Eventual Gander: British History for Dummies

[Review of British History for Dummies by Sean Lang]

There are times in history when one ought to be a fan of a certain publishing house. Scribner's Sons in the 20's. City Lights in the 50's. And now, For Dummies. Now, I'm sure that the For Dummies series prompts scorn and derision for some of their titles. I can only hope that Computers for Dummies reads something like this: "This is a mouse. You use it to do the obvious thing on your computer. When it breaks, you should do anything other than call your 'smart grandson' who does, in fact, have something better to do than help you digitize your photos of cats in front of a background of animated cats trying to hump other still life cats." I might be worried about my grandma taking offense at the previous sentence if not for the content of the previous sentence.

But the For Dummies books on Humanities and Social Sciences are awesome. The actual dummies, the ones who learn things just for grades, flock to Cliffs Notes. This brand, that in the technical realm caters to liberal arts majors on a deadline ("Our co-op newsletter needs to be out by Tuesday and it's not getting there 'til you learn Adobe Illustrator!"), caters, in the humanities realm, to liberal arts majors looking to have more info to masturbate out in casual cocktail party conversation. And so they find wholly competent authors who have a nice, cheeky sense of humor to write it. All the while giving you the facts without the pesky parts of textbooks. Y'know, the quizzes, the forced diversity ("minorities were important too during this period; check out this sidebar that shows a woman/black/poor person who had an interesting life story that is a sidebar because it doesn't fit in to the main story"), the repetition for students skimming a chapter introduction 3 minutes before class.

This is a textbook for people who want to learn, and want to have fun learning. Textbooks use a style that is dry, droll, and drab to make information easy to convey. Instead of dumbing down the words, Lang makes his style more interesting so you read closer. Consider the following chapter/section titles: "1066 and All That Followed", "Children of the Revolutions", "And What Have the Romans Ever Given Us in Return?", "Saxon, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll", "Who wants to be a William heir?", "Going Dutch", "Marlborough country", "Trouble Over: Brdiged Water", "The Battle of Warren Hastings". These are references to, somewhat respectively, an earlier satire of British History, Song Titles, Monty Python, awesome things, game shows, a good way to be told it's alright but you won't get laid, smoking, and historical occurrences themselves. I'm sure I've omitted several altogether awesome ones. And that made me pay closer attention. And that made me learn more.

The writing's funny, sure. In a wry, British manner, instructive itself. (In one passage about the revolts over Poll Tax, the writer notes that the disembodied head the peasants took was surely displayed on a vertical piece of wood using pole tacks). But all the cultural references make this book more admittedly a product of its own time than most are willing to admit. And it's short, a survey course, which means you get blasted with a lot, quickly. This is not a book to read a chapter or two of. If you want that, go to wikipedia. This is a book to read all of in one relatively fell swoop, so that you make connections you might miss if you read about single events. For instance, I had never quite realized that the Prince John who was the snivelling bastard in Robin Hood stories became the King John who, as a snivelling king, was forced by his barons to issue the Magna Carta. Let me know what connections you make.

Don't read this book because I recommend it. That perverts the purpose of this book. It is a book to be read only because you don't have to. The author made this book good; intent and intent alone can make it enjoyable.

The Eventual Gander: Double Feature

Over the span of eight hours this weekend I saw two films: The Last King of Scotland and Zodiac. A few notes.

The Last King of Scotland: Overall a decent film. It manages to achieve the kind of rock'n'roll pacing of a McG venture* and the 360-degree grit of a Tony Scott flick without descending into gonzo garishness or cinemagraphic circle jerk (of course, it's hard to be blinded by the bling when you're filming in Uganda). Anyway, I said it was a decent film. But Forrest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin will nevertheless gaurantee its permanence. For once, the buzz was right. Whitaker deserves not only this year's Oscar but next year's as well. His screen presence is more like screen omnipresence. He dominates every scene he's in, just as Amin himself did. Also, and this is kind of an aside. There is a 15 minute sequence involving Amin's beautiful third wife, a trio of African go-go dancers, and our young Scottish protagonist. Needless to say, my jeans have never been so uncomfortable (this even though I was unable to suspend disbelief enough to think that a 130lb Scot could please a Nubian Princess. The Scots have the endowment of the Irish and the lustiness of the English.)

