Category / Personal

by DrMabuse

Unlawful Common Knowledge

I’m no historian. I’m just a guy who reads books with a layman’s ambition of being well-rounded.

I can give you a brief overview of Ferdinand de Lesseps’ attempt to cut through the Isthmus of Panama without considering the mosquito problem and can suggest, without Googling, David McCllough’s The Path Between the Seas as a good book on the subject. I can tell you about why H&R Block does most of its business in January and why the working poor is terrified of filing 1040s on their own — this, well before reading David K. Shipler’s heartbreaking book on the subject. I can tell you how the umbrella came about and why men have Jonas Hanway to thank for keeping their heads dry.

I could also quote almost any line of The Big Lebowski, sing any Beatles song with pretty solid accuracy, and tell you who directed some random Val Lewton-produced film from the 1940s.

My intention here is not to boast, but to point out that there are just some things that happen to stick and that should stick. Shards of common knowledge that are the average Joe’s duty and responsibility to remember.

Lest the reader think that I am flexing my achievements here, I should also point out that despite several years of Spanish and some time knocking around in Germany, I’m a hopeless monoglot. I’m terrible with remembering first names, even when I use the name in a responsive sentence. Great with identifying sounds and voices, but sometimes the intimate contours of faces don’t always match up, even though I can tell you how a lighting scheme for a stunning shot in a movie works, can negotiate your couch through a tight crevice and tell you whether or not your car will fit into a curbside parking spot.

And I should point out that I often come up with idiotic conclusions, many of which are posted here. I also change my mind on a regular basis.

Seasoning my mind with bits of minutiae has always been a priority for me. Probably has a good deal with the way I was brought up (which was without a whole lot) and my overwhelming need to know things. Some shit, I just pick up. Other things like intricate swing dance moves (working on it) or the correct pronunciation of multisyllable words, not so easily. (In fact, not so long ago, I learned that, despite spelling it correctly on paper, I was pronouncing “mischievous” MISS-CHEEVE-EE-US. How’s that for ineptitude?) But despite the wide swath, I am, by no means, an expert.

But I’m wondering right now, after a pleasant though slightly disheartening breakfast in a diner, just how effective our current system is at turning out well-rounded folks.

Picture your humble narrator reading a book, grooving to Janis Joplin being played over the speakers, nursing a cup of coffee and digging into a fantastic chicken pesto crepe, and doing his best to resist the potatoes with sour cream. (Damn you, starch!) Suddenly, I feel two pairs of eyes seering into me. I don’t look up. But I hear a father talking with his kid, “You see, he’s reading a book.”

I use my peripheral vision to scope out Allen Funt. Not there. Oh yeah. He’s dead.

Is this a recreation of the famous Bill Hicks wafflehouse joke? No. Because reading has taken neither a positive or a negative impression.

“That’s what happens when you go to school,” continues Daddy-O. “You learn how to read and you read books! And you’ll be reading just like him.”

The father’s tone is encouraging. I dig any parent willing to get such a young child reading. The father apologizes. I tell him it’s no problem and scoot up to the edge of the booth, beaming a broad smile to the kid, “And in twenty-five years, another child will be looking at you as you’re reading a book in a diner.”

Nervous laughter, apologies. Really, it’s no big deal, I say. Just part of the natural human cycle that will go on into perpetuity. We are all the richer because of it. I’ll do the same thing myself if I ever have kids.

We start talking. The guy’s all right. This youngish father is there with his mother. To keep the excitement rolling for the kid, I note that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book in one night, starting at a late hour, and was then fully prepared to discuss it with his staff the next morning. The conversation shifts to U.S. Presidents.

The boy’s grandmother is a big Jefferson fan. “Oh,” I say, “have you read Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx? Great book on Jefferson’s character.” She’s read a few books on Jefferson but can’t remember the names or the authors. “Jefferson still lives,” I say.

“What?”

“Did you know that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day?”

I figure this would be common knowledge for anyone interested in Jefferson, let alone anyone who has ever taken a U.S. history class. That Adams and Jefferson died within hours of each other, Adams croaks, “Jefferson still lives” just before meeting his maker, and that, to seal one of the greatest historical coinicdences in human history, the two die on July 4, 1826 — exactly fifty years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

But they don’t know this. And while they’re delighted to know, I’m a bit mortified. The young father is a history major. What’s more, David McCullough spoke at his commencement. I rattle off three McCullough books I’ve read, but the history major hasn’t read any McCullough.

