The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide:
Hundreds of Things You Never Knew You Had to Worry About
By Cameron Tuttle
Chronicle Books, 143 pp., $10.95

All About Me
By Philipp Keel
Broadway Books, 86 pp., $12

The Lounge Lizard Journal
Designed by Michael Mabry
Text by Sam Wick, Bradley Temkin, and David Wick
Chronicle Books, 128 pp., $18.95

OURS IS A TIME OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD. The load is getting heavier, and the information is getting worse. One morning the front pages of all the world’s newspapers scream the formerly unthinkable news that an asteroid is coming to crash into the Earth. Our minds instantly fill with frantic calculations, seeking hints of possible reprieve. “Lawmaker Urges Asteroid Interceptor,” reads a late-edition headline. Twenty years ago, that sentence would have been gobbledygook.

But before the comedians can leap into action and prepare a sturdy supply of witticisms with which to deal with the tragedy—in fact, the very next day—the newspapers are denying the crisis. A scientist has miscalculated.

Instant crisis, instant crisis averted. But there is no relief. We are stuck with a new, vague sense of dread as well as some lingering notions about interplanetary movement that have no value in our daily lives but that will undoubtedly crowd out some other previously held semi-useful data—like how many pints in a liter. If, in fact, there are any pints in a liter. I’ve forgotten. But I recall that the asteroid interceptor will cost $25 million. It has my vote.

The weight of utterly useless information has driven even such a respected figure as JFK confidant Pierre Salinger mad to the point of calling a press conference to warn of conspiracies and disaster—based on a bogus report he found floating through the web. How was he to know it was wrong? The Internet is, after all, the Information Superhighway.

Gerald Celente, author of Trends 2000, a book about where we are headed, was recently quoted in the Washington Post to the effect that eventually this data deluge of “nonessential essential information” will cause our creative senses to wither. Every time you start Office 98, you move closer to becoming one of Celente’s “corporate quantitative thinkers,” who require only lists, charts, numbers, and stats for satisfaction. Thus the nonbook is both the effect and the epitome of the information explosion. Two of the three books considered here are so non as to contain almost no content whatsoever. The third is a new handbook for our times.

That book is Cameron Tuttle’s witty digest, The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide: Hundreds of Things You Never Knew You Had to Worry About. The cover suggests that we should “practice defensive living,” but really there is no defense from much of what she presents. Tuttle dispenses with technical explanations, footnotes, or debate, opting instead for a numbing catalog of afflictions and conditions, possibilities and probabilities of everything that can, and surely will, go terribly, terribly wrong. Interspersed are short statistical “Fright Bites,” but the whole bite-size book is frightening.

Consider:

• If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. A long yawn can break your jawbone.

But there is good news: More people in the advertising business die on the job than those in petroleum refining.

IS ANY OF THIS TRUE? It doesn’t matter. It sounds possible. Ask Pierre Salinger. The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide is destined to keep appearing in annually updated editions.

The nonest of nonbooks is the journal. These are books that absolutely must be judged by their covers, as there is nothing else to judge. Sold mostly in art supply and stationery stores, they are sheets of blank paper between fancy, often textured, covers. They are intended to be filled with the pithy prose and/or pretty pictures of one’s life. Philipp Keel’s All About Me removes most of the guesswork involved in keeping a journal. One only has to fill in the blanks, answering his questions or choosing from a list of options he has supplied.

“With questions you not only reveal your curiosity to others, you also invite others to express their feelings, wishes, and fears,” writes Keel, in the book’s only prose.

He divides existence into categories like Opinions (“What is your opinion of the right to own guns: [ ] Pro [ ] Con”), Family (“Three things you like about your mother:”), Ego (“A special compliment that made you blush:”), Wishes and Dreams (“How you plan to spend the last years of your life:”), Sexuality (“A fantastic kisser you have known:”), If (“If you were a plant, you would be:”), Yes or No (“You like hiking, [ ] Yes [ ] No”), Measure Your Fears (“Pet a snake: [ ] You did. [ ] You would. [ ] You would not.”). And like that.

I can see how some may benefit by answering these prompts (“A friend you should not have kissed:”), but I would be afraid of anyone who handed me a completed book like this. I would be afraid if anyone found a book like this that I had completed. I would rather be struck by an asteroid.

