Holy Hullabaloos, The Blog

A Collection of Thoughts on Recent Reading and the Budapest Metro

I've been reading some good books lately.  Now I will tell you what those books are.  First I read Cameron Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a first edition of which my wife gave to me for my 40th birthday.  For those who don't know, the famous movie was in fact based on a non-fiction book that Crowe researched by going undercover as a high school student in San Diego as a 22-year old.  The book is very different from the movie in all sorts of ways, and although the movie is far more memorable, the book was pretty enjoyable too, though perhaps not worth the $250 that it sells for (my plan is, over the course of my lifetime, to get Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forrest Whittaker, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the four cast members of FTRH who subsequently went on to get nominations for best actor/actress (the three men won the award) to sign the book, thus increasing its value to something approaching a Warhol Marilyn painting or so, and thereby justifying the ridiculous expense of getting the book in the first place). 

I continued my reading with another volume set in a high school, though this one wasn't quite as wacky: the new book about Columbine by Dave Cullen entitled, well, umm, "Columbine."  The whole Columbine event is so incredibly fascinating, and the book is riveting.  I think it took me an hour to read it or something (not really).  It turns out that if you're like me, and the information you recall about Columbine was gathered just from your run of the mill news reports, then almost everything you think you know about it is wrong.  For example, while there was a trench coat mafia at the school, Harris and Klebold weren't part of it.  And while you might tend to think of the two killers as a piece, they were in fact incredibly different kids.  If I gave stars to books whereby the stars represented how much I liked the book, then this book would get lots and lots of stars.

So would "Into the Wild," my next book.  Though I read "Into Thin Air" when that was out and hot, I somehow never read this one--nor saw the movie--and it was another riveting book, which I had to read in tandem with my wife because she picked it up and started looking at it and also couldn't put it down and was ahead of me the whole time and would do that thing of looking over your shoulder and seeing where you were in the book and saying, "oooooh, this is a good part, want me to tell you what happens?  oooooh."  Although of course the wilderness guy who died by himself in Alaska at 22 or whatever was totally different from Klebold and Harris in a million different ways, there were some similarities--young kids who thought they were totally unique and superior than almost everyone else and wrote and wrote and wrote about their uniqueness in journals they left for people to read after they were dead--and so reading this book after reading the Columbine one was particularly interesting.

Now I'm reading the novel "Lowboy" by John Wray about a schizophrenic kid who spends all his time in the NY subway.  It's fine, though I'm not really that into it yet.  Mostly, though, what it reminds me of, because it's set largely underground, is the great Hungarian movie "Kontroll" about the Budapest Metro, which takes place entirely and completely underground.  I learned about this movie because of what happened to me in Budapest.  My wife and son and in-laws and I were on a weekend trip in Budapest from Krakow where we were living.  Budapest is a splendid city, but its subway has this rule--unlike any other subway in the world I've ever been on, and I've been on a lot--that you have to pay for a separate ticket if you change lines.  We all changed lines, and in fact when we were going to the second line a subway worker looked at the ticket we had validated to get on the first line and waved us on, but when we went to exit, some not-officially-dressed guy and his sidekick asked to see our tickets and informed us in broken English that we were in violation of the rules for not getting a second ticket validated when we changed lines.  He said we owed him something like seventeen million dollars.

Okay, not seventeen million dollars. But maybe forty dollars each, so like 200 dollars.

If I had been traveling with my family, we are all scaredy cats and would have just given him the money or maybe even offered to give him more money than he asked for and also perhaps our shoes just to get out of there, but the thing about my wife and her family is that they do not like to give money to people when they feel they are being screwed.  And so I knew that we were going to argue with these guys until either they let us go or brought us to the firing squad.  We argued with them for probably forty minutes about how the guy in the station had waved us on after looking at our ticket, etc. etc., and I even called the US embassy for help, which was useless because I got some 26 year old on the line who couldn't have gotten himself out of a paper bag much less us out of a conflict with the fake Hungarian metro security guards.  We kept insisting that the guys call the police, and they kept saying they were going to, but they never did, which made us pretty confident that they were just screwing with us.  We became sure of this when they offered to let us go for half the money they had originally asked for.  Come on, who are you kidding?  Finally, after forty minutes the guy crumpled up our tickets, threw them on the ground, said "Go!" and then also yelled "US people not right!" 

I have to give my then-four-year old son credit for his patience.  He likes playing and stuff, but he doesn't generally like arguing with Hungarian pseudo-police for forty minutes.

Anyway, when we got back to Krakow, we told some European friends about the incident, and they told us that the Budapest Metro is notorious for this kind of thing, and that there are these semi-official guys who wander the stations and look at peoples' tickets and try to give them huge fines.  The only people who pay them are the scaredy-cat tourists like me when I'm not accompanied by my wife.  The movie "Kontroll" is about one of these guys, and so we watched it as soon as we could.  Again: lots of stars.

