It's Elmo's world, we're just living in it.

 This morning I took my two youngest to the park in Belmont, a very nice park, to play for awhile. Being a beautiful fall day with a little nip to the breeze we had on our pull-overs, mine and Sam's did not attract notice but Bens made him the star of the play ground. You may have guessed, given the title of the blog, that Ben was wearing an Elmo pull-over and you'd have guessed right. Ben's four and a big four at that and he was wearing this red hoodie with a large picture of every childs favorite Sesame Street resident on it, I don't know how we survived growing up before Elmo (Grover was always my favorite), and to a smaller child, well one smaller child in particular, he must have seen life sized. There were a few other children on the playground, all on the young side (young side of four mind you) and all a good deal smaller than Ben. One little boy, couldn't have been much more than a year old, took one look at Ben and his eyes grew large, he pointed at Ben and said 'Elmo'. He stared, star-struck, looked to his mom and said, "Momma, that Elmo." "Yes," replied the young fanatic's mother,"he's got Elmo on his shirt." Ben quickly pointed out to the woman that "That's my jacket, I've got wrestlers on my shirt." He proceeded to pull up his jacket to show her and she gave him a 'work with me kid' look and a nice little smile and nod. The young Elmo fan however was not to be dissuaded, he followed Ben around the playground much of the time we were there and occasionally would come up to him, wave at his 'jacket' and say, "Hey, Elmo." Eventually it came time for us to depart, I picked up Sam and told Ben to come on and we started away from the play equipment, Elmo's number one fan followed right along. His mother grabbed him by the arm right as he was leaving the play area, we told him bye and waved and he stood there on the edge of fandom and waved the way little kids do, with just their fingers moving, and said "Bye, Elmo." I'm sure if his mother would have let him he would have followed us all the way to, oh darn, I forget how you get there. Can you tell me? Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street? How to get to Sesame Street?

Gaimania

I'm about a third of the way through my fourth Neil Gaiman book and I've just become more and more of a fan. This particular book is a collection of short stories, poems and oddities and like most short story collections some are better than others and some are maddeningly incomplete. There are some wonderfully imaginative  stories in here and I think that's what's so great about Gaiman is that his stories hold such a spark of magic, some are humorous, some dark, many are quite strange. One of my favorites so far is a poem (or is it just a short, short story?) titled Locks. Locks is about him telling his two year old the story of Goldilocks and how in doing so he's carrying on a tradition that goes back generations and about how his own reaction has changed to the story as he's grow older. It's really wonderful.
  I'm glad I'm still enjoying Gaiman as I picked up three of his books at GotBooks the other day, just because you like, or even love, a book by a writer doesn't mean you'll like everything by them. Those of you who read this probably know that I've listed Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse as my favorite book many a time and so I started trying to read more by Hesse, three other novels in and I don't know that I'll ever bring myself to try and finish his writings. Some were strange and one (The Glass Bead Game) committed the most horrible sin of being extremely boring. I read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and thought it was amazing, two other novels in and I'd be hard pressed to pick up another one of his. So great love and devotion to one story doesn't mean the author will always float your boat but for now at least Gaiman is still putting the wind in my literary sails.

