The Factual Opinion

No Pictures: The Ratio Seems To Be Two Versus Two, On The Reg.

You Bright And Risen Angels
By William Vollman, 1989

William Vollman is another author in the list of "people who get talked about more than they get read,"  which is due, in no small part, to the writing itself--Vollman's books are usually 1)  Long, 2) Aggressive, 3) Hard-To-Read.  When they aren't, like some of his non-fiction work or the novella Whores For Gloria, they also usually aren't really that good.  So instead of reading well-written articles by eminent literary critics about his best work, there's a wealth of articles about his shorter, more terrible books.  Europe Central, his National Book Award winner from 2005, changed that somewhat, as did the best-of volume of Rising Up And Rising Down--both books were a bit more welcoming, although still unlikely to ever be one of those books that precocious asshole children claim to have read "when they were 11." 

Why all this talk about backstory?  After all, this is supposed to be about You Bright And Risen Angels, right?

Because You Bright And Risen Angels has about 100 pages of sensible and awesome, and the other 400 or so are uncomfortable, boring and pretty much nonsense.  It's decently written and well-imagined nonsense, but it's a book that tries to make sense out of an nonexistent plot, that is chronologically bizarre, that is missing about 700 pages of story (all of which have chapter headings in the table of contents),  and, as if all of that weren't enough, which it totally fucking is enough, thank you very much, is also a book based around a premise that the book is a description of a sort of video-game simulation of the story, being run by two characters, and it will be shut down before it reaches conclusion.  If that's your bag, than go pick up your bag at the desk.

True History of the Kelly Gang
By Peter Carey, 2000

A hypnotic portrayal of some pretty horrible occurrences in a land of poverty, Carey's fictional take on Ned Kelly and his four-man war on the hideous treatment wrought by the rich makes for one of the best Wild West stories not set in North America ever told.  Using an ingenious method of delivery, wherein Carey constructs the story out of a collection of news stories, pulp articles and crude diatribes, True History begins with the end, and then tears ass it's way from the start.  Raised to be an adult almost before he could walk, Ned Kelly's anger, his love and his attempt to save his family is a brilliantly focused story that speaks to the inadequacy of a land to protect it's children, of a people crying out honor and justice to catch up with them.  While it may suffer at times from too much hero-worship, it's nigh-impossible to read about Kelly's tribulations and not find oneself fully in support of him, even as his decisions send him to his end.  While the book may really be a whitewash of history, it's one that fully acknowledges it's fictional nature--and it's a hellaciously good pot-boiler to boost.

Reallionaire
By Farrah Gray and Fran Harris, 2005

If you've ever wanted to read the true story of how a young black child discovered how to exploit his fellows and work his way out of poverty, with nothing more than cold-blooded ambition, financial backing and a willingness to market cheap, unhealthy products to other poor black children, then this is the book for you.  (Quick question:  why do you want to read about that, again?)  Otherwise, you can probably find other poorly-ghost written "autobiographies" at your local flea market or church bake sale.

Imperial Life In The Emerald City
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, 2007

There's a certain level of tolerance required when one dives into any of the well-researched and well-written books regarding the last seven years in Iraq.  One has to be prepared to be confused, frightened and angry--regardless of political leanings, one would have to be extraordinarily selfish to not find some variation on the three mentioned emotions when spending any time exploring the nature of civilian life in Iraq.  Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post correspondent with a long-time relationship with Iraq, chose to focus his award winning Emerald City on the nature of one period of time--that being the brief year where Iraq was under the "control" of Paul Bremer.  Zeroing in even more, Chandrasekaran's book is almost completely set inside the Green Zone, a walled off portion of Baghdad where the majority of the decisions regarding Iraq's future were made.  (Or where the decisions just sort of happened, as the case may be.)

It's an awfully funny book, when one is able to separate oneself from the real impact that these people, Bremer especially, had on the lives of Iraqi citizens.  (Said separation is a herculean task in itself.)  Over and over again, unprepared and inexperienced individuals are placed into important decision making roles regarding the future of Iraq's economy, public health, utilities and security, solely because of those individuals political leanings.  Against abortion?  Related to a Republican think-tank?  Know how to say "yes" to your superiors?

You've got a job.

