Billy’s Booger, A Memoir (Sorta), by William Joyce

This week, we look at some books that make for perfect summer reading, and we start with something special.  Any new book by author, illustrator, filmmaker and poster boy for high-spirited shenanigans William Joyce (born 1957) is a cause for celebration.  But his new book – Billy’s Booger, A Memoir (Sorta) – is sufficient for bursting out into song, headstands while doing a Tarzan yell, and unrestrained fits of the hokey-pokey.

Not that Billy’s Booger is your ordinary, wonderful book.  It’s snot.  It is something quite unique – an illustrated memoir by a master of the form.  In it, he chronicles his participation in a school-book competition, and includes his first opus, Billy’s Booger – The Memoir of a Little Green Nose Buddy.  In short, this is the portrait of the artist as a (very) young man, and provides an insight into the formative components that make up Joyce’s protean imagination.

The story does snot have many fairy tale elements, despite its very traditional beginning of Once upon a time.  Or, as Joyce starts his narrative, Once upon a time, when TV was in black and white, and there were only three channels, and when kids didn’t have playdates -- they just roamed free in the “out of doors” there lived a kid named Billy.

And we’re off for an in-depth look into the Joycean imagination.  Most books in Joyce’s oeuvre exist largely as showcases for his stunning depictions of glowing, nostalgic Americana.  Billy’s Booger, however, is different – it has the full complement of stunning illustrations (some, the finest of his career), but is more of a masterpiece of design than anything else.

Consider – Joyce includes his initial foray into book creation as a special insert into the book itself, published on different weight green construction paper (and printed in what appears to be white chalk).  In addition to that, Joyce reproduces the illustrative style of 1950s-60s hygiene texts, along with loose-leaf paper doodles, and also includes several loving homages to classic newspaper comic strips.  Nor does he miss an opportunity to display his obsessive creativity and imagination: the endpapers include schoolboy doodles of the most mischievous sort, including my favorite: Replace Hallway Floors with TRAMPOLINES – why has this not happened? 

Joyce fills the book with quotations of his many obsessions, as well as many of his early books.  In what may be my favorite illustration in the book, Joyce’s depicts his younger self creating his first magnum opus.  In the background, just perceptible, is the poster from the 1933 King Kong, one of Joyce’s seminal influences.  Nearby is a model spaceship in the mode of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers (Joyce’s sense of science fiction, like that of your correspondent, is locked in 1930s art deco futurism).  On his desk is a brontosaur that may well serve as the model for his later creation, Dinosaur Bob, and doodles on his desk bring to mind his most recent book, The Mischievians.

In other parts of the book, you will see references to his earlier works, including George Shrinks, Roli Poli Oli, and perhaps even a nod to his sometimes collaborator, Michael Chabon.  There is even a little doodle that will become the logo for his animation and imagination company, Moonbot.

And Joyce simply never lets up.  In those pages where he recreates classic comic strips, I was able to spot homages to Peanuts, L’il Abner, a gorgeous Little Nemo page, Flash Gordon (of course) and Dick Tracy.  It is in his affections and deeply-rooted loves that Joyce reminds me most, perhaps, of the late Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).  Like Bradbury, one of the great writers of the last century, Joyce wears his heart and his loves on his sleeve – which is perhaps where they belong.  It is not a fashionable way of looking at the world; and certainly the last thing anyone could ever accuse Joyce of was being “ironic.”  But it is honest, and sweet and boyish and … peppy.  I can’t read Joyce (or Bradbury, for that matter) and not feel young again, or at least young at heart.  If for no other reason, Joyce deserves a medal, perhaps with an oak leaf cluster, if they have one lying around somewhere.

More literal minded readers will wonder how much of Billy’s Booger is “true.”  Well what does it mean when one promises the truth in a memoir?  Is this the actual book Joyce created in his boyhood, reproduced here without editorializing?  Did he, in fact, have such a happy relationship with his principal?  (If so, Joyce was doubly, if not triply blessed.)  And … are these pages lit by the glow of personal nostalgia?

Well … what does it matter?  Billy’s Booger is thickly crusted with enough biographical data to have more than a kernel of truth, and this is the artist’s biography as he remembers it.  Perhaps, one day, there will be a full-fledged autobiography or third-person biography to enjoy in addition to the Booger.

In a culture that values its heroes and children’s entertainment when it’s “dark,” the wonderful world of William Joyce provides a much-needed corrective.  His world is a place of sun-kissed landscapes, mid-century American optimism, and unfettered fun.  His books are for very young children, very old people, and everyone and anyone in between.

