June 2008 Archives

^This was the heartfelt and, I think you must agree, appropriate response to the news that George Carlin has died.

I don't think there is a single individual outside my family and friends (with the possible exception of Dean Smith) who comes close to the level of influence Carlin had upon me.  Not just because I happen to be so fluent in profanity that I'm often mistaken for a native, but because Carlin's incisive views on language and life helped me establish a love for something that's often given lip service, but just as often ignored when the going gets tough: honesty.

Carlin's shtick--if you want to call it that--wasn't making up absurdities (a la Stephen Wright) or embellishing childhood memories (a la Bill Cosby).  He had the imagination to do so, mind you, and sometimes did, as in his hilarious accounts of growing up Irish Catholic in New York City, or when he theorized that the perfect murder would involve picking one guy up and killing another guy with him:  "They both die and there's no murder weapon!"

Most of the time, though, his shtick was simply telling the truth. It was the privilege of jesters in medieval courts to state baldly things that the king would ordinarily find so offensive to his dignity that the speaker would find himself in an iron maiden or something, and Carlin seized upon that privilege with gusto.  In the late 60s, he grew his hair and began using profanity and referring to drugs in his act--and not because it was funnier that way (though it was), or because it was easier (he was fired from the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, as he put it, "for saying 'shit' in a town where the big game is called 'crap,'" and was threatened by a mob at, of all places, the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva.)  He did it because he had realized that he was being dishonest in pretending to be a member of the Establishment, and his main beef with that Establishment was its hypocrisy.

So, it's 1972, and here I come, a nine-year-old boy, interested (as are all nine-year-old boys) in figuring out what the rules are, and how they can be fixed so that they don't apply to me as often.  My friend Bruce Crumpton has me over at his house one afternoon and he pulls out Carlin's 1970 album AM & FM, which features his groundbreaking routine "Shoot," in which he examines the myriad ways our language uses the word "shit."  At that point, I'd only been using the word for about two years (when I expressed my puzzlement over it in second grade, John Thebault cheerfully announced that it meant "Doodoo!"), and though I delighted in shocking my peers with occasional references to the Big S, I'd never really thought about where the word came from or what people used it for.  Carlin changed all that.  Of course, I also discovered how adults would laugh when I recited bits of his somewhat more innocuous "Eleven O'Clock News" and promptly memorized the whole thing.

When the fully-formed "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" appeared on Carlin's 1972 album Class Clown, I was ready to study and absorb every nuance.  I did.  What I couldn't articulate about it yet, however, is that the core of the bit, and in general the core of Carlin's comedy, was a diamond-hard dislike for hypocrisy.  For him, a society that focused on the existence of a word--a mere tool for conveying meaning--while ignoring the purposes and actions of the tool's user was being dishonest.  It was Carlin, not some teacher, not some literary theorist or critic, who taught me the concept of context.

And perhaps more important, what Carlin was teaching me was, bizarrely enough, exactly what I'd been taught by my parents, and presumably what I was being taught by the state of North Carolina, both in and out of the classroom: to say what you really believed, and to believe in what you say.  It's a belief that continues to be crucial to me today, working as I do at a school where the concept of personal honor is taken so seriously that a student can be dismissed for the simple act of lying.

In North Carolina, that belief is enshrined in a pretty prominent place:  the state motto, Esse quam videri.  It means "to be, rather than to seem."

Carlin didn't seem like a good guy to a lot of people.  He was hairy, and he cursed like a sailor, and he had a variety of drug problems over the years.  He was often angry, and some of his books and interviews later in his life made him come off as awfully bitter.

Well, big fuckin' deal.  So's my morning coffee.  And no matter what Carlin said, it was always laced with humor--a spoonful of sugar to help that bitter medicine go down.

So I raise my mug to you this morning, George.  Rest in peace.

Actually, I haven't had much call to give anyone the finger lately, though one guy did come close to getting it after cutting in front of me without signaling on US 29 the other day.  But the moving and writing?  Yes, that I've been doing.  In fact, aside from driving Kelly to the DC suburbs for a fangirl gathering, my main activities over the past week or so have been moving and writing.

As you likely already know--I haven't been shy about mentioning it, at least--the moving part is something we've been waiting to do for, oh, five years now.  Our current house on campus is one where we've lived since August of 1999, making my nine-year residence here the longest in any one house in my entire life.  It's also too small for four people, with only one full bath (upstairs) and a toilet (downstairs.)  The laundry room (which has a ceiling so low I can't stand up in it) is in the basement, and you have to go outside the house to access it.  Oh, and there's been construction next to our house through roughly four and a half of those nine years.  We're thus eager to set up housekeeping elsewhere.

