Coleman Cox Hates You and Other Observations

At a recent trip to a thrift store, I came across Straight Talk from Coleman Cox, a 1928 collection of the "witty sayings" of a Coolidge era sales manager.

Though advertising itself as containing "more than nine hundred thoughts," it really just contains nine hundred variations on "You deserve to be poor" and "get back in the kitchen, woman!" 

I'm exaggerating a bit.  Some of his thoughts are just basic observations that he thinks are funny for some unfathomable reason.  Consider the very first entry in the book:

 A lot of jokes don't age well because the references become obscure, or sensibilities change, but this joke fails wholly on its merits, and the scope of that failure is undiminished over nearly a century.  It also fails as a useful, or even interesting, observation.  Some business partners don't get along!  

I want to provide a full unedited page to give you a good sense of how little this man has to say, and how proud he seems to be of saying it.

My first inclination would be to describe Cox as the poor man's H. L. Mencken, but Cox hates the poor.

His firm belief that wordplay makes wisdom is so unshakeable, that he doesn't even try to make sense half the time.  When he says "Traffic officers and not employers are the ones who caution young men against speeding up and trying to go ahead of every one," who is he complaining about?  Is he reprimanding the employers?  Does he think the young men should behave this way in business?  And what the hell is his problem in the last entry on the page?  Is he complaining about employees being busy?  Does he distrust the phrase "busy as a bee?"  I really can't suss out what he's trying to convey here. If you're wondering how this got past an editor, you might be shocked to find out there wasn't one.

Coleman's success as a writer came though self-publishing small booklets that he would sell to business owners, who would then distribute them to their employees.  As the blurb on the back of the hardcover puts it "Great executives have distributed millions of Mr. Cox's booklets of advice because they realized these friendly suggestions would help their employees work better and live better."

    

Fun stuff!

If you're wondering, does Coleman Cox have anecdotes that only a man completely lacking in imagination could find profound, then you're in luck!

I've found that people who greatly overestimate their own intelligence or perceptiveness tend to drastically underestimate the same qualities in others.  Does he believe that the meaning is so cleverly conveyed that the reader must go back to grasp it?  Does he believe repeating this common idea about perseverance will so rock his audience that they must pause and read it again once the shock has worn off?  Perhaps I'm being mean here.  After all, he's acknowledging that people who get thrown down can come back stronger, so maybe that's a sign of empathy?

Well, fuck you too, Coleman.  And in case anyone noticing the dialect in the above was wondering, yes, there are racist entries, but they're gross in a way that's not funny or interesting, so I'm not excerpting them here.  His misogyny gets personally revealing though.

The first question that comes to my mind is why is Cox going to these cabarets he finds so murder-inducing.  I'm also not sure who he's planning on murdering in this scenario.

There's something fascinating in a person who is so lacking in self-awareness and empathy.  Everything bad that happens to people is their own damn fault, and how dare my employees cause me to lose money.  

This book is, at its heart, marginalia from the side of the roaring twenties generally omitted when discussing American literature.  When we talk about the 1920s, the focus is almost exclusively on the authors of Lost Generation, Algonquin Round Table, or of those who shared similar cultural values.  But the flipside of the jazz and luxury was the gross exploitation that succeeded the Progressive Era, and the broad adoption of social darwinism and laissez faire by industry and government in this decade.  It's likely that the number of Americans who read Coleman Cox in 1928 is significantly larger than of those who read Ernest Hemingway or Dorothy Parker, despite his now complete obscurity.

Well, he has no one to blame but himself.

Before and After Quiz #8

Here we go again!



1. A glamorous American couple rent a villa in the South of France, while their lives unravel due to the accidental kidnapping of 'Sandy Claws.'



2. Two noble friends get caught up in a tragic royal murder-revenge plot, end up being executed, and now free the souls of the soon-to-be-deceased as 'reapers.'



3. Marco Polo regales Kubla Khan with many different stories about the same location: the Texas-Mexico border in the 1950s.



4. After their cruise ship is capsized by a rogue wave, a boy and his aunt's slave escape on a raft and float towards freedom.



5. After the evil queen tries to have her killed, a beautiful princess runs into the woods, only to discover herself trapped in the middle of an airborne toxic event.


Scroll down for solutions!







