One Book

1. One book that changed your life?
The first book I remember changing my life perspective in a really tangible way was Thomas Bell’s Out Of This Furnace. I’ve been promising myself to write about that experience for ages now. Someday.

2. One book you have read more than once?
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Okay, desert island questions bother me. Why would I plan ahead to be trapped on a desert island? I know. I’m spoiling the fun by being freakishly literal, so I’ll just say something long that I’ve never read before. Any suggestions? You know, in the event I’m preparing to be marooned on an uncharted island after a three hour tour goes bad.

4. One book that made you laugh?
The Greedy Bastard Diary: A Comic Tour of America by Eric Idle.

5. One book that made you cry?
Atonement by Ian McEwan.

6. One book you wish had been written?
I don’t understand this question. At all. The one book that would have been very good, if only that guy had written it? The one about the thing with the stuff at the place near the dude who lives over there?

7. One book you wish had never had been written?
I suppose any book containing some sort of nasty ideology, like The Turner Diaries or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, might be a good answer if I had to give one. Even then, I still think books like that have a valuable place in the canon of literature, if only to be studied with scorn and/or ridicule.

8. One book you are currently reading?
Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius by Charles Higham

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Why I Didn’t Say Anything: The Sheldon Kennedy Story. Heavy stuff. I’ve been putting it off forever because of it.

10. Now tag five people:
No. I don’t tag. Not because I’m not interested in other people’s responses. I just don’t like making anyone feel like they’re obliged or pressured to answer these things. Answer yourself if you want and drop the link in the comments.

~Emily Beezwax

A Bibliophile Breaks Her Audio Book Cherry

Audio books used to baffle me. I always thought the pleasure of a book was reading it, not just taking in the story itself. I’ve since had a few people explain that they’re nice when you’re driving or jogging or otherwise engaged in some activity where your hands or eyes aren’t free. It changed my mind somewhat, but I still never took the plunge and actually listened to one (does “War of the Worlds” read by Orson Welles count? That was more of an abridged dramatization, wasn’t it?). Last night, while I was bored and fumbling around iTunes, I came across an audio version of Geek Love and couldn’t resist hitting the “buy” button.

It’s narrated by a woman named Christina Moore and what a wonderful job she’s done. She reads with such passion and animation, it’s simply captivating to listen to her. I’ve probably read that book a dozen times now, but the experience of hearing it was entirely fascinating and new. I lit a couple of candles and got lost in this amazing, strange, bizarre world while relaxing in the dim night. I couldn’t have done that with a book. My last shred of anti-audio book snobbery is formally gone.

~Emily Beezwax

Surviving Atlas Shrugged

I know some of you younguns out there, at some point in your scholastic careers, are going to have a fucking idiot of a teacher that thinks it is important for you to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It won’t be. Trust me. That is why, like the men of yore who stared into the face of cannons so their sons would not have to, I am offering the following to help you survive the experience without wanting to climb a belltower with automatic weapons and take out your classmates in a hail of bullets.

*First of all, once you get to the 200th page, stop. You have read everything Rand will write in the 800 pages that follow. All she does is repeat the same stupid ideas over and over, as if her self-perceived “philosophy,” which is really nothing more than a sophomoric attempt at pseudo-intellectualism, were so complicated and difficult for us plebes to grasp that she must explain it to us repeatedly in excruciating detail. As a rule, when people use 1000 pages to say what they can in a quarter as many, it’s usually to disguise the fact that they’re pulling it all out of their ass. They are rarely offering little more than common sense packaged with fifty-cent words.

*Everything you need to know about the “philosophy” of Objectivism can be learned from skimming the Wikipedia entry. Whenever you’re not sure, take the principles I’ve outlined below and reduce them in application to the simplest form of black-and-white scenarios imaginable. Remember to exclude any real-life variables that may conflict with your conclusions. This is fiction, so you can do that.

Virtuous
Total self-interest and disregard for the needs of others.
The pursuit of personal wealth and gain, no matter who may be harmed or alienated by it.
Complete distrust of any forms of government.
Contempt for the meek, needy and poor.
Disbelief in any power, religious or otherwise, higher than yourself.

