Sylvia van Bell has published her first book. She has demanded a professional masseuse and personal trainer, hair and makeup throughout the book tour, and 215 bottles of Evian in every hotel room.

She’s nine years old.

Tupac Shakur has officially replaced Shakespeare in Worchester, MA. Frances Arena made the swap because it’s “popular with the kids.” While this concerns us, we don’t think this is the sign of the apocalypse. That will happen when learning how to construct a cherry bomb replaces a week of chemistry.

Scott Bakker finished The Warrior Prophet, the second book in the Prince of Nothing trilogy, in a year. But not without defending the outline for his PhD dissertation, teaching pop culture and composition, and planning a wedding. He took one day off, but that was to see The Lord of the Rings.

Clearly, we need to finish up our three volume, 6,000 page biography on little-known Ashcan artist George Spackle, defending Mr. Spackle’s legacy and with a sizable portion pointing out the influence of He Came Home Depressed With A Sliced Banana in the Corner of His Mouth on contemporary comics, by the end of the year.

Nelson DeMille has lost a prenup battle with his ex-wife. What does this mean? No doubt more unreadable hack novels into the Costco piles to compensate for Nelson’s financial shortfall. Thank you, Mrs. DeMille.

After all the hoopla, Return of the Reluctant has managed to nab an exclusive excerpt from Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint:

Ben: You can’t be serious.

Jay: Oh yes, I am. I’m going to beat the shit out of the president. I’m going to bite off his earlobes and then pull his teeth out as slowly as possible. But only after I spend hours tickling him, just after I use his sternum as a footstool.

Ben: Isn’t that a bit much?

Jay: No. Not at all. He is President Bush and he is wrong.

Ben: Shouldn’t you spend your time dwelling upon the details of a stapler or contemplating how newspapers are disappearing in libraries? Or why not some nice memoir about John Updike?

Jay: No. You mistake me for a character in another book. The unseen god, whom we will not dare to mention here, for postmodernism is dead, along with irony. Besides, the god wrote those stories in simpler times. Today, in 2004, months before an election, I am Jay, the star of Checkpoint, and I wish to make a loud and resounding point.

Ben: But your god doesn’t even look like Lenny Bruce.

Jay: If Lenny Bruce would have lived longer, he would have lost his hair as quickly as our daddy.

Ben: We’re living in a work of fiction?

Jay: Yes.

Ben: No real threats?

Jay: No, but I dream of hitting the president’s knees with a golf club.

Ben: He’s a bad man, but I think someone could use a hug.

Jay: You just don’t understand. Follow the footnote that leads to the 4,000 word history of the chocolate chip cookie, and you will see all.

For the record, my TCCI is 54%. Teachout’s damn crazy is he thinks he’s going to get us to eat anchovies or give up James Joyce or pomo, let alone deny the kickass Rio Bravo or choose Steely Dan (!) over Elvis Costello.

In response to the TCCI, I present the Reluctant Index. Answer these questions:

• Edible underwear or underworn edibles?
• Trotsky or Guevara?
• Hunter S. Thompson or Dan Rather?
• Punk rock or bubble gum pop?
• Freezing to death or burning to death?
• 69 or 666?
• Being caught letting loose a fart in public or being caught letting loose a belch in public?
• Joe vs. the Volcano: yes or no?

Tally your score by counting left and right answers. Then divide the left score by three without using paper or a calculator. If the final count is more than 0.00005, you’re okay in my book.

Yet another one’s making the rounds. (seen via Scribbling Woman, who also cites where she got it from)
Continue reading →

Newsday: “In the interest of full disclosure, Cox adds, her boss, Choire Sicha, editor of the New York blog www.gawker .com, happens to be Peck’s roommate. That illustrates another problem with the book-reviewing culture: its incestuousness.”

If Choire doesn’t fess up some tales soon, I’ll be really disappointed. Where’s Grambo on this?

The new One Ring Zero album, As Smart As We Are, features lyrics from Margaret Atwood, A.M. Homes, Denis Johnson and Dave Eggers.

It’s bad enough that the BBC has reported that a compromise bill has been reached in the UK, which will allow parents to “smack their children with moderation.” But apparently Salman Rushdie is one of the people hoping for a total ban on smacking. Rushdie wants to “give children the personal freedom not to be hit.” Rushdie doesn’t seem to have any ideas, however, on how to enforce it.

