Serendipitous Discoveries Co-opted by Book-Delivering Drones

[mallorys_camera]

Finished When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

After I turned the last page, I just sat there for 15 minutes or so, unblinking and unmoving, in that state of mindful self-extinction you’re only supposed to be able to achieve after years and years of rigorous meditation and contortionist yoga poses. The final sections of the book are that good.

David Sedaris is a fucking genius.

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Later, I tried to finish The Club Dumas.

I’d been looking for that book for years when I finally stumbled across it in a secondhand bookstore in Ithaca two weeks ago. I crowed about my discovery to the BoyZ when I got back T-burg.

“I don’t understand,” said Robin. “If you wanted the book that much, why didn’t you just order it off Amazon?”

I blinked at him. “Well, it was kind of like a treasure hunt,” I tried to explain.

He rolled his eyes and shook his head.

Just one more reason to hate on Millennials, I guess. Who wants to live in a world where serendipitous discoveries are co-opted by book-delivering drones?

I sat under a horse chestnut tree on the Vanderbilt Estate grounds and read three chapters. It was a beautiful day, and I loved that horse chestnut. When I was growing up in New York City, horse chestnut trees were all over the place. I used to use to use their lovely pink, trumpet-shaped flowers to dress up sticks.

Eventually every horse chestnut tree in New York City succumbed to some sort of hideous leaf blight so that now there is not a single horse chestnut tree still standing in all of the five boroughs. More than the rising price of real estate, more than the destruction of the Cosmic Diner and the Coliseum Bookstore, the death of the horse chestnut trees signifies to me that the New York City I grew up is as dead as Pompeii even if you can still tour its charred remains.

I was overjoyed when I found a few survivors here in sleepy little Hyde Park.

Anyway, The Club Dumas is a vastly entertaining book for anyone who loves books because it’s all about forging antiquarian manuscripts. All I need to do now is find a financial backer, and I’m good for at least one Guttenberg Bible.

It’s also a handy reference to the life and working habits of Alexandre Dumas. I’ve always been fond of Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers were two of my favorite books growing up. I knew, of course, that Dumas was mixed race; I did not know that his father was born a slave. I also did not know that he ran the writing equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting studio, and that his best known books were actually written by other people – when the first drafts were complete, Dumas would go over them and inject the necessary panache and zest into the prose and plotlines.

There are many, many lovely characters and passages in The Club Dumas – I’m particularly fond of the Cenizia Brothers and can’t think how I managed to pass up the opportunity to visit their shop when I was in Madrid – a place where (it seems increasingly likely) I will never go back. The novel was originally written in Spanish, and I imagine it would be a real treat to read in its native language. A lot of playfulness and poetry survived into translation, but one suspects the primary source has more.

Where the book falls apart is in plotting. It actually has two plots that aren’t at all connected, and this makes it very difficult to get caught up in either one. I kept forgetting who the characters were, where I had seen them before.

The hero is a kind of down-at-the-heels book detective named Corso (great name!) He drinks a lot of gin and is described as looking rather like a rabbit. (Maybe this description reads better in Spanish.) Corso is charged with verifying the authenticity of an original draft of The Three Musketeers and with verifying the authenticity of a 15th century occultist instruction manual entitled Of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows. The publisher of that last was burned at the stake by the Inquisition.

When Roman Polanski made the book into a movie – with Johnny Depp as Corso – he focused on the occult plot. But the Dumas plot is actually the more interesting of the two.

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After reading all afternoon, I came home and began working on an editing assignment. I’m kind of out of my depth on this one. It’s a highly technical scientific paper. Its author commissioned me to do line edits, but, in fact, it needs massive structural changes if it’s ever going to be printed in a professional journal as its author hopes it will. I am not a tech writer. I did not conceal that fact from my client when I took the job, and I’m a quick study – yadda, yadda, yadda – but the fact remains that the piece needs a tech writer.

I mean, I’ll get paid in any event. But…

###

In the evening, I stumbled across a link Max posted on FB to an NYT article about “the humiliating practice of sex testing female athletes.”

And remembered back to one of the great Olympics controversies of my youth, which involved some female East German athlete who had XY mosaicism.

And thought, You know, Max, there is no right or wrong here, there are only cultural trends.

Now, of course, it is the in thing to prate about the vicissitudes faced intersex/transgender/gender-nonconforming women.

Forty years ago, it was not so, and 40 years hence – after ISIS successfully imposes Sharia law across the U.S. – it may not be so. These things are not moral absolutes; they are fads.

Once again, I was just filled with annoyance at that whole self-righteous Millennial generation. Kind of as though I was contemplating those sentient cockroaches who will take over from humans after the collapse of our civilization.

Does every generation view its successors with such intense dislike?

Or am I just over-reacting? Once again?