The "elsewhere" in this case is a house just across the highway from campus.  We're losing a bedroom, but we're gaining a big finished basement, two showers, a Florida room, a mud room, a laundry room just off the kitchen, a carport, and a biiiiiig fenced yard which will make the dog very happy indeed.

Unfortunately, we're losing the internet.

Not forever, mind you, but by leaving campus, we're leaving the wireless network we've gotten so used to over the last year.  Worse, we can't get access to the campus T-1 line there, and there doesn't appear to be broadband within reach, either.  We may be able to get a satellite hookeup, or we may have to resort to *choke* dial-up.  But there will likely be something of a fallow period in this journal during early July while we're figuring out our best option.

In the meantime, while the school is busy cleaning the carpets and clearing away some vines that have gotten intimately involved with the stairs to the Florida room, we're packing.  I've been doing books and CDs so far, and we've gotten fiction, biography, drama, birding, my Doonesbury and Pogo collections, and all the CDs boxed.  Today I'm going forward to get nonfiction and poetry.  Graphic novels will wait till closer to the actual move date, since the kids read them incessantly.  I've gotten a few winter clothes packed, too, but there are a metric ton of them yet to go.

Needless to say, one way to avoid packing is to get focused on writing, and I've done a little of that as well.  In the latest draft of The Amazing Q, I finally added a scene that had been bubbling for a long while.  I then sent the MS out to an editor, as well as letting my crack beta-testing crew (tip o'the hat to Ms. Umlaut and her young Diacritical Marks) take a look.

Meanwhile, last summer's big project, Student Exchange, is on a different editor's desk, and you'll be among the first to know if anything happens there.  And I've even broken out the behemoth that is A Raven for Doves and am working on ways to cut it down to a manageable size, with more good stuff and less unnecessary reader-cudgeling.  (I am not always subtle.)

And right now?  I'm listening to Chet Atkins, and he's telling me to get off my duff and pack.  But I've got this GREAT new John Varley book to finish reading..

Today is the 8th anniversary of my online home, Readerville.com, and I'm sure you've seen more than enough of my own waxing rhapsodic about it.

For a change, then, I'm going to let someone else do the talking:  legendary Rvillean bon vivant dg strong, courtesy of his hilarious "How to Do Stuff" blog, the Psychopedia:

How to Visit Readerville.com

Click on the diagram at the bottom for the full bit of genius.

And he's right--nice ladies DO send you books.

I've often said that my mission in life is to throw off the curve.  When I come across a meme (thanx to Kaethe at "ae" and sometimes "ä" ) that tells me there are 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (or at least such is the title of a new book, edited by Peter Boxall, and which presumably kicks the list up to 1002 right off the bat--how are you going to know which ones to read if you don't read this one?), my immediate response is to say "Oh, yeah?  Who's gonna make me?"  But of course I must first determine which ones I actually HAVE read--the ones which I've put here in bold. Italics indicates that I started but haven't finished the book.

2000s : 4 read so far (and should 7% of the list come from the last eight years anyway?)

1. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Saturday - Ian McEwan
3. On Beauty - Zadie Smith
4. Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee
5. Adjunct: An Undigest - Peter Manson
6. The Sea - John Banville
7. The Red Queen - Margaret Drabble
8. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
9. The Master - Colm Toibin
10. Vanishing Point - David Markson
11. The Lambs of London - Peter Ackroyd
12. Dining on Stones - Iain Sinclair
13. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
14. Drop City - T. Coraghessan Boyle
15. The Colour - Rose Tremain
16. Thursbitch - Alan Garner
17. The Light of Day - Graham Swift
18. What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
20. Islands - Dan Sleigh
21. Elizabeth Costello - J.M. Coetzee
22. London Orbital - Iain Sinclair
23. Family Matters - Rohinton Mistry
24. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
25. The Double - José Saramago
26. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
27. Unless - Carol Shields
28. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
29. The Story of Lucy Gault - William Trevor
30. That They May Face the Rising Sun - John McGahern
31. In the Forest - Edna O'Brien
32. Shroud - John Banville
33. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
34. Youth - J.M. Coetzee
35. Dead Air - Iain Banks
36. Nowhere Man - Aleksandar Hemon
37. The Book of Illusions - Paul Auster
38. Gabriel's Gift - Hanif Kureishi
39. Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald
40. Platform - Michael Houellebecq
41. Schooling - Heather McGowan
42. Atonement - Ian McEwan
43. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
44. Don't Move - Margaret Mazzantini
45. The Body Artist - Don DeLillo
46. Fury - Salman Rushdie
47. At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill
48. Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
50. The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargos Llosa
51. An Obedient Father - Akhil Sharma
52. The Devil and Miss Prym - Paulo Coelho
53. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost - Ismail Kadare
54. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
55. The Heart of Redness - Zakes Mda
56. Under the Skin - Michel Faber
57. Ignorance - Milan Kundera
58. Nineteen Seventy Seven - David Peace
59. Celestial Harmonies - Péter Esterházy
60. City of God - E.L. Doctorow
61. How the Dead Live - Will Self
62. The Human Stain - Philip Roth
63. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
64. After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
65. Small Remedies - Shashi Deshpande
66. Super-Cannes - J.G. Ballard
67. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
68. Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates
69. Pastoralia - George Saunder

