The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N is a charming, short novel from 1937, by Leonard Q. Ross, actual Jewish name Leo Rosten, who taught ESL in New York. It has no real plot – I think it was originally a series of short stories – but each chapter is another episode from the tribulations of Mr. Parkhill, who gamely tries to teach English to a bunch of my very distant cousins. His most remarkable student is H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, as he invariably writes his own name, in crayon, with blue outlines around the red letters. Mr. Kaplan’s English never seems to improve, but he loves class anyway:

“No, sir!” cried Mr. Kaplan impetuously. “‘Good, gooder, goodest? It’s to leff!”
“We say that X, for example, is good. Y, however, is–?” Mr. Parkhill arched an eyebrow interrogatively.
“Batter!” said Mr. Kaplan.
“Right! And Z is–?”
“High-cless!”

Mr. Kaplan always has the last word:

“Maybe isn’t ‘Heng yoursalf in resaption hall” altogadder a mistake,” Mr. Kaplan murmured dreamily. “If som pipple came to mine house dat vould maybe be exactel vat I should say.”

Rich recommended I read Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, which I think he got from Froyo, so when I saw it for $6 in Boston, but a few T stops from Boston College, where the author, Steve Almond, beats grammar into freshmen, I snapped it up, even though it was hardback and I prefer paperbacks. It turned out to be a very entertaining, breezy account of every aspect of Almond’s obsession with candy. From the prologue, “Some things you should know about the author”:

3. The author has between three and seven pounds of candy in his house at all times.
Perhaps you think I am exaggerating for effect.
I am not exaggerating for effect.
Here is a catalog of all the candy in my apartment as of right now, 3:21 p.m., July 6, 2003:

• 2 pounds minature Clark Bars
• 1.5 pounds dark chocolate-covered mint patties
• 24 bite-size peanut butter cups
• 1 pound Tootsie Roll Midgets
• 4 ounces of Altoids-like cinnamon disks
• 6 ounces cherry-flavored jellies (think budget Jujyfruits)
• A single gold-foiled milk chocolate ball with mysterious butter truffle-type filling
• 2 squares of Valrona [sic] semisweet chocolate (on my bedside table)
• 3 pieces Fleer bubblegum

I am not counting the fourteen boxes of Kit Kat Limited Edition Dark, which I have stored in an undisclosed warehouse location, nor whatever candy I might have stashed, squirrel-like, in obscure drawers.

So you can tell that he’s serious about candy. He mostly talks about all the candies he’s ever eaten, the ones he’s heard about but hasn’t eaten, the ones he used to eat that don’t exist anymore, etc. The meat (or nutmeat) of the book is where he goes on a cross-country frenzy of visiting the small regional family candy companies that still make Twin Bings and Idaho Spuds and Abba-Zabas and Five Star Bars, which he claims, convincingly, are the single greatest candy bar in existence:

There was caramel, obviously, but also roasted almonds and nuggets of dark chocolate. It was draped in a thin layer of milk chocolate. The interplay of tastes and textures was remarkable: the teeth broke through the milky chocolate shell, sailed through the mild caramel, only to encounter the smoky crunch of the almonds, and finally, the rich tumescence of the dark chocolate. You almost never see milk and dark chocolate commingled, but the effect in this bar was striking: The sweetness of the milk chocolate rushed across the tongue, played against the musky crunch of the nut, then faded. The bite finished with an intense burst of dark chocolate, softened by the butter dissolution of caramel. What I mean here: there was a temporal aspect to the bar, a sense of evanescence and persistence.

There’s also a lot of interesting history and background and whatnot, plus some sort of distressing introspection about why he likes candy so much: basically, because his family didn’t love him.

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear is the most exciting book I’ve read in quite a while. The book itself is very exciting, but what I really mean is that it gave me the visceral thrill of reading more than any book since maybe The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth’s stunningly gorgeous novel in verse. I can’t read Russian, but if the translation I read is anything to go by, I think Golden Gate is better, even, than its forerunner, Eugene Onegin. One of my favorite half-sonnets goes,

O loveliness, contrained and free!
Ah, Mozart, prince of music makers
Who (for the miracle you gave)
Lie buried in an unmarked grave!
Now the world movers and world shakers
–Archbisops, stewards, counts, and kings–
Rot voiceless, you still lend us wings.

Anyway, that has nothing at all to do with Bluebear. I just like to hype Golden Gate, which for some reason doesn’t get as much attention as Seth’s other books. From Heaven Lake is also too ignored – it’s a wonderful travelogue about hitchhiking from Nanjing to Calcutta through Tibet.

