Dolly Freed’s call to simple living and to abandoning ship on the money economy/wage slavedom is the simplest, yet most poignant I think I’ve come across yet. “It’s feasible. It’s easy. It can be done. It should be done. Do it.”
Well, well, well, if it wasn’t a freegan manifesto. Dolly doesn’t call her book Possum Living that, probably never even heard the word “freegan,” but all the ingredients are there:
(a) Fuck the money economy (Who wants to work a full-time job when you don’t have to?)
(b) Wean yourself off of your obsession with material possessions because it’s easier to live without them than it is to work for the money to buy them.
(c) Learn how to provide for yourself—hunt, garden, forage, dumpster dive, scavenge, diy, borrow, build, and make, and then sit back and love the non-working life.
Though she often quotes the Bible to back up her points, Dolly claims that she and her possum-living pops aren’t religious, idealistic, or anything else that most of the back-to-the-woods folks, then and now, seem very often to be.
No she says proudly, “We’re just incredibly lazy. You wouldn’t believe it! We have an anarchy here wherein neither has to do anything we don’t feel like doing. (Except to feed the creatures. You can’t neglect animals in your care.) Normally I do the housework and the Old Fool does the garden, the heavy work, and the care of the creatures. Not because we have sexist roles, but because the housework bugs him more than it bugs me, and vice versa. If I don’t feel like doing the dishes for a couple of days, why I just don’t do them. I often feed the animals if Daddy feels like goofing off, and he often does the dishes. The anarchy works for us because we love each other and don’t abuse it. It amazed me that so many people must either dominate or be dominated, like a bunch of monkeys on Monkey Island at the zoo.”
But Possum Living is more practice than preach, and in it you’ll find tips for hunting and fishing (and cooking the bounty), instructions for raising rabbits and chickens in your cellar, moonshine recipes, tips for saving money on food (buy your grains at the animal feed store, for one), and instructions on diy health care (coincidentally, all of Dolly’s remedies are moonshine), housing (buy a cheap wreck and fix it up with scavenged materials), schooling (hello, public library), clothing (thrift stores), and law (a very strange chapter mostly involving suggestions for bullying others into doing what you’ve decided is right). The chapters on brewing your own booze are the best I’ve ever seen and the most simple: no fancy gadgets to buy (as there always were in your average brewing/distilling book) and diy as hell.
“Fat and sassy”—that’s how Dolly describes her totem the possum, and it’s how I’d describe her book (though it was an incredibly quick read at 218 liberally spaced pages). And what a lady! She wrote Possum Living when she was 18 years old, and a year after a small publisher printed it (Universe Books, 1979), Bantam picked it up and printed the hell out of it.
Most interesting, perhaps, is that the most recent printing (Tin House Books, 2010) is accompanied by an afterward written by an older, wiser Ms. Freed. Her Dad, who she lived with during her possum days, she left to drown in moonshine, and then she got her GED, put herself through college, and became a NASA engineer.
She regrets, she says in the afterward, the take on diy law she advocated when she was 18 and especially regrets recommending having children out of wedlock. These days she lives in Texas with a couple of kids and a couple of air conditioners. Her possum days are long behind her, but with a little help from her book, yours don’t have to be.
Should you get a’ itching to get yourself some Possum Living, click on the link above. Apparently, by buying it that way, I’ll end up getting money, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Otherwise, I bet your local library has a copy, and I bet you have a pen you could use to copy down all Dolly’s instructions possum-style.
Tonight I will be doing a Click Clack Gorilla reading at Raumstation Rödelheim. Then Margaret Killjoy, the editor of Mythmakers and Lawbreakers will talk about Anarchism in Literature. There will be witty cartoon “slides.” (Fuck projectors. Long live hand written posters on the back of other, older posters.) I am too disorganized to be sure, but I think it will begin around 8 pm.
This is where I ask you for advice
I still haven’t decided what I will read tonight. (Probably two or three peices from the first paper issue of Click Clack Gorilla and/or the website.) So if you have a favorite bit (or subject), I’m taking requests. Leave them in the comments, even if you won’t be able to make it tonight.
I have come to some conclusions about my priorities in the last few days that will change everything. (Rethinking things does seem to be in the air right now, doesn’t it? A Bird song lyric keeps coming to mind, “Everything she knows could be false.” Always a good thing to keep in mind. But this isn’t quite that kind of rethinking.)
