Charles Dickens and the Middle Class Way of Christmas

Charles Dickens has been called the man who invented Christmas, and I think there’s truth to that statement. Before Dickens, Christmas was primarily a religious holiday celebrated by the faithful in church and by the carnal in pubs. What precipitated the change more than anything else were the Christmas stories by Mr. Dickens, the most famous of which was A Christmas Carol.

It was the genius of Dickens to fashion this holiday tale around what is essentially a ghost story. Marley’s ghost is a true horror, coming back from the grave in torment, weighed down by chains, to warn Ebenezer Scrooge to amend his miserly ways. Likewise, the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come, a possible model for Fellini’s personification of Death in The Seventh Seal, always gave me the heebie-jeebies. I even found the overt jollity of Christmas Present to be strangely unsettling.

Dickens success can be measured by looking at the change in the Christmas celebration over his life. It was transformed from being a kind of low-key religious ritual into an overly sentimental, schmaltzified mixture of nostalgia and forced cheerfulness we know today.

And, knowing this, I still love Christmas. It is by far my favorite holiday with Thanksgiving coming in a distant second. I love the way the malls begin to over decorate with Santas and snowmen in late September. I love the way the radio slowly begins to play more and more holiday tunes until by the week before Christmas it’s pretty much all ho-ho-ho and Chestnuts Roasting over and Open Fire ternty-four seven(but I SWEAR if I hear Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer one more time I will vomit up a pine cone!) And I love the Sears Christmas catalog filled with overly priced “sale” items.

I love Christmas because it is corny.

I watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special on television every year, as well as the Andy Williams Christmas show. Heck, if they re-run Friends and Nabors at Christmas (Jim Nabors attempt at televised holiday cheer) I’ll even watch that.

Note that none of this has anything to do with Jesus. I suppose as a Christian I should focus more attention onto the Savior of Mankind. Yet I have totally bought into the Dickens’s Christmas vision of celebration for the sheer joy of celebration with the alacrity of an elf on steroids.

Growing up we celebrated Christmas at our grandparent’s house. (We only had one set, my dad’s parents having died off the decade before I was born.) Every Christmas Eve Lowell, Allen and I would don our sports coats, vests and clip-on ties and have Christmas dinner with a flock of relatives we barely interacted with.

It’s amazing when I think about how all of us fit into that tiny bungalow in the poor section of Akron. And yet there we all were year after year after year feasting on scallop potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato salad and any number of other potato-based casseroles.

I recall one Christmas Eve in particular: December 24th, 1968. My grandparents’ front room was wall-to-wall people. Uncle Harlan had added just the right holiday touch with his eye-watering cigar smoke wafting across the room. Normally the television was under control of the sports enthusiasts in the group. Their testosterone levels being higher than the rest of us, it would be impossible for anyone not interested in “the game” to wrest control of the TV and switch channels to the Dean Martin Holiday special. Yet, on that evening, there were no sports on the tube. Programming was pre-empted by a news event: Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon that night.

I remember hearing the astronauts read from the Bible, and then seeing the lunar surface on my grandparents’ old black and white television.

It was surreal.

In the forty years since then everything has changed. Old relatives passed away, new ones were born. The family, as it shrank and grew, dissipated. I celebrate Christmas with my wife and Lowell. Occasionally I have a glass of wine.

But I still remember how all of us huddled in that small cottage on Christmas Eve. There we are, taking each other’s photos, giving compliments freely and enjoying the season. I can see Grandpa with his pipe and Grandma with her apron, and a cornucopia of starchy casseroles steaming on the dining room table. People are laughing in the kitchen. Outside old Duke, Grandpa’s dog, is awaiting leftovers.

These are my ghosts of Christmas past.

Next: Catholicism versus the Music of Herb Alpert

A Jerry Built Life (1924-2005)

Jury rig and jerry built are two terms that sound similar, have roughly the same meaning but have two different origins. Jury rig is a nautical term and refers to repairs made while at sea. Jerry built comes from World War Two and was used to describe the German efforts to repair their various war machines. To jerry build something has a more make-shift, splash-dash, low quality element to the definition. It’s easy to see why. It’s hard to pay attention to the finer details of an engineering problem when you’re in the middle of Stalingrad.

