written in a very dense street talk, strictly from one or another kid’s point of view, and plenty of essential background info missed out, so it’s often hard to know what the hell is going on.
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But mostly what’s going on is that step-fathers are diddling step-daughters or boyfriends are beating on girlfriends or kids are school are making probably-gay kids’ lives a living hell. You know, same old, same old.
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Of course it's just possible I wasn't the target audience for this book.
Kinda hard to talk about this one, it’s all very blah blah blah, not much happening. A kid gets a summer job. Somebody drowns. But here’s how to tell Kinda hard to talk about this one, it’s all very blah blah blah, not much happening. A kid gets a summer job. Somebody drowns. But here’s how to tell if you’d like Rebecca Curtis – do you like American indie movies? If so, these are short stories written with you in mind.
These are the movies this book is most like
THE PUFFY CHAIR
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LITTLE BIRDS
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DRINKING BUDDIES
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PIECES OF APRIL
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YOUR SISTER’S SISTER
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PLEASE GIVE
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WENDY AND LUCY
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I liked it but not so that I woke up at three am screaming out my joy of having read it, much to the annoyance of my neighbors. I didn’t race round my office giving out free copies. I haven’t taken out full page ads in the London Times at my own expense. When I finished it I thought ok that was okay. Kind of like those indie movies I like a lot but would never bother to recommend to anyone....more
Surprising references to Abba and Joan Armatrading made me remember that this is late 70s stuff from the Don. It’s his next to last collection, and itSurprising references to Abba and Joan Armatrading made me remember that this is late 70s stuff from the Don. It’s his next to last collection, and it’s a last-of-the-summer-wine moment. We look back fondly on the young sprightly avantgardist of the mid 60s who could turn summersaults in mid-sentence and land on a moth’s wing whilst lighting a cigarette (they hadn’t all given up in those days, in fact, it was compulsory to smoke in the 60s, there were classes in schools and tests) but now the old dog kind a drags himself over to your armchair and snuffles on your hand which is all sad and sorrowful and sweet and a bit ech where’s my handkerchief too. He can still do a few tricks but no, these ain’t great days no more. One final collection to go which got slaughtered by the critics. I am not looking forward to that. But this is what you get when you decide to read all of an author’s books. Completists beware. ...more
I kind of sort of liked this woozy teensy bouquet of junkie memories but it was just too oh what’s the word even though the very sky above me was heavI kind of sort of liked this woozy teensy bouquet of junkie memories but it was just too oh what’s the word even though the very sky above me was heavy with the five stars sluiced over this book by all previous readers in all the seven realms of readerdom.
I got a mean and unworthy thought – that you could take sentences from almost anywhere in any of these stories and put them next to other randomly selected sentences and they would make as much sense, so I took something from page 20, 40, 80, 100 and 120 and proved it as follows:
In the room behind her the man we’d brought stood like a bad sculpture, posing unnaturally, with his shoulders wilting, as if he couldn’t lug his gigantic hands any further. He had a bad case of hepatitis that often gave him a lot of pain. “Do you want the police?” He thought about it and finally said “Not unless I die.” I turned away because my throat was closing up. And then I left. The motor traffic was relentless, the sidewalks were crowded, the people preoccupied and mean because Happy Hour was also Rush Hour. My bus went by, bus 24 – it didn’t even slow down
It goes on like this and then it stops. Often a random person dies or maybe somebody doesn't die. There are large vague profound statements every so often. Reading this one felt like I was a first responder continually shouting in the author’s face “What is your name? What have you taken? Do you live here? Is there anyone I can call?” ...more
Least likely to say : raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favourite things. Tra la la, life is a blast. Fling open the wLeast likely to say : raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favourite things. Tra la la, life is a blast. Fling open the windows and breathe in the scent of gladiolas and nightingales.
