Category: Books

I bought this book at a yard sale some years ago, and I’ve decided recently to add a volume of poetry to my mix of books on my nightstand (after my experience with the book of Leonard Cohen’s selected poems). So I read this book.

It’s only 100 pages of primary material, and doesn’t represent a collection of material showing a poet’s evolution. Hence, I could enjoy it and the poems within it much more easily and much more viscerally than I could something with footnotes or 40 page introductions indicating why the poet was good.

Oddly enough, Robert Frost published this book in 1962, which is within the span of years contained within the four volumes in the Leonard Cohen selection (1956-1968). Cohen’s material seems much more contemporary and Frost’s more archaic, but the lack of “sophistication” belies some powerful poetry.

Frost rhymes almost exclusively, and any serious poet who attended college gets that beaten out of them pretty effectively (and unserious poets rarely bother). So a contemporary reader, even I, can find himself or herself pooh-poohing the rhymes as unsophisticated. Sometimes, they are; he rhymes US with Russ (for Russian) at one point. I gave that up early in college, and prefer to work a little harder to make rhymes work.

But if you spend too much time carping about the rhymes and the simplicity of the language of the poems, you miss out on Frost’s ability to nail a phrase or line that captures something of human experience that you’ll want to quote and that his simplistic poems often have deeper meanings below the surface that you can fathom without a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and certain material related to the Kabbalah.

So read more Frost. I knew once that it was good (high school, before I became more “educated” in my poetry tastes) and now again.

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

I bought a copy of this book for $2.95 at Downtown Books, and I was in the mood for a good older (pulp, noir) book after watching Call It Murder, a movie I got as part of a Humphrey Bogart movie box set and which Humphrey Bogart gets first billing only because his last name begins with a B. So after watching a poor transfer of a decent play turned into a bad movie, I picked this book up. Nertz. I deserved it, I suppose.

This book won the Edgar Award in 1951 for best first mystery novel. Apparently, the author was a widely-published short story writer, and the back cover explains that he’s an expert craftsman who doesn’t like a single waste word. Unfortunately, you can flip the book open to any page and find wasted words, impersonal expressions, extraneous adverbs, and everything else.

If this book served as our only artifact, we might assume that 1949 preceded the important invention of dialog. Open this book and just look at the text, and you might think you’re looking at a Russian novel or an academic piece of nonfiction. Long paragraphs fill out the pages, with nary a line of spoken dialog between–and when the characters speak, they speak in paragraphs.

These two factors alone would deprive a book of pacing, but that’s not all. Walsh apparently conducted his research into the Manhattan train depot, the primary setting of the novel, because he spends pages upon pages describing its environment and its back corridors. Whereas I like glimpses behind the scenes of different business/industrial scenes, Walsh pours these wordy descriptions into even climactic action scenes. The antagonist should run down a corridor. That’s all I need to see. I don’t need to know what rooms branch from the corridor, or how high the windows in the corridor are, or upon what rooms the other doors open. Just get the antagonist down the corridor.

Walsh also uses a poor device to try to build suspense, wherein he cuts between the cardboard characters, some of whom are lucky enough to be distinguished by their archetypes but others are only different in name, just as an important event is going to happen. Short cuts might prove interesting and suspenseful if the reader could tell the characters apart or cared about the characters. However, when the clock sits at twelve minutes to noon and these cut scenes stretch into paragraphs and dialogless pages of characters reflecting that they’re scared/anxious/nervous because the upcoming event is important amid meticulous recounting of the staircases and balconies of the train station, the reader just wants to fast forward those twelve minutes so that over the course of ten pages, something important will happen.

Perhaps I’m a jaded modern reader who doesn’t appreciate the important ground broken by this crime novel. But I do know that pulp fiction published at the same time had more at stake than this book. The plot: kidnappers, amusingly spelled kidnapers in this book (obviously, it preceded the common spelling of the crime), kidnape a child and hold him ransom for (pinky to mouth) fifty thousand dollars!. A tough transit cop and his superiors want to find the kidnapers before they kill the child. Russeted onto the story, we have an understated love interest in the secretary of the businessman whose son was kidnaped. Also, we have the train station, which is not personified and doesn’t become a character in any sense like Ray Chandler would do to LA or Ed McBain would do to The City.