The main conclusion is obvious, but goes something like this: “I really, really, REALLY want to get the trash book finished and published as soon as possible.” Well, duh. I already knew that. But I wasn’t living it yet. I was letting other projects distract me.
See, I like to work on five or six projects at once. The perspective this tactic allows is nice, but that means each of those five or six projects take longer to finish. With a big project like a book that is half narrative/personal essay and half research, it taking longer could end up meaning years longer. By then someone else will have written it, or something so close that I won’t be able to find a publisher for it, and I am fairly certain that if I really concentrate, I could finish it before 2011.
And so!
I have reset my priorities. I have decided that I will not work on any zine projects until the trash book is finished. (None!) I have decided that I will not organize any concerts, except for the ones that I have already committed to, until the trash book is finished. (Zero!) My trash book and finishing my wagon are IT.
I will do a little something for the book and a little something on my wagon every single day until they both are finished. The wagon will be the first to go, and I will write the final pages in my symphony of trash from the little red folding table that will live there.
For the last few years my top priorities have been too broad. I was too excited about too many things.
1. Sleep, getting good sleep, and lots of it.
2. Food
3. Everything else, a category in which I worked on a dozen projects and none at all and floundered around a bit (I might call it now) in a “everything is awesome and I’m so inspired and I have so many ideas” sort of way. It’s a great way to feel. It’s just you finish things very slowly, or you don’t finish them at all.
My new list of priorities doesn’t look that different, but it’s gotten more specific.
1. Sleep.
2. Food.
3. The daily life shit that keeps me sane, for example, doing dishes and chopping wood.
4. Making music.
5. Trash book and the wagon.
The first three are part of being alive. They are like breathing, and I can’t understand why some people chose to forgo them (I’m thinking specifically food and sleep here) in order to “be more productive.” The only thing that I am more of when I haven’t gotten enough sleep or a good meal is bitchy. Number four has also become a bit like breathing, but also covers hanging out with friends and drinking whiskey and being ruckus and ridiculous. (Not to be underestimated.) And into number five all the rest of my energy will flow.
You have probably noticed that blogging isn’t on the list. But never fear, this is not one of those letters, the letter where I come to sit you down and explain that it’s over. Blogging will be the thing I do in between other things, when I need a little break or a little feedback. It will not be a goal in and of itself. I’m not sure it ever really was. I’m not really that kind of blogger. And if you’re still here, you’re probably not really that kind of reader.
What it might mean is that I will be here a little bit less, and it certainly means that when I am here I’ll probably be talking about trash and/or my wagon. Maybe I’ll even get a little silly and give you updates on how this whole exercise is focus and motivation is going.
I know some of you are writers too. What do you do to stay motivated? To stay focused? Let’s whisper our secrets too each other across these screens and pretend we’re sitting in a cafe together, spinning out the plots to unborn novels, reading sentences, and trading characters and advice and pats on the back over cups of coffee and fresh mint tea, like we would if we lived in the same city.
Every time I finish reading a book I write down the date, the title, and the author on the last page of my journal. It’s fascinating and exciting to look back over the years at all of the things I’ve read and to remember how each affected what I was living and breathing at the time.
Inspired by a lovely friend’s posting of a similar list (and I thought I was the only one who kept lists like this, long live the book punks!) that I thoroughly enjoyed perusing, I have decided to post my own list because I figure it just might spur a few conversations, and I really like conversations about books. Unfortunately I can’t find the journal I used at the start of the year, so the list is incomplete, and begins in April 2009. I’m also pretty sure that I read a mountain of zines that I completely failed to include.
1. Die 13-1/2 Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär by Walter Moers
2. The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving by John Hoffman
3. Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn
4. Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck
5. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
6. Despite Everything by Aaron Cometbus (reread)
7. Empire of Scrounge by Jeff Ferrell
8. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins
9. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Ellix Katz
10. Double Duce by Aaron Cometbus
11. Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins
12. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaimon
13. Eye in the Sky by P.K. Dick
14. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
15. Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict
16. The Bandit Queen of India by Phoolan Devi
17. Bukaka Spat Here by I Forgot to Write Down the Authors’ Names
18. Rocket Queen (zine–anon author I believe)
19. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (reread)
20. Barrel Fever by David Sedaris (reread)
21. Rumo by Walter Moers
22. Die Stadt der Träumende Bücher by Walter Moers
23. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
24. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (reread)
25. Access All Areas by Ninjalicious (reread)
26. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser
A new book arrived in the mail today, courtesy of my mother: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trashb y Susan Strasser. I’m only on page 7, and it’s already the most exciting book I’ve read in months. Come to think of it, it’s the most exciting book since the last book I read about trash. You could say I’m obsessed. And I could say I am what I eat.
Strasser’s other books have left her something of an expert on the history of housework (A History of American Housework), and in discussing the shift in society away from mending, recycling, and re-use and toward the throwaway society we find ourselves in today, she describes a number of household norms from the 1800s.
She describes how people would throw their garbage and dishwater directly out the kitchen window. She cites magazines that advised housewives to sort food scraps into pig and/or chicken feed, grease for cooking and soap making, and still-edibles. She talks about how scrap collectors sorted everything from fabric to metal to re-use and re-sell. And it all reminded me so much of the Wagenplatz.
Not having running water in the kitchen means we also don’t have a drain to carry our dishwater to a faraway treatment plant that we will never see. Yet we can’t pour our dish-washing water right out the window because the soap we use is toxic. (Was it already toxic in the 1800s, I wonder? I have read that it was once common to use hot water, lemon juice, and a bit of sand to clean dishes back in the day, so perhaps not. But don’t quote me on that.) So we walk a few extra meters and pour the dish water down the gully in the street behind our land.
Food trash we often toss directly out the window: coffee grounds blend into the dirt immediately, and other food scraps disappear into chicken beaks faster than you can say “compost.” (Our chickens seem to spend most of their time in the compost pile. Worms, bugs, food scraps—it’s a regular chicken smorgasbord and their earth-tiling dance keeps the compost aerated and decomposing healthily.)
There is plenty of non-organic trash that gets thrown directly out the window—pretty much anything you need to get out of your hands quick—but those items we usually end up collecting later and sending off to the dumpster 20th-century style.
As for re-using trash, well, I’d that’s what people known in German as “Messies” do best: reinvent the junk they just couldn’t help but fish out of the dumpster and store in their shed for 15 years until just the right re-use for it came up. Clothing is patched, curtains and table clothes made out of old sheets, crates re-thought as shelves, then kindling. (In a world without Ikea all furniture was once future firewood. Fuck you Ikea. )When one of us is in a rotten mood Scissors and I take stacks of plates to a nearby parking lot for a good smashing, though these days I’m saving the uglies to pound into colorful gravel for a little garden path.
The Orm is what Walter Moers calls the divine, possessed inspiration that comes over a writer when working on what will become a masterpiece. In this video—which I guarantee will interest any of my writer readers, and maybe a few others besides—Elizabeth Gilbert (who apparently wrote a best-selling book called Eat Pray Love, among other rather interesting things) talks about her relationship with the orm and re-assesses the way our culture understands creative genius.
It happens often. I’m sitting on my bike or eating a sandwich and a feeling of complete awe falls over me like a god damn seizure. “How the hell did I end up here?” I look around at the wagon, at the dumpstered carrot in my hand, the couch from the trash across the street, and the drafts of my book taped to the walls. Then I grin. And I write things like this.
Punk rock did not save my life. Maybe it saved yours, maybe it didn’t, but it seems like it’s been pretty key for the authors of the books and zines that I’ve been reading lately. Whereas most of the activists in my current community came to activism through punk rock, I came to activism through books, and from there eventually arrived at punk rock. Some people might say this makes me a geek, but as long as we’re throwing around useless labels, let’s say it makes me a book punk and celebrate.
There are a lot of ways to tell the story, and this version is paved with books. So far I’d say it’s been like a good run at Chutes and Ladders, with the end of civilization as the end goal. (Note to self: get an old copy of that game and re-invent it as an endgame scenario. Rejoice; play all winter while hiding inside from the cold.)
