Daniel

Reid's Reads

I used to have this recurring dream where I'm grocery shopping, and each time I reach for something on the shelf, a cobra comes out of my sleeve, spreads its hood, and hisses at me. This is where I was when the planes hit. Where were you? The rest of the day, I had to wait tables at an empty restaurant. That was my tragedy of 9/11. On my way to work (in Dallas), I glanced in the New York direction, looking for smoke. Sure, a bit delusional on the perceptible effects of such an attack; but weren't we allowed temporary insanity?

In Ken Kalfus's latest novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Marshall and Joyce Harriman are losing their minds. Marshall works at the World Trade Center and should be dead on the morning of 9/11. His soon-to-be-ex-wife Joyce has a flight on one of the hijacked planes and, likewise, should be dead. They aren't. The former is late, the latter skips her trip. But there for a little while, each thinks the other is dead. Joyce watches the ordeal from her office window: "His office was on the eighty-sixth floor of the south tower, which had just been removed whole from the face of the earth. She covered the lower part of her face to hide her fierce, protracted struggle against the emergence of a smile." From Joyce's devilish smile at the thought of Marshall's death and onward, this book has one of the funniest, most gut-wrenching, and at turns, most evil clashed relationships in modern literature, a new Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, only with the Iraq War as a backdrop, rather than the Cold War.

As the country escalates to the impending liberation of Iraq, as they say, the Harrimans are consistently knotted with "every other weird public misfortune": the anthrax mailer scam, suicidal subway bombers, even the barrage of images of the falling Saddam statue. This culture clash of ours is mirrored in the book, specifically with a great wedding fiasco, in which a basically non-practicing Christian and a non-practicing Jew are conjoined in holy matrimony. Marshall's post-9/11 dementia allows him to play a very Shakespearean role in the attempt to destruct the joining parties by inflaming their long-denied spiritual piety. Herein, I believe, lies the "peculiar disorder": the somehow self-justifiable derangement in a post-9/11 world. We, as a country, stared at these images, in dire need of the correct response. Meanwhile this derangement seemed to surface. Ken Kalfus responds: "In the national myth-making about 9/11, it may have been forgotten that not everyone understood their horror at first. . . . One of my intentions for [A Disorder Peculiar to the Country] is to satirize how news events infiltrate our personal lives, to the point of obsession. Sometimes we try to resist, knowing that there'll be plenty of time to obsess in the future." The point being, I think, that there is no Great Tragedy; only about 6.6 billion small ones.

Despite the political turmoil here, you can certainly say one positive thing about our government: we tend not to kill our dissenting journalists. However, since President Vladimir Putin came into power in 2000, fourteen Russian journalists have been killed; the latest, and most eyebrow raising, was Ivan Safronov, who fell to his death from the 5th floor of his apartment building, two floors above his own apartment. I guess that’s what happens when your president is ex-KGB.

Anna Politkovskaya was aware of all this. Her journalism had always focused on atrocities in Russian politics, on the so-called “democratic” Russia, the post-Soviet Russia. In 2001, she hightailed it to Austria after being threatened by one of her targets, a police officer. In 2004, she was on a plane to negotiate with the hostage-takers at the Beslan school hostage crisis. She had a sip of tea on the plane, which almost killed her. Rumors of attempted assassination flew. You see, Chechnya wants independence. Russia will have none of it. Why? Who knows. West to east, Chechnya is less than 100 miles wide, in the armpit of the largest country on the planet. It takes longer to get to my grandmother’s house than it takes to cross Chechnya. But, they want out, and they can’t get out, so, death to everyone. Because Politkovskaya’s sympathies were pro-Chechen independence, she was called in to negotiate when, in 2002, separatists seized a theater in the middle of its production. They said, Get out of Chechnya, Russians. Russians said nope. Over 160 people died, including terrorists and hostages, not including Russian forces, of which zero died. At the Beslan school hostage crisis, Chechen rebels again said, Get out, Russians. Russians said nope. Over 340 people died, including 186 school children.

So, between December 2003 and August 2005, Anna Politkovskaya wrote A Russian Diary, a fascinating and terrifying account of the crumbling of Russian democracy. Then in October, 2006, Anna was in the elevator of her apartment building, the doors opened, and someone shot her in the head. Was this a contract killing? Russians said nope.

In A Russian Diary, Anna writes, “People often tell me I am a pessimist; that I do not believe in the strength of the Russian people . . . I see everything, and that is the whole problem.”

And the 1973 Pulitzer Prize goes to . . . no one. Sorry. See you next year. Turns out that a unanimous vote from the Pulitzer jury doesn’t necessarily mean a win. This is what happened to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The aptly named board declared the book “obscene”–-with its rampant fictional drug use and its Cleveland Steamers-–and vetoed the jury’s decision. Oh well. The world needed to read a good 700-plus page, WWII-era, schizoid, technical engineer’s manual slash musical comedy, and so the world got it.