The plot, really, is secondary to the mind numbing description and language. One cannot escape them, and indeed I didn’t so much read this book as rubberneck the wreck it became.

One last thought, and pardon me while I spoil the climax for you. The only mirth I derived from this book I found in the climactic thirty page final chase, wherein the tough cop mortally, or at least seriously, wounds the bad guy with a gunshot to the upper chest, and the villian leaps from a balcony and runs through a door into empty office spaces in the train depot, and falls down some stairs, runs down a corridor, falls down more steps, leaps out of the way of a train when he finds himself in a tunnel, and then almost makes it back to the child to kill him. The legions of law enforcement, meanwhile, cannot find where this fellow went. Because apparently, in 1950, they had not yet invented bleeding profusely.

I don’t think it was supposed to be funny, but during those thirty pages of climax, I had a lot of time to enjoy the absurdity.

This book collects four of Leonard Cohen’s first volumes of poetry, including Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), Flowers for Hitler (1964), and Parasites of Heaven (1966). The book also includes some never-before seen poems, kind of like the bonus material you get on a greatest hits album. Except this collection is not greatest hits, it’s all the filler material, too.

I first heard Leonard Cohen, as I am sure many of my generation did, in the film Pump Up The Volume, where Cohen sings the theme song of the protagonist. Unfortunately, the credits and the soundtrack do not credit Cohen, so all this young man got was the Concrete Blonde rendition. But I persevered and discovered the I’m Your Man album. Good album. Leonard’s got a rich voice, and the songs are literary and lyrical in the best sense of the word.

So it helps to read the book with knowledge of Cohen’s voice. The voice can carry much of what the words cannot.

Cohen’s poems tread the mystical, where they allude to Judaica that I don’t understand. Then he’s throwing all sorts of Catholic imagery into the poems, which I don’t understand as well, but I’m more familiar with them; I went to a Jesuit university, you know.

The best section is The Spice-Box of Earth, wherein Cohen explores relationships in greater detail than the others. I could relate more to the poems, as I was once a young man seeking to get laid by young women. I appreciate the sensual confusion in the coffeeshop pheromones and cigarette smoke. Heck, the section made me feel ten years younger. I remember longing and loss.

But even the best poets have their off poems (apparently, Emily Dickinson had 1767 of them), and unfortunately readers have to wade through them. I took from this book no other poems I could recite from memory than when I began (I could recite “For Annie” which I remembered from an anthology I’d read before I heard I’m Your Man).

But I liked the book okay. I feel smart, reading poetry in my spare time and all. So if you don’t mind some free verse with a distinct coffeehouse flare, you won’t mind this book.

Post script: I would never knowingly participate in a poetry slam in which Leonard Cohen took part. He’s got enough A material, and he’s got the voice. ‘Nuff said.

I can count the number of Stephen King books I’ve read on both hands, and it makes it much easier that I’m not a Stephen King surviving protagonist, because they never finish with 10 digits. I’ve read The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon, the first three books of the Dark Tower, On Writing, The Dark Half, and this book. I really like his style and his attitude, and I liked this book too.

The plot: four friends on a hunting trip encounter an alien invasion or biowarfare during a blizzard. Cripes, it would be a simple enough pitch for a movie, but undoubtedly the two hour feature couldn’t begin to delve into this book.

I’m going to speak about a few things in my few paragraphs, the first of which is his style. As I mentioned previously, a horror novel is simply a fantasy novel wherein the heroes don’t know they’re in a fantasy novel until it’s too late. That gives King the opportunity to play with the timeline, using foreshadowing and flashback to great effect. The simple, throwaway foreshadowing in the beginning of the book really draws the reader in, but King knows when the hook has been set and lays off after the first third of the book. Swell. Also, King lavishes a lot of detail on most of the characters in the book that are more than names. It really bugs the reader when the good guys die, or when they lose fingers.

Secondly, King’s well read and slathers his books in allusions to popular and literate works. He alludes to Poe unself-consciously and mentions a boook by Robert Parker by name. Cool.

Also, I found this book an interesting artifact. Although King, in his author’s note, talks about writing this book in November 1999 through March 2000, Bush is the president (and it’s apparent that he’s not well thought of by many characters). The president has to give a speech about an incident in which aliens bearing infectious and dangerous, world-conquering philosophies spores. The book is published in 2001. That’s a little….creepy.

