| Monday, July 21, 2003 |
13:56 - Smirk me up that grid square
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One of the side effects of having all my worldly possessions-- which primarily consist of things that had been stacked on bookshelves, many of which are in fact books-- strewn about my floor in stacks without any particular place to put them is that I'm tempted to do something I haven't really done in years, since before college: reading.
Now, granted, I never was that much of an adventurous reader. I loved big thick books, but only certain big thick books; I would find a few favorites and read them over and over again. I've been through The Silmarillion some twenty times, for instance, and Watership Down fifteen, and the James Herriot All Creatures Great and Small series until the covers fell off and the paperback spines split. I can't say what the commonalities are between the books I've tended to like, except that I know a book I'll hate the moment I pick it up. Almost all sci-fi/fantasy falls into that category; Tolkien's the one exception to a genre that nearly uniformly makes me furious. And in any case, once I went off to college, my reading time was severely curtailed, and I never really did pick it back up again.
So now that the house work is gradually and slowly beginning to asymptote off, and the things I am doing usually involve a work path as follows: Apply a bead of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; spray a layer of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; apply fingerfuls of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; sand, caulk, prime; paint on a coat of something, then wait several hours for it to dry; repeat; repeat -- I find myself with a number of temporal interstices into which I would normally insert networking time, doing e-mail or blogging or tinkering with code or some such. But that's not possible until the phone company should ever get my house's correct address into their head (they've tried three times now to install the T1, and gone to the wrong address each time, resetting the Beseech a Favor From the Bureaucratic Monopoly clock with each dimwitted call from the middle of a parking lot somewhere miles from my house); and so I find myself sprawling on a couch and reading.
And what should I pick up but the various books by Bill Bryson? They're always a lot of fun, though I should note that they're always funniest the first time through. A long sojourn away from them will also pep them up a little, but I find that if I'm anticipating some cute trick of wording or visualization that I know is coming, such as his extravagant fears in Neither Here nor There about what should happen if he should buy a rubber love doll in Germany and it should flop out of his suitcase and self-inflate in the middle of a crowded subway car, it doesn't give me the lingering, delectable guffaw that I suffered the first time I read that passage-- on a transcontinental red-eye flight, under the dim reading light on my window seat, my paroxysms of silent laughter provoking increasing irritability in the guy sitting next to me and gamely trying to sleep as we soared through the midnight sky over Ohio.
I've always been a fan of Bryson's, I should point out, ever since I was handed a copy of The Mother Tongue by an English teacher at my high school. It's one of the most engaging, comprehensive tomes on the subject of the English language that I've ever run across, and I've read quite a few, many by much more distinguished linguists than he, such as Jespersen and Pei. But I always come back to Bryson. Why? Because there's something about his written wit that I like. It's hard to pin down. He's often described as a Keillor/Kerouac/Barry admixture, but I don't know if that comes near the mark. Bryson spends so much time talking about how bewildered he is by things in the world that I usually find perfectly understandable, and I'm not just talking about computers here, and yet has such a vast wealth of statistics at his fingertips with which to bolster some narrative point or other, that I can never tell if he's as endearingly feckless as he makes himself sound, or if his endless bumbling and gape-mouthed wonder at things like cell phones and underground walkways is all just an elaborate put-on. In which case I find my respect for him is diminished by a significant amount.
Which, I also should note, is the impression I'm regretfully left with after plowing through I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a collection of his columns that he wrote for a local paper after returning to America after living in England for twenty years. Now, I'd loved The Mother Tongue for its wealth of fascinating information wryly delivered; I'd found The Lost Continent, his trek across America, to be uproarious in the best Bryson tradition, though I can't find that one in my bookcase at all now; Notes From a Small Island, about England, was marginally less diverting, mostly because of its monotony; same goes for In a Sunburned Country, on Australia, its interest coming chiefly from the alien nature (to me) of the place. Neither Here Nor There, about his travels through Europe, is the magnum opus, unless it were A Walk in the Woods, the one that really put Bryson on the map, as it were-- his northward hike along the Appalachian Trail. It's in that book that you start to get a glimpse into Bryson's priorities in life, and in I'm a Stranger Here Myself he continues the trend through to its conclusion-- he's willing to devote months toward becoming a wild and scruffy mountain man, able to hike thirty miles a day through sweltering, buzzing mountains, but at heart he's really a cosseted American dad who putters in the yard and wrestles with his taxes and writes long sarcastic tirades about his computer being incomprehensible and unreliable. (DOS-prompt jokes in a 2000 book, even. I wonder.) He spends his Appalachian adventure bemoaning the changing landscape, whose decay he's careful to point out is not always the result of simple crass American industrialism eating away at the natural world-- often it's just, for instance, that the Ice Age is only just now ending, and climates are still changing rapidly, in a geological sense. But over the course of that book and the columns collected in the next, Bryson's disgust with the modern world begins to stick out in sharp relief.
Sure, he remains funny in his later books; that's not in doubt. If I were to characterize his style, I'd say he's what you get if you were to take James Lileks, excise about two pounds of clue from his head along with his conversance with popular entertainment and any smidgen of fascination with modern technology, and instead replace it with several encyclopedias' worth of fascinating environmental and economic and political statistics relating to the past twenty years' worth of American and British history. Also, scoop him up from decidedly practical Minnesota and transplant him to the Imagineered quaintness and contractually quintessent Americana surroundings of New Hampshire, where his neighbors are no doubt the nasally and insufferable cast of Family Guy. And pull the political ripcord and let the spin begin.
There are a lot of points in I'm a Stranger Here Myself where I find myself saying, "Yeah, yeah, I'll let this one slide," with reference to some particularly incisive and slanted barb about something I hold dear. I can take his extravagant rants about the unnecessary complexities of design in personal computers; hell, I write those myself. I can handle his moaning about how the old modular diners from the 30s and 40s are all gone now due to disinterest, but people flock to modern simulations of them like Johnny Rocket's. But I do take exception when I run across those gee-aren't-I-clever statements that I find now and then: If we as a people are advanced enough to send a man to the moon, measure the most distant stars, and cure seemingly incurable diseases, then why can't we design a turn signal that turns itself off if you're not making a turn? or whatever. Things that have very rational explanations, but that I can't explain to the author because this is print media and I can't make myself heard by shouting at the book.
When Bryson spends a column on his slack-jawed stupefaction at the amount of choice you get in American goods and services today, he comes dangerously near to crossing the line: One of the hundreds of cable channels that I get is a twenty-four-hour cartoon network. Perhaps the most astounding thing about this is that the channel has advertisers. What could you possibly sell to people who watch Deputy Dawg at 2:30 AM? Bibs?
Uh, no, Girls Gone Wild videos, of course. Jackass.
Anyway, I understand that Bryson has a new book out in which he denies his statement from I'm a Stranger Here Myself-- that he is competely, woefully clueless about all things scientific, whether physical or chemical or biological or mathematical-- and chronicles the history of the universe and all its component sciences, all in typical smirky Bryson fashion. It might well be fascinating, and I suppose I'd better give it a look, as it stands to reason that it will resemble The Mother Tongue the most closely of all his previous books. And that suits me just fine.
After all, I ought to be able to tell when he's making a salient and amusing or startling point, or when he's blowing a verbal booger like When you are overwhelmed, what is the whelm you are over, and what does it look like? out his nose.
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