lrawles.com Blog

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. - Justice William O. Douglas

I worry that I’m not being fair to Augusten Burroughs. The special place in my heart for gay men with dysfunctional families, obsessive-compulsive tendencies and strong ties to New York City who write semi-autobiographical memoirs – well, that place is already pretty filled by David Rakoff and David Sedaris.

The comparison is particularly strong with David Sedaris: both in committed long-term relationships, Northerners with Southern roots, compulsive smokers (although Burroughs has now transferred his addiction to nicotine gum), larger-than-life mothers, adolescent friendships with tough ballsy girls, a series of humiliating jobs and childhoods dominated by intricate self-imposed rituals.

And okay, maybe that could describe a lot of people. But their styles of writing are so similar – and Sedaris got to me first. So it’s hard for me to objectively appreciate Burroughs.

Anyway, “Possible Side Effects.” It’s a collection of essays, in no chronological order. He writes about his love for his dogs, the curse of chapped hands, alcoholism, getting hooked on nicotine gum and some very disturbing episodes from his childhood.

It’s those sections about his childhood that reminded me too much of “A Beautiful Mind.” Remember when that movie was winning sackfuls of awards? It was about a schizophrenic math prodigy. I couldn’t bear that movie (or “Shine” with Geoffrey Rush) because whatever uplifting message it may have had was drowned for me beneath the horror of not being in control of your own mind.

So debilitating mental illness will never be something I look for in my recreational entertainment, and Burroughs delivers plenty of it through the character of his mother. She suffered from a glittering, manic and magnetic psychosis. (You’ve probably encountered someone like that in your own life, especially if you got a liberal arts degree in college.) It was difficult for me to read while experiencing what was essentially a protracted wince.

Verdict: 5 out of 10. That probably says more about me than about Burroughs, but hey, it’s my review.

I should be writing this from Sorrento, Italy, but the State Department sent me my passport the day after I was scheduled to leave. I shall work tirelessly towards their destruction.
(To the good folks in our intelligence services: I’m mostly kidding.)

So instead, I’m in Boston with my mother, and we leave tomorrow for Cape Cod. It’s still better than a kick in the teeth.

I haven’t written in a while, and I wanted to bring a new cause to everyone’s attention. It’s a movement called “Ban Comic Sans,” and it deserves our wholehearted support:

In 1995 Microsoft released the font Comic Sans originally designed for comic book style talk bubbles containing informational help text. Since that time the typeface has been used in countless contexts from restaurant signage to college exams to medical information. These widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built. While we recognize the font may be appropriate in a few specific instances, our position is that the only effective means of ending this epidemic of abuse is to completely ban Comic Sans.

They make an excellent point. I myself have a passionate dislike for Times New Roman, but very few people will be willing to jump on that bandwagon with me. The least I can do for the cause is to support the ban of Comic Sans.

In related news, I saw an exhibit devoted to Helvetica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York two days ago. A very, very small exhibit. Check out this article about how Helvetica conquered the world.

It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. – Oscar Wilde

In the blink of an eye, Charlie Asher’s world fell apart – not that he hadn’t been expecting it. He was a worrier. After his wife died suddenly, Charlie was left with an infant daughter, a thrift store to run, and an eerie magnatism for the soon-to-be-dead. Oh, and a part-time job as a reaper, whose job duties are outlined in the manual “The Great Big Book of Death.”

I’d read Moore’s book “Fluke” before, and he has a knack for creating bizzare characters. There’s Charlie’s daughter, Sophie, who can kill with the word “kitty” and is guarded by hellhounds; his lesbian sister, Jane, who keeps stealing his suits; a goth-girl disciple and retail clerk; a 7-foot-tall fellow “Death Merchant” named Minty Fresh; a Buddhist with a talent for reanimating squirrel parts; and the Morrigan, a hostile trio of Celtic death-goddess harpies.

From Moore’s acknowledgments, it’s clear that he wrote this book while his mother was dying, and he dedicates “A Dirty Job” to hospice workers and volunteers. Hospice workers appear in several cameos, and his descriptions of families in mourning feel very authentic.

Another theme Moore is enchanted with is the idea of “Beta Males”:

While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes – size, strength, speed, good looks – selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastadons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an an angry, wooly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows.

Our hero Charlie Asher is most decidedly a Beta male.

