The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days by Ian Frazier

If you read The New Yorker, you're familiar with Frazier -- he's been writing short comic pieces (collected in books like Coyote V. Acme and Dating Your Mom) and longer reportage (which grew into books like Travels in Siberia and Great Plains) for them for several decades now. And if you still read it, you've probably encountered the Cursing Mommy, a conceit that Frazier's spun out into four or five of those short comic pieces over the past couple of years. (Despite the fact that it certainly seems like a one-note premise -- young mother, attempting to be Martha Stewart-esque and do something domestic, gets more and more frustrated as things fail to work and erupts in swearing as the whole project falls to pieces.)

It didn't look like the best material to stretch into a novel, honestly -- the more so because Frazier hasn't written a novel in his career so far. But The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days is a better and more interesting work than those individual pieces were -- even though it integrates them (or pieces of them) along the way.

The Cursing Mommy still doesn't get a name here, though -- she tells us this story, and everything comes through her voice, which is surprisingly strong and varied. This is a comic novel, so all sorts of things go wrong for her over the course of one year -- the book is structured as a daybook, or diary, in which she's specially telling the story in her own writing to an audience -- and she deals with it all as best she can, erupting in anger and cursing more than she wants to. The rhythms of those calamities start out funny, but get more nuanced as the year goes on and things get worse (as they always must in a comic novel). In the end, the repeated line "oh, what a fucking horrible day this is going to be" turns from a laugh line into a scream against the universe and finally into something like a philosophy: they are all fucking horrible days, if you let them be, and sometimes declaring them to be fucking horrible days is all that can get you through them.

Don't get me wrong -- the Book of Days is really funny, with subplots about husband Larry's job troubles, general cluelessness, and love of rare capacitors; about older son Trevor's teenage acting-out; about the budgetary troubles of Trevor and younger son Kyle's schools; about Cursing Mommy's book club, and their love for books about how horrible the Bush administration was; about the family's problems with the rapacious Sphagnum Health; and about Larry's Client/Boss, who pursues the Cursing Mommy with far too much zeal throughout the year. But there's some heart underneath the humor, and Frazier isn't afraid to bury some political points in there as well. (You can probably guess what those are, and judge for yourselves how much they would annoy you.)

MST3K 30-Day Challenge

Yes, it's a meme, and I'm going to do it wrong -- I don't have the patience to stick each answer into a separate post and dole them out over a month (even though that would do nice things for my post count).

"MST3K," of course, is the 1990s puppet cable show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a guy (well, two guys in succession) and his robots made fun of bad (and often SFFnal) movies. It's solidly in my fandom, which I'm coming to think more often is congruent with comedy than it is with "science fiction" or other genre terms. But that could easily shift tomorrow. (For instance, I might have to start watching Doctor Who for the first time in twenty-plus years just to see if they let Capaldi swear the way he's so good at.)

Anyway: the meme.


Day 1: First episode?
Season 5, Episode 15 -- Alien from L.A. The cable system where The Wife and I lived in the '90s didn't have Comedy Central, but my in-laws home (just a town over) did. So I watched this on one of the very many Sunday afternoons we spent there, because I'd heard good things about it. (And felt guilty because I didn't get as much manuscript-reading done that day.)


Day 2: Joel or Mike? Why?
Mike.

My take on the great divide is that Joel is cooler and Mike is funnier. Some people like one, some the other.

Also: I saw Mike episodes first (and, still, more or them), and the style of the show got more dense as time went on: the Mike episodes just have more jokes, more references, and more complicated joke-references. (E.g.: "Peter Fonda is Richard Petty in the Marcel Marceau story!" from Riding With Death.) I love that kind of joke-on-a-joke structure.


Day 3: How did you get into the show?
I watched it religiously (maybe obsessively) once it moved to the Sci-Fi Channel in 1997 -- taped pretty much all of the episodes on seasons 8-10, and watched them every week.

I did get some of the episodes available on video then, but didn't go whole-hog into collecting them all, which is unusual for my obsessions -- I'm a real completest.


Day 4: Favorite episode?
Tough to narrow that down, but I'd say 820: Space Mutiny. It's a bad movie that's often funny inadvertently, populated with mediocre actors who struggle to overcome less-than-mediocre material, and the jokes are sharp and specific, with some good running gags.

Ask me tomorrow, though, and I might say Riding With Death or Werewolf or Overdrawn at the Memory Bank or Time Chasers or Pod People or Mitchell or Master Ninja I.


