Only some criminals have cachet

SEATTLE, Washington - The biographical page* of the Bantam paperback version of Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers states the following:

One of the most provocative literary figures of the twentieth century, Jean Genet - like Villon and Rimbaud - is in the great French tradition of the writer-criminal.

Should the writer be the only criminal that we romanticize in this way? I guess combining writer and criminal results in something interesting to us. I've tried to think of another example:

Milkman-criminal

The chef-criminal
The secretary-criminal
The therapist-criminal**
The engineer-criminal
The barista-criminal
The endocrinologist-criminal
The sculptor-criminal
The seamstress-criminal

Nothing seems to be working.

* I'm trying to find out what the biographical page of a book is called, without success.

** This one has potential, if you include Freudian psychoanalysis, which was one of the great frauds of the 20th century. I don't know if "therapist" instead of "analyst" is a correct term for those charlatans.

Time for the Henry Miller tax avoidance strategy

SEATTLE, Washington - Henry Miller didn't know how to manage the piles of money he started making when his juiciest works were finally published in the United States in the early 1960s. He had been poor most of his life, sometimes getting by by sending out letters to friends, begging for food, clothes, whatever.

In 1963 he had high tax bills and a less-than-optimal liquidity situation and sought advice; some of his accountants mentioned that he could get tax write-offs by donating his watercolors to museums and universities. Upon hearing this, Miller (73 years old at the time) tossed aside any notions of making a painting when inspiration struck, and cranked out scores of watercolors which were promptly donated off.

Massive tax write-off

I wish I had known this a few weeks ago, when I donated an old television to a nonprofit. I didn't even bother with donation paperwork for giving away that old dinosaur, but perhaps I could have thrown in one of my paintings, like the one pictured here.

"Yes, I'd also like to donate this painting to your organization. It's worth ten thousand dollars. Yes, yes, I'll need a receipt."

Speed of reading

To be savored slowly... or not so slowly

SEATTLE, Washington - Sometimes I think I read too slowly, slower than my capabilities allow, given my genius-level intelligence. Can something be done? I recently stumbled upon the video below, where the host reveals the secrets of this matter. Our reading is slowed because of subvocalization - when we read a word, we move muscles associated with saying the word. This slows us down. Train yourself to stop doing this, and you'll start flying through texts.

It all sounds very straightforward and scientific, except that it may all be hot air. Subvocalization is real (it can be detected with subvocalization-detection equipment) but many experts call bollocks on the idea that it negatively affects reading speed.

I tried the exercise in the video a bit, and I don't think it was helping much, and like any practice exercise in anything (e.g. painting) I bail out quickly.

Even proponents of various speed reading schemes usually concede that it's useful for absorbing information but doesn't let you appreciate style.



Video found here

Haven't been to Barnes & Noble in a while - rather traumatic

NEW YORK CITY, New York - I've turned into a real grinder in book buying. Used, over-runs, Half Price Books, yard sales - anything but actually walking into a big-ass Barnes & Noble.

I went into one in New Jersey and I've been grinding for so long, I was shocked by the prices. The minimum I saw for a novel was $13.95, and many were $16.95+. I'm used to paying $4 to $7 nowadays. If I really need something that's not available via my usual channels, I'll order it on Amazon for about $10.50 max, and I pay for that with a voucher from a Coinstar machine so it feels like it's free.

Oddly, given my parsimoniousness on this issue, I never read a book from the library.

Do the authors make any money when I buy used? No. Do they make less when I buy at clearance? They must make less, or none at all. What can I say, write for the love of the game. Many of the authors I buy are dead anyway. Our Leaders have blessed us with the First-sale doctrine - take advantage.

Did N.W.A. lift lyrics from Vladimir Nabokov?

SEATTLE, Washington -

From Nabokov's Bend Sinister, 1947:

She sat with parted lips, slightly moving her tightly crossed thighs, producing a tiny sound, soft, labiate, with an alternate crepitation as if she were rubbing the palms of her hands which, however, lay idle.

'Chirruping like a poor lone cricket,' she said.