Local author Michelle Richmond has an excerpt from her new book, Ocean Beach, in the Chronicle.

The Washington Post reports that John Dullaghan has not only tried to live a life similar to Bukowski’s, but managed to create a documentary out of his efforts. The film, entitled To All My Friends, is eight years in the making and about nine thousand tons of cheap red wine in the drinking. Dullaghan, however, didn’t go nearly as far as Barbet Schroeder, who (according to the DVD commentary to Barfly), threatened to cut his hand off if he was not able to make the film.

Melville House has produced several novellas with spicy colors and nifty typography. Do check ’em out. (And, yes, we were bribed. But that had nothing whatsoever to do with the current plug.)

Yes, we’re back, dammit. With a vengeance. Or at least enough unspent passion from last week to proffer some ball-busting posts (we hope). To close up shop on some minor issues:

• Spider-Man 2 is, without a doubt, the finest superhero movie since Tim Burton’s Batman. If you haven’t seen the depressing Fahenheit 9/11 yet, you might want to try Spidey 2 afterwards as a chaser. It’s the kind of movie that not only restores your faith in Hollywood blockbusters, but rejuvenates your faith in humanity. It deserves every penny of the colossal receipts that it’s picked up so far.
• I never thought I’d say this, but the latest issue of McSweeney’s is absolutely incredible. Apart from a stellar design and great paper, the issue is almost devoid of the irony-for-irony’s sake that’s become so nauseating to its detractors. And in fact, guest editor Chris Ware has included some solid underground artists amongst the major comic stars. Particular standouts include Ron Rege‘s “She Sometimes Switched,” a devastating story of a suicide bomber, Chris Ware’s touching “We’ll Sleep in My Own Room,” Richard McGuire’s frequently anthologized “ctrl,” a harrowing offering from Gilbert Hernandez (along with other Love and Rockets setpieces) on racism, and the gloriously juvenile offerings of Joe Matt. If I have any quibble, it’s the relentless plugs for Fantagraphics books. But then as Tom pointed out to me, if Fantagraphics did not exist, it would have to be invented. If you enjoy comics in any way, I highly recommend that you purchase it immediately.
• Stephen King’s latest installment in the Dark Tower series, Song of Susannah (perfectly released for a long weekend of comfort reads), is mostly disappointing. But like any heroin addict, I’ll probably purchase the seventh one. One can only hope that King actually goes to the trouble of explaining details more clearly in the last volume.
• Full-length reviews are in the works for The Coma (graciously sent by Penguin) and Aloft. More details to come.
• I’m hopelessly behind on email. So bear with me the next week.
• Terry has posted a goofy comparative index. We find ourselves torn between the two columns.
• Sarah has an interview with Michael Connelly up.

“No man is an island.” — John Donne

I

The original context can be found in Meditation XVII: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” I encountered Donne’s maxim regularly. Flipping through textbooks, listening to the stern and sibilant musings of teachers, randomly espying it or hearing it in novels and films. Never learning the whole until later, when I read Donne in my college days. The remainder proved to be just as important as the oft-quoted part. Those who popularized these five words, more enduring than any hep catchphrase germinating from the tube and polluting the fine fiber of conversation, had latched onto the “no man” part, implying personal responsibility if you dared to live the sheltered and solitary life. If you went at it alone, you were doomed, preceded with the dreaded “no,” which suggested a null or invalid existence. Then there was the island part. Was this a majestic oasis or a barren isle with merely a solitary tree providing coconut sustenance? When I first heard the phrase, I imagined a yin-yang symbol, the kind I saw recurrently on Town & Country surfboards. Perhaps the dot in the middle, whether jet or pure, was the island that Donne spoke of. Perhaps the answer was up to each individual. Touche.

Logically, if no man was an island, then no island was a man. Or if no man was an island, if no man, then island, or if not an island, then no man.

Q.E.D.: If examined literally, and discounting the Talking Kipwich Islands in the South Pacific (little regarded by oceanographers and cartographers alike), an island could not be a man. They were simply two different entities: one composed of sand and sputtering above sea level, sometimes with rabid castaways (i.e., men) writing HELP messages in the sand (often in vain, followed by tears and/or insanity); the other, the homo sapien (male and female, mind you; we live in the 21st century), a bipedal creature known to his head too much for occasionally magnificent and frequently foolish purposes.

