The Territory

Well the holiday season is in full effect and you know what that means… TIME TO BRING ANOTHER BOOK INTO THE TERRITORY! This week as promised I’m bringing the hugely influential Nikolai Gogol into THA TERRITORA! And I bet your thinking that this is going to be all about Dead Souls but you would be wrong. This one will be about one of the greatest short stories ever written. It’s called The Overcoat and you can look at any Russian author after 1800 and they’ll all say the same thing. That Gogol is part of the reason they write. Dostoyevsky once said “We all were born out of The Overcoat “ The overcoat is about Akakii Akakievich who works as an overworked underpaid office clerk who gets made fun of by his coworkers that make jokes about his sloppy overcoat. He starts saving for a new overcoat and it takes a long time due to his poverty and he winds up obsessing about the idea of his new overcoat. Finally he gets a new one and is not only the talk of the office but of the town and the next day, walking home from work in his new threads, gets mugged and never sees the overcoat again. This event spirals into things unimaginable and crazy as you are thrown into the back of your seat at how surreal, dangerous, funky and awkward things can get. The general vibe that I always got from reading The Overcoat was a feeling of misunderstanding and miscommunication based on societal norms that always seem to interrupt the cool things in life. I will think of this as I am bombarded with reruns of sitcom Christmas specials where upper white middle class models worry themselves into story-arcs as they try to find the right presents for their oh-so-many loved ones that they are consistently surrounded by as the climax of the episode comes to a zenith they all rest well on the pillow of knowledge that they will be surrounded by more and more upper middle class loved ones bringing it more and more until all that is not part of their upper middle class love gets band-aid-coming-off-the-arm-slowly gentrified out of their own neighborhoods and put into places that don’t taste quite as much like chicken. Merry Christmas.

A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer.

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