Heck Of A Guy

Cyber-Bookmarks From DrHGuy: 9 September 2007

Cyber-Bookmarks From DrHGuy are annotated links to arguably worthwhile, recently published online reading, new or revised websites of potential utility or ostensible interest, and other internet-accessible experiences that, were it not for the casually collected, cavalierly collated, & capriciously collocated components comprising these posts, could easily be overlooked - which would be, in some cases, a shame,

Don’t Call Us, …

No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov by David Oshinsky
The New York Times Book Review (7 September 2007)

A celebration of the rejection letters from Knopf that, as the author puts it, “missed the mark,” this column is essential reading for artists subjected to the capricious judgments of editors, agents, gallery owners, curators, critics, etc. and a reminder to the rest of us that rejection may have less to do with an accurate assessment of our own worth than with the faulty judgment of the individual offering the evaluation.

How about a rejection letter that includes the phrases, “very dull” and “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions” - like the one sent from Knopf in response to the submission of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” by Anne Frank. Of course, that manuscript would also be rejected by 15 other publishers before Doubleday bought the rights to one of the best-selling books in history.

A similar fate met the first submissions from Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, Bashevis Singer, and Sylvia Plath, among others.

This essay on missed opportunities by those who claimed to know better can be found at
~ No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov ~

How To Shop The Internet Mall

Online Purchasing And Researching Tips is an expert’s list of cautions and tips for purchasing online.

From my own experience, I would especially emphasize these points from this piece:

1. The wisdom of researching (a) the product being purchased (I’ve had success, for example, finding cheaper alternatives, such as discontinued lines, to expensive electronic equipment) and (b) any online retailers not familiar to the buyer. The easiest means of checking out sellers is to punch the name into Google and search through the results for customer responses. If nothing negative turns up on that first search, run a second with the retailers name and “reviews” or “customer” to find useful information.

2. The necessity of checking shipping and delivery charges before committing to the purchase

3. The usefulness of the sale and coupon aggregation sites. In addition to those listed, I’ve had good luck with the following:

• Brad’s Deals
• More Stuff 4 Less
• Cheap Stingy Bargains
• Flamingo World

This advice about buying from internet sellers can be found at ~ Online Purchasing And Researching Tips ~

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The Incredible Yet Obvious Harry Potter Conclusion

BBC: Are you going to have a lot of loose ends to tie up in [Book] 7?

J.K. Rowling: … I’m aiming to tie it all up neatly in a nice big knot… that’s it , good night.¹

Footnotes

1. BBC Interview↩

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Book Notes At Largehearted Boy

An ongoing feature at Largehearted Boy, an always impressive pop music site, is Book Notes, in which “authors create and discuss a music playlist that is in some way relevant to their recently published books.”

The first entry on the list is Tom Bissell’s God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories, dated March 30, 2005. The total number of book notes appears, by my estimate to be approaching 100, each with a brief introduction, the playlist, and links to book reviews, the author’s web site, the book’s website at the publisher, … .

A wide range of authors and books are representative, some familiar, some unknown to me. The quality of the playlist obviously varies by author but many are thoughtful and provocative, describing links between the music and their writing that stimulate ideas and enrich the reader’s experience; only a few have the ring of a publicist’s touch.

And, there is the voyeuristic thrill of watching as a published author reveals something semi-intimate about his or her preferences, predilections, and peccadilloes.

Admit it - aren’t you a bit interested to see what made it on the playlist put together by Susie Bright, who edited Best American Erotica 2006, and some of the contributors to that volume?

Excerpts

As it turns out, this month, two Canadian authors have contributed playlists, both of which include songs by Leonard Cohen. I’ve excerpted the notes dealing with the Leonard Cohen selections to provide the reader a taste of the offerings at Book Notes”


Robert Wiersema: Before I Wake

Joan Of Arc: Leonard Cohen
Joan of Arc is the patron saint of Before I Wake (and is mentioned, fairly early on, in a conversation between Father Peter and Tim when they first meet in the story). The story of a girl who brought glory and happiness to her people, who then turned on her, burning her at the stake, resonates with me, and informs much of what happens to Sherry in the novel. Cohen’s treatment of the story is unusual, and fairly profound.

