5 Things I hate About Facebook

That would be the next 5 Facebook challenges that anyone tags me with.
My sister took one Facebook challenge and made it a blog entry, so it is sort of like a “meme”, which is another thing I hate times 5.

However this one is about books and we Bs are a book-lovin’ family so SusanB and JohnnyB can not resist. However, Susan nonconformed and took it outside Facebook. Me, I defied the instructions to do 15 books in 15 minutes and not think too hard. The Bs are rebel book lovin’ people who question authority. We get that way from reading books and learning stuff. That’s why ignorant people burn books, because they fear that knowledge will change their little world. (Read more about questioning authority and burning books in “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, available in your public library.)

So here’s my list (I resisted the urge to provide a link for each book – it takes too long. Even longer than it would take to read this entry, which is way too long)

1. Little Bear and the Beautiful Kite – Painfully shy Little Bear was the first literary character I identified with. He overcame his shyness and became a hero (I won’t spoil the plot by saying how) and I knew that one day I would do that and win the affection of some girl (though at the time I had no idea why I wanted to).

2. The Cat in the Hat –I spent a lot of time playing by myself and making up imaginary characters, so I liked the Cat. That beat out the Cowboy Andy series of books I enjoyed. I had a bromance going for Cowboy Andy, but I was able to quit him early on.

3. New Yorker Cartoon Collections – You can read here about how the New Yorker cartons taught me about history, American culture and sex. Yes, I read these not long after I was reading Cat in the Hat. I was precocious.

4. Catcher in the Rye – Read here about how J.D. Salinger taught me profanity and giving an “in your face” to adulthood and my grandmother.

5. Fanny Hill – This early porn book was found in someone’s trash when I was 13 or 14. I learned more from this book than from Catcher in the Rye. Talk about "coming of age"

6. Hiroshima – okay, nothing funny here. Another good book about the horrors of WWII is Night by Elie Wiesel. Makes you wonder why we would drop The Bomb on Japan but not Germany. Because Hiroshima is far removed from our allies but Berlin isn't or because the Japanese are more "different from us”? I'm just asking.

7. And Then There Were None – Got me interested in mystery books. I read all the Agatha Christies because I had a crush on Miss Marple.

8. The Big Sleep – I then read all the Raymond Chandlers and learned that American pulp fiction was better than British drawing room whodunits (that is “who-dun-it”, not “whod-unit”, which is how I read it as a teen) and the dames that Marlowe meets are sexier than Miss Marple.

9. The Martian Chronicles – All of Bradbury is beautifully written. I read every one.

10. Breakfast of Champions – Also read all of Kurt Vonnegut, who combined the silliness of Suess with the fantasy of Bradbury and the adolescent anti-social attitude of Salinger.

11. Canterbury Tales – a book I enjoyed as opposed to the books from high school lit that “stayed with me” in a bad way (e.g. The Red and the Black – Worst. Book. Ever.) Canterbury Tales is bawdy and features farting.

12. Without Feathers – Woody Allen taught me about writing humor and more about philosophy than Nietzsche’s The Stranger or any other existential authors I enjoyed.

13. The Source – The only James Mitchner book I really, really enjoyed. I imagine that when James Mitchner was a boy and his mom asked how he got his clothes so dirty, he would start out, “Well, Mother, in the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. The Earth will be a recurring character in this narrative. So, then …”

14. The Bone Collector – by Jeffrey Deever - Or I could list Rules of Prey by John Sanford which got me interested in becoming either a twisted homocidal killer or a brilliant but flawed detective. I guess I'd go with the detective - they have more normal sex than the killers.

15. The Torah and 15 books of The Bible – More sex than even Fanny Hill and murder right in the first chapter. In fact, they have elements of every other book on my list.

The book I never read that stayed with me is the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem which we had to read and translate in my 4th year of high school Latin. I actual did read it, just not when I was supposed to. I would work on translating each day’s portion during lunch, right before Latin class. I would go to the library where I could find my Latin classmate, Lori Fuglaar, whom I had a crush on and who was smarter than I – I have always been attracted to smart women. She was a remarkably cute girl of Nordic descent who was also very religious. I know this because every time I called to ask her out, she had something to do at church that conflicted with the proposed date.

But at lunch I was able to enlist her help in doing my homework. I know she felt uncomfortable helping me get away with not doing the assignment. So I was able to corrupt her morals … just not in the way I wanted to. If only I could have climbed a tree and saved her kite, I might have won her affection. Oops! Now I spoiled the Little Bear story.
Goddam!

Dear New Yorker

This was the cartoon:
When I entered my caption, my biggest concern was that it was so obvious that many people would have already submitted the same idea and I was too late. So this morning I checked to see who had gotten in first and was sure to be the winner.
The three captions you selected are:

"Free will is overrated."
"This was so much more awkward before Craigslist."
"This is why I suggested a threesome."

The third one has a nice, subtle reference to the difficulty of managing one's own puppet strings and the second one is a nice tribute to the recent murders of Craigslist prostitutes. The first one is weak allusion to the control aspect of the situation.

Do you remember which one is mine? Right, none of them. I wrote, "Please, dear, try to control yourself." I'm not going to try and explain how that works on a couple different levels. I leave it to you to ponder its New Yorker style perfection and to regret your choices. I know it is too late to reconsider and that you can't just pull a few strings and change the decision.

