The Return of the Towers and the Fellowship of the Ordinary King

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 86
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! (Discworld Book 8)

Captain Samuel Vimes, of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, serves an institution that has outlived its purpose. An honest man in cynical times, he performs the actions of police work, knowing the city-state administration doesn’t need or respect police anymore. But deep within the city’s bowels, a movement is festering, with an eye toward overthrowing Ankh-Morpork’s ensconced hierarchy. Soon, Vimes and his men may be the only thing standing against anarchy.

Readers can enjoy this novel in two ways. First, this dry-witted satire of paperback fantasy takes the city guards, who usually exist so our muscular protagonist can kill them like redshirts, and foregrounds their story. In a genre often dominated by “great doings of great men,” author Terry Pratchett reverses the lens, retelling the story from among the people, the pedestrians whose workaday peasant lives fantasists often ignore.

Second, Pratchett directly lampoons the publishing business. In 1989, when Pratchett published this novel, three editors—Donald A. Wollheim, Lester and Judy-Lynne Del Rey, and Betty Ballantine—controlled the fantasy genre. And they largely worked from a beat sheet that Lester Del Rey derived from reading Tolkien, Terry Brooks, and Fritz Lieber. If fantasy felt repetitive in the 1970s and 1980s, that’s exactly why. Pratchett poked the publishing establishment in the eye.

Vimes, and his vestige of men, listlessly repeat the motions of the City Watch, walking the nighttime rounds and proclaiming “all’s well.” But the City Patrician has actively collaborated with the thieves and assassins, giving their guilds a legal status (a nod to Fritz Lieber’s cynical world-building). Therefore, there’s no crime for the City Watch to apprehend, since criminals are now above-board. Law, and law enforcement, have become meaningless ceremonies.

Until a massive dragon, long thought extinct, appears over the city skyline.

The Ankh-Morpork population progresses from denial to paranoia, and finally to acceptance of a world where dragons exist again. Only Vimes somehow keeps his head, managing to wrangle his City Watch comrades to investigate where the dragon came from, and who benefits from its appearance. From the depths of the city’s cesspits to the towers of the royal palace, Vimes determines to root out the truth through old-fashioned gumshoe work.

Sir Terry Pratchett

One can spot the stereotypes Pratchett satirizes. From Tolkien, he spoofs intricate world-building, through his fondness for explanatory footnotes on immaterial topics. He also mentions the restoration of the monarchy, but makes it so silly that the would-be king doesn’t even get a name. From Brooks, he spotlight’s specifically male heroism, which, in Pratchett’s world, inevitably comes to nothing. Heroes, in Ankh-Morpork, are a dime a dozen.

Ankh-Morpork is a city built entirely of shopworn genre stereotypes. Secret wizarding societies proliferate so often, it’s possible to stumble into the wrong one accidentally. Magic artifacts are so ubiquitous, they’re basically litter. Giant dragons that need slain may be extinct, but in the city’s finer quarters, one high-born aristocrat breeds their tiny cousins like champion poodles. Pratchett’s world depicts fantasy when the genre’s components have become banal.

To judge by the word count he dedicates to it, though, Pratchett plainly most enjoys the civic aspect. With assassins and thieves organized into guilds, a beloved Fritz Lieber boilerplate, politics has become the domain of backstabbers and pickpockets. Pratchett envisions a world governed by shifting alliance and skullduggery, that would make the Borgias seem listless and timid. In his luridly described prose, this terrifying edifice becomes hilarious.

Sam Vimes handles heroism diffidently. In a world flush with magic, he uncovers the truth through Poirot-like doggedness. After years on the sidelines, the City Watch must rediscover how to perform investigations. The learning curve is slow, and sometimes descends into slapstick. In the final reveal, however, these very human qualities, not the splendor of wizards or the glory of kings, make Vimes and his men heroic.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw increasing rebellion against the genre style sheet. George R.R. Martin and Gregory Maguire thought, to resist the editors’ dominion, they needed to wallow in violence and sex, glorifying low behavior in high places. But the response, especially in mounting sequels, is cynicism and despair. Pratchett instead chose to present his rebellion through the medium of friendly teasing. The difference is palpable.

This was Pratchett’s eighth Discworld novel (of forty-one), and the first of his City Watch subseries. However, fans agree Pratchett needed several books to find his voice and the setting’s message. This novel makes a good entry point for genre fans and newbies alike, and Pratchett’s voice rings like an old friend.

Reviewer's note: Part 86 of my 1001 Books series used to be Pratchett's novel with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens. In light of the revelation of Gaiman's crimes, I no longer count that book on the list, and hereby completely replace it with this one.

Robopocalypse Now, I Guess

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2

This is a follow-up to the review I'll Be Back, I Guess, Or Whatever

The security cyborg known only as Murderbot continues fighting to rediscover the tragic history that someone deleted from its memory banks. But the trail has gone cold, and somebody lurking behind the scenes will deploy all the resources of gunboat capitalism to keep old secrets buried. So Murderbot relies on its strengths, making ad hoc alliances to infiltrate hidden archives, while coincidentally keeping hapless humans alive despite their own best efforts.

The ironically self-referential tone Martha Wells introduced in her first omnibus Murderbot volume continues in this second collection. The stories were initially published as separate novellas, but that format is difficult to sell in conventional bookstores, so these trade paperbacks make Murderbot’s story available to wider audiences. That makes for easier reading, but unfortunately, it starts drawing attention to Murderbot’s formulaic structure, which probably wasn’t obvious at first.

As before, this book combines two previously separate stories. In “Rogue Protocol,” Murderbot pursues buried secrets to a distant planet that greedy corporations abandoned. The GrayCris company left immovable hardware behind, and Murderbot gambles that information stored on long-dormant hard drives will answer buried questions. Clearly someone else thinks likewise, because double agents and war machines take steps to prevent anyone reading the old files.

With the first combined volume, I observed Wells’ structural overlap with Peyton Place, which established the standards of prime-time soap operas. (Murderbot secretly prefers watching downloaded soaps over fighting, but keeps getting dragged back into combat.) With this novella, I also notice parallels with The Fugitive—the 1964 series, not the 1993 movie. In both, the protagonist’s episodic adventures mask the longer backstory, which develops incrementally.

In the next novella, “Exit Strategy,” Murderbot returns its collected intelligence to the consortium that nominally “owns” it. But that consortium’s leaders, a loose agrarian cooperative, have fallen captive to GrayCris, which has the ruthless heart necessary to manipulate an interplanetarystateless capitalist society. Preservation, which owns Murderbot on paper, is a hippie commune by contrast. MurderBot must use its strategic repertoire to rescue its pet hippies from the ruthless corporation.

Martha Wells

Here's where I start having problems. On the fourth narrative, I begin noticing Murderbot follows a reliable pattern: it desperately protests its desire to chill out, watch TV, and stay alone. But duty or necessity requires it to lunge into combat to rescue humans too hapless, good-hearted, and honest for this world. As its name suggests, Murderbot has only one tool, violence. And it deploys that tool effectively, and often.

As the pattern repeats itself, even Murderbot starts noticing that it’s protected by plot armor. It can communicate with allies undetected, hack security systems, and manipulate humans’ cyberpunk neural implants. It has human levels of creativity and independence that fellow cyborgs lack, but high-speed digital processing and upload capacity that humans can’t share. Like Johnny 5 or Marvin the Paranoid Android, it combines the best of humanity and technology.

And like those prior archetypes, it handles this combination with sarcasm and snark. Murderbot pretends it doesn’t care, and uses language to keep human allies at arm’s length. It also uses its irony-heavy narrative voice, laced with parenthetical digressions, to keep us alienated, too. But the very fact that it wants a human audience to hear its story, which it only occasionally acknowledges, admits that it’s desperate for human validation.

Murderbot comes across as jerkish and misanthropic. But it also comes across as lonely. I feel compelled to keep reading its story, even as I see the episodes falling into comfy boilerplates, because Murderbot’s essential loneliness makes it a compelling character. We’ve all known someone like this; heck, book nerds reading self-referential genre fiction have probably been someone like this.

