By Armando Simón
I grabbed Carl Nelson’s The Barking Squirrel to read frankly for its title. The book is a collection of essays on a wide variety of subjects. As he himself writes, you can read the essays in any order you like. These include his observations as a fledgling doctor, a bus driver, an artist and a theater director. There are also observations about politics and women (both dangerous subjects). Also, crazy neighbors. There were also some book reviews. All essays were prefaced by either a painting or a photograph, a rare practice outside of New English Review.
It has been a long time since I read a collection of essays, particularly on many different topics, so I was at first irritated since I have lately been reading books consisting of one topic, but once I got acclimated, I began enjoying reading them. In fact, most of the essays stay on target (of the title), while a few engage in the stream of consciousness type of narration.
Either way, reading the book is pleasant—that is the word for it, pleasant. I have read other books which left me in the same pleasant state of mind. Nelson’s essays are the musings of a man looking back at different aspects of his long life and events, including contemporary ones, and jotting them down on paper. As he puts it, “But, here again, look at how I spend my time writing essays for which there is little remuneration and lots of opportunity to piss someone off—just for the joy of trying to catch a bit of life on a page, kind of like fishing.”
Don’t I know it.
As I read the different essays, along the way, I found several nuggets of wisdom, much like aphorisms, which I would like to pass on:
“Nobody reveres Murphy’s Law like an engineer.” (His siblings are engineers.)
“It took me many years to understand that the reason many people could not understand what I was saying, no matter how it was pitched to them—was because they didn’t want to.”
“The soldiers of both wars most fear, even above death, embarrassing themselves before their platoon either by cowardice or from incompetence or slackness.”
“In a metropolitan area you must purchase your safety through location.”
“This feeling among the common citizen that we are circling a drain is prevalent. Something up there is eating its tail.”
“The art world, where pretense and fantasy are coins of the realm.”
“Troubled people practice with all the skills of alchemists—to turn the gold of life into mercury!”
“There seems to be nothing in the theater which can be humdrum and planned.”
I’ll leave it to the reader to pan the book for additional nuggets in the book.
Naturally, I have to say at least one bad thing about the book—I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to be critical, to wit—a few of the essays had poems in the middle, written by the author, and I am very critical of poetry. But that is a personal idiosyncrasy of mine.
The other one was that I never did find the barking squirrel in that book.
One Response
Thank you very much for the review Armando. I don’t remember writing half the aphorisms – but I like them! And it’s true about the Barking Squirrel. There is no mention of one in the book, but is a title taken from my substack, The Barking Squirrel, at carln.substack. com