Oddities
Covid conflict seems never ending. Headline from nypost.com: “City workers fume over reward to unvaxxed employees.” Guess they should have all held out.
Headline from newsmax.com: “California Maskless Woman in Store Convicted of Trespassing.”… At least these Seattle guys were following virus protocols by wearing masks, NYP article, photo from King 5:
From NYP — hold the mayo: “Shocked NYC fishermen are catching ‘monster’ 600-pound tunas.”
Born in an affluent Paris suburb in 1920, Boris Vian was a writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer primarily remembered for his novels. He was friends with major figures in jazz and literature. He had ten novels published, four under a pseudonym, four short story collections, seven plays, three volumes of poetry, and three translations, including Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and The Lady in the Lake. He did all that before the age of 40. He succumbed to a heart attack at 39 in a theater while viewing an adaptation of his I Will Spit on Your Grave (It appears it has no relation to the 1978 or 2010 versions of I Spit on Your Grave). According to his Wiki profile: “A few minutes after the film began, he reportedly blurted out: ‘These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!’” He collapsed moments later and died while in route to the hospital. I just finished his last novel, Heartsnatcher, published in 1953, a bizarre absurdist portrait of a weird remote seaside town. Senior citizens are auctioned off, beaten and verbally abused, as are apprentices. The populace is fond of throwing things at their vicar, and crucifying horses. An old-timer is assigned to pull debris from the murky river by his teeth. Most of the action is from the point of view of a psychiatrist who has gone there to fulfill a dream of the complete psychoanalysis of a single human being. He is derided and occasionally punched. Still, he remains. As the years pass, he becomes more like the citizens, although he does not lose his sense of wonder, appreciation of nature. At first he boards with a mom of triplets, whose shunned husband has left her. The narrative’s best aspect is her paranoia about the myriad potential dangers her children may experience. At first that is interesting, but it extends through the final third of the book and becomes tedious. There are elements of the supernatural, surreal at play. For instance, the triplets learn to fly after eating a blue garden slug. The writing, while understandable, is broad, filled with what seem invented words, months called Marchember and the like. Is there deeper meaning to it all? Here are a couple of quotes from an article at steemit.com by someone who dubbed himself godflesh: “There is always a heartsnatcher, as if the very presence of the heart is already enough to blame, and the heartless ones are actually the happiest ones. They live without shame… the phosphorous trace of the love of life is buried between the coarse scars of deadly insensitivity.” 23 users at Amazon have rated Heartsnatcher, forging to a consensus of 4.5 on a scale of five. I’ll go with 2.5. I was happy it’s only 245 pages. The best I can say about it is that I stayed with it, so maybe there’s something at its root. I kept thinking the town’s drinking water needed testing. Here’s the author:
Another good day for the floating book shop. My thanks to the kind folks who bought, swapped and donated wares today. Andy F Bomb dropped off a cache of Russian CDs that should sell briskly. All but one of the session’s sales in English were non-fiction, that being Runaway Children by Sandy Taylor. Since I lost my cheat sheet, here are the ones I remember: Overcoming Overeating by Jane R. Hirschmann; Reader’s Digest Health Secrets For A Long Life 1,206 Tips For a Healthy Mind and Body; The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don’ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life by Charles Murray; My First Hanukkah Board Book; two titles in Russian. Despite all that, the highlight was a visit from Occupy Jack, who waxed historic for at least 20 minutes. One of his Twitter accounts has incurred a permanent ban for incendiary tweets. He’s an Israeli-born anti-zionist. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the one, the only Occupy Jack:
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