Monkeybicycle 6 is Kicking Ass and Taking Names

My very own issue of Monkeybicycle #6 arrived yesterday, and it looks great.  The cover, in particular, is awesome.  What, you don't believe me?  Take a look yourself.  As I think I've mentioned before, it's got a great lineup of writers, 200 pages of fun and fiction.  Among these writers is me.  My story The Advisor is the second story in the collection, which I guess makes it the Dustin Pedroia of Monkeybicycle #6, although honestly I haven't watched enough Red Sox games this year to be completely confident about that.  I was watching instead lots of Bruins and Celtics games, until they both lost game sevens at home (home court/ice advantage: yes!).  Anyhoo, my story is about a law student who is volunteering for a presidential candidate.  The candidate takes a weird liking to the kid because the candidate has got it in his head that the kid knows a lot about ancient political philosophy and that for some reason this political philosophy might help him in his campaign.  I actually wrote the story maybe 6 years ago, after I spent a summer volunteering for John Kerry's campaign.  It was ridiculous what I was doing.  It was 2003, so very early on in the campaign, and everybody figured Howard Dean was going to get the nomination because of course he hadn't yet done that screaming thing.  Probably most law professors would have figured out some way to volunteer their legal services in some substantive way, but since I don't really know how to do anything, I couldn't figure out how to do that so I just showed up at headquarters and started making cold calls to people in Iowa just like the college kids were doing.  I told my friend Bill about this--Bill is a partner at Wachtell, Lipton and seems to know what it is you're supposed to do in life--and he told me that I had to stop doing what I was doing right away before somebody called the cops on me for trying to scam on college girls, which of course I wasn't doing but Bill figured everyone would assume that was what I was doing because why else would some 34 year old law professor be doing cold calls like a 21 year old?  Anyway, when I was doing this volunteering I kept hoping all the time that maybe John Kerry would come into the office and start talking to me and take me under his gigantic furry wing and start relying on me for all sorts of advice, and that's how I came up with the idea for the story.  You know, I have lots of stories, and you can read or listen to all of them on my website if you want.  And if you're an editor, maybe you'd like to capitalize on the possible soon to be mild success of Holy Hullabaloos by agreeing to publish a short story collection I've put together called "Objection! Stories About Lawyers and Non-Lawyers."  We could even throw in the McSweeney's web piece I have coming out pretty shortly on the Sotomayor confirmation hearing (that there was a teaser, in case you didn't notice).  Well, even if you're not interested in that, I still think you should consider buying Monkeybicycle #6, which I think will be great.  When I finish reading it, I'll certainly post something about which stories in there are the kickassiest of them all.  So perhaps look for that. 

Re-reading Ferris

I've written a couple of times about whether I should re-read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest now that he's committed suicide.  Obviously, most of this question has to do with how I might feel reading a book by a favorite author who has killed himself, but the decision might be easier if I was the kind of guy who liked to re-read novels.  In fact, I very rarely re-read any literature.  I've been looking over my bookshelves to refresh my memory, and I bet I can count the number of novels I've re-read on my fingers.  I know I've re-read The End of the Road by John Barth, probably my number one all time favorite novel, and Richard Russo's Straight Man, probably the funniest novel ever written and probably the best about academia (unless you count Barth's book as being about academia).  Also, Equal Distance by Brad Leithauser and Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow.  Brothers Karamazov; maybe Trainspotting.  I once re-read Jay McInerney's Brightness Falls twice within two months, but I was living in China and under the influence of Larium at the time, so I'm not sure that counts.

This is not to say that I don't try to re-read more novels; it's just that usually after about 15 pages or so, I realize I'm not going to enjoy myself, even if it's a great novel that I loved the first time (this happened recently with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami).  So I figured this might happen when I re-picked-up Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, which is probably my favorite novel of the last few years.  But no, it's just as good the second time around.  If you haven't read it, I really recommend it.  It's written largely in the first person plural.  It's about an office.  It's like a literary version of Office Space or The Office, only way way way better, and believe me, I love both The Office and Office Space.  The book was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.  Here's a review from the New York Times.  And here's a tiny, tiny excerpt.  Carl finds himself in the hospital after medicating himself for depression by stealing anti-depressants from a co-worker whose nine-year old daughter was recently murdered and who now spends her lunch hour sitting in a pool of plastic balls at the nearby McDonald's.  Carl went overboard with the meds and is suffering from toxic poisoning.  His coworkers visit him.  They ask him how he's doing.

"Everything looks double," he replied, "and red."

We found that exceedingly hard to respond to.  Everything looks double and red?  Oh, well, that'll go away, Carl.  That's just a temporary side effect of permanent brain damage.