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A Survey of Recently Declassified Literature
by Neil Michael Hagerty
Tear the Lid Offa That Sucker: Notes from the Font reprints a selected history of The Quizzler magazine, published and masterminded by the unflappable Biggie Banks. In its heyday, the now defunct Quizzler sought to educate the complacent college graduate while arousing him to a revolutionary rub by singling out local and federal heresy or, alternately, by following Mr. Banks' handful of friends as they "ironically" moved through the capital markets in various family funded professions. In the simplest possible language (with a liberal splash of exclamation points), The Quizzler detailed the method by which certain presumably banal phenomena related to the vague feeling many of us hold that "everything is a load of horseshit."
Highlights include:
An exegesis on the nine-digit zip-code system that clearly explains how we are all numbered, observed, and visited by a shadowy government agency known cryptically as the 'Post Office.'
A terse but scathing indictment of Wonder Bread that simply lists the ingredients of the bread in a larger, more erudite typeface that makes clear the implications of such otherworldly concepts as "phosphate-bilex-12" and "retardant" without offending the elevated taste of the common readership.
A biographical sketch of Mr. Banks' college roommate, the well-known grist pimp Pendelton LeSard Walker, as he bemusedly grins his way through the vain, high-stakes world of rubber-stamp collecting.
The now-legendary "Superman Is Not A Real Person."
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Joan Davis' new one is called Turd Burglar. As many of us feared after last year's PEN Awards set-to, Ms. Davis has become obsessed by what she likes to call "the exceptional use of whiskey to make words float through the air with dignity and land upon the ear with an endorsed weight." Physical conceits aside, I found this volume largely readable. In one particularly fine essay, Ms. Davis analyzes the subversive misuse of transliteration in the national news media by discussing the various pronunciations of "Taliban" (including, though by no means limited to, 'Tuh-Lee-Bin,' 'Tally-Bahn,' 'Tully-Bin,' 'Tallow-Bun,' and 'Los-An-Juh-Lees').
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Next on this tearstained list, I must note Percy Schlimazel's An Unfinished Treatise on an Incomplete Shit.
The golden triangle of "Mind, Body and Soul," which has been adapted and revered from the High Greeks through to our own Presidential Fitness Awards, seems to have given way in modern culture to the Sunday Triangle of "Football, Beer and Sex." Yet upon closer examination, we find that only the names have changed, and the balance of human spirit remains strong. Football corresponds to Mind, Beer to Body, and Sex to Soul. The Golden Triangle is still the basis for our culture and an unassailable target for racists (unlike the Triangle Offense).
In keeping with the well-known theory of The Western Canon, in which powerful literature flourishes best beneath the shielding vaults of the powerful, Mr. Schlimazel has selected The Western Cannon (a.k.a. Rich Gannon, a.k.a. "The Gray Cannon," QB for the Oakland Raiders at age 36) to represent the powerful central figure of poise and clarity, whose statistics, biography and performance can shield adherents to the New Golden Triangle against the class-ridden denigrators of the modern philosophy (a.k.a. bosses, wives, cocktail party know-it-alls).
Mr. Schlimazel's new work presents the tale of Solomon Peters as he enters into adolescence at the astonishing age of 33. When we meet him, Solomon has fallen in with a gang of dandies, with whom he roams the beaches of San Diego. By day, they smoke glue through bongs filled with Mountain Dew and terrorize sunbathers by pulling their hair and running away; by night, they crowd the Karaoke Bars of Ocean Beach, entering contests for chump change. It is here that Solomon finds himself onstage during David Allen Coe Night. At a crucial point in the contest, just as he is about to advance to the finals, Solomon freezes and can only manage to murmur the Loggins and Messina song "House at Pooh Corner." Humiliated, he shaves his wig and then removes it. Later, after having won by knockout the love of a good woman, Solomon retreats with her into the arcane of the Cabala. At first, he is not sure if she is a Theosophic fascist or just really Jewish, but faith wins out.
In order to perfect himself for his beloved, he secretly plans to convert religions. Solomon undergoes an operation to reattach his foreskin. Although this adds almost two inches to his penis size, it does not impress the parents of his girlfriend, and they beseech him to attend the required religious classes or, barring time constraints, forge some genealogy.
The well-faked climax of the novel reveals Solomon rising from the confusing mire of his search for meaning through an epiphany achieved one Sunday in November as he simultaneously receives oral sex and chugs a beerbong as, on TV, Rich Gannon delivers a perfectly placed pass into the outstretched arms of Tim Brown in the back of the endzone. Time appears to stop, or perhaps run backwards (this is not made entirely clear), as an apparition of the Western Cannon himself emerges from the TV screen and sits Solomon down to deliver "The Holy Playbook" word-by-word. Although this enforced reference to the Mahabharata is amusing, if not altogether transparent, the novel ends before the Word is fully revealed. Hopefully, Mr. Schlimazel will write quickly and get the third and final book in this trilogy out before autumn. I hate when they leave you hanging just when things get interesting. When will I learn?
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Finally, we have Bruno Foro's Lo Stronzo dell Ufficio Affianco (The Asshole in the Next Cubicle), published in a new translation by Kenyon DeLawter, Assistant State Poet of Arkansas. Despite its 2001 copyright, this pastiche of morbidity seems unduly timely, for we now see the effects of our epic transition from a vigorous nation of thieves into a passive-aggressive troupe of clowns waiting under the sewer grate to collect the various bits of loose change that the big dogs let fall from their pockets along with lint, condom wrappers, and half-chewed mints. Mr. Foro axes us all: "What is the deal?"
Unlike many elite-istas who seem to feel that pointing out obvious incidents of cowardice or venality amounts to circumscribing some wider-ranging set of social injustices, Mr. Foro gives the reader a set of possible choices to act upon, if one were so inclined on such a lovely Sunday as this. For example, the old "lock the boss out of his own office" routine has been clearly notated in simple step-by-step instructions worthy of Bob Vila. The gimmick here is to remove the hinges, drop the deadbolt on the inside, swing the door shut using the reinserted deadbolt as a hinge, and so forth.
I must add one basic caveat to this review. As I do not understand una sola parola d' italiano, I am not entirely sure that this book is not, in fact, a collection of Dilbert-like musings on the perplexities of life in the information-technology sector (with a spicy Roman twist). Some research has come across my desk that suggests DeLawter, the translator, has been embroiled in an interoffice feud with his boss (the State Poet-in-Chief of Arkansas) and may have injected some personal venom into this otherwise un-besmirched translation. I will leave interpretation to the reader, however, because like all great works of art, Lo Stronzo dell Ufficio Affianco draws much of its strength from subtle ambiguity, and it is profusely illustrated.
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