My Golden Treasury of Eyestrain!

Because I'm turning forty this year and I'm not about to take up physical activity, I have set out to read 75 books in 2009.

I've tried to read books that "count", thorny books I've been meaning to read but were intimidated by.

I'm at around 54 right now, and I'm working on two right now, Fooled by Randomness and The Trouble with Testosterone.

Here's everything I've knocked down to date:

A Few Seconds of Panic (A journalist attempts to be a professional placekicker in the NFL)

Polyphemus (Creepy short stories)

Alan's War The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope (Lovely Biographic Graphic Novel)

Burma Chronicles (Graphic Novel the author's experiences living in Burma)

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers
(Leszek Kolakowski)

The Wasp Factory (Disturbing novel)

The Beautiful Struggle (Lyrical autobiography of an African American guy who blogs for the Atlantic)

The Spiritual Tourist (British journalist investigates various Gurus)

The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (Book about the various factions within Middle Eastern politics)

Understanding Comics (Nice meditation on the art of Comics)

City of Glass The Graphic Novel (Graphic Novel version of Paul Auster's crazy novel)

Cults In Our Midst (Book about scary cults!!)

Rum, Sodomy & the Lash (33 1/3) (Slim little book about the Pogues album)

The Borscht Belt (History and anecdotes from the Borscht Belt from Joey Adams, old school Jewish stand-up comedian and tummler)

Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Cranky rant from a conservative German political scientist)

Myth and Reality (Mythic vs. reality-based temporal experiences. The author, Mircea Eliade, makes a roman a clefy appearance in Saul Bellows' Ravelstein as a pro-fascist crank)

Every Force Evolves a Form (Really, really good collection of essay written by Guy Davenport. Amazing stylist.)

Feet of Clay (Pathology of Gurus. I was on a cult jag.)

The structure of scientific revolutions (Many people talk about this book. I decided to read it. Painful.)

Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Airy Fairy book about Japanese aesthetics. Probably a good bathroom books for homes with an abundance of potpourri and smelly candles)

Nixonland (A doorstop of a book about the rise of Nixon)

Truth About the Irish (Terry Eagleton. Pretty slight but funny)

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (Really good book about internal Iranian politics by an Iranian American guy)

Moonshine (OH MY GOD. Great book. Author hangs out with a revenue agent, busting moonshiners. Alec Wilkinson is the author)

Noodling for flatheads (Author examines various curiosities of Southern American culture, such as eating squirrel brains. Funny book.)

Something Wonderful Right Away (Oral history of the Compass Players, the forerunner to Second City and various improv comedy troops)

catapult: harry and I build a siege weapon (Two guys build a catapult. Better than it sounds)

The Devil We Know (More Iran. Not as fun to read as the Ayatollah book above)

Your Name Here (POEMTRY, John Ashbury.)

A Childhood: A Biography of Place (Hair raising memoir of a Georgia childhood)

The Wisdom of Doubt (Exhaustive philosophical apologia of religious doubt)

Moral Minority (The Founding Father were children of the Enlightenment and skeptics.)

Patriotism and Other Mistakes (Various essays by George Taleb about various aspects of public life)

Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson's look at the invention of nationalism)

Marriage, a History (See title)

Boys on the Bus (Journalists are bored and drink a lot during the McGovern campaign in '72)

Jesus Interrupted (Book about inconsistencies in the New Testament)

Being Good: An Introduction to Ethics (See title)

Creationists (Forgettable collection of essays by by E.L. Doctorow)

TWELVE YEARS An American Boyhood in East Germany (Great book by James Agee's son, who grew up in East Germany)

Veeps (Funny survey of American Vice Presidents)

On Being Certain (Neurologist and physician posits that the feeling of certainty has nothing to do with outward reality)

The Devil's Candy (Book about the film version of Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities")

The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up (Great book about misfits in modern CHina. Sort of like a studs terkel book)

Politics of the Governed (Partha Chattergee's rejoinder to the Benedict Anderson book referred to above. Newly emergent post-colonial democracies are missing an opportunity when they attempt to emulate the institutions of former colonial powers.)

