While Chris has been busy oiling nails, building a bed and a drinking table, or maybe it’s a drinking bed, I have been thinking about the renaming of “The Furniture of Necessity” to “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” What happens when an anarchist takes over a book? Does the cover get sticky? Do you have to read it upside down? So, I pulled some books from my shelves, changed the titles and opening lines to see what would happen when a book is made “more anarchy.”
I started with Virgil’s The Anarchid (spidey version of The Aeneid): “Anarchy and a man I sing–an exile driven by Fate/he was the first to flee the coast of Arkansas/destined to reach Roubian shores and Roman holdfasts/yet many tools he took on land and sea from the gods above…. (OK, I don’t understand it either.)
Pride and Anarchy: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single anarchist in possession of good tools must be in want of a workbench.”
The Metanamorphosis: “As Gregor Schwarz awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic anarchist.
One Hundred Years of Anarchy: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Schwarz was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice and anarchy.”
Rumpole and the Age of Anarchy: “It was now getting on for half a century since I took to anarchy, and I have to say I haven’t regretted a single moment of it.”
Fear and Anarchy in Fort Mitchell: “We were somewhere around Covington on the edge of the desert when the anarchy began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…’ ”
Because of Winn-Dixie and the Anarchy: “My name is Christopher Opal Schwarz, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog and a knockdown Nicholson bench.”
The Wind-up Anarchist’s Chronicle: “When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, warming a potful of hide glue and whistling along with an FM broadcast of Nirvana’s Heart-shaped Box, which has to be the perfect music for warming glue.”
Now back to where it all began with The Anarchist’s Tool Chest and that well-known first line: “When I am too exhausted from tagging underpasses, ill or too busy to work in my shop, I will sneak down the stairs to my 15′ x 25′ workshop and simply stand there for a few minutes with my hands on my tool.”
There you have it.
–Suzanne Ellison
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Due to excessive brain flatulence (I can’t find my corpus callosum), I forgot to make the “Virtuoso” documentary available for streaming. Yup. Only one month late.