1. Tender Is the Nightmare before Christmas (From F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night 1934, and Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas 1993)

2. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Like Me (from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 1966, and Bryan Fuller's tv show Dead Like Me 2003-4)

3. Invisible Cities of the Plain (from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities 1972, and Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain 1998)

4. The Poseidon Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (from the 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884)

5. Snow White Noise (from the European fairy tale Snow White, and Don DeLillo's White Noise 1985)

What I'm Reading/Watching

The Signet Classic paperback on Voltaire:  I had already read Candide, but this collection includes a couple novellas (Zadig and Ingenuous) and thirteen short stories.  Some were very topical, dealing with specific Jesuits and Jansenists and their feuds, while others were more broadly philosophical and always witty and insightful.

The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack:  Pollack, winner of the 1995 world pun championships, has a brief (154 pages, not counting bibliography, acknowledgments, etc.) account of the history, popularity, and neurolinguistics behind puns.  Very accessible, but at times a bit disorganized, it's a fun read on the subject.  Its original research is limited to asking questions of comedians, writers, linguists, and and neuroscientists, so it's really more of a summation of existing research.

Ended up seeing Lucy (2014) on DVD.  Holy crap was that movie stupid.  The whole 10% of the brain thing would be okay if Besson didn't try to make the movie seem profound by having characters ponder the meaning of being human his liberal use of nature footage.  Then there's the problem of having an action movie where the main character can manipulate matter and no one else can.  There's never any sense of real danger for Lucy.  That said, I can see this having a cult following.  It has a couple big names (Scarlett Johannson and Morgan Freeman), the plot is laughably stupid, and it has some pretty cool visual effects.

What I'm Reading/Watching

I've seen some other lit blogs have a similar weekly-ish post like this, so I figured I might as well, as well.

I'm nearing the end of Dan Simmons' SFF novel Hyperion (1989), the first novel of a tetralogy called the Hyperion Cantos.  Beyond the fantastic world-building, Simmons does a great job of melding science fiction and fantasy elements in the same worlds as a group of unlikely pilgrims go on a quest to find the mysterious and deadly Shrike.  I can't help but feel that Hyperion had a big aesthetic influence on Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga series.

I also saw Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland (screenwriter for 28 Days Later and Dredd).  It's a solid, absorbing SF piece, with fantastic acting by Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander.   The less you know going in, the better.

SMBC Theatre - The Old Man and the Sea

Well, guys, it looks like no one really got this book.

Check out more videos and comics from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on their website.

Judging More Books by Their Covers

Several months ago, I made a post about the particularly bizarre and awful book covers of Tutis Publishing.  If you thought that was the limit of the company's hilarious ineptitude, well, you know as little about Tutis as Tutis knows about literature.    
     
But literature isn't the only area in which Tutis Publishing is fantastically unknowledgeable.  They also have no understanding of history.  For example, Theodore Roosevelt's book about his experiences in the Spanish American War, The Rough Riders:

Fun Fact: Cuba used to be populated primarily by dwarves

Here, we see Teddy Roosevelt depicted as a pantsless Viking.  If you think that's anachronistic, you may be interested in how they depict Stephen Crane's Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage:   

Sparta was only fighting for City-State rights!  

I guess they got the "red" part right.  Still, it's surprising how many American history novels don't have anything on the cover relating to American history.  How would Europe feel if this happened to them?    

The Renaissance generally refers to a period between the 14th and 17th centuries in Europe.  I have a feeling that Tutis's cover design department (i.e. a hungover intern who speaks only in riddles) simply confused the words "renaissance" and "revolution."  But really, three down, and they haven't even managed to get on the right continent once.  Could it get any worse?

Holy crap!  Did anyone else know cyborgs fought in World War One!?!?   Based on the coloration, I think this actually takes place on Mars.  Not only did Tutis choose a random anachronistic image, but they set it on the wrong planet!  This makes sense, I guess.  If there's one thing they are as clueless about as literature and history, it's geography.  I'd like to introduce Tutis's new travel program, why not visit the marvelous deserts?

When you're done basking in the hot Illinois sun, why not visit New England's House of Parliament?

But now it's time to play our favorite game!  Tutis word-association!  Let's try to follow the reasoning behind each of these covers:     

A Stradivarius is a kind of violin. Violins and guitars have strings.  Sting sounds like green. A guitar with a green filter!

Airplanes!  Explosions!  Texas!!!!

I'm not sure if there's enough clarity of purpose for this to be racist.

Scarlet is red!

The real treasure is magic bicycles that can ride on water.

A hound is a dog.  Dogs are nice.