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace (Believing LA TImes reporter covers religion, and is subsequently grossed out.)

Inventing American History (Boston Review Books) (Three slender essays about how popular history is tweaked and glossed over in order to serve national mythologies)

The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture
(Okay, I sort of ended up with this one in a roundabout way.

At my last on-site freelance assignment, there is a pretty good little bookstore nearby where'd I'd peruse the shelves during my lunch break.

I was poking around in the philosophy section, looking at shelf after shelf of books whose titles I couldn't understand when I came across something called Slavoj Zizek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction. I'm a begrudging fan of Zizek, mainly because he can be funny and he's as pragmatic as a crazed Marxist can get, and I'd imagine he'd have an interesting take on Mao.

I pick up the volume, and I see that all Zizek did was write an introductory essay to Mao's On Practice and Contradiction. And who the hell wants to read Mao?

So I note the title of Zizek's essay "Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule" and decide to Google it when I get back to the office. Sure enough, it's there in it's entirety. I print up for the train ride home.

Interesting essay. Lays the foundation for an expensive future visit to Amazon. But one strange little passage sticks with me (Read it. It's long but weird):

"Mao's speculations closely echo the so-called "bio-cosmism," the strange combination of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality which formed occult shadow-ideology, the obscene secret teaching, of the Soviet Marxism. Repressed out of the public sight in the central period of the Soviet state, bio-cosmism was openly propagated only in the first and in the last two decades of the Soviet rule; its main theses are: the goals of religion (collective paradise, overcoming of all suffering, full individual immortality, resurrection of the dead, victory over time and death, conquest of space far beyond the solar system) can be realized in terrestrial life through the development of modern science and technology. In the future, not only will sexual difference be abolished, with the rise of chaste post-humans reproducing themselves through direct bio-technical reproduction; it will also be possible to resurrect all the dead of the past (establishing their biological formula through their remains and then re-engendering them - at that time, DNA was not yet known...), thus even erasing all past injustices, "undoing" past suffering and destruction."

WHAT. THE. FONZI.?

COSMISM! Sound like a worthy candidate for my book buying dollars! Red zombies!

Now, it just so happens about a year ago I went through a Stalinism phase, because who hasn't, right? (Note: I was not an actual Stalinist. I was just interested in that period in Russian history, okay?) One of the books I picked up was a strange, very interesting book called New Myth, New World From Nietzsche to Stalinism, which made that case that Soviet ideology in the twenties and thirties ripped off a lot of ideas from Nietzsche, while at the same time holding him up as reactionary boogie man. (In the same order I also picked up the excellent Everyday Stalinism. If you're interested in Russian or Soviet history, this is a good 'un.)

Amazon very thoughtfully recommended The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture when I was purchasing my crazy Nietzche book (same author!), and the name stuck with me (I didn't buy it at the time because it seemed creepy and I had yet to stumble across the madness that is Cosmicism).

So I Googled The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture and did a search of the index, and yep, you got your dang Cosmicism right 'chair. So I bought it.

And it's good! It's a multi-disciplinary collection of essays by various scholars and it traces different aspects of Soviet ideology, philosophy of science, and aesthetics to different strains of pre-revolutionary Russian folk mysticism, Theosophy, masonry, Mysticism, etc.

Funny how the mind wanders, isn't it?)


Cultural Amnesia (Exhaustive book of biographical essays about various folks, which, in sum, prove that the author Clive JAmes is way smarter than me.)

Occidentalism (The "Occident" in this case being liberal democracy and Enlightenment values. The authors trace the history of anti-liberalism through Imperial Japan, Germany, Russia, Zionism and various strains of Islamism. Interesting book.)

Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years (Michael Palin. Duller than one would think)

The Waste Books (Many, many aphorisms written by 18th century German person, Georg Lichtenberg)

In Praise of Barbarians (Disappointing collection of shrill essays written by Mike Davis, who wrote the excellent City of Quartz.

Who Hates Whom (Breezy book about ethnic hatred and modern warfare)


After January 1st, I think I'm never, ever going to read ever again.

I'm calling you out, Harriet Klausner.

In your reign as the #1 reviewer at Amazon.com has been a little too smug, a little too righteous, a little too goddamn long.

Someone needs to stop you. And that someone is me. So some would say that the fact you've reviewed 15178 books means something, like you are too crazy and too focused to be taken down by a mope like me. Some would point to your claim of reading two books a day as evidence of some unworldly singlemindedness. Well, some people are bed wetting babies.

I'm taking your shit down, Harriet.

True, I've only posted 45 reviews, and you, like goddamn crazy maniac cat lady, have posted over fifteen thousand. And true, some of my reviews are for lesser stars in the Amazon universe, and some aren't what you'd call sincere.

But listen to me now, dollface, I've been only playing up until now. I'm the 10,693rd highest ranked reviewer, considering that's out of 75 BILLION customers, that's not too shabby. If I apply myself, there is no goddamn reason in creation that you won't feel my hot breath on your heels come April.

You make me angry, Harriet. Angry and driven.

I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my keyboard sleep in my hand, till I have kicked Harriet's ass, on the fields of Amazon.com.

HALF-REMEMBERED REVIEWS...

...in which I, Greg, render opinions on things which I mostly draw a blank on.

QUARK

TV Show (Sci Fi Comedy)

Year: 1979?

Half-remembered plot points: Richard Benjamin is the frustrated captain of a space garbage scow, who takes orders from a giant floating head with sort of a big gay moustache. I seem to remember some blond bimbo twins being involved. Then again, they’re were a lot twin blond bimbos on TV back in the day. Was Buck Henry the creator?

Review: I think I liked it, and I have a vague sense that my dad might have liked it to. Or he might have hated it. I don’t remember.


ARK II

TV Show (Crap live action kid show)

Year: 1979?

Half-remembered plot points: Some kind of ecological disaster plunges society into a medieval existence, and superstition takes sway across the land. Some scientists have somehow remained all scientific and what not and roam the countryside in a tricked out van, educating about hygiene and the scientific method. I remember the head scientist looking a little like Harry Nilsson and that a chimp was somehow involved.

Review: I think I liked it. It sounds unbelievably stupid now, of course. But I’m pushing 40.


BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES

Film (Well, a movie anyway)

Year: ??? ’75?

Half-remembered plot points: A bunch of bald, pale people who all look like Donald Pleasence live underground live underground and they worship an ICBM. I think the final scene is the Earth floating in space and a narrator intoning: “Earth, the green planet, is dead.” This creeped me out. Don’t recall what the Apes got up to.

Review: I think it really gave me the heebie jeebies. Although I saw it to the end, so I must have liked it somewhat. Curious enough to watch it on late night TV, if I have insomnia and nothing else is on.


HORROR EXPRESS? HORROR TRAIN? HORROR SOMETHING?

Film

Year: Your guess is as good as mine.

Half-remembered plot points: Rasputin is a zombie with glowing red eyes aboard the Trans-Siberian express. Features Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing!

Review: Based on the fragment I remember, Rasputin clawing his way through the snow with glowing red eyes, it must have been either very creepy or really stupid. I’m guessing stupid. I also suspect it was an Italian production. It has that vibe. Points for the Lee/Cushing pairing.


BA-BA BLACKSHEEP

TV Show

Year: ’77?

Half-remembered plot points: Robert Conrad stars as Pappy Boyington, a Navy lieutenant who leads a rag-tag Corsair fighter squadron off some godforsaken atoll during WWII. Used a lot of cool WWII stock footage shot from actual fighter cockpits. Pappy Boyington has a pet Bull terrier. Peter Frampton guess starred in an episode, sporting a historically suspect shag cut. Each show started with some scrolling type about something deep about courage or perseverance or some sort of lofty crap, while a military chorus sang “We are poor little lambs/Who have lost their way/Ba-Ba-Baaaaa.” FUCK YES!

Review: Oh, come ON! It’s a goddamn World War II show! How could it not be good? The only way to improve on it would be to somehow get a Nazi u-boat pack over to the South Pacific.


HUNTING LODGE/ “Fire the Tribal Warning Shot” 12”

Vinyl 12” single

Year: 1986

Half-remembered plot points: Matt Woodruff invited me over to his house and we drank his mom’s schnapps. He put this on the turntable and we listened mutely to a guy grunting “Fire the Tribal Warning Shot” over tribal drums for ten minutes. I puked.

Review: At the time I probably thought is was deep, but now I suspect puking was probably the best response.


WHAT IS THIS?/ “SQUEEZED”

5 song EP cassette

Year: 1984

Half-remembered plot point: Was the first band of original Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak. Sort of LA New Wave, sort of like that band that sang that song about being on a Mexican radio. Wall of Voodoo?

Review: I played the shit out of one song, an instrumental that sounded like a song a New Wave band would be playing in a New Wave bar on Miami Vice. I think I wouldn’t like it.


SOME SHITTY POSEUR BAND/THE BATTERIES/THE UPTONES

Live Show at The Palladium in San Francisco. Or was it The Stone?

Year: 1985

Half-remembered plot point: An all-ages show in San Francisco. My first or second concert?

Review: The first band with the unremembered name (Secret Affair? That might have been a crappy UK Mod band actually. More about Mod bands below)featured this sort of fey James Brown looking dude and a keyboardist with a unibrow and giant bleached orange fuzzy Jean Beauvoir Mohawk. People threw beer cups at ‘em. The guy with the Mohawk had some kind of attitude problem and nudged me on the way to the bar. I slapped the back of his head.
Don’t remember any of the songs.

The Batteries featured a guy who looked like Keith from the Prodigy as lead singer, and a chubby guitarist who alternately nodded and shook his head in time to the music throughout their set. One song chorus went like this “Radio, radio/Got no soul”. Beyond that, I’m at a loss.

I remember the Uptones being great, and I picked up their EP a couple months later. They were sort of a ska-ish sort of band, with horns and pork pie hats. Now I’d probably hate them.


MODS MAYDAY (Compilation)

Vinyl LP

Year: 1986

Half-remembered plot point: My friend John was a mod, replete with a parka, Fred Perry everything and a little blue Vespa. Why American suburbanites jumped on an archaic British youth movement is a mystery left to the ages, I’m a afraid. This LP was a loner from John.

Review: Holy shit, did this one suck. Dull music, poorly played and recorded through a burlap bag. A bunch of English people singing about having sex on Vespas, while any asshole knows that English people singing about the death of Bela Lugosi is the shit.


LIQUID SKY

Film

Year: 198?

Half-remembered plot point: Something about Alien vampires feeding on the orgasm of Heroin addicts, or something. The lead roles, a man and woman, are both played by one person, a woman. I remember when the man uses a urinal in the film, the actress unloads the character’s junk like he’s carrying a bowling ball in his trousers. Stand out scene features a shrill woman who looks like Ricky Lee Jones reciting a poem about a beat box.

Review: Was baffled and pissed off. Probably would just be pissed off at this point. Vaguely remember being disappointed there was no nudity.


THE INFECTIOUS GROOVE/THE SUGARCUBES

Live Show, Loco Ranchero, San Luis Obispo, California

Year: 1993ish

Half-remembered plot point: I think I had a fight with my girlfriend that night.

Review:Infectious Grooves were hideous. They are actually most of the guys from Suicidal Tendencies playing 3rd P-Funk. Abyssmal.

