Thoughtless for the Day: What to Read Archives

The Greatest Book Ever Written (in 1895)

"I tried to read 'Twilight' but it got boring, like, the second page. There are no pictures, so I'm not reading it." - Snooki

A few weeks ago, Vienna told me she'd had a dream in which a new horror movie was not only selling out in theaters but also causing its audience to go insane. Despite this, in her dream, Vienna was really psyched about seeing the film. I can't say I blame her as it did sound much more exciting than Avatar.

"I guess it was kind of like that episode of Masters of Horror, you know, Cigarette Burns." Vienna added, referencing a TV show in which a man searches for a lost film which causes everyone who comes in contact with it to lose their minds. Except, of course, for Udo Kier, who has been typecast as a nutjob since his first kindergarten play; so he just ended up wandering over to another section of the Disenchanted Kingdom.

"I imagine," I said (and these are the sorts on conversations that go on in our house), "that you could also make a case for the movie in your dream being like London After Midnight. After all, some guy strangled a woman in Hyde Park after seeing it; he claimed that Lon Chaney's make up drove him insane. And London After Midnight is a lost film, so that ties it to Cigarette Burns"

"Then," Vienna said, "you could also argue that the movie in my dream was like the book in The Mouth of Madness."

"Well, the plot of that movie was just a rip-off of The King in Yellow."

"The what?"

"The King in Yellow. It's a book about a book, also called The King in Yellow, that causes widespread insanity. I read it about twenty-five years ago, and I don't think that I've met anyone else who has ever read it. I think in was written between-the-wars, around 1920 or so: which is really creepy because one scene takes place in the 'future' New York of the 1930's, which has been ethnically cleansed, and is now free of 'all Semitic peoples'. Antisemitism wasn't just popular back then, it was endemic."

As it turned out, I was wrong (hey, it happens) about two things: The first was that The King in Yellow was not published in the 1920's, but in 1895: you'll find out why this is remarkable shortly. The second was that, in the book, all Semitic peoples are not banned from New York City in the 1930's. No, America just passes a law forbidding all foreign-born Jews from entering the country: which was actually a pretty liberal attitude for 1895; especially when you consider that it was that year when Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island.

The King in Yellow usually gets categorized as Horror fiction or, occasionally, as Fantasy, but I think the best to description is "just plain weird". The book is a collection of plays and short stories all loosely tied together by the King who can either an actual person, a book, or a symbol. While I highly recommend that you read all of the stories in the book, I implore you (I'm begging here) to read the first story in the book, The Repairer of Reputations (you can read it online here), which is a truly twisted tale that was decades ahead of its time, not only in its perspective on madness, but also for its ability to slowly build an atmosphere of terror while also creating a very convincing alternate history. It even manages to brilliantly juggle two competing narratives. And it did all of this thirty years before H.P. Lovecraft began putting pen to paper.

"In the following winter began the agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square." - From The Repairer of Reputations.

By the way, Robert W. Chambers, the author of The King in Yellow ended his career writing romance novels. Which, if you think about it, would be a much more appealing delivery system for mass madness than a horror novel. After all, there's something wonderfully joyous about the idea of a suburban mom reading The Viscount's Betrothal and then running amok with a meat cleaver.

Who knows, maybe Harlequin Romances or Chicken Soup for the Soul really are part of a secret plot to drive a large segment of the population crazy. How else could you explain this piece of spam that turned up in my inbox:

[Thanks, unknown spammer! Now Dr. Who and Viagra are forever linked in my mind.]

The again, I guess the idea of a book which could transform its readers into raving paranoid lunatics is a pretty far-fetched idea.

Posted by Rodney Anonymous at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The Greatest Book Ever Written (in 1972)

While other critics are currently busying themselves with their "Best of the Year" and "Best of the Decade" lists, I'd just like to take a moment to enlighten the entire world to the ponderous tome that is When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow by Lance Rentzel.

