Steve Almond's The Evil BB Chow and the Inexplicable Evils of Way Too Much SpongeBob SquarePants

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The Darjeeling Delimited; or Three Quirks for Mystic Monks and the Strenuous Oddity of Blue Men Hopping; Plus Undeniable Proof that Al Gore Is Running

A rather anxious Tamilda the Genius 10yr Old here, seeing as it's past one o'clock in the morning and game two of the T-Ball ALCS is tied in the 11th inning 6-6... But wait! A base hit! And now a wild pitch! 8-6 Cleveland! Darjeeling Limited catches a break! My review will be largely positive now, I anticipate... unless Cleveland wheels out a T-Ball stand named Borowski in the bottom half of the 11th. You can never trust that T-Ball stand.

OK. Darjeeling Limited is a story--wait, another base hit, 9-6!--about three brothers who have, for various reasons, become estranged after the death--and one would also assume before the death--of their father. And so, estranged, they estrange themselves from whomever they are with in Europe or the U.S. and meet up in India... for whatever reason they meet--wow! 10-6 Cleveland now!--on a train in an unnamed place. Apparently meeting in say the Bombay or Calcutta airport wouldn't have worked... Why? Because if they'd simply met in an airport then Wes Anderson wouldn't have been able to open the film with the tremendous and self-reflexive metaphor that marks the film as Anderson's own:

Wow, a home run by Gutierrez! 13-6 Cleveland!

OK, sorry. They just keep scoring runs and I feel it's my duty to record them. Anyways here's the opening to the film: Bill Murray sits in a taxi, driving through anonymous urban India, jumps out at a train station, doesn't pay the driver, grabs two old-school suitcases, and takes off at full tilt jowls jiggling huffing puffing after a departing train that seems to be pulling away from him... it's a schlubby moment, and by the time it was over I already felt tired and bored, a bit like I felt 15 minutes ago at the top of the 11th after about 11,000 foul balls.

But then: a change in the music! We remember that this is Wes Anderson, the Human Ipod. He hit shuffle and we know that something is going to happen and it does: Adrien Brody running, lither and less jowly than Murray, but with an equal number of outdated suitcases--surpassing Murray and catching up to the train, tossing his baggage on the back, hopping aboard and gazing meaningfully at, first, schlubby Murray who's been left behind and then, second, at an Indian kid, maybe 14, who's standing right beside him. The kid had watched the whole affair and hadn't lifted a finger, and before Brody walks into the train he looks the kid right in the eye, sort of like how Larry David tries to divine the truth by staring at someone's face for minutes and minutes and minutes. Brody does basically that, albeit more briefly and without the slowed down Woody Allen music, and you get the impression that what he's trying to divine isn't the Indian kid's quote unquote Otherness, but somehow his youth. That he's trying to figure out how this kid could have just stood there, stoically, the whole time and simply observed the over-obviously Oedipal struggle in which Brody had outrun Murray.

(Perhaps it's significant that at the end of the movie Jason Schwartzman--the youngest brother, a thoroughly ironized writer who's always barefoot and looks sort of like a cross between George and Ringo in their Indian days--reads the ending to one of his short stories and Brody tells him "I like how mean you are..." both in the story and in real life... Brody's character seems like he's sort of bad at being mean, that he sort of fails at it, and in doing so somehow makes his meanness worse--like how being cut by a dull blade hurts more and does more damage than being cut by a sharp one.)

In any case, it's quite an opening. It's startling. A truly brilliant example of everything that film should do. And, given it's unbelievably obvious casting of Murray as the outrun schlubb, I'm sure that Anderson wanted people to try to figure it out, to talk about it. Which I will... but maybe not in the way he expected. I expect he expected that the opening would signal a rebirth for Anderson who'd relied too long on the father-figure-ly Murray for inspiration. Indeed, it is a movie about fathers, and in an intellectual way it's sort of beautiful: there's a juxtaposed funeral of the brothers' father and the death of a little boy where the brother's mourn both the death of their father and the death of their former, feuding, childish selves; there's the meta-narratological stuff with Murray and Schwartzman; the Stones play when I was clearly expecting the Beatles; and at the end of the movie the brothers chase after a train and cast off their baggage, literally--the baggage that had been given them by their father. It all fits together.

