Book Mash-Up

I’m finding it difficult to remain faithful to one book.  I’m currently reading Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van der Berg, Vano and Niko by Erlom Akhvlediani, No Logo by Naomi Klein, Watercolor Women/Opaque Men by Ana Castillo, The Animals by Richard Grossman, and Chance Ransom by Kevin Stein. 

I love them all so far, but I just can’t commit to one.  And I’ve been eyeing Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan, Robert Creeley’s selected poems, and the short stories of Tennessee Williams. 

I have plans to purchase Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov, Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, The Physics of Sorrow by Greorgi Godpodinov, Goat’s Milk by Frank Ormsby, The Dirty Dust by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, The Guts by Roddy Doyle, and Young Skins by Colin Barrett, just to name a few. 

I have a problem. 

My inability to focus on one text may be due to the manner in which I spend my days: reading student papers, rereading texts I plan to use for class discussion, reading a shit ton of internet junk, skimming Wikipedia, rereading old poems and writings that I should be polishing but often abandon 1/3 in after something akin to depression sets in. 

So blame it (largely) on my job.  But blame it also on the times.

Many others have written more polished and considered pieces on the subject of reading and culture in the age of Google.  (They have names like Nicholas Carr and Dubravka Ugrešić and Douglas Rushkoff, names you might want to check out.) I am not concerned with composing a long think piece on this, but more curious about my lack of focus means for me, a guy who has long identified as a reader (a kind of odious term, but I’ll use it).  I don’t think I am the most voracious reader in town, certainly not the most erudite.  But I am a book geek.  I like to take photos of my bookshelves and share them with my uninterested Facebook friends.  I love bookstores and feel an odd sense of duty to purchase something whenever I enter one.  I like collecting books, even ones I doubt I’ll ever read.  And I like to keep up with what’s happening in world literature, though I still haven’t read László Krasznahorkai and can’t get into the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.  But I have them on my shelves, waiting for the day when I might want to read them.  Or at least add them to the pile of books I’ve not finished. 

Last year I read Ulysses, which represented a personal accomplishment.   As I have written elsewhere (on this blog and my other), I was previously very anti-James Joyce.  This is because my boss and mentor at the Aspidistra bookshop has no use for the filthy Irish Modernist master.  This is also because I read Faulkner first and, as much as I love Joyce, Faulkner will always be my go-to for stream of consciousness prose.  He essentially ruined me for Joyce and Virginia Woolf, until last year when Ulysses just sort of clicked with me.  It was the right book for me at that time.  I read the bulk of it on the beaches of Rogers Park while happy young people threw footballs over my head.  The setting seemed fitting considering the famous chapter where Leopold Bloom jerks off on the beach.  But I read it slowly, chapter by chapter, taking breaks when the literary hijinks got to be a bit much, reading shorter books on the train and reserving Joyce’s tome for weekend reading.  This created the idea that I could do this all the time: read short, portable books on the train (slim poetry collections, pocket paperbacks) and save the heavy stuff for reading in the easy chair with a glass of whiskey at my side. 

This works well enough, though I think I’ve now gotten into the habit of splitting my attention to the point where I am unable to really commit the mental energy some of these books demand.  What’s more interesting is that all of the books I am currently reading have started to bleed into each other.  The result is a curious mash-up of literary themes and styles.  I will do my best to represent it:

A young woman dresses up as bigfoot while singing of Finn McCool in a series of tercets that dip in and out of the experiences of a first generation Mexican-American woman who seeks to challenge notions of consumerist culture and indict corporations for their branding of sheepherders who talk with dogs and foxes and mice in a Beckett-like voice of absurd detachment in the prairie land of Illinois. 

An amazing book, no?   

Why You Should Take the Train

Like a sock in the eye, the piss stink.  The source was immediately evident: homeless guy, sleeping, his body taking up the entire row of seats but no one really wanted to sit next to him anyway.  I moved to the other side of the train car.  A woman next to me started spraying her wrist with cheap perfume in an effort to mask the odor, but as anyone could have told her, the new stink of her perfume only mixed with the piss smell creating a full assault on the senses.  After three sprays, someone asked her to stop.  The woman did not take it well. 

Two stops into my commute, I heard a man talking to himself. It started as muttering but picked up between Chicago Ave. and Clark and Division.  By the time the subway turned into the El, he was screaming, laughing, raving.  His laughter sounded like how I used to imagine the Joker sounding when I read Batman comics as a kid, only more insane, like the Joker’s laugh while peaking on LSD and getting blown by Harley Quinn.  His gibberish was fairly unintelligible, though I managed to make out: “I like to eat the diarrhea!  Onions!  Garlic!  Taffy apple and farts!”  I’m 100% serious.  A few of his more bizarre vocal effects resembled the Boredoms records I loved in the ‘90s.  He gave everyone who walked past the finger, shaking his head back and forth and laughing that nightmare laugh. 

The woman next to me, still reeking of shitty perfume, started to mumble, “This sucks” and then “God as my witness…” I couldn't see any difference between her and the ranting loon.  Not true: I preferred the loon’s version of talking to himself.  It was fairly original, at least.  

