Depravity and Wonder.

I’m reading an essay by Michael Chabon entitled “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes”. It is in his collection of essays Maps and Legends and I just came across a line I wanted to share with you, “Secret sharers, deception and disguise, imposture, buried shame and repressed evil, madwomen in the attic, the covert life of London, the concealment of depravity and wonder beneath the dull brick facade of the world”

Here he is talking about the motifs of Victorian literature, but I think that something about revealing “the concealment of depravity and wonder beneath the dull brick facade of the world” might as well be part of a writer’s job description. I would have just highlighted the line, but this is a library book and they keep yelling at me for doing that! So instead I am making a note of it here.

Oh! and just in case you are trying to decide if it is pretentious of me to be reading - for fun, no less - an essay by Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Chabon in which he opines on the writing proclivities of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, well then let me just save you some time: Yes, it is HUGELY pretentious. But that’s not why I’m doing it, I’m doing it because I like the way Chabon writes and because reading his nonfiction is a lot like the experience of hanging out with a hugely intelligent, slyly funny, but ultimately well-mannered college professor.

If I was going to be pretentious I would tell you about the time I read a Jonathan Lethem piece in Granta about the work of John Cassavetes. Even I had to not talk to me for awhile after that.

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The Emotional Rube Goldberg.

Recently I discovered that when I have a crap day (which I did today), I can make myself feel a little better by going to the library and wandering through the books and checking out some of the more interesting ones that I find (how do you like the length of THAT sentence, BTW?).

There are, I think, two reasons why this works. The first is that I really am interested in everything. I can find anything interesting. This is a 100% true fact about me, your humble blog host.

The second thing is better. One of my favorite movies is called “Zero Effect” and it is about the world’s greatest private detective (played by the always underappreciated Bill Pullman). At one point he is talking about how to look for something and he says something along the lines of, “When you go looking for one thing, it is very hard to find, because of all of the things in the world. But when you go looking for anything at all, it is very easy to find, because of all the things in the world.” This is how I feel when I go into the library with nothing on my mind except for getting everything off of my mind.

The last time I ended up with an illustrated “Gravity’s Rainbow”, a coffee table book of 1920s and 30s crime scene photography, a fun little novel by Chip Kidd called “The Cheese Monkeys”, a book of Polaroid photography and a PJ Harvey CD.

This time I scored even better because I ended up with “Making Pictures: A Century of European Cinematography”, a nonfiction called “Flower Confidential” by Amy Stewart which appears to be about the international flower industry, something called “”Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences” by one Lawrence Weschler which is about … well, I don’t really know yet but it has a lot of pretty picture in it. There’s also “The End is Near!” which seems to be a collection of really bad art about the end of the world, Michael Chabon’s book “Maps and Legends” which I think is a collection of travel essay or something (it has a beautiful jacket but because it is from the library the jacket is taped on in such a way that one can’t actually read what it says), a novel called “The Anarchist” by John Smolens, it seems to be the fictionalization of the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz (who, of course, you and I both remember from the world’s most bad-ass, it-is-okay-to-love-it-even-if-you’re-a-man-and-a-lumberjack musical “Assasins”). The last book is called “Rube Goldberg vs. The Machine Age”. It is a musky old coffee table book collection of Rube Goldberg comics. To know Mister Goldberg’s work is to love him and if you don’t know him, you should google him right now. He is known for drawings of incredibly elaborate contraptions that accomplish very mundane tasks. If you ever played the board game Mousetrap when you were a kid, then you have built a Rube Goldberg-esque device. Or if you ever saw the movie “Blown Away” with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges, then you know that the bomb that blows up the ship is a deadly Rube Goldberg.

The point of all this is that I found a little gem of a phrase when I read the flap of the Goldberg book (hey, what do you think a book would look like if we let him make it?) and that little sparkling gem was one of the only things that made me smile today. The flap references “a dictionary” and says that a Rube Goldberg is defined as, “(1) a fantastically complicated, improvised appearance; (2) deviously complex and impractical.”

How perfect a definition is that for any of our lives? Or maybe just mine?

I love very much “deviously complex AND impractical”. It says so much yet uses so much economy! (“so much economy” is probably an oxymoron, right?).

So I suppose you can expect to see the song “Deviously Complex and Impractical” on my band's next album. It will be a song with a bass line that is hard to love, but a hook that makes you dream it.

And seriously, go google “Rube Goldberg” right now, he is delightful.


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