I really wanted to like The Progressive Revolution, ex-Clinton aide Michael Lux’s breezy review of liberal thought and action from the Revolutionary War days to today.
Or rather, to some time early last autumn.
That’s the problem. For reasons known only to publisher John Wiley & Sons, Lux’s book had an official publication date of Jan. 17, 2009. As Lux admits toward the book’s end, “I’m writing these words without knowing the outcome of the 2008 election, and you are reading this with the knowledge of how it came out.”
If you’re putting out a bigtime hardcover treatise about American progressivism, and you leave out that movement’s most recent history-changing event, you’ve got a product that’s obsolete even before it’s for sale. Throughout, Lux refers to George W. Bush’s administration in the present tense, and wonders out loud when the lefties will ever regain any influence in the federal sphere.
The bulk of Lux’s work, the historical stuff, is fine. It’s a quick and easy read, albeit incomplete. It reassures readers who suffered through all the Bush-era nonsense that, yes, progs really are Americans—indeed, that “the best in America” is progressives’ doing. Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the long drives for race and gender equality, the labor movement, the environmental movement—whenever and wherever Americans got anything right, the progressives got it done and the conservatives fought like hell to stop it.
Had The Progressive Revolution come out at the start of the 2008 Presidential season, it might have been a building block toward an Obama/netroots philosophy of pride in progress. As for now, maybe Lux will bring it up to date for a paperback edition.
Strangely enough, Wiley did bother to include a copyright-page “Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty” more appropriate for the company’s computer books:
“While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.”
…is there can be only one contender for Most Boring Novel Subject of All Time.
I speak, of course, of novels about the lives (or lack thereof) of writers.
For the most part, us scribes are sedentary documentators and grammar geeks. Quiet folks leading ordinary existences as “home office” denizens or day-jobbers in such unglamourous places as college English departments.
Fictional writer characters often have more adventuresome lives than real-life writers, albeit sometimes to the point of incredulity.
Christopher Miller’s brilliantly funny new novel, The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank, features not one but three fictional writers. They’re all introverted losers, and not of the loveable kind. But they’re damn funny.
The eponymous Dank is a farcical extreme of the sedentary-writer type. He’s a prolific, and mildly successful, sci-fi hack (based only superficially on Philip K. Dick). While himself obese and almost fatally lethargic at any task except writing (and sometimes even at that), his tall tales abound with rugged crimefighters, womanizing spaceship captains, and gallant adventurers.
His pathetic life and more pathetic works are recounted to us, shortly after his death, by a dueling pair of biographers, who’d both been rivals for Dank’s friendship—the annoyingly laudatory Bill Boswell and the even-more-annoyingly disdainful Owen Hirt. As they (mostly Boswell) provide alphabetically-ordered accounts of Dank’s stories and the events (and non-events) of Dank’s life, we slowly (over 522 pages) learn what went on among these three losers, then what really went on among them. Without revealing spoilers, let’s just say that both Boswell and Hirt turn out to be gravely unreliable narrators.
While Dank, Boswell, and Hirt are all dreadful writers, Miller is a terrific one.
The Cardboard Universe is chock full of allusions (to everyone from Nabokov to Vonnegut to various real sci-fi scribblers), Oulipo-esque clever writing tricks, and how’d-he-do-that surprise payoffs.
But you don’t have to know about any of Miller’s references to laugh out loud at his tale. It’s uproariously funny, especially as the world of our three antiheroes retreats to the northern California college town where they all live, then to the block surrounding Dank’s house, then (with Dank’s exile from public life) to the confines of his house, then to the insides of Boswell’s own questionable sanity.
That’s not a place as vast as the far galaxies, but it can be just as scary, and a lot more entertaining.
For its first 50 or so pages of his novel Happiness™, Canadian satirist Will Ferguson provides a quaint send-up of office politics and the book industry (historically, literature’s second most boring subject, after writers themselves).
But the humor picks up once the main story gets underway. This is really a book about a book, the ultimate self-help book, a meandering 1,000-page series of life lessons entitled What I Learned on the Mountain and credited to a pseudonymous guru calling himself “Rajee Tupak Soiree.” Our hero, downtrodden book editor Edwin de Valu, gets the typewritten manuscript in the slush pile at the middling publisher where he gruelingly toils. After some initial misadventures, Edwin has the text published with no changes.
Without the blanding-out process of the industry’s professional prose-polishers, What I Learned on the Mountain gets unleashed full-strength upon an unsuspecting world. Within days (the book biz’s notoriously slow operational pace is highly compressed in Ferguson’s fictional world), it’s the #1 best seller of all time.
And it really works!
Soiree’s turgid prose turns out to have a hypnotic effect, subconsiously leading most of its readers into a new way of thinking. (Ferguson doesn’t attempt to show us how this works; he only directly quotes from What I Learned on the Mountain in very brief snippets.)
The result: Pretty much the end of civilization as we know it.
Millions of North Americans suddenly convert to inner peace and contentment. The alcohol, tobacco, drug, fashion, and baldness-remedy industries collapse. So does the book industry, except for spinoffs and ripoffs of What I Learned on the Mountain. Vast swaths of the U.S. work force just up and quit their posts to embark on vision quests or to join Tupak Soiree’s Colorado ashram/harem. This heaven, like David Byrne’s is a place where nothing ever happens.
