The Reader Travels

My mind is flipping channels today. Lots of related thoughts, flashing by… Being out of control. Laughing about our own misery. God with a sense of humor. TV.

1. Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall fame released an album in 1995, filled with a whole bunch of really funny songs. Shame-Based Man gives us images of drunken daddies, dead and bloated squirrels on the road, grannies who dig Jim Morrison, Bruce dancing naked with a rose sticking out of his anal orifice. It’s beautiful, really. When I wrote the words, “Because no matter what, we have TV,” I was thinking of his song, “Not Happy,” wherein he sings about being unhappy, but it doesn’t matter because he has TV. Then there are trumpets.

2. Most fat comedians tell fat jokes. It’s not easy to be overweight in a society that views fat as disgusting, even immoral in some crowds. And comedy is all about finding humor in misery. Sometimes people joke about things that hit a little close to home for others. If it’s a raw subject for you, you probably won’t think it’s very funny.

Eddie Murphy Raw did just that for me. His abusive mother with the shoe throwing was funny - the gestures, the timing, the boomerang sound effects. Even though it was raw, I could still laugh about it. But when he started talking about his drunken uncle at family gatherings, I was cringing. He nailed it so completely, and at the time I was dwelling on all the drunkenness in my own family, so I just couldn’t laugh. It was what it was. Raw. I enjoyed being Delirious a little more.

3. I’ll flip right past the news every time. If it’s not on Yahoo’s home page, then I don’t know about it. It’s not that I need to push all the ugliness in the world out of sight, it’s just that the news is such sensationalistic crap it makes me roll my eyes so much I get a headache.

4. Oh. The football game is on. I gotta go.

When I think of the south side of Chicago, two songs come to mind - Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and the theme song to the ’70s TV show Good Times. Recently, Chappelle’s Show taught me that the lyrics to the theme song were not, “Blah, blah blah blah, blah, blah,” but, rather, the title of this post. I was glad for this newfound knowledge.

The songs and the TV show give us images of a tough life, but with a comic appeal, so we don’t get buried in heaviness like the world of Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Leroy and Jay Jay were thriving some 40 years after Bigger went down. Certain things had gotten better, while others just got worse.

I’ve never been to South Chicago, but I have lived in the working class metropolis of Houston, Texas, especially the area south and east of Houston, along the ship channel lined with oil refineries. We can laugh about the pollution and the high cancer rate. We can laugh about the wretchedness of race relations and the pedagogy of the oppressed, wherein the oppressed become the oppressors. We can laugh about high crime and high debt.

How can we laugh, you ask? Because no matter what, we have TV. Good times.

When we left our travels, we were in Russia with Dostoevsky, whose most famous novel is Crime and Punishment, about a young hoodlum in St. Petersburg, who commits crimes and is punished.

If I wasn’t a Web site programmer, I might like to teach English literature. I’ve thought about topics for papers where the students might be challenged to read and compare similar books like 1984 and Brave New World, or Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five.

One of those combinations could be Crime and Punishment and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which is about a young hoodlum in Chicago, who incidentally commits crimes and is punished.

Wright was a card-carrying Communist in his youth, and he had a thing for Russia and similarities between the plight of the Russian working class and that of African Americans. I tend to think that Native Son is somewhat of a tribute to Dostoevsky’s famous novel. I don’t know if Wright intended it as such, but I like to think of it that way.

They are both powerful works. The St. Petersburg tale traps you in the mind of a murderer, raging with mania and guilt, while the Chicago tale steps outside of the mind, just to let you watch and observe the crimes and the necessary punishments. We watch as life happens to Bigger Thomas, whose world on the south side of Chicago is out of control, and when he takes control for a brief moment, he abuses that control and loses it forever.

