Notes on a Murder Sponge

Deride domestic cleaning issues at your own risk

On the off chance my wife murders me, I want to tell you something:

I’ve been dipping into “The Best American Short Stories of the Century” and wanted to quick-shout-out A Jury of Her Peers, by Susan Glaspell, published in 1917 and based on the one-act play of the same name published the year before.

It reminds me of a couple of things. The first is that the primary cultural retardant in America is a fear of upsetting the congenitally stupid. I wrote about it here, after realizing that what we think of as “primitive” thinking is really just evidence that we would rather squish new information into old thinking than endanger our already-fragile worldview.

In my story, it was the absurd idea that Egyptians believed a pig ate the moon over the course of 28 days. In Gladspell’s it was the even more absurd idea that women have lives, ideas and insights. That their reasons for being dangerous are somehow more capricious than the reason men are dangerous.