Portion of "Parental Discretion Iz Advised", from N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton, 1988:

Fuck the regular, yo as I get better the
bitches wanna trick and go stupid up on the dick
So I get 'em hot, thinkin' they're gonna get it
As they sit, rubbin' their legs like a cricket

The Gideon Bible isn't good enough any more?

NEW YORK CITY, New York - My hotel room in New York came with two books on the end table - an autobiography by British television personality Richard Hammond and an issue of Alaska Quarterly Review from 1998.

Both books still have the price tag on them.

This painting was not done by me, it was done through me

SEATTLE, Washington - After I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow, I decided to paint one of the opening scenes. (I considered doing this for every book I read but realized, as I like to buy books cheap, that this might quadruple the cost of every book I read.) After completing it, I started running into a bunch of stuff that reminded me of the painting. This is the painting:



After completing it, I ran into this cover image of one of the editions (it's not the edition I read, nor is it the image on my Goodreads entry for the book):



I also noticed after the fact that my painting bears a resemblance to this photo of Atlanta that I have on the wall of my home office. (The painting is an image of London):



Finally we have the image below from Zak Smith, an artist who created one image for each page of Gravity's Rainbow. Like me, Smith included a smokestack and the rocket with vapor trails. I put a hat on Prentice because I was dissatisfied with how I had painted his head.

Mr Smith saved the bananas until the next page's image.

I recommend viewing all the Smith images if you've read the book, and maybe even if you haven't read the book.

Should you masturbate before gambling?

SEATTLE, Washington - I've already discussed how masturbation does not adversely affect athletic performance - but what about gambling? Jean Genet, in The Thief's Journal, claims that a pre-gambling spank was standard practice in the circles he ran in:

He led me a few steps away to the one comfort station on the Parallelo. It was run by an old woman. Surprised by the suddenness of his decision, I questioned him:

"What are you going to do?"

"Wait for me."

"Why?"

He answered with a Spanish word which I did not understand. I told him so and, in front of the old woman who was waiting for her two sous, he burst out laughing and made the gesture of jerking off. When he came out, his face had a bit of color. He was still smiling.

"It's all right now. I'm ready."

That's how I learned that, on big occasions, players went there to jerk off in order to be calmer and more sure of themselves. We went back to the lot. Pépé chose a group. He lost. He lost all he had.

(From the Grove Press translation)

Pemco chimes in on the chicks at the bookstore

SEATTLE, Washington - I talked about the women at the bookstore recently. A new "Northwest Profiles" radio ad from Pemco chimed in on the same subject, discussing the "Ghostlike Used Bookstore Waif".

It's whizbang Flash animation or something, so I can't directly link to it but I screenshotted it below and you can dig up Profile #30 on the Northwest Profiles page to listen to the ad.

Single women do not exist at the bookstore

SEATTLE, Washington - I'll often see an attractive or even semi-attractive woman at the bookstore. Even if she's not so hot, if she has a purposeful air about her in the bookstore that's good enough for me.

But I'd never approach such a woman, for two reasons: (1) I'm not inclined to do such a thing under any circumstances and (2) she is 100% guaranteed to already be taken and her man is also in the bookstore.

Every single time I've seen such a woman and keep an eye on her, her guys shows up in short order. If I owned a watch I could set my watch by it: "Boyfriend appears in 5... 4... 3... 2...".

I've done this little mental exercise dozens of times, and it always ends the same way. And I'm only counting times where I've already looked and not seen a ring on the I'm Taken finger.

One or the other or both of the following is happening: (a) every woman that doesn't look like a bridge troll is already taken (b) women don't go anywhere, even a quick jaunt to the bookshop, without their man. Most likely, the poor guy just wanted to go to the bookstore and these chicks, like most chicks, think that if the guy is out of sight for 20 minutes he's off having sex with someone else.

An odd homage to Burroughs

SEATTLE, Washington - Due to the chaotic mess that was the writing and book-preparation style of William S. Burroughs, passages of text would appear in multiple works, and sometimes multiple times in the same work (some passages in Naked Lunch appear twice). Burroughs biographer Barry Miles seems to have pulled a similar stunt, though I'm not sure if it's mistake or tribute.

