Endocrine, La Comedie Humaine

When I was younger, my mother always considered me to be the more sociable of her children. It wasn't that my siblings were loners, exactly; rather, she took pleasure in telling me that I could "make friends with a tree stump."

Her words.

Lately, however, I've been moving a great deal, which can make a girl shy. And on top of that I have a full-time job making me tired, actual ambitions which occasionally cause me to hunker down, and a person who's almost always at home whom I like a lot better than most of the chumps you just pick up off the street. So when Dave and I do end up hanging out with someone new, sometimes I feel like a conversation jump-start might not go amiss.

Luckily, there are books. You might not think that something that creates such creatures as "bookworms" and "nerds" - generally solo beasts - would be such a social (if you will) aphrodisiac. But you must consider how many books there are: many are written by utter cranks, or are, through their mere earnestness, wildly hilarious. Yes, regular "intellectual" books can also stimulate conversation, but those are the pieces of literature which I discuss with people I already know.

The absolute, number one best-ever book for guaranteed success at a party (or anywhere. In a funeral home this would go over well) is a little jewel called Gunfighting at Home and Related Subjects by one ER Fenjohn. Who this mythical man Fenjohn might be is hazy and unclear. We see a photograph of him at the beginning of the book ("Author answering the door at night with gun in pocket and hand on gun.") and we get certain insights into his character through all-caps exclamations like "I AM A GUNFIGHTER," as well as hand-drawn cartoons featuring two cons named Whacky and Frosty. But what is his essence? From what dark womb did he escape? Why does he look so much like Hugh Hefner?

The answers to these questions are not for us to know. But I do know that this book is as good as the first time, every time.

The second book in my aresenal is a more recent acquisition (I should point out that both of these books are technically Dave's), which was picked up at a local used bookstore this past weekend. The book, Gustav Eckstein's The Body Has a Head, is, at first glance, simply an anatomy text. Certainly it describes the body and its organs, the mind and its methods. But a glance at the book's description on the back cover makes it clear that this is an odyssey of a stranger kind:

"Looking back, it seems all indirection. The earliest memories are scanter than other people's, only occasionally a clear one. Cheese -- ridiculous. There was an inborn love of cheese; on a half-dark wintery morning, because it was Christmas, I was permitted to walk what for my legs was miles and when the grocer had weighed the cheese he sliced off a slice from what was my mother's, gave it to me, because it was Christmas, and I could nibble it all the slow way home, and there was the tree."

From there it really only gets better - for example, the title to this post is also the title to the chapter on the endocrine system.

Beyond that, I had more to say: about, for example, how I've begun reading Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. I haven't actually finished the first book of the Gulag Archipelago yet - a book which contains phrases almost literally crystalline. Cancer Ward is a bit less personal, less elegant. But at the same time the narrative and character development in the book are dreamy and tight-knit, and it may be a better overall piece of literature in my opinion.

But more on that later. It seems a bit ridiculous to talk about Solzhenitsyn in the same breath as ER Fenjohn.

*** Image credit: code poet on flickr.com