Zodiac: Wonderful. It is one of the signs of great filmmaking that the audience is kept in suspense even when they know what's going to happen. I went into Zodiac knowing most of the details--including the fact that they never made a charge in the case--and was biting my nails throughout its three-hour runtime. This is Fincher at his finest, but don't expect to see Seven or Fight Club, Zodiac is a different animal. Also, it's a nice touch that Fincher cast different actors to play the Zodiac based on different witnesses accounts. My one complaint, and it's fairly minor, is that Jake Gyllenhaal couldn't be bothered to change his rugged chic wardrobe or his perfectly unkempt ski-ramp haircut for a fucking 70s period piece. What, is his image under license with the Mid-00's Heart Throb Association of America?



*I debated whether to dignify that ridiculous moniker with a reference for about a half hour

Eventual Gander: Guess Who

On a recent cross-country trip, I found the airlines sending me a not-so-subtle message. Through the miracle of film-scheduling the inflight-magazine promised-me, I was being shown the same film on both my way there and back. Rather than keep my eyes all the way closed for a total of 5 hours to avoid the seven-inch screens the modern jetliner has, I embraced the mediocre and watched the Ashton Kutcher/Bernie Mac vehicle Guess Who.

And to be honest, it wasn't awful. Now, don't get me wrong, it was no Guess Who's Coming To Dinner. Serious issues of class in America were avoided, jokes were stretched out and taken to absurdity for laughs. Bernie Mac is no Spencer Tracy. Ashton Kutcher is no Sidney Poitier. And Thandie Newton is no forgettable generic actress.

But it wasn't trying to be the original. Not only has movie-making changed since the it came out, America has. Back then, Civil Rights was still a buzzword. Now, in 4 states, the majority of people are non-white. We have reached an unsteady equilibrium. And the face of this unsteadiness is... Bernie Mac?

In the original, the father held all the power. He was dominant in the social situation (being the protector of his daughter and family) as well as in the racial climate. In today's shaky family values situation and uncertain racial climate, Messieurs Mac and Kutcher fairly evenly split what power and resentment there was. This was a surprisingly effective twist: no longer was one man in a position to browbeat another. Though the search for mercy through personal experience played great then, now we want situations more immediately embarrassing.

So, how good is it? Good enough to bear if inflicted upon you. Not worth renting. And so, I leave you with this joke of theirs that gets perfectly at the awkwardness the movie lumbers along with: upon first meeting his fiance's family, Ashton experiences a moment of silence. Bernie Mac just mistook Ashton's black cab driver as his daughter's boyfriend, and only now realizes the overwhelming truth. Ashton says, nervously, and ridiculously for anyone with the simplest grasp of genetics: "Wow, I wish she had told me you were black."

The Eventual Gander: Doonesb-ehry

So, this post wsas going to be all about Doonesbury, a wonderful strip that for 40 years has striking down the powerful with vicious satire of advertising and performance art (oh the 80's!). It lampooned start-ups and conglomerates, Senators and Shorties. But one thing it's found in its old age (or perhaps that I've been able to appreciate in my newfound 23-ness) is an ability to make us really feel for characters as we also find humor in them. Cf. B.D, a character we've watched grow from a self-centered football star to a Vietnam soldier to a California Highway Patrolman to a College Football Coach to a Gulf War II amputee. Along the way he married a starlet, had a kid, hired a man named Zonker as a nanny, and gave up his fixation with wearing his helmet. Yeah. In the funnies. Perhaps the epitome of this is this strip. Touching, topical, recent, everything. Incorporates the history of the saga of families and friends while also being funny on the surface.

I was going to review it like that, until I saw this article on Martha Stewart and became totally apathetic to real art, craft, story, or people. Instead, I got focused on Ms. Stewart and her felonious ass. Apparently, she is known in the joint as M. Diddy. Also, she's a nice person, really. While she's filming her new soul-killing reality show The Apprentice spin-off, she's going to be nicer than trump. Quoth the matron:"
She says her version of "The Apprentice" will be different than Donald Trump's and that she doesn't want to be portrayed as mean and harsh. She says she would never use Trump's catchphrase, "You're fired."
"We're trying to come up with other ways to say it," she says. "For instance, if someone is from Idaho, I could say, 'You're back in Boise for apple-picking time.' ""

-D"Goin' Back to Cali^wBoise"an

The Eventual Gander: Of Comics, Web and Otherwise

I'm a computer scientist. What that means, roughly, is that I don't expect pretty pictures on these beasts of burden of post-modernity and relativism. Microprocessors can munge text with the best of 'em, but a single .gif or .jpg confuses them to the point where they would throw up their arms if they had arms. And thank god they don't.

