Zorba and St. Patrick

Wow, so it has been a very long time since I have posted and boy do I feel slack. I could rationalize an excuse here but I’m not up to that kind of dishonesty this early in the morning so I’ll just say that my attentions have been casually turned elsewhere lately. But I intend to make this post the culmination of all I’ve ever considered a good post to be, as a strong show of ambition often makes up for a brief lack of work ethic.

On that subject, my work ethic has not been so lacking, in fact, I finished two papers this week. The first was about Chief Justice Earl Warren of Brown v. Board of Education fame. I focused on a lesser known, but equally important, case brought before the Supreme Court in 1961 (although it wasn’t ruled on until 1962) called Baker v. Carr which was about disproportionate representation. The case paved the way for more progressive congressional districting around the country. Heady stuff I know, (when I told fellow students about my paper either their eyes glazed over or they made an excuse to leave the room) but I found it interesting, and I tried to get Warren’s gradual shift from a conservative Republican to an advocate of civil rights into the paper. The case had a great deal to do with broad civil rights because voters in urban areas were getting less representation than voters in rural districts. Baker v. Carr went a long way in disrupting the good ole’ boy networks of state legislatures around the country.

The second paper was about the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy in South Africa. I don’t feel as confident about this one. I feel that I might not have been specific enough and may have chosen too broad a topic for a short paper such as this. I tried to focus on strategies of democracy building, economic development, and foreign policy and I probably could have done better if I had just focused on one. I’m Second-guessing I suppose.

On a more hopeful note I got an email this week from the dean of campus life which mysteriously said that he needed a bio of me but he couldn’t tell me why, only that it was very positive. I’m waiting to find out what it is about but won’t say anymore about it until I find out for sure.

I finally read Zorba the Greek all the way through. I’ve had this on my list for a few months now, and lately, since my school reading is less than usual this semester, I’ve been reading exactly what I want with no motive except that the book appeals to me. For some reason this has led me to some really great books, Zorba being one of them, and I’m seeing a definite independent male theme in much of what I’ve been reading. The shame is that I started a book of essays by M.F.K Fisher but was sidetracked when I came across a four dollar copy of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris in London. The M.F.K. Fisher lies half read at the bottom of my book bag, and the Orwell was greedily consumed and passed on to a chef friend. I also, and maybe I’ll figure out why later, have a strong desire to read Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, and this is next on my list after I finish In Pharaoh’s Army by Tobias Wolff.

But back to Zorba. I had tried to read the novel when I was in culinary school in Portland. I probably got about half way through but I’m sure I never finished it. I believe the reason had to do with a temporary job I had through the school working for an Irish Pub on the Willamette River in Downtown Portland. (As usual and if you’ve read my posts before you’re used to this, this post isn’t really going to be about Zorbas the Greek but about me. This is a journal after all, and if you scroll way way way way down to the very first post you will see that the intention of this blog is to record personal remembrances, not literary criticism. Just be glad I don’t post pictures of my drunken spring break in Myrtle Beach—that’s a hypothetical by the way, I spent spring break with my father watching basketball—wow, this is a long parenthetical aside.) The owners of the place were the usual restaurant types, overworked assholes, probably coke addicts, who spewed their misery around the disproportionately small kitchen and treated the temps with con-tempt. I remember their being some hassle with getting paid and the owners were very allusive about it, being conspicuously absent come payday.

We were there to get the restaurant through St. Patrick’s Day weekend. The waterfront area was expecting tens of thousands of revelers and the pub, it wasn’t a real pub just a warehouse with some Irish flags hung on the rafters and a bar at the back, needed to provide overpriced greasy food to drunk grunge-heads by the truckload. So they requisitioned the culinary school to send them some scrawny wannabees to do as much grunt work as possible. The first day, we were put in the damp basement of the pub and presented with a huge pan of meat pie stuffing, several cases of puff pastry, and told that we needed to make ten thousand meat pies by the end of the shift. The puff pastry was frozen, and the work was slow-going and incredibly tedious. This condition was exacerbated by an annoying type-A personality who spent the entire shift not helping us but ass-kissing the owners instead.

As usual, I gravitated to the saddest-sack member of our group who, in this case, was a former teacher who had recently divorced and was starting a new career in the culinary field. I tried out a few jokes about our situation and he just gave me a forced look of patience, and after a while I let him do most of the talking which consisted mainly of complaints about his ex-wife. Somehow I discovered he was well read, and this immediately gave me the opportunity to inch out on to the ledge of literary discussion, dropping names like Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. He was duly unimpressed, so I tried a new tack by announcing that I had just finished Zorba the Greek. I hadn’t. I had probably read about a fourth of the novel. He immediately asked me what I had thought of the ending.

I couldn’t go back now. What I had read of the book gave me the impression that the message was one of affirmation of life, existentialism to its fullest, and I suppose I grabbed hold of this notion in order to get me through the dreary days of late winter in the Pacific Northwest. I believe I had seen some of Anthony Quinn’s performance in the movie, although I had no recollection of seeing the end of that either. I gambled on these two thin straws and stated, “what a great ending, it just makes me feel so positive,” or something to that effect.

My fellow meat-pie-maker just looked at me for a moment, and I knew my gamble had failed. He looked down and continued on his 357th pie. Then he said he wondered how I could get a positive message out of a novel where a woman is beheaded, another dies a slow consumptive death, a business fails miserably, and the hero is diminished by the hardships of existence, dying himself, almost as an afterthought. I, of course knew none of this, I had only read enough to know that they got drunk on the beach a lot. I stuttered something about how I never really thought about it like that before and silently hoped that the subject would change soon.

After that, Zorba the Greek lost all its charm for me. If the Pacific Northwest was contributing to my melancholia, reading about decapitation in the Greek Isles wasn’t going to help. I put the book down and possibly picked up something cheerier, like The Idiot. I wish I had ignored that guy though; my recent reading of Zorba the Greek still leaves me feeling positive. And all that talk about food! That alone makes you feel too hungry to sink into despair.

This time around was different. I debated whether to buy the book, but I ended up searching for it in the school library instead. They had one copy, an old addition whose binding looked like it had been on a couple of space missions and back. The jacketless cover was frayed at each corner and stained with different shades of brown and grey. I flipped through the pages and saw that there wasn’t too much underlining and loud colors of hi-lighter ruining the margins. I put it back though, and looked for a newer addition, coming up empty. It was either this edition or waiting until the next day to buy a book I can’t really afford right now. I reconsidered the worn copy, and decided a well-read copy bound in white but with many stains and scars from over-handling is the perfect vessel to carry Kazantzakis’ words. I checked it out and finished it in well under a week.

Overall I still feel that the existential zest that Zorba exhibits is life affirming and positive. Even the flies laying their eggs in the eyes of the dead convey a cyclical continuity of life which seems to be a promise, however macabre, of renewed existence. That’s my take anyway. I’m starting to believe that the guy I was making meat pies with in Portland was just generally grumpy. Actually, I’m not just starting to think that, I’ve always thought that, and my second attempt at Zorba has definitely confirmed my suspicion.