Thus I find myself torn. Only four novellas in, the story’s already become visibly repetitive, and even Murderbot feels compelled to comment on how episodes resemble its beloved soaps. The first-person narrative voice, which combines ironic detachment with noir grit, becomes disappointingly one-note as each story becomes dominated by repeating action sequences. It reads like an unfinished screen treatment. (A streaming TV adaptation dropped as I finished reading.)

But despite the formulaic structure, I find myself compelled by Murderbot’s character. I want to see it overcome its struggles and find the home and companionship it clearly wants, but doesn’t know how to ask for. Murderbot is more compelling than the episodes in which it finds itself, and I keep reading, even as the literary purist in me balks. Because this character matters enough that I want to see it through.

Stephen King and the Monsters of Modernity

Stephen King

I understand the desire to get ahead of the story of Stephen King and his massively unfunny “joke.” After once-beloved authors like Orson Scott Card, J.K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman have been uncovered as truly horrible human beings with repellent opinions, we’re naturally fearful of another seemingly progressive voice blindsiding us. Such preparation only makes sense. But it’s possible to swing to the opposite extreme, at our own expense.

Surely even Stephen King fans would acknowledge that his anti-Trump joke didn’t land. His dig at “Haitians eating pets” resurrects a months-old campaign gaffe that, amidst the mass extradition of legal American residents, appears outdated and tone-deaf. The specific reference to Haitians revives a racist trope, and as we know, this creates the illusion that the racist claims have any basis. The “joke,” by humor standards, was definitely ill-considered.

However, much of the early outrage seemingly assumes that King believes the anti-Haitian stereotypes. That suggests a total lack of situational literacy: King clearly means that Trump is racist, not that he’s racist himself. Online discourse is often dominated by what British journalist Mick Hume calls “full-time professional offense takers” who sustain the discussion by finding the worst possible interpretation, and then deploying it in bad faith.

Reading the most aggressive anti-King criticisms, I’m reminded of the feeding frenzy, over nine years ago, against Calvin Trillin. Like with King’s joke, the anti-Trillin swarm required the most uncharitable, situationally illiterate interpretation of Trillin’s writing. Online outrage follows a predictable script comparable to religious liturgy, and for largely the same reason, to reassure fellow believers that we are good people who share a reliable moral footing.

But before I can dismiss the anti-King sentiment as meaningless ritual, I have a counter-consideration: King himself often displays unquestioned racism. Characters like Dick Halloran (The Shining) and Mother Abigail (The Stand) reflect an unexamined presumption that Black people live, and usually die, to advance White characters’ stories. His Black characters often rely upon outdated, bigoted boilerplates that feel leaden nowadays.

We might dismiss this as an oversight on King’s part. He lives in northern Maine, an overwhelmingly White region of a substantially White state, and it’s entirely possible that he doesn’t know many Black people. I recall characters like Mike Hanlon, whose largest contribution to the group dynamic in It is to be Black. I’ve written before that King seemingly writes about people groups without bothering to speak with them.

Rather than asking whether King is “racist” or “not racist,” a dichotomy that Ibram X. Kendi notes isn’t useful, we might consider what kind of racism King demonstrates. We all absorb certain attitudes about race from our families, culture, mass media, and education. Nobody lives completely free of racial prejudice, any more than prejudice around sex, class, and nationality. Even Dr. Kendi admits needing to purge racist attitudes from himself.

By that standard, King shows no particular sign of out-and-out bigotry. Indeed, he shows a bog-standard White liberal attitude of progressivism, by which he supplants Jim Crow stereotypes with more benevolent generalizations. In other words, he doesn’t hate Black people, but he also doesn’t know them particularly well, either. He replaces malignant suppositions with benign ones, but he never stops relying on wheezy vulgarisms.

Therefore, though a clear-eyed reading of King’s unfunny “joke” shows that he targets his scorn upon Trump, he uses Haitians to deliver that scorn. He falls back on his shopworn tendency to have Black characters carry water for him, in service to his White purposes. This leaden joke isn’t bigoted, but that doesn’t make it any less racist. His joke’s lack of humor ultimately comes second to his lack of agency.

In his book Danse Macabre, King notes that horror often stems from a lily-white, orderly vision of society. Michael Myers’ savagery exists as a necessary contrast to Haddonfield’s suburban harmlessness. Pennywise is most terrifying to the exact degree that Derry is anodyne. For King, evidently, that means that Whiteness is an anonymous background from which horrifying monsters, like President Trump, arise. Haitians, in that worldview, are an exception.

I fear the implications which arise from calling Stephen King “racist,” because that word has baggage. But if we apply the nuance that Dr. Kendi encourages us to utilize, then that word applies. Putting it to use requires far more detail than a BLM protest placard or a hasty tweet can encompass; and his variety of racism is the kind most receptive to correction and repentance. But that doesn’t make it any less racist.

The Fable of the King Who Would Not Die

Bryan Johnson: Meet the multi-millionaire trying to reverse ageing
—Headline on the BBC News website, 13 August 2023

Bryan Johnson

Once there was a certain king—a stupid ruler of a stupid kingdom, in a nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms and their useless kings. Every king in the nation, and many of the queens, thought themselves very important, because the nation had many town criers willing to ballyhoo the supposed importance of their particular monarch. These kings, and many subjects too, heard the ballyhooed fables so often, they came to believe their own mythology.

Like the myth of the king who ruled the kingdoms of lightning chariots and bluebirds. This king believed himself so important that, one day, he unilaterally declared he had renamed the bluebird kingdom, and henceforth, everyone had to honor his kingdom’s name. But every subject knew it was the kingdom of bluebirds, and called it such, ignoring what their king commanded except when his vast, and easily bruised, ego needed appeased. Which was fairly often.

Likewise, our certain king believed himself terribly important, and when he began hearing creaks from his vertebrae, and snaps from his knees, this king boldly proclaimed: “I shall not die!” The king gathered thirty physicians from throughout his kingdom and began dispensing gold generously, demanding research into diet and exercise, and into whatever alchemical potions the king could consume which would prevent his body from aging, and would keep Death, that eternal unwanted visitor, away.

Meanwhile this king’s subjects—we no longer call them “peasants,” though “peasants” is surely what they were—continued their labors. Some subjects hoed rows so they could plant and harvest wheat. Others smelted iron and brought the metal to the kingdom’s foundries, where blacksmiths forged implements so the field workers could hoe rows. The subjects needed little regular direction from their king, and besides, the king’s goldsmiths signed their pay slips, not the king himself.

Within the castle, the king continued demanding miracles from his physicians. “Make the potions stronger!” he commanded, for surely he saw grey beard hairs in his shaving mirror. His physicians bit their knuckles and wondered what more they could do. Saltpeter in his morning alchemical broth? Magnets on his free weights? Artists painted the king’s portrait with square jaw and bulging chest, but the king was not deceived, and knew he had not stopped age.

Elon Musk

Outside, town criers recounted breathlessly the accomplishments which the king and his physicians made in repelling death. Some subjects believed the stories, and repeated them widely, even unto the kingdom of bluebirds. But other subjects held aloft their iron implements and grumbled: “I care not. If he lives or dies, I must still gather the harvest. And look at this hoe! Barely had it, and already it’s rusty. No quality control in this kingdom anymore.”

Several of the king’s guards, watching from the castle, saw subjects raising their iron implements and grumbling, and this made them worry. The king waved away his guards’ concerns, however; what cared he for discontented peasants, when death still encroached? The captain of the guard wasn’t dissuaded, though, and prudently hired more guards, granting them more armor and more swords, because you cannot be too careful. And the stonemasons made the castle walls slightly higher.

All throughout, the king’s subjects continued improving their skills. The blacksmiths made ever-sharper hoes, which the field workers used to make ever-straighter rows, and thus the kingdom saw ever-increasing yields of bread. Admittedly, nobody had more gold to buy bread, so it rotted uneaten, but the bread existed, and surely that merited some celebration. The king permitted the goldsmiths to sign pay slips worth an extra ducat, or whatever, couldn’t everyone see he was busy?