Immoral
Charity, compassion and altruism.
Any person not generating wealth or practical commodities. I’m lookin’ at you, you useless art fags!.
Government of any kind, especially one that provides for the needs of its citizens. If the sick and hungry cannot fend for themselves, it’s better to let the leeching fuckers die.
Publicly funded art of any kind. Again with the damn art fags!

These are just a few examples to help illustrate the underlying tenets of Objectivism that will help you pass the test about Atlas without having to actually be tortured by the whole of it. Onward with the final portion of our study guide.

*The characters in this book do not speak to each other like normal people. They exchange bogus philosophical lectures between them. Imagine meeting with a friend for a cup of tea and casually saying “The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it!” and your companion replying “Yes, yes! Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values!” Shit like that. Lucky for you, they are also utterly and indefensibly one-dimensional, so it’s not like you’ll have to pick them apart like it’s Pride and Prejudice or anything. As with the “philosophy,” reduction to the simplest principles, motivations, thoughts and actions will always serve you well when you’re in doubt.

Finally, remember that in no point during your lifetime will the contents of this book be useful to you. It will not nourish your soul as does literature or provide you with practical approaches for everyday life. It will not help you become a reflective, thoughtful individual or arm you with witty anecdotes to drop at parties (unless they’re Libertarian parties, in which case, all hope for you is lost already). Don’t feel bad about skipping it. In the truest words of Dorothy Parker upon reviewing the hideous beast that is Atlas Shrugged, “This book should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

~Emily Beezwax

Diving Into Teacups

I’ve been re-reading Geek Love pretty slow this time around to take it all in detail. Forgive me while I babble about it here, probably for a while to come. Ignore it if you find it boring. I need to get this out of my system and writing is the only way I know how.

Part of what makes the book so impossible to forget are the little details. Damn near every other sentence leaves me aching. You can’t underestimate just how much the word “love” permeates this story. You have to see past the freak show, forget every definition of beauty and normalcy you’ve known, because somebody else is about to show you just how wrong you’ve been your whole life. With this story, you are the aberration, the outsider. We are normal and boring and from the view of the Binewski Carnival Fabulon, there is nothing more contemptible. There isn’t anything more cloying and dull. They pity us for being ordinary, even those of us considered graceful and well-formed. The Binewski children were not conceived. They were crafted, like works of art. Indeed, Papa did not even call them his children. They were his dreamlets. People came for miles and paid money to stare at them. When it was over, they may have left, but they never forgot.

Olympia spent her whole life hiding in shadows from her orphaned daughter Miranda. She always planned for things to stay that way, but she also wanted to see to it that Miranda was cared for. When Miranda left the nuns that raised her at eighteen, she had a room waiting in the building Olympia lived in. It was a place Olympia never quite adjusted to after a lifetime on the road in a carnival. To her, it was motionless and had needless amounts of space. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a place like that. When she was preparing the apartment for Miranda’s arrival, she wasn’t just cleaning. Every movement was filled with longing and love.

It’s been three years since I saw her rooms. Before she came from the train station, still smelling of nuns, I cleaned. It took days, sponging the ceilings, the green wallpaper with its huge white rose like fetal aliens. These were her rooms long before she came here. The first time I visited the building with the fastidiously courteous agent, the big front room, twenty by forty feet, with its tall windows in a row, was marked for her. The bedroom was more normal. The windowless bathroom was claustrophobic. The kitchen was familiar, as though it had been surgically transplanted from a trailer house.

She had planned that space for Miranda ages before she was scheduled to settle there. A few years after she did, when Miranda was attempting to befriend her, Olympia was terrified Miranda would somehow learn her secrets before they were intended to be uncovered; that she’d work it out, with her Binewski cheekbones and Binewski forehead, that this freakish humpback albino midget was her mother. Olympia had a plan for her to find out otherwise. Later. Just not now. But she couldn’t back down from Miranda’s gestures of friendship. She could not shy away. Not just out of maternal love and curiosity. It was something more, something all-too-engrained in her shrewded genes. She couldn’t expose her worries or turn away in shame or fright. Papa would never have allowed it. “A Binewski never disintegrates in front of the ticket holders.”

It’s details like those that haunt me the most.

~Emily Beezwax