30 July 2009

Harshing the Mellow

Is this yesterday? She asks, picking through the pile of recycled newspapers. No, I say. Today is today. Yesterday is yesterday.

It’s the little things, the little precise verbal things, that make a relationship go. As in go South. No, that new sweater does not make you look fat. It’s the fat that makes you look fat. Then she gets mad at me for no apparent reason.

I have harshed her mellow, as one major newspaper says they say in the marijuana patches of Mendocino county. When we travel, people look askance when we say we’re from Mendocino.

In fact, it’s worse than askance. They seriously smirk. You smokie the dopie? Shreddy the hemp-y, bogart the joint and all that? No, we explain. We live in Caspar. You’ve never heard of Caspar, that’s why we say we’re from Mendocino. That’s MEN-DO-CI-NO, on the COAST. It’s cold there. You can’t grow a red tomato, you can’t raise a green pepper, and you certainly can’t grow pot. In a hothouse, maybe. Five miles inland, no problem. but very little dope growing in lettuce peas and potatoes country. We haven’t seen the sun in five months.

When the sun does show up we go around asking each other what is that shiny yellow thing in the sky. Everyone smiles, but in fact no one knows for sure. We could Google it – What Is The Sun? – but we’re too busy watering the lettuce so it doesn’t dry out in the yellow glow.

The sun’s out! my garden-loving weed-pulling wife announces as she runs outside. It ‘s not really “out” I mutter to myself. If it was out, everything would be really dark and cold and that would be highly disturbing. The light is out, but the sun is... what is it... maybe “on.” The sun’s on! Come and look.

It’s good I don’t say this out loud. I know what’s good for me, or at least I’m learning.

An in-depth article in the Washington Post this week reviewed the Mendocino marijuana industry, interviewing pot heads, medical users, growers, politicians, the Sheriff, and others. The author notes that Mendocino’s golden age of dope growing ended when “growing acceptance of marijuana elsewhere in the Golden State unleashed a confluence of demand, tolerance and legal ambiguity rooted in political cowardice.

“The result set in motion forces that seriously harshed the mellow here and brought the ‘war on drugs’ to the one place in America it had never really reached.”

Harshed the mellow. I haven’t heard that since Sir Douglas walked and talked in the park in Mendocino, which, of course, he never did, as the closest Sir Douglas and his famous song hit “Mendocino” ever got to Mendocino was a bar in Wichita, but that’s another story, and there isn’t any park in Mendocino, unless you count Mendocino Headlands State Park, which probably hadn’t been invented when Sir Douglas first sang his famous song, and who knighted him, anyway?

Jean Jacques Rousseau once confessed, in his “Confessions,” that “women, especially great ladies, must be amused, and that it is better to offend them than to bore them; and I judged, from her remarks upon the conversation of the people who had just taken leave of her, what she must have thought of MY silly nonsense.”

Yes dear, that is yesterday’s paper, the sweater does NOT make you look fat, and the sun is out.

NOTES:

Here’s the URL for the Washington Post article, but they may make you register (free) in order to read it.

I have a lovely old Modern Library (#243) version of Rousseau’s “Confessions” complete with dust jacket and “15 cents” penciled on the top. However, it’s long out of print. Here’s the only current paperback version available as a new book:

“The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. BiblioLife paperback $18.99. ISBN 1103029916

My wife just asked: “Why does he have to confess?”

23 July 2009

Thoroughly & Completely Entertaining

What do you call a book that is thoroughly and completely entertaining from start to the final page? I call it fortunate that I accidently discovered the book in the first place. I was browsing in my local independent bookstore when a “Staff Favorite” sticker came up and waved in my face.

The sticker was attached to David Benioff’s novel “City of Thieves,” set in Leningrad during the terrible siege of 1942. Staff member Jeanette Boyer squeezed the following blurb onto a tiny Staff Fave flag:

“You wouldn’t think two young men’s quest for a dozen eggs would prove a dangerous venture, but set it in war-torn Russia in the midst of a Nazi invasion and you have a spell-binding story.”

When you open “City of Thieves” you meet the narrator in Florida, where he has traveled to interview his Russian emigre grandparents.

“I brought a tape recorder with me. I thought maybe we could talk about the war.”

... “You’re forty years old. Now you want to know?”

“I’m thirty-four. I looked at my grandfather and he smiled at me. ‘What’s the matter? You guys were Nazis? You’re hiding your Nazi past?

“‘No, he said, still smiling. ‘We weren’t Nazis.”

