"The Original of Laura" by Vladimir Nabokov

Yesterday -- a gloomy, cold Monday morning -- I got the happiest surprise possible: Dimitri Nabokov has finally decided to publish his father's final, unfinished manuscript, "The Original of Laura."

Since I didn't start reading Nabokov's books until long after he'd died, I've missed the sweet anticipation of waiting for one of his books. Now -- thanks apparently to Vladimir appearing in his son's dream -- I get to enjoy the last book with the rest of the world...

...and we'll probably all think it sucks. But still!

Taxes Times Two

The real joy of filling out tax forms is knowing that you're going to lose...but not knowing BY HOW MUCH. Last year I was shocked and horrified by the amount of money I needed to pay at the end of April. This year I need to pay twice as much! You may have guessed that I have not started earning twice as much money in the meantime.

There are only certain circumstances during which I require an afternoon drink all alone. This is one of them.

Antics of Arabella

One reason that I decided to read every issue of The New Yorker in chronological order was so I could understand the references. By reading all the stories leading up to the 1928 election, for instance, I can understand the jokes they make subsequently about Herbert Hoover. You might ask if it's important to understand flippant jokes about Herbert Hoover. You'd have a point.

Sometimes, however, an item shows up that I have no context for. Such is the case with the November 17, 1928 two-page spoof of the New York Times, featuring all sorts of Times-related humour that even an avid New Yorker reader couldn't hope to understand.

I give you "Antics of Arabella" (click for full-size) and I ask respectfully: what the HELL?

Pictures, Some of Which Feature Feet!

I've put up a few more pictures on Flickr. Click here to look at the most recent ones. Amongst other things you will see the "hair squid" that I bought from Exoskeleton Cabaret...



...and, by popular demand, a few shots of me with glasses looking oh-so-brainy.



Enjoy!

Zsa Zsa Ditches a Rodent or Two

On Tuesday morning I found a dead mouse at the bottom of my stairs, laid there by my 13-year old, thoroughly calm and domesticated cat.



This shocked me for two reasons, first because there had been no evidence of rodent activity previous to this, but mainly because Zsa Zsa doesn't seem like a cold-blooded killer. She doesn't like to play with things, preferring instead to sit on my lap and purr loudly and then fall asleep. She doesn't even have front claws.

Even stranger, Zsa Zsa didn't appear to be proud about what she'd done. Her attitude was very much "this is my job, don't worry about it." I have to agree because she doesn't contribute much to the household except for love and affection. Now she can contribute murder.

Then, on Friday morning I heard her attacking another mouse in my upstairs hallway. I think she carried it downstairs, thinking it was dead, and then it ran away and escaped into one of the heating vents. I can now verify that terrified mice sound like laser guns when they're cornered, making an awful squeak-squeak-squeaking sound.

I love mice -- some of my favourite pets have been mice -- but I can't say I feel sorry for these ones. If they're willing to make a home in an apartment that smells strongly of feline then they deserve to die...hopefully before they chew their way into my kitchen cupboards.

If you see Zsa Zsa, congratulate her on her accomplishments, but don't make too big a fuss. She's modest.

"Skin and Bones" by Thorne Smith

I LOVE the yearly book sale at the United Church. Besides discovering all the different genres they can tuck the New Testament into -- fiction is my personal favourite -- I always uncover at least half a dozen $2.00 gems.

My definition of a gem is a book that I can't get anywhere else. These are usually oddball hardcover editions that were published previous to 1960, often with handwritten inscriptions on the first page. I don't know for sure that these books are unusual when I first find them, but I can generally make a pretty good guess...and this year my haul was better than ever.

I've almost finished reading the real star of the bunch: a 1939 edition of Thorne Smith's "Skin and Bones," a smutty sex farce originally published in 1933. Who is Thorne Smith? Well, somebody has put up a fanboy page about him, another person has scanned many of his novels. There's a scanty Wikipedia page as well, but in general it appears that Smith has been largely forgotten...

Maybe for a very good reason. I can't figure out if he's the world's worst writer or if he was an extremely subtle satirist. Based only on this book I'm leaning towards the first hypothesis.

"Skin and Bones" is about a man who periodically turns into a skeleton due to exposure to photographic chemicals. He rattles through a series of set-pieces involving a speakeasy, a mortuary, a barber shop, a doctor's office, and a gangster hotel. The situation is the same in every location: he turns into a skeleton, his clothes fall off, everybody is terrified by or disgusted by him, the women ponder euphemistically about his lack of manhood, and then he freaks out and everybody runs away.

Sometimes he's wearing a false beard that everybody likes to discuss for some reason.

These "skeleton" scenes are followed by him suddenly regaining his flesh, but being naked and drunk and besieged by pretty women, often while still wearing the beard. It's like a college kid's never-ending wet dream.

But there's something fascinating about it all. Part of it is the novelty of reading sexy bad literature from the 1930s, but the most (in fact the only) real interesting part of the book is how repetitive and poorly-written it is. Ninety percent of the book consists of disconnected, almost stream-of-consciousness banter between two-dimensional characters, generally about how disgusted they are by the skeleton in their midst. The jokes are obvious and feeble and they're all the same -- often literally -- and none of it seems to have any connection with what happened before. They come, they banter, they move along.

Each time I start to hate the book, though, I realize that it's written in a similar style to two well-regarded satires that I also hated: "Gulliver's Travels" and "Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich." Both books relied on satire so heavy-handed and repetitious that the intent could not be mistaken...maybe "Skin and Bones" is supposed to be the same way, except that I'm not even grasping the intent? I say this because occasionally -- every fifty pages or so -- Thorne Smith came up with a genuinely funny insight that actually made me laugh, so I know he's not a TOTALLY awful writer. Maybe I just don't "get" this stuff?

Anyway, as much as I dislike the book I have to admire the twenty illustrations, most of which involve pretty women showing off their legs, sometimes with a goofy skeleton leering at them. "Skin and Bones" is worth it for that alone, however annoying is the actual content (or lack thereof).

"Speakeasy"

Poetry never appeals to me in its most artistic and vague form, so instead I give you the first installment of "The Unambiguous Poetry Corner."

This one's by John Ogden Whedon, and it appeared in (you guessed it!) The New Yorker on November 10, 1928. It's called "Speakeasy."

Elbows on a sloppy bar,
Feet upon a rail,
Shutters drawn and chinks filled,
Cluttered tables, drinks spilled,
Pretzels in a broken jar,
Ice and sawdust in a pail.

Screeching radio and clinking
Glasses. Shouts, a song, a curse.
Drinkers--sulky, happy, pensive.
There a novice, apprehensive,
Ostentatious in his drinking.
There a poet scribbling verse.

At the door there comes a tapping;
General hush; the singers cease.
Heads befogged in dissipation
Turn in tense anticipation--
Then a grunt, and back to napping.
It's only the police.

I'd Buy Anything By...King Crimson (If There Wasn't Anything Else Available That I Wanted More)

You can tell by the equivocal title that I'm not a BIG King Crimson fan...so why would I "buy anything?"

I don't so much ENJOY the band as I respect their MUSICIANSHIP. Much of their music is sheer wankery, but it is technically brilliant wankery, even if the spectacular fireworks are little more than ear-candy or flat-out "showing off."

There are many King Crimson songs that I like, of course, but for the most part I buy their albums to hear Robert Fripp and his hand-picked bandmates go "look at what we can do!" Crazy tempos, micro-managed song-structures, elaborate fret-picking, Chapman Stick, over-the-top production, unconventional instrumentation...well, that's all pretty nifty but it doesn't necessarily make for "great music."

They started off in the late '60s mixing prog rock and highly-structured jazz, occasionally dipping into saccharine psychedelic folk. In the '80s they picked up Adrian Belew -- have I mentioned that I'd Buy Anything by Adrian Belew? -- and started doing adult contemporary art pop that I find ultimately forgettable.

I like their subsequent music much more: extremely heavy, noisy, somewhat discordant angst that probably got them their gig opening (!) for Tool. Here's their "double trio" act from 1995 performing "B'Boom" and "THRAK." Warning: sheer noodling on display, but it's meticulously rehearsed and sort of awesome. I think Belew is using some sort of MIDI guitar device.



Albums to buy: "In the Court of the Crimson King" (their debut) is pretty darn good and probably the highlight of their early period, but I personally like "The Power to Believe." Albums to avoid: I'm not a fan of "Starless and Bible Black" but apparently I'm a minority. For fans only: I don't think you even dabble in King Crimson unless you're already a fan, but I think TRUE fandom would be to watch the '80s concert videos without getting distracted by Belew's terrible clothes. I am unable to do so.

The Trapezoidal, Slightly Flattened World

I have taken the car out for a few more trips, primarily to force myself to get accustomed to her. But I'm really having trouble getting accustomed to something else: my glasses.

In the past my decision has been to wear the glasses only for distance vision, and nobody has given me a good reason for why I shouldn't do so (besides a few silly, teasing comments in this blog). It seems to me that if I don't need the glasses for everyday life I probably shouldn't wear them, partly to avoid wear and tear on them, but also because there are times when I won't WANT to wear them, and I don't want to be blind at those times because my eyes EXPECT the glasses then.

But the thing is, even after ninety minutes of wearing my glasses at a stretch the world still looks and feels funny. The ground is never where it's supposed to be, my reach is slightly off, round objects are slightly ovoid, and reality REALLY warps when I pay attention to the way it hits the frames.

So I've begun to wonder if I NEED to wear them constantly, otherwise I'll never get used to them. Maybe after a certain amount of cumulative exposure my brain will know how to adjust to them faster when I put them on. For that reason I'm still wearing them as I type this, which is why the browser window is a disconcerting trapezoidal shape (maybe it always was and I just never noticed?)

I've done Google searches for "get accustomed to glasses," but I've found no information about how people actually do so. Is there a support group? Can I join a class where we learn to see things again?

Is this a problem with my prescription, I wonder? Is it my glasses that need fixing, or is it my head?

Learning French with Sol the Clown

Us kids had to watch a lot of extremely surreal Quebecois "instructional French" programs in public school, supposedly to teach us that French people are very strange. Seriously, there really did seem to be a "Quebecois style of humour" that relied more heavily on funny faces and slapstick than our "Southern Ontario" style did.

One of the shows we watched constantly was "Parlez-Moi" starring Marc Favreau, French hobo-clown. There are several complete episodes on YouTube, but I'm sad to say that the one where he eats Dracula's cheese cannot be embedded.

Watch just a bit of this program to understand why most English Canadians retained so little French into their adult years. As my co-worker Dave said when he saw these, "it's obvious that the French didn't want us to learn their language."