the flumgudgeon gazette

One of the things I look forward to most at the end of any term, semester, or set period of busyness is the time and space to read … whatever I want. I’m curious what all of you have been waiting to read, or are reading now, or are surprised you’re not reading. (Also, there’s a hidden motive: my old buddy Zach and I need to select a novel for one of our occasional transcontinental pseudo-book-club ventures, and I’m looking for inspiration. Anyone have suggestions?)

I’m reading: The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey; Assasination Vacation, Sarah Vowell; This Organic Life, Joan Dye Gussow; The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos; and rereading The River Why, David James Duncan. Oddly, I’m not making much progress with any of these.

Lined up on my shelf waiting their turn are: A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson; The Inheritance of Loss, Kirin Desai; Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami; Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon.

The first West Coast newspaper was a hand-written satirical publication first published in Oregon City in the spring of 1844. “The title of the paper was the Flungudeon Gazette, or Bumble-Bee Budget, edited by the Long-tailed Coon, a sort of Pike County Punch affair. The motto read, ‘Devoted to scratching and stinging the Follies of the Age.’

“It was tri-weekly, some eight or ten numbers being issued, continuing during the session of the Legislative Council of the [Oregon] Territory. The paper made quite a stir in those parts, and kept the members on their p’s and q’s all the time. It was burlesquing, comical, and humorously critical upon the honorable body, which, like the California Legislatures, was a compound mixture of Hoosierism and Yankee, without the addition, as with us, of the Chivalry, Greasers, and Sour­ Krout.”

-From an unsigned article quoted in Journalism in the United States 1690 – 1872, by Frederic Hudson, published in 1873.