There’s quite a bit of jerry building in the American character. Take for instance the transcontinental railroad. A monumental task of engineering, true, but the emphasis was to get the project completed. Short cuts were taken. Later, various parts were shorn up using the railroad itself to complete the task. This proclivity for “ad hocness” is reflected in American politics as well. FDR jerry built a federal policy out of an entire alphabet of agencies in order to tackle the problem of the Depression. And there is also a certain making-it-up-as-you-go-along element in the current administration. But that’s okay as long as something ends up working.

My dad was a jerry builder of first rank. Though his engineering projects were smaller in scale (mostly of the cost saving variety), they were non-the-less impressive.

His simplest apparatus was “the prop.” For example, when a couch leg snapped off dad would analyze the situation and then prop it up with a book or two. Some lesser quality JB engineers would leave it at that. But dad would be concerned enough to find the exact height necessary to avoid wobbling; he would test and adjust until that exact height was achieved. His favorite tools were volumes from the Golden Book Encyclopedia ®. When he was finished his prop would often last until the couch was carted off to the Salvation Army the next week.

Our house resembled a museum of Rube Goldberg throw-a-ways. When a refrigerator door failed to latch, Dad fixed it in no time flat with only a fist full of rubber bands and a small canister of Playdough ™. When the hall light when out, he was Johnny on the spot with an extension cord, a shop lamp, and a few of mom’s hair clips. I once saw him repair a three inch diameter hole in our screen door using a tube of model glue and a spool of black thread.

There was no household engineering dilemma that could defy him. I swear, if you gave him a Slinky ®, a pair of panty hose and a dab of peanut butter dad could fashion a better mouse trap.

In 1995 my mom died. Dad was consumed with grief. Occasionally, with the passage of time, there were flashes of the old dad. But, for the most part, he seemed lost in a gray fog. When things broke, they pretty much stayed broke until my brother Lowell had them repaired. My dad had fixed hundreds of things over his life, but the loss of my mom was something that broke him.

Dad passed away in September 2005. After the funeral I stopped by the house to have a cup of coffee with my brother, Lowell. When I arrived, Lowell smiled.

“Bro,” he said, “I’ve got something I want to show you.” He grabbed a flashlight and I followed him down the basement. “Check this out,” he said pointing the beam at the basement ceiling.

It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at, and then all the pieces fit. Apparently some venting had needed repair. Dad had applied some elbow grease and fixed it using a plastic milk jug and massive amounts of duct tape.

I couldn’t help but smile.
JB Engineer First Class, to the last.

Next:
Charles Dickens and the Middle Class Way of Christmas

My Favorite Books (1965 - 2009)

I have a passion for books. I love the touch of books. I love holding them up close and seeing them in my hands. I love looking at them at a distance on my shelves. I even enjoy their smell. And yes, I do judge a book by its cover.

Like most book lovers I enjoy browsing through bookstores. Not those corporate owned, bestseller laden gift shops, though they will do in a pinch. The kind of bookstores I love to browse through are used bookstores owned and operated by women in their sixties. These kind of stores are somewhat organized, but not really. Some books are the shelves, but boxes of books are everywhere.

And a cat is always asleep in the display case.

As it turns out I have a life in books. I can recall where I was and what was happening in my life when I read a certain book.

What follows is a list of ten of my favorite books presented in no particular order. The list is not definitive. It will change as I change.

Franz Kafka’s The Trial
The Trial is the story of Franz K. as he tries to weave his way through the Czech legal system. K. is never told the nature of his offense yet he must prepare a defense. This is not only K/'s problem. This is everyone's problem. I read this book in 1977 when I was twenty-four years old and trying to figure out how the world worked. I'm still working on it.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The theme of the book is innocence versus evil. This is an incredible, delightful, harrowing story of childhood. Atticus is the embodiment of liberalism at its finest moment. I read this book in a single sitting while I floating in a hot tub in Loudenville.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Critics claim The Grapes of Wrath is the greater work, but the plight of the Joads as they try to find work in Depression Era America is, well, depressing. Steinbeck always claimed that East of Eden was his greatest work and I agree with him.

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
All of Vonnegut’s books should be on this list, really. Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano, Slaughterhouse Five are all wonderful. My personal favorite is Bluebeard perhaps because it’s the last one I read. At work in this book are all of Vonnegut’s themes (anti-war, anti-hypocrisy) along with a good dose of humor throughout the story.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury does not really write science fiction. The Martians of The Martian Chronicles are inanely philosophical and completely ridiculous. I once heard Bradbury called the “Rod McKuen” of sci-fi and I think that’s more true than not. His writing tends to be overly sentimental and metaphoric. Yet, in Dandelion Wine it all works. I love this book.


