This Past Weekend

Friday night is, according to the Jewish faith, meant to be a night of prayer, of quiet, of simple pleasures. A nicely roasted chicken eaten by the light of Shabbat candles. The lead-in to a calm, work-less Saturday, the beginning of a day of rest. It wasn’t like that here; it almost never is.

Edith and The Most Ethical Man in the World, Notarius, spent Friday evening at home, which sounds about right, but other than that nothing we did bore any resemblance to a good Friday night Shabbat observance. We ate bowls of leftover chili over rice, served with some very nice guacamole, while we sat in our comfortable living room. Notarius watched the Red Sox play Baltimore. I sat on the couch and read Hal Niedzviecki’s Hello, I’m Special. What got me to contemplating the fact that we hadn’t lit Shabbat candles or anything like that was the fact that the first chapter of Hello, I’m Special is about religious observance these days.
Hello, I’m Special, published last year by City Lights, looked rather promising. The subtitle, How Individuality Became the New Conformity, captures a social phenomenon I’ve been observing since I was in college. I saw this book and was reminded of a little book I picked up about ten years ago, a little jokey gift item titled How To Be A Nonconformist. How To Be a Nonconformist was published in 1967 by a small press in Norwalk, Connecticut, and it’s chockablock with sage advice, most of which still applies today. Niedzviecki doesn’t cite Karg’s book, which genuinely surprises me, but it ought to. Basically, I read all of Niedsviecki’s book when I didn’t have to; I could have just paged through Karg’s book again, and Karg’s is much faster. Not only is it a fraction of the length of Hello, I’m Special, but it’s illustrated. With roughly ten words every two pages. You do the math (I can’t do it myself).
I’m going to cut to the chase here. Hello, I’m Special is mostly unnecessary text, but I found it genuinely interesting when he discusses religious observance, in part because he focuses on Jewish observance in America these days, which is a subject I know a little about. Rather, I know a little about Jewish non-observance. But you get the idea. The first chapter addresses this subject, and he returns to the matter again toward the end of the book; most of the middle of the book I could, frankly, live without, though someone else might find it gripping. The point of the first chapter is this: everyone wants to be special, unique, and acknowledged as such. We all want to be recognized as being different from everyone else. But the methods most of us use to achieve this end up being the same methods as everyone else. So in the end, generally speaking, it’s a load of crap. (As I began to observe in college, when getting tattoos became a normal thing to do, what’s so shocking about a tattoo if everyone else has them too? I always thought it was incredibly dumb to get tattoos, and to this day Miss Edith is tattooless (don’t even own a copy of the Stones' Tattoo You), which I view as being an eminently wise position. I’ve missed out on experiencing pain (yes!); I’ve not wasted money on something I am pretty sure I’d come to regret (fuck yeah!); and I’ve not marked my body in such a way as to make myself utterly unemployable. (I may be unemployable for other reasons, but no one could blame my cranial tattoos for my job situation.) This will be the end of a rather long parenthetical aside.)
So, getting back on subject here: our pal Hal discusses how he’s always been a rock n’ roll rebel type, and his brother was the normal one, but now that his brother has become an Orthodox Jew, his brother is the “weirdo” and the rebel. And this turns Niedzviecki’s head inside out. How is this possible? he asks himself and the reader. Well, this reader said, “It’s extremely possible. These days, admitting to religious belief based on a system founded thousands of years ago really does make you seem batty to most Americans. Funny, huh?” I found the narrative here mildly interesting to read, but it really didn’t say anything to me that Notarius and I hadn’t discussed a thousand times already, sitting around with bowls of chili, with baseball games playing in the background.
It’s not that I don’t recommend Hello, I’m Special; I do, for a certain kind of reader. If you’re a youngish hipster type who maybe isn’t the most contemplative person in the world, and you’re wondering why you feel vaguely stupid all the time, this book might help you figure out why you feel that way. So go check it out. If you’re past that stage, and you’ve realized that your tattoos were a mistake, and you’re now investing large sums of money to have them removed or to have your wardrobe re-designed so as to cover up mistakes made in your callow youth, then you don’t need this book. You would, however, find Karg’s How To Be a Nonconformist amusing, and I just learned that it’s recently been reprinted. It’s available here.

Saturday was not a day of rest here. We cleaned house like nobody’s business all morning. We did have an afternoon of rest, however, which I spent lying on the couch reading: very enjoyable. Finishing Hello, I’m Special, I turned to another recent title that I enjoyed quite thoroughly. It’s a collection of personals ads originally published in the London Review of Books, titled They Call Me Naughty Lola. Assembled by David Rose, this is a perfect gift book for probably eighty-six people you know. If you missed it when it came out last November, I’d urge you to pick it up. I won’t say anything else because I don’t want to spoil it for you, save to say, this is a very special book.