By Marc Heiden, since 1997.
See also: a novel about a monkey.

Reading this month:

Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl?
Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming

My friend came over and looked at my bookshelves; upon seeing that I'd never read this, he pissed all over my graphic novels and beat the crap out me when I asked him to stop. I don't know why I have such mean friends. This is a good book that fills the void left by Kurt Busiek's Astro City rather nicely, with art that falls between Bruce Timm's Batman and a manga flavor.

Cymbeline
William Shakespeare

Obviously, Shakespeare is a friend of mine. I am a fan of his much-maligned later plays; even at the very end of his career, he never stopped pushing himself to try new things. Cymbeline's plot may have more ins and outs than anything he ever wrote. It's sort of a history play, about a king of ancient Britain who defied the Romans, but it also works as a fantasy, like The Tempest, and there are a couple of lines when the inevitably parted lovers are united that are jaw-droppingly beautiful. The god Jupiter makes a surprise appearance, unannounced in the cast list, and Doctor Cornelius will make you stand up and cheer when he slyly double-crosses the double-crosser. Scholars place it either before or after The Winter's Tale, but it reminds me more of a dry run for the magical aura that was perfectly realized in The Tempest than The Winter's Tale, which I'd place alongside Pericles in terms of raw, unpolished emotional impact (showing the author's advanced age and undeniable soul). Though Cymbeline is static at times on the page, it's easy to imagine it rocking the house in performance. Anyhow, the guy can fucking write, so get off his back.

Glue
Irvine Welsh

Ah. The man's back on top form. He's one of my favorite writers, so I lack even more perspective than usual, but I liked this one a lot. His last book, Filth, was a virtuoso performance, almost physically affecting in its brutality, but also something I'd never read again; only the last third of Ecstasy rated great. You can tell from the start of this one, though, that Welsh is back in the zone. Being one of his books, the title serves as assurance that the bonds of friendship will be revealed to be as strong as glue and glue itself will probably be sniffed. Nice. The characters are fully inhabited, and his narrative voice remains committed to them and the strong choices he makes; stories criss-cross over decades, and the principals of Trainspotting even make brief and welcome reappearances. The ultimate impact doesn't rate with the aforementioned, but there's still something genuine about it that's all its own.

Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture
Nelson George

A laser-smart series of essays tracing black culture, both on the art itself and its interplay with mainstream America, originally written for The Village Voice and a few other NYC outlets. Some are about pop culture subjects that are now dated beyond irrelevance, but most are well-written enough to be interesting as historical objects if nothing else. There also a few exceptional ones drawn directly from the author's life. The vast majority of the essays are from 1992 or earlier, though, with a handful of new ones (which also happen to be the best in the book) to mark the revised 2001 edition.

Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem

For a time, while working as a museum security guard, what I read was determined primarily by the size of the book. If it fit into the blazer's inside pocket and could therefore be smuggled into the gallery during my shift, it received consideration. One day during winter break, I worked a nine hour shift all by myself in basement, in the pre-Colombian and Egyptian galleries. Being a museum in a college town while the students were away, I think there were literally no visitors for the entire day, so I wound up reading an entire book from start to finish: Jonathan Lethem's As She Climbed Across The Table, a wacky yet tender story of love among grad student physicists. My last decent relationship was with a biochemist grad student who had dumped me a couple weeks prior, so I kept nodding my head as I read and saying, yep, it's like that, science girls are crazy. I hadn't heard anything about the book before reading it, but it fit in the coat, so I bought it and wound up liking it a lot, the randomness of the discovery casting a glow around the entire thing.

Now Lethem is part of the McSweeney's posse, and he has this book out. The main character has Tourette's syndrome, and it is creating a problem for me in that I have only known one guy with Tourette's, a sensitive feminist metalhead, and he is a spectacularly poor match with the character that I think I am supposed to be envisioning, yet as my primary reference point for Tourette's, he's all I've got. I've found that if I make an active effort to visualize a guy in a fedora, I can think of the character as him instead of the metalhead, but then the character has to be wearing a fedora at all times.

Anyway, I like Lethem's writing, and this book. It's not of the towering monumental brilliance variety, but it reminds me of something that the nicest guy you know might have written and poured his heart into, with deserved props awarded for inventiveness and character (more than, say, story).

Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris

I like to keep track of the books that I see being read on the train, and this one has definitely been a favorite over the last couple months, rating behind only the perennial Ayn Rand / Harry Potter / "Poisonwood Bible" crowd. It's been on my list of books to read for a while. My friend James speaks only in David Sedaris quotes and Eminem lyrics, so I felt like I'd read it already. (There is absolutely nothing true in that last sentence, but I enjoyed typing it.) I was afraid that the glut of glowing reviews from everyoneeverywhere was going to turn me off to it, but any apprehension I had was completely disarmed once I started reading. It's a collection of essays about the author's life, with the first half forming an autobiography of sorts (though the stories were originally written for different publications) and the second half describing the author's current life as an expatriate in France. Breezy, quite funny, a total pleasure to read. I liked it a lot. It has a lot of badly translated language material, which always cracks me up. I rarely make a noise while laughing unless I tell myself to, but I made noise without thinking while laughing at many bits of this book, for whatever that's worth.

Hieronymous Bosch
Walter S. Gibson

Kind of a sucky book on the fantastic Mr Bosch. Most of the reproductions are in black and white and either cropped or miniscule (or both), so it's basically worthless from a visual standpoint. The central argument in Bosch scholarship is over the source for the artist's imagery, which can draw the phrase "whoa, that's fucked up" from the lips of the most stoic and sober of men. Some treat Bosch as a surrealist 400 years ahead of his time; others attempt to link the images to corners of obscure Christian cults from the Middle Ages, always a good time; and others, like Gibson, play it straight and try to get what they need from the mainstream Church and artistic contemporaries. This author rejects Freudian analysis of Bosch with the hilariously flawed reasoning that since Freud's theory of the unconscious hadn't yet been articulated, it cannot be applied to people of the era. (Because humanity didn't have an unconscious until Freud decided they did?) I don't rate the unconscious as a primary source either, but when you've got a piece of flawed reasoning like that in the first few pages, the rest of the essay is probably a lost cause. (Stodgy academics get nervous about having to diversify and demand that the subject conform to their area of expertise.) I'm still waiting for one of these so-called experts to explain the shrouded tiny duck-bill nosed demon monk who pops up in Bosch's larger works, anyway. Scariest damn thing I've ever seen on a canvas.

Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
Patrick McGilligan

A giant book about the director of Metropolis and M, among many others; his first American film, Fury, is also a favorite of mine, and you can't beat that Dr. Mabuse, the original sinister web guy. The central thesis of this book is that Lang was bat-shit crazy. This is one of those books (like Donald Spoto's book on Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius) that makes such a strong case for its subject's lunacy that you're left wondering how the guy ever got a film made in the first place without getting thrown off a building. Ah! But such good films. This is a brick-sized book with mountains of research, probably the best single book if you're interested in the director but overload for a casual reader. The story of Lang's deadly game of cat and mouse with Goebbels and subsequent flight from Nazi Germany does make for some brilliant drama, even if the author suspects it was mostly invented. I'd like to write a Shadow of the Vampire type film based on it. Oh! And Fritz Lang had a wooden monkey named Peter that he kept with him for the last fifty years of his life, from Vienna to Berlin to Paris to Hollywood, and he liked to talk to the monkey and give the monkey a book to read whenever he was reading something. I knew there was some subtle emotional connection that I was making to his films. That explains it!

Read more: Books, Shakespeare | Permalink

I read something about 2AM being the devil's midnight, so I headed down to the lake to see if I could find anything spooky under the radiant white full moon. During the middle few months of the year, the beach is a family friendly fun zone; in the fall and the winter, though, it gets back to the important business of looking like the surface of the moon. The park district has a big bulldozer that they use to build a large ridge of sand between the sidewalk and the water in order to stress the point that people are not supposed to go down by the water. You can kind of tell from looking at the tracks that they just like to drive the thing around, though, and they're probably not too worked up about the access thing. I outsmarted that sand ridge in no time flat. My spooky finds included a spooky dish scrubber - but no dishes!, a spooky plastic fork - way far away from the scrubber!, a spooky empty bottle of wine - where did the wine go? did a ghost drink it?, and a spooky hubcap. Once upon a time, the devil enchanted lost souls on All Hallows Eve; now, he just leaves his shit lying around.

Tomorrow, I will be appearing in the studio audience for the taping of several episodes of the syndicated daytime television series Judge Mathis. I find strange and ridiculous ways to make money.

Read more: Chicago | Permalink

I have no computer access at work and no window in range of my desk; therefore, the only stimuli that comes my way are the ringing phones and the conversations of co-workers. Having nothing else to do, then, I decided to write a play using only things that people in the office said to each other. As an added stipulation, no consecutive lines from within the same conversation were allowed, and the lines could not be re-arranged. (They appear here in the chronological order that they were spoken, over the course of two hours.) It starts out slowly, but stick with it.

(The setting is a laboratory. A, a brave and noble scientist, and B, a melancholic and remorseful scientist, are taking a break.)

