Don't Get Too Comfortable, Final

by David Rakoff
Broadway Books

The subtitle to David Rakoff’s new collection of essays Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a long one: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems. I think, however, it would have been more apt if he’d called it ...and Other First World Absurdities, which is really the over-arching point of these essays: to spot-light how the privileged of the privileged first-world residents spend their time and money when they don’t have to concern themselves with where their next meal is coming from or with the genocidal war next door. Do they spend it on feeding the hungry, on clothing the poor, or on saving rainforests? Ha, ha - get real. They aren’t adopting third-world children (Madonna and Angelina Jolie notwithstanding); they’re not making documentary movies on the dangers of global warming (Al Gore not included).

In Rakoff’s world - in our world, really - if the privileged of the privileged are making movies it’s soft-core porn with hot Latino women. If they’re flying overseas it’s to attend an exhibition of the couture collections in Paris. If they’re having existential considerations on life after death, it’s to work out the logistics of how they’ll survive after having their cryogenically frozen bodies resurrected. But is any of this news really? Even the least informed of us know that our privileged first-world culture has the tendency to drift toward the self-absorbed and the vapid. So what's the point of these essays, which tell us things we already know? In many ways, it’s easy to get the feeling that Rakoff is only preaching to choir.

But part of the pleasure I think in reading Rakoff’s essays is his ability to make the reader seem as if she’s inside the joke, not a part of it. It’s the feeling of feeling superior without really being superior. He invites you laugh at those nutty folk who pay $36 a kilo for sea salt harvested in France and $300 for the formula to a two-week long fast. Ha, ha - oh, you crazy first-worlders, you. But before we get too comfortable (or begin to feel uncomfortable) with our self-satisfied superiority, the thing that keeps this collection from being a nasty behind-the-back snicker at the Richers is that, by the collection’s conclusion, the reader discovers that he hasn’t been laughing at them after all - he’s been laughing at himself. The joke isn’t on them, it’s on you. The clue is on the cover: Don’t get too comfortable.

In a perfect microcosm of the effect of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff imagines “an impoverished seamstress, her fingers bloody from hours of painstaking needlework...being dressed down by an outraged couturier" in the beginning of the essay “I Can’t Get it For You Wholesale”:

“I asked for camellias. These are not camellias,” he says, ripping out the stitches. “Do it again.” He flings the garment at her, an errant bugle bead catching her right in the eye. She weeps softly. The designer’s teacup poodle, Salo Meneo, yaps agitatedly throughout.

Later, as Rakoff roams his hotel room in Paris he writes:

I have a sitting room with a tasseled damask sofa, a passageway with walnut-doored closets leading to a bedroom, and beyond that a bathroom with a claw-footed tub. I count no fewer than three vases of roses...Looking out to the central courtyard filled with statues, I realize that I have crossed the Parliament floor. I used to identify with the downtrodden seamstress in that story I told myself, but I have now thoroughly joined the ranks of the imperious monstrocracy.

Rakoff’s witty insight into not only the “culture of excess” but also into his own heart and mind makes this slim volume a funny and informative read. It’s not hard to find a great laugh-out-loud sentence followed by the deepest insight into the human heart. If Rakoff’s collection is the seat of being uncomfortable, I’ll sit in it any day.

My previous post on this book can be found here.

Roses? What Roses?

Four months ago, on January 12, 2007 Joshua Bell, a world-renowned virtuoso agreed to pretend to be a street musician and play for one hour outside a Washington, D.C. metro station. It was a sociological test of sorts to see how many people busily on their way to work would recognize the beauty and art coming from a violinist whose concerts can cost over $100 to attend. This article in last week's Washington Post is an illuminating contemplation of art and beauty’s place in our lives. This isn’t exactly an article on books or on reading but it is on our ability to appreciate art - even of the written word - in the fast-paced, stressed-out, modern lives we lead today. I found this passage to be of particular interest:

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

PostNote: Many thanks to the folks over at bookninja for bringing this to my attention. I live in Washington, D.C. and I had no idea. How's that for oblivious? And God knows with all of the ugliness in the world today - what with last week's Imus tornado and yesterday's killing on Virginia Tech's campus - I need all the beauty I can get.

