On an island and under the sea

I'm reading The Long-Winded Lady, a compilation of essays by Maeve Brennan. She was an Irish writer who for many years published short pieces in the New Yorker, under the pen name of The Long-Winded Lady. It's hard to describe her writing. They're not really essays at all, just little bits of observation, almost all about a very small piece of New York City where Brennan lived. She writes about the same handful of restaurants where she ate lunch and dinner almost every day, and about the series of hotel rooms and apartments where she lived (never, it seems, for more than a few months at a time), and about the passing scene on the city blocks where she lived and worked.

There's almost no dialogue in these essays. She writes about people, but from a remote observer's perspective. I'm about halfway through the 500 or so pages, and I don't think she wrote anything about anyone whom she actually knew. Only descriptions of strangers--their clothes (she seemed to love fashion and was knowledgeable about cuts and fabrics), their manners, their restaurant orders.

People say that big cities are the most provincial of places. I don't know who those people are, but I know that someone said that, and it wasn't me. Anyway, Maeve Brennan's New York is not so much provincial as just tiny and self-contained. She writes with great sophistication about sophisticated people and places but she seems not to have strayed beyond an area of 16 or so square blocks, except for occasional theater visits.

Because the essays are so sparsely populated, mostly with people whom Brennan didn't seem to know, they have a very lonely quality. If you have ever been in New York City (or any other big city) on a Sunday in August, you will have an idea of what it feels like to read The Long-Winded Lady. Still, the book is not sad or depressing. She writes so little about herself--even when she tells us where she had dinner, she doesn't tell us what she ate--that the reader senses that there's a lot more to this woman than she's sharing. It's like you're looking into the wrong end of a telescope, seeing a compressed and constricted view of a landscape that would be enormous, if only you could see it through the right side of the telescope.

*****
As good as The Long-Winded Lady is, it's not a completely original and groundbreaking work of art. If you've read Louis Auchincloss or Mary McCarthy or any other upper-class mid-century New York writer, then you already know something about Maeve Brennan's New York.

*****

Here's what was completely original and groundbreaking:

Even Squidward is smiling. Kind of.

I used to tell friends that I didn't know what I'd do when my children grew up, because then I wouldn't have an excuse to watch SpongeBob anymore. Fortunately, they like him just as much now as they did when they were toddlers, wide awake at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning. Only a visionary artist could have imagined an undersea world populated by cheapskate crabs, megalomaniac plankton, cynical squids, idiot starfish, bottom-dwelling squirrels; and hard-working, relentlessly cheerful, fun-loving sponges. Bikini Bottom is a world unto itself, completely original, populated by characters who are unalterably themselves in every circumstance

SpongeBob SquarePants is hilariously funny, and that would be enough. But it's much more than that. Almost every episode offers wise and compassionate insight into humanity (well, so to speak) in all its beauty and stupidity and strength and weakness and joy and bitterness. Does that seem a little much for a cartoon? Watch "Tentacle Acres" or "Band Geeks" or "The Algae's Always Greener"  and you'll see what I mean. Or just watch "Sailor Mouth" or "The Inmates of Summer," and laugh your head off.

SpongeBob will live forever; but Stephen Hillenburg, his creator, died this week.  I hope he knew how special SpongeBob is, and how much he means to so many people. I hope he rests in peace.