But it doesn't quite work.

The Departed, too, is about fathers and sons, except that that movie, as they say, works. You care about the characters (some of them), and what happens to them feels somehow like it matters--matters to you, matters to them, and matters in a much bigger way. It feels as though what they're going through--their father/son/Freud issues--and how they resolve or unresolve them has consequences for humanity as a whole. Except for brief moments, The Darjeeling Limited doesn't feel consquential, and perhaps this is because its characters aren't characters, but bundles of quirks. Not bundles of quarks (though they are presumably those too), but bundles of quirks, and habits, and idiosyncracies.

A recent Atlantic Monthly article called (I can't believe I'm typing this stupid pun out) "Quirked Around" argues in a Melvin Jules Bukiet-esque manner that our culture is plagued by Quirk. And while its author, Michael Hirschorn, seems far more congenial than Melvin Jules Bukiet (he doesn't, for example, at any point in the essay advocate for the death of kittens), his point is more or less the same: that quirk is usually bad. Not always, but at least usually.

We’re drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today’s Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio’s This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs.

I don't want to get into all of the examples that Hirschorn cites... but seriously: he finds Arrested Development quote unquote Strenuously Odd? Everything S.O. about it is simply an exaggeration of the S.O. culture we live in--A.D. didn't, for example, simply invent The Blue Man Group. There are actual Blue Men, dozens of them in a dozen cities, who hop around like lunatics playing drums the size of above-ground swimming pools. And hundreds of thousands of people have seen them and loved them--have recommended to their friends and lovers and elderly grandmothers that yes, You should go watch the blue men hop around.

So Q: what's more Strenuously Odd: a TV show that makes fun of silent Blue Men hopping around like lunatics, or the actual Blue Men hopping around and selling computer chips? I guarantee that Michael Hirschorn and his S.O., whoever that may be, have been to one of those shows and have walked out saying "that was really great" and "incredible" and "for a while I forgot they were even blue." I guarantee, in other words, that deep down Michael Hirschorn is True Blue Loony.


I mean seriously, what in the hell is this? (And remember, I'm 10, so I don't use the word "hell" lightly--you wouldn't believe what would happen if my mom or dad or Shelley found me saying much less publishing-on-the-internet this word outside a strictly theological context). So what is the Blue Man Group doing selling Intel Processors? It's economically sanctioned, socially approved MADNESS. Not quirk. It is, plain and simple, Insanity. It's Capitalism and Schizophrenia rolled into one.

Anyways, my point is that huge sweeping statements like Melvin Jules Bukiet's (Wonder Is Bad) or Hirschorn's (Quirk Has Become Strenuous) seem to a) like most sweeping statements, fall apart when actually analyzed with concrete examples--I don't really agree with the majority of Hirschorn's, for example; and b) miss something vital about our culture--neither of them really understands that there is a complex historical context governing why Quirk and Wonder are so prevalent and overworked today, and it seems impossible that any vital piece of art could overlook these contemporary obsessions, even if it ultimately rejects or modifies them. Traditional, Quirk-Allergic Art can't stop the capitalist and schizophrenic drumbeat of the Blue Man Group.

(And worse: perhaps nothing can--but that's beside this point).

But back to India and Darjeeling Limited. Back specifically to a blue man named Vishnu. If Vishnu is the Preserver, then I would say that what Wes Anderson needs is Shiva, the Destroyer. He needs a flaming blue man to dance his last two movies to smithereens and begin again. Hirschorn is right on this: Anderson is drowning in Quirk. I don't want to give anything away, but I'll say that the outrunning of the schlubby Bill Murray, the tossing aside of the patriarchal baggage in The Darjeeling Limited to me rings false. It is a simulacrum of a rebirth, of a starting-over. The film is aware of the falsity of an outsider trying to attain spiritual enlightenment through the half-assed appropriation of a foreign religion, and yet... it holds out hope. Here, look: Shiva destroys The Entire Universe, and I think that maybe that's what Wes Anderson needs to do. To destroy the fictive universe he created in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums (two, by the way, of the defining movies of our times, in my humble opinion), and begin anew.