Do you know about Linux? Pardon the digression, but if you're a resident of Earth, odds are onlya bout 1 in a billion that you're reading this, anyway. Some people say Linux is an Open Source Operating System (OSOS). Maybe it is, but you'll never be happy if you think of it like that. You'll spend all your days frustrated that your computer, the product of 50 years of innovation, can't even open up a stupid interweb game. Instead, Linux is a video game. I have beaten the level where you get firefox working, and I rescued the princess that allows me to look at pictures, but I'm stuck at the boss that is video.

Therefore, this Eventual Gander is focused on comics, that visual form of communication that's still exclusive to we humans. The thing that separates us from the machines is that we laugh at these while the computors[sic] just whir along. Unless you're talking about the New Yorker, in which case we all just whir along.

Strip number 1:
IndieTits. A comic strip titled off the seeming naughtiness that we at the Enfranchised have commented on before. Written as the moonlighting of Jeph, the author of Questionable Content and a man whose dialogue has all the shortness of Ron Jeremy (to wit: Jeph enjoys bludgeoning to death the kernel of a good joke more than Foster does a baby seal's testicles), the strip is visually identical to itself. There are 4 or 5 or 3 or who knows how many backdrops, over which he writes jokes that are obscure or silly. But man did he hit a homerun in this one. He gets to the core of what a comic is. Is there one bird, or two? Which one is telling the story? Beautiful use of post-modernism, man. Just effing brilliant. Especially considering that it was probably written 5 minutes before your deadline when you hadn't actually thought of a joke for the day.

That's what theories of academia are supposed to be used for: covering your ass.

Join us next time on the Enfranchised when I talk some more!

Eventual Gander: Batman Begins

Batman is what every Republican aspires to be. Born into wealth, but he earned it himself. His arsenal of expensive toys and gadgets (serviced by his Manservant, Alfred) is only effective when coupled with his merit. He drives an SUV, and he actually needs it! Bruce Wayne is fabulously wealth *and* helps the public, better than if his income were turned into taxes to support the corrupt government of Gotham.

And that's not to say the new movie Batman Begins is bad. Or good. It is good, excellent, even. It manages to introduce these issues of helping society without passing judgment on any but the most extreme alternatives. Perhaps this is the point of supervillains: never do Democrats and Republicans seem most aligned than when being killed in mass numbers by a poison gas.

Christian Bale's acting is as troubled as it needs to be, but not anguished to the point of melodrama. He holds himself as, during different points in the movie, a bon vivante, a dorky Princeton flunk-out, a Man-in-Black, a ninja (!!!), and lover. Michael Caine's Alfred is alternately helpful, challenging, witty, and inspiring. Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson surprised me by being in this movie. Katie Holmes, for a moment, made me not want to smack her for being engaged to Tom Cruise and this close to choosing Scientology.

There are a few minutes of comic book hokieness. Characters look at each other with horrified looks and slowly piece together the conundrum they're in and that we've recognized they're in for the past 5 minutes. The plot is summarized, the bad guys are pawns of badder guys. But overall, this is a superhero of the Oughts, as opposed to the 80's. Christopher Reeves's Superman was challenged by kryptonite and beams. Tobey Maguire's Spiderman, the first in this new era, was appropriately emo. We get the feeling that if his girlfriend (Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane) died, he would be more hurt not by her loss, but having been responsible for her loss. Pixar's The Incredibles grappled with their own humanity even as they were animated. Batman, we learn in this movie for the first time on the big screen (after 4 predecessors that ranged from watchable to featuring George Clooney's nipples), is the product of immense loss.

The directing is peccable, but quite good. My colleague, Manohla Dargis, has criticized the action shots for not being followable enough. But this is the point. The Bourne Identity did a great job of creating fight scenes where we felt like we understood what was going through Jason Bourne's head as he created convoluted fights that knocked down soldiers. He was a machine. Batman is a man. He uses fear, he uses darkness. If we were to see what he was doing in full, we would not be experiencing in even the slightest the emotional impact of his fighting.

But the focus of this movie is the script. It uses standard tricks of the summer movie. Laughs come when you expect them, for the most part. But it adds something more. Scenes that follow idioms also have deeper meanings. The first occurrence of a repeated phrase is not the most appropriate, but the least. It is later, as our knowledge of the world expands, so do our understandings of its utterances. And, in a surprisingly profound finale, Batman Begins teaches us that sometimes we have to rip down the creations of our Fathers to maintain their legacies.