The Reading Roller-Coaster

Well, I guess I should do my part in spreading the word: The Litblog Co-op has announced its Read This! Spring 2007 pick - Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: Stories by Alan DeNiro. Since I’ve just discovered this apparently popular, well-known litblog today, I’m also adding their Read This! selections from last year: Michael Martone by Michael Martone, Firmin by Sam Savage, and Wizard of the Crow by Ngugl wa Thiong’o. Added to that I still have to buy The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff (released today - yeah!). Not to mention I’ve already begun dipping into The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson, which I picked up yesterday during a quickie bookstore stop on my way from the post office. Yes, I know I promised to spend my next $20 on The Shakespeare Riots but how could I pass up a book about an atheist minister who’s life is saved by none other than the Devil? It was a no-brainer, really.

I’ve realized just now that the reading life - much like life itself, I suppose - is full of ups and downs. Only two weeks ago, I was complaining that I couldn’t find anything worth reading in the bookstore. That isn’t to say there wasn’t anything there - because surely there was - but I spent a disappointing afternoon browsing Border’s shelves and, after a fruitless search, left with nothing. I hate leaving the bookstore empty-handed. I makes me feel as if I’ve failed somehow and puts me in a terrible mood.

Then last week, I stopped in an independent bookstore (in the airport of all places) and suddenly the sun came out again. I picked up three gems: Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, The Final Solution by Michael Chabon, and The Italian Secretary by Celeb Carr. When I returned home, there was a copy of Andy Mandelbuam’s translation of The Aenied waiting for me in my mailbox, which has been on my coveted-book list for many years now. And now, I’ve come across the Litblog Co-op Read This! list. (Contented sigh) What can I say? I’m thinking I need a second job. Suddenly, the reading life is good again. At least, it will be until I begin wondering when I’m going to find the time to read all these books...

Shakespeare...Again?

I know I promised last month to move away from my obsession with Shakespeare and I figured that my completion of Will in the World would go a long way toward accomplishing that feat. But Philip Lopate’s LA Times review of The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff makes keeping that promise very hard indeed. The premise of Cliff’s The Shakespeare Riots:

One evening in May 1849, hundreds of stone-throwing rioters clashed with New York City police and state militiamen outside the Astor Place Opera House, leaving more than 20 people dead and scores wounded...Clashing fans of two Shakespearean actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, became so overwrought that they put their bodies on the line for their thespian idols.

If the riot itself isn’t intriguing enough, Cliff explores the underlaying tensions which sparked the riots. Lopate writes:

...we are given separate chapters on the hazards facing English troupes that toured America in the early 19th century, the reputation of actors as unsavory and licentious (sometimes quite justified), the literary accounts of English travelers who profited by insulting America as an uncouth wasteland, and the mounting ill will between England and her former colony. There were tensions over the Northwest Territories' boundary ("Fifty-four Forty or Fight!"), repudiation (the refusal of Pennsylvania and other states to pay their debts to English banks), the Mexican-American War and America's clinging to slavery long after England abolished it. These excursions into social and political history, crammed with entertaining nuggets, are still only the backdrop for the heart of the matter: a thwarted friendship between Forrest and Macready involving America's favorite playwright, William Shakespeare.

The Shakespeare Riots is set to be released tomorrow. I know where my next $20 on books is going.

The Hard Way, Final

by Lee Child
Delacorte Press / May 2006

Jack. For such a simple name, it seems to invoke a sense of power, of purpose, and somehow, of heroism. It’s the name of one of the most popular action heroes on television today - 24’s Jack Bauer. And it’s the name of the hero in Lee Child’s consistently impressive action thriller series – Jack Reacher. What is in a name exactly? As it turns out, these two heroes seem to have much more in common than a name. They certainly share a sense of ruthlessness. There are whole websites dedicated to the body count Jack Bauer rakes up in a single episode of 24. And towards the end of The Hard Way, the most recent installment of the series – although a new installment Bad Luck and Trouble is slated to be released in May – Child writes,

…the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely…Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.

And they both have an old-fashioned sense of honor in that women, children, and all other vulnerable subjects must be protected and defended at all costs (unless of course, they’re trying to kill them) and they never give their word unless they intend to keep it. They both, too, hold to a very simplistic view of right and wrong; good and evil. Neither of them have any qualms about cold-bloodedly killing – or, in the case of Bauer, torturing – the bad guys because nothing they do is wrong if it’s done for the cause of what’s right. When an ex-FBI agent expresses doubts about taking out the bad guy, Reacher explains, “We splattered a thousand bugs on our windshield yesterday. A thousand more today. One extra won’t make any difference.” For them, the end always justify the means.

