The Relentlessness Club

plus, the news is kicking my ass and the results of a test

painting by Chris Rice

To keep on in a focused way unsentimentally describing the world as one sees it is relentless and I believe the task of art and literature.

Chris Rice, writer and painter

Well, enough of you commented and emailed your interest in joining me as I make my way through the relentless voiced books on the Colm Tóibín syllabus I poached from “The Paris Review.” You can go back and read that post if you’re not one of the couple of thousand folks who already visited. Here’s what I’m going to do: host a zoom call every month or so to discuss each book on the list. You can email me your preferred contact, and I will send you the link when I set a date. The “meeting” will not be like a typical book club thing where you may or may not read the book and come just to hang out and eat good food. It’ll be a — well — relentless discussion? We’ll keep it going for an hour or so, discussing one book from the list and then move on. No pressure. No papers. No demands, other than to read the book and join the community. I’m definitely NOT the boss, but I’ll keep order and things on track and maybe do a trapeze wire act or something. How’s that?

Our first book: Medea by Euripides

First date: Sunday, February 26th at 4:00 pm PT

Email me your full name and email if you’re feeling relentless, and I’ll send you a zoom link at some point before the 26th. I’ll have to figure out the Zoom limitations thingy because I really don’t want to buy a subscription. My email is elsophieATgmail.com

Medea is super short and pretty damn incredible, and you have several weeks to relentlessly read. Sophocles’ Electra is next and will be our March book. I’m thinking the last Sunday of each month. We will be relentlessly reading, I hope, until June of 2024. And then I think we should have a final read of Colm Tóibín’s novel The Magician.

How does that sound?

As for the news kicking my ass, whose isn’t being kicked? I have nothing new to say about the news unless you’re game for a rant about my alma mater (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) creating a school for a degree in narrow-mindedness, touted even on that old white man publication, The Wall Street Journal. Things on my mind? An upcoming trip to a wedding of the daughter of a dear old college friend. A trip maybe to one of the Channel Islands on Super Bowl Sunday, a tradition that I began last year to avoid the simmering rage I feel about Amerikka’s game. On another note, and far more productive is that I just got a notice from UCLA — the results of a study that Sophie participated in. It was a genetic study, and while I had no “hopes” that anything would come out of it as far as Eureka moments and treatments, I was thinking it’d be in-TAH-resting if They found some kind of mutation that would be an explanation for the uncontrolled seizures over nearly three decades. I keep hearing about little kids and babies and even a sprinkling of teenagers and young adults being “diagnosed” with rare genetic mutations that all have numbers as signifiers. These signifiers come out of the “advancements” of the medical/industrial complex, and sometimes I’m envious because back in the last century Sophie’s diagnosis was determined to be idiopathic or cryptogenic and lord knows, it’s been beyond a damn mystery, right? The parents who get diagnoses generally describe their child as 1 out of 200 in the world with a string of letters identifying their syndrome and are, inevitably, involved in some kind of 501c3 that is raising money doing cutting edge research or some such thing. My thoughts go toward the summer of 1995 when I read about the ketogenic diet in an issue of People Magazine and brought the article to The First Neurologist who said the first that’s interesting which should have been a harbinger for what was to come because my Bachelor of Arts in English and French was stretched, to say the least over the next couple of decades. I’ve also long wondered if Sophie has a mutation related to the CDKL5 mutation that is common in girls with Rett Syndrome but never got around to doing the test because it was too expensive and I honestly had reached a point where I thought whatever. Honestly. I felt like I didn’t want to spend the money to find out that Sophie was part of an exclusive group for which much money and research would be necessary to move towards what the world calls cure. Did that make any sense because you must realize that my glibness masks not a small amount of pain and frustration and general resignation.

It took nearly ten months to get them, but here’s what They said:

You are receiving this message because a sample of your DNA was recently collected for a genetic study. We are writing to inform you that, at this time, no significant findings were identified for you in this study. Because our knowledge of genetics is constantly evolving, there is a possibility that you may be contacted again in the future.

Whelp.

I have purple tulips on my dining room table, and one has a petal that appears bruised, marred, a weird discoloration bleeding into the tip. White, yellow, black, back to purple. It stands out from the others. I’ve bent really close to examine it but I can’t figure it out. What happened. This is just to say that I think of things when I stare at it each morning. I lay down my pen and sip my coffee and lift my face to the sun that streams through the windows making watery lines on the walls.