Eventually the day came, which surely everyone must have expected, when the town criers announced that the king had died. Though they carried portraits of the king as square-jawed and muscular, everyone knew the magnets had made him addled, and the saltpeter had made his pecker drop off. Throughout the kingdom, sad-faced subjects agreed this was a most tragic day, then they turned back to their forges and their fields, because work still needed done.

Throughout our nation stuffed chock-a-block with stupid kingdoms, the death of one king mattered little. Workers still worked, and goldsmiths still banked, and everything carried on much as it had before. And somewhere, in a distant castle, the king of the bluebird kingdom struggled to invent another reason to postpone his cage match against that other weird king, Mark Zuckerberg, who, even in the world of allegory and fable, still looks like a pasty-faced android.

Transgender Black Soy-Boy Hippie Beta Cuck Marxists!

“These are transgender Marxists — transgender Black Marxists — who are seeking the overthrow of the United States and the dissolution of the traditional family,” Bachmann said in the interview...while discussing the Black Lives Matter and anti-racism protests taking place around the country.
—NBC News

Former Representative Michele Bachmann

Look around you at the lawlessness you see unfolding, Brian. People standing up and demanding respect. Respect, Brian! Regardless of their bodies, or their jobs, or their nationality. It makes me sick, Brian, the idea that I, a God-fearing American Christian woman, have to treat others with respect, and am not free to feel reflexive revulsion at other human beings. Or shoot them in the face.

All these terrible people are coming to destroy the America you’ve loved your whole life! They’re coming with their liberty for the oppressed, and their sustainable agriculture, and an economy where people actually get paid for their work. Sick-making, truly. What’s going to happen to us good, normal Americans in the coming years when we can’t get rich off others’ labor? Total anarchy, Brian, that’s what’s going to happen!

Think about it. What happens if they make things more fair for Black people? What happens if Black people don’t have to hide from police in routine encounters, for fear of imminent death! Why, these Black people might come to the police and report it when a White landlord screws them on the rent! They might trust authority enough to not let abusive people run over them! Madness, I tell you, madness.

Letting transgenders participate in the marketplace. Blasphemy. I can’t imagine anybody being able to order a McPatty from a teenager without an immediate, implicit understanding of their teenage servitor’s genitals. Just think about what will happen if you need your air conditioning repaired, and you spend the whole time wondering about what your repairman… repair woman?… what they have in their pants. Just imagine. I’m imagining it right now.

Former Vice President Joe Biden

These children, with their deviant bodies and warped minds, they need to get with it, Brian, big-time. In the America I grew up with, we understood our genders from birth. Men were real men, and women were real women, all the time, even in their sleep. And if we did sleep, and we had that recurring dream, you know the one, about Kathleen, the checkout girl from the Piggly-Wiggly with the long red braid, and we… um… we dreamed… Do we have any water?

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, if we had that dream, Brian, we killed it with alcohol, like our mothers before us.

I grew up in an America where all people knew and understood their place. We worked hard to achieve what we gained from life, Brian, we didn’t half-ass our way through violent confrontations with armed police dressed like Sir Lancelot, breathing tear gas and dodging rubber bullets, like some pantywaist Communist peacenik. Let me tell you, I worked hard to make sure Kathleen got that promotion to work under my supervision! On the night shift…

Man, it’s hot in here.

Nowadays, these spoiled children think they can demand rights that my ancestors studiously worked to deny them. Marriage? Pshaw. I’ve always believed marriage is between one man, one woman, and the mutual doubt and recrimination they carry, bolstered by the guilt over having kids at an absurdly young age. My kids have been an absolute blessing to me, Brian. They give me someone to talk with when the nights drag on interminably.

Yeah, the nights get long, Brian, because my husband is such a dedicated volunteer in our community. He’s out every evening, providing free counseling and a hot meal to some of our city’s lost, desperate transgender street children. He makes me proud, Brian, he really does. Sometimes he’s out all night counseling these trans kids. And when he stumbles in around sunrise, with his clothes rumpled and smelling like nicotine, I’m proud of the good he does our town.

This kind of lawlessness, where we treat people with respect, oh my God. Seriously. If I’m not free to pass immediate and binding judgement on complete strangers for their lives and their bodies, I might as well live in Soviet Russia. Because that’s where we’re heading, Brian, complete Soviet takeover of our morals. What the hell, I might as well book the flight right now. Kathleen? Could you bring my purse over here, please?

Oh, yeah, Brian, have you met Kathleen yet? She’s my… um… she’s my personal assistant!

Just Another Beatnik Teacher Comedian

1001 Albums To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 10
Taylor Mali, Conviction

You’ve probably already read Taylor Mali’s poetry without realizing it. His centerpiece poem, “What Teachers Make,” has circulated online since the heyday of e-mail trees and webrings, frequently bowdlerized. But Mali, who paid his dues on New York’s poetry slam circuit, never wrote his poetry for book readers; he’s always been a performer first. Perhaps that’s why he’s released more audio recordings than books. Or maybe it’s because he’s a top-range performer.

Chicago poet Marc Smith invented Poetry Slam, but if you attend any modern slam and listen to the sarcastic humor and rapid-fire patter that tends to win, most slammers clearly want to be Taylor Mali. This album, compiling live presentations of his most significant work, reveals why. Several poems on this recording also appear in his book What Learning Leaves, but Mali has a compelling presence as a performer that you can only savvy when you hear his voice.

Audiences listening to performance poets ask two important questions: Is the poetry any good? And does the performer carry the work effectively? As a poet, Taylor Mali writes in an easygoing vernacular style. He doesn’t use the inscrutable metaphors and weird juxtapositions favored by MFA programs and awards panels. Though he certainly uses heightened language, his verse nevertheless has a plain-English conversational quality that doesn’t require a postgraduate degree to follow.

His poetic structure comes across in titles like “Falling In Love Is Like Owning a Dog,” or “Silver-Lined Heart.” Like Mali’s verse itself, these titles involve metaphors which have depth, but don’t require unpacking. We understand what they mean, though as Mali investigates them further, we increasingly understand what he means by them. As poetry, they aren’t difficult, but they reward the audience’s willingness to follow Mali on a nuanced inner journey.

In performance poetry circles, Mali sometimes gets stereotyped as a poet who writes about his teaching career. Considering the widespread influence of “What Teachers Make” (included on this collection), this isn’t unfair. But only five out of twenty-three poems on this album, including one hidden track, are about teaching. Four are about being a poet, four are about his father, and four are by other poets, featuring Mali as a member of the performance ensemble.

Taylor Mali

Mali has a distinctive baritone voice, accentuated by his performance style, which we could generously describe as “in on the joke.” He avoids common poetry slam affectations of offbeat pauses and strange, syncopated emphases. He doesn’t fear to laugh, just slightly, at his own jokes, especially on willfully humorous poems like “I Could Be a Poet” or “Totally Like Whatever.” His performance feels like a friend, inviting you to share the passionate hobby he’s spent years perfecting.

Many people encountering Taylor Mali for the first time comment upon his humor. If your high school English was anything like mine, the emphasis on somber tone and portentous themes left you feeling glum. Poetry slam, by its structure, discourages this attitude: because audiences have liberty to boo performers off the stage, performance poets learn to engage the audience’s humor and curiosity. Mali has taken this tendency further than most poets, and become a role model for others.

I'm less keen on Mali’s group pieces, especially two written by Celena Glenn. As the ensemble basically sings acapella behind the poet, Glenn’s voice doesn't carry, and the poetry disappears in a distracting soundscape. This recording also features two poems written by Mali but performed by other poets. They suffer from some lack of direction: one has flat affect, while the other weirdly over-accentuates the poetic foot. I could really have done without these tracks.