Chandrasekaran is smart enough to never openly condemn the choices made by these men and women--after all, very few of them had the capacity to see the future their mistakes would create--but it doesn't mean that the author whitewashes the horrific consequences.  More than once does one follow bureaucrats as they ignore the advice of experts, only for their political based fantasy to collapse into self-destruction.  It's all here, in this short book--why Iraq's electricity and school systems have collapsed from their once almost Western levels to something one usually sees in failed Balkan states or why the lack of understanding of tribal relationships spawned a mounting insurgency.  It's impossible to understand a lot of the choices that were made, and thankfully, the author chooses not to try forcing some hackneyed cries of propaganda into any ones mouths.  Clearly, there was little preparation made for worst case scenarios--and when those scenarios arose, no one had the courage to call a spade a spade. 

Recommending someone read a painful book that examines the ongoing destruction of a country and its people is something that is a bit difficult to do--but the truth is that people are dying in Iraq, everyday.  This is one of those books that helps to understand why it didn't have to be that way.  If that's what interests you--knowing the realities of the world you live in, then pick it up.  (Alternatively, the director of Bourne Ultimatum is making a movie based on it, and the movie will have Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear.  So you can just wait for that, we guess.)

-Tucker Stone, 2008

No Pictures: Cormac McCarthy And Omar, More Noir & Scumbags

The Road
By Cormac McCarthy, 2006

A few years back, one of those sociopaths who writes for Pitchfork said that if, at this point, you don't believe in Lil Wayne, you're just fooling yourself.  The same could be said about Cormac McCarthy.  While his biggest public exposure to date is now the Coen brothers No Country For Old Men, McCarthy's star continues to rise based on his prose.  The Road is one of his best--it can't take the title justly owned by Blood Meredian, but it's on the same level of quality as the Border Trilogy.  A book that demands attention, that's almost painful to put down, McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel of a father and son in the wastelands, hunting food and struggling to survive, The Road's acclaim is well deserved.  It's a tremendously good work, even though some of the ground it treads may be well-covered territory, and although it may currently bear the anti-hipster Scarlet O of Oprah's club, it's a book that's going to feature The Wire's Omar and Viggo "Just Fucked Your Mom!" Mortenson when it becomes a movie.  You didn't like it why?  Oh, cause you like Green Lantern.

The Dain Curse
By Dashiell Hammett, 1929

Dain reads like it what it is:  a book that was published in a serialized format.  It piles a hell of a lot of stuff, and a hell of a lot of murder, up onto the same characters throughout the entire book, preventing the total collapse of narrative by constant forward momentum and then ends with the sort of "should've seen that coming, probably kind of did but forgot that guy's name" kind of ending that most of these type of thrillers have.  It's a fine enough read, but it's not the Hammett of the Maltese Falcon, with a tightly wound narrative--it's the Hammett of pulp magazines, with a loose grip on a whirlwind of events.  What's tastier than a whirlwind?  Besides not watching any of those straight to DVD sequels to The Prophecy?  Answer:  Nothing.

The Little Sister
By Raymond Chandler, 1949

Out of all the Chandler books this reader has been exposed to, this is probably the most un-entertaining one yet--of course, it's one of those books that's based in Hollywood and features a bunch of actors and producers.  With the possible exception of Altman's The Player, and a couple of parts of Ellroy's LA Confidential, there's very little that's even flirtatious with the prospect of being interesting about the "realities" of Hollywood.  In a way, that sort of makes this book interesting, since it's from 1949.  That means Hollywood has been a boring ass place to set fiction for over fifty years.  They should put that up on that mountain.

Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member
By Sanyika Shukur, aka Monster Kody Scott, 1993

Here's some of the quirks that "Monster" Kody Scott uses in his book:

1) Instead of the popular and real word "understand," Scott uses the totally made-up, and totally cheesy "overstand."

2) White people are referred to as "Americans."  Blacks are "New Africans."  Anyone of any sort of hispanic descent, regardless of country of origin, is referred to as a "Chicano."  The only asians ever mentioned are called "Koreans," although this reader guesses that it's unlikely that Mr. Scott/Shakur took the time to discern anyone of Asian descent's actual heritage.  Meaning that those who he called "Koreans" may actually be from--oh, any Asian country.  He doesn't care.

3) White people are mutants.  (Not the X-Men kind.)

