Reading Like a Weed, Parenting Like a Warlock

By Charles Hood

From a botanical perspective, any tumbleweed or dandelion is as glorious, as successful, as worthy of emulation as a rose, an oak, or even a redwood—and in some instances, even more so. What a great model for prolific happiness: be content to thrive on the margins. Just blowin in the wind, Dylan says. Weeds need very little, and what they want, humans (and before them herds of auroch cattle or just natural disasters like fires) provide daily, hourly—namely, disturbed ground. We all know that if you were to take a given piece of hillside and bulldoze it to down bare soil, the first plants to come back in after even a trace of rain (and often not even that) would not be orchids.

If you’re reading this, you probably had a weedy childhood—no pun on Cheech and Chong implied—not so much a cultivated and symmetrically-edged childhood as it was surviving between the cracks or finding a place out of the wind next to where the waste oil from the auto repair shop got dumped in the gravel by the railroad tracks. That’s fine (you’re here, now, reading this, aren’t you?), but one of the best things to have come out of that is the pleasure and thrill and terror and confusion of getting to read whatever crazy ass stuff came to hand. I did not grow up in a household with an edition of Proust anywhere within, say, a ten-mile radius. But what we did have, including three kinds of Bible, I read every bit of, nonstop, day and night.

Just as a quick detour that’s not a detour I have to mention how one book that I used to love as a child was my father’s World War Two naval handbook, with diagrams of knots and grainy photos of strange men in white doing elaborate cheerleader poses with coded flags. (How deliciously gay was that?) I spent hours with this book. One day it was gone. Not lost—gone. Me, stunned (who knew books could disappear?), asking, what happened to it. Nobody would say. Turns out that my father—what a nutcase that guy could be—had thrown it out because the author had died of TB and my dad was worried I would catch tuberculosis from the book itself. No, this was not a signed copy: the physical book and the physical author had never met. This was a title with a print run of 50,000 copies, and our copy was a beat-up hardback at least twenty years old. But it could somehow expose me to a disease, and so had been thrown out. Jesus.

Of course the disease had already taken root, the disease of reading, of being ready to do anything for another fix of language. It didn’t have to be good writing, just a book. Barry Lopez on a flight was asked by the man next to him about advice for his teenaged daughter, who wanted to be a writer. Tell her to read, Lopez found himself saying suddenly, tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if people want to say what she is reading is trash. Lopez: “No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language.”

I love this advice, since all I read from Dr. Seuss all the way into college was trash. Porn, sci-fi, my dad’s monthly copy of Western Horseman magazine (after the Navy, dad had been a cowboy), my mom’s hidden-from-sight book club edition of The Godfather, all of the Narnia books all out of order, how-to books on making money, White Power tracts, cookbooks, geology handbooks. If it had language, I wanted it. Even lists would do. I never took a single AP English class but by middle school I was becoming an expert in Nazi tanks, and by early high school was publishing on the same, and branching out into a near fetish-level obsession with Third Reich regalia. But I also knew a lot about cactus, or thought I did (the taxonomy all now has changed), and I adored chick lit, like Misty of Chincoteague. (Horsies! Spanish shipwrecks! Small-town grandpas! O yes, give me more.)

The porn I had to shoplift but the rest I used the branches of libraries from three cities for, and all of my allowance money, my lawn mowing money, my working-for-my-dad-in-his-delivery-truck money. Finally at Glendale College I started becoming more systematic, and I remember asking Mrs. Nibley about this guy Kafka, I had heard of him, was his stuff worth my time?

I knew the name Edgar Rice Burroughs long before I ever heard of the other one, William Burroughs. Gore Vidal in an introduction to Tarzan said that we’re all heroes of our own adventure serials, all day long. Annie Dillard certainly was; she talks about this explicitly in American Childhood. What I find most encouraging about the Lopez quotation is that it implies that he, too, read trash as a young’n. What ho, my lord—what news is this? After all, he’s so High Church in the nature prose, somehow I just pictured him only re-reading some of the more abstruse essays of Emerson, maybe while listening to a lesser-known work of Sibelius and eating an organic strawberry. In contrast, for me, one of my favorite Red Hen Press covers of all time has Barbie as a suicide bomber. Do you think Barry Lopez ever did an air guitar version of “Stairway to Heaven” in his garage?

So many murder mysteries. So little time. Anybody read Anne Rice? Harry Potter? The late, great World Weekly News? But it pays back, in the end, even more than five hundred shares of Microsoft. When I was applying to the National Science Foundation to go to Antarctica, I knew it was one of those zillion-to-one kinds of grants, and in the NSF process, one of things one has to do is to give the project a name. Mine was an aviation project, and because of a Hollow Earth theory promoted in a series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, I named my proposal “Flying to Pellucidar.” (The Hollow Earthers, you may recall, think there’s a dinosaur world inside of our own, accessed at each Pole.) My reasoning was that while the word Pellucidar might be a screwball risk, hell, I come from a long line of screwballs, and meanwhile, if any science fiction nerds were on the selection committee, this could be better than a Masonic handshake.

Sure enough I got it, and I heard later there were indeed some folks who dug the allusion. Right on for us. I am just sorry I couldn’t work in a reference to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Other than the near-endless Tarzan books, movies, tv serials, and loin-clothed action figures, E.R. Burroughs is next best known for the John Carter of Mars stuff, now soon to become a full budget movie franchise. Could be okay: the previews quieted my initial and very bitchy skepticism, and I am sure the panel proposals for the Pop Culture Association Conference to deconstruct the movie-text symbiosis are already cranking up. Burroughs himself is buried in an unmarked grave under a tree in front of a real estate office on Ventura Blvd., so he doesn’t care.

Willy Nelson sings, Mama, don’t let your kids grow up to be cowboys. Aw heck. Ain’t no stopping them. Kids will grow up to be whatever kind of weed they want, with or without all the mulch of ballet lessons and soccer balls you do or don’t want to waste on them. The thing is though, that same kid wants to read? Has to do it, any book, anywhere, even in line at the store or driving back from lunch with some high-fallutin Pulitzer Prizer you foisted off on them for two hours? Watch out then. Now we do have us some dangerous and poisonous swamp cabbage brewing. That’s the first sign that they’re going to grow up as English majors, or, worse still, not just users but dealers, the top royalty of the cartel—they are going to grow up to become not cowboys but poets and novelists and small press interns and bookstore owners and English professors.

God help us all.

Charles Hood’s nonfiction appears in LAR issue 10, forthcoming in October, 2011.