Lt. Tyrone Slothrop is a doofus and is philandering his way across war-torn Europe. Each of these personal conquests happens to coincide with a bomb dropping, and therefore he is of great interest to both Axis and Allies. As an infant, Tyrone Slothrop was a guinea pig. A mad scientist conditioned the boy’s private parts to react to the presence of a new kind of plastic. Now, that plastic is on the tip of missiles. Hence, Lt. Slothrop can sense trouble in a very peculiar manner.

Gravity’s Rainbow is not so much a Band of Brothers, the “greatest generation” kind of WWII saga. It’s more like a long, no-picture comic book. While following plenty of actual historic episodes, the book is very bizarre. There is a scene where someone sticks his head out of an airplane and gets hit in the face with a pie. There is also a lightbulb with full consciousness. Nothing, however, is more bizarre than the narrative. Take this: “This classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China-–howdy, Fong, this here’s opium, opium, this is Fong--ah, so me eatee! no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see? pretty soon Fong’s coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for the [expletive deleted], get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred.” So, yes, the conspiracy theories are vast and the paranoia is high.

There are great books, and there are great, big books, and then there are great, big books that are so great and so big that no one wants to read them. These are the books that are nowadays generally reserved for the academics and for the Gilmore Girls. But if you're looking for more comedy in your military industrial complex literature, you've come to the right place.

Has disaster struck Dover, PA, yet? I've steered clear since the Reverend Pat Robertson forecasted troubled waters for anti-Intelligent Designers in the greater Dover area. But what's all this debate about? I decided to do some research.

If you haven’t had a chance to read the Bible, it opens with all things being created by a supreme deity named God. God makes the light and the stars and fishes and apples, etc. He also makes a man and a lady. I find this best read if you can get the text to scroll across a starry backdrop with the Star Wars theme playing. According to the Bible, then, we were pretty much then as we pretty much are now, intelligently designed, plus a soul. Very interesting.

The flipflop of this seems to be that we were not designed intelligently, that we are literally a monkey's uncle, and over millions of years went from goo to a fish to an apple to a monkey to a pre-historic man to smiling people, sans the soul. Also very interesting.

So what are the camps saying? Evangelist Billy Sunday, from the early 1900s, said, "A-a-ah! Pre-historic man. Pre-historic man. Ga-ga-ga-ga," and then he gagged. Anatomy professor Raymond Dart (circa 1924) said, "I knew at a glance that what lay in my hand was no ordinary anthropoidal brain." Hmm, both good points, but what about natural selection, what about Charles Darwin? British astronomer John Herschel called Darwinism the "law of higgledy-pigglety." Darwin himself responded, "What this exactly means I do not know . . . but it is evidently very contemptuous." What does Pat Robertson say regarding our origins? He says, "You are talking about 10 to 15 billion years ago. Who was there?" Famed linguist Noam Chomsky said of Intelligent Design, "the evidence is zero." But again Pat Robertson said of evolution, "it is a religion, it is a cult. It is cultish religion."

Well, if your head is swimming, like mine, check out Pulitzer-Prize winner Edward J. Larson’s Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory. The book is wonderfully enlightening, and Larson is as fun to read as The 700 Club is to watch. And really, between those two sources, any layman to this never-ending debate should feel comfortable in choosing his or her side. For the lesser alternatives would be Origin of Species, which is real sciencey, and the Bible, which is real long.

There's probably a good way to die and a bad way. I doubt I'm stretching to say that "in my sleep" is everyone's ideal. After reading Nikolai Gogol's oddball stories, you would expect his death to be rather salty. He died in his forties from a hunger strike--he was trying to purge the Devil from his body, you see. A poor diagnosis led to a very thorough bleeding regiment, in which half a dozen fat, black leeches were put on his gargantuan nose, only to be weakly swatted at by the malnourished Gogol. And like this, he gave up the ghost. No thanks.

An old Russian proverb says, "The man with the longest nose sees further." Perhaps this is why Gogol's tales are so effective (and olfactive); his nose, prior to being leech-ridden, was like a big can-opener--supposedly, he could touch his bottom lip to it. Perhaps, also, it was this elephantine sniffer of his that led him to write "The Nose," his 1835 tale of a nose that separates from its owner, only to go about the town in an attempt to make something of itself. It ends up outranking the man whose face it used to sit on. Bizarre? Indeed. But that is Gogol.