Any reasonable reader at this point would expect he’s about to encounter yet another war memoir. But the author undercuts that assumption at the start. Pestered for names, locations, weather conditions on certain days, grandfather counsels the author: “David, he said. ‘You’re a writer. Make it up.”

And so he does, creating a highly believable true-ish story based on highly likely situations. Benioff thus has freedom to tell his compelling tale the way he imagines it. Every page seems real as old shoes stuck in frozen mud. You will get your fill of death and starvation, selfishness and courage, suspense and danger, bizarre scenes and painfully romantic ones. It’s as if Tolstoy had managed to make “War and Peace” both short and very personal.

The story begins, “You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier... In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.”

Leningrad has become a forlorn city littered with frozen corpses, abandoned to fate, cut off from the countryside, bombed from the sky and mortared from nearby emplacements.

The survivors deal with it in a variety of surprising accommodations. “The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city’s books were disappearing like the pigeons.”

An NKVD colonel pulls from prison the narrator and a charismatic friend named Kolya, sparing their lives in return for an impossible task: Go out into the starving city and somehow locate a dozen fresh eggs. The colonel’s wife wants to bake a wedding cake for her beautiful (and well-fed) daughter.

Impossible eggs or instant execution: Kolya and Lev choose eggs. They have four days. The rest of the book details their adventure.

If I was still on staff I would have made “City of Thieves” my favorite as well. When I came to the final page, I said “Wow” out loud. I don’t do that very often.

Author David Benioff is a screen writer and novelist. His first novel, “The 25th Hour,” was made into a feature film directed by Spike Lee; and he has published “The Nines Roll Over,” a short story collection.

NOTES:

“City of Thieves” by David Benioff. Plume Books paperback $15. ISBN 0452295297.

“When the Nines Roll Over: And Other Stories” by David Benioff. Plume Books paperback $15. ISBN 0452286646.

“The 25th Hour” by David Benioff. Plume Books $15. ISBN 0452282950.

In the Land of Long Fingernails

I picked up “In the Land of Long Fingernails” for the macabre title and the nice purple cover. I stayed for the jokes, for the gory details, for the sense of reliving the Sixties, stoned, all over again, but this time stoned in a graveyard in Canada.

The book is subtitled “A Gravedigger in the Age of Aquarius,” and it’s a hoot, especially if you’re a coot who lived through the short-lived Age of Aquarius. Aquarius lasted a couple of years, max.

“In the Land of Long Fingernails” is less deep, so to speak, than “Stiff” by Mary Roach, and not as poetic as books by Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet, author of a number of seriously literary works.

Following his graveyard employment, “Fingernails” author Charles Wilkins went on to publish a dozen books and became a writing teacher. Here he dives back into his memory, perhaps with a bit of fiction thrown in, to recall a long summer he spent forty years ago at what he euphemistically names Willowlawn Everlasting Cemetery.

“To call (the cemetery) by its real name in this era of inquisitional conformity,” he explains, “would be an open invitation to, at best, a law suit, at worst a contract hit – on me.”

Perhaps Wilkins exaggerates, perhaps not. There are issues of union rules and the abuse of these rules. There are employees hailing from southern sections of Italy, graves dug or undug in the night. Who knows, maybe there’s a whole other story of criminal conspiracy hiding under the surface of this tale, but the surface of this story is strange enough.

How strange? For example: Hundreds of “welfare graves” in the oldest section of the graveyard – city burials, no gravestones – are secretly dug up, the plots emptied, cleaned up, resold.

ACTUAL LATE BREAKING NEWS: “A group of Illinois grave diggers were charged Thursday with running a morbid scam in which they exhumed corpses in a black cemetery so they could resell the empty plots, cops said.
Investigators suspect more than 300 bodies were dug up in the suburban Chicago graveyard and discarded in a pit so the ghouls could cash (in).”
Back to our story: Nearby neighbors find femurs and hip joints in their back yards. They are assured they are animal bones, nothing more, and the objects are hastily gathered up and reburied. “The problem, shrugs (one employee) is that ground pressure and frost keep pushing the bones to the surface. And the dogs and coons just keep digging down to get them.”

Then there’s the gravediggers’ strike that took place during a heat wave. Don’t ask.

Those five months during the Canadian summer of 1969 were an education for Wilkins, more or less as wild as the stuff going on every other place in the Western world in those years.