George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was in 8th grade. I found the book in the township library and was completely bowled over by the title. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Wow. The future. In 1965 the year 1984 seemed so distant yet the book proved to be a supreme disappoint. It took place in the future, sure, but there were no rocket ships, aliens or robots. Only poor Winston Smith in his jump suit and a bunch of rats.

White Noise by Don Delillo
You have to love a book about a professor who is the Department Head of Hitler studies. Throw in a free floating toxic event and it’s the perfect read.

Thomas Pynchon’s V
I found this book in a cardboard box in my parents basement long after I moved out. Its cover was yellowed and brittle, but the pages were still crisp. It had never been read. I picked it up and read it cover to cover. Quite literally, the book is about everything.

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Simply the best novel I’ve ever read. To tell more would be to spoil the fun.

The Confidence Man by Herman Melville
I’ve written about The Confidence Man in an earlier entry so I will not elaborate here. I will say, though, that the book is difficult, allegorical and hilarious: a true American classic. Hawthorne, eat your heart out.

(This list is personal. I could have easily substituted other titles. And there is a whole category of books missing- poetry. Wallace Stevens, Cummings, Dante will have to wait for another list. And, I could have easily added other titles and authors: Atlas Shrugged, Dune, Anna Karenina, Steppenwolf, Huckleberry Finn, Letters to the Earth, We, Tarzan, Crime and Punishment, A Princess of Mars, and on and on and on.)

Next:
A Jerry Built Life (1924-2005)

Robert Sheckley and the Future that Wasn’t (1965)

In 1965 my old brother Allen’s bedroom was a permanent Katrina level disaster area. Underwear, comic books, sheet music, homework, Fritos ™ and other miscellaneous flotsam swirled in an ever-growing pile of kidcrap. I suspected our two missing gerbils had somehow been swallowed up by the maelstrom.

It was from this pile that I stole Mindswap, a science-fiction novel by Robert Sheckley. Allen would never notice. He had around three hundred other books sent to him by the Double Day Science Fiction Book Club. Every month Double Day sent him two books on the theory that someday he would send them a check.

Well, so much for theory.

Allen was away that Saturday morning for his weekly tuba lesson and had left his bedroom door open. You couldn’t help but look in: his room was an accident rapidly unfolding in front of your eyes. The book’s cover illustration caught my attention immediately. It showed a human (or humanoid) face slowly morphing into a Martian countenance. You see, you could tell it was a Martian’s head because it had pointed ears. After safely removing the book to my bedroom, I read the synopsis on the inside flap.

Hmmmmm. A human being switches brains with an alien. Intriguing.

That was my first, unassigned, solely voluntary reading-for-pleasure novel, ever. I was thirteen years old. I became a book addict at that instant. From that point on a book has never left my fingertips.

I grabbed up all the Sheckley books I could find (The Game of X, Untouched by Human Hands, The People Trap) and devoured them whole. I read other science fiction authors in quick succession: Blish, Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, Tenn, Clarke. Most of these paperbacks were purchased from the twirl-around-rack at the Majestik Pharmacy. Supply was limited but I wasn't choosey. Eventually no book was safe. My mother once left Potok’s The Chosen on the coffee table. In two days I sucked it dry.

Of all the authors I read during that period, Robert Sheckley remained my personal favorite. Perhaps it was because of Mindswap. I don’t know. He always seemed to be writing just for me. His stories generally had a humorous angle and a twist at the end. And the science fiction element seemed to add just the right optimistic touch. In the turmoil of the Sixties I was relieved that someone actually thought the human race had a future let alone one populated with rocket ships and robots.

That August my family loaded up the Galaxy 500 and we headed south to spend a week at Cumberland Mountain State Park in Tennessee. Unfortunately I was forced to ride the hump most of the way. As I sat there cramped in the fetal position between Allen and Lowell I decided to break the monotony of the trip by engaging in my new hobby: reading aloud from almanacs. I had brought along my Reader’s Digest Almanac just for this occasion.