Then there are more titles of books, more facts, more things that come to mind (which apparently is a lot) — all in the interests of historical boosterism. I talk briefly about Jefferson’s second catastrophic term as president, about Abigail Adams’ “remember the ladies” letter to Jefferson, and several other things.

“You must be a historian!” says the dad’s mother.

“No,” I say. “I’m just a guy who likes pesto.”

The funny thing is that, as several of my teachers may attest, history was never really my strong suit in high school or college. Even though I could bluff my muddled memory of historical facts in essay form.

But I’m thinking to myself that if these two adults, who are very nice and conciliatory, and who are everyday people, think I’m a historian, then we are in very big trouble indeed.

I’m not trying to smear these three people. They were very grateful for the titles they loosened from my tongue. And they had fantastic things to say about our founding fathers, based on what they could remember. They showed a keen interest and curiosity in the ways that our national quilt was knitted.

But the distinction here is that they had no real grasp on the details, even when, in one case, history was the primary base of knowledge.

This cultural stigma goes far beyond mere facts. I had a conversation with an acquaintance the other night and I mentioned the tea ceremony at the Asian Art Museum, which I was honored to attend last weekend. This acquaintance told me how she couldn’t possibly attend because she was mortified that only educated folks would find the ceremony interesting.

Nonsense, I replied. I knew almost nothing about tea ceremonies and Asian art. But I pointed out the atmosphere, some of the limitations, and the rules that I could remember, pointing out that my pulse rate was halved just by sitting down, taking in the relaxing rites.

When our motley group was strolling around the museum, I was audacious enough to call the artist behind one fantastic piece of chiaroschuro papyrus “the Aubrey Beardsley of Korea,” which didn’t sit so well with one self-appointed “expert” who thought that such comparisons were uncouth. Uncouth? I was just trying to remember. Who knew there was an unspoken code of acceptable associations?

I wonder if this “expert” (or any educator, for that matter) has any idea that strangling an individulal’s curiosity or telling someone how they should talk about culture is what leads to people like the history major who can’t remember basic details. I wonder if the experts are truly cognizant of the unnecessary chasm that separates the layman from the cultured. The strange stigma behind an enjoyable book like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which sets out to explain a good deal of science to a popular audience.

What we are seeing, I think, in this age of reactonary and results-oriented education, is a nation that is creating or pepetuating a knowledge class system. The disparity between the knows and the know-nots.

And it kills me to see the mad rush of curiosity suffering such an unnecessary crib death. Really, our countrymen are better than this.

by DrMabuse

The Drunk

“I can’t breathe, motherfucker! I can’t breathe!”

The drunk had only his voice left, but he was determined to fight. A neighbor and I called from the window. We begged the police not to harm the man, to give him oxygen, and the fuzz knew they were being watched. So they didn’t beat him. The drunk had only blurred stamina and a voice that alerted every adjacent domicile that there was a skirmish in the premises. His limbs were pinned down by seven of San Francisco’s finest in the alley adjacent to my apartment. I had to wonder just what the hell it was he did exactly. Had he spurned chase? Had he assaulted an officer? Was he simply belligerent? There was a savage determination in the man’s voice to beat the odds. It took seven police officers to hold him down. Seven.

The liquor had fueled him. It had told him that he was immortal, whatever his problems, whatever his affliction. It had worked the same way that PCP might in another: the abject faith that he was above the law, that he would win in the end, that vengeance of an altogether irrational sort would be his. But the addiction, apparently, was too much for him to operate in society. Tonight, anyway.

Of the seven cops, one was a woman. The drunk, singular in his rebellion, had bitten her hand while they pinioned his limbs down. He called her a dyke. he egged them on. Aside from a feral “fucker” from the lady (an understandable impulse from anyone who had blood drawn from their hand), the SFPD did their job containing him without beating the man down. This was no Fajitagate. They only wanted to get him into the wagon. And the wagon arrived, backing into the alley and colliding into a few trash cans. There was a mesh grille behind the double doors, and I wondered if anyone else was there.

The drunk had been in the Marines at one point. He had been stationed on Treasure Island. So he said. You meet a lot of homeless people in this city, many of them claiming some military stint, some pledge unfulfilled. And he was determined to “fuck your fascist shit up,” thank you very much.

Me? I felt like one of Kitty Genovese’s watchers. Who the hell was I to cast judgment? But if the police clubbed this guy to death, I was determined to run into the alley and stop the violence. Fortunately, they didn’t.