4) The word "human" is a bastardized word coming from the word "hue-man" which, wait for it, it's awesome, is about the original man who walked the earth, who had a "hue" and was black, and was therefore "hue-man."  Which is sort of genius, if by genius you mean, fucking retarded.

Whatever.  It's fine to write racist books about black supremacy.  It's fine to pronounce that shit openly, to lionize acts of meaningless (while totally horrific, unnecessary and disgusting) acts of violence being perpetrated on your neighbor in a hideously poor neighborhood.  Hell, it's a free country.  White people write ugly books of horrific racism.  They actually do it a lot more often then the opposite occurs.  But make no mistake--that's all that's going on here.  It's a book that operates like this:  grow up, be angry, join gang, hurt people, learn nothing, treat parents like shit, get older, get gun, kill people, and then start mixing in going to jail.  Then repeat "kill people and go to jail" until one becomes a black supremacist.  (Not nationalist.  That's a different thing.  That's an understandable thing.  Understanding white/black supremacy is sort of like understanding why priests rape children.  It's impossible to do when you're not mentally unstable.) 

There's nothing to learn from this book that couldn't be grasped by smashing ones face into the wall over and over again.  Stupidity and violence are a shitty way to spend ones time, and they're a waste of one's life.  Did you do it because you were poor?  Sorry, I'm already tremendously fucking bored.  Was I supposed to get angry?  Or Care?  Writing a book about how you were a lousy violent version of humanity:  right next to David Archuleta singing about poor people as "the very least you can do."  The thing were you shot other poor people?  That was the opposite.  Of course, there's no reason why anybody who's ever suffered the weight of oppression, the horrors of racism, the hopelessness of poverty--there's no reason at all why they shouldn't be allowed to write books that are angry responses to it.  But bragging about killing people?  Throwing out pat, shapeless apologies for your horrible past?  Seriously.  Go fuck yourself.  Fuck your shitty book while you're at it.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

No Pictures: Salinger & Chandler Are Kind Of Tools, Hammett And McEwan Are The Opposite

The Simple Art of Murder
By Raymond Chandler
1939

Raymond Chandler didn't just write about Philip Marlowe--sometimes, he changed it up to write about other guys who handled things in pretty much the same fashion that Marlowe would have, but they had different names.  Of course, that's not the sort of cover blurb that sells books, but then again, it's not like anybodies going to use this book as the jumping off point to dive into Chandler.  It's a compendium of short stories, each notching up around 50-70 pages of nasty dudes, nasty ladies and guns.  Sure, it's not bad.  But it's a bit of a slog, and only about half the stories match up to Chandler's best.  Still, it's not like it takes a lot of time to read this stuff, and for the time investment involved it's a hell of a lot better than Dean Koontz.  What does Dean Koontz write about anyway?

The Continental Op
By Dashiell Hammett
1923

On the other side of the coin, you've got a Dashiell Hammet collection of short stories, and none of them match up to the Maltese Falcon.  However, they're all about the same dude, the unnamed "Continental Op" of the title, and he's a delight to follow around.  Described as squat, which makes him sound like some kind of frog, the Op just trips around, fucking with people, fucking people up, and generally just making you wish Hammett had written in a day and age where the Op could have said "fucking" a lot.  Unlike Maltese, there's no higher literary art being reached in these pages, but these stories kick the hell out of Chandlers in the "kick the hell out of" contest, and they're all drenched with so much greasy cynicism that it's sort of like hanging out with writers for the Economist at a low income public school science show. 

The Comfort Of Strangers
By Ian McEwan
1981

Another really uncomfortable study of violence among people who's lives were designed to live without it, courtesy of Ian McEwan.  Interestingly enough, this book was made into a film by Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader, featuring Christopher Walken in a role the book clearly describes as a swarthy Italian with the requisite cheeseball necklace.  Whether the film also includes the brutal sexual violence described in some of the books later passages is unknown to this writer, although it's probably safe to assume that it doesn't--if the film version is absurdly faithful to the book, it would certainly be a notorious film instead of one that's pretty much unknown.  Strangers is a hell of a book, but it's not for everyone--which, in a way, is sort of a spoiler.  After all, it starts off, and spends more than half of it's page count, behaving like a book for everyone.  But, as the Bard once said, shit gets hectic.  And then things get a hell of a lot worse. 

Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction
By J. D. Salinger
1955,1959

According to Wikipedia, which is kind of like saying "more accurate than your parents, not as accurate as reality," Salinger has some kind of weird filing system describing what will and will not be published of his secret filing cabinet of finished books.  Hopefully, one of them will be a longer version, like a Tolstoy long version, of the Glass family.  As it is, both Roof Beam and Seymour are pretty terrific pieces of that story--on their own, they are over-analyzed New Yorker pieces that sell based on the fantasy of whatever it was Salinger was planning to do with this Tenenbaum like family before his grip on his importance as a writer took a vacation from reality.  Yes, they're good.  But they're as good as a short piece of fiction published in the New Yorker is--better than most, that's for sure, but pretty slim pieces of work.  But here's a little-known fact:  the most irritating people you'll ever meet are the people who read and then want to talk about the navel-gazing whitebread bullshit fiction that the New Yorker publishes.  Being a good New Yorker short story is sort of like being the best poet at your high school.  Sure, you're the tops, but you're the tops at something that makes everybody want to throw you down a flight of stairs.  So, J.D. Salinger, if you're googling your own name, because everybody knows that you fucking ARE, because you're FUCKING CRAZY, this reader would enjoy nothing more than to throw you down a flight of stairs.

Introduce that, bitch.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

No Pictures: Ian McEwan Buried A Few Puppies At Some Point

Saturday
By Ian McEwan
2005, Published by Doubleday/Random House

You can only be startled by an Ian McEwan book a few times--whether it's the gut punch in Atonement's epilogue, or the twist of violence that takes over The Innocent midway through what had been a quiet parable about security--eventually you'll start to grasp that while McEwan's books start off with a culture of solemnity, they'll eventually envelop the reader with a shock.  Whether it's an almost uncomfortably cruel lie or an explosive cafe murder, McEwan's books embrace the twist, and after you've learned of his love, you'll spend the rest of his books waiting for its arrival.  While Saturday's is more intense than some, it's one you can see coming.  What makes Saturday worth reading isn't the tension though, as with any McEwan, tension is window dressing.  Saturday succeeds on the brilliant success of another of McEwan's classic loves--that of hollowing out the mind of men to study, in as intimate fashion as possible, the way the mind works when dealing with everything it comes across, from the trivial to the blood-soaked. 

Speak, Commentary
By Jeff Alexander & Tom Bissell
2003, Published by McSweeney's Books

Not a book worth owning, not even a book worth reading more than once, Speak, Commentary is little more than what it's back cover dictates--it's fake movie commentaries about science-fiction films by people like Noam Chomsky, Ann Coulter & Dick Cheney, with some Star Trek freaks for a bonus.  While some of it is pretty hilarious, it's the type of hilarious that never plays well for a crowd, and the type that won't produce laughs on the retread.  On the positive tip, it is far less navel-gazing than most of what the McSweeney's contingent currently puts out, and it's almost completely devoid of precociousness.  (Excepting the idea behind it, that is.)

Amsterdam
By Ian McEwan
1998, Published by Doubleday/Random House

Amsterdam is one of Ian's award winners, and it's easy to grasp why--not as uncomfortably dark as his earlier work, and any reading of the Booker Prize winners displays their lack of interest in blood-theatrics.  Where Amsterdam fails isn't in its lack of nastiness--no, the problem here is in the inability of it's main characters to outshine the ones on the sideline.  The highest of praise can go to the passages of the book that explore the morning a wife decides to risk humiliation to protect a cross-dressing husband--it's a masterpiece of dining room drama that also serves to make the near constant complaints of the two men in Amsterdam's leads that much more irritating.  Still, Amsterdam helped to pave the way for Atonement & Saturday, and for that at least, the book is worth a gander.   Remember gandering?