Speaking of failed rebirths, I guarantee that Al Gore is going to run for President. The Proof? Well, he just put out three video blog thingies on hot political issues (Iraq, Domestic Wiretapping, Universal Health Care). But couldn't he just be employing his newly gained influence in the wake of his Nobel Peace Prize? Couldn't he just be scaring Hilary and Obama into taking stronger, more progressive stands on these issues? Yes, perhaps, except that look: these new videos are BORING BORING BORING. The Old Gore Is Back! Go Gore 2008!

Denis Johnson's Big Plagiarism, Bad Times of Irma Baumlein, and Judith Miller's Wealth of Hamsters

Hello, Tamilda here. We've all been busy this past week--the days are just packed... like sardines in a tin can. Some of us revising dissertations even though we've dropped out of graduate school (Donald Hipsterdoofus); some of us (Christianne Alarmist-Librarian) trying to decipher whether Borges' Ficciones is as obscene as she thinks it is (it isn't); others of us are simply wallowing (Richard Schmooze) or seething (Michael Flatly-Abrasive) or grocery shopping (Gloria Oldschool); and others of us are following the Major League T-Ball playoffs very closely (PB Shelley and myself)... on ESPN Gamecast's tiny 80's-style Tiger Electronics-quality screens.

The last case (mine, Shelley's) is arguably the worst of them all, seeing as neither I nor Shelley have the funds to purchase the MLT-B Post-Season package, even though it only costs $9.95. Someone, it seems, purchased with this month's allowance a) a two hundred year old copy of John Newton's The Return to Nature, or, a defence of the vegetable regimen; with some account of an experiment made during the last three or four years in the author's family; and b) a pouch of Big League Chew the size of a mailman's bag. I won't say who did this, but I will say: 1) Big League Chew is not a vegetable; and 2) you are not, PB, supposed to eat or digest Big League Chew.

But we *have* been reading: on our bookshelves and bedside tables right not are: Steve Almond's The Evil B.B. Chow (which I just finished); Anne Wroe's Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself; David Foster Wallace's Oblivion; and The Return to Nature, or, a defence of the vegetable regimen which Christianne Alarmist-Library is checking for obscenity--she's found, apparently, over seventy instances so far... which is, coincidentally, the number of times cucumbers are mentioned in the book + the number of times pumpkins are mentioned. I'm guessing it's a Halloween thing (cf. her comment about her dog, Samson, in her post on The Yiddish Policemen's Union).

And Denis Johnson's 624 page epic chronicle of Vietnam War espionage and recent-past analogy for our current quagmire in Iraq, Tree of Smoke, which I'm halfway through. Now, because of the novel's justifiably intense / disturbing / highly intellectual nature I wanted to write a funny and ironic blog, so I began searching on YouTube for old clips from Reading Rainbow. But what I found was dead serious. What I found was outright plagiarism. Just look at this review of the novel Bad Times for Irma Baumlein from the 1979 Reading Rainbow rival called Hooray for Reading:



The similarities between Bad Times for Irma Baumlein and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke aren't simply uncanny: they're illegal. I think that Denis Johnson could, at the very least, have changed the names in his novel. I mean seriously, who would believe that a Vietcong double agent was named Irma Baumlein? That name is either the work of a very incompetent spy, or a greedy plagiarist author. I'll leave it to you to decide which is more likely.

And this isn't simply a case of someone "borrowing" a plot and translating it into a different context in the way that, say, James Joyce employed Homer's Odyssey as the template for Ulysses. The case of Tree of Smoke is different because, as should be clear from the clip above, Bad Times for Irma Baumlein is already a scathing critique of the violent ideologies that led up to the Vietnam War. Cf. for instance the place where the twerpier girl is bragging about the how many hamsters she has: Wealth of Hamsters -> Wealth of Nations -> Adam Smith -> Volume II of Marx's Kapital critiquing Smith -> Struggle between Capitalism and Communism -> Cold War -> Bay of Pigs -> JFK -> JFK (1991) -> Kevin Bacon -> Balto (1995) -> Bob Hoskins -> Paris Je T'Aime (2006) -> Willem Dafoe -> Platoon (1986) -> Vietnam War (1959-75)--the Invisble Hand of the Author doesn't really get any heavier than that... it's all there in Irma Baumlein, and more subtly I might add.