Did anyone know what movie won the best picture of the year in 1952? No? I told them. What about the capital of Bolivia? Or the population of Kenya? Before we had even reached the Ohio border, by a vote of four to one, my almanac was tossed from the car and onto the highway median strip.

Our vacation was pretty standard. We rented a cabin in the woods for the week and intended to enjoy ourselves by making our lives just a little bit more miserable. Instead of watching television, we listened to hillbilly music on the radio. Instead of grocery shopping at Kroger, we allowed ourselves to be ripped off by the nearby general store. And instead of our real friends, we socialized with headache inducing strangers who we had never met before and never would meet again.

There was swimming and hiking most days. In the evening we listened to Hank Williams wanna-bes while Dad popped popcorn. Everywhere there was the perpetual trill of locusts. But what I remember most is reading Sheckley by flashlight and thinking about the future.

That future, of course, never happened. When the year two thousand rolled around there were only a few robots and just a couple space shuttles. Even the bad stuff didn’t happen. No invasions. No world destroying meteorites. No soylent green. The sad truth is that technological change is largely incremental. Science fiction is simply that: fiction.

Even without time travel, aliens, Martian colonies and genetic mutants, the human race somehow is still here. There is room for hope.

And that’s something.

Next:
My Favorite Books

Bill Cosby and the Lost Art of the Comedy Album

In 1965 our family moved to Majestik Township south of Akron. It was a small bedroom community: a typical suburb of the period. Split-levels and ranches were all the rage. We lived in a brick ranch. And, aside from the well-tanned Johnstons (who vacationed 6 months out of the year in Florida) and the intermittent foreign exchange student from Thailand, we were an all white community.

During those years, Bill Cosby was the only black man I knew. Sure, I had seen Sammy Davis Jr sing on the Dean Martin Show and watched Jim Brown play football. But I knew Bill Cosby. I heard his voice in my front room.

Yes, he spoke to me.

He spoke to me through his comedy albums. His major opus, Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow, RIGHT, is, perhaps, the greatest comedy album ever recorded. No, it was not ground breaking. And it certainly wasn’t cutting edge. If anything, it was strictly G rated material. Yet I loved it for the sheer niceness of it all. His recollections of his childhood, his parody of Noah (“what’s a cubit”), and his hyperactive manner of expressing himself (“little tiny hairs, GROWING on my face!”) were pure genius.

I fell in love with Bill Cosby, and became a fan of the comedy album.

Having memorized Bill Cosby’s routine, I moved on to Bob Newhart. I missed his classic album, The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart, but made up for it with his composite album, The Best of Bob Newhart. His routines on Lincoln, a retirement party and the discovery of tobacco in the New World put me in stitches. More than a decade later when the Bob Newhart Show aired on television, I was already a fan.

At this point in our family history my older brother, Allen, was into folk music. Looking back, I can see how this might fit into the labyrinth that was his mind. After all, Allen did have a kind of rugged-loner-out-in-the-woods mentality akin to, say, a Euell Gibbons or perhaps the Unabomber. At any rate, Allen would play his Peter, Paul and Mary records over and over and over again.

(You would have thought that with this apparent love of folk music Allen would have played the guitar, but no. Allen’s instrument of choice was the tuba.)

Since my bedroom was next to Allen's, I got stuck listening to the same lousy Peter, Paul and Mary record over and over and over. I couldn’t figure out their appeal. I mean, Puff the Magic Dragon? What was that all about? For me, I was on to my next comedic discovery: George Carlin.

George Carlin’s album lasted a total of five minutes in my house. Once he started into his Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television rift, it was all over. My dad sailed the record out the back door like it was a Frisbee (he looked a little like Odd Job decapitating a statue with that razor sharp derby of his.) Yet in that short space of time I had heard enough of Carlin to know that, yes, I loved him, too.

Other albums followed in quick succession: The Smothers Brothers, Allen Sherman (the Al Yankovich of the 60’s), Cheech & Chong, Richard Pryor.

When I was in college I became an avid listener to the National Lampoon Radio Hour. It was an early, audio version of Saturday Night Live featuring the not-yet-famous voices of John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase. The National Lampoon Radio Hour (which lasted a half hour) was broadcast sporadically and I missed quite a few shows, but when they republished the material in album form, I bought them all.

A short time later I discovered The Firesign Theater. This was avant-garde comedy, but a digestible form of avant-garde. My favorite album was I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus. This was political satire featuring a fantasy amusement park, a robotic Nixon, and a bus full of Bozos. What it actually meant was hard to tell. But whatever it was, it certainly had its funny moments.

