Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. A modern author. I know. Who reads them? Not me. So I couldn’t possibly tell you about the book that had me choking on my own tears at 35,000 feet as Jonathan Safran Foer pulled a modern incarnation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions with a significantly more sentimental twist. If you couldn’t speak, what would you say? And if you were 9, channeling Bill Watterson’s Calvin, and your Dad died in the Twin Towers, how would you handle it? Read, cry, feel, and above all, imbibe, this modern movement of evolving genius.
I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all. When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. “Which problem?” “The problem of how relatively insignificant we are.” He said, “Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?” I said, “I’d probably die of dehydration.” He said, “I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?” I said, “I dunno, what?” He said, “Think about it.” I thought about it. “I guess I would have moved one grain of sand.” “Which would mean?” “Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?” “Which would mean you changed the Sahara.” “So?” “So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!” “That’s true!” I said, sitting up. “I changed the Sahara!” “Which means?” he said. “What? Tell me.” “Well I’m not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I’m just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter.” “Yeah?” “If you hadn’t done it, human history would have been one way…” “Uh-huh?” “But you did do it, so…?” I stood on the bed, pointing one of my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: “I changed the course of human history!” “That’s right.” “I changed the universe!” “You did.” “I’m God!” “You’re an atheist.” “I don’t exist!” I feel back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.
Beat Generation. Want to know why Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg where the names on college campuses in 1958? Read Bruce Cook’s Beat Generation. As Clellon Holmes said (possibly quoting Kerouac himself), “it’s a sort of furtiveness, like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public,’ a kind of beatness—I mean being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are—and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world . . . . . It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.” I wonder who in this generation will be the next beats, the next furtives.
Funny Face. Not a book, I know, but I suffered, so should you. I stopped trying to figure out this movie when the pink doors appeared. I think that was 180 seconds into it. Thereafter it was iPod headphones and alot of Muse. There was a brief consideration of giving it a second chance. So I looked up from the laptop just in time to see Fred Astaire dancing with an umbrella. Only Gene Kelley can do that and be cool. Besides, Fred then added a pink cape. I didn’t look back up until was over. Way over.
The things one reads and watches over a long weekend…
