Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama

Well, dear readers, it's that time again where that bozo from British Columbia, Mark Laba, has paid me in pork and bean money to splat his artwork up on my widely read and much talked about blog. He's now paying me in rolls of nickels and dimes, the brown paper rolls stained with the remnants of his Cheezie-dusted fingerprints but even if he's nickel and diming me to death, I have to take his money as per our previous agreement. Obviously things are taking a turn for the worse for Mr. Laba if he's resorting to paying me with rolls of coins, coins he no doubt fished out of the fountain at the local mall when security wasn't looking. Nevertheless, a man's got to eat and every roll of coins is another notch in my pork'n'bean belt while Mr. Laba, one can safely assume, can't even give his art away due to its infantile rendering and contemptible subject matter. That he even grips a pen in that monkey-fist he calls a hand (a hand that would be much more well-suited to self-pleasuring than attempting any drawing) is an abomination upon the art world and I've seen better results from diarrhea splatters in the toilet bowls of public restrooms than the crude markings Mr. Laba scrawls on cheap paper he finds in wastebaskets. He calls this new drawing "The Loneliness of the Long Distance-Calling Ventriloquist with Walrus" but I think "Laba Licks Urinal Pucks" is more fitting. Those urinal pucks might also explain how he hallucinates and then renders such distasteful themes. Lay off the urinal pucks, Laba, whether you're sniffing or licking them because they'll rot whatever is left of your pine-scented brain. As for the walrus, wishful thinking on his part because no walrus would have sex with him even if he were the last mammal on the ice floe and he had seal meat strapped to his scrawny, pallid body and fake tusks fashioned from toilet paper rolls stuck with his own snot to his face. Anyway, try to enjoy the drawing and I'll certainly be enjoying my pork and beans.

Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama

Dear readers, it's time again for me to post another of that miscreant who calls himself a man, Mark Laba's artistic endeavors even though I'm starting to think he's paying me with counterfeit twenties. Nevertheless, the lady at the Shop'n'Go casts nary a glance at the bills I produce and thus my pork and beans and Chef Boyardee Beefaroni larder is bursting at the seams with chemically enhanced and mechanically de-boned goodness and nutrition. So, up goes another messy piece of pen and ink from a man who must make mucilage his muse judging by his disgusting and talentless work not to mention the crusty stains that always seem to speckle his shirt and pants. In this drawing I believe he his attempting some sort of metaphorical rendering of that keftede-headed Casanova of Crete, the famed Telly Savalas, depicted in all his post-Kojak glory. Or maybe it's pre-Kojak, who can tell from these puerile pen-on-paper markings that would make even goat droppings on broken concrete seem like a Matisse. I believe Mr. Laba calls this one "Who Loves You, Baby," but "Who Loathes You, Laba" would be more fitting.

Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama

Here's another piece of trash Mr. Laba has created. Just keep those pork and beans coming, Laba or I'm taking you off the site. In this instance he apparently was too lazy to even draw something and so he just took an existing Jughead Jones Gag Bag (I'm gagging right now), switched around a bunch of heads and then added his own obscure and idiotic speech balloons that he claims are poetic. I guess they are if you think poetry is something wet you step in in the rooming-house bathroom late a night. Good work, Laba. Leonardo da Vinci you ain't. And frankly, your obsession with Archie comics, goats and Milton Berle's penis is very off putting.

Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama

Here's another piece by that degenerate artist, Mark Laba. That he's paying me in pork and bean money to show his work on my site is the only motivating factor here for me but after viewing this piece of trash, I'm reconsidering this arrangement. Unfortunately I'm heating up a can of pork and beans right now and mmmmm! do they ever smell delicious so I guess the artwork stays for now until I get a bad can and have diarrhea in my pants. Mr. Laba calls this one Nauseous Fingerprints or something like that and all I can say is, I'm getting nauseous looking at it.

Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama

Welcome to a new section of the Haltiwanger Report where I give over content of the page to an acquaintance of mine by the name of Mark Laba. He believes himself to be something of an artist but between you and me, he's just a sniveling excuse for a human being with all the artistic merit of a chimpanzee in a painter's smock and beret. Truly, I detest him and his work more than I hate raisins in butter tarts but he has agreed to pay me twenty dollars a month to feature his art on my widely popular blog and frankly I need the money to keep me in pork and beans. So, without further ado here's Mr. Laba's first piece of work in my Dr. Haltiwanger's Art-A-Rama section. I'm not sure what this piece is as he didn't title it but apparently Mr. Laba tried to draw Archie's head, unsuccessfully I might add. He truly is a dimwit (Mr. Laba, not Archie of course).