Today the comedy album is practically comatose. Cable television has pretty much decimated the audio only comedy format by making visual comedy accessible. This increased accessibility has encouraged comedians to try to out do each other. More often than not, this has made their brand of humor a raunchier, more adults-only fare.

Cosby and Newhart seem to be quaint throwbacks to an earlier, more gentle era by comparison.

In my mind’s eye I can still see my family huddled around the hi-fi, safe in our ranch style home in Majestik Township listening to our friend, Mr. Bill Cosby tell us about Fat Albert, old time radio and volley balls. True, there were wars and riots and crime in the streets. Manson was still on the loose. The world was not a warm and fuzzy place.

But for a time, Cosby made it seem that way.

Next: Robert Sheckley and the Future That Never Was

Citizen Gaines (1963)

Everybody has a hero.
Mine is Bill Gaines.

First, a little history.

Bill Gaines’ father, Max, was the man who invented the comic book. Max gathered the Sunday color funnies from the various area newspapers and used them as content for a 64-page booklet titled Famous Funnies. Eventually these compilations of funnies evolved into sagas of full-bodied action adventure superheroes such as Dr. Fate and the Spectre. The rather wimpy title More Fun Comics soon changed to the much manlier Detective Comics (or DC). This was Golden Age of the Funny Book.

By then Max had left the publishing business for other endeavors. After a string of poor business decisions he returned to produce a new line of comics known as Educational Comics. Where DC produced stories of daring do, EC would give the comic book reading public somewhat different fare. One title will tell you pretty much all you need to know about the Max Gaines’ editorial direction- Stories From the Bible.

The thud you just heard were sales going into the dumper.

When Max died in 1947 his twenty-five year old son, Bill, took over. Bill quickly scrapped the biblical tales of yore and came up with a truly new direction for the business: horror comics. Soon Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear were decorating the newsstands. These titles and more like them were wildly successful and caught the eye of his competitors who quickly produced knock-off imitations.

Bill Gaines certainly knew his market.

Unfortunately he also came to the attention of the ever-watchful eyes of opportunistic politicians. This was, after all, the 1950’s and paranoia was in full flower.

A book soon gave the political class all they needed to create an issue. The Seduction of the Innocent by Dr, Fredric Wertham warned that comic books were an appalling form of popular literature and a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. Apparently gangs of youth armed with copies of Tales of the Crypt were tee-peeing houses across much of the Midwest. Faced with regulation from congress, comic book publishers created the Comics Code Authority that pretty much regulated virtually all of Gaines’ titles into the trash bin.

Except for one: Mad. It was a not a horror comic but a satiric screed aimed at current cultural icons. Everyone took a hit. Hollywood, Washington, even Madison Avenue. Especially Madison.

Mad was born in 1952 as a comic book.
I was born in 1952 as a human being.

By the time I had discovered Mad I was eleven years old. Mad had also changed. In order to escape the comic book code, Gaines transformed Mad into a “magazine” adding additional pages and artwork and charging a quarter.

I remember the first issue I purchased- issue No. 62, October ’63. The cover featured Fidel Castro who, in true Mad fashion, smoked an exploding cigar. You see, you knew it would blow up because there wasAlfred E. Neuman (Mad’s clueless human mascot) on the cigar band with his fingers in his ears awaiting the KA-BOOM. I thought it was funny and I didn’t even know who Castro was!

I loved the magazine and experienced a rush whenever I purchased an issue. My mom hated it, which caused me to love it all the more: silliness and rebellion for only a quarter.

Each issue contained regular features such as a Don Martin panel comic, Spy vs Spy, or Dave Berg’s Look at fill in the topic. Most of the times you could count on a television or movie parody by Mort Drucker. And there were beautifully illustrated articles touching on the inanity of modern life.

I rarely missed an issue and if I did, Bill Gaines was right there to help me out. He published “annuals” four times a year featuring the “worst” of previous issues. In addition he also published a library of paperback books (The Son of Mad, Mad Strikes Back, Mad in Orbit etc…) which reprinted earlier stuff from the fifties. Granted, the satiric pokes at the Eisenhower Administration made little sense to my fifth grade sensibilities, but I loved the art work by Wally Wood and Bill Elder and Jack Davis and, of course, Don Martin, Mad’s maddest artist. I could easily picture myself reading Mad for the rest of my life far into my golden years.