Teach Your Children

Read to your kids; it is one of the greatest influences you can have on them. But beware: the literature I read to my daughter led her to love a movie that embraces anarchy and violence.
We know that what we read to our kids shapes their lives. That's why we read to them at bedtime: it helps prepare them for being 50 years old, sitting in a comfortable chair reading the same page for an hour and a half because you keep nodding off in the same place and now it's well past 10 pm, time to go to bed, and you don't have a clue what the book is about.
Winnie the Pooh was probably my favorite book among those my father read to us. When I tried to share the original Pooh stories with my daughter, she would tolerate only those involving Eeyore because, apparently, I do a very fine impression of a morose, passive-aggressive, donkey with his tail nailed to his ass (no pun intended). Young Allie was more a fan of the Disney Pooh, which was sacrilege in my family, what with the Rabbit character being made into a Bug Bunny/Roger Rabbit mutant and the introduction of Gopher (why? What earthly improvement over the classic Pooh cast does he bring? None, that's what.) She still loves Pooh today, but I don't think the Pooh stories I read her had much influence on who she is now.
The earliest real favorite "book" of Allie's that I remember was an FAO Schwartz catalog. I "read" this to her so many times that it eventually fell apart. She was young enough that she was just learning new words. She would point at pictures, I would say the item and she would repeat all or part of it. That's how she learned to say "Boop" because Betty Boop was enjoying a resurgent popularity that year in the form of childrens' toys because, I suppose, Betty was an equally good role model as Barbie (if you never actually saw the sex-and-drug-influenced early Betty). Our shared catalog reading heavily influenced her later years. I believe she is pursuing her education to enter a lucrative career that will provide money for incessant shopping sprees. And catalogs: Victoria's Secret catalog is her favorite reading material now, just judging by the number of editions we have around the house. But we never sit on the couch with this one, paging through it, pointing at the pictures and saying "Boop".
Somehow, Allie became interested in the New Yorker cartoons and I had several of those books that had belonged to my parents. I would read her those and try to explain them. She loved Charles Addams' and his "Addams' Family" characters. It is because of these cartoons, I believe, that my daughter wants to live in New York someday; all the people there are so witty and weird and gothic.
Finally we got into Calvin and Hobbes which influenced Allie to become funny and ironic and cynical, just like her dad. We read every one of those comic collections we could get our hands on and we still haven't forgiven Bill Watterson for quitting. But it was Calvin and his tiger who led Allie and me later in life to an appreciation of the violence-laden, anarchy-endorsing movie "Fight Club". How is that related to Calvin and Hobbes? Well, under rule #1, I can't talk about it, but I can link you to this.

FAO Schwartz catalog = a frog waltz act: Chaos!

New Yorker State of Mind

For Hanukkah, Karen gave me The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker. Complete? Is that possible? Sure, the book is large and weighs only slightly less than a middle-schooler’s backpack, but it would have to be 5 times larger to include all the cartoons from the 80 year history of the magazine. However, inside the book is a set of two CD’s containing all 68,647 cartoons! I trust that the number is accurate, but I haven’t counted yet.

In fact, reading through the book was easy, but the concept of browsing through the entire CD is a bit overwhelming. If I read 20 cartoons every single day, I can finish in just under nine and a half years. Meanwhile, the New Yorker goes on, so Karen will have to buy me the 10 year supplement when I’m 60.And by then my failing eyesight and feeble mind will make it slower going.

For now, while I’m still spry, the CD’s are great because you can search by date, artist’s name or any of several key words that relate to a cartoon’s theme. They are in pdf format, though, so copying them and using them in a blog entry or Board of Directors report at work is not a simple task, which is as the New Yorker intended it. They are possessive about their intellectual property.

I’ve always been fond of the New Yorker cartoons. My mother had several cartoon collections, either “the best of” the New Yorker type or books of specific artists such as Peter Arno, who drew society people at cocktail parties, or Whitney Darrow, who drew all sorts of people. She had several book of Charles Addams cartoons, populated by odd characters, the most famous of which became the Addams Family. I guess I don’t really know if the books were bought by my mother or my father or by both together.

In any event, I ended up with them. I have read them all a few times each over the years. I learned a lot from them when I was young. They give some added context to the times the cartoons were drawn, revealing things about culture and history. They revealed a few other things too. New Yorker cartoons often contain cartoon nudity and sex. Since sources of visual information about such things were limited when I was a child (what with the scarcity of internet porn), those types of cartoons were of great interest to me then.

They became somewhat embarrassing a few years ago when my young daughter decided that New Yorker cartoon books were good bedtime entertainment. We had a lot of fun reading them together, especially the Addams books. In some of the others, though, I had to skip some pages or try to explain why that man was imagining that lady was naked.

The quality of the humor in the vast majority of the cartoons amazes me. There is so much wit there. A friend of mine at work also enjoys these cartoons and insists that we collaborate and submit some cartoons to the magazine. I’ll let you know if we come up with any that are worthy. Perhaps we’ll have some in the 10 year supplement edition when I’m 60 and can’t read them anymore.

Maybe when I get to that point, Allie will visit and read the cartoons to me at bedtime.