Until a few weeks ago, when I stumbled upon WAtLDiS (or "WaltDis", as I like to call it) at a flea market, I was completely ignorant (and as the Rozz Tox Manifesto clearly states, "Ignorance of one's own culture is not considered cool") of the slow-motion dioxin-car-carrying train wreck that is the life story of Lance Rentzel. If, like me, you were also absent from school on the day when your classmates were ushered into a crowded auditorium to hear The Cautionary Tale Lance here's the scoop:

Lance Rentzel was a professional football player who had been a wide receiver for the Vikings, the Cowboys, and the Rams (coincidentally, the original Vikings employed a device known as the "cowboy ram" to batter down the doors of the Alamo).

Lance Rentzel was briefly married to "entertainer" Joey Heatherton. For you youngsters, Joey Heatherton was not a dude. Joey was a sort of proto-Paris Hilton who was "famous for being famous". Today, Joey is best remembered for inspiring the SCTV character Lola Heatherton. Bring da noise, Joey:

Lance Rentzel would also, on occasion, expose his private parts to children. This proclivity for show and tell led to Lance getting busted on two occasions. The fist offense was quietly swept under the rug, but the second killed Lance's marriage and nearly ended his career

Now, by today's NFL standards, that last item item may not be so shocking, but what you need to remember is that Lance was arrested in 1970 - long before the public's begrudging acceptance of the fact that the overwhelming majority of America's star athletes are raincoat clad monsters who hang around playgrounds. Which brings us to the book itself...

To call WAtLDiS "unflinching" is like calling Joey Heatherton "a bit of a ham". Whereas contemporary ballplayers, attempting to redeem themselves in the eyes of the public, might have a biography ghostwritten for them in which their misdeeds are tersley dispensed with in two small paragraphs on page 179, Lance Rentzel dives right into the muck and mire from the start and keeps returning to the trough with delirious regularity. Here's Lance, just a mere six pages into WAtLDiS describing how his second arrest for public indecency triggered memories of his first arrest for public indecency:

I got dressed and the fear dwindled, replaced by speculations,. I wondered what might happen, trying to figure out an approach, but my mind kept referring to the past. I'd been in this exact spot before. In 1966, when I was playing for the Minnesota Vikings, I was at practice, and it wasn't my mother, it was Coach Norm Van Brocklin who broke the news. He brought me into his office, trying to figure me out. It was one of the few times I ever saw him ill at ease. He said to me, apologetically, "I hate to ask you this, but did you expose yourself to two small girls?"

Talk about your yes or no questions. And with that, WAtLDiS establishes its own habitual pattern of exposure. On page 56, Lance regales us with a tale of young love:

My first affair was with a lady of my choice - an attractive girl from another school. Once we bagan (and it was the first time for both of us), we made love frequently, wherever [sic] we could find the time and privacy. Inevitably there were problems [emphasis mine], like the time we were in the back room of my house and heard someone coming; we quickly gathered our clothes and rushed into the bathroom. We dressed hurriedly, frantically, silently, only to come out and see my mom holding up a forgotten pair of panties.

While we never learn whether the panties belonged to the young lady or to Lance, we do get a glimpse (on page 29) into Lenny Bruce's dark legacy:

"Say, did you hear that Lance Rentzel's problems have been solved?" Henny Youngman began telling audiences. "Sure, he's just been traded to the Montreal Expos."
"There's no doubt about it anymore," said singer Don Cherry at a nightclub in Oklahoma City , "Lance Rentzel can really handle the fly pattern." My older brother, Del, was in the audience with his wife, Kay, and some business associates.

Ahhh, you can almost hear the rim shots over the weeping of Del and Kay.

While you have to admire Rentzel's brutal honesty (if you doubt he's got a pair of balls, just ask the kids at P.S. 154 - they've seen 'em), you also have to be equally dismayed at Lance's repeated naming of the father of the young victim, as well as his decision to have his psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, pen the book's epilogue.

In the end, WAtLDiS is best enjoyed as a mildly deranged historical curiosity (not unlike The Malleus Maleficarum or Going Rogue): a strange time-capsule from the dawn of the era of celebrity tell-alls and power couples.

I'll let Lance's mother have the next-to-last word: