MemeMachineGo!

This weekend I reread my favorite Daniel Pinkwater fiction book, Young Adults. This is the saga of the Wild Dada Ducks, five Dadaist boys at Himmler High School. One of their artistic actions is to print and distribute cards declaring “Horace Gerstenblut [their high school principal] n’existe pas.” The principal calls them to his office (they being the usual suspects.)

Mr Gerstenblut had fifteen or twenty cards on his desk. “What do you fellows know about this?” he asked, handing the cards to each of us.

“It’s in French,” Captain Colossal said.

“It has your name on it,” I said.

“It says that you don’t exist,” Igor said.

“And what do you weirdos have to do with this?” Mr. Gerstenblut asked.

“I’m afraid we can’t tell you,” Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico) said.

“And why not?”

“Because you don’t exist.” […]

Mr. Gerstenblut told us that he was going to let us off because he didn’t have any proof—but he was going to watch us. He said that we were nihilists and that he wasn’t going to stand for any of that at Himmler.

We looked up nihilist in the library. We were tickled. Of course we weren’t nihilists—Dadaists are constructive artists—but we all agreed, if we couldn’t have been Dadaists, nihilists would have been a pretty decent second choice.

Young Adults includes Young Adult Novel, previously published as its own volume, but also two other Dada Ducks stories (the Pinkwater omnibus Five Novels reprints only Young Adult Novel.) For my money, the second story, “Dead End Dada”, is even funnier. In the first story, they hung out at a local drugstore where they could monopolize a booth for a cheap order of cinammon toast. By the second story, the drugstore has been replaced by a Chinese laundromat. The Ducks have continued to hang out there. When they decide they’re going to be students of Zen, they adopt the laundromat owner as their Zen master, without telling him this.

Finally, during the dryer phase of our meditation, Master Yee addressed us all with a profound question for study.

“Okay, you laundry all finish,” our esteemed teacher said, “What you do now?”

“Our laundry all finish,” we responded in unison. “What we do now?”

“Our laundry all finish. What we do now?”

“Our laundry all finish. What we do now?”

“Our laundry all finish. What we do now?”

“Our laundry all finish. What we do now?”

It became a chant as we folded the laundry carefully, consciously, mindfully. It was, as we later agreed, the highest moment yet in our spiritual and artistic experience.

Always miles ahead of us, the Zen master, seemingly irrationally, became agitated. “Okay! Okay! Now you go! You get out! You crazy boys! You go home now! You crazy bald-headed boys!”

It was precisely the right thing to do. The master’s outburst shook us loose from our moment of detachment and brought us into confrontation with reality. This was exactly what had happened to Dr. Wizardo in Captain Colossal’s comic book.

The final story, “The Dada Boys in Collitch” is presented as the first chapter of an unfinished novel telling what happens when they go to college. It’s the classic Pinkwater story: students, failed by conventional institutions, discover how to get their real education. I’d dearly love to see Pinkwater continue it.

For all I love Young Adults, my favorite Pinkwater books are his essay collections (mostly commentaries for All Things Considered), Fishwhistle and Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights (collected in single volume in Hoboken Fish and Chicago Whistle.) I wish that “Who’s [sic] Little Jackson Pollack Are You?” from Fishwhistle were online, so I could link to it.