The Chainsmoking Countess

Installment 1: Girl At MoMA Who Thinks Texting Is More Interesting Than Van Gogh

Dear Girl in the Awful Blue Sweater at MoMA:

I know it is annoying to take your head out of your own ass for three seconds--so warm and dark-- but if you did, you would notice just how crowded the Van Gogh exhibit at MoMA is. I expected no less: I did make the mistake of waiting until the last weekend. However, there were a lot of people who were intensely interested in seeing the paintings and original sketches and letters up close. I was willing to be jostled, maybe rushed a little, willing to see the bigger works through crowds of people, everything I would expect amid a crowd of fellow locals in Manhattan.

What I was not willing to endure, oh stupid girl in the ugly blue sweater, was for you to stand in front of an entire case for about five minutes... texting on your Blackberry. Clearly, you are not a doctor whose medical expertise was needed immediately--a doctor would have been smart enough to move the fuck out of the way when other people were trying to examine items you weren't even paying attention to. I'm sorry if you think texting your grody boyfriend, or coke dealer, or moron friends is more interesting than original sketches of masterpieces by one of the greatest artists of the 19th century, but I don't find watching you do it and take up valuable room at the case more interesting that original sketches of masterpieces by one of the great artists of the 19th century. Bitch.

I await your apology.

I like to sleep until noon amid a pile of adoring devotees who had partied with me the night before. Then I like to have one of them make me breakfast; I send another with the first to make sure s/he does not screw up. When breakfast is brought to me in bed, I take a bite, then hurl the plate and its contents against the wall, to show my displeasure. I tell everyone to leave. When they are gone, I go to the broken plate and eat up the toast, eggs, jam, and other foodstuffs, because they were, in fact, delicious, I just don't want the devotees to get lazy and stop trying so hard. The only trick is the coffee, it's hard to drink coffee after it has spilled on the ground. It's okay, though, because when I emerge from my chambers I usually have someone else run to Starbucks for me.

I decided that, for my birthday (which also happens to be the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, patron saint of writers, and the birthday of Ms. Marlene Dietrich), Mr. LaComtesse and I would go see a movie and go out to dinner. I was between Slumdog Millionaire and Revolutionary Road. Since a co-worker of mine had told me that Slumdog Millionaire was amazing, but very raw, I decided to go for what I thought would be the profound, yet quiet depression of Revolutionary Road--as we all know, profound quiet depression is much more suitable for birthdays.

I had heard great things about the book, and that it was directed by Sam Mendes, who also did American Beauty, also spoke to its credit. I checked out the trailer to see if it would be okay. Observe.

Essentially, if you watched the bit above, you have just seen the whole movie. Every single line is either passionately shouted or whispered through tears while smoking a cigarette, the main character in sharp focus as the background blurs, and you're supposed to ooh and ahh over how symbolic that is. Winslet and DiCaprio have nothing to work with, but I also don't think they bring anything particularly interesting to the film, either. My husband suggested Neil Patrick Harris would be a great fit for the role of Frank; I thought David Schwimmer would be equally interesting. Give me someone who hasn't earned his living crying and being angry at the same time: it adds to the emotional punch of watching the character do it for 2 hours straight.

I liked this movie when it was called American Beauty, back when it was clever, and subtle, and well acted. No one speaks the way these characters do--they just dictate the conclusions a better-made movie would expect its audience to get on their own. "Who makes these societal rules?!" "I don't want to be ordinary!" "Our marriage is a lie!" Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  You want to see the ugly side of post-war American values? Watch Mad Men. No, seriously: watch Mad Men.

In the spirit of the holiday season (Hanukkah, Hanukkah, festival of lights; O! Christmas tree; silent night; jingle bells; ho ho ho; and all that holly jolly shit) and to prove to Bogwitch's readers that I am not, in fact, a completely horrible person, I thought it would be nice to take some time to introduce everyone to books that don't suck even a little.

There are, of course, a veritable cornucopia of amazing books out there. Lolita, Fall on Your Knees, American Psycho (not, as the title would indicate, for the feint of heart), Harry Potter... this is just looking at my two most recent reading journals and only to name a few. Over the past couple years, I have had the great fortune to come across some amazing but perhaps overlooked reads. I shall share them herewith...

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander
Books about break-ups are normally tedious and boring. So too, I find, are autobiographies. But when your break-up takes place over the course of your entire life and you are breaking up with Orthodox Judaism, it makes for an incredible and hilarious memoir.

Shalom was raised in an abusive, highly religious family in Monsey, NY. From birth, he has feared two men-- God and his father. When he learns that, until he is 13, his father is responsible for the son's sins, he does his best to sin as hard as he can so God will smite his father. This includes sneaking beef jerky with cheese and assorted pork products into his daily diet. Auslander's narrative rotates around him finding out his wife is pregnant and then the decision as to whether or not he will circumcise his own son.

Though I have come across a lot of people who have read this book, I work (and live) in a very Jewish community, so I think my sample is a bit skewed. Still,  I am guessing this is probably the most popular book on my list.