Perhaps Denis Johnson's only true innovation in Tree of Smoke is it's commentary on our most current imperial venture, the Iraq War. At the book's emotional climax the novel's clear stand in for Dick Cheney writes home to his mother in that plaintive voice he so often uses:

Dear Mother, I'm in a lot of trouble and I wish you were here. I told a lie and stole a dummy. What'm I gonna do? I'm in so much trouble (p. 322).

I, personally, wept for Dick Cheney at this moment. Why had he so long ago bragged to Saddam Hussein that he possessed the "biggest doll in the whole world"? And look what it led him to do--he stole a dummy (George Bush), told even bigger lies, invaded a country, and still doesn't have all that Saddam had. Not the four brothers or two sisters; not the more or less stable (if oppressive) relations between Sunis and Shiites; not the little dog who can roll over, shake hands and jump over a stick; not the relative regional stability; not the functioning electric grid and running water; and even not the wealth of hamsters. All he has left is the big dummy, a 9 trillion dollar deficit, and a 9% approval rating.

And what good is a big dummy if you've got no money and no friends? Ask Irma Baumlein.

Oh, and what's the other little girl's name in clip? Who, in other words, did Dick Cheney tell his first big lie to? It's Judy Miller... Go back and watch the clip, I'm not joking.

Now that I think about it, maybe a little plagiarism is OK once in a while.

More on this book soon.

Melvin Jules Bukiet: Advocate for the the Death of Kittens. And Smoking.

Tamilda the Genius 10yr Old, here. Jessa Crispin over at Bookslut alerted me to an article at the American Scholar written by someone named Melvin Jules Bukiet. The article is called "Wonder Bread," with a subtitle thingy that runs like so: Come with us to a place called Brooklyn, where the stories are half-baked and their endings bland and soft. The subtitle thingy is, I take it, some sort of play on words, though I'm unsure what part of the loaf of Wonder Bread is the story-part and what part is the ending-part. I would imagine that the story-part is kind of a state of the loaf (i.e., being half-baked) whereas the ending-part is the loaf, or is the subjective experience of what it is to eat the loaf. It is very complicated and doughy pun / metaphor /analogy, almost as complex and doughy as the author's name: Melvin Jules Bukiet.

Anyways, I have read Melvin Jules Bukiet's article and it seems to me that the stone cold kernel of its argument is this: we need more novels and short stories where people smoke cigarettes and kittens are accidentally killed.

OK, this might just be a corollary kernel of the essay's even more central and even more unbreakable kernel: Wonder Is Bad. Wonder Is Bad, and any author who employs wonder to any end that doesn't illuminate the true and real fact that human experience is Utterly Hopeless and Horrible is worse than Bad, they are Phony. A few times the essay wavers on this point, and tries to finesse it, but I find it hard to believe that anyone would walk away from the essay thinking that Melvin Jules Bukiet's point isn't larger and loftier and darker than merely that a certain sort of trendy book is misguided.

As Zizek tells us, kernels tend to be indivisible, and therefore I will try to do something entirely else with Melvin Jules Bukiet's stone cold kernel. I am going to heat it up. I am going to heat it up, roll it around in some oil, and then I am going to sit and wait and watch until (POP!) it pops out of the pan, and then I'm going to pick it up, walk into my yard and throw it to a bird who will lift it into the sky.

But back to the smoking and the accidentally murdered kittens. Melvin Jules Bukiet's essay proceeds by examining a vast number of works written by young hipsterish Brooklynites or Brooklynites-in-absentia (Jonathan Safran Foer, Myla Goldberg, Alice Sebold, &c) and comes to the conclusion that all of their novels fit a certain predictable structure: something terribly bad and sad happens at the beginning (9/11, a girl is raped and murdered, the Holocaust), but by the end the characters in the novel somehow learn to cope with that awful event via some form of the fantastic acting in reality, be it relayed via magical realism or unbelievable coincidence or whatever. The idea being that these young authors offer an escape from the horrors of reality rather than spending 400 pages facing up to that reality.