Day 5: How many episodes would you say you’ve seen?
At least 80 -- possibly 90 or 100, since some of the titles are bland in that old-horror-movie way, and I'm not sure exactly which crawling thing or what terrors I did see. I'm still watching episodes new to me -- mostly Joel episodes.

I've also seen all of the shorts, since I could watch them on my iPad on the train. I may end up watching all of the episodes the same way, but each one takes more than one leg of my commute. 

Day 6: Least favorite episode? Why?
I have Red Zone Cuba on VHS and I think I watched it once -- as I recall, it was just a dull movie that they couldn't bring any life to.

Day 7: Do you own any merchandise?
I've got nearly all of the DVD box sets (missing the really rare ones and the one that just came out), and a "Greetings from the Satellite of Love" T-Shirt.

(Mildly amusing story: a guy asked me in a supermarket the other week if that shirt had something to do with the Velvet Underground -- the source of the SoL's name -- and I had to tell him it was for an obscure TV show.)

Day 8: Cinematic Titanic or RiffTrax?
I've seen a few RiffTrax -- Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny is a particularly amazing piece of work. (And I use those words precisely.) I like their shorts, and might end up buying more of them to watch on trains (see above).

I haven't yet gotten any Cinematic Titanic pieces, purely because I've already got enough to keep me busy for a long time.

I do miss the silhouettes and the inter-movie skits; MST3K had a larger gestalt than just "watching movies with commentary." 

Day 9: Fave fan site?
I get my regular MST3K fix from Fuck Yeah, MST3K! (There are a lot of video posts there, which I tend to save for a binge once a week or so.)


Day 10: Have a favorite season/station it was on?
I only watched it "live" for the last three seasons, so I can only choose from the Sci-Fi era. And there's great episodes each of those three years, but I'd lean towards Season 8, because it was the longest and there was a lot of energy from the new channel.

Day 11: Have you gotten any friends into the show?
Friends, no. My twelve-year-old son (whom I call Thing 2 here), yes. We've watched a lot of episodes together, and it was the five Gamera movies, Werewolf, and the two Master Ninjas that made him a fan.


Day 12: Follow any of the Brains on Facebook/Twitter? Who makes you laugh the hardest?
I follow and have retweeted Bill Corbett. (Possibly others, but I remember him, because the thing I RT'd was the excellent "The frenemy of my frenemy is my frfrend.")


Day 13: Quick! Without cheating, list as many cast members as you can!
Joe Hodgson as Joel Robinson
Mike Nelson as himself, more or less
Trace Beaulieu (Dr. Forrester and Crow I)
Frank Conniff (TV's Frank)
Mary Jo Pehl (Mrs. Forrester)
Bill Corbett (Crow II and Brain Guy)
Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo II and Professor Bobo)
J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo I)
and whats-his-name the producer who did Gypsy most of the time
didn't Patrick Brantseg do Gypsy for a while?

Day 14: Any riffs that struck a chord with you?
"Every male of any species has the biological urge to panty raid." from Horror of Party Beach

(Subject to variation by day.) 

Day 15: Favorite quote?
Isn't that the same as the last question?

OK, how about the long and very funny "and he wakes up" sequence at the end of Space Mutiny?

Day 16: Have you met any of the Brains?
Nope. I hate meeting people, especially famous ones. They'd have no reason to want to meet me, and what can I say to them they haven't heard a million times?


Day 17: Have you been to any live shows?
Nope.

Day 18: Favorite SOL character?
I guess Tom Servo edges out Crow, since he has more of an edge in the inter-movie sequences. (Cf. "Tom, I don't get you." "Nobody does -- I'm the wind, baby!")

Day 19: Favorite Mad?
Oddly (given that I like the Mike-era best), it has to be TV's Frank. He's one of the great comedy second bananas, up there with Marty Feldman's Igor and Hey, Abbott.

Day 20: Least favorite character?
Professor Bobo usually just led to poop-flinging and butt-showing (and some general bad-hygiene) jokes; I don't dislike the character, but he wasn't as strong a character as Pearl or "Brain Guy". 

Day 21: Last episode you watched?
I think it actually was Alien from L.A., which I watched with Thing 2 a couple of weeks ago. So this is very circular right at this moment.

Day 22: Manos: Bad or the Worst?
I haven't watched that one in a while, but I remember it as a really horrible movie that was well-riffed.

Day 23: One-word opinion on Joel?
Big-brotherly.

Day 24: One-word opinion on Mike?
Planet-destroyer.

Day 25: One-word opinion on J. Elvis’s Servo?
Can't do it in one: Nipple Nipple Tweak Tweak Fly Fly Fly!

