I Got A Beaver On My Lap (And a Bear On My Tail)

Any fucking questions?

Me and my older daughter went to see Mr. James Howard Kunstler at one of those book-tour author-reading things a couple weeks back. He's got a new novel out called "World Made By Hand," so he was reading from that and talking about it. I read very little fiction, so I can't say I'm terribly interested in this book, but Jimmy K. is one of my favorite commentators and his four non-fictive books have changed my godddamn life. So naturally I had to show up at the Tattered Cover for the reading.

Having never been to a reading involving a novel before, for some reason it hadn't occurred to me that he would actually read from the book at such length. I'd seen David Brooks and Eric Schlosser and a handful of other authors, but they typically just read little passages. Jimmy Kuntsler was reading for 15-20 minutes at a stretch, even doing different voices for each character; it very much reminded me of being in fourth grade and having Mrs. Braun read Where the Red Fern Grows to the class. Most people seemed far more interested that I was. I don't know, dude; that shit just doesn't hold my attention. So since I was seated in the way back of the room, I was able to duck out with little Olivia and go over to the kid books for a while.

Once I heard the applause, I knew it was time to go back for the Q&A. As with every other reading I've been to, there was a zealous reader in the front row whose hand shot up like Arnold Horshack because he absolutely had to be the first person to ask a question. His question was of course prefaced by six or seven declarative statements intended to broadcast his lit-crit credentials to the audience. I can't even remember what the question was, but I recall that it included the word post-structuralist, so there you go. Kunstler, evidently accustomed to this recurring book-tour character, deftly danced around the question and moved on.

Judging by the number of people there clutching well-thumbed copies of The Geography of Nowhere for him to sign, I wasn't the only one that was antsy for him to do his Clusterfuck Nation schtick, and he didn't disappoint. Once the would-be Foucault nerds were done with their questions, all it took was a little prompting. Kunstler rolled through all his hits: "cheap oil fiesta," "landscape fantasia," "jive-plastic," "sleepwalking into the future," and riffing on the Sun Belt and the orgy of happy motoring. I loved it.

But alas, a woman in the audience saw fit to redirect the talk back to its ostensible topic, Jim's new novel. She asked some fairly innocuous question about the roles of women in the book (which, I should mention, is about life in a post-oil future). For some reason, Jim got very defensive and started ranting about how feminism could only have succeeded in a cheap oil age, and then ended up yelling about how political correctness was just one of the things that his generation produced that he was ashamed of. I'm paraphrasing, of course. But by the end of his rant he looked very worked up, and there was a very long, awkward silence after it. You could see the faces of the audiences wondering, "Are we in trouble?" I felt sorry for the poor woman who asked that question.

In other Kunstler news, a Mr. Duncan Crary has started a weekly podcast with Jim: Behold KunstlerCast!.

Mr. Crary does a fantastic job of keeping a casual, conversational tone going, and it has quickly become one of my top 5 podcasts. My only complaint is the god-awful theme music.

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