Dead Souls

The protagonist of Nikolai Gogol’s apparently incomplete novel Dead Souls is named Chichikov.  This, like many other characters’ names in the book, is a bit of a joke, a play on words I would never have understood without footnotes, and comes from the word that means a “sneeze” or “to sneeze” or something else sneeze-related.

My boyfriend and I once dreamed of owning a big orange tomcat.  The original name put forward was Eugene.  I selflessly donated the name to a friend’s  big orange tomcat and was, in the end, left cat nameless and alone.

But it’s alright, because Chichikov is an EVEN MORE PERFECT name for an orange cat.

Any good pet owner can tell you that naming a house cat is integral both to the accurate representation of that cat’s personality as well as to the development of the animal’s persona in and of itself.  This might be a chicken/egg situation.

I really want to be a good pet owner; about 45% of my brain is devoted to the storage and consideration of Good Names for Cats.

(From http://thecatorialist.blogspot.com)

 This cat is a CHICHIKOV (the theoretical cat formerly known as Eugene).

The “real” Chichikov (real as imagined by Gogol, at least) was a man remarkable in his lack of remarkable traits, a man so desirous of improving his social status that he doggedly pursued a hairbrained scheme: to buy up the papers to the recently deceased serfs of country landowners in order to appear as if he had hundreds of underlings.  These “dead souls” would have to be those who had been counted on the last census, making them officially “alive” yet practically useless.

See, the big orange tomcat pictured here is just like that.  This picture was probably taken while he was in the process of dragging a bunch of roadkill into a pile so he could lord over the pile of dead things like a master hunter and play the hero.  Maybe it’s unfair to assume things like that about someone, but look at him.  It’s just so obvious.

Don’t even get me started on those little girls he dates.

Animal Farm

My sister and I used to have a book called, Everything I Need to Know About Life, I Learned from my Cat.  Everything I need to know about Marxism, I learned from Animal Farm.  Life is full of little wee teachers, and the list could go on and on (Everything I Need to Know About Having an Inferiority Complex, I Learned from Summer Camp.  Everything I Need to Know About Eating, I Learned from Smokin’ Weed).  I once had a friend with a neurologist father and prodigious older sister, and she knew a lot early on, although it’s doubtful she grasped the significance of her absorbed knowledge.  When we were reading Orwell’s famous political commentary/satire in grade nine or so, she was the one who turned to me and said, in wise voice, “Snowball is supposed to be Trotsky.”  I think she might have also said, “Trotsky was cool.  Poor Trotsky.”

For several years after, I knew no more about the Russian Revolution than what she had told me about barnyard antics.  I still thought Rasputin was an evil sorcerer come back from the undead to nab Anastasia.  In reality, Rasputin was more like…well…let’s say…the unmentioned but most certainly over-involved pushy hairdresser of the wife of Mr. Jones, the farmer who exits at the beginning of Animal Farm.  You dig?  Forget that Rah-Rah-Rasputin nonsense – whispers and lies, whispers and lies.

Animal Farm is a book about a bunch of farm animals (surprise!) who take over the homestead.  The socialist leaders Lenin, Stalin and Cool Trotsky are represented by pigs named, respectively, Old Major, Napoleon, and Snowball.  A kindly old draft horse is the hardworking but dimwitted proletariat.  The mean ol’ farmer of neighbouring land is Hitler and the Nazis.  A gang of puppies are Stalin/Napoleon’s secret police.  As anyone who’s read 1984 could tell you, Orwell was highly critical of contemporary socialism and believed it to be basically flypaper for corruption.  Just like in real life, things down on the A.F. get messy.  Spoiler: Snowball kicks the bucket – one might even say he buys the farm (HAHAHA).  But you know the score – or do you?  Canadian History teachers masturbate to the idea of having a political history half as scandalous as Russia’s.  For example, I heard that one reason Stalin was ultimately able to oust Trotsky was that J.S. lied to L.T. about the date of Lenin’s funeral, telling him it was one day later than it actually was.  As a result, HAWTsky was absent at the proceedings, smearing his good commie name in the mud of apparent disrespect.  Total bummer, L.T.!

That, and Rasputin was never undead.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Not long ago, I was talking at my dear friend Ted about what is essentially the idea behind this blog – that is, the seeming ridiculousness of feeling one is entitled to critique works commonly acknowledged as “classics.”

“Like saying, ‘Oh, Of Mice and Men isn’t very good,’ for example.”

“Or criticising, like, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” added Ted.

I stared at him blankly.  “What is that?”