Day 26: One-word opinion on Kevin’s Servo?
Time-twisting.

Day 27: One-word opinion on Trace’s Crow?
Befuddled.

Day 28: One-word opinion on Bill’s Crow?
Intellectual.

Day 29: Something you can’t look at without thinking of MST3K?
Um, a shelf of my DVD collection? There's nothing in the real world that consistently makes me think of MST3K.

(However, a lot of things in the real world make me think of LEGO City Undercover, mostly because I spent 6 months or so playing that game.)

Day 30: Why do you love MST3K?
It's not just funny, but it's funny commentary on something else, in a way that seems live. I like that connection, and the difficulty of fitting jokes into something that already exists in a way that adds to the original without just drowning out the original story.

What's Due Back at the Library Today?

Why, these three books! Let's see what I can say about them quickly.

Lawrence Block, Hit Me

The fifth book about hit man Keller comes after a five-year gap from the fourth, Hit and Run (I reviewed that, and the previous book Hit Parade, here), and returns to the style of the first three books: it's a fix-up disguised as a novel.

Hit Me doesn't explain whether or where its five pieces -- "Keller in Dallas," Keller's Homecoming," "Keller at Sea," "Keller's Sideline" and "Keller's Obligation" -- first appeared separately, though I can see that "Dallas" was, and still is, available as a Kindle Single. But they are all, structurally, separate stories, each with a distinct arc, and just shoving them next to each other and counting the chapters sequentially doesn't turn Hit Me into a novel. Luckily, it doesn't need to be a novel: it's an excellent fix-up made up of gripping stories, each one covering one job of Keller's.

At the end of Hit and Run, Keller had seemingly abandoned his old career, after a serious betrayal: he had a new name, a new wife, a new home and legitimate job in New Orleans, and a baby on the way. But, like the rest of us over the years 2008-2012, the economic crisis changed his plans, and sent him back into his old ways. More specifically, his philatelic hobby, and the money he needed to continue it the way he wanted to, gave him an excuse to earn large sums by traveling to other cities, meeting new people, and killing them.

Hit Me is actually more concerned with philately than with murder; Keller kills because that's what he gets paid for -- and he's good at working out ways to do it and get away quietly afterward -- but stamps are what he really cares about, thinks about, and schemes about. And, along the way, Keller becomes another one of Block's vivid portrayals of modern men -- never quite sure what they want, but always as sure as young Elvis Costello that they want it now. So this is a quieter, less showy book than you'd expect from a "novel about a hit man" -- but Block has never been one to write to expectations.

Simon Rich, What in God's Name

Heaven is a business, primarily devoted to the production of Xenon. Humanity was a side project of its distant, lazy, unmotivated CEO -- we know him as God -- but He's gotten tired of the whole thing and wants to destroy all life on earth so he can focus on his new project: a pan-Asian restaurant. But two angels in the Department of Miracles have a plan: if they can just call one shot -- get two New York schlubs who secretly love each other to kiss within a month -- then God will call off the destruction and let humanity live on. Oh, did I mention that the two angels' relationship is amazingly parallel to those two schlubs?

Back in my SFBC days, we had a cluster of books that sold well for years and that we periodically threatened to put together to promote -- the fabled "Blasphemy Flyer," which we never actually did. So we would have been very happy to see What in God's Name; I'm sure I could have sold this very well for many years.

But, looking at it with a less mercenary eye, it's even thinner than most of the books in this category: not as blasphemous or funny as God: The Ultimate Autobiography, smaller and less exciting than Waiting for the Galactic Bus, and definitely not holding a candle to Good Omens. (It's not really comparable to Towing Jehovah, since that one definitely wasn't funny, and Only Begotten Daughter wasn't really about the yucks, either.) It is a short, pleasant, mildly blasphemous afterlife fantasy by an up-and-coming comedy writer -- Rich is the author of two collections of short comedy pieces, including Ant Farm, which I enjoyed, and the novel Elliot Allagash, which has been optioned for a movie -- but not much more than that.

So, if you're looking for a novel you can read in an hour or two about a God whose more than a bit of a putz and two sets of would-be lovers too shy and odd to quite get together without a serious push, this will do just fine. If you're looking for anything more than that, keep looking.

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

This one requires much less explanation: you've either heard of it already (and, in that case, probably read it at least once), or haven't. If you're in the latter bucket, immediately put Cold Comfort Farm on your list of books to read -- unless you have a strong aversion to actually funny books or an unnatural attachment to the rural muck and torment of Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and their ilk.

