Author: Brian J. Noggle

Well, my friends, this book review represents a departure from those which have come before it. I ordered a copy of Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias and the News in paperback and have decided to test the new paint job in our bedroom by reading a flingable book in it. This book fits that bill already. So, in lieu of sticking a number of Post-It Notes ™ in it and then writing a couple of paragraphs when the heat of the reading is cool, I thought I might let you in on my thought processes as I read the book.

So, day one:

Objections:

• Page xi, in the Preface and Acknowledgements, for crying out loud. Alterman acknowledges missing the works of Robert Caro as he (Alterman) pursues an advanced degree in history–so he (Alterman) listens to the complete works of Caro on tape. Cheez, Louise, Alterman, that’s not scholarship, that’s killing time. When you listen to books on tape, they flow past you in a stream of someone else’s conscious narration, and once the words are past, they’re gone; you’re at the whim of the break in the tracks if you want to listen to a section over again, which is why I rarely do.

  Mostly I listen to books on tape to kill time on long drives to Milwaukee and back, or I used to do them when I had an hour long commute from work (or an hour and a half commute from work to my sweetie’s home, a quarter of the way across the state. If you’re listening to books for twenty minutes at a crack, you’re not paying them much attention. Cripes, I would not dare try to impress upon my mind the serious works of Tacitus or Gibbons through books on tape; I’d require the opportunity to re-read sentences until I grasped their very meaning. Alterman admits he–in pursuit of a college degree, for crying out loud (or swearing out loud in my case)–did less. It’s less respect to Caro on Alterman’s part than I am paying to Alterman, but it’s too late for me to borrow the abridged audio version of Alterman’s work, so I am stuck with my dollar’s worth (plus Quality Paperback Club’s Postage and Handling) of print. Heaven help me, and you, gentle reader.

  Fortunately for the both of us, I skimmed the rest of the acknowledgements.

• pp1-2 in the Introduction, a lot of name dropping, but I disagree. Whereas Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter quote people to indicate bias and slander, Alterman quotes people who indicate there is not bias nor slander. Goldberg and Coulter’s quotes represent primary sources, that is, indications that illustrate their points; when Alterman quotes sources who say there is no bias, it’s the equivalent of hearsay, since he’s not actually illustrating non-bias, but rather people saying there is not bias.
• p2 in the Introduction, Alterman quotes Pat Buchanan, for crying out loud, as though he (Buchanan) were a member of mainstream-right thought. Who are you kidding?
• p3 in the Introduction, Alterman refers to Ann Coulter as a blonde bombshell pundette. Ad homenim as Alterman points out that Coulter is an attractive (hem) woman, and hence should be judged lesser than, say, a homely man such as Alterman.
• p3 in the Introduction FIRST TOSSING POINT this comes a couple lines later:
  

  In recent times, the right has ginned up its “liberal media” propoganda machine. Books by both Ann Coulter, a blond bombshell pundette, and Bernard Goldberg, former CBS News producer, have topped the best-seller lists, stringing together such a series of charges that, well, it’s amazing neither one sought to accuse “liberals” of using the blood of conservative children for extra flavor in their soy-milk decaf lattes. [Emphasis mine.]

Got that? Alterman is saying that Coulter and Goldberg might as well have committed “blood libel.” The tradition to which “Mister” Alterman alludes says Jews use the blood of Gentile/Palestinian children in Zionist rituals of some sort or another. It’s often repeated these days in the Arab media to support the tradition of strapping explosives to Believers, women, and children to blow up Israeli civilians whose crime is stopping at a market or drinking coffee in a particular cafe. Damn you, Eric Alterman. I curse you only to the fate you deserve, whatever form it might take.

I would like to take a moment to apologize to Ajax and Tristan, the felines scared when I flung this book from my hands (towards the door, not the labouriously-painted walls) and to my beautiful wife, whom I upset with my foaming-mouth invective for Eric Alterman. You all deserve a better refuge when trying to sleep. I shall try to read this book alone, with a schnucking hammer with which to beat it, in the future for your peace of mind.

Day: 1
Pages read: 6.5
Chapters: Prefaces and Acknowledgements, Introduction (part of)

Full Disclosure: I remember trying to enter the contest for the Billy and the Boingers songs back in the middle 80s. I don’t remember if I actually completed the entry or not, but I do remember I did not win. So if you must, dismiss this review as sour grapes.

This is not the first copy of this book I have read; I cannot remember if I borrowed it from one of the rangers listed in a previous post (Thanks, Noodles) when it was new, but I bought it at a garage sale in years past along with my other recent funnies pages reads (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, Tales Too Ticklish to Tell) and I’ve read it now, with those same books.

