Holy Hullabaloos, The Blog

Life = Humiliation

A good friend of mine once said, "all life is humiliation" or something to that effect, and I've often thought that he was quite right.  (he said this, incidentally after he stood on the hood of my 1978 Chevy Nova, kicked it, and broke the windshield).  Then today, two things occur which seem to confirm the notion in my mind.  First, I'm reading a novel by Lorrie Moore, who is hilarious and tremendous and insightful and whom you should read if you haven't already and why haven't you because she's so hilarious and tremendous and insightful, and I come across this passage, where the narrator, after relaying the time her husband (soon after divorced; now dead) made her put a litter bag in her pocketbook so it wouldn't stink up their rental car, observes: "I have always felt that life was simply a series of personal humiliations relieved, occasionally, by the humiliations of others."  And then, and then, I go to Peet's Coffee, which I love and which I much much prefer to Starbucks, although I do go to Starbucks often because it's, well, because it's there, and I order a "grande" iced coffee.  And the lady who takes my offer looks at me and says, "so would you like the medium size then?" 

Monkeybicycle Mania

The accolades for Monkeybicycle 6 keep coming in, this time from Timmy Waldron over at Word Riot, a great online lit journal itself.  Waldron has some nice words for my story The Advisor, which you can listen to on a podcast over at the Monkeybicycle website (at least for another few days I think).  Or better yet you can order issue #6 as a whole here.

Lee Klein's Online Lit History

I just came across this page that I wanted to recommend to you.  Lee Klein has run this online lit site called eyeshot for something like ten years now, and he was the first person to publish something of mine (other than scholarly stuff and a Spy chart that was co-written).  On the page I'm recommending here, he gives a short history of the I guess we can now call it heyday of online lit publishing that preceded the rise of blogging a few years ago.  Since I published on a number of the sites he mentions--Sweet Fancy Moses, for example, or Facsimilation--I found the history kind of moving in a weird way.  Not moving in like the way you might be moved when you visually witness the love of a mother for a newborn or anything, but still.

Bren Bataclan is Good (and from Boston, More or Less)

Last night on CBS News with Katie Couric they did a segment on a Boston artist named Bren Bataclan who makes funny paintings and leaves them in public places for people to take home with them.  It's what he calls the "Smile Boston" project, and these days, with the recession and everyone having no jobs and eating lentils only and all, he attaches a note to the paintings that says "everything will be alright."  Bren leaves the paintings in all sorts of places all over the country and the world.  The paintings, as I mentioned, are really funny looking and will inevitably make you laugh.  We learned about him a few years ago when I think he did a talk or something at the high school where my wife teaches, and we then bought a couple of big goofy paintings from him which are now hanging in a prominent place over our dining room table.  It was great seeing him and his work on the national news, although I'm pretty sure that they did not identify him as a Boston-area artist (Cambridge, I think), which if true is kind of lame--now everyone is going to assume he works out of New York when he doesn't work out of New York but instead out of the Boston area, where there are a lot of good and talented and funny people, yay Boston.

Check out Bren's website here.

Read This Funny Book By Wendy Molyneux

The funniest person is Wendy Molyneux.  If you don't believe me, you should look at her pieces on McSweeney's, which are all linked here.  Also, she has a website or I guess it's a blog, although on the blog she says she's starting a new blog, I don't know why.  Anyway, maybe check out her blog.  Also, she has this book out called "Everything is Wrong With You: The Modern Woman's Guide to Finding Self-Confidence Through Self-Loathing," which is very funny, and I say that even though I'm not even a woman, mostly.  Boy, people looked at me weird when I was reading that book on the T and squealing with laughter and peeing myself and belching.  Since I'm not a woman, I don't really know if Wendy's book would actually help you better yourself (if you, unlike me, are a woman), but I still think you should check it out if you are a person who is good.

Monkeybicycle #6 Available for Preorder

If you're looking for something to read (and really, who isn't?) maybe you should check out Volume #6 of Monkeybicycle, a sweet publication that has previously placed pieces and stories (I think) in best nonrequired reading and elsewhere.  I've got a story in there called "The Advisor," which is about a law student who volunteers for a presidential campaign and attracts the attention of the candidate because of his senior college thesis on Confucius.  Wacky zaniness ensues, you can believe you me.  Anyway, my story won't be the best thing in there, I can assure you.  There are some great short story writers in the volume, including Ryan Boudinot and Kim Chinquee and Michael Czyzniejewski and on and on.  Check it out.  It's available for preorder now from the monkeybicycle website for only $12, and it will be available April 25, just in time for the end of April reading season!