Reading Lolita in Shelby

The title to this blog is a play on the title of another book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi that is a non-fiction book about a book club that meets in Tehran to read banned books. As you can imagine there are many books banned in Tehran, I seem to recall that Pride and Prejudice was one, some seem very innocent to our western ideals, Lolita on the other hand, well I can kinda understand that. I just finished reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, let me go ahead and say I enjoyed the book before I add that I can't completely fault those that would censor it. Lolita deals with a touchy subject, pedophilia (poor choice of phrasing there, but humorous enough not to change) and deals with it in a sensuous and at times comic manner. The narrator and protagonist is Humbert Humbert a pedagogical pedophile who, after spending time in several sanitariums, comes to live as a border in the home of a widowed women and her young daughter Dolores ("She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning... She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.") Humbert is immediately enraptured by Lolita and begins trying to get as close to her as he can. I've heard in the media of young girls with older men referred to as Lolitas but as far as I know those girls were all older teens young Lo is but 12 when the story begins. That was one of the shocks that came with reading this story, a story that I had only a hazy idea of what it was about. The first misconception I had dispelled  as I began to read was that Nabokov was  a  Russian writer in the vein of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. While, yes, he was from Russia and had written in Russian Nabokov became an American citizen in the 1940's and taught at a number of American universities and wrote in English. Lolita wasn't translated from Russian it was written in English (the first shock, to keep with the theme) . The home where Humbert meets Lolita is in Virgina not some Eurasian metropolis. The second shock was the afore mentioned age of Lolita. The third was the sensuousness of Humbert's narrative concerning Lo, you'd read these wonderfully written lines about his passion for her and then remember he's talking about a kid and be disgusted with it. Something wonderful that Nabokov was able to pull off was making Humbert a sympathetic character without ever letting you forget he was a villain and a perv and more than a little insane with lust. Humbert is writing his memoir from a jail cell so all along you know the long arm of the law eventually catches up to him and he does at the end feel remorse for his actions, I think this is how Nabokov saves Humbert from absolute villainy. There's a great passage near the end in which Humbert relates a scene in which he has stopped on an over-look to get some air, this is after Lolita has left him, and he can hear the sounds of children playing rising from the city below and he writes -"I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence form my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." Wow, isn't that amazing literature? He realizes that his real crime was stealing Lo's childhood away from her. It's writing like this that rises this book to 'classic' level and saves it from what, by all means, is a terrible idea for a story. There's a postscript on this edition written by Nabokov and I like that he says he doesn't write books with a purpose or to teach a lesson, he writes them for the "aesthetic bliss" of the story. He said he first had the idea for, an wrote, a short story about a pedophile who marries a sick widowed woman to get close to her daughter and that story then evolved into Lolita. As you may well imagine he had, at first, a hard time getting the book published and it was originally published by a French publisher in 1955. That was the final shock, that a book about a sexually active 12 year old (she had experimented with a boy and a girl) and her pedophile step-father touring the country together having romps in sleazy hotels and then her leaving him for another pedophile (yes there was an even worse villain than Humbert, and he gets his in the end too) was published in good old 1955. They say each generation thinks they've invented everything, all the swear words, all the lasciviousness, all the perverts but let's face it from the dawn of civilization there have been those making rules and those breaking rules. To quote a good cliche - there's nothing new under the sun. At the end of the story when Humbert is driving away from the scene of the murder (I'm not telling whose murder) he writes that he felt, "I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic.", where upon he switches over to the left lane and drives until he wrecks, a last final act of anarchy that he calls an "almost spiritual itch". Again, wow, great writing. I look forward to reading more Nabokov, hopefully something without such a perverse nature.

Oh no! Not again. Countinuing tales from the diaper pail.

 Yes ladies and gentlemen it's time for another stomach churning installment of 'Tales from the Diaper Pail'. While picking up my youngest to make room for the 8 year old to get out the door and catch the school bus I became aware of a none to nice odoriferousness wafting from his tiny self. So I take him to the changing table and clean him up, not a pleasant thing mind you but run of the mill, nothing like what was to come. Instead of sliding his pj's back on I thought I'd be a good thoughtful husband and go ahead and get the little one dressed. So the two of us go upstairs, he's walking around  in his diaper playing while I pick out an outfit for him. A minute passes, a minute, he walks around the side of the bed looking as though he is a native of some deep Congo tribe, his body painted with war paint. I say, "What have you got all over you?" He doesn't say anything but looks at me with this funny look on his face as if he were saying, "Well, I've never tried this before. It seems a little strange. What do you think?"
To which I answer, "Is that... (oh god, please don't let it be) poop?". Oh holy mother of God, it is poop!
I grab him by the arm and lead him around the side of the bed and to my utmost horror there lies a puddle, yes puddle, of poop. My gag reflex kicks in and I almost loose my breakfast, but I'm an old hand at this by now, so I bite back down the rising bile and spring into action. It's a triage. First remove the fecal body paint from the little monster, second get him diapered (and dressed this time), third clean. And then clean some more, and still a little more. Not the way I wanted to start my day, but thus is the joy of parent-hood, I just hope my pain and nausea can entertain and amuse my readers.