A: I'm going to get that cup of coffee now. Is that okay?
B: He gave me one, too!
A: Oh! Thank you very much.
B: I'm a little early, twenty minutes. Tell him, no hurry.
A: We're just going to leave this here until I can figure out where it goes.
B: It's Monday.
A: Who's that little guy with glasses?
B: There's no answer.
A: I'll put one in for you.
B: Well, I don't have time.
A: I'll put a ticket in now. Oh, you know what? No change.

(The nefarious C enters, menacing B.)

C: I'm taking this lease stuff right here.
B: I don't mind.
C: Light out...where?
B: Would you like voice mail?
C: I have some work for you to do.
B: It's Monday.
C: You look like you're looking for something to do.
B: Just one second...
C: Where's my little stamp-er-ooo?

(B gives a muffled shriek. Lights down. A and B are onstage.)

A: What did you do to your finger?
B: Let me think back now, with my brain here.
A: Did you do any filing at all?
B: You jogged my memory here.
A: Did you make any folders at all?
B: I told Juan 'no'.
A: Where are we going from here?
B: I never had to do this before.
A: What is the problem now?
B: It's John Chesna on the stairwells.
A: What you've done over there, I don't know.
B: His family was there.
A: This feels funny.
B: Out of three bathrooms...
A: Oh, shit.

(Lights down. C and B are onstage.)

C: Slap him upside the head.
B: You're sitting on my papers.
C: It's a little messed up in the boiler room.
B: Oh, this is a bad day.
C: It's Monday.
B: It's Monday.
C: Can I get a letter?

(Silence.)

C: I need it now.
B: Go ahead.
C: It is a wonderful life. And it's a wonderful month as well.
B: I have John Chesna...
C: We have another person.
B: Oh.
C: They started today.
B: I wouldn't call this fun-time.
C: That's a shame.
B: All these people...
C: It's Monday.

(Lights down. A and B are onstage.)

A: Would you like to stay in this building?
B: I don't know.
A: That's the thing. You could just go bonkers...
B: I know.
A: I am a mother to four little boys...
B: Five or six...
A: And they encourage you not to...
B: I don't either.
A: That's not what I see.
B: The rush is over.
A: I think I should buy some bran cereal.
B: I'd suggest that.
A: Because if they release it in the air...
B: I'm sorry.
A: I have to go to the bathroom.

(Lights down. B and JOHN CHESNA, a derelict, are onstage.)

JOHN: I'm looking at these pretty women...
B: Hello.
JOHN: Not into those kiddie parties?
B: All right.
JOHN: But they love their Uncle Happenin', though.

(Lights. A and B are onstage.)

A: I have a new list.
B: I'm doing my best...
A: Oh! I bet he's on here now...

(JOHN is revealed.)

JOHN: You shouldn't hurt the one you love.
A: Is that gentleman still here?
B: You're right I, uh...right. That's right. It's too bad that happened that way.
JOHN: Some lingerie or something...
A: I have to go to the bathroom...

(C enters, cackling nefariously.)

C: You didn't even miss me, did you?
A: Hello.
C: It's October. Anything can happen.
A: Gosh. You're funny.
JOHN: I went to a party this weekend...
A: What have you done?
B: I don't know.
A: Is there someone on the other line?
C: Is that enough?

(UNCLE HAPPENIN' emerges. He is everything that his name implies.)

C: It's just the easiest way.
A: No, no, no.
UNCLE HAPPENIN': It's Monday.
A: Ah.
B: I'm sorry.
UNCLE HAPPENIN': Monday, Monday, Monday.
A: Did you work with him on this?
B: I'm the contact person.
UNCLE HAPPENIN': It's Monday! How do you think I feel?
A: We're done. Done, done, done.
C: Just pop your head in my office...
A: I have to stop saying "good morning"...
UNCLE HAPPENIN': Monday!
A: There's so much left to do.

(A dies. B answers the phone.)

B: Someone just called. It's the entire grain floor.
C: You can take as long a lunch as you like.
B: Thanks.
JOHN: I'll get right on that.
C: Heh, heh, heh.
B: Is this how you wanted it?

(UNCLE HAPPENIN' and JOHN CHESNA turn on C.)

C: No!...stalled at the tollbooth.

(C dies.

B: I can go any time.
JOHN: Strictly for the ladies.

(JOHN CHESNA and UNCLE HAPPENIN', momentarily sated, exit.)

B: Come back! Come...back.

FINIS

You had to figure, in an exercise like that, a diarrhea monster (Uncle Happenin') would get involved at some point.