Getting back to the best children’s book since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: while waiting for my Indian visa, I was killing time at Green Apple Books, my current favorite bookstore, on Clement Street, one of my favorite streets in San Francisco. You know those little cards where stores tell you what’s good? Green Apple might as well be wallpapered in them, and as far as I can tell, every one of them is right on. Everyone who works there seems to have really good taste. Bluebear was one of these books, and boy, am I glad I took the gamble and got it on top of English, August (see below), which was the book I was actually looking for.

Apparently, Bluebear was some huge bestseller in Germany, a country with notably good instincts in the realm of children’s books, the land of Struwwelpeter and The Neverending Story, which, let me tell you, is an incredibly rad book, and probably 9 times better than the movie, which is also awesome. It’s by some dude named Walter Moers, who seems to have written a bunch of these types of books. I ordered another one, but messed up the shipping, so hopefully it’ll get to me before I leave for India on Sunday. Bluebear is, as you might expect, a blue bear. You may not know, though, that bluebears have 27 lives. This is the story of his first 13½, told as a memoir. Bluebear doesn’t know how he was born, but he showed up as a tiny baby bluebear, floating in a walnut shell, about to fall into the fearsome Malmstrom, a vast whirlpool. Luckily, the Minipirates rescued him, and he spent a happy youth singing pirate songs with them and futilely trying to attack ships that never heeded the tiny corsairs. Eventually, he grows too big, and the Minipirates tearfully set him ashore on an island with a stock of coconuts, but he eventually dies of thirst. The next 12½ lives, though, are considerably more eventful. The book’s very reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorite children’s books, in that the hero visits all sorts of different lands and meets a lot of strange people, but Bluebear is probably even more inventive, plus it has more pictures and maps. It’s actually sort of odd to even call it a children’s book – it has a lot of hard vocabulary, and measures a satisfying 703 pages.

The next few posts have nothing to do with music – I just read a few books that I liked, all in a row, so I thought I’d write up a little something about them, one at a time, in the order I read them:

English, August: An Indian Story was a big hit in India when it came out in 1989, but never got any attention in the US. I don’t think it was even available here until this year, when it was published in the superb New York Review of Books series of reprints. It’s wonderfully unpretentious – not to suggest that Indian fiction has a tendency toward pretension, but the books that get famous over here, Midnight’s Children (great), A Fine Balance (sucks) and A Suitable Boy (pretty great) often have this big task of trying to encompass all of what supposedly characterizes India – every caste, every religion, every time, every place. Of course Indian literature, in English and other languages, is terrifically diverse, but that sort of omnivorous narrative is what’s sells here, I guess. English, August is not that kind of book. Much like the author, Upamanyu Chatterjee, the main character, Agastya Sen, is an educated, well-off member of the Bengali bhadralok, stuck with an obscure Sanskritic name, doomed to a dull and lonely civil service job in the hinterlands. He mostly spends his time masturbating, smoking pot, and reading Marcus Aurelius, and making tentative friends with the other outsiders in his own personal backwater. Chatterjee doesn’t shy away from the plain tedium of the Indian countryside as a lot of his contemporaries do, but neither does he lambaste it as many an urban litterateur does. The book is funny, yeah, but it’s also beautiful:

While Manik chatted with Pultukaku and elicited from him a few misanthropic monosyllables, the familiar feeling of the absurd, as much a part of him as his names, overwhelmed Agastya, and he wondered whether, when married, he would be able to exercise in front of his wife, and what he would do if, just when he was lunging for a push-up she were to say, For someone who exercises so much you’re in awful shape. And suppose she stole his money? And the all-important subject of kinky sex – she might not like sharing each other’s used underwear, then?

Eventually, he knew, he would marry, perhaps not out of passion, but out of convention, which was probably a safer thing. And then in either case, in a few months or years they would tire of disagreeing with each other, or what was more or less the same thing, would be inured to each other’s odd and perhaps disgusting ways, the way she squeezed the tube of toothpaste and the way he drank from a glass and didn’t rinse it, and they would slide into a placid and comfortable unhappiness, and maybe unseeingly watch TV every evening, each still a cocoon, but perhaps it would be unwise to be otherwise. And his once-secret life would be entombed in a mind half-dead to an incarcerating world, and he would remember, with a sense of bemused embarrassment, and in epiphanies flashes, brought on by uncontrollable jolts to his memory through a smell of some unexpected sight (perhaps the view from a train or an ad on TV), his this experience of Madna, that once the restlessness of his mind had seemed the most important thing in this universe, and that he had once been shaken by the profundity of an ancient Hindu poem.

Ever since I was a little kid, when I thought “Leader of the Pack” (vrrrm! vrrrrrrm!) was the greatest song in the world, I’ve loved girl groups. They never seem to get too much respect, probably because they didn’t write their own songs, and they were mostly just manufactured by their producers. So? When the producer was Lou Christie, who cares?