But when Mali performs his own work, he shows himself truly a rich artist. His poems run the gamut between  joy, confusion, laughter, grief, and more. Poems like "Labeling Keys," "Voice of America V/O," and "The Sole Bass" put the lie to the slander that slam poetry is shallow and ephemeral: they aren’t Walt Whitman, but they exist on many layers at once and demand just as much contemplation as the poetry you studied in school.

As a reviewer, I’ve grown weary of saying a particular item I’m reviewing isn't for everyone. That certainly isn't the case here. This CD will appeal to a diverse audience whose only criterion is open-mindedness. Like most poetry slams, this album has uneven moments, especially toward the middle of the evening, but overall this may be one of the few poetry collections in many houses that doesn't just sit on a shelf gathering dust.

One Million Ways To Die in the Star Wars Universe

Greg Stones, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire

One stormtrooper fails to shoot first.
One stormtrooper doesn’t let the Wookie win.
One stormtrooper fails Lord Vader for the last time.

Back in 1963, macabre cartoonist Edward Gorey published a storybook for grown-ups called The Gashlycrumb Tinies, in which twenty-six children meet horrible ends. Did you ever wonder how that would look if nerds rewrote it for their favorite franchise? Yeah, me neither. But Greg Stones, author of Zombies Hate Stuff and Sock Monkeys Have Issues, apparently did. And boy am I glad, because this book is funny.

Stones imagines different ways stormtroopers die grisly deaths. Stomped by AT-AT Walkers; frozen in carbonite; fed to the Sarlacc; stationed on Alderaan. The deaths incorporate images from all eight live-action movies, though mostly the original trilogy. Some deaths probably refer to ancillary material I haven’t read yet. All are hilarious in the deadpan delivery of frankly gruesome content that the characters probably hated.

As with Gorey, however, the real life comes from Stones’ illustrations. His flat, cartoonish look contrasts with the three-dimensional, computer-generated style favored in so many picture books these days, a deliberate nod to his adult audience’s nostalgia for their childhood reading. The approach is playful, with oversaturated colors and not-quite realistic proportions (nobody casts a shadow). The stormtroopers are drawn wearing armor from the original trilogy.

click to enlarge

Stones’ poker-faced prose, never more than one sentence per page, and childlike folk illustrations, give the gruesome content its ironic comedy. There’s always something hilarious about stating awful things like you’re discussing the weather, especially when you know it’s fiction. Stones’ understatement of the truly awful gives his storybook a Gary Larson-ish tone of gallows hilarity. Who doesn’t love laughing in the face of certain death?

This book is, undoubtedly, part of a marketing push to make Star Wars timely with Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm. Funny enough, I’m okay with that.  Despite the cynical marketing edge, if publishers can release books that bring happiness into customers’ lives, I say let them. Stones’ playfully grim take on Imperial incompetence will give nostalgic grown-ups the boost they need while awaiting the next movie release.

The Tick: a Superhero For Post-Heroic Times

Griffin Newman (left) and Peter Serafinowicz in the pilot episode of Amazon's The Tick

Commenting on Amazon’s reboot of Ben Edlund’s The Tick from a cultural mythology perspective is pretty worthless. Since the Tick himself (Peter Serafinowicz) cites Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth in the pilot episode, and gauges sidekick Arthur’s (Griffin Newman) development by stages on the Hero’s Journey, that approach is already taken. This critical approach, still innovative when I discovered it five years ago, is now widespread enough to parody itself.

Not that anyone should mistake this series for parody. Like the best comedies, it has a deadly earnest heart, commenting not upon superheroes or genre media, but upon us. It presents a world where superheroes become so ubiquitous, they’re banal. Arthur, who serves as both series protagonist and audience surrogate, is the kind of dweeby, damaged nerd who, twenty years ago, would’ve embraced a superhero appearing in his apartment. Instead, he appears bored.

As tragedies do, the Tick barges into Arthur’s life unwanted, when the subject believes he’s established a working balance in life. Of course, Arthur already knows this: a flashback in the pilot episode reveals he fantasized about becoming a superhero, until a crashing Arthur is a mix of preparedness and chaos: he has spent his adult life intricately demonstrating that his city’s most notorious villain survived his putative destruction.

But once that evidence comes together into concrete proof, Arthur has no plan. He’d rather relinquish the villain to “proper authorities”—who prove equally unprepared for the actual weight of responsibility. Given the opportunity to vanquish the demon that has haunted his life from childhood, Arthur finks. Without the collusion of the Tick protecting him, and his enemies attacking, he would probably never rise above self-imposed paralysis.

We could make a drinking game of identifying the psychological role everyone plays in Arthur’s life. His sister and primary social contact, Dot (Valerie Curry), encourages Arthur’s grown-up meekness. But her hobby is violent roller derby, a hobby she subsidizes doing under-the-table medical work for the mob. Once he falls into superheroism, he gets pursued around town by the sexy, vindictive Ms. Lint (Yara Martinez), who epitomizes the allure and destructiveness of libido. Et cetera.

Before the first X-Men movie hit cinemas in 2000, superheroes belonged almost exclusively to people like me: socially isolated dreamers who saw superhumans as a repository of our own Jungian archetypes. When Batman and the Joker pummeled each other into their now-familiar stalemate, they weren’t just characters enacting a story. They embodied their’ audiences familiar battle between id and superego: return the monster to the asylum until we need him again.

The mainstreaming of superheroes permits non-nerds to share this externalized struggle. But as with indie rock and video games, the transition coarsens the object we once loved. Since the millennial superhero boom, so many people now read comics and watch related movies that they’ve stopped being art, and become a money factory. Marvel and DC each publish nearly 400 titles monthly, a mix of repetitive (another global crisis? *Yawn*) and and churlish disruption (“Hail Hydra!”).

Arthur occupies a nameless city. In his boyhood, he dreams of becoming a superhero, until he watches a hideous devolved psycho destroy both his city’s entire superhero roster, and his father, simultaneously flattening both the Freudian and the Jungian landscape. Heroism and virtue exist, for him, “out there” somewhere, in other cities and other families. Like his city, Arthur limps through life, a ghost of his own childhood expectations.

But don’t we, too? Don’t we enjoy superheroes, and explode when Zach Snyder mishandles our childhood icons, because we believe virtue exists? Maybe not in our own lives, clouded by moral compromise, the pressures of adulthood, and the need to feed our families. But Batman’s Gotham or Professor Xavier’s Westchester provide repositories of our hopes, a sort of Big Rock Candy Mountain of moral expectation.

So. Arthur believes morality and virtue exist, somewhere. He believes his life does some good, abstractly. But he’d rather be stable, self-supporting, and adult, than live his childhood virtues. Is that what Jesus, that ultimate moralist, meant when he said “Let the children come to me”? We can pay adult bills, or we can live in moral fullness. But not both.

This show acknowledges its psychological depths, implying (though unstated yet) that Arthur created the Tick from his own subconscious. But that’s where heroes come from. By marrying ironic self-awareness with a reluctant willingness to believe, The Tick tells audiences it’s acceptable to remain cynical about superhero overkill (rimshot for the fandom!), while believing virtue is still possible.

Things Sean Spicer is Sorry For Today

First, I’d like to apologize to Greta Van Susteren for dragging her into this. I know you already look like a waffler for jumping ship from Fox News to MSNBC, almost like you don't really stand for anything but the next paycheck. Same for your networks. So having my sad mansplaining ass on your show probably didn't help much. If it's any comfort, when they fire you and you have to move to Russia Today right behind Ed Schultz, I’ll probably be looking for work too. Hey, maybe we could set up shop together? I could be your Ed McMahon! Think about it: “HEEEEEEERE’S Greta!” No, really, think about it. Please. I’ll leave my card with your people.

To Adolph Hitler: I know we keep dragging you out of the metaphor closet like an old coat. All the crap you’ve been through, you deserve the same chance at being consigned to oblivion that we gave Genghis Khan and the guy who thought Blunt Talk would be a step forward for Patrick Stewart. If it's any comfort, we may soon have a new gold standard for awful people doing obnoxious things. Just sayin’, we may get to retire your name soon. Sleep well, Adolph.