Ideas For Novels I Will Never Write

Terror at Ten Pin Lanes

As a man of science, gastronomy, art and literature, not to mention my erotic janitorial accomplishments, you can understand how I am brimming with ideas but have far too many projects to actually complete anything. But then again, I think there is much to be said for the uncompleted task as it leaves an air of mystery and keeps boredom from setting in, for both the artist and the reader or viewer of the work. Take for instance the many novels I have reviewed that I've never read. The fact is, after one or two pages, you've really absorbed the best parts of the book and to slog on ad nauseam is to do a great injustice to both the novelist and your brain. Best to quit while both you and the author are ahead and not get bogged down in those long middle sections and endings that always disappoint. Sometimes having the attention span of a gnat helps you keep one step ahead of the snap of the hungry frog's tongue and ending up as the after-scent of an amphibian's odorous burp. If you catch my drift.

On that note I've created this new section in my report wherein I discuss, briefly, an idea for a novel I'll never write accompanied by a cover drawing for the never-to-be-published book and in some cases, even an excerpt. So, for this first installment I humbly submit my blockbuster novel, bound to be enjoyed by young adult and mature readers alike and that I tentatively title, Terror At Ten Pin Lanes. Of course the book will never be finished let alone bound, so this whole point is moot.

The premise is simple but the plot winds like a hungry anaconda sniffing a lost goat in the Peruvian jungle. Octogenarian Al Kugleman is boiling eggs one day in his kitchen when a blinding light hits him and he's transformed into an ancient Aztec deity and called upon to sacrifice virgins for the good of his community. In exchange he promises a variety of civic-minded upgrades like a new little league ball park, renovations to a senior citizen's home, better cafeteria food at City Hall not to mention helping local businesses with their financial problems. All's well until Dusty Gimple, daughter of Henry and Mel Gimple, throws a monkey wrench into the Aztec god works when her father promises her as a sacrificial victim in exchange for Al Kugelman injecting some life and money into his fading bowling alley. Dusty is a feisty young thing and it turns out Al Kugelman and his posse of washed-up Aztec deities have bitten off more than they can chew when they butt heads with this spunky kid. 

The climax of the novel has a showdown at the bowling alley with a whack load of aging and decrepit Aztec gods facing off against Dusty Gimple and her crack team of Ritalin-dosed high school buddies she calls into action and the lane gutters run with blood although whose I'm not saying. Suffice to say if I were to actually write this book no doubt the reviews would read "Eat hot loin cloth J.K. Rowling and Stephen King because there's a new guy in town and his bowling shoes don't stink." Please enjoy the cover drawing and the excerpt because that's all you'll ever see, perhaps thankfully or perhaps the anticipation of not knowing what comes next will gnaw away at your brain until, on your deathbed you might think, I wonder what ever happened to that Dusty Gimple and if she ever did give those Aztec deities a good whooping like they deserved, trying to muscle in on one town's supply of virgins with the promise of easy money and first dibs at the all-you-can eat buffet.

Excerpt

Chapter One - Aztec Party Hats

It’s odd when you look back from where you are and can’t remember the path you took to get there in the first place. Maybe that’s why people just fall into things and when you ask them how they came to be what they are or where they ended up they just shrug their shoulders and say they were just lucky or unlucky but things just kind of fell into place or happened a certain way. Take me for example. All of thirteen years old and already I’m on the sacrificial virgins list, just because my dad’s bowling alley is going tits up, as the boys at my school like to say. Or better yet, take Al Kugelman a.k.a. the Aztec deity, and the cause of all my problems. I mean who would’ve thought that this elderly man living at the end of our street would suddenly be transformed into an Aztec god while he was standing at the kitchen sink peeling some hard-boiled eggs one day. Or at least that’s the way he tells it but really, when my dad presses him on the details on this remarkable transformation, though it did nothing for his bald spot or comb-over or disgusting varicose veins that stand out like throbbing blue worms when he wears shorts on hot summer days, Al has trouble remembering anything. He remembers the eggs and he remembers some sort of blinding light bathing him in an intense heat and then bingo, he woke up in his La-Z-Boy recliner chair wearing nothing but this magnificent feathered headdress and a loincloth.He walked out of his house dressed like this and Mrs. Kulpinski, next door, almost had a heart attack while she was watering her rose bushes. Al Kugelman is not the kind of man you want to see in a bathing suit let alone a loin cloth but she did admit the feathered headdress made him look dignified.

