Jonathan Frantzen is Everywhere

Today, I turned on Wallace and Gromit, allowed Lief to watch it on continuous loop in the basement (to his utter disbelief and joy), and actually sat down with a book. AND READ SOME OF IT. Jonathan Frantzen's memoir, "The Discomfort Zone." Didn't like "The Corrections," on account of its cruelty, although the bit about the underpaid university lecturer who winds up doing illegal things in Latvia or Estonia struck me as both funny and eerily prescient of what is to become of the over-educated classes on this continent.

But this memoir fascinates me, mostly for its excruciating dredging up of seemingly every (at least I hope that's all he's got) dorky gesture of the man's childhood. If I ever write an autobiography, I'll have to call it "Weird Little Kid," and that could easily be the subtitle of Fratzen's book. So at the part where he's talking about his love of George Schulz, he also mentions Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," which is my bedside book at the moment. A curious choice, really, for a bedtime book for a classically trained intellectual type such as myself--it's about 10 years old and it's about comics, for heaven's sake. Hmmm, I thought, the wheel goes round and round. And went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and a quick scan of the Globe and Mail. The first thing my eye fell upon was a book review of "The Discomfort Zone."

I stopped moving. Held my breath. Someone was trying to tell me something. What? That I should start sending confessionals to Jonathan Frantzen? That I should draw a cartoon version of "Weird Little Kid"? That I was destined for greatness (which I always secretly knew and hence applied age-defying goof to my face every night so that I would be camera-ready)? That all it will take to pull me up out of this funk is an international best-seller? Thanks, Someone, for sending me this important message!!

Then I realized that this is the kind of thing that made my old colleague P start believing he was the reincarnation of the lead singer of the Yardbirds.