Karma Cat

    July 2007 a dedicated dental doctor named Donnie Deadmon died of a deadly disease. For three years he remained in limbo pleading his case to the powers that be before being assigned a lower reincarnation. Yes, a lower incarnation for while he had indeed been a dedicated dental doctor he had sacrificed his family and friends in pursuit of professional gratification. So three years to the day of his horrible death he reappeared upon this earth as a tiny little kitten. One of three in a litter born to an orphaned cat. His early lot in this new life did not proceed to nicely, his mother while out foraging for food to feed her children was struck down in her prime by a UPS truck, many animals I am told believe the UPS stands not for United Parcel Service but for Under these Wheels pets will Scream. Then in another blow of fate to his newly young life one of his sisters, already handicapped by the cruel machinations of destiny, perished. So this kitten and his surviving sibling wondered alone in the world until the day they were taken in and fed and cared for by a kindly grandfather. This grandfather of six new that his grandchildren would love and care for these lonely kittens and they did, immediately and exuberantly. Now several of the grandchildren all lived under one roof and they persuaded their already overtaxed parents to take in these two wayward kittens and like the Darlings accepting the Lost Boys they welcomed them to their home. Fate had finished dealing harshly with the former Mr. Deadmon and he found himself renamed Domino and living the luxurious life of a house cat. While his past life had all but faded from his mind and he was now occupied with chasing his tail and following the youngest child around waiting for him to drop some food he did maintain a curious fascination with teeth.
   While this tale may be a bit mendacious it will at least explain why this cat is always trying to jump on my chest and get in my grille.

www wendesday

I'm not even going to try and catch up on ones I've missed but today I thought I'd start afresh.
What did I last read? Flush by Carl Hiassen. I was under the impression, the impression given to me from the book jacket, that this was a comedy. I had hoped for a sort of Christopher Moore kind of romp, but it wasn't. About a 1/3 of the way into it I was disappointed to find it wasn't a comedy but an action/mystery and was on the very tame side of the road, which when I complained of this my daughter pointed out that Hiassen was a juvenile fiction writer, I hadn't know this. I was already invested in the who/what/when and where so I continued reading and once I had adjusted my expectations it was actually a pretty good story.

What am I reading now? Well I've been reading Clive Barker's Books of Blood volumes one to three but I believe I'm done with it. I read all the first volume and about half the second one and while some of them are good macabre stories there all a little much on the blood and guts side of horror for my taste. I'm not a fan of horror movies but being the month for Halloween I thought I'd read some scary stories, which I do occasionally like. While I liked some of these and couldn't stop reading others, it was kind of like driving past and accident and feeling bad for staring but not being able to help it. I began to feel a little uncomfortable with the stories, a little unclean, if you will. So I've decided to give up on the Books of Blood.

What am I reading next? Neil Gaimans Anansi Boys. It was the only other Gaiman book the library had other than American Gods which I just read a few weeks back, so I thought I'd give it a spin (spin, you know, like a spiders web?).

man there's a lot of red trucks in the world

The other day waiting in an exam room for a doctor to come in I'm holding the one year old up to look out the tiny little exam room windows. Trying to occupy and entertain him while the doctor apparently travels from some other time zone to get to us and I start pointing out the color and types of vehicles traversing the street in front of us. "Look Sam there's a black car and there's a red truck, and there's a blue mini-van, and there's a red truck, and there's a white Cleveland County van, and there's a red truck, and there's a blue car, etc..." So then on the way home we start counting red trucks (not blue cars like in that song where the kid says he's going to meet God. And then he calls God a she which I'm sure some people believe but I think most that say it are just trying to rebel against the status quot. I think if we believe in God and believe that God is all that and a bag of chips then we have to agree that God is not a sexually reproductive entity and would therefore not actually be male or female. Which is something the Judeo/Christian God has over the old Greek/Roman Gods, I mean you never knew when one of them my fly down and rape you. Of course the J/C God might allow your whole family to be killed off, rob you of all your possessions and cover you with boils just to prove how faithful you are but he's never raped anyone. Hmmm, I guess believers can't be choosers.) So, back on point. We counted, okay I counted Rainey turned it into a punch bug game and wore my arm out, about 30 red trucks between the doctors office to Wal-Mart and then to home. So like I said, there are a lot of red trucks in town. I'm still trying to get Rainey to stop punching me every time we see a red truck. And a beetle, and a convertible, and a p.t. cruiser, and a Jeep and God help if it's a red, beetle convertible.