Of all contemporary mythmakers, if I had to guess whom students from the year 2200 would read from our era (assuming their studies of literature aren’t limited to the Koran or Mao), I’d pick King. He’s an engaging writer, he’s smart, he’s good at his craft, and he explores deeper human truths by transcending his genre.

I bought two copies of this book: one for a friend who needs intervention because he believes that Michael Moore has some good points, and one for me. Now that I have read the one for me, I’m almost sorry I bought one for him.

Because it’s not going to change his mind any more than reading blogs will. I’d hoped for a reasoned listing of the inaccuracies in the equivalent of a handy table, but although this book offers a couple of chapters with that sort of thing, for the most part, it’s a blog in binding. Andrew Sullivan and Tim Blair have essays in the book, and the other chapters contain a high snark content that one finds in political tract books and on blogs. For example, the authors spend a chapter psychoanalyzing Michael Moore and examining how he meets the traditional definition of narcissist. As much ad homenim as enumeration of fallacies and inaccuracies, this book disappointed me; I’d hoped for more of the latter and less of the former. At least they successfully avoided the word “asshat.”

Perhaps I was hoping for too much from a book entitled Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.

This book represents another piece of Internet reading published in book form. The author, a professor, has collected and condensed numerous blue book blatherings from students into a one hundred plus summary of history. As a two page e-mail forward, these incidents are funny. A book-sized collection, though, goes on too long.

The joke’s going to be on us someday, though. The mirth comes from we, the reader, recognizing the students’ errata, but the in twenty years, only the home schooled will be in on the humor. Of course, they’ll be running the world, so books like this might still get published.

Clutch your chests and call out to ‘Lizabeth, gentle readers, but I bought this book new, in hardcover, and I paid full new bookstore price for it.

Now that you’ve all choked down some nitro and your condition has stabilized, let me tell you why I did. I read another Hiaasen book earlier this year, and I liked what he did, so I bought another. Worth the price.

Hiaasen is unconstrained by series characters and, quite frankly, the bounds of sensibility when he produces his capers, and this is unexceptional in its exceptionality. A biologist on the take from a local farming operation fakes pollution numbers fears his wife has caught on and will ruin it all. So he pitches her from the deck of the ship upon which they’re celebrating, sort of, their second anniversary. Unfortunately, his newly ex-wife was a collegiate swimmer, so she survives the plunge and decides to come back from the grave to make his life problematic.

Chock full of entertaining characters and situations, mostly believable with the right suspension of disbelief (except for one or more moments of “Oh, come on” back story), and a fine addition to my read list, upon which this book is #44 for the year.

I am so smart and literate. Don’t you want to be my friend?

I bought this book at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri, for a less than a buck. As it’s a frank discussion of race, I have to wonder how this book came to Springfield, Missouri. After reading it, though, I understand why it was $.33. More on that by and by.

I started reading the book with as open of a mind as I can, considering I am the blue-eyed devil (with actual blue eyes, no less). The book cover depicts McCall (I presume) with a hard look on his face. The introduction and first chapters indicate that McCall’s taking the angry approach to the discussion, but I didn’t write it off as a matter of course. McCall came from a tough background, including some prison time for armed robbery, but I don’t discount that out of hand; I’m just a white boy from the city projects myself, and I realize that but for some accidents of fate (not necessarily my whiteness, for I’ve known enough white people who’ve done less than admirable and often prosecutable things) I could have charted a different path.

So I gave McCall a fair enough reading throughout the first section, subtitled “Mixed Messages”. This section includes chapters “The Revolution Is About Basketball”, “Airing Dirty Laundry” (which I read despite an italicized plea for white people to skip it), “Men: We Just Don’t Get It”, and “Gangstas, Guns, and Shoot-‘Em-Ups”. Throughout this section, McCall espouses a sort of personal responsibility message, that blacks (abstracted to all people in my hopeful reading) should take personal responsibility and better their situations as best they can, regardless of the circumstances. Of course, I want to learn something from a book that’s not necessarily describing my life’s experiences, and apply the lessons of others to my worldview. Regardless of the author’s intent.

