When I
was in first grade my teacher made me wash my mouth out with soap. I’m not
kidding. I had said the word “panties.” Again, I’m not kidding. I would imagine
if I’d said the word “f*ck,” the teacher would probably have had a coronary.
I still
remember when I first heard the word in a film. Barbra Streisand said it in
“The Owl and the Pussycat.” In 1970. I was in a theater, and the audience
gasped. How times have changed.
The
word is used so often and in so many contexts that it hardly raises and eyebrow
these days. The word has lost its ability to shock. I wonder what we will find
to take its place.
At any
rate the reason I bring all this up is I’ve read a few books that use the word.
A lot.
The
first of these is The Life-Changing Magic
of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You
Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do. Dubbed “a practical parody” (of
Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of
Tidying Up, which I have not read), the book has some excellent advice. I
wish I’d had access to the book years ago. Her advice on families (especially
her point that simply because we share DNA does not obligate us to care about
or require us to want to be around our families) could have saved me countless
Christmas holidays on the road, in the occasional snowstorm, an ice storm, and,
when I did not drive, in airports, all of which was expensive, and, in
retrospect unappreciated and often unpleasant. The book has excellent advice in
other areas of life, including work, friends, friends’ children, etc. But,
weighing in at 732 f*cks (her goal, she says, was to beat The Wolf of Wall Street, which has something in excess of 500
f*cks), she may be depreciating the value of the word. Anything when used to
excess tends to lose its value.
Chronologically
for me the second along the same lines is Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to
Living a Good Life. I confess I really liked this book. Mr. Manson advises
that we have so much stuff and so many opportunities that we really don’t know
what’s important. He advises that we not try too hard to be happy—that the
desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience and the
acceptance of our negative experiences is a positive experience. He goes on to
explain that the more we want something the less fulfilled we feel. His advice:
Stop trying so hard.
He
discusses the way some people address their problems—denial, for example, which
he says may work in the short term, but not so much in the long term. Having a
victim mentality is another cop out, which, he says, is easy and feels good,
but doesn’t solve anything. He even describes a “victimhood chic,” in which
it’s become fashionable to push responsibility—even for the tiniest
infractions—onto some other group or person. He writes this may be the first
time in history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly
victimized simultaneously. He advises emotions are overrated and that the
reason a lot of people don’t get what they think will make them happy is
they’re not willing to exert the required effort. He gives the example of his
wanting to be a musician. He fantasized, but didn’t practice.
What
Mr. Manson reveals about his own life is interesting—he quit a job a few weeks
after starting it and took off to see the world. He’s now living in New York. For
someone who will soon be 33 years old he has a very mature view. He advises
that we consider the world of 500 years ago and advises that, just as we look
back in horror at their lives, we should realize people living 500 years from
now will do the same—they will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs
define our lives, how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter
most to us but heap praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything… . And
there’s more. The book is 210 pages in length and is an excellent way to spend
an afternoon.
Finally
on the list is Erasure, a novel by
Percival Everett. Mr. Everett is African-American as is his protagonist,
Thelonious Ellison. The son, grandson, and sibling of doctors, and a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, Mr.
Ellison writes scholarly books and papers that get little notice. When he hears
of a middle-class African-American woman who visits some relatives in Harlem
for a couple of days and writes a book about the experience titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and when that
book becomes a national bestseller, he writes a parody including most if not
all of what the isolated literary class imagines goes on in a ghetto. He titles
the book F*ck, and his agent submits
the book as one written by Stagg R. Leigh. The book is contained in the novel.
The book is picked up, becomes a hit, and the novel then becomes about how Mr.
Ellison deals with the success of his parody without becoming associated with
it. This is a fast read (265 pages), extremely funny, and a commentary on our
times.
© 2017 Larry Roth
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