Books Acquired:
Siouxsie & the Banshees: The Authorised Biography, Mark Paytress
Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
Progress Made:
Lucky Loser, Russ Buettner & Suzanne Craig
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
The Bewildering Effect of Cabbages, Michael Rymaszewski
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
Books Finished:
The Last Good Kiss, James Crumley
I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
—John Steinbeck
As I expected, The Last Good Kiss let me down with an ending that was needlessly grim and violent. The protagonist, who had a been a hillbilly Philip Marlowe for most of the book, suddenly turned into Jean-Claude Van Damme down the stretch. But I’ll give James Crumley some credit: He can put together a good sentence and he managed to keep me distracted for some crucial hours during the post-election malaise.
Which is still a thing, though the acute phase has passed and I am once again able to watch cable news for minutes at a time without hurling things. Lucky Loser is, weirdly, kind of helping. It’s comforting in a way to know that we are not wrong; the Once and Future (OAF) was always a fraud, and has always gotten special treatment from a credulous press, who apparently really want someone like their fantasy version of Mr. Art of the Deal to exist.
Over and over again we see how some media stooge or other inflated his net worth, then the next one inflated it even more, until everyone believed he was a multibillionaire when he was drowning in debt. Then The Apprentice came along and inflated him into the Orange Godzilla we see today.
At the moment, two weeks out, I feel moderately sanguine about the whole thing. It’s going to be a disaster, that’s for sure, but will it be an explosion — where many innocents get hit by the shrapnel — or an implosion, a.k.a. circular firing squad? Some combination of both, obviously. But the thing about That Fucking Guy’s transactional relationship with… well, everyone… is that the moment he has nothing to offer them, they’re gone. (Where has Melania been lately, BTW?) It’s going to get ugly and I’ll be there with popcorn.
Enough about current events. This last couple weeks I’ve been reading something 62 years old: John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, which I didn’t necessarily start on purpose. But one day at the cafe I was bored with what I’d brought to read and started perusing the CBFB (Coffee Break free box), which contained a dog-eared paperback of TWC.
I cracked it open and then it came with me to New York and Maryland and back. Steinbeck is a most convivial traveling companion. We have a lot in common: He was one of the greatest writers of his generation; I also write things. He has a faithful poodle, I have a cat who greeted my return from this latest trip with long strings of happy drool. And I certainly identified with this passage:
I ate my corned-beef hash, then made down my bed and dug out Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But I found I couldn’t read, and when the light was off I couldn’t sleep.
I didn’t make much headway on Rise and Fall or VALIS this month. Their time will come. Speaking of heads, I’ve also been working through old friend Michael’s book, which is good so far but unfortunately I only have it on Kindle. Reading on an iPad or, worse, a phone is not my favorite. But it will be read; I am a stubborn man.
So was Steinbeck. By way of explaining why he set out on an epic road trip when his health was iffy, he says,
I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.
The only problem with reading Travels with Charley is that it has made me want to hit the road, when in truth I just got back from the latest of what seemed like 77 trips in 2024. On a personal level it seems like a good time, actually, to surrender a little fierceness. But I appreciate the sentiment.