The Tammys were one of Christie’s first groups, and I guess he went all-out on them. As much as I love the Bangles’ hit “Walk Like an Egyptian,” nothing can stop the Tammys’ “Egyptian Shumba” from being the greatest ancient Egypt-themed pop song of all time. Don’t even talk to me about that Steve Martin song. “Egyptian Shumba” is so bizarre that it’s almost a parody. The first squeaks at the beginning of the song sound like some Austin Powers thing, but nope, it’s a legit, amazing girl-group song, replete with screams and sighs. Handclaps must not have been invented yet by 1963, because this is such a perfect song that if rhythmic handclaps had existed, they would have been all over this song.

I first heard this song on Girls Go Zonk!, a nice one-disc compilation, but you can also get a whole CD of just The Tammys, called Egyptian Shumba: The Singles and Rare Recordings 1962-1964. The best idea, though, is to invest in the mondo box set One Kiss Can Lead to Another. It’s packed with about 75,890,279,852 amazing, unknown girl-group songs, from favorites like the Shirelles and Petula Clark and unknowns, as well.

This has nothing to do with “Egyptian Shumba,” but I may be posting less often here. I’m about to leave for a year in India, studying Urdu in the northern city of Lucknow. I’ll have an Internet connection, so I’ll try to continue to post songs. I might also start writing about my travels, here or somewhere else. We’ll see.

The Tammys – Egyptian Shumba

OK, I’ve had way too long a string of namby-pamby, nicely-nicely instrumental songs here recently. Here’s Nina Hagen, to change that with new wave beepy screechy (she belongs to the Neue Deutsche Welle, or German New Wave, but the name’s also a play on the German national radio station). According to my old German textbook and the German Wikipedia, she was born in 1955 to an actress and was partly raised by her composer stepfather, Wolf Biermann. She escaped from East to West Germany, via England, in 1976, when she was 21. She described herself as, “Nina Hagen, international punk star, UFO specialist, passionate mother, engaged protector of animals, dwelling: Berlin, Hamburg, Ibiza and the rest of the world.” You can hear the animal thing in “Don’t Kill the Animals,” a duet she did with Lene Lovich, who wrote “Lucky Number.”

Lucky for you, dear reader, Hagen’s cover of that song, “Wir Leben Immer…Noch” (”We Always Live… On”) doesn’t have lyrics like, “Animal testing is a dangerous game, / Our systems are different, we’re not the same.” Instead, it has crazy orgasmic screaming and possibly Lotte Lenya-inspired hammy vocal gymnastics.

Her children are named Cosma Shiva and Otis.

My German’s not so hot these days, but let’s see if I can give it a shot without risking an excessively accurate translation:

Wir wandern bloss und nackt in die Unendlichkeit,
We wander [something] and naked in the unendingness,
Wir schweben auf dem Pfade in die Ewigkeit,
We [something something] in eternity,
Wir glauben was wir wissen und wir fürchten uns,
We believe what we know and we fear ourselves,
Wohl weil wir sterben müssen das beängstigt uns,
It frightens us that we must die,
Wir sind die Lebenden,
We’re the living,
Nach Leben strebenden.
Striving after life.

Jeder neue Tag kann gut und böse sein,
Every new day can be good and bad,
Wir stellen unsere Viberationen selber ein,
We make our own vibrations,
Und wenn wir morgens früh an unser ende denken,
And when we think about our end in the early morning,
Dann kann uns dieses wissen durch die Tagzeit lenken,
Then we can [something] know this through the daytime,
Weil wir leben können,
Because we can live,
Und uns das Sterben gönnen.
And death [somethings] us.

Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit,
We vegetate and and we [dunno] through our lifetimes,
Wir verblassen und verpassen die gelegenheit,
We [no idea],
Wir haben keine Zeit, tun uns selber leid,
We have no time, to say sorry,
Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit.
We vegetate and we [something] through our lifetimes.

Wir verstecken unsere ängste in der Zwischenzeit,
We [mumble] our fears in the interim,
Wir zittern immer noch vor der Vergangenheit,
We always shiver before the past,
Wir entwickeln uns nicht weiter, weil Erwachsen sein,
We grow[?] broader, because we’re awake,
Uns einzwängt in die Zwänge der Gesellschaft,
[Something something] society,
Nein, so wollen wir nicht sein,
No, we don’t want to be like this,
Oh, nein dass muss nicht sein!
Oh no, it can’t be!

You want accuracy? Use Babelfish.

You can get the song as a bonus track on the bargain $10 ’80s bathhouse fave Nunsexmonkrock, or in its original context on the slightly more expensive Unbehagen.

Nina Hagen – Wir Leben Immer… Noch