Pigeon English

Pigeon English
Stephen Kelman

I should start this out by saying previously I've fallen firmly in the "pigeons are rats with wings camp." When I travelled to Morocco I purposely ordered Pastilla, a sort of pigeon pie, as a sort of revenge for all the pigeons I'd had to wade through and then dodge their poops when I used to roller-blade to work way back when. Don't ask me why the various assortment of characters of San Francisco's 6th Street didn't bother me while the pigeons did. Perhaps because they had knives.

So when Harri initially makes friends with a pigeon I admit I identified more with his mom who told him it was dirty and don't be feeding that thing. Actually identify might be too strong a word, as the characters in this book are kept a bit at arm's length. So while the book was definitely competently written and engaging, I didn't feel completely drawn into their world. That is, until the last two pages.

What happens manages to stun, sadden and makes you question whether there wasn't a certain amount of comfort in the distance from the characters, i.e. we're used to being uninvolved voyeurs in other's lives, more so for those life circumstances are drastically different from our own.

Oh and by the way -- Pastilla? Let's just say, the Pigeons won that round too. Which is ok with me now. As Harri's pigeon points out - "We ask only for the same rights as you: we just want to live our lives, make a place for ourselves, room to shit and room to sleep, room to raise our children. Don't poison us just because we make a mess. You make a mess, too. There's enough of everything to go round if we all stick to our fair share."

No Country for Moby Dick

No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy










Moby Dick, Or the Whale
Herman Melville






I didn’t know much about Moby Dick before I read it, but my friend Matt barbacked at a gay bar in SF called the Moby Dick and the women’s bathroom was spotless. So I decided, based on that positive association and the fact that my reading tends to lean heavily towards the modern, to give Moby Dick a shot.

For a long time I thought that Moby Dick might be the last book that I chose based on a bodily function. But that was when I was trying to read the (free) e-book version. It took an incredibly long time to plow through a third of the book. I read many other books during the same time. I nearly gave up hope of ever finishing it, imagining my tombstone to read “Beloved Wife and Mother, Nearly Finished Moby Dick .”

But. Then I broke down and bought the paper book. And I found myself…enjoying the book. I don’t think that I’m the only one who had difficulty finishing e-Moby Dick. The e-book version shows 352 highlighters for a particular section of page three. The highlighting quickly dwindles down to close to nothing and you can almost hear the e-sighs as Captain Ahab remains off the page until a third of the way into the book.

Which is in direct contrast to No Country For Old Men, a book that I read (actually re-read) while trying to force myself through e-Moby. In No Country, the action starts right from the beginning. And while the pacing and use of marine mammals are vastly different between the two books, they share the common theme that the past has a claim on us that we cannot escape. And that is a hard, hard thing to live with.

Unless you happen to be Anton Chigurh, who just might be the prophet of destruction, or at least one bad-ass accountant who has a rather funky idea of right and wrong. Or rather right and fair. The two are different according to Chigurh. And he’s probably not someone you’d want to dither over the difference with. Unfortunately, Llewelyn Moss wasn’t aware of this when he made off with a bag filled with millions from a drug deal gone bad that he found while out hunting.

Like Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick, Chigurh will not rest until he has finished his accounting with Moss. Money, drugs, even Woody Harrelson cannot deter him. Judgment, it turns out is not a one-time check-out affair where if your credits exceed your debits you’re free to go. It is an ongoing process and you may be called to pay at any time. As the narrator in Moby Dick says, “Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”

Can one repent? Is it possible to save oneself? Can you run off that delicious cupcake you just ate?

Everyone facing death at Chirgurh’s hand tells him that “you don’t have to do this.” But it is not Chigurh’s choice. Maybe it is not possible to trace the exact path that led to the moment or reckoning. But it is there. And repentance is not possible without knowing what you are repenting for. Without that knowledge repentance becomes mere words. To have that knowledge would be to be grateful for the punishment. As the narrator in Moby Dick says when describing Jonah's (of Jonah and the whale fame) repentance, “And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.”

Captain Ahab though feels no need for repentance. Rather, his need seems to be to complete the accounting that the whale began when he “de-masted” him by taking his leg but leaving him behind. Captain Ahab though, manages to convince an entire crew to help him pursue his revenge. Maybe within a ship’s confined quarters your needs and desires and fate begin to become the same by necessity – there is simply not room for more than one.

And maybe it is also too close of quarters with one’s thoughts that turns you and the object of your desire into the same, so in the end it is yourself that you are chasing. You cannot separate the act from the thing. The act is the thing. You think you are pursuing the thing but the pursuit is the thing and you become the pursuit.

We like to think that we can continually reinvent ourselves. That what’s past is past. But it’s not. The past is us.