Jerk Classics

I don't know who decided every book published before 1922 must be a "pot-purri" of "balderdahses!", "my words!", and "tally hos!", but I suspect that the Indigo Corporation has something to do with it. Aren't all "classics" the same in their books? Their tendency to heap poetic ingenuity into bargain-hunter dollar bins is a depressant to say the least. There is nothing more discouraging to a Homo-Pseudo-Sapiens with a 25$ Chapter's Gift Card in paw to discover that the carefully crafted literary masterpieces of ten generations can now be bought in bulk in the discount section at 6$ a dozen. Bargains are one thing, but this is undignified.

Still, never one to balk at a deal, I was in the middle of loading up Doré-filled telephone book reprints of the world's classics  into my potato sack when I hit the Austen pile. Now, I'm no Darcyophile, but even my untrained eye could detect something awry in the cover of Pride and Prejudice - I think I distinctly and clearly read and Zombies afterwords. Neither wasted nor psychotic at that particular moment, my good genius spoke, and warned me to be on the look out for SATIRE.

It suddenly occurred to me that some Wiseacre Willy was trying to have FUN with the CLASSICS. I suppose I can understand the particular post-pubescent glee of this goomba who decided in one fine, Red Bull spattered afternoon's cram session that some Zombies would be cool right about now. Unfortunately, this sort of thing never occurs in isolation. Imagine my chagrin when I found the following pamphlet in the back of the aforementioned volume:

Book Reviews: Quirk Classics!

This week I review several new releases from the Quirk Classics series. From the people who brought you Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Android Karenina, and Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters, comes a whole new batch of classic literature - with a macabre twist!

Bram Stoker's Dracula ... and Vampires!

The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? Did they have fangs? Turn into bats? Did they drink, like, blood? Because that would make them vampires. What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was it a vampire hunting mission? Because I saw like, 12 vampires on the way here, not to mention their zombie underlings. Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor's clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor's clerk! More like vampires' clerk! Mina would not like that.

I know what you are thinking - why would anyone want to read some old stuffy Victorian love story like Stoker's snooze inducing Dracula? Well, what if I told you they added some freakin' VAMPIRES to the mix? That boring trip to the Carpathians just got way more intense for demon hunter Jonathan Harker. And if you are the kind of guy who can't stand a slow epistolary love story, they've added just enough fang and cross fight scenes to get your BLOOD really boiling! A must-read for classic and vampire lovers alike.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark ... and Ghosts!


Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous poltergeists,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of ectoplasm,
And by ghost-busting, end them!

Shakespeare's most boring play just got what it needed - a gang of crazy ghosts. That's right, it turns out the dreary old Danish castle haunted! it's up to whiny princeling Hamlet and his lovable dog Pastrami to solve the mystery of the 7 Ghosts of Elsinore! No more soliloquies and thees and thous - this play's now got MURDER and THE UNDEAD going for it.

Treasure Island  ... and Pirates!

Couldn't understand what was going on in the original? Sick and tired of that thick Scottish/Irish/Whatever accent getting in the way of everything? Well, Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story about a sea-faring lad and his alcoholic companions just got a much needed dose of PIRATES! Come about the S.S. Arrgh, Matey! as young Jim faces off against a bunch of lecherous drunks, only to be saved in the final moments by some swash-buckling, ninja-slaying pirates. A much needed positive revamp of this tired and depressing Victorian tale of substance abuse and pederasty.

And don't miss our other upcoming titles, including:

Beowerewulf
Homer's the Odyssey ... And Cyclopses!
Dante's Inferno...IN HELL!
The Call of Cthulhu and Sea-Demons!
Hegel's Phenomenology of Ghost Busting!

The Changing of the Guard

Fall (unlike Autumn) is my favourite season. As Thoreau gruesomely puts it, preceding Vincent Price's spiel in Thriller by 120 years: "When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in." Life becomes singularly crisp along with the leaves and the weather. The brains of North American mankind, long melted into steamy juice by the Summer Sun, begin once more to solidfy into a semi-functioning globules. In some, the brightness of the leaves inspire a brightness of thought. These people beget ideas, ideas beget ambition, and ambition begets heartburn. The cyclical melody of nature is played out on every deciduous, while the ground base of the evergreen keeps the eternal rhythm of the Earth. Chipmunks play the kazoo, and the screeching Blue Jay does its level best to ruin the effect of Mother Nature - to no avail.

The annoyances of Summer are less pronounced, and by mid-October usually die out completely. A week-long "dog day" in the bedouin months becomes a welcome guest in the visit of several "Indian Summers", with hardly a scalp skinned. Street performers, moral campaigners, and other "characters" retire to their winter quarters - therein to devise fresh ways of pestering their arch nemesis, "status quo". Likewise most insects are silenced by the encroachment of Jack Frost. A few of Nature's own fascist party (wasps, hornets, and other uniformed menaces) survive, mainly marching up and down crab-apple trees and leaning against school-yard walls looking for trouble. These are quickly persuaded to desist from their political activities by means of a can of WD-40 and a lighter.

While many enjoy the leaves, some are especially enchanted by the dark purplish tint of the high skies. Kierkegaard says: "The reason why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven — in the spring at the earth." I don't think he ever looked straight ahead, which much to the chagrin of the Copenhagen omnibus corporation. Counterpoise his view with that of Edgar Allen Poe, who complains whiningly of  "a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens..." What a wailer! The man ought to have written murder stories! Yet both these nattering melancholiacs highlight the eternal variety and suggestiveness of the Fall sky. Its highs are the highest, its lows the lowest of the year. This applies equally well to the rhythm of the internal; for with Thanksgiving and Halloween no belly is happier than in the Fall; no colon more active.

It is no coincidence that for children school starts in the Fall. It is the tragic high point, and therefore the most dramatic part of childhood living. It is eminently poetic in its archetype: having lived the lives of semi-barbarous tribesmen, swallows versus amazons, they return to civilization, exhausted, browned, and ready to be re-colonized by insipid mental jumping-jacks. 

Yet they are cheerful! School marms well know the narcotic effect of the Fall air - how well it mixes with the rustle of new schoolbags and the odor of pencil cases - and how handily it balances out with the stern, depressive optimism of the modern classroom.

Compare the child of mid-October with the child of late-November in a 300 word essay for Monday. You will see that the high feeling of Miltonic revolt, the heartfelt childhood pentameter, "Better to reign in Summer than serve in Fall!" is replaced by a silent, slavish plodding from bell to bell to lunch to assembly to home. For the Undergrad, the Master's student, and PhD, the preceding descriptions of childhood psychology applies, taking into account the mellowing effect of age; that is, after every Fall they seem to find it harder and harder to get up again.

Halloween is the crown of the season. My enthusiasm for this really American holiday knows no bounds. Compared to the Horror Movie Marathon that is Halloween, Christmas is a preachy after-school special. The beautiful thing about Halloween is that there is no moral analysis. Unlike any other Holiday, its true spirit (the Great Pumpkin if you will) is entirely visible in its activity. There IS no spirit of Halloween besides greed, candy, and monsters. No inner moral. Neo-Pagans will claim it for equinoctal harvest rites, Catholics for All-Saint's days etc. but the import of both of those "feasts" coincide almost exactly with the frankness of Halloween itself. Halloween in all of its incarnations declares "there are two things abroad in life; sweets and demons."

People often debate whether the most cultish franchise of the Holiday Season, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a Halloween or Christmas movie. I believe it falls strictly in the camp of the former. Not only does Halloween abjectly conquer Christmas in a physical sense; one gets the episteme of Halloween (impish scheming, repetitive malevolence, Schadenfreude) imposed upon Christmas in its entirety. The ever-lamented "commercialization" of Christmas is Halloween triumphant.

This brings me to a tangent: The most quintessentially American work of art I can think of? I try hard, but I keep coming back to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! The American season, the American holiday, American puritanism, American greed, denomenationalism, slang, investment, loss, litigation, exile in France, parties, military patriotism, the quest for sincerity, Jazz. There is not one part of the movie that isn't full-blooded American. 

Of course, it is the Halloween story that is typically American. It is the inverse of the Christmas story. In Christmas, the Scrooge or Grinch character starts off greedy and hates the holiday, loses their greed, and through some trial learns to become a lover of the season. Halloween stories are always the opposite. The protagonist starts off loving Halloween, and through some terrifying tribulation, is usually miserable, bloated, or otherwise disaffected by the end. Tu vuo fa l'americano!

 Halloween stories are not the same as ghost stories or horror films. Halloween is not a time for sheer unadulterated fear. I rather think late summer is more appropriate. Henry James, Poe, and Dickens incline towards December as the month of true terror. Halloween is more about mellowing death. Halloween is about the harvest moon. Halloween is America. The very act of Trick or Treating - a kind of sweet-toothed blackmail - is it not an embodiment of the American Dream? It is with strong perception that Thoreau locates the vitality of Fall in America especially:

"Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. "

The Infographics of Dr. Caligari

In the today of today, I have been informed, anybody who has anything to say had better say it using an informational graphic - that is an "infographic" - or not say it all.

What is an "infographic"? In our new digital environment, the fast pace of information transfer has made it necessary to distinguish between plain old information, and the essential  informative information, or as I like to call it, "infoformation". Since, according to Goonberg's theorem, a picture is worth approximately 1024 words in most Indo-European languages, the substitution of images for sentences has been deemed the most efficient and cheerful way to get the point across...

But what is the origin of the infographic? Anything but cheerful and lighthearted. Like many other modern amenities such as rockets and transvestites, the infographic had its genesis in the Weimar Republic era of German history. In the advent of post-war malaise, futurism, nihilism, and especially expressionist film, the raving geniuses of the era grasped this new and powerful means of communicating like Death, the fiend, grabs at the quivering candle-flame of human life.

 Indeed, it has recently been discovered that, in order to make ends meet, many of the most famous German expressionists tried their hand at the avant-garde art of "das Infografik". An examination of Weimar era magazines and newspapers reveals a treasure trove of infographic commissions by no other than F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Hermann Warm. The following examples demonstrate how the infographic kosmonauts of the 1920's captured the Zeitgeist of their era in a tour de force of pictorial efficiency comparable to our own:

Exhibit A: KAIN und ABEL (F.W. Murnau, 1919):

This was originally commissioned by the Kinder Surprise Chocolate firm to illustrate the percentage of German youth who enjoyed Kinder Surprise eggs vs. other chocolate products. Unfortunately for Murnau, the Kinder people were not terribly pleased with his interpretation of the data they provided him, and he was refused payment. Here we see the symbolic shadow-play typical of the early F.W. Murnau at work.

Exhibit B: Beginner's Guide to Investment (Fritz Lang, 1922):

Fritz Lang was commissioned to do this cheerful piece on how to invest in the stock market. It was designed to show the burgeoning class of first-time investors the basic statistics that would help them orient themselves and make the most of their portfolio. Note Lang's characteristic use of emphatic text combined with imagery of mass alienation.

Exhibit C: Twix o'Clockopolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Besides inventing the famous rocket ship "count-down" in Frau im Mond (1929), Lang is also credited with developing the advertising slogan "Twix o'Clock" for the delicious treat. Piggy-backing off the success of his film Metropolis, Lang fused design, advertising, chocolate, and powerful Verfremdungseffekt  imagery to stimulate a spiritual renaissance in the Weimar chocolate industry.

Exhibit D: Das Pie Chart des Dr. Caligari (Hermann Warm, 1928):

The Frankfurter Allegemeine were eager to get a comparative pie chart showing the housing situation in the different regions of Germany. What they got was Hermann Warm's trademark angular approach to architectural mise-en-scene, a few hastily tacked on statistics, and a dire warning for pie-lovers everywhere. This was among the last attempts of German expressionists to use infographics before the movement lost both steam, and funding.

Now that these powerful and unsettling pieces have come to light (or is it shadow?) can we expect a revival in expressionist attempts to convey scientific facts to an ever more info-hungry user-base? Will the public demand not just easily digestible facts, but deeply emotional artistic expression? Will the collective psyche of the Internet flit ever and anon between the light of true beauty and the darkness latent in the human soul?

To all these questions, this author raises a fourfold allegorical eyebrow, and asks "Warum nicht...Nicht...Nicht?"

Pynchon, Adjectives, and Why All Great Writers Must Be Funny (Except Stendhal)

When it comes to "my opinion", we all have our defaults. Defaults, like faults, come in many flavas. One of the most frequently encountered is the adjectival default. When somebody solicits (or depending on how lowbrow they are, asks) your opinion on a certain topic, thing (probably movie, book or album, but maybe food) you no doubt have some safe fall-back adjectives to throw out while you stake out what you actually THINK.

"Awesome!"
"Pretty sweet"
"Kind of boring"
"Interesting but."

For anybody who speaks to me in person, usually about books, the default you get, if it was something I enjoyed, is "funny".

I've called nearly every great classic under the sun "funny". Homer was definitely "funny". Cervantes, Rabelais, naturally, Sterne, surprisingly, "funny". Now Nietzsche also has his moments, and my books Thoreau is a crowning humorist. The whole Rabbinic tradition is one long Catskills routine.

 I reckon I'm the only person in modern history to think the Divine Comedy aptly named without further explication. (Come ON, that fart-trumpet scene with the devils? Black gold!)

Virgil, Pachabel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Russell Brand are all off my guest list because I don't find them "funny" in the least. I need to chortle at least once a page, or I don't like your book.

 (I think the only exception for me is Stendhal, who is more than justified, being a Bonapartist, in lacking a real sense of yuks and still being among the top 5 greatest writers in the last thousand years.)

Why this is? Real cowboys don't cry, so really the only objective (meaning decent) bodily reaction I can trust in is a chuckle. Thus, with a leap of faith so wide it would make Kierkegaard and a self-help therapist proud in equal measure, we come to my personal mantra, "what I laugh at, is, objectively, the greatest!"

Now, having just read, lately, Gravity's Rainbow, I can add it, and Pynchon, to the happy list of gigglers that make up the kaboom of my personal canon. I'm not going to list my favourite jokes (except for the scholastic discussion of "ass backwards", the adventures of Byron the lightbulb, fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch! and nearly every scene with Marvy), but I will say that the book, having been read, reverse engineered a lot of what I previously thought might be funny, into is.

I always thought the great novels of the "classic american + modernist" bunch, Moby Dick, Ulysses, etc. to be particularly funny. Now Gravity's Rainbow shares a similar kind of joke. A kind of conceptual "uh-hyuk" thought goes back to Homeric simile. I mean the "Just as a             climbing a mountain-reared         , so too Achilles..." which are always kind of smile-inducing.

Now Pynchon made me realize that Plato was funnier than I thought in being the first to really invent the "ONE BIG SIMILE" genre. In The Republic, the joke is to cram the entirety of the human soul, errors, byways, naughty bits and the few straight-men, into the framework of the ancient Greek polis. The crux is like teenagers in art class saying "Imagine if we built a giant c(l)ock tower out of lego!" and cackling maniacally.

But the joke only becomes really hysterical when the concept is  planned out. Class after class. Serious, frowning faces, electrons and proteins dedicated to making this really good. The whole tower, the design, the function ("an observation deck! Bahaha!") have to refer back to the initial punchline. This is where all inside jokes and great literature get their "sell" power - details. It turns out that Plato does this exactly this, only with constitutions.

Now Moby Dick (sic) does it with a whale. Ulysses with the city of Dublin. Pynchon, easily enough, does it with a rocket. The technical details (whale blubber, Dublin street meat, rocket schemata), the accuracy in all three cases make the joke even FUNNIER, make it transcendental. It's no longer a passing simile for a smirk - it's an institutional SATIRE.

Laugh-out loud funny isn't just a joke - it's a joke that you get in the presence of others who don't, won't, can't see the penis for the trees.

P.S. Sorry this post isn't that funny itself. Dr. Johnson called fun "a low cant word" and I agree that one can't both talk about and be it.