Never on Monday: We hang out with the meat-free crowd, for 24 hours at a stretch

And so we’ve gotten past another Meatless Monday. Our house, containing nothing but Paul McCartney fans, has been adhering to this practice since the composer of “C-Moon” and “Biker Like an Icon” and other classics, instructed us to knock off eating flesh for 24 hours at the beginning of each working week. Yes, you’re right, and I suppose if he told us to jump off the roof, we’d probably do that, too. You can meet the Beatle’s meaty theories by clicking here.

Make mine a Quarter-pounder; hold the hamburger, please

I had a drink last week — two, if you’re keeping track — with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Casually, I asked her if she was still a vegetarian. “Ppff,” she said. She gave that up years ago, after her GP finished an examination with this assessment: “That diet you’re on has worked wonders. Congratulations, you’re now officially anemic.” Beside which, her occupation frequently requires extended stays in danger zones such as France and Belgium, where someone who declines the horse-meat or blood-sausage course is forever identified as L’Étranger, and that`s never conducive to closing deals.

Nonetheless, I find I’m not at all missing the dead animals on the table on Mondays, and we’re seriously considering expanding the program to add a Weggie Wednesday, or possibly a Flesh-free Friday. Part-time vegetarianism, it can be said, has something going for it. It allows you to feel virtuous on occasion, although not to the extent that your friends can’t stand listening to you, or being around you. Though it strikes me as a good idea, I would never proselytize for Meatless Monday, the way Sir Paul has taken it upon himself. I cringe to think of his former spouse, the lamentable Heather Mills, as she applies her lunatical passion to promoting the cause of veganism. If Heather Mills is the face of the vegan movement, kindly hand me a cheeseburger — unless it’s Monday.

It happens that our having adopted these once-weekly dietary principles coincides with my recent discovery of the 1947 recording by the great Johnny Mercer, backed by no less than the King Cole Trio, of “Save the Bones for Henry Jones (‘Cause Henry Don’t Eat No Meat.)” This seems to be one of those many nonsense tunes popular with hep-cats in the ’40s, along the lines of Mercer’s “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank,” except that the lyrics could be read as an anti-vegetarian diatribe against the title’s Mr. Jones:

Our banquet was most proper
Right down to demi-tasse
From soup to lox and bagels
And pheasant under glass –- class!
We thought the chops were mellow
He said his chops were beat –- reet!
We served the bones to Henry Jones
‘Cause Henry don’t eat no meat
He’s an egg man
Henry don’t eat no meat.

These striking phrases, from tunesmiths Danny Barker and Vernon Lee, are clearly intended to depict the carrot-fancying Mr. Jones as a sorry specimen of post-War manhood. They endorse, in syncopated fashion, the skepticism of the old dialect-humorist Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote: “Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classified as cannibals.” (If that doesn’t strike you as clever, try reciting it with a comic Irish brogue and see if it makes a difference.)

McCartney has cranked out the occasional novelty ditty himself, and can more than hold his own in that genre, as he demonstrates through his verse about the sergeant-major being a lady suffragette. You’ve therefore got to wonder why Macca hasn’t applied his lyrical talents to creating an answer to the Henry Jones slur. Or perhaps he has, and it can be found on the never-played B-side of one of his countless releases.

And, since we seem to have strayed onto the subject, whatever happened to the good old Answer Record? These days, public discourse takes the form of idiots screaming polemics at each other on talk radio. Previously, when radio stations programmed empty-headed music instead of cretinous chatter, you’d have records arguing with each other: “Eve of Destruction” countered by a “Dawn of Correction,” “King of the Road” rebutted with “Queen of the House.” The notion seems beyond quaint by current entertainment industry standards, where divergent views in the hip-hop community may pass unnoticed — unless a performer is unlucky enough to be fired upon by Uzi from a passing car driven by a fellow artist.

But who are we to question the ways of Sir Paul? If he deigns to ignore the scornful provocation of Johnny Mercer, and chooses a dignified silence in reply to the mocking piano riffs of Nat Cole, that, my friend, may be the purest form of eloquence. Of course, it’s also possible that Paul is no longer capable of achieving anger, having purified his spirit and softened his mind by four decades of abstinence from the butcher’s counter at Waitrose.

In which case, I’ll answer on his behalf, in the form of the following Johnny Mercer-versus-Johnny Lennon mashup:

He’s an egg man. They are the egg men. He don’t eat no meat.

Books, Briefly: One too many Jerry Stahls, and Ginger Strand’s veritable Niagara of trite observation

One of the very cool new applications on LinkedIn.com is the feature that encourages users to keep track of, and comment on, books they’ve recently read. Useful for the LinkedIn community, but especially useful for the gizmo’s sponsor, Amazon.com, which must be mining the data like there’s no tomorrow — which there may not be, judging from what appears to be the typical jamoke’s usual reading habits. Not that I’m any better, as the following list reveals, all too obviously. It was pointed out to me over lunch by my friend Phil Diamond, that the downside of sharing your book list with the planet at large is that everyone now knows what you’ve been reading. ”Is that bad?,” I asked Phil. He answered, inscrutable as ever, ”It’s just not the same stuff I read.” Which, I guess, must be why he says to-may-toe, while I say to-mah-toe. The following — admittedly, a little fiction-heavy, with at least one Jerry Stahl too many — is what I’ve lately racked up, between trying to get a couple of things done. They`re listed sequentially, and linked to Amazon. Feel free to comment: except Phil, who already commented.