Most likely to say : one pint of Jim Beam, two pints of Jim Beam, three pints of Jim Beam. Those were a few of my favourite things. But now they're gone. And it's five in the morning, and the stores aren't open yet....more
The last long story in here was like the hypo John Travolta plunges into Uma Thurman’s chest after she ODs in Pulp Fiction, because this BrobdingnagiaThe last long story in here was like the hypo John Travolta plunges into Uma Thurman’s chest after she ODs in Pulp Fiction, because this Brobdingnagian anthology was about to up and die on me until that point, its pallor was waxy and lips quite blue. However Claire Watkins’ delicious 53 page novella of the 1849 gold rush (The Diggings) brought it back to startled life. It’s written in a male version of the formal tone adopted by Mattie Ross in her narration of the Coen Brothers’ great remake of True Grit.
Each morning and night I fried a hunk of pork in the same skillet we used to pan the river. . After, I mixed flour in the grease to make a gray, pork-flecked porridge. I was a lacking cook, I admit, but that pork would have bested the fairest housewife. Pickled, cured or fried, the swine of California was the stingkingest salt junk ever brought around the Horn.
I still think of myself as a fan of short stories but these 740 pages have made me reconsider – like when one of your heroes puts out a really strange album, and you have to scratch your chin and let it go by, but then the next one is even stranger and more unpleasant – I could be talking about Tom Waits again here – alright, I am – and you have to think, well, maybe I’m not a fan any more. Maybe we’ve split up. Maybe Tom Waits already moved out the house and didn’t tell me. I mean, I haven’t seen him for months.
There are eight gold plated crackerjacks here, out of 32. It doesn’t help that three I’d already read in the books they came from (Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock, Tenth of December by George Saunders and We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo, which is a novel, so that was cheating).
There was a massive amount of vagueness and withholding of specifics in a lot of these stories, so it was really hard to know where they were coming from. I think you’re supposed to you know be an active reader and do the math yourself but shoot, really. Just tell me. But many times, a short story is like a joke or a poem, you get it or you don’t. I loved the crazy children’s games instructions in Play by Mathias Svalina but the critic in the Independent called it a “rare misfire”. I assume that meant that he liked all the ones I disliked – in fact he singled out for special praise Pee on Water by Rachel Glaser, which was puerile, laboured and tiresome, so I hope I don’t run into Jonathan Gibbs any time soon or fisticuffs may ensue. Maybe just shoving and glaring.
Typical of the WTF kind of shenanigans you get in these stories: Madmen by Lucy Corin gives us an America where when girls go through puberty they have to visit a giant asylum and pick out an inmate (a “madman”, which can be of either sex) who will then go to live with the girl and her family. How zany is that – some kind of metaphor do you think? Beats me. Of course it’s not explained, you take it or leave it. The story burbles along in the voice of the eye-rolling self-involved teenager. It’s kind of slightly wackily amusing. But, er, huh?
There were three unreadable stories, from authors who have previous form with me, meaning I already dislike them, so no surprise – Zadie Smith, Sam Lipsyte and of course Mary Gaitskill of the Yeah Whatever school of American literature. I think I’m the only person who doesn’t think she’s a minor godlet.
Science fiction inveigles itself into a few of these stories – Special Economics by Maureen McHugh was terrific and audacious, set in near future China, Standard Loneliness Package (great title) by Charles Yu, which was frankly really really silly, and Valley of the Girls by Kelly Link. All would fit well in any Gardner Dozois annual SF anthology.
I noticed that many of the narrators throughout the book were kind of zonked-out, stoically recording parts of their fairly dreadful lives and kind of shrugging hopelessly, what can you do. Pretty much nobody has a good time in these 740 pages.
Ben Marcus in his introduction describes the effect of good short stories as something akin to LSD or a new form of crack. He’s so over the top that to Ben Marcus the top is just a dot ten miles below his feet :
When I want to be ambushed, captured, thrust into a strange and vivid world, and tossed aloft until I cannot stand it, until everything is at stake and life feels almost unbearably vivid, I do something simple. I read short stories.
Get a grip, here, Ben. It seems you have neglected your medication again. I too wanted to take a trip upon your magic swirling ship, Ben. I wasn’t sleepy and there was no place I was going. But the thing never really got off the ground. A lot of manoeuvring around the runways and some scary faces peering in at the windows.
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