Here's one example. From Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible:

Stern had a friend called Harry Phipps, a 24-year-old, short, blond-haired, baby-faced, narcissistic American millionaire.

From Miles's The Beat Hotel:

Stern had a friend named Harry Phipps, a twenty-four-year-old, short, blond-haired, baby-faced, narcissistic American millionaire,...

Those look like the type of minor text changes that a student makes when trying to make it look like they didn't plagiarize something.

I saw some more examples but the former book is poorly indexed and the latter is not indexed at all so I'm not going to hunt for them.

Book Review - The Producers: Profiles in Frustration

SEATTLE, Washington - In case you've wondered what it is that a television or movie producer does - you can read The Producers and still not be quite sure what they do.

Author Luke Ford has been around the block. A few of us would read his porn gossip website when we were in grad school in the late 1990s. This type of profession was unusual for a convert to Orthodox Judaism, and he wrestled with this for years (a struggle chronicled in his XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without a Shul) and appears to have finally thrown the porn reporting over the rail.

The book contains interviews with 68 different producers. If you're interested in movie scuttlebutt at all, the material is interesting. Luke doesn't talk a lot in the interviews, and when he does it's often to ask questions about values and Judaism. Luke's the kind of guy that throws all his stuff onto his website, so you can read most of the interviews (except the ones with Jeff Wald, which were removed due to threats and litigation) on his website. Some good example interviews are Peter Hyams (I never seem to like his movies) and Christopher Mankiewicz (for his repeated bashing of producer Arnold Kopelson).

I also did throw a dozen or so movies into the Netflix queue while reading the book, including The Man From Elysian Fields, Trees Lounge, and Sordid Lives.

One amazing thing about Ford's writing is his incredibly bad spelling. For a guy obsessed with Hollywood, he inexplicably misspells names like Lee Strasberg and Hal Wallis. He must call Sidney Lumet "Sydney Lumet" a dozen times. At least his mistakes aren't confined to names - Luke, there's no such thing as "du-op" music. Luke, "He's the worst human being whoever lived" is not a valid sentence. I'll forgive Luke for writing that Don Phillips "grew up in Ventner, New Jersey, a heavily Jewish town" - the name's wrong but it was a heavily Jewish town in the 1940s.

Ford claims he was laid up with "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" for six years, perhaps those were the years when spelling is learned.

Notes on recently read books

SEATTLE, Washington -

Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara: Nice to see that an American was writing in the 1920s and 1930s while not living in Paris. This novel takes place in Gibbsville, a fictionalized Pottsville, PA, circa 1930. It's a decent enough novel about the type of people that would inhabit such a place at such a time. (spoiler alert) I didn't think the guy's life was bad enough for him to kill himself (end spoiler) but I didn't write the thing.

I didn't know much about O'Hara upon finishing this book, and I assume this was the definitive word about Gibbsville/Pottsville. But, while poking around the we're-moving sale at Twice Sold Tales I saw a big book of Gibbsville essays authored by O'Hara. On top of that he set five of his novels there. He just kept writing and writing and writing about Gibbsville/Pottsville - maybe he should have spent more time in Paris.

Stork Club : America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Café Society, by Ralph Blumenthal: I felt mildly let down by this book. It may just be that the Stork Club's owner, Sherman Billingsley, was not a very compelling figure. It seemed to have a fine-grained focus on Billingley's various battles over the years (mobsters, unions, Josephine Baker, sticky-fingered employees) without giving much insight on either the man or the broader "café society" in which the Stork Club operated. At least he spent a few years banging Ethel Merman.

Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health, by Elliot Valenstein: This book was written in the late 1980s and heavily updated in 1997, but some facts are eternal: the Mental Health professions continue not to have much of a clue about the etiology of many of the things that they call "mental illnesses", but they pretend that they do.