Hallelujah: Jeff Buckley¹
I had to include this song for two very different reasons. First off, it nicely encapsulates a number of the book’s themes, particularly those of failure and redemption. There is an uplifting quality to the song that belies its lyrics, and a rich quietness which can only be described as holy. The second reason is more personal. Despite everything I’ve done, despite everything I bring to the table, I don’t think I’ll ever write anything as immediate, anything as moving, as this song. I don’t think there are any words to rival the sound of an acoustic guitar resonating in an empty room… Ah well. There’s nothing I can do except, as Bob Dylan once said, “keep on keepin’ on”. To quote Browning, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Anosh Irani: The Song of Kahunsha

Take This Waltz: Leonard Cohen
I was in a taxi in North Vancouver, on a dreary rainy night about eight years ago. Being a recent immigrant, my mind was an attic for the mundane: phone bills, health insurance, student loans, social insurance number. Through the speakers, a voice came on. It grabbed me like Death itself, but a life-giving death, a death unsure of its own function. When the song got over, I asked the Persian taxi driver who the singer was. “Leo-nard Co-hen,” came the answer. His words and music ripped apart my phone bills and made me care even less about health insurance. I was not expecting Cohen, but he came anyway, unannounced, and took charge with his haunting, inspiring work. ²

Footnotes

1. The playlist did not specify this was a cover of Cohen’s Hallelujah, a significant oversight, if an understandable one↩
2. ”I was not expecting Cohen, but he came anyway, unannounced, and took charge with his haunting, inspiring work.” Way cool, eh?↩

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The Heck Of A Guy 2007 Summer Read

Christopher Buckley has packed his latest novel, Boomsday, brimful with all manner of fun:

• An absurd, eminently believable plot (AKA a typical Christopher Buckley plot)
• A protagonist who is not only smart, independent, and female, but also a blogger
• A fast moving, action-satiated plot with lots-o-laughs
• Fiscal policy
• Chortle-inducing, pun-enhanced organizational acronyms, such as
     SPERM: Society for the Protection of Every Ribonucleic Molecule
     ABBA: Association of Baby Boomer Advocates
     BADMAP: Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predictor
• Sex
• Focus groups
• A $700 an hour lawyer whose client persists in telling the truth, thus negating his value
• A successful $15 million class-action suit against the Salvation Army for dispensing sugar doughnuts to a a few diabetic disaster victims
• A Bosnian battle scene with an explosive conclusion
• Mobs of U30s (Under 30s) attacking golf courses in Boomer retirement communities
• Fraudulent nursing-home schemes
• A proposed pro-am golf tournament - on a course built with slave labor in North Korea
• Presidential campaign slogans that are - uh, unconventional, including
     “No Worse Than The Others”
     “You Know Where To Find Me”
     “Shut The Fuck Up”
• A patrician senator with a prosthetic leg and Tourette’s, who aspires to be president
• A southern fundamentalist preacher suspected of matricide, who aspires to be president
• A Silicon Valley tycoon blackmailing the president to become Secretary of the Treasury
• The tycoon’s obligatory trophy wife
• A Russian prostitution ring shaking down a prelate on the short list of Papal candidates
• Wisdom about love: “Once you’ve slept with a woman, it’s harder to lie to her, despite the necessity.”

It’s easy to see why Boomsday is the official 2007 Heck of a Guy Summer Read; what’s not to like?

Thank You For Transitioning

The titular “Boomsday” is a play on the “Baby Boomers” generation and “Doomsday,”¹ referencing the impending Malthusian economic crisis that will be triggered when the Boomers retire because of the resulting exponential increase in total Social Security and Medicare benefits paid to these now officially elderly Boomers paired with a similarly dramatic decrease in the number of employees paying into those systems.

Propelled in equal parts by her disgust over the government’s failure to address the issues and by her nearly continuous ingestion of Red Bull, Cass, the heroic blogger by night and PR maven by day, creates a contemporary, not quite Swiftian, modest proposal: Voluntary Transitioning. Voluntary Transitioning is her euphemism for elderly Boomers, in return for certain incentives (e.g., elimination of ones estate tax, free Botox treatments), agreeing to voluntary suicide at a given age, thus alleviating the fiscal crunch.

Initially designed as a “no way it will actually become law” idea to force Congress to consider the underlying problem, the proposal is used to garner political advantage by various players, gaining traction to the point that its enactment becomes a serious possibility, and, as one might guess, hilarity ensues.