I've vaguely felt like re-reading Cold Comfort Farm for more than a year -- I actually pulled out my copy, just before Hurricane Irene, but didn't get to it before the flood killed it. But The Wife and I rewatched the movie -- which is also excellent, in a very similar way -- a couple of weeks back (though The Wife didn't remember seeing it before, strangely). And so, through the mysteries of Inter-Library Loan, I got a copy of this edition, with the Roz Chast cover and the Lynne Truss introduction, both of which I recommend.

Cold Comfort Farm was Gibbons's first novel, published in 1932, as a takedown of the then very popular "rural novel" (Mary Webb seems to have been the exemplar of this now-forgotten subgenre), and it's as funny, and as endlessly quotable, now as it was then. It's a book about the triumph of thinking and planning over blind tradition and florid emotionalism, so I expect a lot of SFnal people will love it for that. But, most importantly, it's wickedly funny and deeply lovable, a joy to read and a joy to re-read and a joy to remember.

Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse

Into every life some frivolity must come, or else we would slit our wrists at the sheer horror of it all. When I find myself in need of frivolity, I've turned to various writers, but none have proved as reliably frivolous as Wodehouse. One particularly excellent feature of Wodehouse's work is the sheer depth of its sublime triviality: I've read my way through his two main series -- those featuring, on the one hand, that young nincompoop Bertie Wooster and his all-wise gentleman's gentleman Jeeves, and, on the other, those centered around Blandings Castle and its human and porcine inhabitants -- and there are still a dozen or two standalone humorous novels, or books in shorter series, that I still haven't got to. (In that context, I could also mention Psmith, that unflappable young gentleman, and the equally unflappable but much less young Uncle Fred.)

One of those minor series centers on Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, one of those men whose self-confidence is always much higher than warranted by circumstances or than similar confidence is extended to him by any other human being. Ukridge, who mostly appears in short stories, is a font of get-rich schemes and new angles to make his life smoother and richer, every one of which scheme or angle leaves him at least as bad off as before -- but never, ever, daunted in the slightest.

The one novel about Ukridge is Love Among The Chickens, in which that ever-cheerful character decides that starting a business farming chickens on the Dorset coast is the royal road to riches -- why, you can get the chickens and feed on account, and then sell back the eggs (dozens every day!) to your creditors and local conveyors of comestibles, quickly building a quick and easy stream of ever-increasing income without any outlay or hard work! -- and drags his boyhood friend Jeremy Garnet into the scheme. Of course it doesn't work as Ukridge expects, since nothing ever could, and of course there's a love plot for Jeremy, plus angry creditors, rural policemen, and wise but unheeded blue-collar types, since this is a Wodehouse novel.

The whole isn't quite as sublime as Wodehouse at his prime -- this is a very early novel, from 1906, and he was still working out the details that worked best for him -- but it is sublime, and silly, and frothy, and deeply, deeply frivolous in the very best way. I recommend it, and three or four dozen other Wodehouse books (choose one to taste), for whenever the press of non-frivolous life becomes too strong.

A Particular Set of Skills

There have been a lot of parodies/mash-ups of that particular Liam Neeson soliloquy, but this one is quite clever and fun.

(Well, I think so, at least.)

Unicorn Being a Jerk by C.W. Moss

So this does not actually require a lot of thought or analysis, OK? There's this unicorn, and each two-page spread shows him being a jerk -- got it? One page with a line of text, the facing page with an illustration.

That's what Unicorn Being a Jerk is -- see, you already pretty much got that from the title, didn't you?

You're probably saying "this is probably based on a website," and you're right.

You might also be saying "this kind of cheap, tacky book never existed before the Internet," which means you're either really young, really forgetful, or really stupid -- I'll let you decide which is most flattering to you. Look, we got 101 Uses for a Dead Cat over thirty years ago, and a whole series of Truly Tasteless Jokes books later that decade -- I focus on the '80s, since that was my own prime buying-cheap-tacky-books time, but there was similar stuff in the '70s, '60s, and probably even earlier. And later, of course, there were more books, many of which you might even still own, or remember fondly.

This is not a deep book, or one for the ages: it's quick, and generally funny, and perhaps even more interesting -- read against Totally Tasteless Jokes and Dead Cat and The Book of Bunny Suicides and others -- to examine what we find unacceptable behavior today that would have been unexceptional or unexplainable thirty years ago. (For example, "painting his horn white to avoid the gay crowd.")

It won't change your life, but it just might entertain you for a while -- and maybe your friends as well, if you leave it off on top of your coffee table or toilet tank. And that's plenty.