A good hunk of the book is history, covering the evolution of thought about mental disorders and the history of treatments for said disorders. He gets into what is currently in vogue (chemical explanations for "mental illness") and what some of the alternatives are (e.g. physical brain structure issues). Chemical explanations are obviously popular with pharmaceutical companies, and Valenstein is quite hard on them, blaming them for distorting research and giving detailed coverage of the speculations, crumbs of knowledge, and outright bullshit that pharmaceutical companies have peddled as established scientific fact over the years (e.g. "low serotonin levels cause depression").

Valenstein doesn't think we should abandon psychoactive drugs, he agrees that they help some people some of the time, but he thinks we should honestly acknowledge that we don't have a very good idea why they have the effects that they have or what the drugs say about the underlying etiology of "mental illness".

(all "mental illness" scare quotes are mine, not Valenstein's)

In Praise of Melancholy

SEATTLE, Washington - The 10am Friday hour of Dennis Prager's radio show is always designated the "Happiness Hour" and happiness is discussed. Dennis is a big proponent of happiness.

This week, he let an enemy into the den, so to speak; he interviewed Eric Wilson, a professor at Wake Forest and the author of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

The commercial-free mp3 is here: topics discussed include the treatment of melancholy in various Christian and Jewish traditions; Keats; Sartre; and the role of melancholy in creativity.

Can you put on the Clemson-Maryland game? Why not?

SEATTLE, Washington - The Central Library in Seattle has some sweet flat-screen monitors, but apparently they're not used for sports. Instead, you get such handy information as the number of "Dewey Items" that are checked out, vs. the number of "Non-Dewey" checkouts.

Just because it's not sports doesn't mean you can't bet on it. I hear Non-Dewey is favored by 125 for Monday - if the line goes any higher, then take Dewey and the points, but if it stays there or goes lower then lay the wood.

Comments on various Howard Hughes books

SEATTLE, Washington - My obsessiveness in reading Howard Hughes books closely parallels the obsessions of the old man himself. Below are some notes and comments, not really reviews, of the Hughes books that I've read, in the order that I first read them. I've read most of them several times.

Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness by Donald Barlett & James Steele

I have the 1979 edition of this book, when it was called Empire. (Hughes died in 1976.) The authors are Philadelphia newspaper reporters, and the book materially and stylistically reflects this - it is fairly light on the tits and ass, and long on the business dealings. The authors are quite critical of the Mormon Mafia and are not in love with Bob Maheu either. Hughes is portrayed as almost completely incompetent in his last year or two. Written so soon after Hughes's death, certain details are missing (e.g. later developments in the estate battle, and some of the Watergate revelations.)

Best/unique things about this book: Most detailed coverage of various legal battles, including TWA, Air West, and the 1947 Senate hearings; probably the best coverage of the Glomar Explorer affair; detailed coverage of the 1975 Mell Stewart enema showdown.

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Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos, and Letters by Richard Hack

Hack is a celebrity biographer, and that's the nature of the book - heavy on the ladies, light on the litigation. Probably as breezy a read and as good of an introduction to Hughes as any of the books. Some saucy stuff, but nothing outlandish. Heavy coverage of the mid-to-late 1930s, Hughes's most active time with women, and almost no coverage of 1961-1966, when Hughes was living in Bel Air and consumed with TWA litigation. Does not fawn over Maheu even though Hack co-authored Maheu's memoir (discussed below).

Best/unique things about this book: Contains the full, nine-part, 3-page single spaced Hughes memo on how to open a can of fruit.

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Howard Hughes: The Untold Story by Peter Harry Brown and Pat Broeske

Another tits-and-ass effort by two entertainment writers. In terms of sheer volume of women discussed, this is the top book by far. The authors had access to Hughes's "security chief" (actually, more like Director of Surveilling Women) Jeff Chouinard (who, mysteriously, is not mentioned in any other book as far as I can recall,) and he provided piles of details on the chick scene from the late 1940s onward. The authors are fairly critical of Bill Gay and the Mormon Mafia. This book attributes Hughes's erratic late-life behavior to undiagnosed neurosyphilis.