At first everyone just thought he’d had a stroke seeing as he was speaking some kind of language that wasn’t recognizable as anything but gibberish so we all figured he’d just forgotten how to talk. Which is what happens with a stroke, apparently. My grandmother, Nana Euclid had one and mom had to sit with her for six months looking at alphabet books for babies, sounding out the letters and trying to put them together into simple words. Like cat and rat and dog and nut. She finally did get most of her speech back except sometimes she sounded like she was trying to talk underwater or with too much food in her mouth and her left eye got lazy and would look out at something else even when she was staring straight into your face. Which is actually something I admired because then you’ve got your vision in two different places, like those chameleons that can rotate each of their eyes separately and then no predator can sneak up on you. And believe me, they’re plenty of predators out there waiting for you, even in tenth grade. I mean besides all the evil guys and kidnappers that your parents are always warning you about or you see on TV, it’s the ones closer to home like Lester Springmeyer, that kid two blocks away whose always showing me his weenie or Mandy Glower, popular at school even though she’s dosed to the gills on Ritalin and has the attention span of a Smart Phone and uses that phone to spread terrible made-up rumors about people she hates and of course Al Kugelman, octogenarian and Aztec god to boot, sticking me there on his sacrificial list because my dad said it was okay if it would help save his bowling alley, that you have to worry about. I’m not too happy with my dad right now and my mom put up quite a stink but Al promised that the sacrifice was years away, not really until I was an adult because he’s backlogged with sacrificial virgins currently (they’re trucking them in from all parts of the country, the demand for Al’s services are that great plus Al has a rule that no one can be sacrificed until they’re of voting age so the victims awaiting sacrifice are piling up), and by that time dad figures, once his business is back in business again he can find a way to buy Al off. But I don’t think Aztec gods can be bought off so easily, especially when you’ve signed some parchment in blood and I know dad did this because after he got back from Al’s late one night from a supposed poker game he was swearing and yelling at mom about where she kept the Band-aids. Blood may be thicker than water but it certainly isn’t as thick as the air at our house after mom got wind of the deal dad cut with Al the Aztec god.

I was in my bedroom that night when dad got home, but I was still awake even though it was well past 11 and a school night. So I heard everything.

“What’s going on, Henry? Why are you bleeding? I thought it was just a friendly poker game.”

“It was, Mel. I just cut myself, I was trying to cut a piece of salami, the knife slipped and I cut myself. Now where are the goddamn Band-aids?”

“On your forearm? You’re cutting salami and that’s where the knife hits? I mean I understand a finger, a knuckle, but who cuts a piece of salami and the knife slips all they way up their forearm. You didn’t make some kind of deal with that old goat, did you?”

“He’s not an old goat, Mel. He’s an Aztec god and he can make things happen. Like getting the bowling alley back on track, bringing in some business.”

“I knew it. You signed a pact in blood with that old pervert. You promised him our daughter, didn’t you?”

“Mel, look at it this way. He’s backlogged on sacrificial virgins right now. I mean you could fill a warehouse with them. He told me he probably wouldn’t get around to sacrificing Dusty until seven or eight years from now. And by that time really, what’re the chances she’ll still be a virgin. Off to college, all that jazz, really we’d be closing our eyes and pretending we’re blind if we didn’t recognize what’s really going on. Which then instantly stops her from being sacrificial material. So, bingo, the bowling alley is saved and Dusty continues on her way, graduates, meets a nice guy, gets married and then one day she and hubby and the grandkids inherit the business. Or if Al is still dead set on sacrificing her, by that time with the bowling alley doing well I’m sure I could pay him off with a nice chunk of money. I mean he’s an Aztec god and everything but even an Aztec god needs some rec-room renovations or a new water heater or something.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not the fact that my dad offered me up for sacrifice but that he actually expected me to take over the bowling alley one day. Since I was a toddler it seemed my dad was forever putting me to work there. When I was crawling he would attach dusting pads to my knees and have me go up and down the lanes removing dirt and polishing the wood. I thought it was a game. As I got older he put me in charge of spraying the bowling shoes with disinfectant and that’s about when my disgust for bowling and the various vile odors of human feet really swayed me towards becoming anything but the owner of a bowling alley. As far as I was concerned virgin sacrifice would be a piece of cake compared to deordorizing shoes and helping old people with gargoyle toes try to find the right size shoes for their gnarled feet. Or worse yet, having to attend to the bowling shoe needs of my classmates’ stinky feet. Humiliating was not even close to the shame I felt but it all went right over my dad’s toupee as he thought he was teaching me solid life lessons and business values that would see me through to my old age. Either way I had no intention of being sacrificed, by my family or an Aztec deity but if gods were anything like humans, especially of the adult variety, I’d have them both eating out of the palm of my hand in no time. With a little mall money to spend too.

