My Life So Far (Based on the Novel By ...)

This one is harder - I tend not to read books in the same year they're published (with a few exceptions).  So tying a book to a particular year is tough. Syd Hoff was my literary hero when I was first introduced to the joys of reading by my mother at the age of three. From three to six, it was all about Syd. It turns out that Syd and I share a birthday (September 4th), though I didn't know it until about five minutes ago when I looked him up on Wikipedia. It turns out that you can sort of classify my love of reading into eras:

• The Syd Hoff Era.
• Mid-60's
• Danny and the Dinosaur, Sammy the Seal, Chester The Horse
• The Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle Era
• Late 60's
• The Donald Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown Era
• Late 60's
• The S.E. Hinton Era
• Early / mid-70's
• The Hunter S. Thompson Era
• Late 70's, all of the 80's, much of the 90's
• The Jay McInerney/Bret Easton Ellis Era
• Late 80's through the mid-90's
• Everything Else (1975 to present)

I strayed a little, of course. During the prepubescent eras, The Phantom Tollbooth was the most significant of the "one hit wonders" I loved. And Where The Wild Things Are around the same time as Syd. Later came the Everything Else era which meant literally that: any single author/genre/whatever was now beside the point.

Everything Else started around 1975 when I made it out from the downstairs backroom of the Everett Public Library upstairs to the land of big people's books. Manchild in the Promised Land was the first "adult" strength read, a tale of growing up that was grown up with a vengeance. And wholly foreign from my way of life. In other words, brilliant.

The late 70's found me devouring Creem and Rolling Stone, the former handing me Lester Bangs and the latter the works of Hunter S. Thompson. That was all she wrote. Lester and Hunter were gods to me, especially Hunter. For me, there's Hunter and then there's everybody else. Even his later work, when he got lazy and repetitive. Didn't matter, it was all fantastic. It taught me what the truth really means.

Of the fictional variety, I loved/love Bret Easton Ellis (especially American Psycho), Jay McInerney (especially Story of My Life), Joseph Heller (especially Something Happened), John Irving (especially A Prayer for Owen Meany), F. Scott Fitzgerald (especially Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned), William Burroughs (especially Junky), Charlies Bukowski (especially Ham on Rye), James Frey (I love his style, and especially A Million Little Pieces, even more now that I know portions were made up), Leon Uris (especially Trinity and The Haj).

My favorite book of all, hands down, no-contest, is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I first read it in the early 1980's and have since re-read it a number of times. It never gets old.

The only book of any heft that I've read in one sitting on a single day is Christine by Stephen King. I'm not a huge King fan but have read more than a few of his tomes, many of them simply wonderful. I happened to start Christine early morning hunkered down in the laundry room on board CVN 69 while floating around the Mediterranean Sea during the summer of 1983. I was new to the ship, working in the Intelligence Center, but temporarily assigned to clean my division's enlisted sleeping area. Most lowly straight-outta-school enlisted types take a turn at this and the duties included doing the entire division's dirty clothes and towels. There was only one laundry room available and it was particularly backed up on this day, so I spent thirteen hours head resting on the large sacks of clothes, waiting for and then doing the shitload of uniforms, towels and other at-sea personal items I was stuck with. I spent that time with Christine.

Lately I've been going through random stuff, whatever I find on Amazon or in Borders. I love the Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino, especially Out. Even translated, her books are bitter, cynical, funny, just great.

In the last dozen or so years, I would have to say that my favorite single book has been Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis, published in the late 90's. God I hope she publishes again one day.

As evidenced by my King affection, I'm not immune to the charms of McNovels. I've enjoyed those by the likes of Tom Clancy, John Grisham and Michael Crichton, especially the latter. If I'm stuck at an airport and find myself without a book, these guys are nothing if not consistent. Crichton was a Harvard M.D. whose first book was a non-fiction account of modern medicine circa 1970, entitled Five Patients. It's one of my favorites. As is The Andromeda Strain. These guys tend to have good story structure but mostly fall short on character development and prose/imagery. Characters and imagery are the most important qualities of a good read for my money, but I can and do take story structure alone in a pinch. Sometimes you're surprised by these guys and get a good chunk of all three.

So that's the "list" as best I can put it. It's out of phase, out of time, not particularly linear. I've read a helluva lot more books than I've seen movies, more even than I've listened to songs (I'm not talking casually listening here, which I do many times a day, but really focused listening). Still, I can't bring myself to associate any one to a given year.

For those that suffered through this self indulgent literary life crawl, you can take comfort in the fact that I'm done with this particular obsession. No more lists for a while.

Now I need to go out to the porch and chip the rest of the ice off my front strairs (wouldn't want the postman to slip, fall and sue me). Then it's time to prepare for Chinese New Year coming our way tomorrow. The Year of the Tiger, my Chinese astrological sign. Of course, in China it's already tomorrow and Chinese Dick Clark has long since hosted the ball drop from Tiananmen Square. Back here in Philly, I need to get my last ditch New Year's Resolutions in order before our time about eight hours hence.

