PICTURED LEFT: Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird.
PICTURED RIGHT: Richard Kline, “Larry” from Three’s Company.

(Inspired by Languor Management.)

• Voodoo Lounge author Christian Bauman has apparently promised to reveal some of his personal foibles or, minimally, to blog naked during his guest appearance today at the Elegant Variation. We understand that the man is hot. Smoking hot. So hot that he’ll be serving as a surrogate pair of mittens in December or devoting said thermal energy to more fantastic offerings. In any event, Joe Bob says check him out.
• Frances Dinkelspiel offers a report on the film version of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Don’t let the Ohio reference fool you. This does involve a San Francisco local.
• Recently, various personages gathered to pay tribute to Saul Bellow. Jeffrey Eugenides introduced himself as “the guy who never knew Saul Bellow.” The caterer then stepped forward and introduced himself as “the guy who didn’t even know who Saul Bellow was.” He then proceeded to inform Mr. Eugenides that the tapas and canapés were “to die for” and was swiftly removed from the premises shortly after another wave of sobbing emerged from the assembled crowd.
• Edna O’Brien is returning to Bay Area theatre with Family Butchers. It’s a Magic Theatre production. A script excerpt and other goodies can be found here.
• Chris Elliott, novelist?
• A new study suggests that classical English literature is essential to the teaching of English. In other groundbreaking news, it is believed that the theory of relativity might just help you sort out electromagnetic waves. And maybe, just maybe, 3.141592675 might have something to do with circles.
• Some scientists claim to have found Homer’s Ithaca.
• The Sydney Morning Herald talks with Curtis Sittenfeld. Unfortunately, despite being of an age where she should have developed some speaking chops (Sittenfeld is 30), Sittenfeld, like, uses the word “like” in just about every answer to the intrepid Australian journalist. Like wow!
• Does a bear shit in the words? Not always. But in Canada, polar bears go batshit crazy.
• And if you’re aroused by birds, there’s a reason.

The minute I heard the news that Tom DeLay had been indicted, I experienced a sudden burst of euphoria. I felt a wave of equanamity settle over my entire mind and body. I was good-natured and friendly. I didn’t mind if others won at the board games. Hell, I was feeling so good that I’d happily play the UnGame again.

The doctors took me into a room and gave me a checkup. Then Heidi (the doctor) took me aside and said, “I don’t believe this, kid, but not only will you not need any tricyclics again, but you won’t need yulthodranine. Why, you can walk right out that door if you wanted too!”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all, Ed. You see, you’ve just taken in what’s known in Washington as a muckup mirabillis. Your mind and body was so overjoyed to see some small moment of justice in a hopelessly corrupt system that it responded instantly with bonhomie and defeated your mental malady.”

“No stress?”

“None. You’re a veritable Tesla coil of calmness.”

“I can leave today?”

“The orderlies will help you pack your things.”

I looked at the orderly whose finger I had bitten. I asked this orderly if I could give him a hug. He complied. He squeezed me a bit too hard. Then he gave me a roast beef sandwich with raw roast beef. At least the guy had a sense of humor.

The other orderlies helped gather my stuff and pretty soon, I was out the building.

I was cured all right.

I have to ask: What is the point of playing a board game when you can’t screw someone over? Is not the purpose of a game (whether life or Life) to win with as great a margin as possible? If I learned anything growing up in a chronically miserable and highly competitive family, it was this: If you don’t screw them over, then you’ll get screwed over. Play the game until they run to their bedroom sobbing.

I’ve played several games of Monopoly, tittering like a smug bastard every time someone lands on my hoteled Park Place and watching their hard-won and carefully accumulated savings go into my prodigious coffers just after they’ve mortgaged all their properties. In an instant, my opponents are down to nothing. But, so as not to completely humilate them (well, this is a bit of a lie, but at least the sentiment exists), I’m taking every property they own with the exception of the purple ghettos of Mediterranenan and Baltic Avenues, the latter involving a measly maximum rent of $450 with a hotel. In the rare moments in which I land upon Baltic Avenue, I observe my opponent’s eyes light up, collecting the $450 like a transient huddling over an unexpected yet meager fire.

I’ve also enjoyed invading multiple continents when playing Risk, strong-arming my way across the globe only after I’ve suggested to the other players that I am their friend and that I would never ever consider taking Brazil to complete my acquisition of South America. I suppose this is the closest that one can come to living out the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Of course, since I play these board games to win, I’ve lost a few friends who didn’t understand the objectives. I’ve seen boards flipped over just before my final moment of conquest. I’ve had people not speak to me for weeks, telling me that if I’m going to play a board game that way, then I’m likely to stab them in the back during a birthday party or sleep with their girlfriends. I should point out that violence is not within my nature, but I argue that if the object of the game is to win, then what crime have I committed exactly? I’m only abiding by the game designer’s wishes. I’m only playing by the rules.

With these sentiments in mind, I sat down this afternoon to play the UnGame. My participants were a sixty-year old schizophrenic, a man whose wife had moved out with their children leaving only a note reading I WASTED THIRTEEN YEARS OF MY LIFE WITH YOU NOW I’M GOING TO FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES, and a teenage lesbian who had been forced into the hospital by her parents, insisting that the doctors could “make her normal,” whatever the hell that meant.

In other words, I was assured an almost complete and total victory. But au contraire. Much as one would expect from the rosy and desperate title, The UnGame challenges the traditional object by creating an entirely new goal: everyone wins! In other words, the UnGame challenges what is likely a healthy outlet for surviving in a ruthless capitalistic system and replaces it with some Kommisariat-style form of socialism. I expected all of us to be hauled away to the quiet room and shot sequentially with ruthless Soviet efficiency.

Alas, the executions didn’t happen. But bad feelings did. The man spurned by his late-blooming virago began to tell us all along that he had been an ass man and that his estranged wife wasn’t interested in sodomy. We shifted in our seats as he confessed these needlessly intimate details. The teenage lesbian, in particular, thought this was a hoot. The schizophrenic thought that he was talking about the gas man and began shrieking at the top of his lungs about a gas leak that the bastards upstairs had failed to tell us about.

I hope we don’t play the UnGame again. I don’t recommend it. Because without that pivotal conquest component, how can one enjoy one’s self? It’s miserable listening to the problems of the world. But perhaps that was the whole point of introducing the game. Never mind that the U.S.S.R. was a failed experiment at this sort of forced socialism.