Edwin de Valu sees everything he’d known (including his wife and his ex-lover) disappear around him, and feels responsible for it. This milquetoast salaryman reinvents himself as an action hero (or antihero), determined to strike his revenge on Tupak Soiree and all he represents. In the process, he learns the real lesson of life—it’s meant to be a struggle. Happiness, real happiness, is a journey, not a destination.
And (spoiler alert) Edwin also finds out that Tupak Soiree is a total fraud. What I Learned on the Mountain, the book that conquered humanity’s cynicism and greed, was a cynical attempt to make money.
I found Ferguson’s ending to be a real cop-out. I wanted to read about the ultimate battle for humanity’s soul, between evil-disguised-as-good (Tupak and his blissed-out hordes) and good-disguised-as-evil (the now angry, gun-toting Edwin).
That story remains to be written.
So does the heart of Ferguson’s conceit, a sufficiently-long example of Tupak’s seductive prose stylings.
But these failings may simply mean Ferguson’s conceptual reach exceeds his stylistic grasp.
In other words, he’s also still striving.
(Sidebar 1: The novel’s original Canadian title in 2001 was Generica, referring to the uniform state of bliss people adopt upon exposure to Tupak Soiree’s teachings.)
(Sidebar 2: Could there actually be a style of writing that, like monks’ chants or recent attempts in “binaural-beat” electronic music, rewire the human mind? The story possibilities, oh the story possibilities…)
(Sidebar 3: What would US/Canadian society really look like after a mass conversion away from anxiety/depression/addiction and toward inner peace? We’d still have to feed and shelter ourselves, and we’d still have tribal/social/political differences. More story possibilities…)
I’ve watched three of the four discs in the box set Harveytoons, The Complete Series. These 1950-1962 cartoons have proven to be just as perverse, violent and corny as I remember from my childhood.
In my adult years, I’ve learned these films were originally made by Famous Studios, which had been formed in 1942 after Paramount foreclosed on the more prestigious Max Fleischer studio. I also learned that, despite at least two of the films depicting the studio as situated in sunny Hollywood, it was really one of two animation factories in New York. (The other was the even less-respected Terrytoons.)
When Paramount parceled out its old theatrical shorts to TV distributors, it told those buyers to remove the Paramount name and logo from all distributed prints. Thus, when Harvey Comics bought one of the Paramount cartoon packages (plus the rights to all the starring characters therein), Paramount’s “Noveltoons” jack-in-the-box logo became “Harveytoons.”
These retitled films were first televised Sunday afternoons on ABC in 1959. I first saw them three or four years later, when they were syndicated onto local weekday kids’ shows. (As I recall, they aired locally with Brakeman Bill on KTNT, later KSTW.)
I’m surprised at how many moments from the films have been part of my brain’s hard-wiring, after all these decades:
Some aspects of the films which I hadn’t remembered:
Casper, as first created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in 1945, was a cloying object lesson in “fair play, overcoming peer pressure and being accepted for who you are (not by how you appear),” to quote a reviewer at imdb.com. As the Famous crew over the years turned the premise into a repetitive gag formula, its life lessons seemed a bit shallow–particularly when juxtaposed against the brutal hijinx of Herman and Katnip.
But in today’s sociocultural context, it makes more sense.
Casper is a sensitive, intellectual (the films often open on him reading a hardcover book), optimistic kid, who wants to spread amity, love, and cooperation in the world–in short, a progressive Democrat.
The other ghosts (later standardized in the comic books as the Ghostly Trio) are snotty schoolyard bullies who thrive on propagating fear, misunderstanding, and discord–in short, conservative Republicans.
Most of the “living” humans and animals in the Casper films have been indoctrinated by anti-ghost propaganda into fleeing at first sight of Casper, even though Casper has only the best of intentions. Heck, the other ghosts are never seen performing anything more harmful than frat-boy pranks.
But those pranks are what the other ghosts “live” for. The other ghosts not only want Casper to be perceived as scary, they want Casper to become scary. By refusing the ghost agenda, Casper is a rebel against, and a threat to, the dominant (ghost) culture.
Ironically, Casper usually gets out of trouble when the predators threatening his new-found friends see Casper and flee in fright. Casper’s curse is also one of his gifts.
But Casper’s bigger gift is perseverance. One new friend at a time, he effectively spreads his message of togetherness. For a non-corporeal being who’d apparently “died” at a presexual age (an aspect of his story that wasn’t discussed until the 1995 feature film), he’s got a lot of interest in helping corporeal humans live better lives together.
I could think of worse role models.
…sooner, but I’ve got another Seattle Times book review online now. It’s about Finding Betty Crocker, depicting a Minneapolis women’s-history expert’s search for the legend, and the reality, behind the brand name.
…Seattle Times book review today. It’s about Love’s Confusions, a delightful little academic treatise comparing how various thinkers have thought about desire and devotion over the centuries.
…in the SeaTimes, on a funny little slacker novel called Bald.
…in the Seattle Times today. This one’s about Selling Seattle, a British academician’s view of the ’90s national-media hype about our once-fair city.
…in the Seattle Times today, this one on the McSweeney’s “humor” anthology.
Yr. obt. cor’s’p'n’d'nt is once again providing freelance book reviews to The Seattle Times. The first of the new batch is out today, concerning Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.