Two Recommendations for Funny Things

I highly recommend reading Patricia Marx's piece in the Jan. 5 New Yorker about her travels around China with two kosher inspectors, as they inpsect various foodstuff factories to make sure that the stuff coming out of them is in fact kosher.  Marx, who has written all sorts of books and articles over the years, is very hilarious.  Here's a line from the piece: "Nobody knows how many Jews are now in [China], but reasonable estimates put the number at around three thousand, which is roughly the same number of Jews as live in my apartment building."  Her story really makes me want to write up a story I've been wanting to do about the time I lived in China in 1993 and worked for a sketchy U.S. law firm.  A guy came in from L.A. who wanted to explore the possibility of putting hot dog stands all over China.  We brought him around our small city (Xiamen) so he could talk to people who owned parks and whatnot about the possibility of putting up hot dog stands.  As far as I know, he never followed through with the idea, though this might have been because, as he screamed at me on the phone one day a few weeks after the trip, "you guys [i.e., the sketchy law firm] are fucking this up."

Patricia Marx, incidentally, was one of the first two women elected to the Harvard Lampoon.  She was there (and was maybe the ibis, one of the big officers, named after some sort of bird) at the same time the possible next Supreme Court Justice of the United States was on the Lampoon, apparently not really writing anything.

Also, if you live in the Boston area, you might want to come to Brookline Booksmith on January 22 at 7 pm to see Chris Monks read from his new book about how life is like a video game.  As I've previously mentioned, Monks--who edits McSweeney's Internet Tendency--is really funny.  He's going to be reading along with Dan Kennedy, who writes lots of stuff for McSweeney's and has a new book out called Rock On, and Ben Greenman, who writes for all sorts of places, including the New Yorker, and who has a new book out called Corresponences.  The night guarantees to be hilarious.

Christopher Monks is Funny Redux

Long time readers of this month-and-a-half-old blog will recall that back in October I suggested that you consider buying Christopher Monks's new book, The Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life and that, under no circumstances, should you consider buying the book Wet Cats, which is a book that has lots of pictures of cats that are wet and that is the main competitor to Chris's book.  At the time, I hadn't read Ultimate Game Guide, but I recommended it on the basis that Monks is a very funny manwho has written many funny things (he's the web editor for McSweeney's, if that's any hint).  Well, I have now read the book and can testify that it is, indeed, very funny.  Of course, in my original post I noted that if I read the book and didn't find that it was funny I would nonetheless tell you it's funny anyway, so I guess there's no way for you to really know whether I think the book is funny or whether I am just saying that the book is funny even though I think it is not funny.  Still, though, let me say: the book is funny.

It's no surprise, of course, that on a line-by-line, page-by-page basis, the book is hilarious, because that's what we knew Monks could do from reading his pieces on McSweeney's and elsewhere.  What is surprising, though, is how well the book works as a whole.  I don't read many straight humor books because usually they are just a bunch of funny pieces stuffed together and are not much more than the sum of their parts.  But this book actually succeeds in communicating a larger sense of the trajectory of an average human's life in a way that is both funny and, for me at least, kind of sad (but in a good way). 

In two-hundred-and-thirty-or-so pages, your character (and the book is probably the second best book I've ever read that is written in the second person, after Bright Lights, Big City) emerges from the womb, encounters all the typical small and large challenges that we all basically face, succeeding in some and failing in others, meeting new people along the way, encountering some of the same people time and time again, and then (SPOILER ALERT) dies.  At the end you get a little bit of the feeling that, while the details may differ, this is basically what every life is like: typical, mundane, filled with flashes of love and angst, and, while ultimately unremarkable and pointless, nonetheless delightfully funny and absurd.  I guess for many this may seem depressing, but for me anyway, that's kind of how I experience my own life, so the book really resonated with me. 

Oh, and did I mention that the book is funny? 

Hullabaloos Endorsement: Tennessee Tuxedo for Director of the National Black and White Zoo

Regular readers of Holy Hullabaloos: The Blog will know that we here are doing our part to help President-elect Obama and his hard-working transition team by occasionally recommending potential nominees to high political posts.  In our first two recommendations, we endorsed Randy Moss (the lawyer, not the football player) for the Supreme Court and Sarah Vowell for the National Archivist.  Today we are simply tickled pink to announce our third endorsement: Tennessee Tuxedo for Director of the National Black and White Zoo.

Ok, so this endorsement is a little more dicey than our other two, we realize.  For one thing, there is no National Black and White Zoo.  Really, though, who would deny that there should be one?  Who wouldn't welcome with open arms a sanctuary where wide-eyed visitors, young and old alike, can come gaze at all the weird animals that are both black and white--penguins, pandas, zebras, killer whales, skunks, dalmations, and the like.  We have previously, in another fora, explained this concept at some length, and we don't feel like the idea needs any further justification here.