With its deep-orange faux-alligator skin cover, The Lounge Lizard Journal is a gorgeous piece of nonness. Like All About Me, it is intended for recording one’s swinging life. A handy page of stickers is included, should you need to label anything “Swank” or “Let’s Swing.”

There are six “chapters”: The Threads, The Cocktail, The Hi-Fi, The Foxes, The Bachelor Den, and The Films, and an appendix, The Hi-Life, which lists simpatico books, web sites, bars, and drink mixes. The tiny introduction frankly states that the book is a “personal invitation to join the domain of the Rat Pack,” an enduringly impossible dream of the latter half of the 20th century.

But there is no real information about these topics, just decorative art. Much of what passes for content in Lounge is sampled—images from old ads, phrases, slogans, and quotations, some lifted from the liner notes of recent CD collections of lounge music, themselves repackagings of the past.

The compilers did venture as far back as the ’20s for Algonquin wit Robert Benchley’s line, “Let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.” They also quote the very modernly unmodern Combustible Edison’s mantra, “In all things, be fabulous.”

Mostly the pages contain only lines superimposed over a snappy design. To paraphrase eminent philosopher-naif Nigel Tufnel, how much more non can a book get? None.

At this point, the lounge revolution is more a design movement than a musical or fashion one. It persists because art directors can’t resist the lure of atomic ovals, floating boomerang shapes, and duotoned populuxe splendor. The best ’50s and ’60s design is happening right now.

Chronicle Books is very successful at repackaging this century, producing endless volumes of fetishistically gorgeous pictures of the way we wished we were and the things we used to possess or want to possess. Call it yuppie porn. Thumbing through these beautiful, empty pages, I came to believe that the only safe place to live in the world of tomorrow is yesterday.

Reprinted from Washington City Paper

State by State With the State
By the State
Hyperion, 271 pp., $10.95, paper

An American Festival of “World Capitals”
By Laura Bergheim
John Wiley, 299 pp., $14.95, paper

AMERICANS LOVE TO TRAVEL, but we frankly don’t give a damn about the rest of the world. And why should we? From sea to shining sea, a person could spend a lifetime exploring the curiosities along our blue highways and never see it all. Or learn a thing.

Which is why State By State With the State is the perfect travel guide for the Ugly American. As the subtitle explains, it is “An Uninformed, Poorly Researched Guide to the United States.” A witty celebration of ignorance, it won’t even make you feel like traveling.

A guess: The inspiration for this book was its title. Another guess: The group never left the confines of New York City&#151never left their apartments&#151to write this “guidebook” to the U.S.A.

The State is a many-person comedy troupe, none of whom is particularly distinguishable, even the lone female. Its MTV show aired during a glut of sketch-troupe shows, and seemed like just more of the same. But what was a weakness on television is a strength in print. Many similar voices blend well, while also providing a subtle variety that a single writer would likely not have achieved.

From the dedication to the utterly useless made-up index, this is nonsense, pure and simple. But the best kind of nonsense: loose, wild, and quick. Most of the items don’t even have a premise, they just start silly and riff on their own inanity. This can be an exceptionally unfunny technique, made more excruciating with length. Here, it works. The authors create a giddy mood&#151happy ignorance on holiday&#151and build on it.

The cover proudly proclaims, “Finally Without Maps!,” though there are outlines of states. The country is divided into the usual regions, and each state is given its due, either playing up stereotypes or creating fresh ones.

For instance, under “Georgia Events and Activities,” we learn that “the Georgia Film Festival runs from June 3 through July 3 and features some of Palestine, Syria, and Jordan’s finest new directors. Security is high and attendance low, so good seats are easy to come by.”

Fort Lauderdale is wonderfully described as “the French Riviera of Terrible Awfulness.”

There is a list of “Things You Don’t Overhear in a Bar in Jackson, Alabama,” that includes, “Group hug!” and “I don’t really like Charlie Daniels’ music, but, Christ, what an ass!” and “Why can’t I find me a woman like Yoko Ono?”

They don’t just pick on the easy-target South. The group offers an “Iowa-Kansas-Nebraska Weekend Romp” (for some reason trademarked): “You want to see Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, but all you have is three days? Not to worry. Just follow this plan to get the most out of the time you have. And remember: This is only a guide. Feel free to adjust the following itinerary to tailor it to your own needs. Day 1: Kansas. Day 2: Iowa. Day 3: Nebraska.”