For those reasons, and many others, the book Billy’s Booger is our pick of the week.

The World Loses Ray Bradbury, Part II

Yesterday, we were talking about Ray Bradbury and love.  His heart was huge and copious – it had room for Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and Capt. Ahab and Shakespeare.  As with all great lovers, Bradbury was somewhat indiscriminate, but his passion could not be faulted.

Because of his love, others found love, too.  The artists inspired by Ray Bradbury in one way or another would read like a list of some of the most popular voices of the past several decades: Stephen Spielberg, Stephen King, William Joyce, Rod Serling, Robert McCammon and Michael Chabon.  All of these writers/filmmakers have mined that deep vein of American nostalgia laced with science-fantasy, a cornerstone of the American literary voice.

Bradbury loved the movies, writing several himself.  His screenplay for Moby Dick (1956), directed by John Houston (1906-1987), is a masterpiece of concision and a model of adaptation.  His screenplay for his own novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), is something of a disappointment, as he felt the need to make changes to the plot.  These changes (including a whole reinterpretation of the Dust Witch, one of his greatest characters) greatly hampered the finished product, though it still has much to commend it.

In fact, much of Bradbury’s post-1960s work is a mixed-bag.  In The Bradbury Chronicles: The Lift of Ray Bradbury, Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future, biographer Sam Weller sums up Bradbury’s life from 1974 to the present in a scant 30 pages.  It’s possible that Bradbury, incredibly prolific and certainly promiscuous with his gifts, wrote himself out by the time he was 55 or so.  Sadly, the great man sought to sometimes go back to earlier masterpieces and ‘improve’ them, like a master craftsman handling his own work with wet varnish on his fingers.

But there was much to savor, still, in the later Bradbury.  Indeed Bradbury, always more of a short story writer than a novelist, actually started working seriously in the long form, producing some interesting work.  Perhaps the most interesting things about Bradbury’s later work was his persistent wish to rewrite his own life story.

A Graveyard for Lunatics, written in 1990, is a journey in nostalgic re-writing.  In this novel, young screenwriter Bradbury teams up with young stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen (both long-time real-life friends since adolescence) to solve a crime in a movie studio.  Green Shadows, White Whale (1992) rewrites his own experience working with Houston in Ireland on Moby Dick, and is a diverting fictional memoir.  From the Dust Returned (2001) is his homage to friend Charles Addams (creator of The Addams Family), inspirited by an Addams illustration intended for one of his books, but never subsequently used.  His two mysteries – Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and Let’s All Kill Constance (2002) – take him back to the Venice, California of his youth.

In 2006, Bradbury wrote a coda to what his perhaps his finest work, Dandelion Wine, called Farewell Summer.  In this slim book his protagonist, Douglas Spaulding (a thinly veiled Bradbury) experiences his own sexual awakening.

As the world mourns the loss of Ray Bradbury, perhaps it’s best to remember the things most notable about him: his gifts as a stylist, his love for all the artifacts of the great American Century, his central role as the bridge between High and Popular Art.  But more important, to your correspondent, is the man’s temperament.  Bradbury had a sense of wonder, and he wrote with a boy’s touch.  It was this eternal youth and strong sense of optimism that I think the world will miss the most.  Bradbury himself expressed this perfectly when, in an interview to have been published in The Paris Review, Bradbury spoke of the difference between himself and Kurt Vonnegut.

He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic … It’s the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York critics, that caused [Vonnegut’s] celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

I was lucky enough to meet Bradbury several times.  Each and every time I did, I made sure to tell him that he had a profound impact on my life and that I loved him dearly.  Today, I’m so happy to have had that chance.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Amsterdam, inexplicably winner of the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, is a remarkably uneven novel … one is nearly tempted to say disjointed. 

That is not to say that Ian McEwan’s prose style is lacking.  He is not a luminescent stylist in the manner of, say, Michael Chabon, but McEwan writes with a striking economy of line and incisive ability to capture character with a phrase.  So how did so accomplished a writer fail so badly with this book…?

Amsterdam tells the story of four people, one dead and her three surviving lovers.  The novel opens at the funeral of Molly Lane, who died painfully after a swift and debilitating illness.  Molly seems to be that perfect woman who can only be realized post mortem: she is loving, sexy, talented, erudite, carefree and supportive.  Clearly too difficult to write in anything other than the reminiscences of other characters. 

Among the mourners are composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday.  Each had longish affairs with Molly in the past, and are friendly with each other independent of her.  Also attending is Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, another of Molly’s ex-lovers.  Garmony is an extreme right-winger (he would seem to be nearly as loathsome as our former President Bush) in line to become Prime Minister who uses the funeral as an event to glad hand reporters.