The Sugarcubes were amazing. Bjork was roaring like a kid in full tantrum mode, and the bassist was wearing a baseball cap that read “Stoned”. Great! I saw Einar in the mens toilet, arranging his hair with a wet comb right before. Also great.


KING KONG/GUS THE FOOTBALL MULE

Double Feature, Festival Cinemas, Walnut Creek, California

Year: 1976

Half-remembered plot points:My first cinema experience was apparently Herbie the Love Bug, but I don’t remember it. This odd pairing is my first memory of sitting in a cinema. The King Kong was the Jessica Lange/Jeff Bridges version. I just remember Kong in the cargo hold of the ship going back to New York and feeling rather bummed for the ape. Too young to appreciate Jessica Lange’s semi-topless scene in the jungle. “Gus” was the story of an Austrian mule that is trained by his teenaged owner to kick soccer balls. Somehow the pair come to America and win the big game for some sadsack Gridiron football team.

Review: I remember the movie theater being dark and loud. King Kong was great, Gus so-so.


BIG JOHN, LITTLE JOHN

TV SHOW (Crap Live Action Kids Show)

Year: 1975?

Half-remembered plot points: Something about a grade school teacher who finds the fountain of youth and drinks from it, but it only works half the time. Thus, Big John will morph into Little John (the child version of himself), usually at comically inopportune times. One episode involved somebody stealing cookies. The actor that played Big John was a regular on the Golden Girls years later.

Review: The theme song (“Big John! Little John! Something, something SIZE!”) was fucking genius, and I recall this being Saturday morning appointment television. I’m at a loss as to what drove my passion for such a patently retarded premise. Maybe it was because I was six.

Another review up over at Radar. Also: a deperate plea.

This stuff is kicking my ass.


The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice

By Greil Marcus
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

At first blush, pop Zarathustra Greil Marcus's latest book, The Shape of Things to Come, looks like something cooked up by a Sarah Lawrence undergrad in an end-of-term panic. According to Marcus, America exists only as a cultural construct coalesced from the words of our national prophets—people like Martin Luther King, Philip Roth, David Lynch, John Dos Passos, Pere Ubu's Dave Thomas, and ... Bill Pullman(!). But while showing us how to unlock the mystery of America by loading up an Amazon shopping cart, Marcus manages a wild-eyed grandeur that out-argues any co-ed essay. Analyzing these prophets' works, from the conflicted professor of The Human Stain to the menacing, eyebrowless dwarf of Lost Highway, Marcus gains insight into the nature of these United States: America doesn't really exist, at least not as other nations exist. Rather, the country is a collection of vanguard ideas, weirdo prophetic narratives that come to life when you and your neighbors invest in them. The book is a rambling mess—but it's a beautiful and seductive one.
—Greg Mills

The desperate plea is this: If anyone out there owns a CD copy of The Screaming Blue Messiah's Gun Shy, could you burn it for me? It's out of print, it's a great CD and I can only find it for a gazillion dollars. So, anyone? Leave a comment in, uh, comments.

My first review is up.

I've been a busy bastard, being overwhelmed by the demands of non-blogging and whatnot.
Family things have been beserk -- the wife is working entirely too hard, Ruby started kindergarten, and Owen is getting his tonsils out next week. Too much for a such a shallow doofus such as myself to handle.

My first reviews are up over at the newly launched Radar Online. The books I reviewed are

My Life as a Furry Red Monster: What Being Elmo Has Taught Me About Life, Love, and Laughing Out Loud and Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11. Of course the rest of the site is very funny and snarky.

Also, I just produced some kind-of-fucked-up web videos for a large client. I'll try to post them next week. One involves a couple of live beavers, while another involves an elevator being filled with snakes. (A rip off? You decide.)

Currently the worst selling book on Amazon US

The LCSH Century: One Hundred Years With the Library of Congress Subject Headings System.

Currently the 4,566,718th most popular book. I'm thinking of getting it, just because it's so sad.