While the forthcoming demographically induced economic apocalypse is the primary focus of Buckley’s satirical attack, it is not the only target. This excerpt, for example, resonates with the concerns of certain Boomers like me:

Buckley sets the stage for this spectacle by constructing what one of his characters calls, an “asshole-rich environment” - the Washington of public relation firms, lobbyists, politicos, press agents, political consultants, spin doctors, bureaucrats, and the other such dangerous denizens that was the home base of his first and most wondrous novel, Thank You For Smoking. Indeed, a particularly instructive joy of reading Boomsday is chance to view the workings of the many promotions, campaigns, and manipulation of public opinion.

None Of The Characters Are Sympathetic - But Who Cares?

All of the characters, including the brilliant, plucky, and inevitably sexy Cass, are self-serving, sneaky, and manipulative - if they aren’t downright maliciously evil.

Boomsday, in fact, falls short of Thank You For Smoking because that first novel was driven by the personality of Nick Naylor, the ace lobbyist for the tobacco industry, the central character, and, most importantly, a guy the reader cared about.²

One should note, however, that it is Thank You For Smoking that is the aberration in this genre, not Boomsday. Satire requires no sympathetic characters, and it could be legitimately argued that such personages actually impede and distract from the message.

If one can’t have everything - and apparently one can’t - choices must be made. One may realize, for example, that, as Rupert Holmes eruditely declares in Escape (The Pina Colada Song),

I am not into health food
I am into champagne

One drinks champagne because it’s fun to drink champagne, not for its health benefit. Similarly, one reads satire because of it’s fun to find the message piquantly portrayed, not for profound insights into the human condition.

Hammering Those Subtleties

While I’m a unabashed, unreformed, unrepentant Christopher Buckley fan, he does have one teensy-weensy little habit that occasionally causes me a tad of annoyance - which I’ve thus far healthily sublimated into developing detailed, explicit, and illustrated plans for a prolonged and particularly painful interrogation, with methodologies based on the Spanish Inquisition, of the author about this trait in hopes of saving his wretched soul from damnation.

Mr. Buckley, it seems, is risk-abhorrent, appalled by the possibility that someone, somewhere, sometime might miss one of his jokes, overlook an allusion, or misunderstand one of his references. Consequently, no mythological reference is left unexplained, no allegory unexamined, no pun unexplicated, and certainly no cleverness of any sort unrepeated.

To provide the prospective reader a sense of this experience, I’ve translated a portion of the implicit between-the-lines authorial meta-monologue into prose, most effectively read with a maternalistic intonation:

Cover to Cover Coverage - A Heck Of A Guy Exclusive

While a few articles mention the “pop-art” cover design, I find only one other review that discusses it further and even that review lacks illustrations. And, that one also gets the image wrong - I think (see below).

Not only is the cover brightly colored with alternating yellow and blue rays running from the center to the periphery but the central graphic, a red, scalloped ellipse with the words, “Boomsday” and “A Novel,” is actually printed on the first page, not on the cover. That composite image is viewed through an opening in the cover page.

These stripes are elsewhere described as “sun-rays” and the central image is called “a red cloud.” Perhaps these terms were only meant as verbal illustrations, but it seems rather straightforward that the design emulates an explosion - as in BOOM, as in Boomsday.

The back cover continues the motif of radiating blue and yellow stripes, the latter of which are inscribed with typically effusive logrolling praise (e.g., “funniest” this, “quintessential” that) for the book and author.

[Click on graphic to view larger image]

It is, indeed, way out.

The Boomsday Decision

Sadly, a number of otherwise perfectly decent folks don’t enjoy Boomsday. Perhaps they don’t like champagne either. Maybe they don’t care for their children or love their mothers. It’s not for me to judge.

For the rest of us who are fortunate enough to enjoy a savaging satire sprinkled with sophomoric puns and hyper-ridiculous acronyms, it is a dandy book for summer.

As Juvenal noted, Difficile est satiram non scribere, It is difficult not to write satire. For Buckley, it’s darn near impossible.

Thank goodness.

Footnotes

1. Near the end of the book, there is a repeated allusion to James Joyce, which leads me to wonder if there is not also a connection between “Boomsday” and “Bloomsday,” the June 16th commemoration of Leopold Bloom’s activities as documented in Ulysses by James Joyce.↩
2. Buckley may agree. In most of his other fiction, he alludes to Thank You For Smoking - as he does in Boomsday, noting that the mentor learned his trade at the feet of the esteemed Nick Naylor.↩

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