But the first section of the next chapter really set the tone for the remainder of the book. The next section, “American Dream”, begins with a chapter entitled “Father of Our Country” which posits that the founding fathers were hypocrites because Washington fathered children with one or more slaves who cannot now join the clubs formented around his progeny or something like that. I can’t argue one way or another whether these people have a case or not or whether it’s true; however, McCall doesn’t present a compelling case, either. His arguments come down to two:

• The alleged descendents have an oral history that says it’s true.
• All slave owners boinked their slaves, often without consent of the boinked.

Oral history? The Greeks had a oral history that actual dieties intervened in their wars. The Anglo-Saxons had an oral history that indicated that Beowulf slew a monster and its mother, the latter in its lair in the bottom of a lake. Oral histories prove only that people have been saying things. As for every single slaveowners boinking their slaves, undoubtedly for free extra slaves, all is an awful big number, and it’s refuted by one did not. Although I don’t have a single instance to refute the point, I can more easily accept one did not than all did. But this chapter’s only Fonzie revving the motorcycle before he goes over the tank.

The next chapter, “Old Town: The Negro Problem Revisited”, examines the gentrification of a black neighborhood in Virginia. Apparently, Old Town lies on a waterway, which is always a target for revitalization, from the Landing in St. Louis to the Riverwalk in Milwaukee. When McCall talks about the iniquities of eminent domain, I am with him. Frequent readers know how I feel about that. But McCall also charges some racial superiority issues when whites knock on homeowners’ doors and make offers for the homes. McCall thinks this is whitey talking down to the “poor” black folk; I see it as people making offers in the market, where both are free to choose what offers to make or accept. But I’m not as tribalist as McCall, who’s all about defending black ownership in a downtrodden area, even if that means the area has to remain downtrodden. I like revitalization, and I don’t mind it if it’s done without the power of the government.

This chapter, though, contained the passage that turned me from an “Oh, Please,” reader to a “Fuck You” reader:

I am reminded of an incident that happened several years ago at a Shoney’s restaurant in North Carolina. While heading to the salade bar, I heard a commotion. When I moved closer, I saw a thirtyish black man yelling at a scruffy white guy. It seems that the white man had shoved an elderly black man, who was standing in lin in front of him. The younger black, seeing the insult, intervened in his elder’s behalf. I got there just in time to hear the redneck angrily justify his rudeness. “He was in my way!” he snarled, pointing at the old man.

The white man’s audacity infuriated the brother. Stepping closer, he shouted, “He was in your way? Your way? Motherfucka, you ain’t got no way!”

The old man seemed embarrassed by it all. He stood quietly, watching the tension between the two young hotheads escalate. At some point, the brother stepped even closer to the white man–he got to within an inch of his noes, daring him to make a move. And as he did that, I instinctively slipped behind the redneck, readying my plate, which I fully intended to crash upside his head. [Emphasis mine.]

I didn’t know the old black man any more than I knew the brother defending him–we were all strangers. But I was fairly certain we shared some common experiences: If they live long enough, most blacks experience being deemed a problem because some white person or persons decide that we’re in their way.

That realization was enough to make that brother and me want to take out the wrath of slavery on that redneck–not only for hassling the elderly black but for all the Old Towns, where black life is disrupted or vanquished to accommodate white folks’ fancies, for all the times white America has said to blacks, Step aside. You’re in my way.

This is a Washington Post reporter explaining, even justifying racial violence. He was going to sucker this “redneck” to avenge slavery. He didn’t see how the incident started, but he’s ready to bust whitey over the head.

Never mind what else I have to say about this book. I finished it, but with less credulity than before. I cannot speak for all black experience, but neither can McCall. Our country is too large and the experiences of its people too diverse to base any all on something as simple as skin color. But McCall’s obviously got some issues. He throws out racial epithets like cracker and regional epithets like redneck to bolster his points, or to keep his voice and speech “real.”

I’m probably harsher on the book because when the book started, I thought the author and I shared different life experiences, we shared similar beliefs in personal responsibility. The reality of the author’s viewpoint crashed on me like Shoney’s china, though, and I realized that the author thinks I am to blame for the ills which befall his perceptions of the world. Defensive? You bet I am, but he was offensive first.

I bought this book as part of a package for signing up with the Writers Digest Book Club. As part of the package, I paid something like a dollar for it plus shipping and handling, and undoubtedly it was the last book in the required allotment of four or five to get the free Writer’s Market that year. To make a short story long, I don’t normally seek out this sort of book, but I got it, and I read it.