In some way or other, all of Gogol's stories are a confusion of rank in Russian officialdom, a sort of Three-Stooges scramble for seniority. Gogol's "The Diary of a Madman" could be seen as such a scramble, as a clerk, vying for a lady, begins to lose his mind, achieving social status only through delusion--he thinks animals speak to him, his dated diary becomes non-dated ("the 86th of Martober"), etc. "The Government Inspector," a play by Gogol, is a slap-sticky, mistaken-identity drama--someone lamer than myself might call it a "tour de farce!" In it, a criminal, with a nose for opportunity, is mistaken for--that's right--the Government Inspector. Hilarity ensues.

Gogol's work, like his nose, is a tad surreal, a bit lopsided, and always funny. It's hard even to pronounce that name (Gaw-gol) without sounding like you're gargling a couple of marbles.

Last summer I was working at the local fair, manning the hotdog booth. About midday, a chubby little fellow, bald, big earlobes, wearing robes, came up to me, and I thought, “This chubby little fellow looks like the Buddha. I wonder what the Buddha’s doing at a local fair and, more specifically, at the hotdog booth?” And just as I thought that, he said, “Make me one with everything.” Then he laughed hysterically, and then disappeared in smoke. After such a bizarre encounter, I decided to look more deeply into this idea of “oneness”; and while I was at it, I would figure out why the Buddha is always laughing.

This past January, Modern Library released a new translation of The Dhammapada, which are the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha, of course, lived millions of years ago and, disappointed with his unenlightened neighbors, he crawled through a vast wardrobe, into a land where everybody squats, and he called this new land Nirvana. The Dhammapada are verses that help guide the average joe to enlightenment. “Better than living a hundred years / poor in virtue, unfocused, / is a single day lived / as a virtuous meditator.” “Slight is this fragrance – / jasmine and sandal. / But the scent of a virtuous person / wafts supreme among the radiant ones.” These read sort of like a Buddhist version of those old How-To-Be-A-Gentleman books: “A Buddhist gentleman always opens the door to enlightenment for a lady.”

For the better part of an afternoon I fasted and meditated in my daughter’s sandbox, until she informed me that I did not waft supreme among the radiant ones. After showering, I picked up the new, follow-up text to The Dhammapada, Modern Library’s Basic Teachings of the Buddha. This book is a compilation of Buddha essentials, told in more of a narrative fashion. But, like the former, it is a guide to seeing everything: with mind, body, and spirit. Buddhism is clearly about awareness. For example: “imagine that you were to see a discarded corpse, a fleshless skeleton smeared with blood, still bound by tendons.” Okay, I can do that. Do I go ahead and vomit or what? “Making your body the focal point, reflect: This body of mine is of the same nature as that one; it will become just like that one; it, too, is not free from death.” Ah, now I see: it is contemplation. Total thoughtfulness is the oneness the Buddhists speak of. Total thoughtfulness eases your mind, and therefore, you are glad. The Buddha’s not laughing because he’s insane; he’s laughing because he’s happy. Although, to be honest, someone keeps prank calling me at night--no talking, just giggling. That can’t be good.

Why is it so hard to count dead bodies in wartime? We go to war, and all of a sudden, everyone starts guesstimating. In Fall of ‘04, The Lancet survey said there were about 98,000 Iraqi casualties; the next year, Bush said there were about 30,000. Maybe they brought some back to life. You’d think we could have one guy following behind with one of those little clicker things. I’d do it, but I got financial aid for college.

Whatever happened to the pen being mightier than the sword? Why do we even have that dumb phrase if we’re still going to war? Did you know the Japanese announced their readiness to negotiate surrender at the end of WWII? Not in the mood to negotiate, we dropped atom bombs anyway. They didn’t teach us that in school.

Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt and Cod, just published Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea (Modern Library), and when you read this book, you’ll see that the instinct to keep your kids from fighting is a good instinct. How do we warrant human slaughter? Pope Urban II, in launching the first Crusade (11th Century), declared that the war was "just." Separating the world into good and evil, one merely had to show another as evil to justify killing him. According to Augustine, Jesus didn’t mean love your enemies, he meant love the God in them. "A priest," says Kurlansky, "could love the reflection of God within someone and still club that person to death, which was more moral than stabbing or chopping him to death." The Church even came up with a new term for killing non-Christians, or evil people: malicide. The point being, a lot of people die unnecessarily. During WWI, civilians were one-fifth of the casualties, two-thirds in WWII. Nowadays, it’s around 90%. That means for every malicide (death of an evil person) in wartime, his wife and kids are probably killed, his brother and sister, his neighbor, the mailman, the lady walking her dog, the paperboy. The question Kurlansky poses here: does violence merely lead to more violence? The answer, of course, is yes.

If there were ever a book that every human should read, it is Nonviolence. Kurlansky’s clear prose and voracious research expose warfare for what it historically is: the always easier, always bungling antonym to unarmed resistance.