Man's best friend outside of a dog, 12: Running With Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

Due to a strange bit of scheduling, I read almost this entire book while sitting in the O'Hare Marriott, waiting to meet up with our ride back to Champaign. Let it be said, they have some really comfortable chairs, and are kind enough to not hassle people who spend hour after hour sitting there without any obvious purpose.

If World's Fair was about a family in which nothing too much happened, this could be considered the exact opposite situation. Burroughs' memoir, assuming it is even half truthful, deals with an upbringing about as unconventional and bizarre as just about any ever put into print. As to truthfulness, we'll leave that to the lawyers, and just evaluate the book as if it were a novel. I don't mean this as an insult in any way, because it's basically the way I read Bill Bryson, Erik Larson, and any number of other non-fiction authors whose style is more narrative than informational.

The obvious comparison for Burroughs is David Sedaris, as several hundred reviewers have noted. The comparison isn't exact, of course. Both are funny, and both are gay, but Sedaris' stories are more about minutiae blown up into shaggy dog stories, whereas Burroughs' childhood is so exaggerated that even if slightly falsified, it includes numerous felonies (with him as victim, not perpetrator) and events that should have required intervention by a host of public agencies. The comparison is inexact enough that Salon's reviewer slammed Burroughs in a three-page review for all his narrative flaws, but I find myself feeling vastly more kindly toward him. His writing style is indeed on the simple side (education was hardly his first priority growing up), but the material is so outlandish that it doesn't require verbal fireworks to jump off the page.

Burroughs is a very bemused, surprisingly detached narrator, whose adolescence was so traumatic that it is hard to treat his memoir as anything but a coping mechanism. It's a bit ironic that the family he lived with sued him, given that his tone is so nonjudgmental throughout that one could make a strong suggestion that there is a Stockholm Syndrome effect at play, especially in the case of the daughter who was apparently sold at age 13 to an adult mental patient of her psychiatrist father to be his girlfriend in order to pay the family's bills. This one seems to be on strong footing factwise, as the father lost his license as a result according to public records. In some ways, Burroughs blandness as a narrator could probably be attributed to his lack of finesse as a writer. You just don't always get the feeling he has much more to say about anyone around him. As a result, the appeal of the book is really at its heart the freak-show aspect, lightened up by its good-natured breeziness. I know I should look down on it for that, but it works. Even though his childhood was a trainwreck, the book is anything but, and makes for a disturbingly good read. I'm still surprised that I liked it so much, but I did.

The movie, it should be said, is faithful to the book, with some, but not all, of the more graphic bits removed or edited around. It falls into the category, in fact, of movies that hew so closely to their source material that they add almost nothing to the book whatsoever. Alec Baldwin's performance is good, but nothing else about the film is particularly memorable.

Sunday Concert/Picnic Blogging

Sorry for the extended absence, but I'm back, and will try to resume posting on a mroe regular basis again, as well as clear through a growing backlog of unreviewed books (yes, I know that this is my own personal obsession, but so be it).

Friday night's regularly scheduled post was interrupted by an actual event here in Champaign, a concert at one of the local bars featuring a band from out of town. It marked the second time that we've seen The Tossers, an Irish/Punk band from Chicago. I've linked to one of their videos previously, and would basically describe their music as somewhat punk-influenced Irish. If the Dropkick Murphys are about 60/40 or so Punk/Irish, and Flogging Molly about 35/65, then The Tossers are about 25/75. More than anything else, they sound a great deal like the Pogues, and like the Pogues, tend to perform frequently, and likely best, a few sheets to the wind.

Onstage drunkenness, or at least drinkingness, can have a few interesting effects. Last time we saw them, it was a Sunday night (as quiet in Champaign as just about anywhere), and they were on the last night of a reasonably long tour through the Midwest. The band, who were pretty good and hammered, proceded to play just about every Irish song I know and more (Camptown Races even), and not a single one of their own creations. Not a one, in an hour and a half of continuous music. Last night, we were treated to a mix of the new (their album Agony just came out a few weeks ago), the old (The Valley of the Shadow of Death--cheerful album titles all around), and the older (Several of the Rover songs, and a number of Pogues covers). What can I say, the show rocked. For some examples of what we heard, check out this video or perhaps this one. Drunken Irish music is best played loud (there is a reason I lean toward Irish Punk, and away from the "Celtic Ladies" movement that certain of our readership prefers), and inside a bar, it is extremely loud. Even better, Champaign has a smoking ban, so the air inside was pretty clear (only the band gets to smoke), while all the smokers had to stay outside.

Making the show even better, the opening act was actually pretty good too. I am not sure if JigGsaw is a local college band, but they do pretty good pop/progressive punk for a local band. Thanks to the wonder of the internets, you don't have to take my word for it, and can check out their music on their Myspace page. Perhaps I am kidding myself, but I thought their rhythm section actually did a surprisingly good job of mixing things up, dropping into all sorts of ska-based beats and other things to keep things interesting.

Saturday was a bit calmer, as we went for a picnic at Lake of the Woods park in Mahomet, IL. BTW, let me highly recommend a good picnic basket for anyone who lives anwhere near the outdoors, which I assume is most of you. Very little in life is as relaxing as a nice picnic.

The park is home to the Early American Museum, which is just shockingly well done for a small museum. Rarely have I seen a small museum that manages to combine as thorough a collection of artifacts (in this case 19th century housewares, photographs, and other antique items) with a reasonably good overview of the time period for the area. I particularly liked the exhibit on baseball in Illinois over the past century, something that has sadly disappeared from the area over the past couple decades.