Babe The Blue Ox

Thanks again to Sarah for so ably guiding this skiff whilst this salty old coxswain tended to his paternal duties. As I've said before, I've decreed unto myself that I shall track as little of that familial bliss into this foyer as possible, but if you want to see photos of the progeny and so on: http://www.oliviakaul.org. And of course, as always, if any of you out there have some spiel you want me to put up here, I'm always more than happy to do that. You know, I only have so much bullshit to give the world.

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In the "Worst of Missoula" feature in this week's Missoula Independent, there is an issue addressed that has bothered me for years. You don't see it so much in bigger cities, but it's all too prevalent in your smaller towns and mid-sized cities: drivers who stop for pedestrians on busy arterials. Too much courtesy! Also very dangerous! For instance, say you're a pedestrian standing at an intersection with no stoplight or crosswalk. You'll happily wait for two or three cars to pass before you enter the roadway, but inevitably someone will someone will stop and (sometimes impatiently) gesture for you to cross. But you, the pedestrian, still have to wait for the other lane's traffic to acknowledge what's going on, and for them to stop for you too. Meanwhile, traffic is stacking up and the first stopper is getting impatient and staring you down, making you feel real self-conscious. You start to get pissed off, because you would have happily waited the six or so extra seconds to make a determination as to the safest time to cross the street.

I have noticed that this sort of thing is most common in your typical college town, where people tend to indulge themselves in pathological guilt about the fact that they are driving and not walking. These people want to absolve themselves of the perceived crime of motoring and make a meek attempt to telegraph some sort of "I'm with you, bro!" pedestrian solidarity statement by overextending courtesy, a courtesy that, as I've postulated above, is really quite the opposite.

Compounding this colossal misunderstanding is yet another phenomenon I've witnessed often in Missoula, in Bozeman, and in Boulder, CO: the pedestrian specimen that makes a big show of indignity if a motorist doesn't stop for them and acknowledge their every whimsical decision to cross the street, regardless of whether a crosswalk or stoplight is present. The implicit message from this specimen is clear: You, the vulgarian motorist, are indeed a criminal if you don't acknowledge the obvious exalted moral superordinance of THE PEDESTRIAN!!! (or CYCLIST!!!, as the case may be).

I find that one of the bennies of living in a cutthroat metropolitan area is the fact that motorists are notoriously inconsiderate. And as crass as it may seem, it does have a favorable by-product: as an inveterate walker, I appreciate that I'm expected to be the steward of my own safety.

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Josh Henderson is a guy I've known since about '88, and is one of several of my friends about whom I often think, "Goddamn, I wish that guy would get a website going." And especially in these times, I figure the world needs more people like Josh who are paying real close attention to political affairs, and who have a lot to say about it, and who aren't content to regurgitate the same old de rigueur Bush-bashing jeremiads.

So, finally: http://thebellman.org. This is actually someone else's site, and Josh is a contributor, but you can be assured that anyone with whom Josh consorts has got to be up to snuff.

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And finally, a book review for that ass:

The Mezzanine
by Nicholson Baker (1986)

Easily one of the strangest books I've come across. It's nominally a novel, it even says so on the cover. But there are very few elements herein that you would associate with a novel, such as characters or an identifiable plot. Well, there is a minor plot, I suppose: the narrator is taking an escalator to his office on the mezzanine and notices that he has a broken shoelace. That's about it. This very minimal plot structure serves mostly as a jumping off point for the narrator's many (many many many) mental expeditions into just about any topic you could think of. His makeshift shoelace repair reminds him of the nine or so life-changing, time-saving adjustments he's made in his life thus far, all of which are neatly enumerated and described in painstaking, obsessive detail. He discourses at length on the phenomenon that causes men to say "oop!" instead of "oops!" and on men that will display their whistling virtuosity in the office bathroom, but nowhere else.

Riding the escalator, he becomes fascinated at how the custodian cleans the escalator railing&emdash; by standing on one of the stairs and dragging a wet rag across it as he rides up. Later, he is somehow reminded of how much his life has changed since the advent of the paper milk carton to replace bottles. You, the reader, are dumbstruck at how much observational detail Baker can wring out of something as mundane as a milk carton, and how he is able to make such huge discursive leaps of topic. Footnotes abound, and often span several pages as he describes the minutiae of some other detail that is only tangentially related to the main detail he's describing.

If this sounds like an indulgent literary conceit to you, you're probably right. But any perceived wankiness is forgiven and forgotten as most of it is actually pretty interesting and funny to read. Baker has a unique talent for describing the most unremarkable things in life &emdash;such as the unique pleasure derived from the refilling a stapler with staples&emdash; with aplomb and dry wit, and he is evidently well aware of his preternatural fixations on the things that go unnoticed by most people. Reading something like this, you often find yourself saying, "Yeah, I enjoy such-and-such mundane task too, but I guess I never really noticed how satisfying I find it." You also often find yourself forgetting that you're reading a novel. Indeed, it reads much more like the journal scribblings of a park-bench obsessive-compulsive outcast, and the first-person narrative doesn't do much to dissuade you of that notion. You also start to suspect that this novel is in fact autobiographical, and that perhaps the skeletal plot is only there to mask the fact that Baker is revealing his true nature.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Baker's literary style is often described as Seinfeldian. But the fact that this book predates the Seinfeld show by about four years both invalidates that comparison and confirms the unsullied uniqueness of this work. And besides, the format and mainstream appeal of Seinfeld would have been highly compromised if they ever endeavored to pursue something like refilling a stapler with even 1/100th of the detail Baker does. Moreover, Seinfeld's oeuvre had much more to do with social or interpersonal weirdness than with the finer points of the simple, ineffable pleasures one can find in everyday life. So it turns out that the Seinfeld comparison is wholly inaccurate, and just serves to illustrate how starved we are for a cultural reference to describe something that goes into exacting detail about things that aren't talked about much. David Foster Wallace might be a more contemporary point of reference, if only for the footnote fetishism and obsessively detailed descriptions, but then, I've never read any of DFW's novels (only his essays), so this is just a guess.

For readers who dig intriguing literary experimentation and don't mind a little bit of writerly self-indulgence, I highly recommend The Mezzanine. Like Vonnegut, Richard Powers, and David Foster Wallace, you're constantly rewarded for paying close attention to the little literary flourishes and nuances. But if you require an exciting plot or identifiable characters in your fiction, I'd imagine you'd just find Baker's schtick pretty irritating.

Postscript: around the time I was reading The Mezzanine, I was reading an issue of Newsweek in a hospital waiting room, and learned that Nicholson Baker's latest endeavor is a book in which the dialogue consists of two men plotting to assassinate President Bush. Christ, the guy's got cojones!

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