Also, to the Jews offended I mentioned Adolph during Passover: Mazel tov. I guess I was meshuggeneh. What a schlemiel, eh? Is okay, I go through desert with you. We all one people now. Is good, right?

My sincerest apologies to the camera guy who had to watch me flail. I slipped a C-note, so now your whiplash treatment is covered by Trumpcare. But let's just let that stay between you and me. We don't want everyone thinking they can get that kind of treatment.

To the UPI pool reporter, who asked about the tax returns, and I replied “Are you high?”: I had no idea that Jeff Sessions would order a spot drug test. Also, I had no idea about your Medical Marijuana card, or your debilitating pancreatitis, or the meds you can’t swallow without your dope. I truly am sorry, and though your lifeless remains can’t appreciate my sincere contrition, I did send your wife and your boyfriend fruit baskets, so it's okay. Right?

Fort Sumter. Not really me but, y’know, I knew people. So just, I’m sorry in general for that one. While we're being honest.

My regular cabbie, Sadiq, has become the one guy I can trust. He listens to my frustrations, and his old family hummus recipe belongs in the National Archives. Seriously. So Sadiq, if you’re watching this, I’m sorry for all the things I’ve had to say about your country, your family, and your people. That Instagram you showed me of your mother is really, really… well… I shouldn’t have asked for her number, that was inappropriate. You know I don’t have the connections to get her a green card, sorry. Do they have fruit baskets in your country?

To my agent: I know I said this would be a good way to kick-start my stand-up career, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I hadn’t really figured out how to get free stage time yet. And in fairness, hey, free publicity, right? It’s the Madonna principle: if people are talking smack about you, at least they’re talking. Okay, I admit, Madonna never had to make excuses for a guy who tried to stage-manage World War III. But I never tried to dry-hump a nun in four-four time. Which is a pretty good trade-off. I hope.

My wife says I should probably apologize for rendering up our firstborn as a hostage to The Donald and his diabolical plans. Because I used to believe in him, I really did. But you and I both know he’s gone batshit crazy off the rails, and I really want to get out of this train wreck. But he has my son. So until I get my family out of this, I guess my only hope is to grip my chair arms, make peace with my Lord, and await the sweet release of death.

And finally, I apologize for always wearing the same grey suit whenever I leave the house. There’s no excuse for that shit. I had the guy at Men’s Wearhouse take my measurements this morning, and I have my eyes on a debonair pinstripe number on the closeout rack. I hope they take EBT, because once I bust my son out, you know they ain't gonna pay me the big bucks anymore.

Politics Is Our Nation's Large Intestine

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Four
Armando Iannucci (director), In The Loop

A low-ranking British Cabinet Minister (Tom Hollander) does the unthinkable one day on live national radio: he tells the truth. He says what he thinks without bothering to consult the official party script. He suddenly finds himself under fire from the Prime Minister’s personal attack dog, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), whose ability for piquant vulgarity and psychological warfare approaches legendary. In politics, careers have crumbled over less.

This pseudo-documentary, with a large ensemble cast and trans-Atlantic scope, serves as an indirect prequel to the BBC satire series The Thick Of It, but is functionally freestanding. It depicts British and American political maneuvering as blatantly Machiavellian, focused on winning without regard for such trivia as facts or collateral damage. It positions power politics as an essentially glamorless enterprise, occupied by small people operating for insignificant gains.

Long before Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi salvaged a foundering acting career by playing The Most Vulgar Man In Britain. By his own admission, he’d gotten trapped in a black hole of repetitive parts, playing politicians with repressed sexual secrets. He attended auditions for The Thick Of It feeling bored, combative, and despondent. Turns out, these were the three qualities show creator Armando Iannucci wanted, and Capaldi became an overnight celebrity.

Buoyed by Capaldi’s performance, this movie thrives on language. This story focuses on how people use language to inform or deceive, to bond together or tear apart, to open or close the nation’s systems to its people. Hollander’s Minister is simple, honest, and winds up road kill. Capaldi’s Tucker lies, bullies, plays double-talk, and wins. Capaldi’s verbal duel with General George Miller (James Gandolfini) is one of the best pieces of legerdemain ever captured on film.

Simon Foster (Hollander), Minister for Overseas Development, has no business getting involved in war planning. The British PM and the American President both want to invade “the Middle East,” but Foster calls war “unforeseeable.” Because his political domain trades in global altruism, he literally cannot foresee something so uncharitable as war. Both sides in the heated international debate begin trying to recruit Foster, and his epic naivete, to their purposes.

Foster’s office includes Judy Molloy (Gina McKee), his Director of Communications, and Toby Wright (Chris Addison), his “Special Advisor.” They represent different pushes on British politics: Judy is scrupulous, knowledgeable, and ethical. She wants to help Foster do his job to his utmost. Toby is theatrical, savvy, and smug. He pushes Foster into high-profile media histrionics, apparently because he thinks Foster’s profile boosts Toby’s own by extension.

Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, the most vulgar man in Britain

On the American side, a deputy Secretary of State makes an alliance with a ranking Pentagon general, both agreeing they lack manpower for a successful war. They have no humanitarian illusions; they don’t want war because they can’t win. But Linton Barwick (David Rasche), the President’s point man, performs remarkable end runs to keep naysayers outside the decision-making circles, and if that means freezing out the military, so be it.

This movie’s Oliver Stone-ish handheld camera work and semi-improvisational dialog give it a look like unfolding news. The fly-on-the-wall tone sometimes makes us feel creepy, as when Malcolm Tucker or Linton Barwick use their bizarre manipulative techniques to eviscerate anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. (Search Malcolm Tucker on YouTube. His ability to turn ordinary vulgarity into squirm-inducing sagas is both hilarious and terrifying.)

This movie manages to strip politics of all romance. It does this, in part, by pushing elected officials out of the story: in the entire ensemble, only Simon Foster was elected to anything. Instead, it focuses on appointed functionaries, unanswerable to the people, performing elaborate maneuvers to turn unpopular propositions into inevitable actions. It presents the United Nations as the large intestine of world politics.

Watching lies accumulate, expert liars speak from both sides of their mouths, and promises hang on dog-whistle language, this movie achieves a level of complexity I can only call “poetry.” The dialog bypasses the brain, stabs straight into the gut, and leaves a scar. The comedy arises because we know, instinctively, that the unelected apparatchiks who govern our lives really are this low to the ground.

Co-writer/director Iannucci avoids a heroic or viewer-friendly movie. He intends his audience to feel distressed, even terrified, that our leaders might maneuver thus. His take on the Operation Iraqi Freedom preparations look familiar to anyone who follows news, particularly anyone who follows recent revelations kept secret at the time. This is our politics, folks. Iannucci makes it blackly funny, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Schoolhouse Block—the Movie

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Three
Mike Million (director), Tenure

Professor Charlie Thurber (Luke Wilson) loves teaching, and his students love him back, some a little more than they probably should. But he hates academia's competitive paper chase. After being passed over for tenure once too often, he decides to knuckle down and join the game at bucolic Grey College. But a screw-loose colleague, a sexy competitor, and family pressures may be more than a loyal English professor can bear.

This straight-to-DVD gem will probably never get the recognition it deserves. PR people can't compress its concept into a plug line. Its gentle, optimistic tone defies hip cinematic cynicism. And its low-key humor, based on characters and language rather than broad physical comedy, will never rake in the big bucks. Yet I can't help but love this film, possibly because I see myself and my colleagues here on screen.

As Grey College’s only non-tenured English instructor, Charlie assumes a new full professorship is his for the asking. Until the department hires Elaine Grasso (Gretchen Mol), formerly of Harvard, a well-published but awkward wunderkind, to sweeten the competition. Charlie, a gifted teacher, sports a brief CV, because “publish or perish” passed him by. But with job security and pay on the line, he becomes painfully aware of academic politics.