Also attending is Molly’s husband George, a wealthy publisher of trashy books. 

Following the funeral, Clive -- perhaps McEwan’s one sympathetic character in the novel -- fears that he too may be ill.  Both he and Vernon were upset by the horrific details of Molly’s passing and he discusses end-of-life care with Vernon.  Both men vow that if either becomes too sick or too debilitated with illness to live with dignity, that the healthy man will help the other find the release of death.

Clive’s illness proves to be nothing more than anxiety, and the novel lurches to its next key plot point: George has uncovered, among Molly’s effects, compromising photos of Garmony in drag.  He sells them to Vernon’s newspaper and Clive and Vernon argue bitterly over the morality of publishing them.

Vernon decides to print them, and is absorbed in the roll-up to publication while Clive works on his symphony, commissioned by the government to celebrate the coming millennium.  The bitter words exchanged have festered to some degree in both men, and their misunderstandings escalate after Garmony out-maneuvers Vernon by having his wife make the photos public herself.

All of this is good stuff.  Both Clive and Vernon are realistically rendered, each with a some degree of sympathy.  And while this is not a comic novel per se, there is a great deal of humor in the depiction of each man.  We also get an idea of the inner workings of Clive as an artist.  Here he is thinking while taking a train across London:

In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like.  But now it appeared that this was what it really was – square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic.  It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after.  No one would have wished it this way, but no had been asked.  Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it.  To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare of Milton, had ever existed?

What happens to McEwan’s book then is quite tragic – the final chapter seems to flee from the main body of his story and turn into some kind of grotesque shaggy dog story.    Let me make this clear – the closing chapter of Amsterdam seems to belong to another book; it comes almost completely from left field, as if McEwan suddenly remembered he had been writing a comic novel, and decided to close it off with an unfunny joke.

With his conclusion, McEwan successfully breaks the covenant between writer and reader by effectively defacing and erasing all that has come before.  What is doubly confusing to your correspondent is that McEwan seems to want to write a straight novel while playing some cheap kind of post modernist game.  That Amsterdam won the Booker Prize is just one unpalatable aspect of the book among many.

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

Some time ago we covered Michael Chabon’s wonderful book of essays, Manhood for Amateurs.  As a professed Chabon devotee, it is with some surprise that I confess disappointment at his earlier essay collection, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (2008).

Chabon (born 1963) is one of our most interesting, contemporary literary writers.  He is one of a small number of literary writers who still care about craft, construction and well-made stories, as well as the expansive humanity found in the best fiction.  He also has a more-than-healthy respect for quality genre fiction.  His books, though, have largely been hit-and-miss affairs.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of the most remarkable books of its decade, and Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth and The Mysteries of Pittsburg are all equally fine.  He floundered terribly with the unreadable The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Gentlemen of the Road (his sword-and-sandal tale) and The Final Solution (his poor rift on Sherlock Holmes) are perhaps, if anything, worse.

And yet I both like and admire Chabon.  He is a critic of remarkable sensitivity and his prose style is fluid, descriptive and often achingly beautiful.  No post modernist, Chabon values human beings, human interactions, and the deep and vital connection people have with art.  We need more like him.

That is one of the reasons I was so disappointed in Maps and Legends – many of the essays are almost brilliant, but they never quite take off.  Also, the essays here are often so disjointed, with too many disparate elements almost connected by a central argument, that they never feel organic or honest.  These are largely essays as performance art, with Chabon seeing what he can get away with.  He could do better.

However, we must congratulate Chabon on his fearlessness.  Many serious writers would dread losing membership in that august body by admitting to a passion for comic book artist Howard Chaykin, or admiring Cormac McCarthy’s sole foray into science fiction, The Road.  Chabon is determined to find art in all manner of places, and that is a gift.

As with all essay collections, this is a mixed bag.  Many of the essays are only interesting to those already familiar with the genre he addresses: his thoughts on Howard Chaykin and comics legend Will Eisner are really only meaningful to the already-initiated, and one feels that Chabon missed an opportunity to make larger points.  He almost scores high with his essay on Sherlock Holmes, but, as with many essays here, Chabon introduces so many side issues (pastiche, genre-fiction in general and detective fiction in particular, the sinister nature of secrets) that one nearly forgets his central point, if he ever had one.  (And Chabon and his editors should both know better – it’s Professor Moriarty, not Dr. Moriarty…)

In “Imaginary Homelands,” Chabon details how a Yiddish phrasebook inspired The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and the essay is infinitely more amusing, interesting and moving than anything found in his novel.  Also excellent is his discourse on the ghost stories of M. R. James, and in “My Back Pages,” Chabon describes, with great wit and depth of feeling, his struggle to write his first novel. 