It was that night really, overhearing my parents arguing, that I made up my mind to do something about this whole mess. First things first, I was going to have a talk with Kugelman and get the lowdown on this whole Aztec god business. I knew him of course as the old guy down the street and one of dad’s poker playing cronies but since his transformation, he didn’t really say hello to me or mom anymore when we passed him on the sidewalk, maybe because he secretly knew my sacrifice was looming and he felt guilty about it. Or maybe Aztec gods didn’t talk to mere mortals like us except to give us sacrificial instructions on our day of reckoning.

Speaking of days of reckoning, Kugelman was very private about his whole sacrificial process. The way I read about it, the Aztecs liked to make a big show out of their days of sacrifice, attended by thousands, bodies being carted up and down the steps of the huge temple pyramids, lots of feasting, like a trip to Disneyland but with lots of blood and no mouse. But Kugelman was really secretive about the whole thing and never invited anyone to watch. It all took place out back of Yeager’s Muffler and Brake Shop where there was an overgrown and unused field behind a beaten-up chain link fence. In the middle of the field was a Quonset hut and that’s where Al Kugelman set up his sacrificial altar. The door was padlocked and occasionally customers at Yeager’s waiting for their mufflers or brakes to be fixed would catch a glimpse of old Kugelman, done up in his colorful feathered headdress, loincloth and fuzzy slippers, ducking inside and closing the door quickly behind him. Nobody ever saw a sacrificial victim being taken inside and even when Mr. Blanchard, a retired army colonel and the leader of the town’s boy scout troop, set up a twenty-four hour surveillance on the Quonset hut, nothing out of the ordinary was seen except of course Kugelman in his crazy get-up going in and out of the hut a couple of times. And not a drop of blood to be seen, which is pretty strange when you’re sacrificing people for a living. The town council managed to persuade Mr. Blanchard to call off his surveillance because they were afraid of angering the Aztec god, especially after he’d just promised them a new baseball diamond and bleachers for the Little League team.

So, one Saturday morning I begged off bowling alley duty with the excuse that I was going to go downtown and have a look at my dad’s competition. See if I could come back with some ideas to make dad’s business more successful. Dad’s bowling alley was in a rundown building with musty carpeting and lanes that were warping over time. The gumball and candy machines had the same stuff in them from the 1950’s when the place was first built. At the time it was high tech. Now Galaxy Lanes had opened downtown with glow-in-the-dark bowling, state-of-the-art score keeping computers, a snack bar that served gourmet pizza and fancy coffee and even a singles mingle bowling night where you could meet that special someone while knocking down pins. The fact was it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see where dad’s alley had gone wrong and Galaxy Lanes was succeeding. But it would take money to update or a miracle to bring people in, both of which would take an Aztec god to make it happen as far as my dad was concerned. And an Aztec god demanded a sacrifice and so off I went to meet the man or god who held the key to my fate.

It was a beautiful spring day, warmer than usual as I pedaled my bike down the street. Between the chirping birds, fluffy white clouds, buzzing bees and blooming shrubbery the promise of summer was only a stones-throw away.