But I sympathized with him. I wondered if he had been left behind at some point. I wondered about his military experience. I wondered what had caused him to become so blotto and so enraged. Had he been abandoned? Had he served in the Gulf War? Or was his life a grand lie?

One police officer for every limb. They threw him into the van and laughed a bit afterward. But I pondered the man’s fate. What would our current local services do to help him? What would our social programs do to reach him? Would he be released to the streets, only to unleash violence again? Or would he somehow find himself? Was this a drunk left to drink himself to death? Another high-maintenance person abandoned to the fateful gods of the streets?

by DrMabuse

Gone Fishing

I’d initially posted some ballyhoo about taking a break. But announcing yet another hiatus strikes me as not only repetitious, but vaguely dishonest. This blog has always served as a beacon for truth. A skewered truth, a truth restricted by my own blinders, sometimes a downright ugly honesty. But truth nonetheless. I’d be doing my readers a disservice if I didn’t explain why my appearances here will be less frequent.

William Gaddis once described it as “the rush for second place” and composed an essay on the subject in 1981. He dared to chart how a certain spirit of rebellion in American culture was often spawned by a gnawing sense of failure, a long and frustrated nose cantilevered against a morose and pockmarked face that frowned long into the deepest shadows of yesteryear. The feeling that one’s efforts weren’t worth much in the long run. The successful person in our society, the hard-liner who plays by the rules and makes partner or vice president after a decade or two of thankless labor, is in so deep that it would never occur to him that there are others who starve and scrape for an altogether different success. These lower-end feeders are often derided as failures. Their needs don’t meet the basic burden. But what would our world be without these non-conformists who perform unspoken deeds in the dead of night?

Whatever measure of success one finds, there are hard choices. Passion flaring over common sense. And when a bottom-end straggler reaches a certain age, when the hair falls out and the crow’s feet form around the eyes, there comes a point where one wonders why it continues. Because persistence pays off? Sometimes. Because no man is an island? Definitely.

The duty remains, the steadfast flow follows. But it requires rumination and rest and unseen labor and barely any sleep. I’ll be back, but right now I’m reoiling the wheels. And I’m smiling as I dance in the dark.

[UPDATE: In response to certain socipathic nitwits who clearly have more time than I do (and whose currency is so inflated that they feel the need to goad some A-1 folks), I quote Carl Sandburg: “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”]

[UPDATE THE SECOND: Publisher’s Lunch reports this item: “Separately, the NYT Book Review has announced that next Sunday’s issue will present a considerably slimmed-down 100 Notable Books of the Year. They will publish their list of top 10 books of the year on December 12. Editor Sam Tanenhaus says of the ‘more selective’ list, ‘In general, we favored strong narratives. This happens to be a year when some of the best books, fiction and nonfiction, were about or set in the past.'”

[I can’t tell you how sad this makes me feel. One of the great annual joys is seeing the NYTBR present a crazed list that backs up their credentials as a book review source for one of the nation’s major newspapers. It essentially communicates to the reader that, love or hate their selections, the NYTBR is doing its job. But more importantly, much like the recent joys of the IMPAC longlist, the sheer number of books is something to cheer about, an annual occurrence that offers a friendly nod to reading. The reader finds the morsels he may have forgotten about and a few titles he didn’t know about. It’s a win-win situation between reader and listmaker.

[That Tanenhaus would scale this down to a piddly selection of ten (no doubt with Leon “Scummy Little Reviewer” Wieseltier’s involvement) proves that, despite his recent poetry issue and the inclusion of James Wood prominently on his pages, he still remains an asshat who is, in all likelihood, Bill Keller’s corporate handmaiden. That he would dispense with such a proud tradition in favor of audience-friendly “10 Sexiest Books Alive” homages to People convinces me that, unless he offers a compelling alternative, he’s not going to get any brownies on my watch.

[NO BROWNIES FOR YOU, MR. TANENHAUS!

[UPDATE TO SECOND UPDATE: The good Dr. Jones, fresh from his excavations in Nepal, informs me that we can’t withhold baked goods until the final tally. To uphold the brownie fairness doctrine, I renege on my brownie decision until we see what happens over the next two weeks. Tanenhaus shall salivate at his own peril.]

by DrMabuse

Momentary Sayonara

There’s nothing really to say. And the last thing I want to do is lecture like Neal Pollack. So I’m going the hell away for a week or so. I leave these pages to the annoying spammers, the killer barflies, and perhaps the Superfriends, if they even remember their passwords. No bullshit hiatus here. Just casual indifference and a return to these pages after a much needed lost weekend with Paul Giamatti. I might even teach a red state virgin a thing or two about reproductive rights.