1900s: 64 read (plus others started) and I'm tired of listing the ones I haven't read at all

72. Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
95. Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
164. Arcadia - Jim Crace
180. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
183. Possession - A.S. Byatt
196. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
203. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
209. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul - Douglas Adams
210. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
227. Watchmen - Alan Moore & David Gibbons
238. The Cider House Rules - John Irving
242. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
245. White Noise - Don DeLillo
249. Dictionary of the Khazars - Milorad Pavic
258. Neuromancer - William Gibson
272. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
288. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
291. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
293. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
301. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
303. The World According to Garp - John Irving
312. The Shining - Stephen King
320. Interview With the Vampire - Anne Rice
341. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
349. Sula - Toni Morrison
351. The Breast - Philip Roth
358. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
375. Slaughterhouse-five - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
384. Myra Breckinridge - Gore Vidal
389. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
393. In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan
399. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
408. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
413. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
418. Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor
422. Albert Angelo - B.S. Johnson
427. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
437. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
438. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
441. Labyrinths - Jorg Luis Borges
444. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
451. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
456. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
472. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
477. The Once and Future King - T.H. White
481. The Midwich Cuckoos - John Wyndham
494. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
496. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
508. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
520. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
521. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
526. Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
527. Foundation - Isaac Asimov
529. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
539. I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
555. Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau
564. Animal Farm - George Orwell
572. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
579. The Outsider - Albert Camus
588. Native Son - Richard Wright
608. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
610. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
623. At the Mountains of Madness - H.P. Lovecraft
649. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
667. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
671. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
675. Orlando - Virginia Woolf
699. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
704. Billy Budd, Foretopman - Herman Melville
711. Cane - Jean Toomer
717. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
736. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
780. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
781. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1800s: 25 read (plus others started) and I'm STILL not listing all the unread ones 
790. The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells
791. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
794. Dracula - Bram Stoker
797. The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
799. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
808. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
833. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
839. The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
840. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
854. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There - Lewis Carroll
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne
867. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
868. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
875. Silas Marner - George Eliot
876. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
883. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
889. Walden - Henry David Thoreau
897. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
902. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
904. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
908. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
909. The Purloined Letter - Edgar Allan Poe
911. The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allan Poe
913. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
916. The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allan Poe
918. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
938. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

1700s: 4 read (plus others started)
969. Rasselas - Samuel Johnson
970. Candide - Voltaire
975. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
982. A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift
983. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
987. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
988. A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift

Pre-1700: 2 read (plus one started)
996. The Thousand and One Nights - Anonymous
1000. Metamorphoses - Ovid
1001. Aesop's Fables - Aesopusj

A quick look at the list will reveal some weird stuff, and not just the occasional oddity of dating (Billy Budd is a 20th-century novel?) and the disproportionate representation of works from after 1900 (and the CRIMINAL lack of material from before 1700--only a dozen titles!)

*All of the Poe titles listed are short stories, not books.

*Many of the other "book" titles listed (such as Everything That Rises Must Converge) are also short-story titles, though I suppose it's possible that the title refers to a collection by the same name... but after seeing the Poe examples, I'm a little suspicious.

*Labyrinths and Ficciones contain a number of the same Borges stories, though they're two different collections.

*There appears to be not a single poetry collection--though Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar sort of heads in that direction--nor epic poem (Paradise Lost ? The Iliad? Beowulf? The Inferno?) on the list. 

*I don't see any major religious work, such as, say, the New Testament or the Tao Te Ching. 

*No plays, either, though I can understand why you might want to see, rather than read, a great work of drama.  

*There's a decided lack of non-fiction options, leaving such crucial works as Darwin's The Origin of Species, Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life... on the sideline, not to mention more recent non-fiction classics such as The Perfect Storm, The Song of the Dodo, or A World Lit Only by Fire.

*Yay for putting Jim Crace on the list, but how you put Arcadia on it and leave off Being Dead and Quarantine I simply don't understand.

But hey, I'm over 100 and counting on this list.  And I'd like to see how its compilers would stack up on MY personal list.