V by Jennifer Natalya Fink
I had the good fortune of being educated in part by dear Professor Fink. Her debut Burn is also excellent, but V has a special place in my heart. Why? One of the main characters in this story is a hat. The hat is a consummate liar and gets all the best lines.  This more or less encapsulates the awesome-ness of this book. 

V follows a Jewish 12 year old girl who, after an ecstatic vision, becomes an anorexic self-abuser to attain sainthood and fulfill her place as the third of the St. Veronicas; an orphaned monkey; a dotty but perverted Englishman; and a gun, who does not speak... which normally is a given, but not so in V. Oh, and don't forget the voice of God, whose proclivities make the Marquis de Sade seem merely curious. The writing is truly stunning and, in a sea of voices, the story's voice remains clear and consistent.

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
I read a lot of collections this past year, many of which I loved. This was not only my favorite, but the least popular as far as book sales goes... This is a series of short stories that center around the economically depressed town of Knockemstiff, Ohio. Everyone in this book probably would have had a halfway decent chance at a decent life if only they had been given a sliver of opportunity, but Pollock heartlessly doesn't even give them that.

Between every kind of abuse you can image, socioeconomic standing, untreated mental illness, drug addiction, they were all doomed from the start. From the little boy who is forced to befriend the neighborhood weirdo and is violently abused  to mentally ill hermit child rapists who kill people with copperheads. (Yes, the snakes. How, you ask? That's how fucked up this book is.) If you are the kind of person who doesn't "like to read depressing literature," get the fuck over it and read this book. The writing is (almost) impeccable (my one complaint is that the women in this book are not as well-drawn as the men and occasionally fall into "types" rather than characters.) The writing is powerful and, in spite of the subject matter, incredibly beautiful.

Feed by M.T. Anderson
My husband recommended this to me after having read it a couple years ago for a science fiction class in college. It takes place... I'd say less than 100 years in the future. 76% of Americans have a "feed" (basically, the internet) implanted in their brains shortly after birth. Run by corporations, the feed can sense your emotions and thoughts... which makes it very easy for said corporations to send personal ads to you 24/7. All this makes it very easy to forget that the environment is destroyed, the planet is engulfed in war with its sites on America and everyone is breaking out into hideous and mysterious lesions (which have been made fashionable by the cast of Oh? Wow! Thing!, the feed's most popular show).

The story follows Titus, an innocuous, spoiled little shit. He and his friends, one more vacuous than the last, decide to go to the Moon (recently annexed by the US) for spring break. There he meets Violet, an awkward but bright professor's daughter who actually speaks in complete sentences.

The majority of the story examines the consumer mentality through the love story of the two teens. The world Anderson paints is as familiar as it is eerie. The writing style itself is amazing, even with intentionally limited vocabulary, poor grammar, and banality, Anderson manages to tell his story with compelling poignancy.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
As I was reading Feed, Mr. LaComtesse discovered Anderson had another book--the styles cannot be more different. Octavian Nothing is a historical fiction in the style of a Gothic novel. It begins with the title character describing his childhood--he lives in a house full of philosophers, scientists, and artists who all address one another by number only (Mr. 113, Mr. 06-28, etc). In addition to conducting cruel and unusual experiments on children and animals, they study and examine Octavian himself as well as his mother, Princess Cassiopeia. I recommend going into this novel with little or no information, just plunge in because everything you know about it will take away from some of the punch as you read.

If you were to ask people their hobbies, most would put reading somewhere on that list. "Oh I'm such a reader!" they declare. "You'll always find a book in my bag!" On the surface, this is encouraging... until you discover what people are reading. Then it's just downright disconcerting: they read nothing. Thousands of pages of nothing a year. These are not bad people, neither are they necessarily stupid people. They may (and probably do) belong to a book club; many even majored in English or Literature in college. I call these individuals the Cotton Candy Consumers of the world; they buy mass quantities of something that will fill them up for about three seconds, burn off quickly and provide no lasting mental nutrition. They can not tell you the name of the last book they read, its plot, or the name of the main character. Some Cotton Candy Consumers recognize that they are not reading great works of literature; they just brush it aside as 'Oh, you know I just don't want to think when I read.'

Don't get me wrong, I can understand wanting a break from deep, philosophical or analytical stretches that one may encounter at work or in the stresses of his/her own personal drama (though, I would counter, that if you say this, you probably don't think all that deeply in your day to day life..). I mean, for Christ's sake, I watch America's Next Top Model. But the difference between a 500 page John Grisham and the whacky antics of Tyra Banks and her posse of famewhores is that ol' TyTy only takes up an hour of my time a week. If you don't want to think for long enough to finish a 500 page novel, even if it is so simple a child could have written it, you run the risk of your brain just stopping one day.

