Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage

For TC Style September/October 2006.

“As Francis Bacon knew, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

Every fall without fail I get the urge to find a bench in a nice tree-laden park with coffee and a book that reminds me of the joy of reading and writing. This year, I chose a peculiar story about a rat. Almost reminiscent of the classic tale of Algernon, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage is the story of a rat born in an East Coast used bookstore that survived on books, first by eating the shredded pages his mother Flo used to make her nest, and then, miraculously, starts to read them.

Through this phenomenon, Firmin becomes literate and develops a voracious appetite for books, further distancing him from his fellow rodents and bringing him closer to the humans he so adores, Norman Shine in particular, the bookstore owner with an astounding wealth of knowledge. Unfortunately for Firmin, he quickly learns that his adoration of the human race is not reciprocated, especially with Norman placing rat poison traps, which sends Firmin out into the streets and finds shelter with a dejected science fiction writer.

Sam Savage, holding a doctorate in philosophy from Yale, brings a lot into this novel. Not only is it an amusing feast for bibliophiles, but Firmin’s observations bring a lot of questions about the human condition to consideration. Bear in mind the Western connotation of the word “rat,” which Firmin surely encounters in his reading (as well as, amusingly, his contempt for Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little) and the Eastern (Asian) understanding that the rat is cunning and intelligent with a great survival instinct. The poor reputation that the rat holds in our continent comes to mind when first reading Firmin’s story, and brings back memories of the dejected, somber story in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

The story of Firmin is such a fantastic trip for book lovers and both casual and serious students of philosophy. The intelligent rat finds solace and relief from his outsider status by becoming the characters, having to remind himself that “Eisenhower is real, Oliver Twist is not.” This strong desire for escapism is all too familiar, where the weak can imagine themselves strong, the lonely loved. Firmin strives to reach out to his beloved humans, even trying at sign language, but to no avail, and at some point tries to change his somber lack of success by going to the Rialton movie theatre, where he experiences lust after watching the nude actresses at the late night show, making his condition even more painful, more … human.

Savage positions before the reader these two elemental aspects of humanity; the earthy nature of the body and the spiritual realm of the mind. By casting this dichotomy into the body of a conscious rat, he is able to mock our delusions and perceptions. Holding a mirror up to our souls in the character of Firmin, we question our essential selves and our understanding of reality. Should our perceptions be taken as true or, like Firmin, do we delude ourselves into believing we are other than what we are?

Both of Firmin’s temples offer an escape from reality and the pull from both is strong. By casting the theatre into the role of seducer, Savage resurrects the worry that movies will destroy books. While today it is clear that books have survived the assault of movies and television, the concern for the relevance of the great works of literature in modern society continues.

I’m not often swayed by modern writings, but this one has gotten to my top 10 of the year. Autumn colors in central Illinois have a knack for making me want to read even more than I already do, and this is just the right fuel for the fire.

Hide behind your smile, all the world loves a clown

On the Shelf: Death and the Sun: A Matador’s Season in the Heart of Spain by Edward Lewine (Houghton Mifflin 2005)

For TC Style May/June 2006.

Edward Lewine’s almost-journalistic account of the tales and trials in the life of bullfighter Francisco Rivera

Death and the Sun is a detailed blow-by-blow account of a year in the life of Francisco Rivera Ordonez, a Spanish matador. “Fran,” as he is referred to in the book, has a tough act to follow: three generations of his family were great toreros, including his father, affectionately called Paquirri by the entire country. And the author Lewine also has some high expectations to meet. Hemingway is still one of the most popular and dedicated fans of bullfighting and the writing thereof, and right alongside him are Allen Josephs, Barnaby Conrad and Sidney Frumpkin, the rare American torero. Lewine has succeeded.

He opens by saying that this was not a work of fiction, but rather journalism, which prepares the reader for the plethora of terminology and detailed narrations of bullfighting that almost read like a manual. While Lewine was right to identify his work as journalism, the story of Fran, his upbringing, and his future make for a wonderful story that wouldn’t seem out of place if placed in The New York Times, which, coincidentally, is where the author had been a contributor.
The account of two very important corridas in Sevilla is a definite page-turner despite Fran’s bad luck of facing an unenthusiastic, defensive bull. Sentences and words are short and rapid to mimic the pace. But Lewine may not have been consistently successful at maintaining the difficult and delicate balance between the intricate history of Spain’s essential pastime and the story of the newest Ordonez torero. The trap of writing a book about what you adore and love is that you are tempted to saturate your audience with all there is to know about the subject, correcting almost every myth and injecting history and explanations at every turn. The question with Death and the Sun becomes, “Is this book about bullfighting with Francisco as an example, or is this a story about Francisco with many interjections?“

In a way, Lewine’s styling is much like the bullfights he so adores—in fact, the book is formally split into three thirds, like the fights. First there are a few trots about the ring with fascinating tidbits of information the reader may enjoy, like how toreador is never used, that it was from the opera Carmen, which was written by a Frenchman. Despite the popular belief, the first few stabs and piercing are not to aggravate the bull but rather to calm it and bring it down from the alarm of being surrounded and defenseless, and the musings on the setup, ceremony and traditions of the corrida and the bullfighting culture try to coax the reader into the setting, to learn more than just a red cape, a bull, and a fancy costume. The second round is where the picadors enter on horseback to pic the bull, to slow it down a bit more but still trying to keep its fighting spirit for when the matador, the torero, takes on the bull alone in the third segment. We see Fran build up to the height of the season by channeling his preoccupations and intimidations aside, overcoming them and surpassing others’ expectations just as a torero defers the bull’s charges to the picadors on their horses.