Read more: Chicago | Permalink

I am getting tired of writing about all of the people who are trying to kill me, but it seems like that's all that's going on any more. Here is a story from work: I am temp-ing at the property management office that runs the Chicago Board of Trade. As usual, my duties mostly involve screwing around. (I don't have a web-connected computer, though, which sucks.) The woman who sits in front of me normally opens the mail for the office, but in light of the recent anthrax mail scares, she has been ever-so-slyly shifting the task into my hands. I accept the mail and look down to start working; then I peek up and catch a fleeting, satisfied, thought-to-be-secret grin on her face. Clearly, it was her tactical genius that earned her the Mom Of The Year coffee mug.

Two characters are role-playing in a wood-paneled family basement on a Saturday night. One, a young boy named Terry, is the GAME MASTER; the other, an elder demon named CTHULU, is his only friend.

GAME MASTER: Cthulu, you realize you have a minus 7000 against all charm rolls.
CTHULU: Blurgh.
GAME MASTER: Okay, roll.

CTHULU rolls a pair of ten-sided dice. The GAME MASTER takes note of the result.

GAME MASTER: The elf resists your advances.
CTHULU: Blurgh.

I should write a feature-length script about those two.

I wish I had enough money to buy airline tickets. I have no qualms about flying in airplanes or going overseas right now, and tickets are so cheap. They will probably be expensive again by the time I regain financial stability in mid-2002, though. Still, were a superhero to be created that was based on me, he would be The Man Without Qualms, because he would not have any of those, and people would notice, and make comments about it, and buy him a milkshake.

Read more: Miscellaneous | Permalink

I am under constant assault.

Certain parties who are probably terrorists have requested more details about how I broke my finger, most likely because they want to try for themselves. Fuck off, certain parties. I am on to your games. I have grown tired of telling people the real reason it broke (football) and the party line is now that Mike Saul got drunk and belligerent one day and beat the crap out of me.

Read more: Sports | Permalink

I would like to seize upon one of the major issues of our day and speak briefly about terrorists. I have not ruled them out as the guilty parties in the breaking of my finger this weekend, however air-tight their alibi may be. They called in a threat to one of the subway stops on my route this morning, providing me with an excuse for why I was late to the temp job I was going to be late to anyway, but in general, they seem to have switched their modus operandi from bombs to the postal system. They have been sending letters with the biochemical weapon anthrax enclosed to unsuspecting targets throughout the country. When people open the mail, they fall victim to the deadly poison. Because I feel that I should stay alive, I will no longer be opening any mail from the terrorists. I will now strenuously check the return address field of every envelope that I receive, and if the envelope is from the terrorists, I will throw it away. That is the way it has to be. I want to apologize to all the perfectly reasonable terrorists for whom this will be an inconvenience, as well to as all of the people with the vaguely Greek last name Theterrorists, but I must take precautions. This also means that I will not be paying my terrorist bill each month, which may wind up hurting my credit rating, although now that I think about it, why was I paying that bill in the first place? I mean, I know what the phone bill and the power bill do, but what's that one? Hey. You fucking guys.

Last weekend, I set a new all-time high score in bowling: 150. And I did it for America! I try to help out where I can.

Read more: Politics | Permalink

When I am old and my friends begin to pass on, I am going to give them Viking funerals. I figure I owe everyone that much.

Wednesday October 10, 2001 @ the Harold Washington Library, Chicago:

INTERVIEWER: How did you feel about the attacks on September 11?
KURT VONNEGUT: Well, we were completely unprepared for what happened. I mean, we hadn't even found out what happened to Chandra Levy yet.

Sunday was an eventful day. I have a pleasant routine on Sundays: I wake up late for class at the ImprovOlympic, rush over there, improvise for a while, join my friends in the middle of their football watching day and eat whatever is left of the bean dip, and then we run around and yell at each other when the game is over; later, I go home, sleepy and full of stomach, optimistic that some sort of job will commence on Monday. This last Sunday, however, was different. United States military action against Afghanistan began, for example. Bombs were dropped. Also, the landlord finally turned on the heat in my apartment. It was very cold for several days, and I had to wear multiple sweaters whenever inside. Were these events linked? The night before, I had noticed that someone taped "Afghanistan" to my mailbox. I peeled it off and went on my way, not realizing until the next day that the label was part of a plot by the bastards to fool the government into thinking that my apartment was Afghanistan. The army had been trying to freeze the Taliban out, but once the label was gone, they realized that Afghanistan is actually very far away, not in my apartment, so they switched to Plan B for their reprisals. That is the best explanation I can come up with for Sunday.

I have not been linking to many things of late and have thus risked being decommissioned, so let me resolve that: