Found it for $4 at the the con. Can't be bad. Apparently there's a whole series of these 1974 proto-fotonovels.

Colonel Gentleman's List of Five Things mrdankelly doesn't feel one way or another about, but which seem to bother many people on the Internetses.

* Twilight

* Uwe Boll

* Turning books into movies, movies into books, comics into movies, books into comics, movies into comics, and so forth. Personally, I like to see another person's interpretation of a work. You can't really damage a piece of art by reinterpreting it. I will allow that it's bizarre that they're turning Bazooka Joe into a movie, but I don't think the film will damage Joe's integrity as an artist.

* Reality TV. I don't watch it. I will say that if the currently most popular shows on TV are about people singing and dancing, that speaks well for our culture.

* What Oprah thinks.

From my library:

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who played a murdering son-of-a-bitch rapist, thinks you should read more, starting out with Watchmen. maybe daddy will read it to you before you go to sleep each night.

Oh, please, let there be a Rorschach one eventually. "READ. Or break little finger. (hurm)."

Plunging further into my book collection. This comes from one edition of a series of illustrated texts.


The guy at the bottom of the first cartoon looks so damn rueful. "They'll pay! They'll all pay!"





Why is the dog "sickness"?







Shit! This fence is made out of impenetrable incompetency!



Bad-ass contract says, "Fuck you, pig! I can go wherever I want!"

Currently reading The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard. Kane is a puritan swordsman who travels the globe, fighting ghosts, monsters, necromancers, and witch doctors.



No, really.

It's pretty good too, in that pulpy way. Find it here.

I'd like to dig into some new horror (and by that I mean contemporary books... though I'd love to hear about all your old favorites as well. They'll have to pry my Mary Shelley from my cold, dead hands). Any particularly spooky modern writers I should be aware of? Smarter writers are preferred, though I don't mind the occasional potboiler.

In 1994 I made a trip out to Boston to visit a cartoonist friend and his girlfriend. I had a great time, and as the man said in Heart of Darkness it expanded my mind, largely owing to my hosts' laid-back attitude to life's weirdness. Relaxing around fellow nonjudgmental weirdos can be a good thing once in a while. Just don't overdo it.

Part of the trip involved a drive to Lowell, MA, birthplace of Jack Kerouac, one of my favorite writers. Even back then I was a gravehopper, and I wanted to pay my respects at Kerouac's final resting place. This was pre-Internet, so no Googlemaps or Find a Grave weren't handy, leaving us to pull into town and search for the tourist bureau. We found it pretty easily and stopped in to ask for directions to Ti Jean's grave. A nice man behind the desk gave us a stack of maps (which I still have resting on the bookshelf beside my collection of Beat books) and outlined the path to the cemetery. Damn good thing, because Lowell, at least at the time, had an aversion to street signs. We may well have driven past where little Jack first saw Dr. Sax along the river, or grooved on Thomas Wolfe within redbricked cottages in which the ghost of Gerard floated, saintly, holy, and everybody goes AWW!!! etc., but we wouldn't have known it. The trip to the graveyard was a pretty straight shot. Nice meditative place, and in sight, if I recall correctly, of one of Kerouac's watering holes.

But back at the tourist bureau, after showing us the way, the man behind the desk said, "You know ____________ over there actually met Kerouac! Hey, _________!" Let's call the man Tom, because I can't remember his name to save my life. It's been 15 years.

Tom was a jowly, dour fellow with scholarly glasses perched at the tip of his nose. He looked a bit like Mr. Weatherbee from Archie comics. The man behind the desk asked Tom to recount his story of meeting Kerouac to the nice out of town hipsters. Tom, as it turned out, was a schoolteacher back in the 60s. One day, while teaching his kids, someone tapped at the window. As you've guessed, it was Kerouac, though I can't recall if Tom knew this at the time. He walked over to the window, opened it, and asked him what he wanted. Jack said he wanted to talk to the principal, the same guy who was principal when he attended school there. Tom told us that it was apparent Kerouac had been drinking. He told the King of the Beats that his behavior was inappropriate and that this was no way to see the principal. Jack just sort of harrumphed and mumbled. Tom closed the window and went back to his class while Kerouac walked off.

A few minutes later, Kerouac entered the building, found Tom's classroom, and sat down. Once more Tom chided Jack for his bad behavior. Kerouac, smashed, babbled spontaneous prose, demanding the principal. Tom asked him to leave, and he did. End of story.

I don't know what my friends thought, but I wasn't all that surprised. I think Kerouac is one of the great modern American prose stylists. His work isn't just be-bop-vootaroonie gibberish. Well, some of it is, but most of it isn't. I'm currently reading On the Road: The Original Scroll, which is based on Kerouac's first draft rather than the final version edited to protect tender 1950s sensibilities. Frankly, it's excellent. Skip past the bogus transcendental holyman poses and embarrassing praising of the sweet life of migrant workers and you encounter some thrilling descriptions of 40s and 50s America, midpoint between the old untamed frontier and today's superhighway nation.

Much as I adore Visions of Gerard and Tristessa, however, I also know that Kerouac was a souse. A talented fellow who worked his ass off to craft enduring prose, but a mama's boy souse filled with regrets about his freewheeling past. I don't think Tom was interested in shattering my illusions; I think he was trying to introduce us to the man rather than the myth—the successful unhappy son of Lowell.

As I read through OtR:TOS (I have only 100 pages left to peruse), I reflect on the way I felt while reading the expurgated edition at 21 versus reading the unvarnished version today, 20 years later. At 21 (or was I 23?) I dug on the book's constant feeling of motion. The pages vibrated, like the pre-seatbelt deathtraps Jack and Neal drove from coast to coast and up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They grooved on life, smoked "tea," partied everywhere, and bumped uglies with chicks who were total strangers, man! As Neal Cassady would say: Yes! Yes! Trapped in the suburbs, I decided—unlike any other young man who read On the Road before me, I'm sure—that this is what life should be like.

At 41 it's still an exciting ride, but not a pleasant one if you know what happened later. Every time Kerouac takes a drink at a party, I wanted to scream, "Jack, stop! You're gonna croak at 47, bleeding out internally in the bathroom!" Yet, beside Neal, Jack was a comparatively old man when he kicked off. Fast-living roman candle Neal Cassady passed at age 42, drunk and dying of pneumonia beside a railroad track in Mexico. Joan Vollmer, wife of William S. Burroughs, is a willowy, speed-freak specter in OtR only a few short years away from having a bullet sunk between her eyes by her husband. Meanwhile, Billy Burroughs, Jr., snuggles with his father in a scene so adorable via Jack's description, you can almost forget Billy will be dead by 33, after a life spent being hit on by his dad's pals in Tangiers in his teens, shooting a friend in the throat, and pickling himself in booze. Meanwhile, you get a better idea of how nuts William S. really was, skimming Mayan codexes while expounding on orgone energy and government suppression of tooth-healing chewing gum. Throughout the work, you see the suffering family members and peripheral Beats who also wrote books and poetry without becoming t-shirt icons, quickly growing tired of Jack and Neal and their cadre of freeloaders crashing on their couches, borrowing money, trying to fuck their wives and daughters, and outright stealing from them. But for space, I'd also touch on Jack and Neal's penchant for finding magical negroes.

Kerouac grows disenchanted with Cassady in OtR, but not nearly fast enough. Cassady is a meathead. The sort of fast-talking experimentalist satyr who convinces you that because he lives on the edge, he possesses gnosis. In fact, all Neal knows about is how to beg, borrow, steal, cajole, mooch, and poison relationships. He's a bad penny surrounded by enablers, Jack Kerouac among the most guilty of the lot with his permanent canonization of the "Holy Goof" through OtR.

That's something I think I missed at age 21. Kerouac, who was a fairly conservative fellow, was annoyed with being considered the leader of the Beats, the father of the hippies, and the prophet of the First Church of Perpetual Freeloading Motion. What seemed so important and spiritual and real in his early 20s (during the course of OtR, Jack and Neal are in their early twenties, amazingly enough), turned out to be fairly empty and sad. The "mad ones" that Jack said he lived for were undependable losers who left him standing on cold street corners at midnight without food or cash, arms filled with a few scraps of clothing, hoping his G.I. Bill check arrives soon so he can buy sandwiches for the trip back home to Memere. Then it starts all over again. Kerouac has plenty of good stories, until you realize it's the same story over and over again—the old tale of going out to look for America and not being able to find it anywhere. Just a string of broken marriages, lost friends, annoyed hosts, poverty, and the need to dub the numbing effects of booze, sex, and drugs as kicks.

Actually, it's a remarkably depressing book. Read it as a cautionary tale.

Thoughts while reading The Old, Weird America.

Greil Marcus is an excellent writer and thinker, but he occasionally dips his pen too deeply into the purple inkwell—all the way up to his armpit at times. It would seem that not only is Bob Dylan a genius, he's some sort of Vice-Supreme Being. No portion of the Basement Tapes, whether it be a dropped instrument, stoned ramble from Robbie Robertson, or burp from Mr. Zimmerman himself is without ponderous meaning, and the whole of American musical history is but prelude and postlude to the glory that is BOB.

Nifty: The Penguin Classics Children's Library for just $299.40 on Amazon.

Confusing: No indication of which books are included, beside the ones shown in the picture. Unless you're really buying six paperbacks for $299.40, which I doubt. Perhaps they're made of rubies or some similar precious substance.

Mitigating Factor: For those bibliophiles among us who would love to own the Penguin Classics library complete collection, but lack the wealth or cunning cat burglar skills needed to pinch it from Penguin HQ, it seems likely that this would be an equally satisfying purchase at a fraction of the cost. Still, it's weird that not even the Penguin site provides a listing of the kids' books.

Later Note: Oddly, this other listing provides 51 books, but gives the impression that the Penguin Classics Children's Library has yet to be released. I find some of the selections not as kid-friendly as they might think too. Frankenstein—in which a reanimated corpse slaughters his fickle creator's family one-by-one—doesn't seem to be bedtime reading for a five-year-old, for example. Wait until you're six.

Finished that Greil Marcus book. What should I read next?

From my Facebook book review page. I have a feeling I'll be expanding on this later. Christ, I hated this book.

An incredibly awful and unfunny book. I suspect Clarke tried to parody modern lit, ala B.R. Myer's manifesto, but the jokes are so rarefied and oblique—even for a fairly omnivorous reader like myself—they mostly fall flat as the reader wonder who the hell he's is talking about. That is when the jokes aren't obvious and not especially witty ones about, for example, Harry Potter, Shelby Foote, and, I'm guessing, Cormac McCarthy or Hemingwayesque writers in general. Some bitchy sniping at book clubs too.

It's difficult to see Clarke's overarching point. Does he find modern literature pretentious, or does he consider it fluffy and inconsequential? Do readers deserve better treatment, or are they hollow-headed ninnies who can't possibly understand The Craft?

His protagonist Sam Pulsifer is nonreactive to the point of autism, which is supposed to be funny, I guess. The storyline meanders and makes little sense, dabbling in absurdity and purposelessly outrè and illogical characters as if suddenly recalling it's supposed to be a COMIC novel, and "weird" always equals "hilarious." The Times called it "wildly, unpredictably funny," which was true. Throughout the entire book I had no idea when I would laugh. Unpredictably, it turned out I didn't laugh at all.

* Okay, this is a new experience. One of my novel's characters is scaring the shit out of me. Which is what I intended to do with him, just not to George Stark levels. Let's hope Malcolm Ochs stays on the page.

* My office has a book exchange in the lunchroom. Clearing my shelves, I left out an extra copy of Finnegans Wake I had on hand, some quickie book on America's slide into fascism my dad passed along to me, and a copy of Snow Crash (which bored me so much I couldn't finish it). It amuses me that Snow Crash remains unclaimed after a month.

Sailing To Byzantium
William Butler Yeats

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

The Bedside Reading List

Hey, forgot all about this. Ye gods this is taking a long time. Once again I started reading other, frankly more interesting books. I need to start writing more reviews here. I've been coming across some good stuff. Anyway...

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough

Chasin' That Devil's Music by Gayle Dean Wardlow

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader

Dark Water by Koji Suzuki

The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax

Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford

The Oxford Annotated Bible by God and Friends

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The Elephants of Style by Bill Walsh

Orientalism by Edward Said

Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth Pretty good, if rushed at the end. The characters are mutable things, Pa Roth changing from a stalwart fellow to a bit of a dope. Ma Roth is a tad useless as well. Interestingly, while the book discredits the idea that it can't happen here, it specifies that it wouldn't happen exactly the same way it did over there.

From Cottage to Bungalow: Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1869-1929 by Joseph C. Bigott—Academic and proud of it, meaning fact-filled and dry as the Sahara. My God. This was so dull, even a Chicago architecture buff like myself couldn't plow through it. In fact, most of the book discusses houses in Hammond. I couldn't finish it, sorry. I'll try again later.

To Sleep with the Angels by David Cowan

Memoir from Antproof Case by Mark Helprin

The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emry—You can't really "finish" a reference work, particularly one about raising crops, slaughtering livestock, and so on. Come the End Times, when carrots are selling for $50 each, I'll regret it. Ah, the wife has a green thumb, so I'll be fine.

White Noise by Don DeLillo

A Stack of Architectural Prairie Digests

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

SAS Urban Survival Book by John "Lofty" Wiseman

You Can't Win by Jack Black (No, not that Jack Black.)

The Odyssey by Homer

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by

Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Stupid.

Of Paradise and Power by Robert Kagan

Fantomas by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

A manila folder of clipped Harper's and New Yorker articles.

You'll all be pleased to know that "Stuff White People Like" site creator Christian Lander—yes, he has a name now, as well as a series of pictures that show him in the traditional garb of the polyhedral dice-throwing libertarian grad student... though he's given up pursuit of his PhD—has released his un-book five months after his site broke big. I held a copy of the book in my hands yesterday. Because I am cheap, I read it in the store instead of buying it, because fuck him and his pretty pony. No need to buy a book I'd donate to the Salvation Army in a month anyway.

I'll avoid the usual railing about SWPL's reverse racism because, well, that' s crap. White people have very little to bitch about, and when they try to play the race card, it's just sad (which is not to say that I'm discounting the historical discrimination some white folks—and I don't mean only the Irish—have gone through, because it happened, it was real, and it was wrong. However, you sound like a delusional ass when you cite great great grandpa's inability to find a job in the old country as a reason why you're offended by White Men Can't Jump.). Also, Adam Sternbergh pretty much nailed the reason why SWPL is largely lame as humor goes: appealing to rather than pricking your audience's ego isn't satire. It's coasting.

Anyway, I mostly want to address the physical form of the book.

Hoo boy.

First-off, it is a bad-looking book. I've seen 1970s hippie press, return to the land publications with better production values. I expect flimsy binding, cheap paper, and bad scans from kook literature, not Random House products. Page after page tells the tale of a long weekend of Lander and his best bud or girlfriend dragging and dropping reams of HTML code, clipart, and photos from the SWPL site to QuarkXPress. Skimming, I detect resistance to the hand of an experienced editor. Either that or SWPL's shelf-life—a period of time it shares with opened cartons of eggnog—demanded a quick, light touch. Which is too bad for Lander, because it makes him look like a featherhead. While I hate quibbling over the occasional error, Lander's writing voice is that of the self-satisfied douche, so I'll make an exception. Letting the book fall open, I found a typo in which Lander thanks a friend for his "brillance" in writing about the hilarious phenomenon of straight white men finding Asian women attractive. A quick scan turned up other typos. As an editor—one who makes grammar his occupation, by the by, and not simply because I am white—let me just say, wow.

As a happy side note for you SWPL fans, Lander provides updated witticisms, such as his comment on the book's Helvetica type—a favorite white people font! Why they even made a documentary about it. And we know how white people love documentaries, don't we? They like them because they're white. Har. Haw. Hee.

The original SWPL site especially rubbed me raw when Lander and friends practiced this sort of purposeless search and destroy method of criticism. As I said before, the expensive sandwiches rant was pretty brilliant (sorry, "brillant"). But when you start talking about yoga, the New York Times, healthcare reform, t-shirts... Why are these particular items "wrong" or even worthy of satire? To criticize a book's typeface reaches new heights of inanity while demonstrating the engine that drives SWPL. I equate it with the old playground trick of telling a kid that he must be retarded because (A) he's wearing a blue shirt, and (B) only retards wear blue—quod erat demonstrandum.

Recent interviews reveal that, hey whattyaknow?, Lander is white, Canadian(!), and actually likes the stuff he lampoons. Which reminds me of one of the reasons the Republicans repeatedly won elections these last few decades: liberals kept voluntarily slicing off their own nuts. pomobarney pointed out the site's South Park Republican streak—something I suspect Lander is downplaying now that he wants to sell books. Truthfully, what I always hated was the site's provincialism and anti-intellectualism. Returning to the blue shirt syllogism above, you truly cannot win with SWPL if you have any desire to expand your tastes, exercise your mind, or enjoy anything outside of a list of approved subjects that has yet to turn up at SWPL. It's almost a white version of the black belief that not acting "street" means you're a Ding Dong. It's remarkably fucked up if you think about it. Who knows, maybe it's a Colbertesque play on conservative pundits' tack of pretending to be beer-slugging NASCAR fans even though they eat out every night at Chez Paul and take in the opera now and again. How banal. How counterproductive.

Hilariously, and to his chagrin, Lander's site got a shout-out Stormfront. Thank God Kanye West also liked SWPL and ran a link on his page, granting him the African-American approval he instinctively desires as one pale of hue. One wonders how he can bear it, especially as he sprints from (white) independent bookstore to bookstore the next few months, trying to gobble up the bare drops of fame his little masturbatory exercise in self-sustaining satire provides.

Colonel Gentleman's List of Five Cheap Literary/Historical/Filmic References/Homages mrdankelly Wants to See Banned from Use by Lazy Directors, Writers, Comic Book Creators, and so on for All Eternity

1. The Wizard of Oz
2. Alice in Wonderland
3. Christ references, especially positioning a character in a cruciform pose when he is "suffering" for someone or other's sins.
4. Nazi Germany
5. That staircase scene in Suspicion where Cary Grant is seen ascending a staircase with a glass of poison glow-milk (or whatever the hell it was).

Every time I start participating in one of those "Have You Read the Top 100 Arbitrarily Chosen Great Books, and if Not Is It Because You Are a Dummybutt?" memes, I become annoyed and have to stop. I've been pondering the reasons.

1. First, you always have to mention the famously impenetrable and/or overly long books: Ulysses is always there. So are War and Peace and Vanity Fair. See, these are the monkeywrenches, intended to take the wind out of your sails after you proudly report reading all the literature that's not only good for you but also readable--such as Lolita, The Lord of the Flies, and Catch-22. "Hell, anyone with half a brain can read a page-turner like The Great Gatsby. Why haven't you finished Middlemarch, Gummo? Afraid? Stupid? Just give up. You'll never earn the boldface."

2. Secondly: the lazy listings.

"Everyone should read Madame Bovary."

"Sure thing!"

"And, but of course, Animal Farm."

"No argument there! I'll get right on it."

"And... and... um... er... Heh heh... the complete works of Shakespeare!!!"

"Uh, what?"

"You heard me: the complete works of Shakespeare. All of 'em. Prime stuff. Perfection. Not a cough in the carload. Read them all or you're an illiterate boob."

"Even Coriolanus? And Titus Andronicus?"

"Uh, sure. Yes, yes, very important. Classic Shakespeare. Only a dummy would fail to read Titus Andronicus"

"Oh, then I should most definitely read Cardenio, no?"

"Well, um, er... Sure... Everyone who considers himself well-read MUST read Cardenio! Harrumph!"

"I'll get right on it."

"WELL, I should hope so!"

"Once they find it, since the play's been lost for centuries, poser."

"Gulp. Hehehehehehehehe..."

3. Thirdly, the contemporary New York Times Book Review stuff. They may be fine and enjoyable works, but what does it say when you set Anna Karenina and Jude the Obscure on either side of The Time Traveller's Wife, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and The Life of Pi? The first two met the test of time, while the rest met the test of your wife's book club.

4. The sops:

His Dark Materials? The Hobbit? The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Bridget Jones' Diary?

Winnie the Pooh?

Come on.

Don't you patronize me, you big-brained dandies.

5. The obscure shit: Germinal, A Suitable Boy, and Cloud Atlas do not, in fact, exist. These titles were specifically developed by a team of New York Times Book Review critics and Oxford dons to fuck with your head so they can have a good laugh at your expense. The same thing goes for Finnegans Wake, which consists of a single page of text specifically designed to scare the hell out of you, followed by 2.3 million blank pages that you'll never see because you'll be too busy trembling in the corner of the library.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen- core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)

Admit it. You just soiled yourself after reading that.