Salvage King, Ya!

A Herky-Jerky Picaresque

The opening quote from "Heart of Darkness" tells you this is not going to be your ordinary hockey story.

The book's protagonist "desired to have Kings meet him...on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things."

Here the "ghastly Nowhere" is the horrific world of pro hockey, and the word "Kings" refers to both the LA Kings and the name of the salvage yard operated by our hero. To cement the connection with "Heart of Darkness," his fiancée is known only as "the Intended."

The second quote, from Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," announces a water motif, which is reinforced by the hockey player's ironic name, Drinkwater. He prefers booze. Water is something people drown in, like his grandfather, and a dead California surfer, and the ships and planes that sink beneath the waves before his very eyes.

Blindness is another motif. Drinkwater has a bad eye. His uncle wears an eyepatch. A player loses an eye to one of Drinkwater's shots on goal. A dead horse flies past in a tornado, eyes open. A shark is shot in the eye. "Out vile jelly," thinks Drinkwater. He sees but cannot resist the violence, hypocrisy, and decadence of pro hockey. He's unruly on and off the ice. He snorts cocaine, takes Antabuse to control his drinking, shuttles back and forth between the three women in his life, his Intended, his ex-wife, and a waitress known only as X.

The GM has a huge face, part meat, part vegetable. Count your fingers after shaking hands with him. This man wouldn't give you the parsley off his plate, he wouldn't give a worm to a blind robin, he'd sell a blind man a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

But it's not just pro hockey. The game's ills are society's ills, and violence is everywhere. An ETA bomb blows up Drinkwater's packsack. His dentist commits murder. A bullet hole in his car signals the death of a young boy in a Disneyland parking lot. A Coast Guard ship capsizes, planes keep crashing around him -- a jetliner at LAX, a floatplane cartwheeling across a California inlet, another slamming into the lake in front of his house. He grabs a body but loses his grip. He swims down among the dead.

Drug use is epidemic. Everyone is using or selling. Farmboys, jocks at the local gymn. Coke snorted out of the Stanley Cup, off a model's belly. One of Drinkwater's friends wants him to smuggle in a small boatload. Bodies of addicts turn up in the lake in front of his house. Alberta is a giant quivering nostril. The whole planet is freebasing.

A Hockey Everyman

Drinkwater's played for the Pats, Broncos, Mudcats, Screaming Eagles, and LA Kings. He's played for Billings, Billington, and the Birmingham Bulls, for Kansas City and Salt Lake City, for Adirondack in the AHL, Peoria and Flint in the IHL. He's played the hookworm league, and semi-pro in Seattle, and for $100 a game in Saskatchewan. He's won the K-Mart Player of the Game in Omaha.

His face has been carved up by Bobby Clarke and Billy Smith. He's driven around with Gretzky in a gold Italian sport car. He's played poker with Harold Snepsts, lent smokes to Eddie Mio, sat drinking in the same bar as Chelios and Ludwig, Chris Nilan and John Kordic. He's been coached by Bep Guidolin, defended by Don Cherry.

He wears a knee brace and is "held together with velcro and tape." He keeps breaking his fingers and nose. He's punched a fan and a ref. He's been concussed, knifed in the thigh, defrauded by his agent. He's played the game since before helmets were mandatory.

The forward with Phoenix, an Oiler draft pick, comes at me, using me for a screen, and powers a slapshot right past my midsection. His shot breaks our goalie's stick. I ice the puck up high, ring the glass to get a whistle, to let Dobozy the redhead goalie pick out a new stick. "He broke my stick," Dobozy complains, sounding offended, "my good stick." "There, there, don't cry." I'm just glad the Phoenix guy didn't maim me with his slapshot, a howitzer, a cannon blasting by my gonads. He rang one off our goalie's mask; out cold. 120 MPH. Now: imagine that it's another game in Podunk that means nothing and it's YOUR head, your face on the line. The pruneface scouts at the end of the arena jot down the following brainstorm: "LACKS DESIRE." Fuck them. As if they have the market on desire.

Structure

Jarman is primarily a short story writer, and this, his only novel, is packaged in non-linear chunks. There's no complete game, season or conventional plot. It's all in pieces, like Drinkwater himself. Everything is flattened out, past and present and future rolled into one.

Because of the structure, most readers would not notice if a few of the 58 chapters were sent to the penalty box. They have titles like Kingdom Fucking Come, Sexual Nebraska, Hoarse Latitudes, The Land of No Odometers. Excerpts have appeared in 28 journals and one anthology.

Jarman's latest collection, My White Planet, contains an account of playing hockey in New Brunswick. It's called "A Nation Plays Chopsticks." Any hockey anthology without it is incomplete.

Defining the World

The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary

The making of a dictionary hardly seems a fascinating topic, yet reading this book made me wonder if it's possible to write a dull volume about Samuel Johnson.

Defining the World by Henry Hitchings describes the herculean feat of creating the first comprehensive English dictionary, a task which Johnson completed almost single-handedly in nine years. (Its French counterpart occupied 40 scholars for 40 years.) One of the reasons for the dictionary's success was its inclusion of quotations to illustrate usage.

Defining the World is organized chronologically, while chapter titles are presented in alphabetical order using words from the dictionary, beginning with "Adventurous" and ending with "Zootomy." Johnson's methodology and the dictionary's subsequent influence are given, along with details on Johnson's life in 18th century England.

While a monumental achievement, the dictionary wasn't perfect, and Hitchings doesn't shy away from its mistakes and shortcomings. He notes absent words, as well as words whose meanings have altered over the years, or which have become quaint or are no longer in use, like pissburnt, jolthead, smellfeast, bedswerver, and looby. Some definitions (like the oft-quoted one for oats) have a delightful quirkiness that reveal as much about Johnson as the word itself.