“For those of you who missed it, or have forgotten,” he writes, “1969 was, among other things, a time of flower children, free love, campus protest, the battle for civil rights, the death of God.” That year half a million seekers got themselves back to the garden at Woodstock, and a pair of US astronauts “planted an American flag on the moon... (and) knocked a golf ball around amid the rocks and moon dust.”

On his first day at Willowlawn Everlasting, Wilkins is shown how to bury the “ornate little caskets” containing cremated human remains.

“Luccio dug a knee-deep hole and said, ‘Throw me one of those birdhouses.’ ‘Which one?’ I said, examining them on the ground. ‘Any of them.’ “I looked at him, thinking I had misunderstood.

“‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘They’re all the same.’”

That sets the tone. So does this advice from another gravedigger: “‘There are two things you have to do to survive around here,’ he told me as he twisted a bud of shredded marijuana into a rolling paper. ‘The first is to pay no attention whatever to anybody in any position of authority – that’s crucial. The second is to spend as little time as possible thinking about reality.’”

Still useful advice for some of us. “In the Land of Long Fingernails” finds humor in the rituals of death and entertainment in the earthy details. All probably much more fun to read about than experience first hand.

NOTES:

“In the Land of Long Fingernails, A Gravedigger in the Age of Aquarius” by Charles Wilkins. WW Norton hard cover $24.95. ISBN 9781602397095.

Cover blurb: “I don’t know how Charles Wilkins escaped my notice until now, but I intend to read as many of his books as I can before I, too, end up in the land of long fingernails.”
– Mary Roach, author of “Stiff”

News | 07/09/2009: Four nabbed in ghoulish scheme at historic cemetary by Bill Hutchinson

11 July 2009

Do evil, get rich

Let’s see... Pacifica Foundation, a non-profit progressive radio network founded by pacifists in 1949 currently is $740 thousand dollars in the hole. Our community radio station, KZYX, is about $140 thousand behind. Mendocino’s Symphony of the Redwoods is suffering from lack of funds, so are any number of other non-profits.

Is there anyone or anything not currently in the red zone?

Oh yes, this headline: “Dick Cheney gets $2 mill to pen memoir.”

The most secretive, torture-embracing politician of our time, main brain behind the Bush disaster, gets two million dollars to speak about mishandling the economy, spying on Americans and shooting his duck hunting partner.

Do evil, get rich. It’s the American way.

Publisher Simon & Schuster is paying Cheney, and the same publisher is about to unleash the world’s biggest/fastest most tasteless instant book in history, 500,000 copies of “Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson.”

One day after Jackson’s death, Simon & Schuster bought the rights and undertook a race with the pallbearers. Jackson died on June 25; the tell-all will be published on July 14.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the publisher took only four days from first hearing of the manuscript until it delivered files to the printer. Seven copy editors worked on the manuscript during that period.

Meanwhile, newly-resigned Alaska governor Sarah Palin is writing a book, due next year, for a reported advance of “several million dollars,” according to her agent. At least 20 books have already been published about Ms. Palin, with another half dozen scheduled. No one knows if her resignation will hurt or help her own book, but the betting in publisher world is that it’s better to get these books out fast than to wait.

One former Penguin editor said, “The truth about all these books is that you treat the authors like stocks: You want to buy low and sell high, or buy high and sell even higher. With Palin, you don't know where her stock is going to be in a few years. So you want to sell now.”

Finally, consider the new yearbook published for Vineland High School in New Jersey. When students unpacked their yearbooks they discovered the wrong year printed on the spine.

The publisher apologized and sent 525 stickers to cover 08 with 09. They did not offer to return the $75 to $85 each student paid for a copy of the yearbook.

One graduating student told her local newspaper, "I think they should have checked it out -- just to see if there were mistakes -- before giving them to the school. Or they should've given us better stickers," she said, noting the decals aren't adhering very well.

I can’t finish this litany of bad news without mentioning Amazon and their book reading device The Kindle. News this week is that they’ve lowered prices so you can obtain one for just under $300.

The other news, more technical but potentially much more important: Amazon has applied for a group of patents that may allow them to insert adverts into books you would read on your Kindle.

Lessee... You’re reading along in “Oliver Twist” and you get to the part where little Oliver pleads, “Please sir, I want some more” and up pops an ad for McCann’s Finest Steel Cut Oat Meal. You’re reading Kerouac’s “On the Road” and you find yourself staring at a Ford truck video. Pickapeppa Sauce for Faulkner. Marlboros for Sedaris. Won’t reading be fun one day!

notes...

The Wall Street Journal on the instant Michael Jackson book