At the other extreme, comedian David Koechner (Anchorman, The Office) plays Charlie’s best friend Jay. A chronic loser and academic outcast himself, he apparently exists to offer appalling advice. Urging Charlie into numerous adolescent stunts and theatrical displays, he definitely increases Charlie’s visibility before the tenure committee. But Charlie quickly questions whether succeeding at the cost of his integrity really accomplishes anything.

Anybody who’s studied, or taught, university-level liberal arts recently will recognize Charlie’s fundamental struggles. For three generations, America saw investment in higher education as not merely a moral good, but a tool for fighting the Cold War. Since the middle 1990s, however, willingness to subsidize education has plummeted. Administrative patronage plums have mushroomed, while classroom budgets have cratered. Fiercer competition for fewer jobs has become SOP in academia.

Luke Wilson (left) and Gretchen Mol

But this story isn’t exclusively for scholastic types. Anyone who’s felt the frustration of today’s widening gap between work and reward will recognize this story. Charlie desperately wants, not fame nor recognition, but security enough to do his job the best way possible. Glimpses of his classroom technique and his students’ undisguised respect prove he’s proficient. Yet somehow, in today’s go-go economy, doing a good job isn’t good enough anymore.

This movie’s shoestring production permits a design edge missing from many recent Hollywood spectacles. Shot for $5 million, it uses existing locations, like historic Bryn Mawr College, to give the production an authentically bygone texture. Without expensive music or digital effects, the producers rely upon genuine performances and careful mood to hook audiences. It’s odd, and appealing, to watch a film without having our senses shocked or our emotions manipulated.

I especially respect writer-director Mike Million’s rejection of hip conventional screenwriting techniques. In a movie marketplace dominated by Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!, we’ve become jaded on over-high stakes, cascading tragedies, and three-act structures. Million’s picaresque storytelling, about a schlubby everyman who wants to do a good job well, makes an engaging change. This movie offers few focus-tested surprises, preferring to offer engaging characters in a smart situation.

And thankfully Million avoids the most obvious trap: he doesn’t force Charlie and Elaine into bed. Throughout the movie, they develop mutual respect, even friendship, that complicates Charlie’s desire to subvert her career. Toward the end, they imply the possibility of possible future courtship. But essentially, their relationship is a realistic depiction of professional competition between two smart people who happen to be opposite sex.

Wilson plays Charlie so he has our sympathy, but doesn't need our pity. He excels at what he does, and students seek his help because he's a good teacher. But being good isn't good enough anymore. Anybody who's ever postponed grading or given students just enough to get by while hammering on our own scholarship to show the department we deserve to exist, will recognize Charlie as one of our own.

And this movie doesn't jump out waving jazz hands to convince us we ought to laugh. Despite a few exaggerated moments, it mainly displays an understated quality that shows its audience a level of respect we've grown unaccustomed to recently. If more movies like this emerged from mainstream Hollywood dream factories, Sunset Strip might have fewer zillionaires, but the movies would still be something to look forward to.

Don't Go To College... Yet

If you have any kind of a social media account, you probably witnessed this week’s viral video, “Go To College,” exhorting youth to pursue higher education rather than just hang out. Produced by website College Humor, which has collaborated with the Obama administration previously, and co-starring SNL actor Jay Pharoah, it makes a catchy tune. And it showcases the success the Obama administration, and the First Lady especially, enjoy using social media for social good.

I find myself torn. Anyone familiar with my background in college education will understand why I think getting your higher degree matters. A good liberal education makes people free, a truth understood since Greco-Roman times. But as one among millions of Americans finding his life options severely circumscribed by inability to pay college debt, I have severe qualms about pressing students into schooling for which they’re often unprepared. There must be a middle ground somewhere.

Ever since the GI Bill created an entire new generation of college-educated middle-class workers following World War II, higher education has undoubtedly been key to entering America’s comfy home-owning central echelons. Because of this, students, especially academically astute students who take standardized tests well, face monolithic pressure to attend college. Being inexperienced, youth remain often unaware of other options available. Thus, except among the poorest Americans, college becomes the supposed funnel to adult economic stability.

This is further compounded by the frequent lack of career guidance colleges provide outside vocational programs. All through high school, the top advice I received was: go to college. In college, my professors urged me into graduate school. In graduate school, my professors urged me into a Ph.D. program and eventual professoriate—during years when spending on college professors was bottoming out. I graduated with a degree, an outdated résumé-writing guide, and $30,000 of debt.

I cornered one professor and demanded guidance on how to pursue a career in my field. He admitted he didn’t know; he, and his colleagues, had been outside the non-academic job market so long, any job-seeking skills they’d once had were irretrievably outdated. Though my major programs (I doubled) both offered career planning classes, they taught only broad, sweeping maxims, from professors who’d spent years, sometimes decades, off the market. I quickly came to despair.

However. During my teaching years, I noticed something distinct and consistent. My best students, almost without exception, hadn’t started college directly from high school. They’d taken time off to pursue something fulfilling, meaningful, or remunerative. This may have involved travelling, getting a job, or starting a family. One particularly successful student had served two tours in Iraq and wrote movingly about PTSD. One spent a year studying evangelism in Scotland. One had been to prison.

Students who worked, traveled, or lived before college entered with important skills. They had better ideas what they wanted from higher education, giving them laser-keen focus on their ultimate final goals. And they were more self-directed, which made them better able to handle college learning. Freshly minted high school graduates were more accustomed to a teacher-centric, classroom oriented learning environment, and unprepared for the hours of autonomous, private study college demands. Many hit a wall.

When America introduced compulsory state-based schooling back in the Nineteenth Century, early backers like Catherine Beecher and Horace Mann needed ways to compel reluctant students into the classroom. One way they accomplished this was to create an undercaste of social rejects and malcontents, whom they nicknamed “dropouts.” We see these instruments of social control perpetuated today whenever anybody says the people who cook food, build roads, and stock shelves deserve “menial” pay for menial work.

Now our highly respected FLOTUS, backed by America’s well-funded media machine, insists online that every job besides literally watching paint dry and grass grow deserves, even requires, post-secondary schooling. But my classrooms were already flooded with students who didn’t want, and were unprepared for, higher ed. They simply didn’t see any other options, a fact with came across in their measurable outcomes. College literally isn’t for everyone. Creating even more pressure forecloses students’ available options.

Nearly a quarter-century ago, John Taylor Gatto wrote something that’s really stuck with me: that life without education is life only half-lived, but we mustn’t mistake education for schooling. Ramrodding students into academic environments for which they’re unsuited does them severe injustice. Why is college universally better than apprenticeship, on-the-job training, or national service? Why can’t youth postpone college until they’re ready? College shouldn’t be a jobs factory. Kids deserve better than more unwanted pressure.

Sumner's One-Stop Literary Joke Shop

Melanie Sumner, How to Write a Novel: a novel

Aristotle “Aris” Thibodeau wants you to know she’s an old soul. Only 12.5 years old (and she doggedly claims that point-five), she’s already endured enough life to understand her mother’s romantic mistakes, grade college-level papers, and tell her own story. Somebody gave her a book entitled Write a Novel in Thirty Days!, and she accepts that challenge. This book, a half-joking satire of postmodern metafiction, is the result.

I can only imagine, after publishing three novels and teaching college writing for over a quarter century, Melanie Sumner has become disgusted with MFA workshop fiction. She lards this novel with in-jokes that writers and writing teachers may find hilarious. I laughed often at Aris’ knowing, winky narration. But I also wondered who Sumner really wrote this novel for. There’s a fine line between satire and being mean to up-and-coming strivers, and Sumner can’t always find it.

Aris narrates a complicated domestic drama that simultaneously echoes and mocks literary realism. Having pronounced herself engaged to a charming, conveniently absent classmate, she sets about arranging her widowed mother’s remarriage to a local handyman whose flaws Aris cannot see. Aris’ mother, whom she addresses as “Diane,” met both her late husband and her handyman at AA; Diane attends meetings so obsessively that she’s clearly traded one addiction for another.