But what about the kittens? Woven through the mean-spirited critiques of these books by young authors is Melvin Jules Bukiet's genealogy of the Brooklyn Book of Wonder (he drops the Wonder Bread pun / metaphor / analogy as quickly as he picks it up), citing Michael Chabon and JD Salinger and Paul Auster and even Günter Grass. And Jonathan Lethem. Melvin Jules Bukiet seems to like Lethem, a little, and argues that the "BBoW authors have adopted Lethem as a surrogate father," and that "he ought to disinherit them." Why? Because they, his imitators, have somehow "carried [him] away" with wonder.

So OK, here's the kittens:

Moreover, Lethem doesn’t pull punches. On the second page of The Fortress of Solitude, a kitten is accidentally killed while the protagonist’s mother smokes cigarettes. Unless it’s Mr. Harvey in The Lovely Bones, no one smokes in BBoWs. They’d as soon smoke as fail to recycle. Also, a daring flight at the end crashes.

I copied and pasted this quote so that I could really lean into it, so that I could smash it to pieces, so that I--Tamilda, the 10yr Old Genius--could pretend to be like Edward Norton in Fight Club and destroy something beautiful. Except that as I reread it I'm no longer angered--this passage is not like Jared Leto's face. It's more like Meat Loaf's, and that's sad. In fact, Melvin Jules Bukiet's whole essay reminds me not of Wonder Bread, but of Meat Loaf. Yes, the singer / actor / pitiful victim of testicular cancer, but also the food, the actual loaf of meat. It's heavy, it's eerily dark, and I almost never want to eat it. It's Wonder Bread gone horribly, crazily wrong.

So let's leave aside the fact that a kitten being accidentally killed while a mother smokes is a far weaker "punch" than the opening of The Lovely Bones that Melvin Jules Bukiet describes earlier in his essay--that is, the opening where a young girl somehow magically survives or transcends her rape and murder. Let's leave aside the fact that this part of his argument undermines itself and let's get to the indivisible kernel of my own argument.

My central hypothesis is this: Melvin Jules Bukiet is a nerd. A big one. And not one of those kind of cool half-ironic Wonder-Bread-t-shirt-wearing Brooklynite nerds, but like an old school Revenge of the Nerds-type nerd. I know, it shocked me too. I never would have guessed it based on his name. And yet look at this picture:


At the beginning of his essay Melvin Jules Bukiet is very interested in letting us know that he knows about all of the hip streets and neighborhoods and landmarks in Brooklyn. At first he just drops names (Prospect Park, Fort Greene) but quickly enough he just outright lists places in order to establish his credibility. You should notice, however, what is conspicuously absent from his essay: the nerd picture. It would ruin his whole ethos and clue us into the fact that with a name like Melvin he must be good friends with wedgies. I am imagining an entire dresser drawer filled with underwear elastic thrown to him by bullies. Heck, I bet even the half-ironic Wonder Bread t-shirt nerds gave this guy wedgies when he was young and--and I can't tell this for certain, it is just another hypothesis--I bet that they still do.

If Jonathan Safran Foer [cf. the never-used Freaks and Geeks photo below] is giving you wedgies and you are a college professor of course your world view is going to be bleak as heck. The kid in my class who got the wedgie at the beginning of the year didn't eat his lunch for a week, and that was his first wedgie. Imagine what a lifetime of wedgies would do to you! It would make you conclude your essays like this:

In fact, trauma’s never overcome. That’s what defines it. Your father is dead, or your mother, and so are most of the Jews of Europe, and the World Trade Center’s gone, and racism prevails, and sex murders occur. What is, is. The real is the true, and anything that suggests otherwise, no matter how artfully constructed, is a violation of human experience.

Here's the problem with this logic: the real, the whole real, hasn't already happened. Yes, we are shaped by our personal and collective histories, sometimes irrevocably. But not always. The real is not something that is always already predetermined, that we can only watch from the sidelines, keeping a scorecard. That's not how it works, because we are part of the game, and because the game isn't over.

