Book Review: "The Hidden Life Of Humans"

The Hidden Life of Humans by Erika Ritter

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


First, the good: this book had a really cute cover. Now, the bad, which is all of the rest of it. Have you ever had a friend who couldn't just say a thing simply, but instead had to get sidetracked into endless pointless tangents, or who tried much too hard to be clever, until you just wanted to shake her and shout, "Get to the point!"? Erika Ritter is that friend.

She's terrifically fond of similes and metaphors. Especially long unnecessary ones that go on and on. The story here is simple: forty-something television writer Dana fills her life, such as it is, with meaningless hook-ups with married men. Lo and behold, she falls in love with one of them, an annoyingly British one named Carl who is basically full of manure. Will she ever realize she could have more out of life? Will she ditch these bozos and move on? Does anyone care what she does by the time they've slogged through almost 400 pages of her self-absorbed nonsense?

Oh, I almost forgot. About 10% of the novel is narrated by a dog named Murphy. That's the cleverest, best part of the book. The rest of the time is taken up with Dana's boring life, her incredibly irritating friend Karen--who calls Dana "Katie", because, teh quirky--Dana's imaginary conversations with people who aren't even really there, which drag on for eons, and of course, the obligatory and endless similes and metaphors.

If you want to read a terribly over-written novel about a not very interesting woman, a novel that never will grab you or make you curious about how anything will come out--except for the sainted dog--this is for you. Otherwise, drop this turkey off the nearest cliff and run away.



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The Fashion Sense Of Scarecrows

The fashion sense of scarecrows falls somewhat below
what one might wish for or expect, but let me be direct--

We are here by dint of some master's splintered stake,
charged with undertaking to repel, not attract

Those 24 that you've not caught, killed, tricked or baked.

The moral sense of scarecrows is something not often considered
as something pertinent to hired foreman or spurned bird,

But ruminate on this, as we have, long nights among the stalks--
envy of avian creatures gives rise to unwonted nocturnal talks

About how to catch and kill the critic, and leave him rotting intestate. 
______

10 lines it took me for-freaking-ever to come up with, for Kerry's "Eye of The Beholder" mini-challenge at Real Toads!

   

The Advice Communist

The "Life" section of the Detroit Daily Worker begins 
running a column called "The Advice Communist" alongside
state-sanctioned recipes for cornbread pie and
tips for decorating your collective factory.

Dear Advice Communist, writes Cheryl from Oak Park,
My mother wants a big church wedding, but my fiance
doesn't. They fight continually about it and I am in the 

middle.

Please help.

The Advice Communist reads the letter carefully, adjusts his

pince-nez, then composes his response:

There is no God, therefore your mother is a czarist symp-

athizer. 

Inform the authorities about her. Then after she

disappears, get married by a noble worker in the bed

of his state-manufactured farm truck.

Nancy from Southfield writes, My relatives from Frankenmuth

are visiting for Thanksgiving, and I am worried because

they don't control their bratty kids. What can I do?

Dear Nancy: Drive back the fascist swine with a withering hail

of machine-gun fire, followed by  mighty waves

of infantry. Pound them with artillery until nightfall,

then let the Michigan winter do the rest. If the cowards abandon

any of their indoctrinated swine-children, put them on

a train to the gulag. Happy Holidays!

The Detroit Daily Worker also runs the "Peanuts" comic

strip, featuring noble proletariat Lucy and 

capitalist puppet Charlie Brown. 

______

For De Jackson's "Let's Get Jambin' " at Dverse Place of Counterproductive Intoxication, and, of course, for the glory of the worker!

"The Advice Communist" first appeared as part of a May 7, 2011 post at my satire blog Objets D'art. 

Successes, Enumerated

I.

Congratulations! I didn't get the job.
Useful degrees never bore my name,
but the inside covers of used paperbacks did.

Tolstoy, Ferlinghetti and Bronte made poor references,
had no current phone or email,
and though I came to know them well, they had little to say about me.