And how does our fair city rate? Though we’ve yet to achieve statehood, Washington joins the other 50 in being pointlessly dismissed. While Republican- and Democrat-spotting and a visit to the “life-size” Lincoln Memorial are suggested, the best our town has to offer is Dunkin’ Donuts. “There’s nothing special about the ones in Washington,” the writers note, “but we think that going to Dunkin’ Donuts is special enough. (We recommend the donuts.)”

I do have a pathetic quibble with the entirely useless index. Listed is “Mxlplx, Mr.” Surely they mean Superman’s annoying visitor from another dimension, Mr. Mxyzptlk!

The section on Road Games is laugh-out-loud funny. Such time-passers as “Lick the Seat Belts,” “Try, Try to Punch My Eye,” and “What Did I Have for Lunch” may seem obvious. However, many of these games must be played using 13 20-sided dice.

You don’t read this book, you nibble at it, starting anywhere. And like the unhealthy bag of potato chips it resembles, you’ll find yourself gobbling more than you intended.

TO WRITE HER BOOK, Laura Bergheim most likely did get out of the house, if only to go the library. Though she disclaims that it is “not a scientific or comprehensive directory,” An American Festival of “World Capitals”: From Garlic Queens to Cherry Parades (A Guide to “World Capitals” of Arts, Crafts, Food, Culture, and Sport) is fairly extensive and full of useful information, for both the serious seeker of Americana and the ironic traveler out to snicker at the locals.

It’s typically American to proclaim so many “World” capitals, and then only list ones in the United States. Maybe Solvang, Calif., is the “Danish Capital of the World.” Maybe the pastries in Denmark are really lousy.

But Bergheim is an enthusiastic booster, and she presents a uncritical tour of our globe-trumping greatness. Many of the illustrations are courtesy of local Chamber of Commerces, so while Las Vegas is described as the “Entertainment Capital of the World,” don’t expect a mention of its active prostitution industry.

World Capitals is organized by category rather than by state, so those planning a trip must read the book rather than skim the contents for an itinerary. Bergheim not only lists dates for annual festivals and celebrations, but provides addresses, phone numbers, contacts, and offers recommended reading (which not surprisingly includes Charles Kuralt’s books).

Many “capitals” earned their titles over time as a result of industry developing around natural resources or local traditions spawned by immigrant or like-minded populations. More and more, capitals are self-proclaimed, awarded by local business or government eager for tourist dollars. If one expected that New York City would be the Bagel Capital, one would be wrong. That honor belongs, of course, to Matoon, Ill. Matoon is the home of the Lender’s factory. Lender’s sells a lot of frozen bagels and wants you to know it.

The text is broken up by many “Did You Know” sidebars, aimed at readers not entirely in the know, like this mention of “Lutefisk Capital U.S.A.,” Madison, Minn.: “As if the briney [sic] codfish dish weren’t famous enough, MTV viewers swallowed an unanticipated dose of fisk, courtesy of Lutefisk, the band.”

Tacit acknowledgment is made of the fact that eventually most travel will be done without leaving one’s chair. “Cyberspace Contacts” provide pointers to capital-related web sites, such as toyfarmer.com, which the Farm Toy Capital. There are four farm-toy manufacturers located in the Dyersville area. Go figure.

DESPITE THE HAPPY TONE of the book, all is not entirely peaceful in World Capital Land. There are the many rival Capitals. Watermelons and spinach have several claimants. Bergheim wisely admits that the many regional varieties of barbecue are each justly deserving. Thus Kansas City, Memphis, Texas, North Carolina, and Kentucky may all share the crown. (She also explains the Spanish roots of the word “barbecue.”)

But some of the rivalries make as little sense as what they commemorate. For some reason, Sun Prairie, Wis., believes it has more of a claim on being America’s Groundhog Capital than Punxsutawney, Pa.&#151even though their woodchuck, “Jimmy,” arrived 61 years after the justly famous Phil.

This is the dark side of Chamber of Commerce greed and provincial chauvinism. Punxsutawney’s tradition grew honestly from its German-immigrant population and natural abundance of groundhogs, and has been dutifully maintained since 1887. To think that mayoral proclamations and press releases can rewrite history is simply insulting.