Needless to say, Native Son is not something you want to read during the hectic month of December, but it might be a challenge for the new year. If you haven’t read it, you should know, it’s a lot easier to get into than Ulysses. It’s just seriously heavy.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has a lot to teach us about embracing our individuality. The Island of Misfit Toys is a place where insecure freaks go to grumble about being victims of a society that doesn’t want them. Boo hoo! Rudolph didn’t belong there, because he didn’t enjoy the pity party. Rudolph wanted to let his little light shine, literally. So he left.

I have often found myself on the fringe, never in the popular crowd, never really wanting to be. Sure I’m a bit of a misfit, but I’m also an observer. It’s interesting the people you meet on the fringe. Lots of them look at the popular ones with longing, hoping for acceptance, scraping on windows, their noses pressed to the glass. Please, please love me. Many of them spit vitriol, acting like they hate the in-crowd, while they secretly long to be on the inside, playing “reindeer games” and all that.

My brother-in-law asked me the question today, did the misfit toys choose to go to the island, or were they sentenced there like it was a prison? The answer is, both! It feels like a prison sentence when you’re pushed out. No one loves you, no one sees your worth. But the only thing that kept those toys in that prison was themselves. The misfits chose defeat. They chose to be outcast so they could stand around resenting other toys and feeling like they were somehow superior.

Rise up, ye misfits of the world. Turn on your shiny, red nose. Sing your song and dance your dance. Stop being so pathetic and self-righteous. But don’t go out and join a sorority either; that’s just gross.

Happy birthday to Lori and Maggie and Ana, my lovely December birthday ladies. We’re all glad you weren’t the products of virgin births. Because that just wouldn’t have been any fun for your parents. And it would be a helluva thing for you to live up to.

I mean, think about how rough that would be, all the speculation about who the father really was. Because you know you can’t believe a word she says if she’s telling you she ain’t never had the sex before. Okay, so maybe she’s really a hermaphrodite, and she impregnated herself. Yeah, so now she’s a real freak, right? And so is the kid. Forget about the reindeer games, buddy, you might as well go live on the Island of Misfit Toys. (Don’t you love a good mixed metaphor?)

The idea of virgin births makes me think of dear, little Owen Meany. I actually watched Simon Birch last year, just interested to find out what Hollywood did with John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. It had nowhere near the poignance of the book; the character was Simon, not Owen; and the story was not really Owen’s either. I guess that’s why Mr. Irving couldn’t let them keep the name.

So different from everyone else, his life is not easy. But Owen is a miracle, and he is destined for greatness.

If you’re like me, and your Decembers are filled with planning and shopping and cooking and singing and parties and exhaustion, then it’s never a good idea to start reading Ulysses in December. It’s just a crazy undertaking, and you’d be causing yourself an unhealthy amount of stress.

To this day I have not read all of Ulysses; but I was awed by the writing; and I will return to it one day. But I made the mistake of picking it up in December, and I think it made me physically ill with chills and back pains and all that.

So what did I learn? I learned that reading in December must be an escape. It must be relaxing and light hearted. If you want to read Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway or Moby Dick or Lolita or Crime and Punishment, just don’t do it in December, unless you don’t have school or a job or children or volunteer commitments, or you live in a culture that doesn’t turn December into a consumer hell.

This December I’m rereading an old favorite - Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire. It’s a wonderful story in a magical world with sing-song dialogue. It’s no wonder they made a musical out of it.

Here are some other recommendations for December reading:

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Naked by David Sedaris

Flying Dutch by Tom Holt

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

Standing in the Rainbow by Fannie Flagg

Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry

The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank by Erma Bombeck

Christmas carols keep me from being a big humbug, and Christmas makes me think of Christianity, which makes me think of The Bible, which makes me think of blood and gore, which appeals to my morbid side. Is that wrong?

Our local suburban arts center hosted an open house last week with a Russian Christmas theme. All the schools decorated a Christmas tree with Russian imagery, and children painted pictures of Russian dolls and such. There were cookies and balloons for the kids, and old ladies tap dancing in little red Santa’s helper dresses, admittedly fun for all ages.