I can't really blame them for that last one though, because if there's one thing Tutis is as clueless about as literature and history and geography, it's animals.  There's nothing I can say about these next two:   

Goddamnit Tutis!  That's not a horse; that's a stack of poorly photoshopped books on a poorly photoshopped desk next to one of John Tenniel's illustrations from Alice in Wonderland on an entirely separate background.  That looks nothing like a horse!

Four Quick and Easy Ways to Write a Genius (and Why You Shouldn't Use Them)

            Based on various books and movies and TV shows, I have identified a few ways to introduce a character and make it immediately apparent that s/he is a genius (even if s/he is not). 

#1 Trust me, I know what I'm talking about.

            It’s a sunny day in the park.  Kids are playing soccer, young couples are walking their dog, some old ladies sit at a bench and gossip.  Suddenly, a man collapses, clutching his head and screaming.  People turn and stare, someone shouts “Call 911!”  From the gathering crowd, our protagonist emerges, leans down over the thrashing victim.  A moment later, the protagonist stands and declares that, “There’s a foreign body lodged in his vitreous body.”   

            This guy clearly knows what he’s talking about.  I mean, would you be able to determine that just by looking?  Do you even know what a vitreous body is?   This guy must be a brilliant doctor!  But let’s try it again, except with layman’s terms:   

            “Suddenly, a man collapses, clutching his head and screaming.  People turn and stare, someone shouts “Call 911!”  From the gathering crowd, our protagonist emerges, leans down over the thrashing victim.  A moment later, the protagonist stands and declares that, “There’s something stuck in this guy’s eye.”

            Both versions of that statement say pretty much the same thing.  In fact, the latter would probably be more useful simply because the people the protagonist is addressing aren’t medical professionals. 

            This is a good way to display professionalism or an area of expertise, but unless it is backed up by actual evidence of genius (not just competence in a specific field), it’s not enough.  

#2  The Smartest Guy in the Room

            A team of FBI agents are sitting in a conference room.  It’s midnight, they’re all tired and frustrated.  There’s a serial killer on the loose, his calling card based on his ocular fixation.  The agents raided a suspect’s apartment, but it was empty except for a few posters and some old books, all bagged, tagged, and on the table.  Suddenly, a young upstart agent fresh out of Quantico bursts into the conference room.  Ignoring the protests and questioning of the senior agents, our protagonist lifts a copy of a book: The Complete Poems of T. S. Eliot.  He reads excerpts of the eye symbolism in “The Hollow Men,” he reads the stanza about eyes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  He picks up a copy of The Great Gatsby and begins a short lecture on the eye symbolism.  This guy’s a freakin’ genius!  

            To best demonstrate why this is wrong, I’ll use a brief anecdote about how I accidentally convinced an entire class that I was some kind of mathematical genius.  In my Writing about Literature class, we read a play called Proof by David Auburn.  In the first scene, as a proof of the protagonist’s genius, she immediately recognizes the number 1,729 as being the smallest number “expressible as the sum of two cubes two different ways.”  I pointed out in class that this was The Hardy-Ramanujan number and explained the story behind it.  After that, I was asked for my opinion on the veracity of every mathematical assertion in the play.  I’m not a mathematical genius.  I just happened to watch an episode of Q. I. that discussed that number a couple nights prior to the class.   The reason it seemed to be an indicator of genius is that I was amongst English Majors, just like the young upstart FBI agent is among investigators.

            You wouldn’t expect a FBI investigator to know the prevalent themes in T. S. Eliot poems any more than you would expect an English Major to know about the Hardy-Ramanujan number.  The protagonist here isn’t necessarily smarter than the other people in the room, rather, the protagonist knows things that are generally trivial at best for the group being addressed. 

#3 The Smartest Person in the Room (Version B)

            Same situation as above.  The young upstart FBI agent comes in and tells the other agents what they missed.  After hours of racking their brains for clues, the genius protagonist figures out what they all missed within seconds. 

            Even taking into account what was discussed in the previous section, the agents in this example would probably have at least skimmed the books, or found the Cliff Notes on them, or called an English professor, or something.  All too often, the smartest man in the room ends up being the least incompetent man in the room.  Just look at any crime procedural where the protagonist has some special ability (e.g. Psych, Monk, The Mentalist, The Dead Zone, Sherlock, etc.).  Ninety-nine percent of the time, they only solve the crimes because they either don't operate by police procedure (breaking and entering, warrant-less searches, etc) or because the detectives missed something that should have been obvious to them, not because of any particular genius on behalf of the hero.

