God I hate 600-page books.  Nosebreakers, we call them in academia.  They’ll break your nose if you’re reading in bed and fall asleep with that slab of hardbound paper balanced on your chest.  An occupational hazard of the social sciences, along with nearsightedness and diminished attractiveness to the opposite sex.

The only thing worse than a 600-page book is a 600-page book filled with fine print and tabular data instead of something more interesting, like porn.  Right now I’m slogging through Timothy Cardflecher’s Agrarian Trends in Hacienda Tenoteches, 1715-1810.  A century of data about the operations of a large hacienda in a forgotten backwater of New Spain, as Mexico was called back then.  Commercialization, price movements, productivity effects, you name it.  It’s all here in excruciating detail.  This is the worst drubbing my attention span has ever endured.

Normally I’d just read the introduction and conclusion and skip all the dreck in between, but I’m writing a book review.  Because nobody else wanted to.  Book reviews are publication credit in this publish-or-perish dystopia, which means somebody on the bottom rung of the academic food chain – a mere Ph.D. student like me – never gets a chance to review the good books.  The books with cutting-edge analyses instead of moldering tables.  The light bedtime reading, as opposed to the nosebreakers.  The good books are always snapped up by the tenured and tenure-tracked, with leftovers for the visiting faculty who are playing musical chairs with each other.  But every once in a while a table scrap falls to the floor.

Sad thing is, I happen to know Professor Cardflecher.  Tim.  Met the dude at a conference in Miami.  I believe the feminist descriptor for him is “nice guy”.  We got drunk on cheap beers in the hotel bar and exuded an all-too-resistible heterosexuality for the benefit of any hotties in pheromone radius.  He was bragging about the book contract, a golden opportunity to repurpose his Ph.D. dissertation.  Four years of research and writing validated.  Then another two years of editing and rewriting until the text was finally acceptable to University of North Carolina Press.  All for a print run of 200 copies.  200 fucking copies.  A hundred to various research libraries around the world, a hundred to Tim for mementos and doorstops and stuff.

It’s within the realm of possibility that nobody will ever read Tim’s 600-page book, just my 4-paragraph review.  That should motivate me to diligence, but my reviewing style isn’t diligent.  Lacking the intellectual horsepower of my peers, I focus on entertainment value.  I eschew the classic book review format – intro paragraph, paragraph about strengths, paragraph about weaknesses, closing paragraph – and chase from one punchline to the next.  “A waste of trees” is how I dismissed a tome about Sandinista pacifists.  “Mercifully short” was my reaction to a study of Mexican demographic data.  “Begs the question of Argentine economic development” I complained about a history of Argentine economic development.

I don’t have any witty smackdowns for Tim’s book.  Not yet, anyway.  I flip through more pages.  Eyes glazing over.  Pulse flatlining.  30 cc’s of adrenaline for the patient, stat!  But I already drank all my Diet Pepsi, made all my coffee.  Now I’m down to cheap vodka.  The highway to hell in a convenient plastic jug.

Out the window the afternoon is fading into angry pink tints.  Traffic ebbs and flows in the street, Koreatown respiring.  Somewhere a lowrider is pumping bass.  The tang of diesel smoke assaults my nostrils.  But everything is coming at me dimly, through a displaced temporal fog, not here and now.  My head is swirling with memories of yesterday – all the fun I had with Nooshin, our long sandy hike into the harsh beauty of Canyon Sin Nombre, the contentment she radiated and the sad nervousness beneath it.

A married woman in one of those Muslim hijab things.  Who won’t tell me a thing about her husband.  Or her family.  Or even herself, really.

I’m hit with a drunken impulse to call her.  I stop my hand before it reaches the cellphone, lying on the bedspread next to me.  The impulse lingers, fascinating me.  It’s not a booty call thing.  I’m used to those urges, and satisfying them with Phoebe – or my right hand, now.  This impulse is new and strange.  A longing for connection.

Memories of Nooshin.  Like I don’t have enough bullshit to deal with already.  I focus on drinking those brain cells dead, one by one.