My friend Percy Shelley always tells me this when we're losing in t-ball, and the authors that Melvin Jules Bukiet cites at the beginning of the essay believe this too. What is the last word of Joyce's Ulysses? It is Yes. In the end Molly returns to a memory of when she and Bloom were young and half in love--not half in love with easeful Death like melancholy Keats, but half in love with love and hope and possibility and, yes, Wonder. If there's nothing to hope for, to wonder about, we should ask what is life worth living for and seriously consider the late Kurt Vonnegut's idea that human beings should just leave.

At a reading at Skylight Books in Los Feliz last night the fiction writer Steve Almond made the convincing case that in spite of the sadness, Vonnegut is actually an extremely hopeful writer--that he helps us through trauma via the "courage of his imagination" (Almond's words), and that this is why people like Jon Stewart have thanked Vonnegut for making high school livable. It seems to me that this is what fiction should do: it should open our eyes to the horrors and truths of Pandora's box, without losing sight of the hope, wonder, buried at the bottom of things.

Now, this does not mean that the books that Melvin Jules Bukiet reviews aren't employing Wonder irresponsibly. (I haven't read all of the novels of the last few years that Melvin Jules Bukiet refers to, and hadn't planned on doing so any time soon--there are other books like Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke that are higher on my list. I'm not sure that people regard BBoW as anything more than wish-fulfillment-lit in the first place. In other words, it seems to me that solid American Literature won't be shaken by their, in Melvin Jules Bukiet's words, "ripples").

There is nothing more pressing than actively critiquing our fantasies, our "wonders"--I am far more than sympathetic to this cause. Without such intangible wonders eating up our time and molding our ideals we wouldn't, for example, be fighting a hopeless war in Iraq. This aspect of Melvin Jules Bukiet's argument is categorically true. Joyce, too, makes it crystal clear that things only get better after shattering the fantasy. In the Circe chapter of Ulysses Stephen Dedalus shatters the fantasy-producing gas lamp at the whorehouse with his ashplant, and it is only then that he and Bloom can commune. But the fantasy was necessary--"the true" and "the real" couldn't have come to light without the fantasy, without the gas lamp, and this is because that is how human beings experience the world. Through fiction.

It makes me wonder what Melvin Jules Bukiet's fiction must be like. Maybe I'll read it one day...

Ha!

Here are my dogs. They're great.

Tamilda the Genius 10yr Old Baffles Univ. of Maryland Researchers by Discovering the 100% Perfect Yawn

My mom was driving me and Percy and my dog to t-ball practice today and there was this really weird story on NPR about yawning, about this professor guy who tried to design and record the 100% Perfect Yawn--a yawn so yawny and lazily contagious that anyone who heard it would just instantly stop what they were doing, open their mouth, stretch their arms or paws behind their heads, and Yaaawwwhnnnn.

Ah.

But there was a problem and the problem was this: no matter how good the yawns were that he was taping, no matter how loud or quiet, whether they played them with video or just with the sound, no matter what angle or how wide people yawned, no matter what the scientists did only 55% of people hearing or watching the tape yawned. 55%. They kept seeing that number (55%) over and over, and they couldn't do better. It was incredibly, incredibly frustrating for them. It must have felt, for them, like an unfinished yawn, 45% of which laid down in their diaphragms, heavy and sleepy and not budging an inch.

What, if you were a psychology professor devoting your life to yawning, could be more frustrating than that? Perhaps this: I, a ten year old living outside of Cleveland, have discovered the 100% Perfect Yawn, a yawn so contagious that anyone who even glimpses it involuntarily and immediately yawns and falls asleep. It is 557 pages long, was published in 2001, and it is 100% Perfect at making you, your dog, the person who wrote it, yawn like an abyss. It is a yawn in prose. It is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

How did I, Tamilda, a 10yr old, end up reading a book like The Corrections? Well it happened like this: my principal had an nervous breakdown. Because she was an elementary school principal it is safe to say that her psyche was already teetering on the edge of whatever table or armoire psyches normal sit on. In first grade, for example, I once peeked into her office and saw her running around waving a red high heeled shoe in the air at what I, crouched and peeking, took to be a bat because Principal Mendez shouted at least twice that she wished "[it] would just materialize already so that [she] could drive a wooden stake through [its] bloody heart!!!" Meaning that she thought the bat was a vampire that could somehow "materialize," even though that's not exactly what vampires do (they metamorphose). Also, she was wielding a red high heeled shoe at the walls and ceiling and framed diplomas, not a wooden stake. Also, there was no bat.

