Friday, December 30, 2011

What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been

The end of the year is a time traditionally associated with reflecting on the past 350+ days and making resolutions for the next 100 days.  (Yeah, I know everyone pretends they are making resolutions for the whole year, but when was the last time you heard someone in November saying, “I really have to do this in order to meet a promise I made to myself 11 months ago”?)

So, taking these matters in order:

1. Reflections

This last year was pretty much the same as the 18 years which preceded it.  Honestly, I suspect next year will be much the same.  I am fine with this.  While reading Mencken’s “On Being an American” last night, I realized how much my sense of well-being is akin to his.  (This shouldn’t really have surprised me—I have had his picture on my office wall since I started working at Mount Holyoke; it’s just been so long since I regularly read Mencken, that I seem to have forgotten how much I enjoy him.)  He writes:
To be happy (reducing the thing to its elements) I must be:
a.  Well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.
b.  Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men.
c.  Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste.
It’s item c) on that list which made me chuckle at self-realization.  While the external circumstances of my life are remarkably unremarkable, I am unceasingly amused at the world around me.

I do live my life vicariously in books, to be sure.  So, for an exciting tale about the last year, I would refer you to Hunter S. Thompson’s The Curse of Lono.  If you have never read Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, then don’t even think about reading this book.  Read the account of his trip to Las Vegas first.  It’s funny, irreverent and quite memorable.  Indeed, I found On the Road dull because I had read Thompson first, and Thompson does a much, much better Kerouac than Kerouac did.  But, if you have read the Las Vegas book, and you want more Thompson, then a) unfortunately I haven’t read anything of his that is nearly as good as that book, but b) there are three other books you might enjoy.
            1) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail  This is an attempt to mix the drug-addled Las Vegas trip with coverage of a Presidential campaign.  It sort of works.
            2) Hell’s Angels  This is a surprisingly good book if you want to know about a motorcycle gang.
            3) The Curse for Lono.  I just read this a few weeks back.  Of these three books, it is far and away the closest thing to the Las Vegas book.  It’s actually pretty good, so I am surprised that I have never heard of it.  I found it at a library book sale.  No deep plot here, no shocking insight into human nature, but a very clever ending and a tale well-told.  Somewhere buried under all this story is presumably a true story about Thompson being sent to Hawaii to cover a marathon, but I suspect the true story is nothing like the story in the book.  (And if the true story is exactly like that in the book, then I think I’d rather not know.)  Thompson reminds me of Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow—it’s all just so over the top, it’s amusing.  But, sometimes, both Depp and Thompson end up seeming more like impersonations of themselves playing the roles which made them famous than simply themselves playing the roles which made them famous.  When the illusion is lost, then the work seems a bit flat.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the original Pirates of the Caribbean are thus perfect.  In the sequels to both, the illusion gets punctured every now and then.

It just occurred to me that Depp played Thompson in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  I’ve never seen that movie—the book strikes me as one of those things that can only be desecrated in transferring it to film.  But, I am now wondering whether the connection made in the last paragraph is because I subconsciously had already connected Depp and Thompson because of the movie or whether it is just a sign that Depp was obviously the perfect person to play Thompson in a movie.

2. Resolutions

I hereby resolve to read a lot of books in 2012.

What’s on my reading list?  Too many things to count, I suppose.  But, I do have a new long-term goal.  Last week, Janet was talking with my mother and her husband (who were visiting for Christmas) about their bucket lists.  (That phrase strikes me as annoyingly idiotic, by the way, but alas, I can’t figure out a way to stop it from becoming a part of American English.)  I realized while they were talking (mostly about trips to far off lands) that one thing I would really regret not having done before I die is reading all of Plato.  So, I’ve just added the Collected Works of Plato to my reading list.  I didn’t tell the participants in the discussion this was my new goal—they all would have just stared at me in disbelief before Janet uttered some remark about the how absurd it is that this would be my goal.  Sadly, I have little doubt that just about everyone else would agree that when comparing “Take a trip to China" and “Read the collected works of Plato,” it is only the former which is a socially acceptable thing to which to aspire.

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