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Mar. 13th, 2006
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The flip side of the early 1900s
Mar. 13th, 2006 01:08 pmSo I finished "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair last week, and decided I needed something a little floofy to decompress.
My local library's audiobook collection tends to suck poxy ass, so my choices were limited, but I did find two little documentaries* by Ken Burns; "Lewis and Clark", which I've just started today, and "Horatio's Drive", which I just finished this morning on the way in to work.
"Horatio's Drive" is the tale of a wealthy retired doctor who decided in 1903 to be the first to cross the continental U.S. in an automobile. It is his tale of trial and adversity and the triumph of the human spirit.
Except, see I just finished an epic tome about the horrific struggle of the urban poor in 1906 Chicago. I got to hear Sinclair's histrionic, nearly endless tooth-gnashing over a man who walked 20 miles in the snow without a jacket, starving, upon his release from prison to find his wife dying in childbirth. Worse yet, this was not the worst night of the man's life. And I didn't even get into the horrors of the meat packing industry. So there was that, the actual trials of Job in quite literally the depths of Hell, which I follow up with...the incredible drama of some rich guy's crappy car getting stuck in a mud bank in Wyoming.
It was incredibly stupid of me to think that I could listen to Horatio Jackson's struggle to survive THIRTY SIX hours without a meal during his road trip, and feel affected by it. (Don't worry, he got a hearty lamb dinner from a local herdsman, bless his soul.)
His letters home to his wife were darling - and read by Tom Hanks no less - so it had its upside, and there were some funny punchlines to the tale, but overall I should have waited for one of the Tom Robbins books to become available instead, because the juxtaposition of wracking poverty and idle wealth was wrong wrong wrong.
(P.S. Robbins' "Villa Incognito" was a bunch of strange, quirky, paramasturbatory intellectual elitist fun, which you must all read so I'm not the only one with the mental image of a Tanuki with great big giant testicles and a gut that sounds like a drum.)
* I say "documentary" instead of "nonfiction" or "historical fiction" because they're really just audio transcripts of the documentaries broadcast on PBS. As nonfiction literature, they'd be atrocious.
My local library's audiobook collection tends to suck poxy ass, so my choices were limited, but I did find two little documentaries* by Ken Burns; "Lewis and Clark", which I've just started today, and "Horatio's Drive", which I just finished this morning on the way in to work.
"Horatio's Drive" is the tale of a wealthy retired doctor who decided in 1903 to be the first to cross the continental U.S. in an automobile. It is his tale of trial and adversity and the triumph of the human spirit.
Except, see I just finished an epic tome about the horrific struggle of the urban poor in 1906 Chicago. I got to hear Sinclair's histrionic, nearly endless tooth-gnashing over a man who walked 20 miles in the snow without a jacket, starving, upon his release from prison to find his wife dying in childbirth. Worse yet, this was not the worst night of the man's life. And I didn't even get into the horrors of the meat packing industry. So there was that, the actual trials of Job in quite literally the depths of Hell, which I follow up with...the incredible drama of some rich guy's crappy car getting stuck in a mud bank in Wyoming.
It was incredibly stupid of me to think that I could listen to Horatio Jackson's struggle to survive THIRTY SIX hours without a meal during his road trip, and feel affected by it. (Don't worry, he got a hearty lamb dinner from a local herdsman, bless his soul.)
His letters home to his wife were darling - and read by Tom Hanks no less - so it had its upside, and there were some funny punchlines to the tale, but overall I should have waited for one of the Tom Robbins books to become available instead, because the juxtaposition of wracking poverty and idle wealth was wrong wrong wrong.
(P.S. Robbins' "Villa Incognito" was a bunch of strange, quirky, paramasturbatory intellectual elitist fun, which you must all read so I'm not the only one with the mental image of a Tanuki with great big giant testicles and a gut that sounds like a drum.)
* I say "documentary" instead of "nonfiction" or "historical fiction" because they're really just audio transcripts of the documentaries broadcast on PBS. As nonfiction literature, they'd be atrocious.