Ted gave me the eye of disbelief.  “Uh…it’s a really famous book…”

I am a university student and Ted did not finish high school.  Further proof that this means just about nothing at all when it gets right down to it.  So I hadn’t heard of Betty Smith’s “coming-of-age classic,” despite the fact that between the ages of ten and fourteen about 75% of the books I read could be described as YA coming-of-age novels.  Despite the argument that just about every book ever written about people under the age of thirty could be said to contain sprinklings of C.O.A., I am referring to the great preteen-targeted works of our time (Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, or, uh, anything by Judy Blume).

My little sister is fifteen and reads exclusively Teen Vogue, Seventeen, and books about boys and shopping.  Her English teacher once asked her, “Sophie, when you go to the library, do you only look for books under the ‘bimbo’ section?”  Unfortunately for her, she has an older sister who doesn’t consider herself above open condescension.  As a result, I’ve totally forfeited the best part of being an older sibling - the ability to steer her in what I consider to be “the right direction.”  One word out of my mouth concerning her media intake triggers a prompt, “Shut up, Maddy!”  It becomes obvious that I have damaged this part of our relationship almost beyond repair.  It requires a superhuman measure of delicacy to convincingly explain to her that it’s not her fondness for bimbo media that concerns me, because I read the same things (albeit less openly).  It’s more that I don’t want her obvious intelligence to be drained, leaving her wading forever in the soulless pop culture mire.

Coming-of-age is a very inclusive label.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is about a saccharine preteen girl growing up in pre-hip Williamsburg at the turn of the century, back when it was a slummy neighbourhood inhabited by first and second generation white immigrants surviving on a diet of reconstituted stale bread, raw potatoes, and pork tongue.  Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret is about a neurotic preteen girl growing up in the suburbs during the 1970s who, with her friends, chants “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” in hopes of, well, you know.  The friend who lent me her copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn says she loved it when she was a tween, and I might have liked it, too, but, ultimately, the C.O.A. novels that kept me coming back were closer to Gossip Girl – where, unlike in the former, any mention of consumption has nothing to do with the disease.

Don’t you hate when you read a magazine interview with some celebrity, and the interviewer asks the question, “What’s your guilty pleasure?” and the interviewee responds with something like, “chocolate ice cream?”  I have always resented the question because I feel it implies an expected puritanism, denial of pleasure, the idea that women should fear weight gain more than they should a world without ice cream (horrors!), etcetera.  However, I realise now that guilty pleasures have I, and theirs names are those old issues of NYLON I keep stashed for breakfast table reading.  But I haven’t bought a new issue in months.  I swear.  Because everyone knows that magazine’s gone down the tubes.  And I, for one, am a serious woman.

Thank you, Richard Price

“Reading Catcher in the Rye when you’re fourteen is like Jesus came down and slapped you.”

(possibly misquoted from an interview in the May 2008 issue of The Believer)

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez is my celebrity crush. The characters he writes make gorging oneself on dirt clods and chugging perfume seem like the logical manifestations of heartbreak and desire. If anyone’s books deserve to be reread, they are his. I know people who say they never reread books. I am obviously not in this camp, and to these people I say, “Read Love in the Time of Cholera at least twice, ideally sandwiching romantic entanglements between readings, imbibing cologne until you’re good and rowdy – at which point you must put down the book and get thee to a brothel.”

I first read Love in the Time of Cholera on the heels of 100 Years of Solitude, an admittedly tough act to follow – and I didn’t really get into it. So an underdog type pledges undying love to a woman who marries someone else, biding his time until her husband dies by notching his own bedpost until he’s sleeping on a toothpick – so what? I am a cold woman. In my experience, the wooing stage can only last so long before it’s time to get used to the idea that it ain’t never gonna happen. If you can’t handle setting things in motion, you should cut your losses and set your sights elsewhere. My romantic pragmatism originally made it hard for me to sympathise with the lovelorn protagonist Florentino Ariza, who finds a kind of nobility in suffering for love. Buddhists may claim that suffering is at the heart of the human experience, but I dig emotional comfort, so Ariza’s line was just not my jam.

However. I did write previously that there is no safety without danger, and there is, similarly, no comfort without discomfort. So after reading this book a second time, I think I get it. Ariza holds out hope that he and his beloved will be together one day because, after all that bad, the good would be so good, mindblowingly good. I once dated a guy who said all he wanted to do was relax. Maybe it works for him, but it wasn’t long before I felt like boredom was melting my brain all over the bedsheets, because relaxation only exists in opposition to action – and there wasn’t a whole lot of that. Smoking a joint in bed feels great if you’ve been ripping up the dancefloor all night, but it feels like premature retirement if all you’ve done all day is strenuous shit like smoking joints in an upright position.