Reviews of Books I've Never Read

People of the Deer by Farley Mowat

With the somewhat recent passing of Farley Mowat, it seems amiss that I have never reviewed any of his books that I've never read. Well, I'm here to remedy that situation and though I could have selected one of his more well-known novels like Never Cry Wolf or The Dog Who Wouldn't Be or his much maligned by the critics but still wildly popular memoir, Hair of the Beard, Hem of the Kilt, I chose instead his very first novel because that was the one on the thrift shop fifty-cent sale shelf. It was this book really that was to cement the ideas that later would make up Mowat's oeuvre of Arctic tundra, antler envy, wolves in fleece clothing, dogs flying airplanes, reindeer salami, oil tankers carrying the cryogenically-frozen heads of ex-Nazis and the mysterious disappearance of the Franklin Expedition's narwhal-tusk lacrosse sticks from the Lacrosse Museum of Irkutsk.

Mowat was not a man to dither around with fanciful words like dither, homunculus, Francois Mitterand or bratwurst, when one could get right to the point with simple usage and syntax like "underwear-shaped icebergs," "smelly bear gland mittens" or "eyes stretched hard against the bleak and blinding snowy wasteland like caribou snot cradled by lichen stained with Viking blood."

His intuitive way with both nature and direct mail order catalog marketing have led his legions of fans to say everything from "Damn, Mowat, that book really opened my eyes to the plight of walrus' used as florists in situation comedies," to "Thanks again, Farley, the slippers arrived just in time for my wife's birthday and were just as you described but even better. That dried oolichan skin feels great on the tootsies." The point is, this two-fold skill set of both narrative dexterity and salesmanship situated Mr. Mowat in a unique position in the annals of Canadian literary history because if you're able to write an engrossing book and equally adept at engrossing potential customers with poetic descriptions of products from electric toenail clippers to deer hoof salt and pepper shakers (Mowat set up quite a successful little deer hoof novelty cottage industry for his extended family including his ne'er do well brother-in-law, Albert, who bankrupted his own father's maple syrup company by mixing the maple syrup with motor oil to get more syrup per litre thus lowering his production costs while boosting his sale price), then you've got it made in the shade of a deer tick infested pine tree.

Speaking of deer hooves, be they on the animal or adorning your tabletop, it's time to get down to the blubber of this book and examine the motives and morality that Mowat likes to hit us with with all the sting of a frozen seal flipper smack across the face. If you don't know what that feels like then obviously you haven't had a typical Canadian upbringing. What Canadian child hasn't been disciplined with a frozen seal flipper at one time or another? It's part of what makes our nation great, our seals fearful and our citizens so polite.

The premise is this. Farley Mowat, as a fictional version of himself and renamed Nigel Cluneworth II, travels far into the Arctic Circle to discover a lost Arctic tribe who might very well have been the original descendants of the Pleistocene ice age inhabitants who crossed the massive land bridges from Siberia to Baffin Island and then traveled inland to the barrens of Hudson Bay. There they found vast herds of caribou and bucket loads of ptarmigan (Colonel Sanders would've had a field day with these birds if he ever got this far north as ptarmigan, cooked and breaded, are not only delicious but size-wise made for cardboard buckets), so they had plenty to eat and lots of feathers with which to make their trademark duvets. Unlike the Inuit who fashioned snazzy snow houses from their surroundings back in the day, this tribe, known as the Ishkabibblelites, according to Mowat but refuted by everybody else except Mowat's dog, Randolph, refused to build any type of shelter against the elements and so the duvets were integral to their outdoor existence. If you have any doubts that these Arctic grouse can provide the proper protection against such fierce and unrelenting conditions then just find yourself a gaggle of ptarmigan, plunk yourself down in their midst (they are highly attracted to human flesh due to its high trans fat content, porous skin and hair follicles that, to the ptarmigan seem to mimic the texture of certain tundra mosses that they like) and as they snuggle up to you with their plump grouse bodies you will feel a warmth like a thousand suns or twenty Pizza Pockets fresh out of the microwave and duct-taped to your body with maybe one or two inserted into your anal cavity for extra warmth against those endless Arctic nights.