Essentially, it’s a little collage of writing ideas, some microessays about writing, and a lot of photographs. The style’s such that you can pick it up, flip it open, and have something to write or some lesson about writing. Numerous single-sentence mandates dictate that you should write about a particular topic or situation; other pages contain a single, often vertical, “horiscope message” that could serve as a plot. So there you have it.

The author embraces the writer lifestyle, which involves teaching college classes, going on writers’ retreats, and “getting published” along with all the touchy-feely, grok-the-word crepe that festoons the lives of the lifestyle’s participants. Personally, I’m not all into that–particularly the last part, apparently–so I could do without it. Still, it’s an interesting little book, a quick enough read (since it’s probably under 10,000 words all told in its unnumbered pages), and maybe something from it has stuck in my mind and has been encysted into a pearl of a story or essay for the future.

At worst, it’s book number 41 for me on the year and will add a small element of color to my trophy bookshelves.

I am sure some of you are going to ask me why I read this book in hardback. Hey, I don’t know. I just read lots of books. The little red dot indicates either I paid thirty-three and a third cents for it at Hooked on Books or that the International Masculinity Squad has someone in the treeline about to take me out for my gross transgressions against manhood. I guess I picked it out from the bookshelf outside the bookshop where the booksellers put the books they want people to steal. So I flipped a 33-cent piece onto the counter and walked out of the shop with this handbook for becoming The Total Woman.

All right, I read the book because I thought it would be amusing to read. It’s carbon-dated to 1973, which means it was written about the time I was born and coming home from the hospital. The back cover contains a photo of Ms. Morgan, who looks like an amphed-up Liz Crocker from the time period. A former beauty queen from an upper-middle class suburban Wonder bread world dishes out some advice to other high-strung married-too-early tract house denizens. Man, urban-born and 21st century me was going to laugh, laugh all the way through the book.

A funny thing happened on the way to that mockirvana. I started respecting the book and its viewpoint.

It’s not that different from any other self-help style, inspire-yourself book. Whereas other, more contemporary tracts tell you how you can be a better businessperson, salesperson, or more complete self-actualized Bobo, all of them seek to make you better at a particular role. This book’s not that different. It definitely presents a different set of lines in which to color–those of a Christian housewife–but it offers a certain amount of pluck, vibrance, and intelligence to the role. It’s not so much about remaking yourself as a Stepford Wife (a reference contemporary to the time in which this book was written, remember) as remaking yourself as the Wife of Bath.

Because although the book encourages a certain submissiveness on the part of the wife, it’s not because of a woman’s inferiority–rather, it’s because she can, and because she wants to be part of the whole that is the functioning nuclear family unit. Not only a part, but the backbone. Of course, in 2004, “nuclear family” is a perjorative in many circumstances, but I still personally admire the goal and the imperfect-but-striving examples in the world. So screw you if you’re too smart to be constrained by tradition and morality that won’t let you have open marriages or that require committments to your spouse and your children.

So, what should you do if you’re a Christian housewife who wants to strengthen her marriage (and, in most cases, fears that her marriage is failing or is not satisfied with its current state)?

• Focus on the good things
  You got married to this person for some reason, theoretically because you guys liked each other. Focus on those things, and make an effort to be more like the person you were then, and not the nagging harpy you are now. Okay, not nagging harpy, but look beyond the concerns of the day-to-day household management to reconnect with the people who have made the household.
• Feed his ego.
  He’s only a man, and he needs to be stroked. When he’s stroked, he’ll stroke back.
• More, imaginative sex.
  Okay, here’s my favorite passage from the book:
  

  Still another gal took the course [The Total Woman course, which this book describes] being held in her Souther Baptist Church. She welcomed her husband home in black mesh stockings, high heels, and an apron. That’s all. He took one look and shouted, “Praise the Lord!”

  Indeed. Sex comprises one quarter of the book, and she advocates dressing differently, wearing costumes, role playing, and other things–in the name of family values! Good marital sex helps a good marriage. Also, she’s an advocate of the female climax, which she says has helped many class attendees learn to appreciate sex. Morgan’s writing about the dark ages, undoubtedly, but it’s interesting to note that the book is geared toward church-going women. Contrary to the popular caricature, maybe women who are Christians and who go to church can be sizzling lovers.