(this review is in a series of reviews that consider not only the art in question, but previous thoughts about it. See also reviews of Tom Wolfe's new novel or The Finer Point of Sausage Dogs, )

The Eventual Gander: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs.

If I can't come up with an aphorism to start this review with, at least I can think of one to ignore completely: Alexander McCall Smith's The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs has a fine cover. Of course this doesn't matter in any book you're reading for literary merit, which would have the same intrinsic value whether it was read out loud, Morse'd over a telegraph or even read hunched over a Palm Pilot with a screen too small and too dim for true appreciation. But this is not a book of "literary merit". It is, at best, a good way to feed a habit of pseudo-intellectualism. When I saw this book lying on the table at Kepler's, my mouth started salivating and my neurons releasing endorphins in the same anticipation a junkie must feel at that first call of "Crack rock ho!" (ho, here, in the "Land Ho!" sense, not the Noelle Bush sense).

That I, a pseudo-intellectual on the way up would stoop to the level of paying $9.95 for 128 pages of tripe might seem paradoxical. But this is not a book to be read, it is a book to be consumed. The aforementioned cover has texture, two colors of ink, and no fewer than four well-designed fonts all selected to contrast their roles to one another. Framed in the center is a delightful illustration of a dachshund, sized up in anatomical consideration. If all this detail sounds like pretension, that is only because this is pretension of the highest kind. It is not exclusionary, it is not off-putting. It is simply something that is to be enjoyed.

My editors tell me I should, at some point, get to the book itself. The staff at my local bookorium had placed it in Sci-Fi/Mystery. But this tome eschews such a simple taxonomic view of writing, instead labeling itself "A Professor Dr. von Igelfeld Entertainment." What this means is that it has the same sort of bumbling main character, intrigue, and rich detail that a mystery has, but without any of that pesky murder, whodunit, or actual matter to be investigated. The result is a travel tale without any real root in plot, truth, history, or narrative necessity. It is as if Dr. McCall Smith is asking us to take a vacation not only from our own lives in reading this text, but to take a vacation from what we think an author properly ought to do.

Dr. von Igelfeld, the protagonist, is a hugely compelling character, and I hope to read the other two books starring him to see if perhaps he was developed in something that approached a true adventure at some point. He has the powers of neither perception nor deception. The result being that slights uncommitted are paid back in slights unnoticed. His worldview is, at times, beyond simplistic: he is the author of a scholarly text, "Portugese Irregular Verbs" and that should put him beyond reproach or question. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand the way the system works. His administrative prowess is best demonstrated when he asks, of a religious conflict, "If he were the Patriarch, the could he not unilaterally put an end to schism simply by expelling schismatics? That is what von Igelfeld himself would have done."

Sure, I could quibble about the narration (switches point-of-view arbitrarily and not enough to be a true device. A choice made rarely enough is only a crutch.) But why? This is an enormously fun and quick read. The intellectual equivalent of slapstick opens it up as he is mistakenly sent to lecture on the Sausage Dog (the beginning of the intertwined confusions) and, out of a desire not to offend his host, never corrects the impression. Puns in turn lead to surgery on one of the elongated beasts by our Philologist hero with the expectedly disastrous results somehow leading to an interaction between our man and (an extreme farce of) the Bishop of Rome (a caricature felt all the more deeply in this Papal intermission).

It is not hard to see how Faulkner's prose is a deep cigar. Something you sit down with for hours on end, to appreciate its complexities and how its flavor changes as you go on. Hemingway is a pipe: a completely different way of looking at the habit. Sure, you don't inhale and you smoke less less often, but it's a more potent smoke. Which is the more dangerous? Who could ever compare the two? A subscription to The New Yorker is, then, like an addiction to Camel Lights: You remember that you wanted to start, but now it's a chore instead of a pleasure and you can't quite remember *why* you wanted to start. On this scale, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is a pack of Nat Shermans or Dunhills: you pay more for its luxurious packaging and beneficial image. In short, it can be recommended for everything but its substance.

Jugdgment: Keep one on your shelf, as a rainy-day reading list. To be opened only in times of extreme depression or boredom when even other fare as light on the intellectual scale as an Austen or a Chabon would be cerebral overload.

