Your Humble Blogger was sufficiently inspired by the Ian Frazier piece in The Best American Essays 2003 to pick up Dating Your Mom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1986) at the library. This was actually a mistake; his stuff is brilliant, but better to read one a week or so, rather than twenty-five in three days. Some of the pieces were great. “The End of Bob’s Bob House” is my new favorite:
Bob took one look at me and hollered ... “Anything you want, it’s on me.” My Gd, I drank the place dry that night, and then I had a good solid piece of American grain-fed beef and got in my car and ran over a claims adjuster and ended up in the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. That’s the kind of guy Bob was.
“The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo” uses up the joke in the title, but it’s a pretty good joke anyway. “Just a Country Boy” is about perfect, and has the more or less imitable Ian Frazier style to a T. “Your Nutrition and You” is good, and ends with the note that “Readers wishing a transcript of this column should sit down and copy it out in a firm hand on sheets of ruled paper,” at which I laughed for quite some time. Oh, and “LGA-ORD” is inconsistent, but ... “those of you on the right side of the aircraft ought to be able to see New York’s finger lakes region that’s Lake Canandaigua closest to us those of you on the left side of the aircraft will only see the vastness of eternal emptiness without end.”
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
I agree in all respects — I love Frazier, but he should be read in bits.
If you ever run across The Best of Outside (which has a bunch of good essays) make sure to read Frazier’s “Keeping America’s Trees Safe from Small-Curd Bubble Wrap”, which I adore. I can’t explain why exactly (it’s just a personal discussion of how he and his buddies like to go around snagging litter out of trees) but it makes me laugh and cry together.