Nigel, after days of traveling by dogsled across the barren tundra, finally encounters the first signs of the Ishkabibbilites in the form of a mound of blood-stained duvets, some freshly plucked ptarmigans and a gutted caribou carcass. It's not long before Nigel finds the tribe hunkered down a few miles away and enjoying a late afternoon picnic of fresh, raw caribou meat and lichen salad. Though they're wary at first, once Nigel proves he speaks Ishkabibblelite (which Mowat describes as a deep guttural noise, not unlike a male caribou looking to mate or the sound of Mowat's Uncle Stan eating blood pudding), he is welcomed into the tribe and even honored with his own duvet although Nigel is deathly allergic to ptarmigan feathers and sneezes incessantly. As he wanders the tundra with these nomadic nomads of the north, Nigel comes to understand their ways, their culture, their fears and their plight from the gradual encroachment of the "white man" that is threatening their way of life. Mowat deftly describes the hardships of the Ishkabibblelites, from the cannibalistic larvae of the devil flies that hatch in the rotting carcasses of caribou but quickly seek out human flesh to satiate their omnivorous appetites to the corpses of the white trappers riding across the ice floes on their ghost sleds looking to carry away the weak, the elderly and the snow blind to their hellish lairs beneath the ice. And that's just an average Monday up there in the Great White North. That all changed of course once they set up bingo halls in the Quonset huts. Here are a couple of passages from the book guaranteed to raise your hackles, spackle your mackeral and shrink your man-tackle so that it doesn't freeze from being dragged through a snowbank.   

"I paddled over to the still-quivering corpse and saw the murderer in all his glory, its ovipositor throbbing as it began ejaculating larvae into Kakumee's bloodstream. Eventually these squirming eggs would form a small mass about the size of a grapefruit beneath the host skin and it was ironic that the only cure for this invasion of these repulsive parasites was the injection of actual grapefruit juice in a land where sadly no grapefruit had ever, nor would ever, be seen. If they succeeded in hatching then the nematodes would become winged and soon every man, woman and child's liver would be consumed and there would be no igloo left for Ootek or seal meat for Franz, the German explorer, bon-vivant and heir to a schnitzel fortune back in Gruenwurst, who had lost his way 20 years ago searching for the Northwest Passage and had been hanging around ever since, ingratiating himself with the Inuit and the Ishkabibbleites, using his cheery beer-hall personality and promises of sleds full of pork sausage if his father ever received the letter he sent tied to the leg of a well-trained but slightly aging passenger ptarmigan who most probably had gone down somewhere over Labrador or at best, a few miles out over the Atlantic."

And then there's this:

"The ghost trapper appeared, lips frozen into a grimace and his voice was like that of a dog breaking wind. The Eskimo hunters stopped and admired his strange sled until it dawned on them he came from the land of the dead. His journey was done but theirs was just beginning. Curiosity and zoology had rendered him a corpse and his subsequent darkness bade ground squirrels, Arctic hares and garrulous ptarmigan to multiply until their tracks covered the hills, valleys and full bellies of wing-boned sorcerers trusted to discern the hastily erected tents of lifeless beings who grew fat on the flesh of the lost, sick and forlorn." 

What one notices immediately is the surreal, almost stream-of consciousness tone this second example takes. For good reason it turns out for during the time Mowat was in the Arctic, he had discovered, and was helping himself quite liberally, to a hallucinogenic lichen the Ishakabibbleites referred to as Kaila, God of Dizziness, Bright Light and Vomiting. And it's here where literary history takes a turn for the surprising because, as it turns out, Mowat, through some earlier university spore exchange program between the U.S. and Canada where they were feeding mole-rats various psychotropic plant extracts and fungus scrapings (on behalf of the military of course), and monitoring their reactions, befriended a young William Burroughs who was already showing a penchant for mind-altering drugs and as Mowat wrote to Burroughs during his Arctic excursion, "Hey Bill, get your scrawny ass up here to the Barrens because I've found some lichen that'll knock your socks off and turn your head into a spongy mass of primeval tundra mush that stinks of the spoors of long dead woolly mammoths and Neanderthal armpits. I'm guessing it might just be your cup to tea and fuck if it doesn't make the Northern Lights look like the birth of the goddamn universe taking place right inside your brain."

A short but enlightening correspondence ensued and the end result was Burroughs was up there as fast as a DeHavilland Beaver could drop his bony butt on the ice. The never-before-published letters between the two men, known as the Lichen Letters, were no doubt the inspiration behind a later series of published correspondences between Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, well-known as The Yage Letters that explored the two writers' search for and experimentation with an Amazonian vine that, when brewed became a powerful hallucinogen. For my money I'd take the lichen over the vine any day because tropical climes give me hives and I like to avoid snakes and sloths when I'm hallucinating. Plus, after my psychedelic journey, I like to know there's a snowmobile nearby so I can get to a Tim Horton's Doughnut shop as quickly as possible and refuel my body with a couple of maple-glazed after exploring the deepest regions of my mind. It's a known fact maple-glazed doughnuts restore the body's tissue, brain cells and nerve fibers after heavy cerebral exertions. That's why the rest of the world is crazy for the stuff. By the way, the Lichen Letters are slated to be published by my good friend and roofer, loving divorcee and life coach, Ed Smeeley Jr. under his imprint, Nail Gun Through The Head Press but hopefully I'll be able to give a preview of some of these letters on these pages soon. Stay tuned. 