Even online, Punxsutawney rules. Compare Punxsutawney’s elegant URL (www.groundhog.org) to Sun Prairie’s geeky gibberish (http://tmcweb.com/sorairie/ghog.htm). Please.

I will say this to Sun Prairie: Give it up. You’re nuts. The people of Sun Prairie are stupid idiots if they think anybody cares about their pathetic furball.

It is such pigheadedness that makes Americans so damn ugly.

Reprinted from Washington City Paper

For the Love of Cheese
Might Magazine
Boulevard Books

What NOT to Name Your Baby
Andy Meisler and Michael Rey
Ten Speed Press

Do You Remember?
Michael Gitter and Sylvie Anapol
Chronicle Books

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO LITERARY HUMOR? Anyway? Visit the humor section of any bookstore and you will not find much funny fiction. Oh, the better shops may have a Thurber collection, a Wodehouse or two, possibly a Tom Sharpe paperback. Mostly, what you will find will be recycled collections of newspaper cartoons that were barely amusing in the first place. And all 97 volumes of the “Tasteless Jokes” series.

The situation is getting worse. Paging through Publishers Weekly for upcoming releases reveals that the future of print humor is: Cats. And Dogs. These are a some of the actual titles you can expect to find filed under “Humor” in the coming season: Listening to Catnip: Stories From a Catanalyst’s Couch, Historical Cats, Bedtime Stories for Dogs, A Cat’s Christmas, Holiday Hounds: Songs for Festive Dogs, 101 Reasons Why Cats Make Great Kids. And, of course, let’s not forget Garfield, who, being both a cat and a cartoon represents the ne plus ultra of modern humor.

Ha. Ha.

Hardly anyone, it seems, is writing comical prose. And what work there is gets hidden in the overcrowded stacks of General Fiction, to be utterly ignored by everyone. It was only by happenstance that I stumbled across the funniest book of recent memory, Roddy Doyle’s hysterical The Commitments (Forget the movie, which completely missed the point, the book is a gut-buster). Likewise, the little-known works of Jay Cronley (Quick Change, Funny Farm) are routinely pushed off the shelf each time Clive Cussler releases a new volume.

Of course, who can blame an author for not wishing to have his work sandwiched between an oversize edition of For Better or Worse comics and the collected wisdom of a TV comedian.

In fact, since the death of P.G. Wodehouse, writers regularly producing amusing fiction have been scarce. Before he abandoned comic filmmaking, Woody Allen generated three slim volumes of very funny stories. He seems to have abandoned this as well.

I BLAME THIS SHIFT IN TASTE AND STYLE on the computer. (I blame everything on the computer, but that’s fodder for another day.) Compare humor styles before and after computers became ubiquitous.

In the typewriter-bound ’70s, the epitome of print humor was to be found in the National Lampoon. Though the magazine broke new ground in its use of language, attitude, and subject matter, in the main it still trafficked in the traditional form of wringing laughter from prose. If S.J. Perelman had toked up and wandered into the Lampoon offices, his material would have been welcomed. The Lampoon featured long stretches of paragraphs that one was expected to read. Chris Miller and John Hughes wrote lengthy stories with vivid characters.

By the ’80s, the Lampoon braintrust had dispersed and computers had begun appearing on desktops everywhere. Words were now to be processed. People began “interfacing” with “text,” searching and replacing and compiling backwards and forwards through their databases faster than the blink of an eye. Like ATMs replaced human interaction in the banking industry, digital thinking replaced analog. The advantages of direct access became apparent.

And so by the late ’80s, the epitome of print humor was Spy magazine. Taking a journalistic approach to comedy–or perhaps a comedic approach to journalism, the Spy editors married a sarcastic point of view with the Lexus/Nexus search engine to perfect the art of Statistical Humor. The magazine got laughs presenting the fine print in contracts. Verbatim. Transcripts of lawsuits were offered for our amusement. As USA Today had done with news, Spy condensed comedy into charts and graphs.

And it was funny. We are all now prisoners of the Information Age, and like any tyrant, our new master will be mocked. “Stories” with “characters” are relics of an agrarian age, when people had to amuse themselves around a campfire because there was no cable. In a machine-driven age, data rules. The modern humorist is a clever compiler. And so it is that the most common form of joke-telling today is the Top-Ten List.