Meanwhile, Aris’ brother Max demonstrates autistic symptoms. Aris pronounces herself Max’s co-parent, and persistently gives Diane unwanted advice. Her childlike pronouncements on romance and parenthood increasingly highlight the gulf between her viewpoint and real life, almost daring us to determine how reliable a narrator Aris actually is. Gaps add up until readers inevitably second-guess everything they’ve read. Maybe Aris wants us to doubt reading itself.

Sumner almost dares us to pass judgment on this narrator and her book. Aris’ narration is a point-for-point mirror on textbook creative writing, and she frequently admits that things happen in her story, not because they happen, but because her how-to guide says it’s time. Sometimes this is funny; other times, it feels disrespectful, rude, and taxing, like Sumner spun a @GuyInYourMFA tweet across 300 pages.

Melanie Sumner

For instance, I struggle with our viewpoint character. Does Sumner intend us to take Aris seriously, or does she see her first-person narrator as a send-up of fake literary children like Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield? Sumner lards Aris’ narration with anachronisms, weird contradictions, and signals that Aris isn’t really writing this book. Then in the willfully ironic introduction, she concedes, “I could be lying about my age.”

Sumner also digs in other literary conventions throughout. Aris’ mother adjuncts at a rural Christian college, which stifles her own creative impulses. Sumner, a tenure-track professor herself, apparently doesn’t realize how little work colleges actually permit adjuncts to do, or their pay scale. Also, adjuncts aren’t “denied tenure,” because they’re not tenure-track, and a fired Christian college adjunct probably won’t subsequently snag full professorship at Harvard.

Aris doesn’t number her chapters. She’ll just toss page breaks in irregularly, and divides “parts” according to stages on Freytag’s Pyramid: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Dènouement. Of course, these designations are ironically disconnected from what’s actually happening on paper. They just demonstrate Aris’ literary knowingness. Events happen because Aris writes them down; basically, she’s writing herself into existence.

How audiences respond to Sumner will depend on what they bring into this book with them. By daring us to judge Aris’ story, by challenging us to separate Aris’ unreliability from Sumner herself, she basically invites MFA instructors, hipsters, and literary burnouts into her circle of self-congratulation. Which isn’t entirely bad; personally, this struggling writer found this book often funny. But just as often, I found it facetiously annoying.

Sumner hit my event horizon with Charles Baxter, one of Diane’s students. Aris develops a creeping crush on Charles while reading his papers, which consist of confessing grim family secrets in playful tones. When Charles actually enters the scene, Sumner clothes him in a zoot suit, letting him demurely confess personal crimes with understated charm, while descending into increasing stereotype. The blatant digs at Iceberg Slim and Malcolm X felt mean.

Reading Sumner’s early pages, I wanted to like this story. Name-checking common MFA foibles and overused literary tropes felt cathartic, with flashes of true humor. But she just kept going. English major in-jokes and literary cynicism kept accumulating past the point of interest, and like that coffee-shop philosopher we all know, the novelty wore off pretty quickly. This is a good, funny concept, but a long, tiring novel.

Paleoconservatism 101

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 40
P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

When Republicans swept mid-term elections in 1994, newly elevated House Speaker Newt Gingrich encouraged his fellow Republicans to do something almost completely unprecedented: rather than living full-time in Washington, DC, legislators should reside in their home districts, only commuting into Washington for Congress’s notoriously short workweeks. The results have been disastrous. Legislators who once shared neighborhoods, taverns, and taxis have become complete strangers. Nobody reaches across the aisle anymore because nobody talks to one another.

This, probably PJ O’Rourke’s most influential, least doctrinaire book, appeared halfway through the George HW Bush administration, when elected officials still kept company, and Congressional floor debates still influenced votes. Ideas mattered. Therefore, though O’Rourke’s Libertarian conservative credentials permeate his analysis of American federal government, his side-splitting timbre has bipartisan bite; he cares less about parties, more about consequences. It’s a unilateral debunking clarity broadly missing from political commentators anymore, including, sadly, from O’Rourke himself.

PJ O’Rourke made his bones doing on-set script doctor work for Rodney Dangerfield films, which comes across in his comic timing, frequently coarse humor, and knack for unornamented language. O’Rourke and his close friend John Hughes called themselves the “token conservatives” at National Lampoon magazine; later, O’Rourke wrote this book, originally as separate articles, during his hitch as “National Affairs Desk Chief” at Rolling Stone. He claimed to share an office with Hunter S. Thompson.

This mélànge of influences glimmers through O’Rourke’s humor. “Democrats are also the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” What O’Rourke wrote as joshing exaggeration is sober fact anymore. Elsewhere, he characterizes the three branches of government as “Money, Television, and Bullshit.”

P.J. O'Rourke

O’Rourke describes a government beholden to conflicting forces: spending programs lingering from Great Society liberalism, underwritten with tax structures colored by the Reagan Revolution. Despite today’s ubiquitous Reagan worshippers, O’Rourke notes that, even in the Gipper’s long shadow, killing, or even cursorily remodeling, grandfathered programs was virtually impossible. O’Rourke’s unsentimental skewering of government priorities makes an excellent antidote to today’s unthinking Reagan hagiographies. (Many programs O’Rourke mocks were later dismantled under Bill Clinton, a Democrat.)

One reads O’Rourke’s description of a typical Congressman’s workday—he followed an actual Congressman for one day—with out-and-out nostalgia. Not because we ever remember doing anything similar ourselves; no, his description of eighteen-hour frenzies of meetings, debates, and gladhanding feels downright nightmarish to anyone lacking a Congressman’s ego. Rather, as O’Rourke describes his anonymous Virgil leading him around, we realize, he’s talking with colleagues, constituents, and regular citizens. Real conversations, not pre-scripted press junkets.

That human touch is broadly absent from today’s political scene. O’Rourke cracks wise about “the president act[ing] as a human augury” at budget meetings, or “the president heal[ing] the sick” by signing the Americans With Disabilities Act. Indeed, we still roll eyes at the meaningless ceremony attached to government actions. Yet these activities involve speaking with people holding different opinions. Like coelacanths, we know such beasts still exist; we’ve just never seen one.

Thus, O’Rourke’s cuttingly comical tracts reads like a time capsule. Though inarguably conservative in outlook (his disdain for public welfare and reverence for Reagan loom large), O’Rourke describes philosophical precepts uncolored by partisan cable news, web aggregators, and Koch Brothers talking points. In 1991, even talk radio was still nascent. Commentators like O’Rourke couldn’t expect ideologically unswerving audiences; communication with people who disagreed remained mandatory. This book reads like he cares what ideological opponents think.

O’Rourke describes a utilitarian conservatism here, one interested in reaching vast, diverse audiences, not just an ideological base. Tea Party loyalists certainly won’t appreciate his willingness to acknowledge complexity and nuance. But centrists and leftists would enjoy debating this version of conservatism, largely because it disdains dogma and sloganeering. O’Rourke channels Reagan’s folksy charm, Russell Kirk’s thought, and Jonathan Swift’s hilarious intolerance for hogwash. That’s why this notorious conservative enjoys many fans on the left.

Sadly, since this book debuted, O’Rourke’s views, increasingly untempered by interaction with diverse influences, have become increasingly partisan and dogmatic. He treats disagreement as indicative of stupidity, and reduces complex arguments to idiotic caricatures. Recent books have become virtually unreadable for anyone who doesn’t share his strict Libertarian nationalism. Worst, they aren’t even particularly funny. But for one shining moment, O’Rourke gathered a massive multilateral audience around this hilarious exegesis of Washington’s notorious power edifices.

The Hilarious Verse and the Terrible Truth About TV

John F. Buckley & Martin Ott, Yankee Broadcast Network

Poetry has always dwelt in strange neverlands, caught between today’s commonplaces and an idealized, probably allegorical past. Poets address today’s needs using bygone methods. From Homer to the medieval troubadours to modern MFA workshops, poets have always somehow not belonged to the present. Therefore, despite repeated pronouncements of poesy’s long-overdue demise, poetry today, if anything, matters more. Barraged by media messages and ever-shifting issues too fast to comprehend, we’re all somehow outside our time anymore.