So, what about this book got on my nerves? Continued and egregious use of a term I’d never heard used before (and would be hesitant about entering into a Google search engine): f*ck-puppets. The asterisk is mine, because my dead grandmas may be reading this from heaven. The more grandmother-appropriate equivalent would be “mistresses” or “kept women.” It made me all uncomfortable, and I don’t enjoy feeling like a prude, Christopher Moore!

But don’t get me wrong, I really liked this book. In fact, it won my heart the second I realized that the cover was glow-in-the-dark. I am all about the meaningless externals.

Verdict: 8 out of 10. I read it in one sitting, and laughed until my seat neighbor on the airplane started looking at me funny.

For an even better book with a similar sense of macabre whimsy, read “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. “Good Omens” would score a 9.5 on my scale. Armageddon has never been this funny.

I have to admit, I was a little alarmed by the intensity of my glee when I found out that Paris Hilton is going to be serving 45 days in jail. And I am not alone.

But I think I’ve figured out why there’s such public rejoicing: Paris Hilton is our modern-age Marie Antoinette.

It’s not just the coincidence of Hilton’s first name. They were born into fortunes. They were fashion trend-setters. They spent obscene amounts of money on their birthday parties. They both liked tiny dogs: Marie Antoinette’s dogs were Papillons, Paris Hilton has those chihuahuas. What was “The Simple Life” if not an extended version of “Let them eat cake?”

Of course, to be fair, those stories about Marie Antoinette’s depraved sexual exploits were almost certainly made up by French pamphleteers. The documentation is rather more solid for Hilton’s.

[Side Story: My friend Tara spent two years in Senegal with the Peace Corps, and when I sent her care packages, I'd try to include some DVDs along with the Visine and PowerBars. These were the lean years of grad school, so I got used ones from Blockbuster. But the most popular one I ever sent was "The Simple Life 2," where Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie "worked" on a farm. Tara said her Peace Corps friends always gasped at a scene where a bucket of milk got kicked over, because dude, it was a whole bucket of milk!]

I am not the editor of a newspaper, and shall always try to do right and be good, so that God will not make me one. - Mark Twain

Some books have appeared in my life at exactly the moment I needed or could appreciate them. This is one of those books.

It was the autumn of 2003, and I was spending two weeks in Paris as a prologue to a three-month internship in Prague. (Grad school rocked.) It was the first time I’d been in a country whose language I didn’t speak. My French is abominable, and my Czech was non-existent (I did later learn some Czech; sadly, all that remains in my memory banks is “Can I buy a metro ticket?”)

I had seminars through the mid-afternoon, but after that I was free to wander around (my very favorite pastime). I was spending an awful lot of time in the Gilbert & Jeune bookstores, which had a respectable number of new and used books in English. I reached down and plucked this book from the bottom shelf, then sat down on the floor to flip through it. Fifteen minutes later I had to buy the book and leave the store, because I was making a public spectacle of myself by laughing so hard.

P. J. O’Rourke was a foreign correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine from the 1980s through 2001, and “Holidays in Hell” is a collection of his travel stories, published in 1988. These weren’t the most sought-after travel locales. O’Rourke went to places like Lebanon, Nicaragua, Poland, El Salvador, Jim Bakker’s Heritage U.S.A., Northern Ireland and Panama, and got as drunk as he could on whatever local liquor was available.

But the article that was making me burst forth with those embarrassing snorting laughs was “Among the Euro-Weenies,” written from Paris in a fit of pique as O’Rourke tried desperately to get a visa for Libya in time for the coolest of the 1986 bombings.

I’ve been over here for one grey, dank spring month now, and I think I can tell you why everyone with an IQ bigger than his hat size hits the beach at Ellis Island. Say what you want about ‘land of opportunity’ and ‘purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain’, our forbearers moved to the United States because they were sick to death of lukewarm beer – and lukewarm coffee and lukewarm bath water and lukewarm mystery cutlets with mucky-colored mushroom cheese junk on them. Everything in Europe is lukewarm except the radiators. You could use the radiators to make party ice. But nobody does.

I loved this entire book, especially “Seoul Brothers,” “What do they do for fun in Warsaw?” and “The Holy Land – God’s monkey house.” But there were two quotes in “Holidays in Hell” that I’ve carried with me, quotes that helped prepare me for the next three months of editing articles about the former Soviet republics and the Balkans.

