What Are You Reading?
- Mike Dickey
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
This morning's mail preview from the USPS, which we receive by email, shows Peg's about to receive a love note from the Corning City Court. We are pretty sure we know what this is about. Roughly a month ago I sent a check for that ridiculous ticket she received for looking at her phone in the Wegman's parking lot, but in reviewing our bank records they never cashed it. What fresh humiliation do they have in store for us, what exercise of police force to let us know who's in charge and it ain't us?
I swear if this goes beyond a phone call and re-sending of a check, I'm putting a sign in front of the damned condo and moving away from Corning forever. Like every storybook community in America, this one comes with an extreme darkside; in Corning's case it's a company town with a roving group of skinhead gendarmes whose job is to harass people like us. Screw 'em. We'll just move. As it happens, we're really good at that.
The only place I've ever lived where it wasn't this way? NYC. They're too busy with actual policing to poke at a couple geezers because they're jealous of our cars or our whole head full of adult teeth. The one thing I've grown to realize as I wrap up my 62nd year on this planet is that small town living is a form of damnation for me. That's something of a revelation.
Whew! And I haven't even been drinking. They obviously hit a nerve with me this morning.
So, with the end of my NYU adventure I have a few minutes here and there to read things that aren't law. What a luxury.
I tore through my first complete book in a very long time over the last week, reading Ben Fountain's Rasputin Swims the Potomac.
Fountain's a great writer, an ex-lawyer from Texas whose books have been favorites of mine for years. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk left me alternating between guffaws and tears as he follows a soldier back from Iraq who's honored at a Dallas Cowboys football game, surrounded in the luxury boxes by out-of-touch, rich Texans who could never imagine his dysfunctional home life in rural Texas, anchored by a father who's a furious MAGA nut. Fountain's nonfiction work, Beautiful Country Burn Again, takes the reader through the 2016 presidential campaign, illustrating in vignettes the nature and immediacy of the threat that year, the aftermath of which we're living now.
In Rasputin, Fountain picks up on that theme in a piece of absurdist fiction. DJT is running for a third term, but his rallies are being marred by mass outbursts of "weeping sickness", where his followers fall in groups, crying hysterically in some sort of religious MAGA ecstasy, while his nonweeping acolytes ferally pummel the hell out of them. Then the campaign learns that a pro wrestler calling himself Rasputin, "the Wrath of God", somehow heals a bunch of these people on live television. The Donald tries to bring Rasputin, who's actually a combat vet from Buffalo of Irish lineage, onboard as a running mate, only to have him launch an insurgent political campaign from his 14,000 square foot mansion and harem in the Dallas suburbs. And, as we see, it turns out this guy really thinks he is Rasputin, and things start happening that lead the reader to thinking perhaps it's so.
All great fun. I tore through it. Peg demurred, saying it was too close to current reality to provide a means of actual escape. She suggested I read the book she's about to finish, Scoundrels in Law, about a crooked NYC law firm in the Tammany Hall era. I'll likely get there, although books about lawyers aren't exactly an escape for me.
A few days ago I started Crazy '08, about the 1908 baseball season and all its larger-than-life personalities. Baseball books, done right, really are about my favorite form of escape. Next on my reading table is David Halberstam's October 1964, recounting the epic World Series between the declining Yankees and the resurgent Cardinals. I have probably a half-dozen of Halberstam's books, written over the course of literally sixty years (the oldest, I think, is One Very Hot Day, following American and South Vietnamese troops through a patrol in 1967).
When we're not reading books, we've returned to the tactile pleasure of perusing physical magazines, mostly The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Peg loves the former for its surveys of the NYC arts scene, not to mention the insightful political essays and always droll, hilarious cartoons. I'm partial to the latter for its constant ability to drag fresh ideas into view, bringing perspectives I never even considered.
For instance, this weekend I read a review of a historical work on the heretical understanding between Augustine and the end of the Inquisition that the "apple" in the Genesis story, the one that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden, was actually a metaphor for anal sex, which God reserved for himself.
I have to admit we never covered that one in seminary.
It's behind a paywall, but you get a little of the gist. If you have the liquidity in this age of scarcity, it's worth the subscription.
Which leads me back to work, where I'm only spending maybe a third of each long workday on things for which I can charge, and the rest on managing this sprawling empire we've accumulated. Like resolving traffic tickets, for instance.
*sigh*
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