Way to go! I stayed for years in part time positions
because there was staring out the window to be done,
bad poetry to be written,
and rain to be contemplated.

II.

Fan-freaking-tastic! The acrimonious divorce,
the shit-canning of thirteen years of trying to be
straight,
responsible,
respectable, and all that jazz.

So sorry, Mr. and Ms. Notgoodenough.
Hello, solitude. Hello to bashing away at the hunk of marble
inside of which I had been hiding.

I got rid of my slave name.
I loved several wrong but exciting persons,
too much and briefly, but oh boy. (though most of them weren't.)

And now here I am. Ta-da! 
With the house on fire,
my tail on fire,
and my words on fire.

Don't call 9-1-1, I want to burn.

III.

Somewhere, in some non-existent suburban shadowland,

there is a sensible person who put her books away

along with her red shoes.

She is liked, I guess, by all,

whoever she is,

blinking on and off as required, like a traffic light.

______

 
For Izy's Out of Standard at Real Toads.

 
 

Novembre

Born with a Fleur-de-lis birthmark,
I said, "De la paix du ciel, 
je suis venu pour la guerre."

Lamb, lioness, God's own girl.

Now, in autumn,
I light candles for those I pray for,
and dance on the graves of the rest.

A strong heart waits for you,
My Love,
here in my body's dust.
_____

A 55 for Kerry.

"De la paix du ciel, je suis venu pour la guerre." = "From the peace of Heaven, I have come for the war."

 

Reconsidering Liars

"Let there be light."
Did you think
He had it just lying around?
The sun, the stars....all made up.

Billy Robinson was an upstate New Yorker of Scottish ancestry,
a magician who reinvented himself
as Chung Ling Soo, Chinese conjurer,
ripping off most of his act from another vaudevillian.

His wife Suee Seen was really named "Dot." 
They weren't really married.
She was as American as he was.

Consider this:
"America" is a construct. 
You start with trees, bears and native tribes,
kill most of them, plant a flag and
Voila! America. Something that wasn't there before,
like a rabbit out of a hat.

You'll argue that it was there, just different,
like "your" card, now at the top of the deck every time,
fanned in the illusionist's hands.

Watch and learn, padewon.
Billy Robinson whipped lather in a mug and shaved off his moustache,
used greasepaint to darken his complexion,
threw on some bright Oriental robes,
and started banking the cash from the suckers who came for his act.

God would tell you,
ya gotta have a gimmick,
whether you call it Manifest Destiny or The Ten Commandments.
Billy's was a stunt he called "Condemned to Death by the Boxers."

Marked bullets were loaded into rifles wielded by stooges in costume;
the weapons were rigged not to fire,
but Chung Ling Soo would appear to catch the deadly missiles with a china plate.
However,
the sun and stars are slowly burning themselves out,
and the rifles became worn with cleaning.

Bam! Bam! And down went Billy, right there on stage.
"I've been shot," he said, in astonished perfect English.
You can look on Wikipedia today and find Chung Ling Soo's whole story.
Do you think that if he had stayed Billy,
kept his moustache,
and sold tam o' shanters in a shop all his life,
that anyone would remember him now?

Let there be light,
how ever it is made, and how ever far it has to travel
to get here.
________

Cassandra

With barbs through my swollen lips,
I told huge lies
about an angel.

With a cracked skull, I said every wicked thought I had,
to the wind,
to the wind.

The angel warned every neighbor and cousin about my evil.
She wept,
and swept her reptile tail discreetly out of sight.

I ran, such an ugly girl that the sun turned away,
and the clouds
abandoned white for shroudy gray.

No one believed anything I said--
not the stupid, swaying trees,
not the flimsy hollow-boned birds,
not the thin air I spread my screams into.

No one, until I found her in the crack-glassed mirror,
spit on by Apollo,
disregarded and accurate--

Cassandra.
_____

for Ella