Oh, it's also Valentine's Day tomorrow. I don't know why Billy Ray Valentine gets to have his own day, but apparently he does. I'll drink some frozen orange juice in his honor.

Goat's Heart Soup for your Soul (where the Wild Things Aren't)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm really looking forward to the Spike Jonze take on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Now that its almost upon us, I'm taken back again to my youth when books really captured my imagination.

To be sure, I still love to read; however, nowhere near as much as I did when I first became aware of seemingly unending world of adventures to be found on the written page. And it was picture books like Where the Wild Things Are that led me to that world.

There's a good write up this morning on the LA Times page, not so much on the movie as on Sendak's groundbreaking work (it's not exactly "family friendly," which was scandalous for a children's book circa 1963).

I certainly dig the visuals I've seen of the flick - they're arresting but still quite faithful to the originals in the book. I'll be lining up to revisit that world come next weekend, for sure.

Speaking of reading, last night I got through a couple chapters of The Men Who Stare at Goats and it's a page turner. Man, have we got some batshit crazy programs - and people - cooking away in the DOD. I guess I knew that, having worked first in the DOD proper as a member of Navy Intelligence and then 14 years thereafter for a company that suckled on its lucrative teet (I know, I know - I'm a hypocrite, but one who's made peace with that now for the most part).

Still, most of the wacky things I was exposed to were generally comprehensible idiocy. The shit in Goats is simply baffling madness, with generals believing people can learn to walk through walls and numerous long running programs training intelligence operatives to be psychic just two of the perhaps more reasonable examples.

I guess none of this is, in the end, all that surprising. But it still shocks the sensibilities and raises my ire when I put the taxpayer hat on. We can invest millions (and indeed over the years, billions) into this sort of thing but public healthcare scares people!?!?!!?

Apparently the "Goat Lab" is still in operation down at Fort Bragg, in a seemingly deserted building filled with de-bleated Billy the Kids (loose lips sink ships or more accurately, 'if a goat bleats word'll leak to the streets'). These goats are then brought into a special room where they are placed in front of men who stare back at them intently, attempting to stop their hearts with the power of thought and the evil eye.

Goats! Huh! What are they good for!?! Absolutely nothing. Good God, y'all!

If successful, these brave operatives will be humanity's only hope come the inevitable war with our goat overlords. We wouldn't want Moses cursing our lack of foresight in some distant future: "You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you all to hell! Baaaahhhh!"

I'd much prefer: "Get your stinking hooves off me, you damn dirty goat! Or I'll stop your heart with my stink eye!"

You think this merely fantasy?

Google has this year introduced upwards of one hundred goats to its 'payroll.' They're now grazing the property of their Mountain View corporate headquarters, officially as a greener alternative to lawnmowers.

Yeah, right.

Google controls access to the world's information and now is itself controlled by these crafty four-legged devils. They chew and Sergey, Larry and Eric jump. The kids are calling the shots these days and I don't mean the younger generation. Bleating will overtake Tweeting as the Social Media craze with the Google name behind it.

Perhaps the "Goat Lab" budget is money well spent after all. You just need to look at things from the (far) right angle.

Maybe the boys at the Pentagon should form a task force to befriend the Wild Things. Bring them into the fold as part of the 'coalition of the imaginary' against this growing petting zoo axis of evil. A couple hundred million to research the idea ought to start things off on the right foot.

No? Baaahhh!

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot Fighting in the Captain's Tower

I am once again finding myself re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces. For sure this book is and will likely remain my hands down #1 favorite. I don't think I'll ever forgive John Kennedy Toole for taking his own life at such a young age and denying the world more wonders such as this. If you haven't read this, do yourself a favor and pick it up ASAP - it is amazing on so many dimensions.

For my own amusement, I took a quick spin through my bookshelves to see what other books stuck with me over the years and would constitute the Buzzard literary top 20 (okay, as it turns out, top 21). Not surprisingly, the protagonist of one of them is a guy obsessed with ranking things (whether music, or girlfriends or what-have-you). So, in nearly no particular order after Dunces, ...

• A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter Thompson (okay, maybe this is #2 for me)
• A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (I liked this better than Garp or Cider House)
• Lives of Monster Dogs - Kirsten Bakis (Brilliant book, written in 1998 but she hasn't written another)
• A Million Little Pieces - James Frey (I liked this even better after I found out a lot of it was made up)
• Junky - William Burroughs (Junky beat writer extraordinaire)
• Monster - Sanyika Shakur (Former LA Crip - great writing)
• Trinity - Leon Uris
• High Fidelity - Nick Hornby (lots of obsessive top 5/10 lists - love Hornby but this is my fave)
• American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  
• Out - Natsuo Kirino
• Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon
  
• Hell's Angels - Hunter Thompson
• Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
  
• Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung - Lester Bangs
• Something Happened - Joesph Heller
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
• The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
• Manchild in the Promised Land - Claude Brown