It probably started with The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin. I’d read and loved her Earthsea Trilogy when I was 10 or 11, which lead me to more of her books (she does a lot of interesting social critique type science fiction/fantasy, I’d recommend checking out The Left Hand of Darkness as well, if you like that sort of thing), which led me to The Dispossessed. It is a story about anarchists who have taken up residence on the moon that revolves around a physicist who gets the chance to visit earth (the anarchists and the earthlings have little to no contact) and talks a lot about capitalism and anarchism and the pros and cons of how each is run in these two fictional societies. I haven’t read it since, but at the time it was fascinating, eye-opening, and had passages that left me with that warm magical feeling of having discovered something in black and white on paper that I had felt budding inside of me for years, but had never articulated. That feeling that the author had managed to perfectly articulate my very own thoughts, and that I was not alone. Nikki, meet anarchism; anarchism, Nikki.
From there I jumped into The Alexander Berkman Reader (which was alright) and Living My Life by Emma Goldman (which was fantastic and inspirational). Again and again I discovered thoughts and feelings on paper that felt as if they’d been bubbling inside of me for years, unspoken, unsown. Now here were others thinking them, describing them, praising them, analyzing them, and reading their words helped me to clarify my own thoughts, and slowly I began to speak, the seed that had long lain dormant sprouting up and up, toward the bright light of the sun.
Then I got a copy of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and my fucking head just exploded. There are probably still pieces of it on the wall behind my bed. I was excited and read Quinn’s Story of B (for many a book more digestible as it’s narrator is not a talking gorilla, as in Ishmael) in a storm.
It was the same year that I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser whose last chapter so poignantly declared, hey, if what you read here bothers you, then do something, stop buying this shit, we have to start somewhere and individuals can make a difference. The day I finished that book I stopped eating meat. That was important. Not the fact that I sworn off meat, but the fact that despite having spent most of my life feeling too small and helpless to change the world’s big bad problems, this book had convinced me in a few paragraphs that I too had leverage power. That was all in one year, round about 2003.
That’s how I came to anarchism, to food activism, and to the tip of the anti-civ iceberg. When I started reading Quinn I couldn’t believe that friends of mine had actually read it without freaking out and/or drastically changing their lives. (Actually, I still sometimes wonder how this is possible.) But despite the fires Quinn had lit in my brain, after that year I still landed myself a “chute” instead of a “ladder” and signed myself up for a corporate desk job. There were college loans to be paid off, and I could start two weeks after graduation. What I really wanted to do was travel, but in the end I took the safe route, paid off the loans, and let corporate life gradually destroy all the bits of my creativity and spontaneity that college hadn’t already gotten.
I was still reading about anarchism and activism, but besides working that was pretty much all I was doing. Corporate Desk Work Steals Human Soul (I’d like to see that in the headlines), ho hum, everybody knows the story and mine isn’t any different, except that after a year I ran screaming, brashly decided to move to Germany after being offered a job taking care of some rich people’s children, and a whole new era began.
My reading had left so many questions, and I tried to work them out. So civilization was crap, but what now? I sure as hell didn’t have a clue. Even Quinn’s Beyond Civilization didn’t really clear this up. What about the pacifism versus violence issue? At the time I actually wrote an essay about why pacifism was a decent idea and that violent things like guns were kind of stupid. How embarrassing to look back at, like an awkward pubescent yearbook photo. Lucky for me I never ended up publishing the zine I had written it for.
I also started to get interested in spreading ideas through alternative mediums like graffiti and urban art. I read Days of War, Nights of Love and Evasion, and my head exploded again in ecstasy/intellectual harmony/inspiration once again. Every day I was changing little things about my life. The seed I had found in my reading that last year of college had sprouted into an enormous vine, still climbing.
I slobbered over books by Howard Zinn and the Situationalists. I participated in Food Not Bombs. The little things in my life that I was changing started to become big things. I took six months off work to work on some writing projects and never really managed to convince myself to come back. I moved into a little dwelling in a squatted community and left my job for good. I became a scavenger and more or less stopped buying things, stopped buying into them. Fuck the job I didn’t really like, fuck the health insurance salesperson making money at my expense while denying coverage for things I needed, fuck pretending like money really meant anything and could be traded for things as precious as food, water and shelter. I started dedicating my life to things that felt important deep in my gut, instead of those things I’d been socialized to understand as important.
When my cousin got her hands on As the World Burns by Derrick Jensen and excitedly sent it on to me, its message totally blew everything we’d read up until then out of the water and articulated so many points we’d still been a bit tongue-tied about up to that point in a clear, logical way that helped us both to further untangle our own complicated thoughts.
