James Hynes

Today is Election Day, and I'm suffering from metaphor overload. My nerves are shredded. I'm as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I'm vibrating with anxiety like a tuning fork. My forebrain, and the poll numbers at Real Clear Politics, are telling me I shouldn't worry so much, but my shrill, hysterical, paranoid lizard brain is screaming constantly at a pitch only dogs can hear. I can't even claim to be unique: you can read all about my condition in the New York Times.

If I were calmer, I might take to heart John Marks' passionate defense of the spirit of Kum Ba Yah over at No Depression. But I'm not, so I can't. No today, anyway. All the caffeine I've had this morning doesn't help (I float through every morning on a sea of Diet Coke). And the fact that I watch Jon Stewart and Colbert right before I go to bed every night. And the fact that I've bookmarked not one, not two, not three, but four electoral maps, which I try not to look at more than once an hour.

I'm not completely out of control, though. In the evenings (before Stewart and Colbert, anyway) I've been trying to avoid watching the cable news channels, and have pretty successfully given myself a couple hours of respite by reading non-election-related stuff. I just got the new NYRB collection of Daphne Du Maurier's macabre fiction, Don't Look Now, selected and introduced by Patrick McGrath, and have been reading a couple stories a night with great pleasure. The title story didn't get to me the way I hoped it would, but that's mainly because it's a plot-driven story, and having seen the Nicholas Roeg film version already two or three times, the story has nothing new to offer. Du Maurier's story "The Birds," however, is a different matter. I've always loved Hitchcock's film version, but until two nights ago, I had never read the original, and was astonished and pleased to find that it's even better than the film—grittier and much, much darker. Hitchcock took only the basic conceit of the story and invented his own story (a middle-class psychodrama, basically), while Du Maurier's version features a rural working-class family living under siege from flocks of murderous birds. It's more elemental and scarier, not to mention more purely apocalyptic. The story is set in Cornwall, where Du Maurier lived much of her life, and her evocation of the sea and the stark landscape make the story a much more evocative and moodier experience that the film.

The other book I'm reading to distract myself from, um, current events, is David Michaelis' superb biography of Charles Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. I've been wanting to read this book ever since the first reviews came out, and I just bought the paperback edition over the weekend. It turns out to be even more resonant than I thought it would be: Schulz was only a few years younger than my father (he was born in 1922, and my dad was born in 1918), and as I read about his life in the upper Midwest, in St. Paul, Minnesota, I can't help but think of my dad's childhood and young manhood in Michigan, in a small farming community just west of Lansing. There's not a point by point comparison between the lives of Schulz and my father, but Michaelis' evocation of Schulz's mix of keen intelligence, deep feeling, and ironclad Midwestern reticence ("Keep it to yourself," is the Midwesterner's motto) strikes a very deep chord in me, and brings the memory of my late father back to me very vividly. The struggles and complexities of men of that generation hit me especially hard as I sit spang dab in the middle of my own middle-age, and ponder just how much, and how little, things have changed from my father's generation.

And a third thing that caught my eye this morning, and briefly wooed me away from the electoral map: this article in today's Washington Post, about an English actor named Robert Lloyd Parry who's doing a one-man show as the great English ghost story writer, M. R. James, performing a couple of James' classic ghost stories by candlelight. Sounds wonderful. Wish I could go see it tonight, but instead I'll be enjoying the macabre thrills of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Happy Election Day! Calm down! Go vote!