The worst selling music CD currently in stock is something called
That'll Flat Git It Vol. 18, at #802,568. Apparently the previous 17 volumes covered as much as anyone ever wanted to git.

Sex, Solid Fuel Rockets, and L. Ron Hubbard.

ATTENTION ASAIM USERS LOOKING FOR SEX FILMS: THERE ARE NONE HERE. CALL YOUR MULLAH, YOU FILTHY BEAST.

Just read an interesting book:
Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons.

It’s the true story of the high school dropout who helped launched the space program, John Parsons. But this is no fuck-up does good and become Lee Iacocca bullshit. Parsons was a WACKO, as well as an interesting footnote in the history of religious chicanery, serving as a bridge between the Victorian Old World flim- flam of Aleister Crowley and the Space Age Yankee flim-flam of L. Ron Hubbard (who makes a last act appearance as a dastardly villain, fleeing on yacht with Parson’s lady and a good chunk of his life savings.)

Parson blew up sheds in and around Cal Tech by day, and ran a Gnostic free love freakshow in an old Pasadena mansion by night. (LA was very, very weird in the forties. Full of racial strife, institutionalized corruption and flakely cults. The more things change...) Parson was Crowley’s man in LA, running the local temple of Crowley’s order, the OTO. He was also one of the underappreciated international network of amateurs that ushered in the rocket age.

Rockets were written off by the scientific establishment as goony kids stuff, not worthy of study, especially as propulsion for spacecraft. Some physicists, who should have known better, even argued rockets would not work in a vacuum.

It was only through the efforts of a bunch of obsessed misfits existing outside academia that the US eventually had any sort of rocket program. The Nazis, on the other hand, became very very interested in what their nerds were up to rocket-wise and as a result 3,000 V2s later rained on London and Rotterdam. Rockets worked.

The sadly ironic result for Parsons is that once rocketry became respectable, weirdos like him were pushed aside for degreed professionals. While his grab-ass little posse of pyros eventually became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Parson ended his life in an accidental explosion, blowing himself to smithereens mixing up demolition effects for a movie studio.

What’s interesting is watching Hubbard, at the time a fairly successful Sci-Fi writer, out-Crowley Crowley, creating a global religion with not a little cribbing from Crowley’s playbook. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp (Conan’s co-creator) even make a brief appearance to comment on the audacity of their fellow pulp-spieler.

It’s the prose is a bit dry, but the subject matter more than makes up for it. As soon as you’re done rereading Princess Daisy, give it a spin.

A shattering read.

Below you'll find some Amazon reviews for various Family Circus books written by your truly. They were all taken down. I can't imagine why. I received many, many helpful ratings.


I Just Dropped Grandma! (Family Circus) by BIL KEANE

Edition: Paperback Price: $3.50

Availability: This item is currently unavailable.

7 used from $2.00

A gentle exploration of the politics of mercy killing,March 23, 2005

I revisited 'I dropped Grandma!!'recently, just afterdevouring Keane's 'It stings, Mom, it stings!' and I was instantly reminded of the humanity of the early Keane, before he took up with Erza Pound.

'I droppedGrandma!!!' is an epic, Dickensian story, a didactic old-fashioned tale of love and loss that speaks to both the most basic human dilemmas and contentious contemporary subjects.

Keane writes with an absurdist aplomb that brings laughter up from the diaphragm like so many bad oysters. PJ's appearance here is a delight-- winsome and true. Without revealing too much, one scene in particular warmed cockles I never knew I had-- let me just say the combination of a dazed grandma,a pillow case full of lead shot and an uncooperative blanket sleeper is a madcap cocktail that will leave you incontinent from laughter.

'I droppedGrandma!!!!!!' is an exquisite novel, one that made me reconsider my notions of death, loyalty and the sanctity of a sealed urn.

A shattering read.