That said, Márquez’s writing is over the top beautiful, but I was still frustrated with Ariza the second time around. Because this is somewhat optimistic fiction, he does get the girl in the end (spoiler! But you know it’s coming, really), but a real-life Ariza could never exist. Because, when it comes to romance, humans want to survive, and, when it comes to sexuality, humans are ignoble genitals with limbs attached. If I had a friend like Ariza, we’d sit down for a pint of Chanel No. 5 and I’d tell him the score.

This is actually a really good read.

Candide

Childhood precociousness does not presuppose gradually increasing talent for the rest of one’s life (see: Frankie Muniz).  I’d say in most cases that the talent avalanche hits the barrier around age eleven, from which point said youngster drops back to a normal level of skill-development, with somewhat of a head start.  I may have been eight years old when I somehow got my hands on Voltaire’s tragicomedy Candide, but that hasn’t panned out into Proust scholarship a decade later.  Besides, I didn’t get any of the sex jokes and didn’t know the meaning of the word “eunuch.”  What I did understand was this: Candide is a happy-go-lucky young man who unwittingly enrolls in the school of hard knocks – but (mostly) keeps his chin up, gosh darn it!  His mentor is a philosopher named Pangloss who preaches that this is the “best of all possible worlds,” and so everything happens or exists for a reason.  For example: our noses are shaped the way we are so we can wear glasses.  This was a familiar idea because, after all, I had already read A Hole is to Dig.  In other words, I got the gist.  I also got the gist of The Old Man and the Sea.  Why wouldn’t I?  All it is, is a story about an old guy and a huge fish, right?…right?  Anyways.

I don’t own a television, but whenever I end up in front of one, watching children’s programming, I get depressed.  So many of the more recent shows and movies produced for kids are so wimpy.  My boyfriend works at a video store, and a little while ago he went through a phase of watching recent releases like Surf’s Up and Over the Hedge.  The latter was terrible.  It was so bad.  There’s no real drama, nothing really scary, no Bambi’s-mom-died tears.  Curse the socially conservative values of American media conglomerates for churning out this waste-of-CGI and its sappy “family is the most important thing” message.  Damn them straight to the hell reserved for racial profilers by including a sassy-black-woman character in the form of a stinky sassmaster of a skunk.  I realise the magnitude of this generalisation, but kids are better than this spineless pap.  If they can understand a cartoon based on Hamlet (The Lion King, of course), then they can swallow something a little meatier than Over the Hedge.  Alice in Wonderland was my favourite movie when I was a kid, and it is comparatively very bizarre and very un-PC, what with the hookah-smoking and the Queen’s bloodlust and all.  I once played the Queen of Hearts in an awful high school play and one of the most gratifying aspects of this was that a lot of the kids in the audience were actually very afraid of me.  As they should be!  There is no safety without danger!

It’s not as if the landscape of contemporary kids’ fare is completely hopeless.  A round of applause to Japanese animators like Miyazaki whose continued efforts to suspend youthful audiences between terror and horror should inspire American film studios to stay on their toes.  Philip Pullman’s “young adult” book series His Dark Materials (the first of which is the recently film-adapted, and declawed, Golden Compass – what a shame) is one of my all-time favourites.  I don’t deny that quality kids’ books and movies are out there; I just wish corporations and over-protective parents wouldn’t rank inoffensiveness higher than emotional development.

Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald is amazing.  He turns a phrase like no other and The Beautiful and Damned is a great title.  His descriptions of early-twentieth century American aristocracy make me want to wear diamonds, drink gin, and drape myself all over the chaise longue in the sunroom of my lavishly-furnished summer home.  If you have ever been involved in any kind of intimate relationship with another person and/or struggle with obligations towards others, you should read Tender is the Night. The story is about wealthy Americans (surprise, surprise) living in Europe, and the Internet just told me that Fitzgerald was writing the book while his wife, Zelda, was hospitalised for schizophrenia.  So, yeah, it’s about being in a relationship with someone suffering from mental illness – which I have never experienced, to my knowledge, but the feelings of obligation are familiar.