Best/unique things about this book: Most detail on Hughes's marriage to Ella Rice in the 1920s; best coverage of how Hughes worked on the mothers of the young women he was pursuing.

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The Passions of Howard Hughes by Terry Moore & Jerry Rivers

Hughes staged a bogus wedding in international waters with the young starlet Moore in 1949 to get her into bed. It worked. Moore later claimed to be married to Hughes for 8 years, which is interesting because she married another guy in 1951, divorced him, and married yet another guy in 1956. This book consists of vignettes (with lots of dialogue cobbled up by Moore) on various business and sexual escapades. Much of it reads like Hustler Forum letters. But, in books like this, it's the spirit that counts, not the narrow correctness of the dialogue, and Jane Russell said that this is the only book she ever read that captures the essence of the real Hughes.

Best/unique things about this book: Attributes the following dialogue to entertainment legends:

• Billie Dove: "Get the champagne and pour it over my feet and up my legs and onto my pussy... now be a good boy, Howard, and lick it all up."
  
• Marilyn Monroe: "I dyed my pussy just for you, Howard."
  
• Bette Davis: "Or were you dreaming about my tummy and how smooth it would be, and how it would feel when you ran your hand over my stomach down to my pussy and how silky the hair would feel?" - "I'm going to show you what it's like to fuck a real woman." - "Can Katie Hepburn offer you this?" - "I'm going to show you what the word 'fuck' really means."
  

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Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness by Michael Drosnin

This book covers a narrow time period, the Vegas years (1966-1970) and the immediate aftermath, and is based largely on memos stolen from Hughes's Romaine Street headquarters (pic of the HQ that I snapped here) in 1974. Drosnin also wrote The Bible Code, that's not a good sign, but still, this book is valuable for direct, extensive quoting of Hughes memos from the relevant time frame. Many of the memos are between Hughes and Bob Maheu (see Maheu review below.) Drosnin is pretty hard on the Mormons.

Best/unique things about this book: Most detailed coverage of Watergate issues; entire chapter on Hughes's dislike of blacks; excellent coverage of Hughes's dithering regarding the party to open the Landmark casino in 1969.

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Next to Hughes by Robert Maheu and Richard Hack

Maheu first started working with Hughes in the 1950s and served as his Vegas top dog and alter-ego in the late 1960s, all without ever meeting the big guy. Maheu mixes discussion of his work with Hughes with the stuff he was doing on the side, like arranging to have his mob pals murder Fidel Castro. Maheu blasts Bill Gay, who orchestrated the ouster of Maheu from the Hughes empire in 1970-71, as being the greedy bad guy in all of this (which some claim Maheu was) and essentially "killing" Hughes through drugs and isolation. Kirkus reviews called this book the "self-servingly selective reminiscences of a world-class hustler" and "a graceless, narcissistic, score-settling apologia."

Best/unique things about this book: Actually, considering who wrote this book, it is rather light on details. The best parts are the parts only tangentially related to Hughes (like the Castro business.) Maybe this really is "selective reminiscences." I learned more about the Hughes-Maheu relationship from the Drosnin book than from the Maheu book.

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Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham

Prolific celebrity author Higham makes the most controversial claims of all - that Hughes was a prolific, practicing bisexual and died of AIDS or an AIDS-like disease. In addition to extensive, sordid coverage of Hughes's heterosexual action, Higham alleges homosexual action between Hughes and (among others) Jack Buetel, Tyrone Power, Randolph Scott, and Cary Grant (the last two pictured here). This book is nonjudgmental, almost to the point of apologetic, about the role of Bill Gay and the Mormons in Hughes's late life isolation and physical decline. The Hughes in this book is colder and more uncaring than in any other portrayal.

Best/unique things about this book: Best coverage of Stewart Granger's idea to murder Hughes, and the actual physical attacks Hughes suffered at the hands of Glen Davis and Oleg Cassini.