Then there are the readers who will not admit what they are reading is shit - they're far too busy and important to read tripe - but they really don't want to actually think, they just want people to think they're smart. These people definitely majored (or at least minored) in English, but it was probably for lack of any other option. Whatever shall they do? Occasionally, they will actually read something good, particularly if Oprah recommends it (and she does, in fact, recommend tremendously excellent books) but they get absolutely nothing out of it and do not enjoy themselves. Fortunately for them, about half of all major bookstores are devoted to readers like these--it's called the "popular literature" section. These books can be found in the front of the store (because publishers pay for them to be there) and it is stocked with works that are just as formulaic and poorly written as a mass market fiction, but the covers are artier and printed on higher quality stock. The authors, incidentally, probably also majored in English. They may even have their MFAs or, if non-fiction writers, a doctorate of some sort. Herewith, a list of top offenders...

The Time Traveler's Wife - Okay, I actually found this book original and entertaining. It really has no place on this list, but it's ragingly popular and it shouldn't be anyone's favorite book. Great premise and it went in very interesting places, but the dialogue was painful. The characters were all just so witty and so hip. Everyone is an eloquent supermodel with a sharp sense of humor... except for the folksy black cook who talks like Mamee and the kindly Korean neighbor. Even in their imperfections, they are just too cool. They kind of talk like nerds who fling around big words and bawdy humor to sound cool, like saying "Shall we imbibe some libations, comrades?" instead of "You guys want a drink?" They constantly have great sex and talk about it in said terms and it gets really old after a while. Overall, however, very enjoyable.

The Secret Life of Bees - This book was just so proud of itself. The symbolism was heavy-handed and none too interesting. All the Black Madonna and "Woo Hoo! Period Power!" was just cheesy. The troubled teen, the tough on the outside, creamy on the inside nanny/maid, the tightass, the wise woman,  and the "Magical Retard" (a close cousin of the "Magical Negro" trope) just made for one very predictable, familiar book.

Anything Paulo Coelho- A while back, I read Veronika Decides to Die and, after profound disappointment, glanced through some Paulo Coelho books and realized they are in the same vein. Honestly, anyone who wasted their time on one of his pieces of shit deserves to complain about anything this guy has ever done. The books are short, and they read more like Enlightenment Age discourses than novels, only sans any type of illumination whatsoever. The characters just speak the author's ideas over and over, which is annoying in and of itself but is made worse by the fact that the Coehlo doesn't have very good ideas. The thesis of Veronika Decides to Die is that sanity is a consensus and that you should be yourself: yeah, I think we got that 40 years ago in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not to mention this guy's grammar is atrocious. I thought maybe they just saved money by getting a shitty translator, but no, that's a major complaint of the Brazilian critics as well.

Water for Elephants - This book tells the story of a poor orphan who joins the circus, becomes a hero, and wins the girl. The end. There. I've saved you 331 pages of familiar characters, melodrama, mediocre writing, and (if you're like me) 5 subways rides to and from work when you could be reading something else.

Everything about this book is familiar: The plucky naive hero whose courage glides him to be savvy, but never jaded, confident, but not cocky; the fainting heroine; the surly, misunderstood clown who's really a kind-hearted soul underneath the makeup; the evil husband; the homey black nurse; the evil ring master whose employees are worth only what they bring in; the wise elephant; the lusty wenches; the migrant worker with a troubled past who says things like "I don't rightly know" and "reckon" and whole lot.

All the characters were caricatures and I knew EVERYTHING that was going to happen about 100 pages into the book. From Marlena getting preggers (seriously: she's married to her husband for 4 years, sleeps with Jacob and his magic sperm ONCE and gets knocked up? How convenient.), to the elephant speaking Polish (and killing August), to Walter coming around, etc. The good all end happily, the bad unhappily. The reader is even assured that the child is Jacob's and Marlena never gets fat: just in case you thought SOMETHING might go wrong! One thing I DIDN'T call 100 pages in was a 93 year old running off to join the circus. Know why? Because it's so ridiculous as to be impossible.

If the point was to realistically show how brutal circuses were, carry it to it's final conclusion: kill someone we like, not just the people who deserve it or animals without names. There was obviously a lot of (what must have been fascinating) research that went into this book. But even that was thrown in my face. Every time there was something I didn't understand, a character blatantly explained it right away rather than allowing me to just figure it out based on context clues and subtle writing.

The Kite Runner - Though it brought to light a culture and a political scene that few people know about and more should, it was horribly written and predictable. Any eloquence or symbolism was picked at like a scab because Hosseini just couldn't bear the thought of you not getting how clever he was. It's not enough to simply put in a ridiculously obvious symbol, like the main character getting an identical scar to the of the friend he betrayed, but Hosseini makes sure to repeat this fact, and the analysis of this symbolic action, over and over again. He also frequently used a Pashto or Persian word in context, enough that someone who didn't speak the language would get it, then repeated that word and put the English translation next to it, as though repetition imbued it with some deeper meaning. It didn't. This book conquered even the strong: I am the only person I know who read this book and doesn't have a boner for it.