Zolapalooza!

When Uncle Dave gives me money for my birthday, he says it's an investment in his future, meaning that Stinky will be less likely to murder him in his sleep with a rusty machete. Oh, Uncle Dave, you're so amusing. Actually, Uncle Dave is a pretty nice guy who is relatively low on the list of people that Stinky is likely to horribly mutilate.

Ha. "Horribly mutilate". Is there another way to do it? But Stinky digresses.

For an adult, Uncle Dave is fairly tolerable, except when, Stinky assumes, he is trying to be funny. Like when he says stuff like, "Roseanne, bar the door" and "Do you know why exorcisms are legal? Because possession is nine-tenths of the law." Hilarious*. But Stinky is certain that Uncle Dave reads Stinky's blog, which is more than Stinky can say about his other friends and fambly members. In fact, Uncle Dave gave Stinky his first opportunity in the blogosphere, undoubtedly the finest piece of writing ever to grace Uncle Dave's blog, Born Under Pants, or whatever it is called.

So after reading Stinky's last blog entry, Uncle Dave said, "Nice to see you are finally reading The Classics, little man, and not wasting your time with the graphic novels and the hippity-hop music, or whatever people of your ilk and generation cotton to these days. By the bye, the passages you quoted seem to me a precursor to the final paragraph in Zola's Nana."

Well, that's Uncle Dave for you, using made-up words like "precursor" to make himself sound smart. He also said that Nana was a novel about a Parisian courtesan who meets a frighteningly nasty and disfiguring demise from smallpox, following a life of dissipation and moral turpitude. Yes, Uncle Dave tends to talk that way. But this made Stinky eager to read the book, especially after he looked up the word "courtesan".

For those of you who wish to commit yourselves to the preceding 400 pages, go right ahead. For those of you with busy schedules, like Stinky, the rest of the novel can wait. Here is the final paragraph describing the beautiful Nana's grisly end, which does not disappoint:

                     Nana was left alone with  upturned face in the light cast by the  candle. She was the fruit
                   of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood,  a shovelful  of  corrupted flesh thrown
                   down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched
                   its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed  the grayish  hue of mud;  and  on  that
                   formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some
                   decaying damp  from  the grave.  One eye, the left eye,  had completely foundered  among 
                   bubbling purulence,  and the other,  which remained half open,  looked like a deep,  black
                   ruinous hole. The nose was still suppurating. Quite a reddish crust was peeling from  one 
                   of the cheeks,  which it  distorted  into a horrible grin.  And over this loathsome  and  gro-
                   tesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed down
                   in rippling gold.   Venus was rotting.  It seemed as though the  poison she had  assimilated 
                   in the gutters and on the carrion  tolerated by the roadside,  the leaven with which  she had 
                   poisoned a whole people,  had but  now  remounted to her face and turned it to corruption.

Most awesome paragraph of all times? Probably.

Thanks, Uncle Dave.


*Sarcasm

Nana. But Uncle Dave says it's A Classic, Mom.