مع السلامة (ma’a salama) melting pot. さよなら (sayonara), salad bowl. America is an omnibus of purple prose bound in balding eagle skin.
We’re talking primo leather from a batty bird who steals hot dogs from kids at ballparks. True story. ((Not a BORN FREEagle mugging on a ride-or-die Clutch album. (Book of Bad Decisions, 2018. Photo by Dan Winters, danwintersphoto.com. Gallery recs: “Works on Paper: Cold War” and “Constructions.”) And not some early bird crunching half-frozen fish bait for gonzo wildlife photographers. (See *“Photographic Memories,”* by Dale O’Dell, daleodell.photoshelter.com. Gallery recs: “The Secret Martian Expedition of 1950” and “Tales of Loneliness.”))) Look, the Cascade Raptor Center in Eugene, Oregon, does great work. It’s not their fault sombunall bald eagles are jerks.^[The turkey vulture: now there’s a noble bird. Properly glabrous, too.]
Bald eagles aren’t listed as endangered today, but the details of that DDT/soft eggs nightmare are so horrifying they get a pass. How about the skin of a less-benign species of Least Concern…?
On to the Necronomicon!
As much as I want to stare into the abyss of “H.P. Lovecraft and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Elder God,” ((Whatever doomed writer steals this, please shoehorn in SD/chibi shoggoths.)) you can’t blame him for human-skin-bound-book lore. Best as I(nternet) can tell, that’s from “Evil Dead.”
The technical term is “anthropodermic biblipegy”—but, c’mon, gatekeeping with these-are-just-everyday-descriptive-words from Greek and Latin is the domain of doctors, lawyers, and Hogwarts professors.^[And yoga instructors, though they’re stretching Sanskrit via Hindi. See Aleister Crowley’s “Eight Lectures on Yoga.”] There’s a thing called The Anthropodermic Book Project, a quartet of professionals who test such claims. Their count, last updated April of 2024, is fifty-one books with alleged human skin covers, thirty-two tested, and eighteen confirmed as legit. But they’re on hiatus. Too bad; they’re clear, if wordy, science communicators.^[anthropodermicbooks.org/about/the-science]
But you can’t judge a book by its cover, no matter how titivated or titillating. It’s how it performs in the sheets that counts.
On to the Great American Novel!
SPOILER ALERT!: The following mini-listicle comes from a “dynamic list” on a Wikipedia article.^[Still patronizing A.I.-integrated search engines? It’s your cognitive funeral.] These are potshots at the ones I’m pretty sure I read or at least skimmed the captions in the “Great Illustrated Classics” editions. ((My wife remembers a version of “Around the World in Eighty Days” or somesuch that resexed the canon to include a female protagonist. Here’s her imagining the publisher bragging about the sex change to his wife: “Hey, Francine, look at this. I put s’more tits in there just for you, sweetheart! You want some equality? There you go! I got your interests at heart! So am I takin’ you to dinner or what?”))
Short reviews of Great American Novel candidates I qualified in the preceding paragraph:
- “The Scarlet Letter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Everybody fucks.
- “Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville: Whales, too, but not quickly enough to keep up with whaling.
- “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe: Slavery is bad. Ditto for stereotyping.
- “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain: The South be cray cray.
- “The Red Badge of Courage,” by Stephen Crane: War kinda sucks.
- “The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Green light on these assholes.
- “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck: Life’s a bitch and then you breastfeed some rando. Thanks, America.
- “The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger: Shut up, whiner. ((On the other hand, his short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is haunting and casts two incidents in Catcher in a very different light.))
- “Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov: I hatehatehate that this book is so good.
- “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee: Only in Mayberry.
- “American Psycho,” by Bret Easton Ellis: Yeah, that squares.
- “Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace: Great except for the footnotes and parts about rehab and tennis.
All worthwhile, but something’s missing… Where’s the inter-generational trauma? The outsider vs. the establishment? The literal little guy vs. the literal big guy? What about transgressions, spectacles, gun violence, sideshows, and strip clubs? Where’s the elective surgery, exploitation of children, and the insidious spirit of entrepreneurship? And cults? And explosions?
Page for page, Katherine Dunn’s “Geek Love” is packed with more America and Americana than any of those. My favorite book, hands down.^[IYKYK.]
But maybe there’s no need to distill America(s) into a single book when we can enjoy them by volume.
On to omnibuses!
I mostly read on A4, two pages a side, double-sided, printed on a laser jet printer. Had to ditch my library when I ditched the States. But a handful of tombs made the cut as makeshift décor, Zoom background fodder, computer trays, and doorstops.
Partial reviews of four omnibuses
- “The Best of Raymond Chandler,” by Raymond Chandler (Chancellor Press, 1985): Font size a little small. Paper adequate thickness and prone to yellowing. It kicks the second Philip Marlowe story, “Farewell My Lovely,” to the end and dubs it “the spiciest Chandler of all,” which, as far as I can tell, refers to the racial slurs. Missing my favorite, “The Little Sister.”
- “The Art of Eating,” by M.F.K. Fisher (Harvest, 2004): Lovely transfer of classy, historical font. Slightly slippery paper. Sections of the war-time primer, “How to Cook a Wolf,” may prove useful.
- “The Books of Earthsea,” by Ursula K. Le Guin (Saga Press, 2018): Beautiful illustrations by Charles Vess. Eminently readable font and size. Lovely paper. Ged sleeps a lot. A medically concerning amount, actually. “Tehanu” saves the series, though.
- “The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels,” by Patrick O’Brian (HarperCollins, 2016): I don’t own this. Font’s too small. Paper’s too thin. I lug around all twenty of the twenty-one Norton hardbacks; they’re cheap, adequate, and you can make a little fort out of them. The only OG British version floating around is number fifteen, “Clarissa Oakes,” which I requisitioned on principle. It was renamed “The Truelove” in the States, perhaps because they thought no one would buy a nautical historical novel named after a woman. For shame, Norton, for shame. (“Mind if I smoke?” “I don’t care if you burn.”)
On to the end!
More than two dozen countries have red, white, and blue flags. That’s hardly imaginative. Time for a makeover, America! Mix those colors and what do you get: purple!^[Well, magenta, if you’re mixing light, not pigment, but since when was light-displaying technology important?] As of today('s Wikipedia search), there are only a handful of countries with purple on their flags, and most of those only include it as part of a rainbow. ((Having said that, the purple parrot on Dominca’s flag is quite fetching and the principles behind the partly purple rebel flag of Saint-Dominigue from the Haitian Revolution and the Anarcha-feminism flag are both, ahem, part of a healthy, open-minded diet for freethinkers who don’t outlaw ideas or criminalize flag burning, hint-hint, wink-wink.))
This is too good an opportunity to pass up. Here, a mock-up in JS Paint:
There you go, America, a brand new flag! Happy birthday! Who loves ya, baby? ((Choose your own Death By Stereo soundtrack! Outraged: “5th of July”; Hopeful: “Desperation Train”; Defiant: “Sing Along With The Patriotic Punks.”))