Welcome to the Yankee Broadcast Network, home of such undying television classics as “Lusts of Midgard,” “Real Housewives of Wayne County,” and “The B-Team.” This network’s gelatinous onslaught of reality TV, plaintive melodrama, and pandering blockbusters keeps audiences hypnotized, while advertisers strategically market dissatisfaction and ennui. This dystopian hangover of television’s reptile-brain impulses blurs boundaries between life and semi-scripted potboilers, reducing viewers to a dreamlike fugue where fever visions increasingly resemble MTV montages, or vice versa.

Casual readers might easily mistake Buckley and Ott’s satirical poetry for mere light verse, interesting but forgettable like Edward Lear. But as poems mount up, as verse styles both traditional and experimental tease readers’ expectations, and as pop culture references meld with ancient poetic tropes to create new hybrids, easy judgments vanish. Eighteen years ago, Ani DiFranco sang “Art imitates life, but life imitates TV.” Buckley and Ott assert those are outmoded distinctions in terrifyingly half-joking poems like “Commercials of the Apocalypse”:

When even the walls began to turn on each other
and kids kicked around skulls in the wreckage for fun,
from skin to sin they sought to sell us things, and so
advertising was born again. Who can forget Zom-B-Gone

with its blend of seventy-three special herbs and
pesticides, able to repel hordes of undead salesmen
and make scorched lawns lush once more? Doesn’t
everyone still hum the jingle from Crazy Ed’s Eyeglass

Emporium and the double-eye-patched pirate’s ayayays?

Poets seldom collaborate today; we’ve come to expect solemn navel gazing interspersed with outbursts of Billy Collins-style try wit. It’s tempting to parse these poems seeking which lines Ott wrote, which Buckley. But that misses the point of their extroverted, non-gloomy experiments, reminiscent of that stalwart theatre class game, “Yes And.” Try to miss the improvisational implications veritably streaming, jazz hands aloft, from poems like “Coming Soon to the Disaster Channel!”:

\

Martin Ott (right) and John F. Buckley

Tornado week features The Traveling Travails
of Tracy, a ragdoll that flew from Tulsa to Tallahassee,
her left arm torn when it toppled a telephone pole
in Mobile, Alabama, the snapping of the pretty hem

on her tiny gingham dress sawing Baton Rouge oaks
into splinters. Will she and eight-year-old Stacy,
her newly homeless owner, ever be reunited?
Tune in Tuesday at 9PM for a whirlwind adventure!

It’s easy to recognize the time-delayed rubbernecking popular from cable TV, the hackneyed “History” Channel train wrecks too real for parody. Yet these poets capture not only the voyeuristic excess and shameless hucksterism behind the shows themselves, but also our childlike will to permit such content into our homes and minds. This perversely symbiotic relationship between producers and audience informs poems like “Better Living Through Television” and “Television Through the Ages: a Smithsonian Walkthrough.”

Buckley and Ott experiment with forms. Besides formless free verse, traditional techniques like sestina, ghazal, and terza rima appear periodically. Many of their best poems have lines too long to excerpt for review. Images which originate in one poem reappear elsewhere, giving the collection a Sherwood Anderson-like internal consistency. For example, Hayden Smunchner, evolves from promising talent, to vulgar, fawning huckster, before appearing one final time, in the painfully topical “Fireside Chat”:

The fireplace has been replaced by a TV
cracked open like a dinosaur egg, a blue
flame flickering inside the screen. President

Smunchner, half-ruined face still swoon-worthy
from the right, patiently waits for the drums
to subside, for children to trust they won’t be

eaten. The purple mountains proudly wear
their scars, the length of battlefields smoking
onscreen like Tinseltown toughs. His voice

is low, clear, reasonable—there’ll be extra
rations for rebuilders. His words are not
important; they rarely are. He has taken

the country as a bride, the smoldering
dream of courtship denied...

Reading this surprisingly funny condemnation, we progress from cognizant laughter, to squirming amusement, to undeniable realization: if TV does this to us, we’re willing participants. We’ve chosen the passive path, while producers like YBN merely sell what we’ve already purposed to buy. Like all good, timelost poets, Buckley and Ott ultimately don’t write about TV; they write about us.

A Good British Comedy Goes Awry

Michael Frayn, Skios: A Novel

Michael Frayn is a writer who makes other writers jealous, because he can dip into new forms easily and often. Though he made his name as a playwright, and his Noises Off is standard repertory for regional and educational theatre, he has also written highly successful, award-winning novels and nonfiction. (As far as I know, he’s ducked poetry.) After ten years away from novels, he returns with a farce whose noble ambition perhaps exceeds its capacity.

London playboy Oliver Fox hates himself and his reputation, and already regrets the weekend rendezvous he’s arranged with a girl he hardly knows. At the baggage claim on the Greek resort island of Skios, he steals the luggage, and the life, of Dr. Norman Wilfred. It seems Dr. Wilfred is committed to speak at a prestigious but shady philanthropic foundation. Oliver’s natural charm wins over wealthy Americans, but he will soon have to deliver a lecture on a topic he knows nothing about.

Elsewhere on the island, Dr. Norman Wilfred can’t find his luggage, his connections, or anything that brought him to Greece. A strange, inarticulate cabbie has dropped him at a decaying holiday villa with an emotionally unstable co-ed, and calling the foundation’s desk just leaves him trapped among goats. As he grows increasingly desperate, he starts to question everything on which he’s built his life, and whether this strange, pretty woman might not be the salvation he needs.

This book starts as a traditional British comedy of manners. In one plotline, Oliver digs himself a hole he knows he can’t get out of, yet he enjoys the attention (and the pretty coordinator) so much that he can’t stop himself. In the other plot, Dr. Wilfred’s Oxbridge pretensions slowly unravel. A primal, lusty caveman lurks beneath his cultured restraints, but the woman he now loves doesn’t share his passions, much less understand. Jane Austen lovers would approve.

But this is Michael Frayn, and anyone familiar with his work knows he loves to watch lies unravel. Over the course of two hot Mediterranean nights, people pin their hopes on the air, then watch everything fall down around them again. Angry declamations lead to heady cross-island pursuits. Jilted lovers, thought long gone, suddenly reappear. Secrets prove impossible to conceal, and someone pushes Dr. Wilfred to reclaim his life, even though he no longer wants it back.

The giddy pace and emotionally intense storyline feel like they would work on stage or screen. The book is fast-paced, and you can read it in two evenings, but prose puts a limit on something like this. Specifically, where a movie or play drags audiences along and forces them to keep up, readers can put the book down and ask themselves questions. Farce doesn’t do well answering questions. It relies on an audience that remains, in some way, permanently confused.

In pursuit of that, as we approach the end, the dramatis personae takes a quantum leap. People briefly mentioned in early chapters suddenly become major players in the story. A gentle, intimate comedy suddenly has a cast of thousands, all of whom talk past each other. Roger Ebert would call this an Idiot Plot, a story of epic misunderstandings that could easily resolve if one person told the truth. That is, if anybody else were listening.

Which is a shame, because the early chapters are quite good. They contain deep psychological insights and complex cantilevered motivations, all for characters so complex that they can’t understand themselves. We laugh good-naturedly with these characters, at first, because we know them better than they know themselves. They remind us of people we all know, the kind of people who could benefit from a long, solemn conversation with their own bathroom mirror.

Perhaps Frayn is dissatisfied with subtle character humor. Perhaps a writer who made his name slipping philosophical insights into panicky farces thought he needed the big laughs to sell the conclusion. Even he knows how confused the product winds up looking, since he includes a chapter explaining how this story would end in an ordinary farce, right before he suddenly swerves, giving us a conclusion that has little to do with everything that came before.

This should be such a good book. It’s insightful, funny, and rueful, right up to the moment where it implodes. I enjoyed the early chapters, and thought perhaps Frayn was bringing back an older form of gentle but surgical comedy. Then, in the clinch, it turns into stampeding entropy. So close, and yet so far away.