No Pictures: The Way It All Gets Started

Here we are, with The Factual Opinion's attempt to fill the interweb with things that are not the remaining Top Five Albums of 1983: this time, the flavor oft referred to as literature, treated with the same level of contemptible idiocy that we normally utilize for treating the comics and the cartoons.  It's books, people, and No Pictures will be the source to find out what happened when a little bit of intelligence and a heaping mass of chutzpah get combined with things recommended by Harold Bloom.

The Book of Job
Translated with an Introduction by Stephen Mitchell
1987, Published by North Point Press, Harper Perennial

If there's one thing that you can plow through in one sitting and grasp very little of, it's the Bible.  Just ask any of those lunatics who claim to have done it, or even better, ask them what it "meant."  Make sure you've got a snack, and a firm grasp on your ability to hide fear.  Crazy people can sense that.  Mitchell's translation of the Book of Job is pretty much a standard text these days, utilized for college classes and the oddly involved Sunday School class, yet that shouldn't be a turn-off to the casual reader.  (Conversely, the fact that it's not a turn-off to the casual reader shouldn't serve as a turn-off to the critical reader.)  It's an involving work, utilizing contemporary language with a poetic structure that's well suited to Job, a book often referred to as the favorite of people with dead children.  That being said, you can still get quite a lot out of it, even if your life doesn't closely resemble that of an ER season finale.  Who hasn't asked themselves why a guy like Milton Friedman led such a charmed life while Gandhi couldn't even afford shoes?  Why Mother Theresa had to hang out with lepers while Princess Di enjoyed the bright lights of gay Paris?  It's just not right!  Luckily, God will show up near the end of this delightful fable and tell you why:  'cause he's the deity version of Glengary Glen Ross's Alec Baldwin character, and his balls are bigger and brasser than the rest.  Always Be Closing, ye dust-eating sons of Adam.

Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit
Samuel Beckett
1931, 1949, Published by John Calder Press, Calder & Boyers

Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
1951, Published by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris
English Translation by the Author

One thing never to do when going into some Beckett for the first time is to remember how esteemed literary critics always refer to him as "very, very funny."  If it's your first time at the can't-go-on, must-go-on dance, you'll be kicking yourself in the taint to find the humor.  But for those of us returning to the Great French Irishman, you'll find Beckett's brutally intellectual analysis of Proust to be gut-busting hilarity.  Nobody puts the screws to Swann like Beckett.  Malone Dies is another beast altogether--if you've ever wondered where A. Dice Clay ganked his routine from, you'll find something suspiciously familiar about the passage where Beckett describes how the pig butcher's wife knows better than to deny her autistic husband safe passage to her "cunt."  The laughs really get going though, when Beckett rips full tilt into the graphic description of the meager supply of lead his nubby pencil is capable of:  until he pulls aside the wizard's curtain and reveals that he's got another as-of-yet unused writing implement under his pillow!  That's a point scored for the unreliable narrator, and it's well-deserved at that.

Picnic, Lightning
Billy Collins
1998, Published by University of Pittsburgh Press

Ah, Billy Collins.  Only in America could we have a Poet Laureate of such unbearably adorable whimsy.  Whimsically taking the reader around his glorious little homestead, delighting the reader with the true tale of the three blind mice, Picnic, Lightning is a whimsical romp that delights down the road of doe-eyed does and doe-eyed children, along with gum-drop covered thunderstorms.  One imagines Billy Collins sitting down at a whimsically archaic typewriter, with a "World's Most Contented Garrison Keillor Fan" coffee mug, listening to Peter, Paul & Mary sing the songs of the Partridge Family whilst penning  his latest bestselling collection of poems about waking up in the morning.  If you're the reader for him, and you'll know by walls covered in kitten pictures, than prepare yourself to dive into a pool of whimsy, filled with the juice left over when a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul gets pressed through a cheese grater.  Can't find his book?  Check Grandmother's casket.  You've got a few minutes before they bury her with it.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

Comments

[BerserkerJosh]

Billy Collins KILLED my grandmother, you insenstive jerk. I come to your site to be outraged at your indifferent outrage and outrageous indifference!

Also, I don't know who it is or if there is one, but I'd wager that if Billy Collins does American comfortable whimsy (or whimsical American comfort, as it were), the British Poet Laureate writes poems exclusively about the weather, the slipping punctuality of the trains since British Rail went private under Thatcher, the poor tea and and absence of breakfast beans one finds abroad, and campy puns about traffic jams. You know what I say? USA! USA!

[Leigh Walton]

If I were some kind of moral utilitarian, I'd be forced to admit that bringing happiness to millions qualifies Billy Collins as a splendid example of humanity. That would be unfortunate.