The train reached Berwyn and the drunk came aboard.  He yelled at the sleeping homeless man, “Get up, buddy, you stink!” then walked to the other end (even booze couldn’t dull his senses that much).  The loon screamed, “SUCKADICK! SUCKADICK! SUCKADICK!”  The drunk replied: “Shit, a stinker and a fucking nut!”  I was more afraid of the drunk.  He looked angry.  And—far be it from me to judge—but what the hell was he doing getting that drunk at 4:00 PM? 

And you know what—it wasn’t the sleeping dude with the piss pants or the loon or the drunk that bugged me most.  It was the perfume sprayer and the few people who decided to commiserate with her: the suit wearing prick who said something like, “Why not go to a park and piss yourself.  Why did he have to board a train where people are trying to get home?” or the weird lady with the flying kitten spandex pants who kept rolling her eyes, or the college girls who giggled the entire time.  Fuck them.  At least the drunk knows he’s a drunk and the homeless guy… what choice does he have?  Guy’s gotta sleep somewhere.  Why not the train?  These oddballs are touched, to put it mildly.  They live lives we can’t possibly imagine.  They offend, sure.  They stink, they’re weird, and they challenge our fragile idea of normalcy.  But they’re interesting.  I wouldn’t want to spend any more time with them than I have to, but that goes for all the assholes on that train today.  And me?  Why the hell do I get to pass judgment?  I can be just as obnoxious as the next guy.  Just because I manage not to piss myself or scream at strangers doesn’t make me any better (well, not much) than anyone else on that train.  Who knows, any of us seemingly normal folks could someday be that weirdo on the train.

And that’s why you should always take public transportation: to remember that you are a few small tragedies away from being as crazy as the next asshole.

24 Great Replacements Songs

In an attempt to answer a friend’s question about where to begin with The Replacements, I let loose a bit of gibberish about why Let it Be is their best record though not a perfect record and how, really, the Mats never made a perfect record, though Let it Be and Tim are damn near close, but that ignores a lot of other great songs, which gave birth to this post, which I’m calling: “24 Great Replacements Songs” though you know that already since it’s the title of this post, which is above this rambling sentence. 

Ahem.

In no special order, here are the songs that belong on anyone’s Replacements mix:

“Favorite Thing”

“Left of the Dial”

“Androgynous”

“Unsatisfied”

“Here Comes a Regular”

“Little Mascara”

“Bastards of Young” (though the live version from SNL is preferable to the studio recording)

“Black Diamond” (better than the original version by Kiss)

“Swingin’ Party”

“Kiss Me on the Bus”

“Take Me Down to the Hospital”

“Buck Hill”

“Lovelines”

“Lookin’ For Ya”

“Mr.  Whirley”

“Color Me Impressed”

“Alex Chilton”

“Skyway”

“Can’t Hardly Wait”

“Achin’ to Be”

“Talent Show”

“One Wink at a Time”

“If Only You Were Lonely” 

“Waitress in the Sky”

No Surprise, Just Business As Usual.

Okay, Rahm won.  I don’t know that anyone is truly surprised (I’m not), but I sense disappointment from most of my friends.  And from 44.3% of the voters who got off their fucking asses.  I’ll assume the low turnout has to do with the cynicism that has festered here in Chicago since well before the era of Richard M., as most of the people who could get it up to actually discuss the runoff in terms beyond an apathetic shrug cited elections A.H. (after Harold) as examples of whaddya gonna do? 

Let’s not address the fallacy of slacktivism.  (Okay, just for a sec. Yes, these two jerks were far from ideal candidates; yes, Chicago is a politically corrupt town; sure, your vote wasn’t really going to change the inevitability of the Raht’s reelection; but maybe...  “But maybe” are words born of optimism, perhaps misplaced and certainly laughable, but goddamnit, the easiest way to guarantee that shit stays fucked is to do nothing.  Hiding behind some sort of “I’m not going to sell my vote this cheaply” pseudo-ideology is nothing short of horseshit.  I’m not stupidly optimistic, but I’d sooner be that than a defeatist posing as a revolutionary.  I’m looking at you, Russell Brand.  Shave already.) 

Low voter turnout aside, what were Chuy’s chances?  Well… apparently they were better than many of us imagined.  He did get 44.3% of the vote.  Imagine what that number might have looked like if more people showed up to the polls.  If we can agree that Rahm did not exactly slide back into the office on five, maybe we can see the runoff in a positive light.  Maybe Rahm learned a lesson: that reelection was not going to be as easy for him as it was for his predecessor.  Maybe he’ll think again before closing mental health facilities and schools; maybe he’ll be a little more responsible with the TIF money and stop using it for projects that will do nothing for the city and its citizens; maybe he’ll see that his tough guy persona is alienating and that talking like an asshole does not make you a strong leader.  It makes you an asshole.  Maybe he’ll see that his job is tenuous and that he has to actually work to keep it. 

Nah.  He’s rich.  He’ll win again.  And again.  As often as he wants the job, he’s got the job.  And we let him have the job when we give up hope.  So please, my fellow cynical Chicagoans, get off you fucking asses and vote next time.  Or don’t.  Whatever.  You deserve mayor 1%.  Good job, Chi.  Summer’s coming.  Duck.