The Eventual Gander

(Schiavo/PopeWatch 2k5: Mortality always wins)

Here at the Enfranchised, we read a lot. Just... not quickly. So, hitherwith, we introduce our review masthead: The Eventual Gander. That's not to say we'll review anything less than the pinnacle and forefront of pseudo-intellectual circles. As the saying goes: What's good for the prompt goose is good for the eventual gander.

Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons

When Ansel Adams passed away, he willed the negatives of all of his photographs as a tangible possession. Celebrity worship aside (in the current day and age a man of his stature could leave a receipt on a table after dinner and find it on eBay by dessert), he did this because he felt they had value. To him, taking a picture was composed of two equally important steps: first exposing the film to capture an image, and then turning this semi-Platonic abstraction into bona fide hangible art through the process of printing. Writing is like this too, and in I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe has succeeded admirably at the first but managed to hide that fact beneath severe stumbling in the second.

Without appearing too pathetic, allow me to say that Wolfe is spot-on in many instances. Speaking of that opportunity to slip one's alma mater into conversation, he writes (of the fictional Dupont College), "Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life". If this sounds horribly pretentious and off-putting, well, it is. Which is why, he continues, "no Dupont man... had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul." He continues to observe the intermittent cycle of a freshman's life: from the heights of arrogance to the troughs of self -doubt and -pity. This, of course, while the self is trodding through a life of intellectual luxury on someone else's tab with no responsibilities to speak of. Trivial matters such as sides of the room, borrowings of discs compact, unfounded crushes are such stuff as life and death are made during a co-ed's career. Translate to the language of rap, this would best be put, "Mo' Education, Mo' Problems."

He has his other bones to pick, of course. One of the title heroine's suitors is the star of a basketball team. Wolfe has applied his expert eye to the NCAA, endorsement deals, groupies, just about every morsel of the Big Man On Campus Phenomenon. He dissects feelings of parental shame and familial denial. These are all spot on observation, etc. Thus ends the positive portion of my review, such as it is.

The imperfections, on the other hand, are many. And yet, somehow, the critics got them wrong. Many were shocked at the lurid and, quite frankly, unarousing descriptions of intimacy he includes. Wolfe took home an award for worst sex scene of the year. What the committee missed was that it was not the worst scene of sex. It was a great scene of the worst sex. He distorts his writing because that is how it is in the trenches of modern fraternity houses and two-room doubles. But he never lets up. His writing is awkward and the characters stiff throughout the whole novel, as if college is something to be experienced for all eight semesters through a lens of discomfort. The result approximates a really interesting person with bad breath: you force your way through to the end because you know you will enjoy having heard it, even if the experience itself is excruciating.

One of nine-thousand and seventy-three sayings attributed to Mark Twain is "Show, Don't Tell." Wolfe apparently decided to piss on the House of Clemens. Well, okay, you say. Sometimes you just don't have the space to do all that. But in a book that winds through 676 pages and weighs enough to take down a gazelle if the situation arises, you think he really could have pointed out that athletics is a golden ticket with more subtlety than "the sweet irony was that [basketball player extraordinaire but less-than-stellar-academician] had wound up at a better university than Eric [(the smarter but less-baller brother)]."

The bigger issue is that this is Tom Wolfe. At every turn, in every nook of prose and cranny of words, you can see the man in his white suit typing out this introduction to a new world. He shows off, dropping terms as if they were names. He clues in the reader to the lingo: "dormcest" is mentioned by an "RA" as a type of "hooking up". And yet the actual act is still "rutting", which is often preceded by simulation of the "mons veneris" and the "ilial crest". Thanks Tom. Just what I needed: a newly old man to turn his attention to my home to tell me how bad it is, all the while knowing that he really wants to be back there. To be where the culture is being made, where it is being blindly felt in the backseat of an Escalade on the way to a formal. Your criticism would mean a lot more if it weren't compensation for jealousy.


In the end, I am Charlotte Simmons should never be allowed in the fiction section of a bookstore. Instead, copies of it should be relegated to that part of a college bookstore next to a sweatshirt bearing the (trademarked) logo of these cathedrals of learning, money, and semi-anonymized semi-drunk semi-dancing semi-sex. That way, when Mom and Pop come to visit Junior and Juniess, all settled into their dorms, they can pick up a hat or fanny pack for expressing their pride in public, and a copy of I am Charlotte Simmons for abating their curiosity and empty nesting in private.