“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine — they are the life, the soul of reading.”
LAURENCE STERNE
“Tristram Shandy”
I have always wanted to write a column that is just one long series of — but before I get to that, there are plenty of other columns that I’ve had the good sense not to write. For instance, ever since The New York Times sold the Globe in 2013, I’ve wanted to write a column starting out, “Is it safe to make fun of the Times now?”
Back in the day, an editor spiked my column mocking the Times’s reliably precious Travel coverage, e.g., a 2006 puff piece on a five-star hotel in Kabul: “The hotel is surrounded by a perimeter wall, and, at the entrance, an obstacle course of barriers — wide metal tubes filled in with concrete — leads to a thick steel gate guarded by three men with Kalashnikovs.”
Like you’d want to visit Kabul without the 82nd Airborne in tow. I mean, really.
It probably is safe to make fun of the Times now, and were I to do so, I’d have at its crazy, tendentious, anti-Amazon coverage. What did Jeff Bezos ever do to them? Oh, right. He bought The Washington Post, bulked it up, and started giving it away for free. Well, never mind.
Speaking of free, did you know you can get free stuff from Amazon? It has costed out the price of returns, and if you buy, say, a junkola $14 Compact Oxford Russian dictionary, and try to return it, Amazon responds: Keep it. Don’t bother returning it, plus we will refund your money.
What’s so bad about the Oxford dictionary? First of all, it’s practically the only language dictionary available — I tried three stores before clicking on Amazon. That’s because of the Internet. You can translate huge blocks of text just using your browser, so the kind of dictionary I wanted to buy, an old-fashioned Cassell’s 100,000 worder, was impossible to find.
I hated the Oxford dictionary because it failed to disclose that it was one-half English-Russian. I know English, Q.E.D., thus about half of the 90,000 advertised words were already known to me.
I know Russian, too, but I certainly don’t know enough Russian to fully savor the seventy line long “Pedal Digression” in Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, “Eugene Onegin.” That’s right; Pushkin devotes four sonnet-length stanzas of rhymed, iambic tetrameter to praising young women’s feet. And why not? I’ve been known to appreciate a well-turned ankle myself.
Where was I? Right, Pushkin. There is a character named Jack Pushkin in the novel I just finished reading, Meg Wolitzer’s “The Interestings.” It’s a good novel, I recommend it, although in the “Jeopardy!’’ category of “Russian Authors as Characters in Modern Novels” it would place second to Jhumpa Lahiri’s wonderful “The Namesake.” The father of the title character names his child Nikolai Gogol because he was reading Gogol’s story “The Overcoat” when he miraculously survived a train wreck.
(Vladimir Nabokov bored everyone he met by insisting that “The Overcoat” — “Shinel’” in Russian, and no, I didn’t need the dictionary for that — should be properly translated “The Carrick.” That idea was (1) incomprehensible and (2) nonsense. Nabokov also hated Dostoyevsky and insisted that “Notes from the Underground” should better be called “Memoirs from a Mousehole.”)
I’m wandering a bit here . . .
If you saw the movie of “The Namesake,” then you of course remember Kal Penn, of “Harold and Kumar” fame, in the title role. Penn spent some quality time swanning around the Obama White House working in the nebulously titled Office of Engagement. Lately, James Franco-like, Penn has been pursuing some kind of fancy degree at Stanford. We hope that, James Franco-unlike, he has not been targeted for extinction by North Korea.
What better place to salute the Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and the translucent power of juche thought!
But I digress.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. He can be reached at alexbeam@hotmail.com.