I read Endgame in my first wagon home by candlelight (no grid electricity or running water there) and since then the progression of my gorilla thought has become less and less track-able as my influences have swung away from (mainly) life-changing books (though I was recently quite inspired by The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Katz) to life-changing people (and the songs and zines they write and distribute themselves) and experiences that have kept the ball rolling since as I try to create media that will inspire others myself.
And that brings us right up to today, to you and me sitting on opposite sides of two computer screens. You knowing so much about my life, and me wondering so much about yours.
I read Empire of Scrounge by Jeff Ferrell on an eight-hour train ride north. Across the aisle a woman was reading a magazine article titled, “What to buy for the man who has everything.” There were pictures of products accompanied by bite-sized blurbs praising them.
Empire of Scrounge is about trash picking, scrounging, recycling, living off what others waste, selling scrap metal, collecting cans. It is a fascinating, articulate book, both narrative and academic in scope.
I let the book fall open at random and read a passage that I had underlined: “It’s long been my sense that, more than any other engine, corporate hyperconsumerism drives contemporary U.S. society, along the way constructing a seductive if sad sort of store-bought commonality among many of its members. As disturbing, the profligate waste produced by this endless hyperconsumptive panic seems less an unfortunate by-product than a component essential to its continuation. (5)”
Outside of the window bright yellow fields of canola slid past us as they had been for hours. It was the first time I had ever seen canola plants, though I recognized them from the picture on the bottles of oil at the supermarket.
I glanced back across the aisle at the magazine reader. Her eyes were still fixed upon the page, studying each item suggested for the ominous Man With It All. (Does he really exist, I wonder?) The article, directly juxtaposed with the thesis of the book on my lap, becomes a direct example of Ferrell’s point, presuming as it does that though there are people whose lives and homes are completely saturated with material goods, these people still need to have more. “Having everything” must be redefined as “still not enough,” else sales plummet, marring the economy.
The article also insinuates in its unspoken premises that gifts have nothing to do with need. Which is another way of saying that consumption, buying things, is an important and meaningful activity in and of itself. Even if your budget is a bit stretched (there are articles about this too), even if you already “have everything,” you must continue to consume, else all, else YOU, will be lost.
So companies invent new products to ensure that there is always something new to buy, and magazines print articles advising consumers on acceptable consumer practices. The only acceptable practice being to never stop or slow down. There are even shirts and buttons available to this tune, emblazoned with sayings like “Shop ’til you drop” and on sale now at your local retail outlet for 9.99.
There are encyclopedias worth of “literature” on this subject, though they are rarely described as such by their readers. Stores filled with magazines whose main “articles”—that is, advertisements thinly veiled as articles—win people marketing awards.
What is fashion but a clever way to convince people that their clothing, though still perfectly wearable, must be discarded and replaced with the new season’s trends? (Arguably there is some fashion that could fall into the category “art,” but this is generally not the subject of Cosmo’s fashion spreads.) What are fashion magazines but propaganda machines for this myth? People study these magazines like religious fanatics pour over their bibles. As a teenager, I did it myself. Each month’s issue the new Word, the scriptures to be interpreted and lived in an attempt to be socially acceptable, to have words like “hip” and “fashionable” fastened onto one’s identity moniker.
The products for the Man With It All will inevitably be purchased and will, just as inevitably, be thrown away again. After all, it was never the product itself that was important, not in a case like this. It was the act of buying it that mattered. What happens afterward is irrelevant.
If I “have nothing” (as defined by magazine articles) then maybe in a healthier parallel universe, I am the one with everything. Because I will be able to decide for myself what having “everything” means. And everything will have to do with life, with food and shelter and joyful relationships. Every stilled shopper is a stilled economic cog. Let’s get lost.
I have spent the last two days working on my book. It is ironic that writing and writers are so often romanticized. “What a fantastic life he must lead,” people think. “He’s a writer.”
But watching someone write a book is probably one of the most boring spectacles there is. And writing? Writing is sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day, not talking to anyone, interacting only with the glowing screen. I wouldn’t trade it for any other occupation, but I’m not going to lie to you about it either. The process of writing is really only interesting for the writer.