Strangers on a Train
By Patricia Highsmith

There's quite a bit of Strangers on a Train that doesn't need to be there--huge paragraphs of spastic descriptions of rooms and clothes, hair and smells that only serve to showcase the nervousness of a first time writer.  Still, Strangers on a Train is an excellent piece of genre work, and it's obvious why Hitchcock found such success with his film version--this is a story that's impossible not to finish, and the overblown descriptions aside, it's a frighteningly good book from someone who was rarely acknowledged for her massive talent.  (While she was alive, that is.  Now her various publishers behave as if everybody was reading her.)  While Highsmith is too dead now to enjoy the benefits of the beautiful paperback editions of her work, one hopes that she at least enjoyed these stories when she wrote them.  After everything is done here, people will still be reading about Bruno and Guy for the next hundred years.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

No Pictures: Waiter, More Swedish Thrillers Please

The Man Who Smiled
by Henning Mankell
2005, English Translation, 1994, Swedish
Published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

As Kurt Wallandar books, Smiled sets the unsightly record of being the worst one ever.  Might be that Vintage Crime/Black Lizard agrees, as they waited to publish this, the fourth book of the series, until after all of Mankell's other Wallander books had been on the stands for awhile.  Makes sense--this is nothing much more than a protracted epilogue to the visceral gun-fest that ended White Lioness, which was actually a pretty great book.  Still, Mankell didn't want his character to go the John Mcclane route and start solving crimes the way he did at the close of White, so the first fifty or so pages of Smiled contain nothing but a descriptive passages of a man trying to drink and fuck away the memory of slaughter.  Luckily, he returns to the force to solve a real softball of a case, one that discloses it's motive and perp in the books prologue.  After that, it's just more observances of Kurt, the only detective who seems to operate best sleeping around 2 to 3 hours a night for months at a time.  By the end of Smiled, he's basically reverted to being the exact dude he was before Lioness.  That's a serial for you.

Resuscitation Of A Hanged Man
by Denis Johnson
1991, Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Jesus' Son is amazing.  Hanged Man is good, just a little too long, and a little too in love with being crazy.  Not much in the way of plot here, mainly just a fun ride down into the world of that guy on the bus having a massively religious conversation with himself.  (Which the main character, at one point, actually does!  And he does it far enough into the book that you can't help but get really disgusted with all the people that are reacting the same way you do when somebody is talking to themselves on the subway!  They, meaning you, are a total dick!  Why are you a total dick?)  While Hanged is a decent journey in a lunatics brainstem, it's pretty much just a diverting time-filler.  The dialog is off the chain, though.

Groundwork Of The Metaphysics Of Morals
By Immanuel Kant
1785, Published by Some German People
Review Copy Published by Cambridge University Press

The best story ever told about Kant is the one that refers to the legend that the man took his morning walk at the same time every single day, to the point where the locals set their watches by his rounds.  Due to a late night reading some masterpiece of philosophy, he missed his walk and a whole lot of people spent the day running late.  It's got to be a lie, right?  But if you've spent anytime with Groundwork, a book that quite happily advertises itself as "difficult", "unwieldy" and "complicated" you'll probably find yourself believing it.  After all, it reads like a guy who's life was planned to tight corners.  It's about a lot of stuff, like the ground, and the work that needs to be done to it so that metaphysic morals can be built there.   No, that's really what it's about.  Fuck you, you didn't read it. 

The Laughing Policeman
by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
1971, English Translation, 1968 Original Swedish
Published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

It takes a long time to get to the part of the book where the aforementioned "Laughing Policeman" is revealed, and by the time the cynical joke is revealed, the reader has probably already reached their fill of cynicism.  This is, after all, the David Simon version of 1970's crime fiction, meaning everybody is a little too real, their behavior a little too normal, and the crime a little too upsetting.  (Which means, of course, that it's a tremendously good fucking read, even in a genre that's swamped with quality work.  There's certainly got to be a huge backlog of terrible Swedish crime books, but America seems to only translate the cream of the crop.)  The mystery underlying the book plays out well, and it ends with the sort of relentless intensity that would surprise even the biggest Alien 3 fan.  It's surprisingly timeless stuff, and barring a few too many cops with seriously fucked up conversational skills, it's pretty unique to the field as well. 

Poor People
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Hugh Alpin
2002, Alpin Translation, 1846, Original Russian
Published by Hesperus Press

In the world that is books constructed out of letters, this is not better than The Sorrows of Young Werther, but it is better than getting punched in the face, mostly because it's short.  But there's no one on Earth that's going to feel sorry for either of Dostoevsky's whining idiots by the time they near the end.  That's a sort of testament to his ability as a writer, as he effectively portrays the characters as people the reader will most certainly wish a massive amount of harm on, but it doesn't serve to make for a pleasant period of reading time.  If anything, it's a masochistic journey with some of the most selfish morons Fyodor ever put on the page. People who choose pride over bread deserve to die of starvation.  I don't give a shit how you paint it.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

No Pictures: The Way It All Gets Started

Here we are, with The Factual Opinion's attempt to fill the interweb with things that are not the remaining Top Five Albums of 1983: this time, the flavor oft referred to as literature, treated with the same level of contemptible idiocy that we normally utilize for treating the comics and the cartoons.  It's books, people, and No Pictures will be the source to find out what happened when a little bit of intelligence and a heaping mass of chutzpah get combined with things recommended by Harold Bloom.

