Author: Brian J. Noggle

As some of you remember, I reviewed Bill Cosby’s Time Flies in February. I liked it, so I have invested in other books by Bill Cosby, including this one, for which I paid $2.95 at Downtown Books in Milwaukee.

I’ll give the customary ding to the pop-psych introduction by Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D. Again, this is like throwing a Dr. Phil introduction onto a collection of Andy Rooney pieces, or perhaps Dr. Laura in front of a Chris Rock book. Come on, the difference between the styles jars the reader, and to be honest, if I wanted to read a self-helpish treatise on love and marriage, I would buy a book with pictures, diagrams, and innovations I could not even imagine when I was a fevered twenty-year-old. I mean, it’s like getting served a bowl of brussel sprouts in Baskin Robbins before you can have any ice cream. Sure, I wolfed it down, spitting some into my napkin to conceal it, and then I rushed into the main course of dessert.

This book contains two parts. Part one deals with Cos’s youthful forays into love, which entails everything you expect: Lust, pounding hearts, sweet agony, heartbreak, loss, and all of the above by age twelve. Cosby captures the adolescent and early adult experiences of the opposite sex and the attempts to find a mate–which they did in the old days; now, I think kids just attempt to mate. So this first section really represents the strength of the book, and the stories are told with Cosby’s easy style. Good reading.

Unfortunately, the second part, Marriage, deals differently with his relationship with the woman who finally bagged the struggling stand-up comic who would only decades later evolve into the biggest sitcom star in the business. Perhaps he’s mining his marriage with a sitcom eye for humor, but the second half of the book really focuses on the nitpicking, and the little recurrent tense spots, and the stupid fights that occur in many marriages. As a sitcom veteran, Cosby also recognizes that the husband must be made into the often inept and impotent victim, and that’s how he paints himself. Henpecked. It’s hardly a flattering or inspiring vision of a marriage that’s lasted twenty-five years (as his did by 1989), and Cosby longs for an evolution to a state like his parents’ marriage of fifty years. Ye gods, he’s projecting another 25 years of hard belittlement.

Granted, Cosby hits on the benefits of marriage and at the end alludes to the joys of shared memories, but he disservices the day-to-day, which includes as many (or more, preferably) bright spots as nitterings.

Still, it’s an okay read if you’re a fan of light comic essays in Cos’s style, worthy of a library checkout or a cheap purchase.

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.