Metaphorically and logically, however, no island was a man. Thus, the state of being an island implied something outside the realm of man’s knowledge and existence. Or his everday life.

The question my fourteen year old self had, however, was whether or not I was an island.

II

Seventh grade, poor, severe personality problems, unresolved trauma from natural father. Confined to room. For the best really. Several mistakes. Frequent bursts of tears. A period that exists largely as a expanse of duvatene, a handkerchief just before the execution squad. Except I did not die. I was shot several times, but, like Rasputin, I would not die. Years later, I would find myself living and refuse to hate the people who put me there.

Abdication of responsibility. Yes, don’t fix him, let him rot and sort out his own problems. Pretending, disguising the deep hurt. A Samsung black-and-white television set for company that only received the local PBS station. Comics too. Strips, not comic books. Working out a system to reclaim the neighbors’ back issue newspapers and being kept sane by Bloom County and MAD Magazine. Ripping shreds of wallpaper to see what was beneath and finding train patterns. (What would you do?) I liked trains. Too much, it turned out. Welts from a belt, from the second man my mother married. He threw me out of the house with only a threadbare blue blanket for company. I shivered in a car shelter on a cold night in an apartment complex for hours before trying to sneak back to the house, only to be smacked in the face by this man with the mustache and the horrible rage. Just like Dad No. 1. Somehow, I was let back in. My mother looked the other way.

But I would be let out of my bedroom jail for school and to go to the library. They tried to turn me into an island before I was a man. But in the library, oh, I found friends. Books, glorious books. Whatever they had. They even let me work the microfilm machine and I’d dig up articles on this Reagan guy, whose smile I did not trust. Doonesbury, Erma Bombeck, James Thurber, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, rereading the obligatory Judy Blume and Mary Rodgers, strange compilations of pop culture and fads, even politics and history. There was pleasure in the books, but the pain was so overwhelming that I could not concentrate on the books for several years in high school. But I returned. Defiantly. And never looked back.

The library demonstrated that I was not an island. I was a piece of its multi-floored continent and I’d get a smile of encouragement from the librarians. This might be one reason I find librarians so sexy.

They could tell me otherwise. But with the books and the records and the photocopies of articles I’d hide up my T-shirt (thanks to the one librarian who saw this young and able scholar and slid dimes across the counter, no questions asked), and the movie ads I’d cut and tape to the walls, I knew that there was an identity which extended beyond the shabby trappings. Just an undiscovered country. Like Freedonia.

I lived to tell the tale. That’s the part that matters.

III

He went through the same treatment. A troubled personality. Relentless verbal abuse. And the sad part is that I was an accomplice. But my stepbrother (Marriage No. 3) still found solace in me, even when we nicknamed him “Nyuck Nyuck.” We rallied around a NES, zapping bad guys and defeating minibosses. Sometimes, we’d team up and we’d get along. Strange how a side-scroller could forge a bond. Stranger still was how much time we devoted to beating a game.

It didn’t last. Near the end, he was relegated to a tent purchased from an army surplus store in the backyard. My mother was afraid of him. Or, more specifically, like me, she wouldn’t give him the chance. That was the real reason he was sent away.

But he ended up joining the Army. In the days when military involvement and casualties were unthinkable. Turned out to be a decent guy with a constant smile on his face. Ended up being Soldier of the Year. He forgave us all. Well before I was able to confront my own personal demons. I was proud of him. Today, this man, who found solace in a system when his family refused to give him help, now finds himself about to be shipped to Iraq. His wife’s expecting. And it scares the bejesus out of me. I don’t want him to end up dead. I don’t want him to die for something stupid.

The great irony is that the Army provided him with the ineluctable proof that he was not an island, that his life mattered, and that his existence involved decency and honor. But the Viagra-hardened big boys have decided that these men, individually, are islands. To be kept away from public consumption, to be disregarded, to be dishonored, to be ordered to do god knows what.

He could turn out to be just another fresh face or another statistic. An inconsequential mark on an unseen blotter.

I don’t want to feel angry, but if my stepbrother goes down, then there will be hell to pay. I’ll become outright seditious. I’ll call upon everyone to pay attention to that clause in the Declaration of Independence that everyone so conveniently overlooked the other day:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (emphasis added)

I don’t feel safe and I’m sure as hell not happy about my stepbrother. But there’s one thing I do know: No man is a goddam island.