Forever Isn't Over Yet - May 14th, 2008

On Monday I went through a medical screening test that requires what they call “mild sedation.” The prep the day before was bad enough. I’d prefer not to go into great detail except to say that doctors have an annoying habit of treating the logical and obvious as though they’d never heard of such a thing. When I asked mine about the prep – “what if I vomit?” he looked politely puzzled and asked me to repeat the question. Then he thought for a moment, his brow furrowed at what was plainly a baffling question and told me. “Well, just pace yourself if you have to.” Which, I learned on Sunday night, didn’t do much good. To quote Mark Twain, “I thought I had thrown up my very soul.”

Of course, the following day, when I mentioned it at the hospital to the nurse who was inserting the IV, she just nodded and said, “Oh yeah. That happens,” as though she’d heard it a thousand times before.

In fact, it was not the prep that was the worst part, but recovery. The procedure itself was nothing. My main memory is of being very pleasantly stoned. After I woke up, they drove me home in a van and I ate some soup M had bought just before passing out on the couch. It was when I woke up there a couple hours later that I remembered why I don’t drink.

I felt like a roach that had been doused in Raid. The last time I’d been so miserable had been in my twenties, after a Harvey’s Bristol Cream binge. I crept about the house, a trembley nauseated and paranoid wreck, and by nightfall had such a pounding headache that I slept, or tried to sleep, with an ice-pack balanced on my forehead. The night was spent occasionally waking up to adjust the pack and then dropping off back to sleep to continue a long, bizarre dream about adopting a green kitten. Not until yesterday afternoon did I begin to feel normal, and I’m still a little shaky this morning.

Gumbo today.

I just finished reading a novel I liked very much, Gerri Brightwell’s The Dark Lantern a thriller set in Victorian London. To read it is to be plunged, as a twenty-first century reader, into an alien and inhospitable city seen from several POVs – a naïve young man struggling to make a name for himself in the new “science” of psychometry, his beautiful secretive wife, and a country girl newly arrived in London to work as a housemaid.

It’s a claustrophobic, gas-lit, pungent world that Brightwell creates, and she’s populated it with people so vivid, so believably shaped by their time that I found it almost impossible to put down. The main character, the housemaid, is not so much naïve as painfully aware of her own ignorance and vulnerability, occasionally shaken by the repressed rage of the powerless and hungry. The villains range from a skin-crawlingly evil ex-convict, to an ordinarily malicious and mercenary fellow housemaid, to the secretive wife, who veers from sympathetic character to antagonist and back throughout the book. Best of all, the ending is logical, satisfying, and unpredictable. Not many fiction writers can open and end a novel well. Or so neatly illustrate what a myth is the term “the good old days” when it comes to the poor.

In the meantime, I am continuing my long, thankless slog through Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. No, I am not a masochist. Badlydrawnjeff threw down a gauntlet of sorts by saying he’d be interested in my opinion of the book once I’d finished, and now I’m chained to the damned thing until the bitter end. The last time I felt so honor bound to finish a nonfiction book was when I read The Bell Curve, and that was at least clearly written.

So far the “secrets” breathlessly imparted to me by Lucianne’s boy include the astounding news that Mussolini preceded Hitler, that the KKK was once quite a powerful force in American politics and that Margaret Sanger had an unsavory connection with the eugenics movement -- in short, “secrets” that are well known to anyone who’s actually read about WWII, the holocaust, the Klan, or the eugenics movement.

Goldberg’s target audience seems to be very young and/or very ignorant souls who have not actually read books about twentieth-century history. In fact, they’ve apparently not even seen movies or read novels about the rise of the Third Reich etc. They’ve just read rightwing websites talking about what all those commie-lib college professors, novelists and filmmakers supposedly say about it. It’s a mindset moved three notches to the right of reality.

And unlike The Bell Curve, it’s badly written. I’d been assured that Goldberg, whatever his faults, is a very witty lad indeed, but I have this fetish about lucid writing and if he’s witty I’m missing the jokes as I try to sift through a sticky morass of shifting definitions and illogical connections.

I’ll go into the self-serving and Conservapedia-like lies of omission that riddle the book later, after I’ve read the last page and have returned the thing to the library, possibly using a pair of tongs.