Goatboy Junior
I spent the holiday weekend alone with my two-year-old son, a recipe for suicide in lesser men. But I endured quite well, thanks to the curative powers of yoga, hiking, and high-grade premium marijuana (which I only used after he went to bed, thank you very much). Obviously, two-plus years in Austin have turned me into a soft-brained hippie.
After I managed to wrestle the whelk into a semblance of sleep, I had a lot of time at night to do whatever I wanted as long as I didn't leave the house. I chose the following activities: Watching Turner Classic Movies and, if applicable, professional football, smoking the above mentioned high-end herbal substance, and reading two short novels by Muriel Spark.
Therefore, I announce Books Number Three and Four in my 50-Book Challenge. The novels in question were The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls Of Slender Means, two of her earlier works. The only other Spark I've read is Memento Mori, one of her classics, but I found it relatively tough sledding compared to the two I've just completed. Spark's novels contain many important religious themes, which I am either too unintelligent or uneducated to understand, and lots of quoted poems, which I skip over almost entirely. I extracted what I wanted from these two: Their acid satire of low-end artistic types, who never seem to change no matter what the country or time period. Spark also has a trick, or a skill, that I admire very much. She's able to move the narrative backward and forward in time, without seams, so that nothing appears in flashback. The majority of each novel takes place in a specific period of time, but once in a while, she'll tell us what a certain character will be doing in 20 years, and suddenly everything about that character makes perfect sense. It's truly genius, and I will be trying to imitate this device often in the years to come.
So I read Muriel Spark. So fucking what? She's good. And besides, I like to read everything.
Meanwhile, the good people at Soft Skull Press have asked me to write 50 to 500 words on the theme "What Would Bill Hicks Say About Our Current Situation" for a hagiographic tribute to that increasingly popular iconoclastic audience-abuser champion consumer of porn. Naturally, I went for 500. They gave an absurdly generous deadline of mid-April. I rammed out a draft during the first half of Desperate Housewives. It may still require tweaking, but here goes. Note: At this point the post becomes political.
I love how it’s become fashionable to express sympathy for tsunami victims. Suddenly, America has discovered something. There are poor people in the world! And they need our help! But it’s not enough to just give a tenth of your paycheck to the Red Cross and then quietly go about your business. No. Everyone has to know you care. A basketball player gives one night’s pay to a tsunami charity, and it’s the lead story on Sportscenter. I didn’t see Kobe Bryant giving money to the families of rape victims, but at least now I know he wants to help the homeless of Sri Lanka. And I loved that telethon. Jay Leno telling you that 175,000 people is about the size of your town, or the town next to you. Jay would know. Wipe out a couple of dumbass small towns, and suddenly he’s two steps behind in the late-night ratings war. But Nelly was a lot better than I thought he would be.
You know, I’d like to see someone throw a telethon to benefit the women and children we haven’t killed yet in Iraq. THAT would take some balls. I wonder how it would go....
“Fatima is 12 years old, but she’s grown up a lot since her country was invaded illegally two years ago. Her father and mother were killed in the assault on Fallujah, and she watched helplessly as a methamphetamine-addicted Marine beat her younger brother to death with a rifle butt. She went to leave with an aunt and uncle in Mosul, but soldiers came in the middle of the night. They took her uncle away to prison, where professional torturers made him drink water spiked with Borax, smear his face with his own shit and have sex with a dog, tactics approved by the Defense Department and the Attorney General. He committed suicide, and Fatima was sad. Then one night, while she was on the way home from the store, three black-masked supporters of Muqtada Al-Sadr blew up a taxi in front of her aunt’s house. And don’t even talk about the three times she’s been raped by her cousins! Please, give to help this girl. Your money is feeble compensation for the fact that, to preserve President Bush’s place on the throne of heaven, we’ve emptied our national treasury to commit de facto genocide. But the dismantling of the fanatic Christian cult that created our President starts one dollar at a time. Eventually, you’ll have to start killing your neighbors, but for now, help Fatima get over the trauma of having her life utterly ruined forever by a series of bad policy decisions. Let’s make the world safe for people who don’t think that two guys kissing on the lips condemns their souls forever to hell. Our operators are standing by.”