Then I grew up and my Mads simply collected dust in a paper bag in my closet. I went to college, married, and went to work. Sometime during all of this I picked up a copy. Everything, of course, had changed. Instead of a rush, I felt a pang of sadness. Gaines was not hip, or cool, or cutting edge. He was more like your weird uncle who wore leisure suits and tried a bit too hard to make you laugh.

In 1992 Bill Gaines passed away and his magazine now appears to be moribund as well. DC, the publisher, announced that Mad would become a quarterly magazine instead of a monthly. If I was Alfred E. Neuman, I would start to worry.

I will always admire Bill Gaines. He did not let the blowhards in Washington defeat him. He took a wildly ridiculous idea, blew it all out of proportion, and made himself a mint. His magazine became a 20th century icon. And for a season, he made me feel less self-conscious about being an adolescent.

In the middle sixties amid all the change that was swiriling around me, Bill Gaines made me laugh.

No small achievement there.

Next:
Bill Cosby and the Lost Art of the Comedy Album

My Ongoing Love Affair with Herman Melville (2009)

Everybody knows the story of Moby Dick: the great white whale, and Captain Ahab who pursued it. The book is considered to be the greatest American novel ever written. This judgment is rendered by professors of literature in colleges across America. Hollywood has also paid homage to the book by producing at least one feature film (screenplay by Ray Bradbury) and, who knows, Oprah may yet select it for her book club.

Yet today hardly anyone really reads Moby Dick. Even the Classic Comic version barely gets a skim. But then, maybe you don’t have to really read it. Big albino whale, enraged and insane captain, what else is there to know?

Actually, quite a lot.

I fell in love with Herman Melville after reading his first book, Typee. The book’s plot is simple. A sailor jumps ship while its anchored near a south Pacific island. He’s quickly captured by the local inhabitants and is kept as a kind of human lucky charm. The story contains hints of cannibalism and lots of naked Polynesian women. The 19th century American reading population loved it. It bounced Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter right off the best seller list.

Melville quickly followed up with a second book, Omoo. Again, it was pretty much the same tale as the first: life among the heathen. And again it was a monster hit. Melville suddenly smelled a literary career. He then did the absolute worst thing a man pursuing such a career could possibly do: he took himself seriously.

His next book, Mardi, was a flop. It contained the usual Melville motifs- exotic landscapes, unwashed heathen, scantily dressed Polynesian women, but he also wove into the plot symbolism and metaphor. This over estimation of the literary sensibilities of his readership was a huge mistake. Melville would continue to make the same blunder with everything he wrote after Omoo. Granted, the intellectual class loved this stuff. But the general public scratched their collective heads while thinking “what the hell?”

Consider his next novel: Redburn. In this novel a young man travels from America to London. It is told in first person by an older version of the main character. A large part of the fun in reading the book are the insights the older version of the character makes while examining the younger version of himself. Now factor in that this point of view is not Herman Melville’s, but the thoughts of a totally imagined character. In literary terms this is a point-of-view trifecta!

Of course sales went nowhere.

Then, after a few more disappointing novels, Melville unleashed Moby Dick. As everyone knows the story is told through a sailor named Ishmael. Well, sort of. Midway through the book Ishmael becomes a kind of omniscient narrator being able to comment on the thoughts of other characters.

Is Ishmael mad? Or is it Melville the author that’s unreliable? Or should the reader just accept it and move on with the story?

As the book progresses Ishmael examines the whale from every possible perspective only to end with the mystery still in tact. By the conclusion of the story the novel’s entire structure begins to crack revealing a narrative so large, so symbolically complicated that it resembles nothing less than the literary equivalent of a painting by Picasso. In many ways the book is a kind of proto-post modern novel akin to Pynchon’s V. Or is it V that is mimicking Moby Dick?

Graduate papers are still written postulating the meaning of the whale. Is it God, evil, everything, nothing or all of the above?

Predictably sales for Moby Dick were abysmal.

