I’ll Seize the Day
Tomorrow is a Jonathan Goldstein book that I didn’t even know was coming
out. I regularly listen to Goldstein’s CBC show WireTap and have read Ladies
and Gentlemen, The Bible! but didn’t know that he had a new book coming
out.
It’s really difficult not to read a book by Goldstein
without hearing his characteristic voice, especially when bits and pieces of
this book have already been featured on WireTap.
There are so many echoes of Goldstein on the radio in this book, especially
stories like “Soulmates,” about Mary Poppins and The Penguin meeting at a
dinner party expecting to have a lot to talk about considering the whole
umbrella thing. I remember hearing that story, and many others on WireTap (the book is divided up into
around fifty chapters, vignettes, or, as described in the introduction,
Goldstein’s “pensées”),
and reading the stories I remember hearing Goldstein say on the radio provided something
like instructions for how to hear the voice narrating this book.
The occasion for the book is Goldstein’s impending fortieth
birthday, and the book chronicles his thirty-ninth year, as he counts down the
weeks until he turns forty. Goldstein retains his existential, anxiety-ridden
style, supported by an infrastructure of humor, a complicated combination of
heaviness and light, heaviness and light. The foreword and the epilogue are
both written by his (ex)agent, Gregor Ehrlich, a self-referential framing
mechanism that critiques and comments on the book.
Instead of writing about the book as a narrative whole, I’m
just going to include a few selections from the book, to highlight what I think
makes it another incredible book by Jonathan Goldstein:
1. “It appears someone has taken a candy out of the office
candy dish, removed its wrapper, sucked it, and put it back in the bowl where
it now sits stuck to the bottom, red, wet, and gleaming. Someone who is capable
of something like that is capable of anything. There is a sociopath among us. I
make a mental note to stop using the communal office dishrag and start keeping
my uneaten Melba toast in a locked desk drawer.”
2. “Everyone has a hidden talent for something. The lucky ones
discover theirs before it’s too late. Would it be more sad or less sad to go
through life never discovering you can fly, or discovering it only a minute
before dying? I guess it would really allow for a beautiful death – an old man
flying out the window after a long life.”
3. “Step one: shave. While doing so, I stop at the moustache and stare at myself
in the mirror. Moustachioedness. I look like a completely different style of
person, like the kind of guy who’d sing Motown songs in the public showers at
the Y – someone who’d shirtlessly open his front door to the gas man, possibly
calling him ‘chief.’ When I finish I’m left feeling as if, after a long night
out, my face has finally taken off its pants.”
I’ll Seize the Day
Tomorrow is almost like an extended episode of WireTap, funny, introspective, and never incidental.
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