Chabon’s three greatest strengths are his great empathy, his expansive feelings toward literature and the human spirit, and a limpid prose style.  Here is Chabon writing about Philip Pullman’s series of fantasy novels:

Like a house on the borderlands, epic fantasy is haunted: by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt, the debased or diminished stature of modern human-kind; by a sense that the world, to borrow a term from John Clute, the Canadian-born British critic of fantasy and science fiction, has “thinned.”  This sense of thinning – of there having passed a Golden Age, a Dreamtime, when animals spoke, magic worked, children honored their parents, and fish leapt filleted into the skillet – has haunted the telling of stories from the beginning.  The words “once upon a time” are in part a kind of magic formula for invoking the ache of this primordial nostalgia.

Equally fine is Chabon writing about the Norse mythology he read as a boy: Loki never turned up among the lists of Great Literary Heroes (or Villains) of Childhood, and yet he was my favorite character in the book that was for many years my favorite, a book whose subtitle might have been “How Loki Ruined the World and Made It Worth Talking About.”  Loki was the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them.  And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.

Throughout Maps and Legends, Chabon has wonderful things to say about the adventure of childhood, the even-greater adventure of adulthood, genre fiction and fine art, and his identity as a father, a husband and a Jew.  The essays may not all hold together in any organic way, but there are treasures strewn throughout.

Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King by William Joyce

We at the Jade Sphinx ring in the holiday season with a great treat – a look at the new book about Santa Claus by celebrated children’s author and illustrator, William Joyce.

“Children’s author,” though, seems something of a misnomer, considering the breadth and range of Joyce’s ambitions and accomplishments: he has also designed film characters (Toy Story and A Bug’s Life), has formed a new company, Moonbot, a Shreveport-based animation and visual effects studio, and he has recently produced a 13-minute animated short film and an e-book app called The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.  Joyce manages to do these things with an amazingly light touch and great insight – perhaps his real title should be Kid-in-Chief.

Earlier this year, Joyce started a remarkable undertaking: the creation of an entire cosmology incorporating all of the great myths of childhood (Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Boogeyman, etc) detailed in a series of picture books and young adult novels.  The first book in this series, which are all under a banner title The Guardians of Childhood, was The Man in the Moon, which was released this autumn to rave reviews.  He now picks up the Guardians saga with Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King, co-written by Laura Geringer, which continues the overall story while introducing a key character who will later evolve into the Santa Claus beloved by folklore.

The concept of inter-connected picture books and prose novels is a unique one, and facilitates Joyce’s mythology nicely.  The Guardians of Childhood series is new territory for Joyce.  Most of his celebrated picture books were really chamber pieces: A Day With Wilbur Robinson (1990) detailed a simple afternoon, Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures With The Family Lazardo (1988) described the summer of a sophisticated family and their pet brontosaurus, even his first stab at the Santa Claus legend, Santa Calls (1993), was really a one-night adventure story.  But Joyce’s goal with the Guardians is more complex and symphonic, and like L. Frank Baum and Oz, he is creating a whole alternate history, a densely packed saga of fantastic fiction that brings to life a fully-realized fantasyland.

Joyce has also rather heroically altered his signature style for his Guardians conception.  Rather than the vibrantly colored, sun-kissed slices of Americana that Joyce fans have sought in the past, Guardians tells a somewhat darker tale, with influences that run more deeply to European fantasies.  This beautifully designed book is filled with ‘illuminations’ (illustrations) by Joyce in pencil and charcoal.  The book design provides ample opportunity for Joyce to delight readers with full-page drawings and marginalia, and changes from white pages with black text to black pages with white text for a somber and effecting flashback.

Though darker than his other conceptions, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King is filled with typical Joycean joie de vivre and insouciance.  Despite the darkness of tone, Joyce’s prose is optimistic, zestful and fun.  (Some chapter titles include: Wherein Speaking Insect Languages Proves to Be of Value, Where the Impossible Occurs with Surprising Regularity, and Partly Cloudy and Most Unfair.)

The plot of the book is simple:  Pitch, the Nightmare King, was imprisoned previously by the Man in the Moon.   After an accidental escape, he threatens the children in the haven of a great wizard, Ombric Shalazar.  In much need of help, Ombric is joined by the swashbuckling bandit and freebooter, Nicholas St. North.