Melville’s last novel published in his lifetime is my favorite- The Confidence Man. The plot: On April Fool’s Day Satan, in the form of a mute, boards the Steamboat Fidele and proceeds to bilk the hypocrites onboard. Again, the book is filled with symbolism, allegory, metaphor and satire. Even the chapter titles are an essential part of the structure of the novel. Sometimes it seems that the novel’s voice transcends the printed page to discuss plot points with the reader! This was Melville showing off, flexing his literary muscles. But his readers were unimpressed and uninterested. He was casting his pearls before a rapidly vanishing audience.

He then withdrew from writing and made his living as an official at a customs house. But Melville always wrote. He published poetry and produced a book of short stories and, in the process, created another literary classic: The Scrivener. In this story the main character, a scrivener- a kind of human Xerox © machine- holds the reader’s attention by doing, literally, absolutely nothing.

In 1891 Melville died. It wasn’t pretty. He had been mentally ill for years and largely forgotten. An obituary the size of a postage stamp marked his passing.

And then he became great.

Thirty years after his death Moby Dick was rediscovered and at last appreciated. In 1924 Melville’s posthumous novel, Billy Budd, was published with critics claiming that it rivaled Moby Dick for its sublime, subtle symbolism and subdued style.

This is why I love Herman Melville.

Because of his stories,
Because of his unappreciated genius.
Because he never gave up.
And because he continued to write long after his audience left.

He is the rare example of a man who was great in spite of his audience, not because of it.

Next: Citizen Gaines (1963)

The Worst Job (1965- 1970)

To be truthful, being a paperboy is not the worst job in the world. But it was certainly the worst job I ever had.

Worse than weighing lampblack for Firestone.

Worse than bussing tables in New Jersey.

And, yes, worse than washing dishes and scrapping pizza pans in Cape Canaveral.

For five years I was forced to lugged a fifty pound bag full of pressed wood pulp around the neighborhood for three dollars a day.

My dad encouraged me to take the job. He had a romanticized notion of what it meant to be a paperboy, or, as he called the profession- a newsboy. He had been a paperboy himself. Of course back then the news was a bit weightier with Roosevelt, Hitler, World War II and the Depression.

When my turn came, I got stuck passing out a sack full of Nixon headlines. Trust me, no one was excited about that.

Life is unfair.

Think about it. When you’re a paperboy there are no days off. No sick days. No personal days. No excuses. God may have rested on the seventh day, but the paperboy who delivered the news to the rest of creation didn’t.

Here’s the list of some of the more hateful duties of a paperboy:

Dealing with neighborhood wildlife. Mostly dogs. This was way before mace became available to the general public. I had to deal with everything from menacing german shepards to yappy wienner dogs with only my wits to protect me.

I was lucky I survived.

Folding, rolling and delivering the papers. Not as easy as it sounds. Paper rolling is a learned skill among paperboys. Sure, anyone can roll up a Friday paper, but try a Wednesday paper filled with inserts and advertisements. It didn't help that I couldn't have cared less about how the papers were rolled.

Collecting. Basically, it’s a modified version of begging. You're a kid and an adult owes you money. Who do you think is going win?

Inserts. At least once a week newspapers came with some assembly required. We'd find our stack of newspapers next to an equally tall stack of Sears advertisements. Some paperboys simply chucked them, doing themselves and the consumer a favor. I, however, could never cross that moral threshold.

An Interesting Newspaper Fact

In terms of weight, not all papers were alike. As previously mentioned, Friday’s papers were always thin. Wednesdays could be as thick as your fore arm. Sundays were approaching the bulk of a Christmas catalog. And holidays were the size of a major metropolitan area phone book.

In 1966 December 25th came on a Sunday. In terms of paper size, it was a perfect storm: It was a Sunday and a holiday all rolled into one backbreaking sized paper. For the first time in my life I dreaded waking up on Christmas. To top it off, when I opened my eyes I saw it had snowed over night. Not just snow. But SNOW. Close to eight inches of the white stuff covered the neighborhood.

As I walked out into the kitchen, I was surprised to find that my dad had drafted a very reluctant Allen and cluelss Lowell to help. Then he fired up his VW and drove us around the route. He folded and rolled while the three of us delivered.

What could have been an act of futility matching Sisyphus turned out to be an exercise of familial cooperation.

When we were done, Dad drove home leaving my brothers and me to finish up and walk the final two blocks back to the house. It was around six in the morning on Christmas day. There was no sound except for the gentle hiss of falling snow. When we got back, mom had made up pancakes and bacon.

This is one of my most favorite memories.


Next: My On Going Love Affair With Herman Melville