Assuming that President Obama does establish a National Black and White Zoo, it seems beyond dispute that Tennessee Tuxedo would make an ideal director for the institution.  As anyone who has studied animated programs from the early 1960s will tell you, Tennessee Tuxedo was created in direct response to then FCC-Chairman Newton Minow's complaint that "television is a wasteland."  Together with his dimwitted pal Chumley (a Walrus), Tuxedo worked tirelessly to improve conditions at the Megalopolis Zoo, which was run at that time by a George Bush like executive named Stanley Livingston, who consistently and thoughtlessly foiled the duo's good hearted attempts to make life more liveable for ordinary zoo inhabitants like Baldy the Bald Eagle and Yak the Yak, among others.

When faced with a difficult zoo-improvement-related situation requiring advanced scientific or practical knowledge (like how to start a newspaper to spread information and ideas throughout the zoo community), Tennessee and Chumley would inevitably seek out help from their scientist friend Phineas J. Whoopee, who would explain the relevant concept using his three-dimensional blackboard, which is an instrument that I myself would really like to have in the classroom.  Tennessee and Chumley would try to implement Dr. Whoopee's suggestions, but they would always find their dreams squashed by the cruel and insensitive Mr. Livingston (i.e., "Republicans").

With his love of science and endless efforts to improve living conditions for the most needy among us, Tennessee Tuxedo would be a stellar choice for Director of the heretofore-nonexistent Black and White Zoo.

(it's true that Get Smart's Don Adams, who voiced Tennessee Tuxedo in the original series, is dead, but maybe Steve Carrell, who played Adams's character in the movie adaptation of Get Smart, could fill in?  An administration with both Sarah Vowell and Steve Carell?  That would be sweet!)

Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice

I've been writing fiction of one type or another since I was a kid.  For the most part, up until a few years ago, it was terrible.  I once "wrote" a "novel" called Arrivederci, Loser (named after a piece of hate mail my wife got from an ex-friend) which was so bad it makes me weep just thinking about it.  It's hard to say what it was about.  Suffice to mention that one of the plot lines involved a walking, talking blueberry muffin who had escaped from Pastry Land.  There are a few excerpts from it on the "errata" page of my website if you want to cry a little.

For whatever reason--mostly because I started reading a lot of short stories I would guess--a few years ago I found a voice that, in my opinion anyway, is pretty decent.  I would say that I've published about twenty stories in various online and print journals.  There's a list of them, with links to the online ones and sound files of me reading some of the print ones, on my website if you're interested. 

My most recent story, and the one I'm most proud of, is called "The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice," which was published in issue six of a great and very cool journal called Barrelhouse.  I've always thought that being a Justice on the Supreme Court would be the best job in the world--not just because the job itself is so fascinating and involves so much power, but also because you can remain basically anonymous, which means that you can go about doing all the things in life that regular people do when you're not in the office. 

Want to volunteer to play with kitties down at the animal shelter?  Go ahead.  Take part in high level Stratego tournament play?  Knock yourself out.  Go to a rave and dance like a fiend all night?  Why not?  I remember when I was clerking for Justice Ginsburg, she would occasionally take us all out for some event and even though she is very distinctive looking (I wonder why her glasses never caught on as a major fashion trend?), people wouldn't generally recognize her if she wasn't right near the Court (when she was walking around the Court, people did often recognize her, and she was incredibly gracious in saying hello, posing for pictures, etc.)  The Ed Tuttle story explores the possibilities of this anonymity.  It is about a Justice who has recently lost his wife and takes off for an extended summer vacation in Jackson Hole to escape from his life in Washington.  While he's in Wyoming, he learns how to fly fish, rediscovers his sexuality, and realizes that it's still possible to be humiliated even when you've got life tenure.  

If you're interested, you can buy a copy of the journal here .  In addition to my story, there's a lot of great stuff in the issue--an interview with Bill Wyman, ex-bassist for the Rolling Stones--on his "land fishing" hobby, some art and stories about roller derby, and lots of excellent poetry and fiction, including my favorite, Joel Winbrot's "The Consequences of Sudden and Complete Oxygen Deprivation for the Actuary in Apartment 253 on the Morning a Pharmaceutical Sales Representative Missed Her Important Flight to LAX."  There's a little review of the issue at NewPages.com, which is a great place to go to learn about what's happening in the lit journals.  I'm giddily delighted that the reviewer singled out Ed Tuttle for some praise, saying that "Wexler succeeds in two difficult tasks: humanizing a member of the land’s highest court and earning laughs and empathy on the same page."  Thank you, kind reviewer!

(and if there are any editors out there who'd like to see my short story collection "Objection! Stories About Lawyers and Non-Lawyers," my agent would love to hear from you.)