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The Getaway by Jim Thompson

Jimbo`s masterpiece

Recommended: I return to this book every couple of years, and grow ever more impressed with each re-reading. Thompson, the sly master of 1950s-era American pulp fiction, gets everything right in this novel. And then, just when he’s got the reader convinced of the book’s many merits as escapist fiction (in at least two senses of the term), he pulls a series of gearshifts and fast left-turns that no other writer would have imagined or attempted, and connects all the spaces between Macbeth, Freud, and Dante’s Inferno. Even after repeated readings, it’s still hard to accept the depth of Thompson’s bleak vision, and impossible to figure out how he pulled off this remarkable feat.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

Recommended: Lee’s twee, a poet and he knows it, and you suffer the first chapters until he finally gets going. When he hits his stride, describing his mother’s odd life in the Cotswolds in the earliest part of the 20th Century, you’re entitled to sit up and take notice. His often reprinted passages about his sexual initiation, the cider with Rosie referenced in the title, are funny and humane, and ring beautifully true. By the time he’s explained what the motorcar did to the 1,000-year-old ways of village-life he was born into — geography measured in terms of the speed of horse-travel, eight miles an hour — your eyes should well up.

The Hunted by Elmore Leonard

Dutch being, you know, Dutch

Formulaic mid-’70s Leonard pot-boiler, this time set in Israel, where his rough-housing buddies and their uneasy gals exchange sharp dialogue and fire big guns at each other — including an Uzi, which makes sense, given the locale. I read this one over an evening in a hotel room in Swindon, England. Could not have been more perfect.

Love Without: Stories by Jerry Stahl

An uneven collection of short stories spanning 20 years that will add nothing to Stahl’s reputation, hard-won from his outstanding novel “I, Fatty.” The first tale seems to be an earlier, undeveloped version of his novel, “Perv: A Love Story.” Others are period pieces from late-’80s Playboy Magazine, and one is a scatological rant against Vice-President Cheney. Giving the devil his due, the references to the private lives of the Three Stooges and Stevie Nicks’ post-performance pleasures are nothing short of uproarious.

Dead Liberty by David Craig

Cold War-era thriller by the great Welsh novelist James Tucker, using his ’70s pseudonym. A rewarding, convoluted tale of one journalist’s role in the attempted escape by a middle-class family from East Berlin, that holds up well nearly 40 years after publication, and may be one of Craig’s very best books.

Downtown: My Manhattan by Pete Hamill

Gotham`s all reet with Pete

Recommended: A fine writer’s valentine to the Capital of the World, which underlines the big-heartedness that made and sustains the great metropolis. In contrast, lesser places such as Toronto, with their condescending cruelty toward fellow inhabitants and disinterest in the world beyond, are revealed as simply not worth thinking about. Writes Hamill: “Where I came from, the rules were relatively simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts. Never cross a picket line. Don’t look for trouble, because in New York you can always find it. But don’t back off either. Make certain that the old and weak are never in danger. Vote the straight ticket.” Words to live by from a book that fires the spirit.

Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand

Ms. Strand has, perhaps, 200 reasonably acceptable pages in her 300-page-plus first-person account of the history of Niagara Falls and its bi-national communities. What grates is her awful tendencies to place herself in the forefront of this narrative, whether she’s annoying the librarians at the public library on the New York side, or laughing at the attendees of a Red Hat Society gathering in Ontario. A kindly, patient editor might have reined in the author’s worst instincts, but there is no such mediator in sight. Consequently Ms. Strand’s worthwhile sections on the rise and fall of the border-hopping Niagara Falls Museum are watered down by dreary self-referential remarks about her boyfriend Bob, her circle of Manhattan friends, and her father. She possesses a certain kind of naïveté not uncommon to contemporary U.S. authors, whereby she views events as either being American or Not American, and feels a pathetic obligation to delineate and explain the distinctions to an uninterested readership. This extends to her erroneous definition of the Bloody Caesar as a “Bloody Mary with Tabasco,” and Canada’s National Drink. No need to tell her about Mott’s Clamato; the information wouldn’t conform with her cookie-cutter reasoning apparatus, or her proclivity for stringing together smug, facile paragraphs. Caution to student writers everywhere: There may be an okay book buried somewhere in this sloppy, sophomoric volume, but the author is too occupied with drawing attention to herself to let her subject matter or material take center-stage.