  Don’t tell them, though, or those coastal Democrat types will come to carry off our womenfolk like the barbarian invading hordes they are.

So I read the book, and although I laughed at certain parts, I appreciated the sentiment and the intelligence of the author. She certainly seems earnest enough, and she’s smart enough; although the only endnotes are scriptural citations, she quotes Shakespeare and Robert Browning easily. Also, the churchgoing aspect of the book isn’t overwhelming–she’s not proselytizing, she’s talking about her convictions. The shortest chapter in the book, near the end, talks about her relationship with God. Interesting, a little personal and common, but not something the make the book unreadable.

If you can find a copy for under a buck (with shipping, if you’re Internet inclined), this book will offer a view of marriage from a viewpoint outside your own (most likely) and will offer ideas and insights that you might apply to your own marriage. If you want it to work.

For example, tomorrow night I shall greet my wife at the door wearing black mesh stockings, high heels, and an apron. (Don’t tell her, though!)

I have been a bad dog. I actually finished this book several weeks ago, and I planned to write a longer piece summing up insights I had into it. However, the book got buried on my desk, and I’m not in the mood to write a longer piece on it, so allow me to sum up:

• Book deals with the rise of an educated upper class (and upper middle class) and how these new members of society alter the culture. It seeks to explain why so many people wear Birkenstocks and shop at Whole Foods and REI.
• The Bobos (Bourgeoius Bohemians) of which Brooks speaks tends to conmingle the baby boomers with geek culture. It’s an interesting mix, and maybe he’s onto something, but I think his generalization might be too hasty.
• The bit about intellectual life, wherein he describes how a person can become a public intellectual, was quite amusing.
• Book seems dated, particularly in political area, especially when one thinks of foreign policy questions that none of us really speculated in 2000.

I understand that it’s chic to savage David Brooks in some literary circles these days, but I found this book accessible and thought provoking in a good way. It encourages musing about social trends, with all the anthropological and philosophical currents that go with it. I want to compare this book to Make Room For TV, but that sells this book short. Both deal with a sweeping orchestra of human experience above the more personal accounts I usually read. So it’s a good book, and a good change.

Oh, yeah, I paid $12.50 for it, but I wanted to read it when it came out, so I waited four years and got it for half price. It’s good that it’s remained relevant enough to be worth the price.

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.

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.)

I bought this book at a garage sale some time ago to sell on eBay. It didn’t sell, so I read it. The hardback edition came out in 1990, 14 years ago. You want to feel old? Calvin would be in his early 20s today. No doubt he’d have given up Hobbes by now, unless he were a developer or a cartoonist and he kept Hobbes around to decorate his workspace.

I like Calvin and Hobbes, the cartoon. I liked this collection. Calvin and Hobbes were pretty popular in their day (Watterson, the cartoonist, discontinued the strip in the 1990s). Actually, they became so culturally iconic that even today, ten years later, you can go into an auto parts store and by unlicensed and unofficial decals depicting Calvin urinating on an automotive logo of your choice (Ford seems rather popular). Have you noticed that the last of the iconic cartoons, Dilbert, stems from the 1980s. Remember the 1980s, when iconic cartoons abounded? You couldn’t help but bump into The Far Side, Bloom County, Garfield, or Calvin and Hobbes apparel or pop-cultural references. Heck, even Cathy was touted as some zeitgeist for single women. Can you think of any cartoon created in the last decade that has captured that wide of an appeal? I couldn’t. I guess it’s the same thing television suffers; the fragmentation of the audience. Or perhaps it’s the decline of the newspaper. Or maybe they just don’t make them like they used to.

So what about Calvin and Hobbes made it successful? I reckon the use of an imaginative six-year-old gave Watterson the opportunity to take on very adult themes and to make them simple. When cutting through the normal nuance and adult-thinking, Calvin could mutter a throw-away punchline that would clarify an issue the way no six hundred word editorial column or two hundred page political book could. Watterson also built in great latitude when he made Calvin an imaginitive six-year-old; his incarnations as Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, and Calvinosaurus keep the material fresh and interesting for the reader, and they probably kept the cartoon fresh for the artist.

By all means, enjoy the book if you’re a Calvin and Hobbes fan. If you’ve never read them, you damn kid, check it out. The material’s not dated and will last a couple of decades. By 2060, though, it will be as accessible as Andy Capp or Snuffy Smith.