When I am writing, I am no longer with you in the room. I do not hear the television or the music playing in my headphones (though having the music playing at all is part of my ritual for entering the writing trance). I am in the story.
When I am excited about something, can’t wait for the day when it will finally happen, I write out the scenario as I imagine it, tens of, hundreds of times in my notebook. Because every time I write it I am there, living it.
Virtual reality and time travel were invented when the first word was written.
My manuscript is getting fat—53 pages fat to be exact. But the structure is chaotic, still a direct reflection of my garbled thoughts. I have only ever been capable of organizing my thoughts through writing. So first comes the babble, then the order. At the end of it all I find that I have finally learned how to say what I was thinking, to translate the brain babble into English.
My computer screen is too small to fix lengthy structural problems. At most I can see three paragraphs at a time. So I printed out pages one through 16 and taped them all to the bookshelf behind my desk, making large notes in the margins about what was happening in each section so I could look at the bigger picture, making notes about where to move things that were still incubating in paragraphs set off with bolded question marks.
It was then that I played “dead flag blues” (a godspeed! you black emperor song) and stared at the pages, fluttering there against all those bound volumes.
I imagined them burning, edges curling in on themselves in yellow and orange.
I have dedicated myself to sterility, to nonfiction. (It was an accident, officer, I swear!) Yet my heart beats in these lines, and the louder it gets, the closer I will be to finishing.
I hear it is national novel writing month. A little bird told me.
It is winter, and I have to resist the urge to go into hibernation with every cell. But with a sore throat, I give in and spend the days in bed drifting between sleeping and reading, reading and sleeping and dreaming.
Rain clicks onto the roof and on a wicker chair across the room, the Beard plays the banjo. The wood stove crackles, and I sigh. Sore throat or not, I feel perfectly content to be just where I am, in this skin, under this blanket and this roof.
Wrapped in four down blankets, propped up on pillows, tea steaming beside me, and hankies within arm’s reach, I read for hours, taking breaks to stare longingly, excitedly at the shelf of unread books above the bed, to fade into dreams of adventure stories not yet written down on any page.
In bed I forget about logging onto the computer and writing. Without any particular story to tell you, I thought I would tell you about the stories I’ve read recently, hoping a few of you might read them too, and tell me what fills your own rainy fall nights.
Should you for some reason decide to purchase any of these books, then pretty pretty please do it through the links I’ve provided at the bottom of the page. Because if you’re going to buy something anyway, amazon might as well share a bit of the profit with the click clack gorilla, right? Right. So. To the books!
Die Stadt der Träumenden Bücher—The City of Dreaming Books as it’s called in its English translation—is the kind of book that I, literary geek that I am, had fallen for before I’d even parted its pages. The cover, a horizon of books as far as the eye can see. And the first page? More books, and a lovely poem about books, dreaming of the days when they were trees, dreaming of being read. Love. At. First. Sight.
The plot follows an aspiring young author (Hildegunst von Mythenmetz) to the city of Buchhaim, the city of dreaming books, and a place where books are dangerous, poisonous, and sometimes alive. On the search for the author of an unsigned manuscript, he finds himself in catacombs beneath the city, battling fantastical creatures and, well, books.
An extra bonus for all the literature geeks out there is that all of Moers invented authors are permutations of real-world authors. And that the book was actually written by Mythenmetz himself, translated by Moers, and filled with amusing footnotes about words and concepts that, not existing in his own language, Moers had to reinvent or translate around.
Moers imagination is as delightful as J.K. Rowling’s, and, much to my approval, generally more morbid. Morbid fantasy meets adventure meets literary humor. You, and by you I really mean me, just can’t go wrong with a formula like that.
Until ten minutes ago, I didn’t know that Walter Moers—who is an extremely popular German comic- and novel-writer, had been translated in English. I may have even, as late as last night, rather snobbishly insisted that he couldn’t have possibly been translated into English because I hadn’t hear of him until recently. Not in all my years of fantasy geek-dom or book clerk-dom (oh Waldenbooks…) had I once heard his name. Then I came to Germany and he was everywhere, and so I read The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Blue Bear (which I’d recommend starting with, should you decide to dip your toes into any of these fine adventures) and Rumo And His Miraculous Adventures and became immediately addicted.
Stock up for winter, dear friends, and I will cross my fingers that the English translations are just as good as the originals.