Rock Springs by Richard Ford

Fine fiction: See the Fords going by

Recommended: Ford’s rare gift is the ability to tell small truths using spare, unadorned language. These 10 short stories reveal the lives of ordinary residents of Montana and the Great Plains, where Calgary and Winnipeg are large, exotic centers heard on the radio but never seen. Men hunt, fish, and keep their anxieties unspoken. Women leave. Cars are stolen, guns used to threaten. Fists sometimes kill. This is an important collection that takes the Hemingway formula into a compelling, unsettling new direction.

Perv: a Love Story by Jerry Stahl

Published in 1999, this coming-of-age tale set in the earliest 1970s is a showcase for the developing talents of Stahl. The flaws in this book are considerable, and stem from the author’s determination to show off his Terry Southern-like tendencies. Other portions are satisfying and admirable, but Stahl’s need to be regarded as edgy ultimately sinks the story.

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky

Fascinating study of the 300-year decline of the role played by the oyster as an consumable, and an economic enterprise, in New Amsterdam and New York City. Filled with historic asides and detours, and leading toward an inevitable environmental nightmare, author Kurlansky has great material, and a well-honed storytelling sense, but is in the unhappy position of having to convey more than anyone would want to know about this subject.

Achoo? The very word sounds foreign and sinister

This business with mysterious infections, folks getting sick and dying, is old-hat up here in our neck of the woods. Seems like just yesterday that SARS — or “Deadly SARS,” as you prefer — was being passed around town in Toronto, and you’d see pedestrians ambling along furtively down busy Dundas Street in their facemasks. Sold a lot of hand-sanitizer, too. Co-incidentally, my buddy Bob owns a company that had just introduced some new topical anti-infective agent, and there was a big meeting of dermatologists from the northeastern US and Canada set for the weekend when the SARS outbreak first occurred. This should have guaranteed that his product would fly off the shelves, but most of the doctors were no-shows, and the sanitizer went nowhere. He’s probably still got a warehouse filled with the stuff.

 

 

Someone probably thinks they saved their own life by skipping that Toronto concert

All this took place six years ago. I should remember it clearly because I paid a preposterous sum to take two out-of-town friends to the Air Canada Centre see Elton John and Billy Joel, and the performers were too cowardly to show up and breathe the same air as the rest of us. Wayne and Bev couldn’t cancel their flights, so we had a leisurely dinner in the Annex, and caught a local band playing on Markham Street, and went for a walk, and it was a nice night out, for all that. Eventually, I got a refund on the ducats, but I’ve never again felt any warmth toward Elt and Bill — and I was basically indifferent toward most of their music to begin with.

 

That weekend in 2003, the hotels were offering SARS Specials, so the missus and me stayed in a fancy room in the Hilton and hung around downtown. It was really quite pleasant, unless you happened to be pacing, hopeless and panic-stricken, in a waiting room nearby a hospital isolation unit while your parents or children were dying.  A guy I’ve known for years, and never really gotten along with, lost his in-laws to that SARS outbreak. I sent a short note of sympathy, not expecting an acknowledgement under the circumstances, and not getting one. I’ve run into the guy since then, and we’ve chatted, but never discussed the SARS matter. What would you say about it?

 

A delightful fellow, and certainly not sick, but we wish he`d stop coughing

Now we’ve got that swine-chicken ailment, coming up from Mexico. Our community news media are taking it more or less in stride, although some locals have already been infected. The fellow in the next office was vacationing in Mexico a few weeks back, and I hear him coughing away, but he’s an ex-smoker who works with the COPD patients’ group, so I’m thinking there isn’t necessarily anything with which to be unduly concerned.

 

I note, however, that the US news outlets are growing ever-more hysterical over this latest crisis. Vice-president Biden evidently just advised citizens not to take public transit anywhere. If he really said that, it sounds like another incident of Mr. Biden’s Ralph Kramden-like tendencies to speak lunacy and then issue an ‘‘I’ve got a big mouth’’ recantation. Another explanation is that the Democrats want to own the panic surrounding disease, the way the Republicans earlier laid claim to terrorism, and use this fear to manipulate the poor, foolish public.

 

This morning I witnessed two of American broadcasting’s leading proponents of idiocy, MSNBC’s team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, weighing in on this issue. Commenting on the decision by the German airline Lufthansa to place physicians on each of its flights to and from Mexico, Ms. Brzezinski wondered what good that could possibly do to stop the germs from entering the United States. Ms. Brzezinski bears a slight physical resemblance to Madge, the manicurist in a series of early-1980s TV ads for Palmolive detergent, who would tell her unsuspecting salon customers, ‘‘You’re soaking in it now.’’ Shocked at her question, I spoke those words aloud to the television. The saddest thing I’ve heard in years, and there have been a good many sad things in the new century, is this madcap insistence on assigning a nationality to potentially fatal microbes. As if viewers of cable news would all feel a lot more safe, if only the germs had originated in Boise, and could be given All-American names such as Todd and Trish.

Nothing to joke about, except...