A Pilgrim’s Digression

Every once in awhile, I think to myself, “There must be a faster route to work.” And so I decide to take a different bus to the Metro station. And so I end up at work fifteen minutes late. Of course I stopped at Starbucks along the way. Good coffee today. The Sumatra blend Starbucks served earlier in the week was oily tasting. I’ve read about a kind of coffee bean fed to monkeys, then collected from their shit and ground and brewed as a particular delicacy. I wonder …

I noticed one of the supervisors in my department signed in for work, then went out to Starbucks for coffee, this morning. I have a problem doing that myself, not because I am a moral exemplar, but because I am lazy. I’d rather buy the coffee on my way in to work, rather than sign in, then leave the building again to buy my coffee. Passing through security every time you enter or leave is a real bitch. We have coffee shops in our building, but only one serves good coffee, and it is just as far to walk there as it is to go out to Starbucks.

Ah, the life of a civil servant office worker. How utterly … boring.

On the train today I read an R. Crumb cartoon in the New Yorker concerning a trip to Cannes he and his wife took a few weeks ago. Crumb is a favorite of mine. There is an ordinariness, a lack of pretension about his work, that I appreciate. That may be at odds with received opinion of him. I know his work is often read from a psychoanalytic viewpoint; he particularly angers feminists with his interest in sex and big butt, big legged women. Comparing him to newspaper cartoonists is probably an insult, but so many newspaper cartoons, these days, are overtly political. Is Boondocks supposed to be funny? I read an article about its creator in the New Yorker as well. He seems like an angry young man, which is attractive when one is an angry young man one’s self. With age comes temperance. Trudeau makes me laugh occasionally, though not often. He’s pretty tiresome, I think. Crumb is a true artist. He has his political opinions, but they come through much more subtly. Or else he simply announces them in a bland, straightforward way that breaks all the rules of political comic strip wit. In his New Yorker article on Cannes, for example, he depicts himself and his wife as provincials in an alien environment of wealth. He critiques the greed that supersedes art in a media event such as Cannes. He critiques the deference paid to undeserving movie stars, choosing to praise the uncomfortable, quiet Daryl Hannah over Uma Thurman during a press conference with Tarantino and his two female stars. He remarks on the extraordinary amount of “security thugs” roaming about Cannes. Remarkably, he and his wife see Fahrenheit 9/11, but Crumb does not remark on it immediately. Finally, at the very end of the article, he inserts one pane in which he and his wife speak directly to the reader. They say that they believe the movie is true and deserves to be seen. This is the only overtly political statement in the whole article, and it is refreshingly straightforward and lacking in a pretense of superior knowledge. I respect that.