#4 The Smartest Man in the Room (Version C)

            The protagonist is face to face with the serial killer in an empty warehouse.  A fistfight, a struggle over a gun, a gunshot, and the serial killer crumples to the ground.  A moment later, the FBI agents rush in.  They had received a note from the killer earlier in the day that hinted towards a carrot farm as his safe house.  The protagonist tells the FBI agents that carrots do not actually improve eyesight.  In World War Two, the British fighter pilots had found a way to put radar devices in their planes, and were therefore able to shoot down the German planes at night.  Not wanting to give up their secret, they claimed that eating carrots improved their night vision.  The protagonist knew that someone so obsessed with eyes would know this, and that the carrot farm must have been a distraction.

        This has a lot of similarity to the first “Smartest Man in the Room” entry, but is so prevalent I think it deserves its own spot.  Busting an urban legend or breaking out a neat piece of history is an incredibly common way to show a character’s intelligence by demonstrating that they don’t think like everybody else.  Putting aside the reasons in the earlier “Smartest Man in the Room” entries (which are perfectly valid), you should avoid this one because when people do this they are, very frequently, wrong.  The two big ones that I see a lot are the “truth” behind Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and the NASA multimillion dollar pen vs. Russian pencil stories.  The former story says that when John F. Kennedy said “Ich bin ein Berliner,” he was really saying “I am a jelly donut.”  While there was a jelly donut called a Berliner, this would be like hearing someone say “I am a New Yorker” and assuming that they’re calling themselves a magazine.  This is repeated not only in countless TV shows, but even in Pulitzer Prize nominated books like Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.  The (condensed) NASA pen story goes as such: NASA spent millions developing a pen that would write in zero gravity.  The Russians just used a pencil.  NASA didn’t actually spend money on developing the pen.  Additionally, pencils are terrible in a zero gravity situation, because the tips break off and you get graphite and wood dust whenever you write with them.  I guess my point is, this particular method of displaying genius is usually done so poorly that it has the opposite effect of what’s intended.  

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: A Spoiler-Free Review

           The only Haruki Murakami book I read prior to 1Q84 is Kafka on the Shore.  Like Kafka, 1Q84 alternates between narratives, and casts the protagonists as instruments of forces that they do not understand.  The biggest difference between the two is about 700 pages. 

            Perhaps that’s unfair.  The story in 1Q84 is distinct and its elements of mythology and metaphysical ponderings were entertaining and engaging.  But the length was, in my opinion, a detriment to its overall strength.  However, looking back, I can see that while the pacing of the novel as a whole was a slow trudge through the moors, the pacing of any individual chapter was a gentle walk down the road.  If I could give one piece of advice on how to read this novel, it would be to read one or two chapters at a time, and then put the book down, go outside, run some errands, take a nap, and then read another one or two chapters.  Unless you are completely in love with 1Q84, it won’t be an easy read if you try to go through it in long sittings (as I did).  

            One thing I’ve seen quite frequently in reviews and discussion about 1Q84 is how it changed people’s perspectives on (or at least got them thinking about) the nature of reality, the universe, etc. etc.  While I certainly saw all those themes and ideas, I don’t think there’s any there that I haven’t come in contact with before.  If this type of subject isn’t your usual fare, I think it will have a much more profound impact. 

            One question I hate answering is “Would you recommend it?”  I don’t like making blanket recommendations.  If you like long books (I’m talking nearly 1200 pages), if you like or are interested in reading books which question the nature of reality, of morality, of metaphysical existence, if you are okay with a slow pace, then I would recommend 1Q84.  If you don’t fit one or more of those categories, then I probably wouldn’t.

Constrained Writing

Experimental literature seeks to challenge conventional techniques and discover new or better ways of writing.  One such method is called "Constrained Writing," wherein the author is in some way limited.   One of the most common forms of constrained writing is called lipogrammatic writing, in which one or more letters is verboten.

Perhaps the most famous example of this is Ernest Wright's 1939 novel, Gadsby, which contained 50,000 words and not one letter e.

                                                

This feat was surpassed in 1969 by French author Georges Perec's La Disparition (the English translation is titled A Void), a 300 page novel also without any e's.

While a challenge like the aforementioned is by no means easy, only certain words are eliminated.  In Michel Thaler's 2004 novel, Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train from Nowhere), an entire type of word is off-limits.  No verbs in this novel.  

An even odder restriction was placed on the novella, Not A Wake, by Michael Keith.  The length of each word is determined by the value of pi.  Hence, "Not A Wake..." and 3.14...