Although the experiences of these two literary men tripping out on hallucinogenic lichen while wandering the tundra are not described in this novel, the essence of that event are reflected in an evolving subtext throughout the book that allows Mowat to play with words and ideas as if he were locked in an ice-fishing hut during spring thaw, listening to the ice creaking as it softens up while he screams for help but only gets the howling of wolves and the sputtering of a snowmobile misfiring from bad spark plugs miles away in reply. Maybe if he'd gobbled down a dozen maple-glazed doughnuts to begin with it would have given him the strength to karate chop down the walls of the hut in the first place but who thinks of these things when you're venturing out on the lake to catch a couple of winter trout and maybe masturbate to thoughts of Anne Murray singing Snowbird while dressed in a fetching purple pantsuit on an episode of the Tommy Hunter Show that you saw years ago when you were just a kid and your father told you to "get th'hell to bed," as he tried to adjust the rabbit ears on the TV set because the only thing he was seeing about Anne Murray singing Snowbird was just snow on the screen.

A young Farley Mowat and fellow explorer and future literary star, William S. Burroughs (turned away from the camera), stopping to admire the barren landscape after ingesting some hallucinogenic lichen. Mowat was later to use his seal and polar bear furred garments as the inspiration for his magnificent beard that he grew over the next fifty years. Burroughs, on the other hand, despite the allure of psychotropic lichen, couldn't wait to get out of the Arctic for sunnier climes and remained a close shaver for the rest of his life.

Eventually, and ironically you might say, the very people Mowat sets out to both depict and illuminate the world to their hardships, kick him out of the tribe as his incessant sneezing due to ptarmigan feather allergies keeps scaring the caribou herds away. Soon the Ishkabibbilelites are starving as their primary food source is driven away and though Mowat tries to pass this off as the result of the intrusion of the "white man" and their judicial systems, hunting practices, prepackaged noodle soups, nasal sprays, aerosol cheese and the preponderance of discarded toupees from out-of-work game show hosts clogging up the Arctic sea, it's really Mowat who is responsible for this atrocity and he's got only himself to blame. Which is where many critics have taken offense at Mowat's passing the buck and see this as a moral lapse in his writing and judgement. Not to mention a negligent and offhand approach to his allergies almost leading to the decimation of an entire race of peoples. 

But that's neither here nor there (which lies somewhere between midair and unaware), because this book is still a great expose of government hypocrisy, the destructive forces of economic control in the Arctic, the tenuous balance between nature and technology, the caribou antler hat-rack and side-table lamp industry and one man's quest (albeit stoned to the gills on psychedelic lichen) to bring to light the plight of a forgotten people. And by that I mean the Ishkabibblelites and not the cryogenically frozen heads of ex-Nazis looking for a good home and basement deep freezer in the suburbs. This is truly an amazing book even though I barely made it past the first page but with a cover like this featuring a herd of majestic caribou outlined against a stark Arctic winter landscape, their enormous curved antlers just waiting to be turned into inkwells, salt and pepper shakers, hat-racks, lamp stands and ashtrays, their dung heaps peppering the air with their joy and their fear, and the unseen but anticipatory arrival of the ancient tribe that likes to eat them (including the eyeballs and snouts), you don't really need to read anything inside. Sometimes, you really can judge a book by its cover or a caribou by its hide, especially when it's standing under a urine-yellow sky and you've just ingested some hallucinogenic lichen or, in my case this fuzzy mold growing on the half a can of uncovered Alphaghetti at the back of my fridge that left me feeling a little queasy but turned my hot plate into the Northern Lights after I finished vomiting into a pillowcase. Mowat remains a writer of incredible and indefatigable talent (although he is dead so some fatigue must have set in by now) and I believe  I'll return to him again and again to never read his many fine novels for ideas and inspiration, or at least as long as I keep finding moldy food in my fridge or under by bed.