The Book of Job
Translated with an Introduction by Stephen Mitchell
1987, Published by North Point Press, Harper Perennial

If there's one thing that you can plow through in one sitting and grasp very little of, it's the Bible.  Just ask any of those lunatics who claim to have done it, or even better, ask them what it "meant."  Make sure you've got a snack, and a firm grasp on your ability to hide fear.  Crazy people can sense that.  Mitchell's translation of the Book of Job is pretty much a standard text these days, utilized for college classes and the oddly involved Sunday School class, yet that shouldn't be a turn-off to the casual reader.  (Conversely, the fact that it's not a turn-off to the casual reader shouldn't serve as a turn-off to the critical reader.)  It's an involving work, utilizing contemporary language with a poetic structure that's well suited to Job, a book often referred to as the favorite of people with dead children.  That being said, you can still get quite a lot out of it, even if your life doesn't closely resemble that of an ER season finale.  Who hasn't asked themselves why a guy like Milton Friedman led such a charmed life while Gandhi couldn't even afford shoes?  Why Mother Theresa had to hang out with lepers while Princess Di enjoyed the bright lights of gay Paris?  It's just not right!  Luckily, God will show up near the end of this delightful fable and tell you why:  'cause he's the deity version of Glengary Glen Ross's Alec Baldwin character, and his balls are bigger and brasser than the rest.  Always Be Closing, ye dust-eating sons of Adam.

Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit
Samuel Beckett
1931, 1949, Published by John Calder Press, Calder & Boyers

Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
1951, Published by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris
English Translation by the Author

One thing never to do when going into some Beckett for the first time is to remember how esteemed literary critics always refer to him as "very, very funny."  If it's your first time at the can't-go-on, must-go-on dance, you'll be kicking yourself in the taint to find the humor.  But for those of us returning to the Great French Irishman, you'll find Beckett's brutally intellectual analysis of Proust to be gut-busting hilarity.  Nobody puts the screws to Swann like Beckett.  Malone Dies is another beast altogether--if you've ever wondered where A. Dice Clay ganked his routine from, you'll find something suspiciously familiar about the passage where Beckett describes how the pig butcher's wife knows better than to deny her autistic husband safe passage to her "cunt."  The laughs really get going though, when Beckett rips full tilt into the graphic description of the meager supply of lead his nubby pencil is capable of:  until he pulls aside the wizard's curtain and reveals that he's got another as-of-yet unused writing implement under his pillow!  That's a point scored for the unreliable narrator, and it's well-deserved at that.

Picnic, Lightning
Billy Collins
1998, Published by University of Pittsburgh Press

Ah, Billy Collins.  Only in America could we have a Poet Laureate of such unbearably adorable whimsy.  Whimsically taking the reader around his glorious little homestead, delighting the reader with the true tale of the three blind mice, Picnic, Lightning is a whimsical romp that delights down the road of doe-eyed does and doe-eyed children, along with gum-drop covered thunderstorms.  One imagines Billy Collins sitting down at a whimsically archaic typewriter, with a "World's Most Contented Garrison Keillor Fan" coffee mug, listening to Peter, Paul & Mary sing the songs of the Partridge Family whilst penning  his latest bestselling collection of poems about waking up in the morning.  If you're the reader for him, and you'll know by walls covered in kitten pictures, than prepare yourself to dive into a pool of whimsy, filled with the juice left over when a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul gets pressed through a cheese grater.  Can't find his book?  Check Grandmother's casket.  You've got a few minutes before they bury her with it.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Mad Archives, Vol. 1

Mostly Written by Harvey Kurtzmann
Mostly Drawn by Wally Wood, Will Elder and Jack Davis
Originally Published by EC in 1952-53
Collection Published by DC in 2002