But Jack Bauer is very much a man of his time. He is, as many people enjoy pointing out, a post-9/11 hero equipped with the kind of fictional high-tech computers and programs Homeland Security only wishes they had. In this morally fuzzy world of “War on Terrorism” Jack Bauer is the “whatever it takes” kind of hero who, if he’d existed, surely would have prevented the day which instigated his birth, or so the creators of 24 would have you believe. The truth of the matter is that without 9/11, Bauer wouldn’t exist. There would be no context in which for us to understand, whether we cheer them or not, Bauer’s tactics.

Jack Reacher’s appeal on the other hand is that he’s a man outside of time – or past his time – living as a nomad loner on the outskirts of society. He’s so out of touch that it’s news to him that cells phones have developed text messaging. At another point Child informs us:

Silent phones made Reacher nervous. He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone. Every time it happened he had to endure a little burst of unrequited adrenaline.

Though it’s safe to assume that Bauer and Reacher are both very likely in their early 40s, Reacher somehow seems older than Bauer. Reacher’s old school. He isn’t chasing nuclear bombs with semi-automatics and saving whole cities with the help of the super counter-terrorism unit CTU. He’s so old school, he doesn’t need a watch to tell the time within a minute and instead using computers to break open his newest puzzle, he uses plain old brain-power – the kind that keeps him up at night and haunts him during his morning coffee.

Reacher isn’t interested in saving the world, he’s merely interested in righting wrongs wherever he sees them. He defends battered women, kidnapped children, and guiltily accused men. If Bauer’s the kind of hero you wish could save the world, then Reacher’s the kind of hero you’d want to save your life.

Shahnameh, pt. 1

A few weeks ago, I caught some flack from a friend because, despite its admittedly many problems, I liked the movie “300.” It was, to my friend’s thinking and not without some justification, a racist depiction of not just the Persians (i.e. the modern-day Iranians) but of anyone who didn’t claim white Western descent. But where he saw racism I saw the dramatic depiction (alright, an annoying slow-motion, video game, bronze-tinted, senselessly brutal depiction with absurd dialogue - sure) of Herodotus’ account of my most favorite battle of antiquity, The Battle of Thermopylae. How do I recreate the shivers that crawled up my spine when I read, as an intrigued new college student, that when a Spartan hero, one of those incredibly and impossibly built killing machines, is informed that the Persian arrows were so many that they blotted out the sun, he replies, “Then we shall fight in the shade.”? No, it isn’t just a corny one-liner they put in the trailer. According to Herodotus at least, he really did say that.

But therein lies a problem: the only accounts of the Persian Wars are from Western sources. And for all of the things at fault with “300", being true to its sources - mostly - isn’t one of them. If the Persians seem both incredibly effeminate and vile at the same time, it’s because, according to the Greeks, they were. If the Greek warriors, despite their own atrocity, are made out to be heroic freedom fighters it’s because, according the Greeks, they were. For whatever reason, the Persians didn’t see any need to record their own account of the Persian Wars and, if they did, we’ve lost it to the oblivion of time.

Biased and one-sided though it is, I still love Herodotus’ Histories and I still love the Battle of Thermopylae. It’ll take more than an overdone Hollywood movie to change that. But I’ve felt the need to even my knowledge of epic histories out a bit per se, which is why I bought Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings by Abolqase Ferdowsi, newly translated by Dick Davis. And Shahnameh is an epic which covers the history of Persia, from the beginning of time to the coming of Islam. However, Shahnameh is a history in the way that The Iliad is a history. It is based on some historical fact but, like all those other tricksy poets like Homer, Ferdowsi takes some creative liberty.

As a result, either because of Ferdowsi’s story telling or because of Davis’ translation, Shahnameh so far reads like the bastard child of the Bible and the Lord of the Rings...in a good way. Compare this early passage:

The just and prudent Hushang was now master of the world, and he set the crown on his head and ruled in his grandfather’s place. He reigned for forty years, and his mind was filled with wisdom, his heart with justice...Mindful of God’s will, he set about establishing justice. He helped the world flourish, and filled the face of the earth with his just rule.

...with this passage that immediately precedes it:

He gathered together fairies, leopards and lions, savage wolves and fearless tigers, birds and domestic animals, and this army was led by the intrepid young prince...the black demon came fearlessly forward, and the dust of his forces rose into heavens, but the king’s fury and the wild animals’ magnificence rendered the demons’ claws harmless. When the two groups met, the demons were defeated by the animals; like a lion, Hushang caught the black demon in his grip, cleaving his body in two and severing his monstrous head. He laid him low in the dust and flayed his wretched body of its skin.

I haven’t even put a dent in this massive tome but over the course of what will be - yes, I admit it - months, I look forward to trying.