Pure Drivel

The local Schnuck's (one of those grocery stores which I just looove to visit), has just enticed me to visit them a little less grudgingly.  They have set up a used book table:  paperbacks $.50 each and hardcovers $1 each.  I splurged and spent a whopping $3 on my first perusual.  Few greater joys exist in life than finding that super-sweet bargain on a used book table.  Yes, I am a nerd.  However, the nature of the bargain also means that I will purchase something I would never have considered paying "good" money for. 

I found a treasure - a  "like new" hardcover edition of Willa Cather's My Antonia - and I found a "buy-it-because-it's-only-$.50" bargain - Pure Drivel by Steve Martin.

As you might expect, Martin's book is both amusing in a bizarre sort of way, and risque.  One of his most comical "essays" is on writing.

Writing is one of the most easy, pain-free, and happy ways to pass the time in all the arts.  For example, right now I am sitting in my rose garden and typing on my new computer.  Each rose represents a story, so I'm never at a loss for what to write.  I just look deep into the heart of the rose and read its story and write it down through typing, which I enjoy anyway.  Sometimes, it is true, agony visits the head of a writer.  At these moments I stop writing and relax with a coffee at my favorite restaurant, knowing that words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with, and, of course, ultimately denied.  Painters don't have that luxury.  If they go to a coffee shop, their paint dries into a hard mass.

I would recommend to writers that they live in California, because here they can look up at the blue sky in between those moments of looking into the heart of a rose.  I feel sorry for writers - and there are some pretty famous ones - who live in places like South America and Czecholslovakia, where I imagine it gets pretty dreary.  These writers are easy to spot.  Their books are often depressing and filled with disease and negativity.  If you're going to write about disease, I would suggest that California is the place to do it.  Dwarfism is never funny, but look at the result when it was dealt with out here in California.  Seven happy dwarfs.  Can you imagine dwarfs in Czecholslovakia?  You would get seven melancholic dwarfs at best...seven melancholic dwarfs with no handicapped parking spaces.

I can't say I exactly recommend the book, but the laughs were worth the $.50, and the couple hours I spent on its 104 pages.