And besides, as Chauncey Gardner agreed, “Who has time to read?”

All of which leads, finally, to the books at hand, which are largely list books. And, largely, funny.

What NOT to Name Your Baby (Ten Speed Press, Berkeley. 64 pp.) is perhaps the most noteworthy, because it accomplishes the most with the least. It is in fact merely a listing of names, with ’50s-era photos of babies in distress completing the illusion of an actual baby-naming book. Some names are intrinsically funny (Jor-el, Hortense), but authors Meisler and Rey have not merely slapped together a haphazard collection of ridiculous nomenclature. Working through the list reveals a fine and subtle agenda at work. In the girls section, Dee Dee, Gennifer, and Hillary share an uneasy proximity. Then the improbable Soon-Yi pops up. Kathie Lee might at one time have been perfectly acceptable–no more. La Toya, of course, was never a good choice. Likewise, in the boys section, we find the absurd Axl. But the eye almost passes completely by Orenthal before realization hits.

THIS BOOK PROVIDES A REAL SERVICE, though, when it suggests that no future baby girl should have to go through life as “Kennedy.”

For the Love of Cheese (Boulevard Books, 140 pp. $12) is subtitled, “A Celebration of All Things Cheesy; A Celebration of Life Itself!” Assembled by the editors of Might magazine, this is not a cookbook, but a report on “the very cement that holds this nation together.” Their cheese, like this country, is “everything big and flashy and shiny and squishy.”

There are grades of Might-style cheese. “Velveeta” is typical and tacky and “too obvious to care much about (Animal sidekick movies, fuzzy dice, white shoes, early Bette Midler). “Dorky” is a slight step up, but more to be pitied than scorned (Fern bars, Pictionary, screen savers). “Evil” cheese makes us shudder (being a vegetarian who only eats “chicken and fish,” car commercials that pretend that their assembly line workers love their jobs, Al D’Amato).

But the cheese that Cheese is most concerned with is “Supracheese.” Cheesy, but also fun, it is the “cheese we all share.” Cheese is not an attack on “big-hair-mall-rat-semi-suburban-morons.” The authors bravely admit, “It’s us.”

In tiny, tiny print, three columns to a page, the compilers insightfully sum up so much of the current condition in short, simple phrases. Their “Linnaean taxonomy” includes “Going Out Cheese” (dancing in front of the mirror naked, dancing in front of the mirror fully clothed, dancing in front of the mirror trying out a new dance, practicing your smile, practicing your laugh, putting a condom in your wallet “just in case”), “Political Cheese” (calling yourself a technocrat), “Corporate Cheese” (colored paperclips, the “I-don’t-know-what-to-say-to-you-because-I’ve-already-said-good-morning” smile and wink, employee discount clubs), “Sports Cheese” (Mascots, mascot antics, mascots frolicking with other mascots, mascots doing push-ups, mascots doing push-ups but then giving up after a few, ha ha), “Being in a Rock Band Cheese” (Closing your eyes while you sing; the “no-chicks-at-practice” rule; pointing to someone in the audience; being big in Japan), and many, many more.

An impressive work, but not entirely new. Steve Miller was on to the same thing when he shouted during the fade-out of his 1968 song, “Living in the U.S.A.,” “Somebody give me a cheeseburger!”

Do You Remember? (Chronicle Books, 144 pp $9.95) is funny insofar as one has a sense of humor about oneself. A compendium of pop culture icons, images, slogans, catchphrases, and fads, it catalogs decades of silliness–mostly Boomer-related, but also covering important talismans of Gen-X vintage: “Right foot yellow!,” “Cassius Clay,” “Jarts,” “Dyn-O-Mite!” Boldly designed, it would be an attractive coffee table book, except that it measures only 6 1/2 inches square.

The most useful aspect of Do You Remember is its index. How helpful it would be to have this one-stop guide to the fancies of the last 40 years digitized on a CD-ROM, where it could be searched at the click of a button. A serious lapse on the part of the publishers. This is, after all, the computer age. Print, as the great scientific genius Egon Spengler noted, is dead.

Reprinted from Washington City Paper

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