Dreaming of Gwen Stefani
Dreaming of Gwen Stefani
Synopsis
Mortimer Taylor Coleridge is a unique man. With a mind of rare mathematical precision, he is obsessed with imposing order upon the chaos of every day life. A once brilliant student of evolutionary biology at Columbia University, he has turned his back on a promising academic career to devote his life to selling hot dogs at Papaya Queen. There, Mortimer uses his keen intellect to become the quickest and most efficient of hot dog men, devising a numerical-based system to sell hot dogs which maximizes both time and effort.
One day while watching TV, Mortimer comes upon VH1, and his life is instantly transformed. While watching Behind the Music: No Doubt, he decides that he and Gwen Stefani are soul mates, destined to be together. When Mortimer discovers that her favorite food is a Papaya Queen hot dog, he dedicates his life to preparing for the day, which he knows will come, when Gwen Stefani will walk into the Papaya Queen where he works, order a frankfurter and fall in love with him.
Dreaming of Gwen Stefani takes our culture’s obsession with celebrity to its logical—or illogical—conclusion.
Praise
“Dreaming of Gwen Stefani is a quirky and compelling riff on the nature of romantic obsession, celebrity worship, free will versus determinism and the joys of Papaya ‘Queen’ hot dogs.” —Jay McInerney
“Mandery delivers disparate treatises – on the history of hot dogs, pop-culture obsessions, and yeah, evolutionary biology (humans are just worms, basically) – by turns equally comic, philosophical, and scientific.” —Chicago Reader
“The book moves toward Mortimer’s inevitable meeting with Stefani. When this moment arrives, all of Mortimer’s fastidious preparations, calculations, and obsessions will have readers holding their breath awaiting the outcome.” —Ink 19
Excerpt
Chapter 12
On the first meeting of Biology 235: Introduction to Evolutionary Biology, in September 1990, Professor Fillmore Skinny posed the following questions: “What separates man from other animals? What makes humans human?”
Hands shot up.
“Ability to speak.”
“Ability to reason.”
“Guns.”
“The New Kids on the Block.” (This was a popular musical group at the time, a joke. Most people have forgotten the New Kids, but at the time their immortality seemed assured.)
Professor Skinny wrote all of the answers on a green chalkboard at the front of the lecture hall, arranging the responses into logical groupings: language, art, agriculture, self-destructive behavior, and so forth. By the time the class had exhausted itself the list had grown to an impressive size, two dozen or so items in all. He then dismissed the students without another word.
At the next meeting of the class, the chalkboard remained in its place on the stage. Skinny entered, wearing a tattered brown suit and bow tie—his customary costume—and pointed to the first word on the list: “language.”
“Vervets,” he said. “Vervets are a cat-sized breed of African monkey. They talk. When vervets see a leopard, the males give off a loud series of barks and the females give off a high-pitched chirp and all of the monkeys in the vicinity scramble up trees. When a vervet sees a martial eagle—the leading killer of vervets—it emits a short cough of two syllables. Nearby monkeys look up or run into the bush. If a vervet sees a dangerous snake, it chutters, and the vervets in the area stand on their hind legs and look down.
“Their vocabulary doesn’t end here. Vervets have words for baboons, jackals, hyenas, and unfamiliar humans. When vervets interact with other vervets, they grunt. They have different grunts for when they approach dominant monkeys and subordinate monkeys, and for when they see a rival troop. They have a vocabulary of at least a dozen different words, and these are only the ones that scientists have been able to decipher so far.
“But animals don’t have grammar, you say. Well, dolphins do. Marine biologists have trained dolphins to recognize symbols for dozens of nouns and verbs. They have also taught them linguistic instructions, like ignoring the previous word in a sentence. For example, say this to a trained dolphin: ‘Bring ring delete ball’ and the dolphin will bring the ball.
“Research in humans shows that the ability to learn language is genetically determined. People with a defect on the eleventh chromosome suffer from an affliction called Williams Syndrome. These people have rich vocabularies and something resembling an addiction to using flowery speech. Ask them to think of an animal and they will more likely pick an egret or an antelope than a cat or a dog. But they are severely retarded.
“People with a different defect on chromosome 11 suffer from something known as specific language impairment. They can memorize grammatical rules, but they cannot apply them instinctively. They know by heart that the plural of ‘dog’ is ‘dogs,’ but ask them the plural of an unfamiliar word, like chriropodist, and they’re stuck. Passive voice, suffixes, word choice rules, all give them problems too. And it’s entirely hereditary.
“So if animals other than humans have language and if the human ability to speak is genetically programmed, then this doesn’t really belong on the list, does it? If anything, the evidence suggests that humans are more like other animals than not. It suggests instead that other animals have sophisticated linguistic capabilities, more sophisticated than we like to believe, and that it is only a matter of time before we comprehend these capacities better. The evidence certainly does not suggest that humans are unique in any way.”
With that Professor Skinny walked over to the chalkboard and unceremoniously drew a line through the word “language.” Then he walked out of the room.