I was once in a relationship with someone who told me he loved me after about three days.  I thought I was going to hyperventilate.  I liked him, and I didn’t want to wipe out such a serendipitous budding relationship, so what else could I do but pretend it was reciprocal?  I wish I could write this man an anonymous letter telling him not to ever do that again, if not for fear of scaring someone off, then for fear of adding an onerous element of obligation to the relationship before it even gets the chance to take off.  We were together for a while, but I was mildly disturbed for the entirety of the relationship for reasons I didn’t figure out until a lot later.  Now I know: I could never live up to what he thought I was feeling.  Extenuating circumstances eventually separated us, but if we had been divided by my hand, I know he would’ve fallen apart.  No mental illness was involved, just a sweet, somewhat slow boy with the capacity for affection of a beaten puppy.  Tender is the Night is not about this situation.  Which is good, because I don’t think I would want to deal with it again.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I am very bad at understanding people with accents.  By that I mean people whose mother tongue is English, but are from, say, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia…all other former British colonies.  There are, obviously, shades of grey, but I will say that the billet I stayed with in Essex spoke with a Cockney-type accent so strong I had to ask her to repeat just about everything she said (“‘ow old aw yoo?  Ahm four’een”).  Besides an admiration for British pop music (Keith Moon being a favourite earlier in my life), I am no Anglophile.  What’s so glamourous about black lung and conservative class politics?  My billet once complained to me that all the English people in American movies had such “posh accents.”  “I ain’t posh, I’m common!”  she declared.  I didn’t ask her to repeat herself.

My edition of D.H. Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover includes a translation dictionary for the eponymous lover’s local vernacular, including the slang he uses to talk about the female genitals – one of the reasons the book was declared an “obscene publication.”  That, and the fact that the plot revolves around Lady Chatterley carrying on an affair with the groundskeeper while her impotent paraplegic husband glooms around in their country manor.  Either Lawrence is kind of a downer, or newly industrialised England really was just horribly bleak.

After reading another of his books, Sons and Lovers, my biggest issue with ol’ D.H. is his awful attitude towards women.  His female characters are bitter and shrewish.  And he refers to the clitoris as a “beak” (what!) that tears at a man as a woman forces him to stay inside her till she’s satisfied.  Sounds like D.H.  was fucking rocky outcroppings, not women – or maybe he just felt emasculated because the women he was with needed clitoral stimulation?  I hear he was heavily into anal sex, which probably says a lot about him dodgin’ the beak.  I kind of hate him.  Two beaks up for the book, one ruptured sphincter for D.H.

The Odyssey

The other day, my friends Ted, Katie and I were talking about how silly television shows about reading are – you know, Reading Rainbow, Wishbone. The aim is obviously to shoot kids between the eyes while they’re watching after-school TV with the Good News About Reading, but why would anyone read Huck Finn when they could watch an affable dog pretend to be the titular character instead? And wouldn’t the producers of these television shows be upset if kids took their advice and went to library instead? If entertainment executives really cared, they would make all the television shows on their network uberboring so television wouldn’t even be an option for fun-lovin’ tots. Besides, I’m pretty sure I saw a screaming, placenta-encrusted newborn one time on Reading Rainbow and that shit is gross.

That said, I was a prepubescent bookworm who also happened to watch a lot of YTV, and one my sister’s and my favourite computer games was Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey. It was necessarily primitive and usually froze up the computer, but Circe, Polyphemus, and the gang kept us coming back from more.

The plot of the game is taken up almost entirely by Odysseus’s seafaring journey and his various misadventures on different Greek islands, which is probably why I was surprised to discover, once I actually began to read the book, that the majority of the action takes place on Ithaca, and the reader only experiences his Amazing Odyssey when he’s talking to other characters about what he’s been through. This means that Homer was, while telling the story, actually telling the story of a man telling a story, within which there is occasionally further storytelling. Seriously meta!

For those not in the know (do you not watch TV?), Homer’s Odyssey is the story of a really well-rounded guy who, after fighting on the frontlines against Troy, offends Poseidon, god of the sea, and, as a result, spends no less than twenty years trying to get back home again to Ithaca – presumably about 10 minutes away as the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flies. In sum, the Odyssey is all about two things:

1. Biting the hand that feeds you is a total bummer (sacrifice them bulls!).
2. Odysseus is so pretty and smart. I wish I were that pretty and smart so Athena would favour me.

Actually, there’s one more significant theme to be noted: guest etiquette. Apparently in ancient Greece, pretty and smart guests could show up unannounced in any royal court they wanted and have gold and slabs of meat showered down on them by their hosts, often even before their hosts knew who they were. I’ve heard that vampires can’t come into your home unless you invite them in, so that’s really asking for it. On the bad-guest front, a motley crew of men set up camp in Odysseus’ home while he’s away, wooing his wife and eating all his food – and, until Odysseus finally gets home, nobody stops them. 800 BC was a good year for freeloaders! What I’m taking away from this is that my friends are really cheap and I need to befriend some long-dead Mediterranean monarchs.

The Odyssey is a good read, if a little heavy on the filler (see: renumeration of B-list Greek heroes). If I were given the choice to pick it up from that old man’s garage sale again, I would. Everybody! -

What’s the story, Wishbone? Do you think it’s worth a look? It kinda seems familiar, like a story from a book…