Books & Mags

Laughing All The Way To The Remainder Table

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Look on the lighter side? Tardar Sauce would rather not, thank you.

William Zinsser once described the humour section of any given bookshop as the most depressing place in the world to contemplate the state of arts and letters.  When Zinsser wrote that essay in 1966, much of the humour section consisted of anthologies of comic strips, bound editions of comic book story arcs, and ‘ slight parodies based on trends that were long on booger jokes and bathroom humour  and short on actually literary merit.

With the advent of National Lampoon as an outlet for humour writers who had outgrown their incubation space at Harvard and other college-based humour magazines, trade paperbacks featuring cartoons and parodies began to scoot Charlie Brown and Pogo Possum to the edges of the shelves.

The 1970s’ was a time when the elevation as the comic and humourist from a gadfly observing from the edges to an icon and spokesperson made a significant impact on pop culture.  Situation comedies centered around comedians (rather than entertainers who do comedy) began to dominate the network schedules, especially in a culture that had wearied of titillation and violence as prime time mainstays.   The close of the decade saw NBC’s Saturday Night Live , with its Second City alumni-heavy cast peppered with contributions from the BBC’s Monty Python crew  dominate and reshape the genre in television, cinema, and print.

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The Hannah Interview

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by Jas Faulkner 

Sam was laughing when I answered the phone.

“Open your email,” she said. “it’s not one of those screamie video things, I promise.”

Suffering for your art? Hannah knows better. She has  already figured out having written is better than writing.

It was a picture of a hand printed sign that taped to the front door of the store with a My Little Pony sticker.  It read: “Book sighing at the back of the store.  Free cookies with book.”

Tab’s niece, Hannah, was staying with her favourite aunts and it looked like she was back in business.  Whenever Hannah’s parents work took them out of town, Hannah packed her suitcase, filled an old knitting bag with her latest sketchbook, lozenge paints, brushes and her latest journal and supplies for her guinea pig, Darla Hood, Darla’s cage and carrier and head over to her aunts.  She found her parents’ penchant for digging up stuff to be tedious and preferred the glamourous world of books.

However, she was having none of this retail or struggling author stuff.  Her goals were twofold: she wanted to reopen Meg Ryan’s bookstore from “You’ve Got Mail” and she wanted to be a rich and famous writer of books with purple covers.  For those of you playing at home, Hannah is precocious eight-year-old.

“We had a signing last Friday.”

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The Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Best 100 Mysteries of All time

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Pulp paperback version who lists Hopley as author, and then claims another Woolrich pen name as the real author.

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes—George Hopley–(Cornell Woolrich)–1948–IP

Of  the numerous novels of suspense Woolrich has written and I’ve read, The Night Has a Thousand Eyescaused the most tense and angst filled moments. The uneasy

The younger Cornell Woolrich.

reality of a Woolrich novel is the knowledge that the conclusion of the story can go either way. A relentless dark hopeless story can end miraculously, or tragically. The reader is unaware of which will prevail until nearly the last words. The journey to the conclusion can be nerve shattering in intensity. In the instance of this novel, it haunted me, and now that I’m rethinking, it still does. It’s a novel of predestination, of a lack of control over life and death, of hope that ekes along, but barely.

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John The Eunuch and Mary Reed, Eric Mayer–10 Questions

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Ancient history is not a strong suit of mine. I enjoy it, especially when served up with mysterious mayhem and murder. Still, not having indulged in Mary Reed and Eric Mayer’s highly regarded series of John The Eunuch, I almost felt at a loss as to what questions I could ask. A little research into the books  helped, and the husband and wife writing duo’s detailed answers are filled with all the atmosphere, style, and  history one could possibly need to get started and delve into their work.

The series protagonist is John the Eunuch, Emperor Justinian’s Lord Chamberlain. Set in the Byzantine 6th century Roman Empire, real and fictional characters appear side by side and for those of us who know nothing about that period, an entire new world will open up! The series has received numerous starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, was a finalist for the IPPY Best Mystery Award, nominated for the Bruce Alexander History Mystery Award, the American Library Association’s Booklist Magazine named the Lord Chamberlain novels as one of its four Best Little Known Series. and was nominated multiple times and won the Glyph Award from Arizona Book Publishing Association for Best Book Series. So, take a trip to another time and world with Mary and Eric.

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Victoria Woodhull and The Historically Invisible 51 Per Cent

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I heard the name of Victoria Woodhull  in a specialized course, History of American Women, in college. My college years are considered pre-historic, and as such, you would have thought by now everyone  would be not only aware of women who were movers and shakers in our past, but they’d be required study–or–like white males, just plain studied. No, of course not. 40 years more or less didn’t bring both sexes and various ethnic people into the discourse. History still belongs to those who write it and apparently those who write it are white males–or, and I have nothing to back this up except ignorance displayed by the younger among us,  current history books and courses  aren’t current in the sense of inclusion, but in edition number.  When I was in grade and high school, the only women  that had anything to do with our country’s beginnings consisted of one who mythically sewed a flag, and another who served water on the battlefield–oh, and one president’s wife saved some portraits when the White House burned. Betsy Ross’s house is nearby in Philly, and although the story is discredited time and again, the fantasy lives on. Molly Pitcher is immortalized in a touching way–one of the New Jersey Turnpike’s rest stops bears her name. And Dolly Madison churns out ice cream. That’s it, they are the sum total of women who existed with a contribution to our country’s emergence. And if you notice–their notoriety is contained within the domestic arena.

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Arthur Rackham

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A typical Rackham brown reprint, and human tree.

When I first discovered golden age children’s illustration, Arthur Rackham reigned supreme. I was enamored with his fairies, elves, sprites in various forms–from Peter Pan, to English Fairy Tales, to Rip Van Winkle and The Wonder Book. Not able to afford first editions, even then, I settled for typical reprints. Not exactly the finest copies, at least they made more of his illustrations available to me than did the David Larkin outsize paperbacks showcasing the various artists. After a trip to London and a bunch of postcards later, I was so transfixed by his art, I decided to write a thesis for a theatre class in college. The thesis had three

Trees a la Rackham.

parts. The first, a written analysis of his work and influence, second, makeup based up his characters, and third, a small production utilizing aspects from his artwork.  I can’t for the life of me remember what the makeup consisted of, nor what the small production was all about–but I still have my paper–with grammatical errors, misspellings, and postcard examples of his work, still intact.

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