Oh, and fuck you, Homeland Security.

[UPDATE BEFORE FLIGHT: Holy hell. Maud’s opened up a can of whoopass on Neal Pollack. On the Pollack question, I should point out that Lenny Bruce’s last days were spent reading from law books pointing out the absurdity of true writ. It was, by all reports, the dullest standup comic routine ever devised.

[Also, McSweeeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, Michael Chabon’s followup to the Treasury of Thrilling Tales, is (so far), a marked improvement over its predecessor and well worth your time. It certainly helps that RotR fave David Mitchell has a Number9Dream-like tale in there, propinquitous to cool contributions from Margaret Atwood, Poppy Z. Brite, Jonathan Lethem, Roddy Doyle, China Mieville, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Peter Straub. Charges of nepotism aside (Julavits and Waldman show up), I’d love to see Chabon edit one of these things every year or two. Of course, if he could include a few overlooked folks like Paolo Bacigalupi, Barry Malzberg, Kelly Link, and the prolfiic Paul Di Fillipo, his rants against genre ghettoization might have more credibility. Now, flight.]

by DrMabuse

Status Report

  1. I am badly in need of a vacation. I have been waiting for Thanksgiving to roll around, but alas even two weeks away is an eternity.
  2. Because of the general fatigue, my reading speed has dropped to an all-time low. A mere 75 pages a day, if that. It’s not the books I fault, but a certain malaise that nags at me. Why does literature matter? It does, don’t get me wrong. But in prioritizing reading and responding above other things, am I not the apolitical parvenu remaining blissfully ignorant in Stalinist Russia?
  3. November’s election: oh, how to fight off the bitter aftertaste! And why is the right so angry? They won this motherfucker!
  4. Writing is pathetic. We’re talking 400 words or so a day and that involves staring at a screen for about two hours, putting a ZoneAlarm Internet Lock on the comp. And even then, none of it matters. Not the poetic descriptions of vagrants fading into urban colors, not the dialogue involving choices. We’re talking earnest questions that nobody wants to answer. Understandable.
  5. I have been trying to avoid all political news. Fallujah, rigged elections, mandates, tax code readjusted for the rich. But this, apparently, is an impossibility. My moral concern about my country has eaten away hours of my time — reading news stories, replies, angry bloggers, the like. Before I know it, it’s 2 AM. The sad thing is I haven’t a clue as to how we can win. A few general ideas, sure. But nothing within my current existential purview. What a waste!
  6. Invariably, people want to talk politics in social clusters. And I’m sick sick sick of it. Somehow, everything else seems trivial. You can’t talk about a winning restaurant or a fantastic feeling someone had last week without coming across like a complete and utter cad. To resist social discourse is to be Donne’s island, but it all leaves me feeling spent and secluded these days. And so I’m reluctant to chatter or socialize, even when I force myself to. Plus, I am now very cognizant of stupid people and I don’t like these elitist impulses.
  7. There are strange people taking away the solitary time I need during my weekday lunches to remain a happy and sane person. And apparently I’m not alone. The strange people in question have sensed the dip in cheeeriness and have brought in their efficiency experts and their positive values programs and their Leo Buscalgia rhetroic (accompanied by milky New Agers who resemble the palette of Cream & Wheat and cherub-cheeked bald guys who haven’t smiled convincingly since 1986), and it all makes everyone feel uncomfortable. And they are rebuked in whispers.
  8. There is a general feeling of defeat in the Financial District. People are overworked, nobody’s hiring. This is the new American way — at least for the next four years. And while one can complain, the general sense is that one should not if she expects to keep her job. It is much like the mentality behind the Great Depression. Guilt for having to settle within a socioeconomic archipelago of overqualification.
  9. There are surely better ways to eke one’s existence than this.
  10. I have no shame about how these points are interpreted.
  11. I’m a cheery soul and I’m fighting every impulse that resembles that moment in Happiness where Ben Gazarra willingly applies the salt to his meal. As long as I exist on this planet, I will not throw in the towel. But I weep at the growing batallion of Gazarras who have seemingly infiltrated every urban hot pocket.