Fancy book learnin’

by RAF KATIGBAK

Let me make a confession: I can’t read.
I don’t mean that in the cognitive sense, that I don’t understand the meaning of written words or symbols, or that all the sentences on this page look like squiggly wild-style graffiti to me. No, as much as I like the idea of owning a typing helper-monkey to whom I could dictate my columns every Tuesday morning (and that would scratch my back and make pancakes on Sunday), I do know how to read. It’s that I can’t in the sense that I just never finish a book.

Sure, I can pick one up and, of course, open to the first page and start. But as soon as I try to string a few sentences in a row, my brain glitches, and I either get really, really, really bored, or horribly distracted. It’s like cramming for exams; I end up reading the same sentence over and over again and my mind wanders to other seemingly more important things like, “Did I separate my whites and darks before putting my laundry in the wash?” or “How can Liquid Nutrition charge $8 for a smoothie? Isn’t it just frickin’ soy milk and bananas?!”

Alas, as my cousin in Virginia once told me, I ain’t much for fancy book learnin’. Which is pretty ridiculous given my profession. It’s a terrible secret that’s haunted me every time I meet up with my contemporaries. I even feel bad using the term “Catch 22”, since I’ve never even read the book. In my frustration, I’ve wondered, “Why can’t they come up with an expression using the one book that I actually have read?” Isn’t there any way we can change the idiom “a web of lies” into “A Charlotte’s Web of lies?”

Yes, that’s right, Charlotte’s Web is pretty much the one book I’ve ever finished. And that doesn’t really count because my grade school teacher did the reading. But there’s a reason that Charlotte’s Web is the first and last book I remember reading. It totally scarred me as a kid, more so than that scene in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure when Large Marge shows her true face (still scary).

I know what most of you are thinking: “How can a harmless book like Charlotte’s Web be so fucked up?” Well, you see, it was traumatising because it seemed so harmless. As a frail, skinny emotionally fragile 10-year-old boy, that book lulled me into a state of bucolic contentment. I saw some of myself in little Wilbur; small, hyperactive, different than the other, pur laine, “normal” kids around me. It took me to a happy place where a lowly runt can fight against the odds and actually flourish, finding friends, a happy home and even success. Thanks in no small part to Charlotte, the wise and caring mother figure that shows the way. Then it proceeded to rip my 10-year-old fucking guts apart. Charlotte dies. And I bawl my fucking eyes out. Since then, not only have I not been able to finish a book, but now I live in a constant weird, paranoid state where I think every time something is going too well, just like in the book, I wait and brace myself for the inevitable shit storm I am convinced is coming. Thanks E.B. White, way to fuck me up for life.

But I love the idea of reading. I’d love to exalt the virtues of Chaucer or discuss the mythic utopianism of James Joyce. But alas, I don’t know about any of that shit except for what I just Googled on the Internet. Now, with the Internet, I wonder if I even need to read. I’ve learned more about books from the Internet than even my most learned friends. For example, my so-called bookish friends didn’t even know there was a sequel to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. “It’s true,” I told them matter of factly, “it was even made into a movie: Naughty College Lolitas #44.” I even went so far as to order the DVD. It was pretty good.

But watching the movie adaptations of books will only take you so far. When my friends discuss the complexities of Foucault and Derrida or talk about the bittersweet suffering of Golden Era Russian literature, I’d love to respond with something more thoughtful than, “Oh yeah those are totally awesome, but I really prefer the film. Speaking of movies and books, did you hear they made a book out of Lord of the Rings? Can’t wait to read that piece of shit.”

Nope, literary references just go way over my head. Sure I use terms like “Orwellian” or “Kafka-esque”, but damned if I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca