We NEED Paul Krassner. George Carlin is wonderful and fine and
still
more or less funny, despite needing to repeat every punch line three
times
so today's college students can actually get what it is he's saying,
and
Mort Sahl was grand, and Bill Hicks died waaay too young, but we
NEEDED Lenny Bruce, we needed Lord Buckley, we needed HL Mencken,
we
needed Tom Paine. We needed Jane Dornacker, but poor helicopter
maintenance
took her away too soon. That leaves us with few bright spots: The
Amazing
Double-L standup (Latina-Lesbian) Comic Reno. And we NEED Paul
Krassner.
First of all, we need some distraction from watching that pissant rich
kid
in the White House doing his poppy's buddies' bidding by trying to call
down
Saddam Hussein, "...gonna shoot yer ass, huh, how 'bout that?" It
sounds
pathetically funny when anyone who grew up in a city knows that punkass
wouldn't last a week in the lamest gang in the mellowest city in
America...
But the western part of the Carlyle Group Caspian Sea pipeline was
designed
to go through northern Iraq, so they're gonna get those B-52's out
there to
dig another trench, this time through the "Coming Soon to a
Dictatorship
Near You" Kurdish Autonomous Region. (Which also allows our allies, the
Turks, to stop killing their Kurds with our poison gas and dump
them
next door. After all, since dumping Europe's Jews in Palestine worked
out so
well, why not do it again...
And I say "need" rather than "want" because, other than Ms Reno, Paul
Krassner is the only person today I know of who is so morally and
mentally
skewed into a twisted phenomenon that he can not only get you laughing,
but
with laughter that actually has healing properties to help you lower
your
hypertensive reaction to the outrageous insanity coming from various
media
cloacas, dropping your systolic/diastolic level from, oh, say, 240/180,
which is where the daily outrage puts it, down to a less
artery-exploding
level. This relaxation comes from knowing someone has put his finger on
the
spot -- right in the eye of the matter. And he's been doing it fast and
furious for over 40 years.
So guess what? Just out and just in time, brand spankin' new, a lovely
collection of articles, essays, and literate sneezes in the direction
of all
that is holy, all gathered together in one bound paper volume called
Murder at the Conspiracy Convention (Barricade Books, Fort Lee, New
Jersey, $17.95, with an introduction by George Carlin.) Get it. The
secret
interview with Monica Lewinsky alone is worth the price of admission.
But ok, not everyone is as masochistically obsessed with what passes
for
reality as I sometimes am. How about this? The Chess Garden by
Brooks Hansen, originally published in 1995, a work of such
extraordinary
imagination and fantasy, that it made me feel, even in my 50's, like
that
proverbial 7-year-old who just read Treasure Island and
discovered
there's a world out there, a world of fascination and adventure to be
found
in books.
The story? A nineteenth-century physician sets out to find the
Antipodes and
sends letters back to his family at their home in Dayton, Ohio. The
family
home has a chess garden which people in the community have been free to
use
in pleasant weather, gathering to play chess and other polite table
games,
and since the doctor's departure, gathering around each time another
letter
arrives from him.
Brooks Hansen writes in a disarmingly congenial tone, the story-telling
an
easy invitation to come along and join in on the discovery, rather than
a
recanting of adventure already done. The magic exists without pompous
fanfare. Absolutely the most totally engrossing complete
world-in-a-novel
I've read since Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia and that was
written
in 1905. Jeannie Mancini of Books Unlimited in San Mateo, CA, touted
this
book to me, and for that, I owe her bigtime forever.
You want non-fiction, you say? Got a winner for you, not new, but
available,
a history by one Giles Milton. The complete title is Big Chief
Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in
America
(Farrar Straus and Giraux, 2000). It is, as you might have already
guessed, about Queen E the First, and her back-door sweetie, Walter
("Call
Me Sir") Ralegh, he whom she kept in nauseatingly excessive luxury. And
the
various fools, hustlers, maniacs and the like who went west to settle
the
wild American shore. Lovely history -- our history -- told with style
and
humor and substance.
Mr. Milton has written two other histories, one called Nathaniel's
Nutmeg: or The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who
Changed the Course of History about the battle for the spice trade
between England and Holland. ("The spice! The spice!") The other,
The
Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville.
Mandeville was
a 14th century Frenchman, or perhaps an Englishman hiding in France
under an
assumed name to avoid prosecution for murder he committed back home, or
perhaps someone else, a person known only through his writings of
travels
through Turkey and India and etcetera, most of which may be stolen from
other sources, or perhaps not. Based on the superlative abilities he
shows
in Big Chief Elizabeth, I am certain they are also worth
reading --
Mr. Milton is a marvelous historian.
Next, a book by Daniel Quinn for those who would actually like to think
about saving the world: Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and
Spirit
which has been around since 1992, but don't let that dissuade you --
the
Bible's been around longer than that, and this is a better book, more
readable, wiser, more compassionate, more insightful.
In many ways, this book was ground-shaking, enlightening,
mind-altering, and
life changing. It was made into an obscenely idiotic movie with Anthony
Hopkins as a scientist-gone-mad because he learned to see a gorilla's
point
of view (Ishmael is a gorilla). Ignore the movie...
The book is an investigation into the process of learning how to
recognize
just what went wrong with the human race, and how it can be righted
with a
shift in point of view.
I have just found and gotten a copy of a sequel titled -- My
Ishmael, published in 1997. I have not yet read it and I hope it
can
nearly match the first, but I doubt it. I am prepared to be surprised,
but
the first book was unique and moving in a way does not get repeated. It
brings to mind the comment once made about something else: "Columbus
discovered America and let it go at that -- he didn't feel obligated to
go
on and discover Australia, New Zealand, Fiji."
Finally, Steve Martin's short novel, shopgirl (40 Share
Productions,
2000, $10.95) a tender and quiet and engrossing novel about a young
woman
who clerks at Nieman's in Los Angeles, what she thinks, some people
whom she
meets, some emotions she feels, some love which happens. Told simply
and
quietly, it is a gem.
That should keep you busy long enough to stay out of trouble, amuse the
hell
out of your idle hours, and even make you feel you spent your time
doing
something worthwhile.
