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…