But as Hitchings notes, "Johnson's finest definitions remind us that he was a poet." The dictionary is a work of art, one that can be browsed through for pleasure, not only for the enjoyment of Johnson's prose but also for its snapshot of 18th-century life. As Hitchings says, "it abounds with stories, arcane information, home truths, snippets of trivia, and lost myths. It is, in short, a treasure house."

The dictionary is available as a pair of downloads (Volume 1 and Volume 2), but if you're not interested in perusing an electronic edition, Hitchings's book is the next best thing.

Boswell's Life of Johnson

The World Without Us

The most obvious aspect of this book, and one that has delighted sci-fi writers for years, is what would happen to our cities should the human race be decimated.

Generally, the structures which would last the longest are either underground or made of stone. Khufu after all has diminished only 30 feet in 4500 years, and the astonishing subterranean cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey have been around since the dawn of history.

The Chunnel and the Moscow subway system would have a a good chance of lengthy survival, though they will eventually be flooded. In the case of the NYC subway system, that will only take a matter of days.

Monuments such as Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, and Hagia Sofia will survive, as well as ceramic objects and pennies that contain substantial amounts of copper (unlike the current ones). Even paper will last a relatively long time if not exposed to air and water.

Poisonous Legacy

Of course, less palatable monuments will also survive. Take nuclear waste. Now there's something that's going to be around for a long long time. How can we warn future generations about the locations where we've stored it? What kind of sign would last for 10,000 years, and would people understand it? In 10,000 years languages will morph into unrecognizable forms.

Then there's plastic. Approximately one billion tons have been produced and all of it is still around. It doesn't biodegrade. It weathers to bits but that only means an increase in the number of creatures that can swallow it, often to their detriment. The oceans are filling up with it. The North Pacific Gyre is an expanse almost the size of Africa, covered with floating garbage, most of which is plastic.

Then there's genetically modified food, POPs and PCBs, and other unsavoury items. Humanity, we are told, has become a force of nature.

What About the Animals?

The author covers the origins of humans, and who might replace us if we disappeared. (The primate with the second largest brain, he suggests -- baboons.)

He visits the theory that megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons were extirpated by prehistoric hunters, and mentions a plan to return elephants to North America. He provides details on more recent extinctions (the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon), and discusses the vast numbers of birds killed each year by flying into glass windows or frying themselves on power lines.  One authority says one billion necks are broken annually in the US alone.  Birds will definitely do better without us.

As for our pets, cats will survive but dogs won't. Neither will cockroaches in unheated apartments, nor all those creatures that live in or on us, such as lice and numerous kinds of bacteria.

The End

The author concludes the book by mentioning the Voluntary Human Extinction Project, and the Transhumanist movement, which involves uploading our minds into machines.

Then he heads off into space, tracking the interstellar vehicles we have sent aloft -- the Pioneers and Voyagers -- which will exit the solar system and likely keep on travelling long after we are gone. So too will electromagnetic signals from Earth, including TV shows. I Love Lucy will play to the rest of the galaxy until the signal is lost in the background noise of the universe.

Physically, this well-written and wide-ranging book ends with a 30-page bibliography and a 16-page index. But it is the 14 pages of acknowledgements that gives a better idea of its scope. The author visited Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, East Africa, a primeval Polish forest, an isolated coral reef in the Pacific, the abandoned resort of Varosha on Cyprus, the petrochemical complex stretching from Houston to Galveston, the Ekati diamond mine in the Canadian Arctic, and other places.

Your Inner Fish

A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Paleontologist Neil Shubin begins with a brief account of his role in discovering an ancient creature intermediate between a fish and a land animal. Its fossils were found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, and the creature was given the Inuit name Tiktaalik.

Later, Shubin pays another visit to Canada, this time the fossil beds near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy. There they found rare fossils of the tritheledont, a reptile whose teeth showed mammalian characteristics.

Shubin uses these events to anchor a description of how our anatomy contains links to more primitive creatures. For example: "Tiktaalik has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist composed of the same bones as an upper arm, forearm, and wrist in a human."

Following are a number of observations that I found interesting.  

Human Embryos

1. They have four gill arches, which ultimately develop into jaws, ears, larynx and throat.

2. They have a notochord, which breaks up and forms the disks that cushion our vertebrae.

3. At an early stage in their development, their elbows and knees face the same direction, as do fish and amphibians.

4. Gonads are initially located high up in the body, as in fish.

Evolution

1. Two factors may have been involved in the evolution of bodies: predation, and the rise in atmospheric oxygen.

2. "The origin of mammals involved not only new patterns of chewing...but new ways of hearing... Bones originally used by reptiles to chew evolved in mammals to assist in hearing."

Genetics

Shubin also describes some of the Dr. Moreau-like tinkering that scientists have done in order to understand how genes work. Some of the genes he mentions are Noggin, Pax 6, and Sonic hedgehog.

1. Genes from the embryo of one animal (e.g. a mouse), when grafted to the embryo of another (e.g. a shark), can perform the same function.  This leads to a conclusion such as: "all appendages, whether they are fins or limbs, are built by similar kinds of genes."

2. "Inject extra amounts of frog Noggin into a frog egg, and the frog will grow extra back structures, sometimes even a second head."

3. Turning on an "eyeless" gene can result in creatures growing eyes virtually anywhere on the body. For example, "they could use the mouse gene to trigger the formation of an extra fly eye anywhere: on the back, on a wing, near the mouth."

Trivia

1. Fish have no necks.

2. Tooth replacement in reptiles continues throughout their entire lives.

3. Some creatures, like single-celled microbes, have no body at all.

4. Some creatures have no anus, they expel waste through their mouth e.g. jellyfish and corals.