Beyond the middle school artwork, there were a number of authentic Russian icons painted on canvas and wood and etched on metal. The best icon was the dark face of Jesus raised on what looked like a wooden window shutter. The name of it had something to do with not being created by human hands, like it was one of those miracle pictures that just appears on a wall or a window overnight. Like the face of the Madonna that appears on a tortilla (see Off the Map). It must have been carved and painted, but it did have an ethereal effect, and it was really spooky to think of it as being created by the hands of god or an angel.

But my second favorite icon was all about the violence. It was the head of John the Baptist on a bloody platter. There are lots of such images in the Russian Orthodox tradition. I don’t know what it is, I just think there’s a lot of power and poignance in this type of stuff. Like the image of Jesus nailed to the cross. The idea is to cringe and say, “Whoah!”

Then there was this painting, which a friend posted on The Arcadian Bookroom’s art discussion. It’s Giotto di Bondone’s fresco called Massacre of Innocents, all about what happened shortly after Jesus was born. It’s one more example of biblical gore for all to enjoy (”endure” rhymes better, but it’s really not what I wanted to say).

I may be going to hell… But I’ll go there singing Christmas songs.

In George Bird’s translation of Dostoevsky’s The Double, there’s a scene in the beginning of the story where the hero is described as being “as pleased as Punch.” My first instinct was to blurt out, “What?”

I thought to myself, why would Mr. Bird translate the Russian story into English cliches? I mean, how cheesy is that? But when I started researching it, I found that Punch and Judy are characters known by Russians and Britons, Germans and Italians alike.

Dostoevsky was most certainly comparing Mr. Golyadkin to that crazy little paranoid puppet. The Double even had a character (who could very well have been one of Mr. Golyadkin’s personalities) named Petruschka, which just so happens to be Punch’s alias whenever he tours Russia.

Punch and Judy puppet shows are not what you’d call politically correct, what with all that raunchiness and violence. Sadly, it’s just not funny to beat up your wife anymore, not even with Punch’s signature slap stick. Despite all the political correctness, it’s good to know there are still “professors” of Punch and Judy puppet shows in most of the English speaking nations of the world.

In Gogol’s Ukranian short story “”St. John’s Eve,” he describes a particular beautiful girl as “a dark-browed daughter.” It made me think of similar descriptions of beautiful girls in Arabian Nights.

The really pretty girls in Scheherazade’s tales had faces that looked like the moon and one long, black eyebrow atop their eyes. Ukraine is fairly close to the Muslim world with Turkey sharing the Black Sea to the south. They could very well have shared similar ideas of beauty.

Sir Richard Burton’s notes in the back of his translation of Arabian Nights give a little thought to the joined brow. It seems that in Burton’s time, the Arab world saw it as a sign of distinction and beauty. But in the western world people thought it was the sign of being a werewolf or possibly a vampire.

And just so you know, according to Wikipedia, the word “unibrow” has officially made it into the dictionary, but the technical term is “synophrys.” Who wants to talk about a “synophrys,” though? Not me.

Gogol and Dostoevsky both mention serfs in their stories, these people on the fringe of society. So I had to surf the Web and read up on Ukranian and Russian feudal history. Travels don’t always lead to other books. They often lead to the peripheral knowledge that can be garnered from the wonders of Wikipedia.

It seems the Ukranians had a tradition of turning peasants into proud soldiers. To be a Cossack was much better than being a slave to the man. In the translation I read of Gogol’s story “Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich,” the narration speaks disparagingly of a domineering woman who “registered her husband as a peasant.”

I’d have to read more than Wikipedia to truly understand what he meant by that. I mean, was registering someone to be a peasant like signing him up for welfare, putting him on the dole? Was it meant to say she was lazy, selling away her family’s dignity and independence? Was it meant to say that her act was a social castration of her husband? And what exactly was the process? What kind of paperwork did one fill out? Or maybe “register” is the simplest translation for something we don’t really have words for in English?

Do you know?