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The Asylum of Howard Hughes by Jack Real & Bill Yenne

Jack Real worked with Hughes for years when he was an executive with Lockheed, and eventually started working for Hughes himself in the last years of Hughes's life. He was the only "friend" Hughes had in his last years, the only man who regularly saw Hughes who was not a part of the Mormon Mafia. Real is vicious in his portrayal of Bill Gay and most of the Mormon aides. Interestingly, he portrays Chester Davis in a somewhat warmer light than Gay, where most writers portray Gay and Davis as being birds of a feather. Most of the book covers the post-Vegas years (1971 to 1976) and thus has almost no coverage of Hughes's sexual adventures.

Best/unique things about this book: Has coverage of some Hughes business dealings that are not covered in any other book; extensive detail on Hughes's last few piloting experiences in England in 1973; a somewhat rose-tinted view of Anastasio Somoza; details Hughes's attempt to communicate a bribe offer to Del Webb via ESP.

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The Mysterious Howard Hughes Revealed by Verl Frehner and Chuck Waldron

Chuck Waldron started working for the Hughes organization in 1957 and joined the inner inner circle of Hughes aides, controlled by Bill Gay, in 1971. He's not the aide Jack Real identified as the "good" one. Verl Frehner is just some guy, not an author, who became Waldron's neighbor in Las Vegas after Hughes's death, got to talking with Waldron about the Hughes years, and has written this book. Waldron is listed as the co-author but he's always referred to in the third person in the book. This is a strange, published-on-demand book that is written in an aw-shucks style and clearly has not been professionally edited. Gay and his Mormon troops are portrayed in the cheeriest possible light, dutifully carrying out Hughes's wishes. Hughes is portrayed as being a busy bee, wheeling and dealing up until about a month before he died, while all other authors portray a Hughes greatly slowed down in his last few years.

Best/unique things about this book: Detailed coverage of Hughes's "escape" from the Bahamas in 1972, and in general, the most detail on Hughes's moves from residence to residence in the 1970s.

Book Review - The Sheltering Sky

SEATTLE, Washington - Paul Bowles was an artsy Westerner hanging out in North Africa before it was cool to do so. He started visiting the area in 1931 and moved to French Algeria in 1947. At the time, he was a composer by trade; The Sheltering Sky was his first novel.

The book chronicles the post-WW2 journey of three wealthy slacker Americans (hubby and wife Port and Kit, and friend Tunner) taking an extended get-away in French North Africa. Port seems to have the crazy idea that this long trip with a guy friend tagging along will do wonders for his troubled marriage to Kit. The trio starts out in a heavily Frenchified port city and slowly works its way into the desert, partaking of the fleabag hotels, strange cuisine, and exotic scenery.

Disaffected post-war young adults wandering aimlessly, hanging out in cafés, pondering their lives, fooling around a bit - sounds like The Sun Also Rises. I would say it is similar, except the writing has a few more adjectives, it's after a different war, and none of the main characters got their crank shot off in the war.

The book may have a few more adjectives, but it's still done in a relatively spartan style. Spartan terrain, spartan writing, etc. Works well enough for me.

William S. Burroughs's reading of The Sheltering Sky was one of the influences that led him to move to Tangier in the early 1950s, so I was expecting some drug use and gay sex with teenagers. Not much of either - the only "gay" sex involved a guy getting down with a woman who was dressed like a man - is that gay?

I didn't find out until after finishing the book that Bernardo Bertolucci made The Sheltering Sky into a movie in 1990. I got my hopes up - some good desert cinematography, a sort of heterosexual Lawrence of Arabia - but Wikipedia notes that Bertolucci "turns the bleak, sinister tone of the latter part of the book into a desert love story". Shit! I'll still rent it and watch it, but I would root for a bleaker movie. If there is not some hot loving in the movie - some Last Tango in Paris, go-get-the-butter eroticism - I will have to declare it a failure.

Another note on Thomas de Quincey

SEATTLE, Washington - de Quincey and Todd Solondz - separated at birth?

Couldn't have said it better myself

SEATTLE, Washington - The "War on Drugs" is riddled with hypocrisy and inconsistencies, but perhaps the central one is this: some psychoactive substances (alcohol, nicotine, etc.) are deemed acceptable for consumption, and others (marijuana, opiates, mescaline, etc.) are prohibited or doled out only in specific medical circumstances. Attempts have been made to justify why some substances are allowed and others are not, but upon close examination these categorizations are somewhat arbitrary and are strongly distorted by misinformation and special interests.