After a minute or so the secretary saw me crouching and gawking and recording ever detail of this for future use with what was already, at age six, a pretty astounding memory, and told me to "shoo" with one hand as she secretly gave me a long waxy Tootsie Roll with the other. The point of this anecdote being that my principal, Mrs. Mendez, was well on her way to Crazyville well before the No Child Left Behind standards kicked into high gear and caused her to decide that our entire schoolwide curriculum would revolve around Fractions and the War of 1812, which she saw as somehow related.

I know more about Fractions and the War of 1812 than most PhD's who've written dissertations on the War of 1812 or Fractions (if such PhD's exist), and therefore when I sit at my desk listening to my teacher or some overeager bleeding heart graduate student volunteer lecture my class on Andrew Jackson or the number 11/20 I am literally bored out of my mind. And when I use the word literally I mean it literally: my mind literally crawls out of my head and wanders around the school, snooping into teacher's desks, into their purses, into the lunch box of the kid whose parents have a maid. My mind can do that, and that is how I ended up reading The Corrections.

On one such day, a week ago, my mind crawled out of my head, walked down the hallway, ran its fingernails along the grout between the tiles, pulled the sharp odor of antiseptic wax into its nostrils, and angled into the teacher's lounge where it began rifling, as my bored-out-of-its-mind-mind was wont to do, through the teachers' personal belongings. Lipstick, chapstick, tissues, pictures of ugly children the teachers hid from us--the usual. But then, tucked into the side pocket of Mrs. Saunders' faux-Louis Vuitton, something unusual: the 100% Perfect Yawn. My mind slipped it out of the bag, thumbed through it, read the back cover, and tried to figure out what a woman whose official job was titled District and Regional Grade Normer could be doing reading a book described as "Frighteningly, luminously authentic."

It must, my mind decided, have been some sort of cruel play on words--The Corrections, Grade Normer: get it?--given to her by the art teacher the previous Xmas in the Secret Santa exchange. As I thought about reading it, flipping it back and forth in my mind's hands, there was suddenly a noise, back in the classroom. My mind dropped the book, sailed along the waxy scents of the hallway and then leaped straight back into my head and peeked out of my eyes just in time to see Hilary Fuentes swivel down in her seat, place her hand to the side of her mouth as though she were about to the tell the floor a secret, and puke all over the tan linoleum, apparently out of pure boredom. Her mind, it seems, can't wander quite as freely as my own.

But back to Jonathan Franzen's 100% Perfect Yawn. I was soooo bored by the Fractions and the War of 1812 that--and recall, children were literally puking out of boredom--my mind would climb out of my head, walk down the hall, pick up The Corrections, and read it for 6 hours a day every day for a week. That is, 6/24 = 1/4 = a solid quarter of my day was spent with Jonathan Franzen, who supposedly wrote the book while blindfolded. By the way, I normally read much faster, around 180pp/hr, but that's when it's me sitting with the book in my lap, reading words on a page--having your bored-out-of-your-mind-mind read it several doors down the darkened hallway takes considerably more time and energy and patience.

But I did read it. I read every single word that Franzen wrote, and I yawned. I read those words and I wished for something else, anything else, even Strong Motion, and I yawned. I read that whole damn book all the way to the end, and boy oh boy did I yawn. Life became, through that book, a living yawn, a static yawn, like how Michael Bolton breathes in through his nose and out through his saxophone for days and days on end. That was me, except that my saxophone was a 557 page book about a horribly unhappy family. It truly was the 100% Perfect Yawn and had it gone on for two hundred more pages I don't doubt that it would have been infinite. A black hole yawn that could swallow life, the universe, and everything.


But at least I didn't puke--I can say that much for the book.

(I'm just joking. I didn't read any of that book--I wasn't that bored. I read the 4322 page District and Regional Grade Norming Handbook instead.)