This book actually immediately precedes Tales Too Ticklish To Tell, in that it introduces the Boinger storyline carried over into the later volume and introduces the basselope and Lola Granola characters.

What I said about the later book which I reviewed earlier remains true: It’s dated material. Still, I think this one is marginally better than the other. Since it deals less with the 1988 political season, it can focus on more universal themes, such as Tipper Gore leading a crusade to ramrod morality into rock music. Man, how things have changed, huh? But I digress. Because storylines involve Steve Dallas looking for a change from his lawyer work and Opus feeling his biological clock ticking–which leads him to his search for his soulmate (the aforementioned Miss Granola), Breathed gets to examine the human condition instead of the current political climate.

Face it, the human condition will remain mostly the same, regardless of the calendar date, which is why we’re reading Shakespeare four hundred years after he wrote his plays, or at least we’re watching movies on cable wherein Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves play them, but why Berke Breathed is struggling against obscurity and why Garfield–mocked as a comic strip in the second comic strip in this book–is now a major motion picture featuring the voice of Bill Murray.

Well, finally I have saved enough money up from my, er, prudence with purchasing one dollar books to save up for a copy of The Private Eye in Hammett and Chandler by Robert B. Parker. He stripped some of the academic verbiage from the dissertation he wrote for his PhD and published it as a limited edition via Lord John’s Press in the early eighties. How limited? This printing was limited to 300; I think the more exclusive run was under 100, so there are fewer than 400 copies of this book in print. And I got one. Nyah, nyah.

Here are some pix:

Click any photo for super size

I’ve read all of Parker’s fiction, some of his profiles, and some of his nonfiction, but this represents the greatest divergance from his normal style I’ve seen. He stilted its prose to impress some review board, or whatever group determines whether a master becomes a doctor, so I realize I, consumer, am not the target audience. Still, it’s more stilted than most nonfiction I read for fun, Make Room for TV notwithstanding.

To summarize, Parker takes us on a six chapter, 63 page exploration of the hard-boiled detective character embraced by Dash and Raymond, exploring how they fit into the literary canon of American heroes. The first two chapters run through obligatory quotations from other critics and academics, which rather drags but undoubtedly proved that Parker did his research. Then, Parker explores earlier manifestations of the American hero archetype that led to hard-boiled private eyes: the frontiersman, demonstrated in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales and Daniel Boone’s legendary biography.

Parker doesn’t build a revolutionary case, nor does he really reveal any blinding insight into the scholarship of the hard-boiled detective–although my reading is certainly limited, but I have read some (American Tough, and so on). The biggest insight is not in the text itself, but in its relationship to how Parker would craft the Spenser novels.

Using this document, one can see an earlier step in Parker’s thought processes than The Godwulf Manuscript. For example, he notes that neither the Continental Op nor Philip Marlowe could really describe the code of honor to which they adhere. Spenser and Hawk, in Parker’s novels, don’t suffer, at great length, from this flaw.

So it’s an interesting read if you strive to emulate Parker’s success by imitation and ceaseless devotion, or if you like Spenser, I guess. Although there are no We’d be fools not to, there is one Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?–proving that this really is Parker, with the throwaway allusions that characterize not only his novels, his screenplays, but also, apparently, his most serious nonfiction. Thankfully.

P.S. Class, why is it that two of the vendors selling this on Amazon.com are both selling the exact same copy, # 245, of this numbered limited edition? Never mind, class; I am cynical enough to guess.

Unfortunately, I read this book immediately upon the heels of The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and this volume suffers by comparison.

It’s been sixteen years since this book came out, and it’s already not much more than a time capsule into the last two years of Reagan’s presidency. Whereas Calvin and Hobbes touched on broader human themes that sometimes touched on daily topics, but Bloom County’s storylines are completely wed to the period in which they were written. I mean, who remembers the Jim and Tammy Faye enough to find a penguin’s take on them amusing? The cover of the book depicts George (H.W., as he would later be known) Bush with Opus on his lap; it refers to the photo of Gary Hart with Donna Rice on his lap that spoiled his bid for the Democratic nomination in 1988. See how the topics fade to irrelevance and obscurity?

Bloom County, like Calvin and Hobbes, became iconic in that Opus was on everything in the late 1980s; apparel, plush toys, lunchboxes. However, unlike Calvin and Hobbes, which is fresh and funny twenty years later and probably will for a number of years yet, Bloom County’s as relevant and contemporary as Snuffy Smith. Unlike Watterson, who quit while he was popular (like Gary Larsen) to avoid a strip depicting Calvin in his little red wagon flying over a pool with a shark in it, Breathed has continued trying to breathed life into these characters through Bloom County and then Outland and now Opus whenever a Republican president needed a public lambasting by a penguin. (Read James Lileks on Opus last week.)