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Grandma Was Here by BIL KEANE
Edition: Paperback Price: $3.99
Availability: This item is currently unavailable. 33 used from $0.78
The thriller that will chill yer to the bones. , March23, 2005

Picture: a girl of 6, let's call her Dolly. She's in a dusty attic, trying to stash a forbidden Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers from her tyrannical father, Pastor Bil. She finds a loose board and finds...the photos. Her grandmother Thelma, string of pearls sparkling, standing next to Pol Pot...on a pyramid of human skulls.

So starts this summer's must read thriller. Dolly criss crosses the globe, searches for clues as to just who this woman "Grandma" really is. The arc of her journey takes us to torch lit SS orgies, a pit of deadly poisonous Black Mambas in Jim Nabor's secluded island retreat, underground brises, scrapbook parties, and a final confrontation with Thelma... and her army of deadly gibbons. Read it at the beach, read it at the dentist, read it under a bush. JUST READ IT!!!!!

A shattering read.

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What Does This Say? by BIL KEANE

Edition: Paperback Price: $15.00

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

The face of G_D has horn rimmed glasses. March 23,2005

It's not for nothing that everything we do, see, feel,smell, eat, shave, grope, dilate these days is described as Keanian. Bil Keane is the grandfather of really just about everything, and this book, this"What Does This Say?" (to even try to name such an entity as this with the crude of human language is theheight of folly. But that's marketing for you.) breaks it all down for you.

It reads like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem crossed with the libretto of"Cabaret". It's also a great distillation of everything everywhere, and gosh darn it if it doesn't make you chuckle.

"What's Do This Say?" deals with the epic rise and fall of Dolly and PJ, as they kill a hobo for kicks, get VD, fight a bear in a cave, and spend a fortnight camping with Uncle Roy in Bimini.Great stuff! If you like reality as it is practiced in this particular domain of spacetime, then give it up for Keane!

Truly, this is a shattering read.
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The Family Circus by Bil Keane

Edition: Paperback Price: $9.71

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

6 used from $10.10

Keane: Apologist for NIHILISM!!!!!!, March 23, 2005

Keane finally went for it with this one: a full frontal assault against propriety and "taste".

Because of his extreme sensitivity to the absurd and grotesque in human affairs, Billy Keane, protagonist of this masterpiece of decadence has estranged himself from society and savors the most bizarre aspects of human existence in his quest for novelty.

Tired of life in these vulgar times, Billy reject everything that is "natural" and concentrates on pure sensation and artifice. His attempts at contemplative solitude are comically foiled by the antic of his polyamorous siblings and the amyl nitrate induced rages of paterfamilias Bil. Mirth turns to smoldering lust upon the arrival ofUncle Roy, dark moustachioed Lord of Misrule that invites Billy to finally commit totally to the realm of the senses (and eat a lot of ice cream!).

A shattering read.

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Daddy's Cap Is on Backwards by BIL KEANE

Edition: Paperback

Price: $3.99

Availability: This item is currently unavailable.

3 used from $19.87

I want to Keane to stop. Yet I want Keane to take us deeper, March 23, 2005

In Keane's "Daddy's Cap Is On Backwards", we are sucked into a firestorm of sick inducing satire of theblackest sort. Will his brood of tiny sociopath Blackbeards successfully shatter the paper thin eggshell of Bil's sanity by insisting his forward directed hat is in fact backwards, while their backward directed hats are forward?

Like his spiritual father Nabokov, Keane is not above cruelly toying with his characters like a house cat with a wounded vole. In this volume, Keane broadens his cruelty so it encompasses his reader as well.Keane takes us through a topsy-turvy hall of mirrors in a pomo tour de force that would make an MLA conference attendee bleed from her eyes.

Is Bil the Author also Bil the Protagonist/Victim? Does the book's phantasmagoric horror mirror unholy themes that trouble the real life Keane family? Keane flays himself open, yet in the end we are all victims. And we are perhaps all equally culpable? Ambiguity abounds in this tome.

A shattering read.