The greatest moment is not here, it is in the killing, in the third round. Matador, after all, means killer. The bull must die no matter what (which is why there is no betting on bullfights in Spain, even if they’ll gamble on poetry readings and drinking contests). There are a few great flourishes and moves, like the veronicas a torero performs with his cape and sword before a final killing stab to the bull. But the balance between story and sourcebook appears again, and so abruptly after Fran’s fight against a bull from the same breeder whose animal had killed his father Paquirri, on the anniversary of his father’s death do the epilogue and bibliography start. It is a good book on bullfighting on its own while also paying tribute to other writers on the subject, including the ever-popular Ernest Hemingway (there is a short chapter simply titled “Papa”). Have some sangria while you go through it.

Not much to the life I live, same four walls

On the Shelf: House Thinking: A Room by Room Look at How We Live by Winifred Gallagher, 2005

For TC Style May/June 2006.

“The overarching insight that unifies our dwellings and this book alike is that home exists as much between our ears as in a building.”

I had picked House Thinking to review for this issue because I was also trying to find a new treatment for the eight-by-twelve-foot room in my apartment that serves as my study. I wanted it to be more than a place to shelve all my books and computers, and I thought I’d get some ideas from author Winifred Gallagher, especially with my newfound interest in minimalism.

Well, it’s a mixed bag. Reading this book will not get you to reinvent your living room in various shades of blue in a three-day weekend, or show you how. (I was hoping for some actual steps to help in getting the project started.) But it will try to get you to understand why you would want to do it, and how to start planning it. Gallagher may bring some ideas about how to go about furnishing or arranging a room, but House Thinking is primarily concerned with how our psychology, how our societal developments shape the rooms we live in. You can use this book for ideas on how to conjure a perfect home, if such a thing were possible, but it’s more along the lines of understanding how the homes work in relation to what you do, how you were raised and how you live your life—very much like form following function, but with more attention to the past. Gallagher gives examples from Edith Wharton, Monticello and other famous domiciles to support her take on design psychology, and such citations and quotes bog down the writing at times, but reading it left me wondering what I considered to be important, and how I could bring that into my stark, unadorned space.

Almost like learning from example, you can try to realize what you yourself treasure, you can realize what you yourself need your room’s function to be and act accordingly. For instance, if your master bedroom simply does not evoke the relaxation or intimacy needed, take the memory of your honeymoon on the Mexican coast and revive the room. This doesn’t necessarily involve an out-of-place sandbox or cumbersome aquarium, butwith light neutral or brown fabrics and bright blue glass with furnishings that encourage sprawling out or curling up. Add a warm golden fabric for the windows if there was tequila. Toss in maracas if you played them while your spouse tried to dance.

House Thinking is divided by rooms, including separate chapters for the great and living rooms and offering discussion on the garden, children’srooms, the second home, the basement and the office, which I am sad to say did not offer much specific advice to my personal situation, but the chapter was wonderfully honest in admitting that no home office could really replicate the environment of an actual workplace, simply for the psychological mindsets we enter when we sit at our desks and promptly end when we go home for the day. Gallagher also adds the tendency of electronics and telecommunications to further isolate and stretch relationships even if they are marketed to help keep people together.

Part design psychology, part history, it almost reads like a contemporary tome on wabi sabi, the Japanese tradition of finding more than just aesthetic value of furnishings and instead looking to its history and how it was made, and appreciating the imperfections that make it unique. But it’s not just about feng shui and SAD and the dozens of words blithely tossed about at open houses. Gallagher’s book is a marriage between Sigmund Freud and Martha Stewart, and a refreshing change from the modern bustle of stores such as Crate and Barrel and Ikea that cater to the recent trends of buying instead of fixing.

Buy the book, learn from it, pass it on to those friends of yours considering the mother of all remodelings. At the end I felt better about not knowing just what to do with my study, and my pocketbook shares that elation. The bookshelves don’t have to be taller or larger,the computers are just fine. It’s the lighting and lack of more than one chair.

Nobody leads at all

Here it is. An attempt at a public, seemingly more intellectually stimulating weblog when compared to the LiveJournal I’ve been keeping for the past four years. But that one has seen some great melodrama and emotion in the time I was an undergrad, and, frankly, I don’t want to show those to the world.

So let’s see where this goes. I’ll still keep my preference to quote song lyrics as subject lines, but perhaps I’ll be able to develop a different voice aside from the incredibly casual.

And stop using the Backspace key so often. I sit for a civil service exam Friday morning and while there is no typing test, the guidebook on clerical civil service tests that I bought has a section on the typing test. If you make an error, you double space and go on. No Backspace key. Thing is, that key’s existance and availability could very well be the only thing that’s kept my existance from winking out. So many things I could have said and written to people would of gotten me killed.