The first wasn’t actually O’Rourke’s, but it was on his dedication page:

Often the more you understand, the less you forgive. – Jillian Becker, Director of Institute for the Study of Terrorism

The second is from his introduction:

Half the world’s suffering is caused by earnest messages contained in grand theories bearing no relation to reality – Marxism and No-Fault Auto Insurance, to name two. Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.

And oh, it is true. As someone who can spell Srebrenica, I tell you it is true.

I have an unhealthy relationship with Amazon.com’s “Recommended for You” feature.

While some of our interactions are positive and result in me finding new books to love, I tend to look at RfY’s suggested products as referendums on my personality and worth as a human being.

For example, at the moment my #1 book recommendation is “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance” by Laurie Garrett. What does it say about me as a person, that three of the top 15 books on my RfY list are about how infectious disease can kill us all?

And okay, I’ve read not one, but two books on the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic in the past three months (”Flu” by Gina Kolata was quite good, but “The Great Influenza” by John M. Barry really dragged in the beginning – he spent 76 pages on the foundation of Johns Hopkins University alone.) But I’m not the survivalist lunatic that RfY seems to think I am! I’m not! I don’t need camping supplies!!

See how worked up I can get? I’m this close to breaking the dinner plates and shouting tearfully, “Sometimes it feels like you don’t know me at all!”

The history behind the little pink packets my grandmother used to lift from restaurants is a strange one, and Rich Cohen is a strange narrator for the story. As the disinherited grandson of Sweet ‘n Low inventors Ben and Betty Eisenstadt, “all they have left me is this story.”

The memoir follows Grandpa Ben as he invents the sugar packet (only to be screwed over by the Domino Sugar Company) then Sweet ‘n Low, weathers the anti-saccharine campaign by the FDA in the ’70s, only to be busted for mob corruption in the ’90s. Yes! Sweet ‘n Low was under federal investigation. Think about that the next time you’re sweetening your coffee. The final section of the book deals with the disinheritance of Cohen’s mother, the once-favorite daughter, for reasons that seem unclear even to the participants.

“To be disinherited is to be set free,” writes Cohen. It’s a theme he returns to several times during the book, that to be without family is to be free. To be encumbered by family is to be trapped, tied down, smothered to death by loving arms.

It’s the five-mile-walk-to-school-uphill-both ways story that your grandfather tells to make you feel weak and lazy….I sometimes think a family is no more than a collection of such stories, a chronicle that locks you down like the safety bar that crosses your lap before the roller-coaster leaves the platform, without which you would fly away in the turns.

But his memoir isn’t filled with bitterness as much as it’s filled with exasperated love for family members fantastic in their weirdness.

When I was briefing my brother-in-law on his new family and told him that [Aunt] Gladys had not left the house since the Nixon administration, he said, “You mean mostly she stays in the house but now and then she leaves the house to go to the store?” I said, “I mean mostly she stays in her room but now and then she leaves her room to go to the bathroom.”

Or his grandmother Betty:

[Her brother's] birth taught Betty lessons she would follow for the rest of her life: that boys are better than girls, that love is finite, that love is coal, and there is a shortage, and there will never be enough to go around.

And his uncle Marvin (or, as he insisted on being called, “Marvelous”):

He said he had been prescribed a pill for fading memory, but told me he forgets to take it. He does remember that he forgets, which struck me as suspicious.

It’s also a love letter to Brooklyn. I was born without the New York City gene. It’s never been my dream to live there, nor have I ever bothered to visit friends while they were living there. The only part of NYC I’ve set foot in is the JFK airport. I spent a summer during college in Ireland with a group of NYU students, and I was left with the impression that the only topic of interest for people from New York is New York restaurants.

But a lot of Midwestern kids (especially in their high school years) have a dream, a longing, an infatuation with New York City that borders on the pathological. Rich Cohen is one of these. He was born and grew up in Illinois, but his extended family lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is another character, another quirky family member who helped shape the trajectory of the company. Even I grew to have some affection for it.

Verdict: 8.5 out of 10 for lyrical prose and funny-from-the-outside family drama.

It’s a dicey business to write non-fiction about people who are still alive to refute everything you’ve said about them. Cohen wrote an article on Slate.com called “Just Screw It: How I told my family I was writing about our feud over the Sweet ‘n Low fortune” that’s well worth a read.