Re-imagining Santa Claus as a reformed swashbuckler is a stroke of genius.  There has always, perhaps, been a touch of roguishness in the Big Man From the North, just as there was more than a touch of Santa Claus in swashbuckling figures as diverse as Robin Hood, Simon Templar and Zorro.  Here is how Joyce first introduces the man who would be Santa:  Later that night, in the raggedy camp of the wildest ruffian of the Russian plains, there slept a young bandit chief named Nicholas St. North.  No one knew exactly how old he was, for even he did not know his birthday, but he was old enough for the beginnings of a beard and was without argument the most daring young rascal in all the Russias.  A hero he was not.  But it was said that he once defeated an entire regiment of cavalry with a bent steak knife – while he was eating.  Impressive swordsmanship indeed, but not the kind of achievement that would make a mother proud.

Joyce also returns to the notion of a haven, or contained paradise in this book.  This recurring them can be found in the art deco mansion in Wilbur Robinson, Toyland in Santa Calls, the enchanted forest in The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs (1996), and even the oversized house in George Shrinks (1985).  Even in his nonfiction book The World of William Joyce (1997) his studio seems to be a place where the rules of adulthood are suspended.  Here, Ombric Shalazar rules over Santoff Claussen, a land with talking bugs, owl sentries, trees that become homes, and all manner of magic. 

Like figures as diverse as Michael Chabon and Ray Bradbury, Joyce has drunk deep at the well of Americana.  His influences are many, and you can catch the current of many of them in his new book:  Oz, Robin Hood, robots, Superman, and Little Nemo in Slumberland.  But William Joyce is his own thing, almost his own genre.  Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King is a deeply satisfying continuation of his magnum opus, which is estimated to run a full 15 volumes.  It is eminently possible that, once he is done, William Joyce will truly inherit the mantle of L. Frank Baum, and enter into the folklore of children’s lit himself.

Michael Chabon’s Manhood

I just realized that the above title might promise more than I can deliver…

Michael Chabon (born 1963) is very much an anomaly in contemporary serious fiction: he is actively involved in telling a story and he wants you to like him.  As such, his remarkable popularity with the general reading public and with the literati is a happy coincidence that ensures both his continued publication and his serious critical reception.  This interest in narrative (and, to a lesser degree, genre fiction) is a refreshing change in American letters, which for decades has been mired in short, slice-of-life tidbits that read as if they were missing both the opening and closing pages.

I have found Chabon’s fiction to be very much a mixed bag.  I thought The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) to be magnificent; indeed, one of the best books of the decade.  I also found his The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), Wonder Boys (1995) and Werewolves in Our Youth (1999) to be powerful and affecting books.  However, in trying to craft more ‘literary’ forays into genre writing, he has churned out an astounding number of clunkers, including the incomprehensible Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Final Solution (2004), the sword-and-sorcery meller Gentlemen of the Road (2007), and the completely unreadable alternate history, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).  (In fact, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is such a bad book that the thuggish policemen who so recently attacked peaceful American protestors should be forced to read it twice.  Aloud.)

Chabon’s second nonfiction book was Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, published in 2009.  (His earlier books of essays, Maps and Legends, published in 2008, will be covered in a future post.)  Chabon’s Manhood encompasses a great deal of territory (sorry), and the full range of his musings and concerns make expansive and fascinating reading.  And, more so than after any of these novels, I closed the book thinking, “I like this man a lot.”

Chabon breaks his essays into interesting categories, such as Exercises in Masculine Affection, Patterns of Early Enchantment, or Studies in Pink and Blue.  Each and every section has much to commend it, and the essays in Tactics of Wonder and Loss contain passages that can only be called shimmering.  Here, for example, is Chabon writing about his own, aborted first marriage in his essay The Hand On My Shoulder: The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be.  Marriage seems – at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington – to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best.  We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.

Fine stuff, that. 

Chabon also has a great deal of insight on the richness of childhood imagination, and how the imaginative landscape of our childhood often coalesces into our adult frame of reference.  He, for example, loved the short-lived Planet of the Apes television show he watched as a boy because the format and premise were open-ended enough for his imagination to run riot and play a variety of different games.  He fears that current entertainment for children is so over-produced and so ironic that this lush imaginative landscape has grown smaller.  Chabon also believes that a healthy appreciation of ‘crap culture’ (comic books, junk movies, television) is not necessarily a bad thing, and that: what smells strongly of crap to one generation – Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies – so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

Of course, as with any book of essays, there is some dross with the gold.  His Biblical mediations while watching the Barack Obama inauguration feel forced and his article on circumcision could be cut.  (Sorry.)  But for every minor misstep, there is an embarrassment of riches to be found in Manhood for Amateurs, and it comes highly recommended.