Many authors have made the case that adults should not be bound by these categorizations, and should be free consume whatever intoxicants they wish (one that I've read being Saying Yes by Jacob Sullum). While book-length assertions of this principle are great, it's tough to beat the succinct and elegant case made by Thomas de Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

I just started reading Confessions, and may or may not write a full review later. This book was first published in 1822, and an expanded version was published in 1856. Well-written English from the early 19th century has great style that simply cannot be matched by modern authors. The passage that caught my eye first appeared in the 1856 publication (italics and archaic spellings in the original):

If in early days I had fully understood the subtle powers lodged in this mighty drug (when judiciously regulated), (1) to tranquillise all irritations of the nervous system; (2) to stimulate the capacities for enjoyment; and (3) under any call for extraordinary exertion (such as all men meet at times), to sustain through twenty-four consecutive hours the else drooping animal energies - most certainly, knowing or suspecting all this, I should have inaugurated my opium career in the character of one seeking extra power and enjoyment, rather than of one shrinking from extra torment. And why not? If that argued any fault, is it not a fault that most of us commit every day with regard to alcohol? Are we entitled to use that only as a medicine? Is wine unlawful, except as an anodyne? I hope not: else I shall be obliged to counterfeit and to plead some anomalous tic in my little finger; and thus gradually, as in any Ovidian metamorphosis, I, that am at present a truth-loving man, shall change by daily inches into a dissembler. No: the whole race of man proclaim it lawful to drink wine without pleading a medical certificate as a qualification. That same license extends itself therefore to the use of opium; what a man may lawfully seek in wine surely he may lawfully find in opium; and much more so in many cases (of which mine happens to be one) where opium deranges the animal economy less by a great deal than an equivalent quantity of alcohol.

Book Review - Talk Talk

SEATTLE, Washington - I'm a fan of T.C. Boyle, but he may be starting to show his mileage a bit in his most recent novel, Talk Talk. Or maybe it's just me.

The first Boyle novel that I read was The Road to Wellville, and it's easily among my five favorite novels. Most of all, it's funny; even given all the talents of Boyle that are on display in Wellville - the detailed historical research, vivid insight into the good, bad, and ugly of human nature, command of the English language that I can only dream about - I essentially considered him a humorist.

But something happened as I worked my way through his novels - each one got less and less funny. Maybe I read them in the wrong order. Water Music, his first and probably most ambitious novel, is excellent but perhaps a notch down from Wellville on the laugh scale. Riven Rock has some humor, but also some pain (not that that's a bad thing.) And Drop City has laughs, but early 1970s hippies are such an easy target.

Talk Talk is an identity theft caper. A deaf teacher, Dana Halter, ends up in jail on a zillion warrants, and after a few days in the calaboose it is determined that she is the victim of identity theft. She loses her job in all of this commotion, and when the authorities do not show sufficient vigor in pursuing the fraudster, she enlists her boyfriend Bridger Martin in a quest to hunt him down. Yep, a guy stole Dana's identity - if she had a female-specific name then none of this would have happened.

The amateur sleuths end up hot on the thief's tail, and a chase ensues from the central California coast, to Marin County, to Boyle's home turf, the Hudson River valley. Along the way, Bridger gets his identity stolen - be sure to use a pay phone when you call an identity thief.

As I said, Dana is deaf. Bridger is not, though he is working on his sign language. I'm not sure how much this deafness adds to the book, perhaps if I had more training in the arts & letters I would see the deep significance. Boyle does seem to like the occasional communication issue, such as the no-hablo-inglés Japanese deserter stranded in Georgia's barrier islands in East is East, or the psychotic and frequently incommunicado Stanley McCormick in Riven Rock.

This book is not bad, but I would say that a reader can maximize their Boyle enjoyment by sticking to the period novels listed above, where all of the author's talents and capabilities are on display.