This first (as of yet, only) archival volume of the 1950's comic book Mad doesn't fully explain or explore the impact Mad has had on popular culture.  The book itself contains a few biographical details on some of it's contributors and begins with a leisurely essay that glosses over some of the history of the seminal, and still going, publication that bears the name.  Besides that, it's a full-color reprint of the first six issues, all of which are made up of 8-10 page satirical pieces, with a random piece of prose or fake "letters to the editor" dashed throughout.  No, it's not as interesting as it might be, and no, it's unlikely to make anyone without a severe taste for nostalgia laugh out loud.  In all honesty, if one is interested in the history of American comedy, early Mad might be better served by exploring the work in a more scholarly publication--like Bill Blackbeards work on George Herriman's Krazy Kat.  But if you're just interested to see the genesis of the type of humor that's become such a major force in American comedy, touching everything from The Simpsons, The Groundlings, Vice,  Second City and The Onion, than this book is worth the trip.  It's also to be commended when compared against the art of the period: it's quite clear that in 1952, the best artists in the industry weren't drawing Superman.  There isn't a single page in this volume that isn't graced with brilliant cartooning, and although the humor (and the items the humor is satirizing) are rather dated, these were some of the best comics that were coming out in an America trying to move away from the worst war they'd yet to know.  Kurtzmann's willingness to piss all over the cheesy heroics and knee-jerk patriotism that haunted the comics and pulp novels of the day was, and still remains, an act of explosive honesty and courage--even as it results in works of comedy that no longer contain the same bite (one assumes) they once had.

As is the case with the majority of high-quality reprints of old cartooning, the Mad Archives project has been dormant since 2002, and there's been no response to our queries about the remaining 3 volumes mentioned in this books press release.  One hopes that the books will eventually see the release they, and their contributors, deserve, but at this point the interested reader will have to settle for reading the issues on their computer, from one of the various CD- or DVD-ROM collections.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

Cerebus Volume One

By Dave Sim
Collection Published in 1991, Originally Published in 1977
Published by Aardvark Vanheim

Cerebus is one of the most successful independent comic books of all time, right?  Or is it one of the most successful independent publishing ventures of all time?  Either way, it's the longest running comic series by the same author.  And it's one of the longest single fictional narratives in recorded history.

How bad do you want to read it now?  Knowing that it's author has been written off as a misogynist, that you're never (and by never we mean absolutely never) going to find anyone else who has read the whole thing, that it's never going to be widely popular, that you're probably not going to understand portions of it, you're definitely going to dislike entire books of it, and that anytime you give to it will never be returned.  And you may finish it and not find it rewarding in the least, except for a spirit of completion.  Isn't Epic Movie the number one movie right now?  Shouldn't you be leaving?

If you're interested, than you mine as well start here, with Book One.  And although random Internet critics might point out that the book never completely returns to the poorly constructed parodies of these pages, and any cursory exam shows that the art is never this bad again, and those same critics will say that you could actually go ahead and skip the whole book entirely and start with the much better (supposedly) second volume High Society and not miss much of a step, what's really the point?  After all, Cerebus is made up of 25 300-500 page volumes.  Why skip only one?  It's a stupid idea to try to read them all anyway, so why attempt to make the adventure only a tiny bit shorter? 

Yes, a few of the characters from Volume One will show up on a regular basis over the course of Cerebus 6000-odd pages.  Except for Jaka and Elrod, they don't make much of an impact that registers--as aforementioned, the majority of this volume is taken up with parodies, most related to sword and sorcery books like Conan the Barbarian.  (Although they don't feel like parodies--in essence, they seem like they're supposed to be taken seriously, something that was never that easy to do when the main character was a human douchebag like Conan, much less when it's a drunken asshole aardvark.  If anything, it almost seems like Dave Sim wanted us to enjoy this low-rent version of Dungeons & Dragons straight up, and it's only called parody now that he's proved to be a much better writer.)  By the close of the book, the stories begin to stretch over larger chapters, and they become much funnier, even when they cleave to close to becoming overlong jokes.  Although this first volume will do nothing to make one desire to read more, it does serve as a relevantly useful introduction to one of fictions most successful creations.  But if you're still interested in Cerebus Volume 2 at the close of this book's 500-odd pages, that's more a testament to advertising and recommendation: this book will have done little to warrant it.

-Tucker Stone, 2007