Jack The Scribbler

Yes, there is life after death.
But it doesn’t involve cryogenics or Christianity.
It’s the obituary: The written tribute that is born immediately after someone — usually famous and otherwise — departs for parts unknown.
Putting it together is not easy.
Besides requiring meticulous research, it also involves managing morbid expectations especially since those considered terminal cases have a bad habit of bouncing back to the pink of health.
That’s not all.
Preparing an obituary more often than not involves disturbing the bereaved, who may find it unpleasant to discover that the deceased left the maid pregnant.
But then again, these complications have failed to prevent Marilyn Johnson — who has written tributes for Princess Diana, Jacqueline Onassis, and others — from writing a book about the whole subject.
“Obituaries have a pull, a natural gravity, for those of us who’ve observed that life has a way of ending,” she says in the book’s introduction. “But however morbidly we arrived at this page, we’ve ended up sticking around, hanging out, admiring the writing, getting hooked on the daily rush.”
Published in 2006, The Dead Beat just about covers the length and breadth of obituary writing in newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Although newspapers in both countries generally employ an obituary writer and an editor, the similarities end there.
Americans are more inclined towards solemnity, preferring to treasure “folksy,” romanticized impressions, even though the deceased while alive was a notorious neighborhood drunkard who asked everyone for some change.
The British, to their credit, are less forgiving, employing euphemisms — if at all — to “aim for some higher truth,” Johnson quotes an editor as saying.
As a result, the book cites an obituary for outrageous British comedian Malcolm Hardee, which was published in the Telegraph.

“He did an impression of Charles de Gaulle, his penis playing the part of the General’s nose. He was also celebrated for a bizarre juggling act performed in the dark and with nothing visible apart from his genitals, daubed with flourescent paint. Fans would greet his arrival on stage with cries of “Get yer knob out.” He was said to be huge in Germany and Sweden.”

But whether British or American, risque or respectful, obituarists, just like anyone else, are prone to quick judgment.
Which explains why Andrew McKie of the Daily Telegraph ran an essay-length correction entitled “The Day I Managed to Kill Off Tex Ritter’s Wife.”

“I apologise unreservedly to our readers for having misled them. More importantly, I apologise to Mrs. Ritter. I am genuinely delighted she is still with us — I came to like her a lot while preparing her obituary for the page.”

Despite these oversights and various other complications surrounding the composition of an obituary, scores of people remain obsessed with them as indicated by frenetic online activity in various usenet groups that Johnson cites in the book.
This prompts her to say that “[i]t’s the best time ever to read obituaries, and I’m here to tell you, it’s a great time to die,” she says.
Amen to that.

The Graywolf Annual: Short stories
Edited by Scott Walker
A Book Review

Of the twelve short stories in this collection — the very first in the Graywolf Annual series, published in 1985 — only five make the cut; that is, less than half of the collected pieces provide a clear, moving epiphany that generally characterize good fiction.
Yes, the anthology barely makes the grade.
But that’s if you’re looking at it from the bean counter’s perspective.
Overall, the anthology’s not too bad.
In an age of memes, tweets, and status updates, five pieces in this volume provide examples of fiction’s raw, unmediated power, compensating for the shortcomings of the other seven (two of which, by the way, have been previously unpublished).
In no order of importance, these five works are Andre Dubus’ After the Game, Richard Ford’s Winterkill, Elizabeth Cox’s A Sounding Brass, Tobias Wolff’s Our Story Begins, and Bobbie Ann Mason’s Hunktown.
Those familiar with Dubus will find After the Game hardly a departure from his easy, conversational approach to storytelling.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
“I wasn’t in the clubhouse when Joaquin Quintana went crazy,” so goes Dubus’ first line.
Direct and honest, the story provides a warm familiarity similar to slipping into an old shirt or an old shoe.
Ford’s Winterkill, Cox’s A Sounding Brass, and Mason’s Hunktown all feature haunting endings, their protagonists lying in wait for tectonic shifts in their damaged, incomplete lives.
Winterkill’s Les Snow preserves what remains of his personal space by slipping outside unobstrusively to get some time to fish by himself to avoid being noticed by his friends.
A Sounding Brass’s Ginny embraces the challenge of raising her two kids immediately after her husband is killed in a freak hunting accident.
Hunktown’s Joann takes it all in stride, despite what appears to be her second husband’s attempt to move to the city and form his own band and her divorced daughter’s carelessness in managing her own life.
Wolff’s Our Story Begins is no less impressive although factual errors slightly disrupt the narrative action.
Charlie, the main character, eavesdrops on three coffehouse patrons who talk about a priest who brings Miguel Lopez de Constanza, a Filipino, into San Francisco.
The whole story is implicitly premised on the fact that Filipinos living in 1980s Philippines speak Spanish.
“Let’s say that for some reason, you, Truman, find yourself in Manila dead broke. You don’t know anybody, you don’t understand anything anyone says, and you wind up in a hotel where people are sticking needles into themselves and nodding out on the stairs and setting their rooms on fire all the time. How much Spanish are you going to learn living like that?”
Too bad — cursory research could have easily corrected this wrong impression, even during that time when the internet was a pipe dream.
Fortunately, the oversight doesn’t prove to be too distracting. Wolff’s piece is still one of the best in the collection.

A book review of P. J. O’Rourke on the Wealth of Nations

P. J. O’Rourke reads Adam Smith so you don’t have to.

Or so says the blurb—printed in boldface—on the front inner flap of his latest opus.

Entitled “On The Wealth Of Nations,” the work is the American journalist’s take on Smith’s classic as part of Atlantic Monthly Press’s Books That Changed The World series.

The offer is just too good to be passed up, both for fans and first-time readers of America’s funniest Republican.

Besides allowing readers to experience the dense, wry prose of the famous Scottish economist, On the Wealth of Nations also promises to showcase O’Rourke’s biting wit once more.

Considered as America’s funniest republican, O’Rourke has conjured highly original one-liners while avoiding wayward missiles in Iraq, periodic gunfire in Lebanon, and corrupt policemen in the Philippines (his piece about Edsa I is included in Holidays in Hell, one of his very best books, next to All the Trouble in the World and Give War A Chance).

As Rolling Stone magazine’s foreign affairs desk chief, he was also the most well-traveled conservative commentator, giving his readers something to laugh about every time he submitted dispatches from abroad.

Sad to say, his latest work falls below expectations.

Like his previous two books—The CEO of the Sofa and Peace Kills—On The Wealth Of Nations arguably shows that being something of a television celebrity—through his regular appearances at HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher—may have blunted his edgy, no-holds barred, take-no-prisoners writing style.

This is not helped by the fact that O’Rourke in On The Wealth of Nations is “all over the place,” according to one discerning Facebook user, noting the author’s awkward attempt to establish a unifying theme to hold the book together.

Instead of dishing out outrageous, racy, and funny diatribes, O’Rourke simply quotes liberally from Smith and then provides weak insight that does not befit someone of his stature.

Originally printed in a shorter and different form in a UK publication, the book also includes an Adam Smith Philosophical Dictionary, as compiled by O’Rourke, his literary nod to Voltaire and Ambrose Bierce whose The Devil’s Dictionary remains cited to this day.

In an entry called “Homeless, an alternative view on the,” he quotes Smith as saying “The beggar who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”

While the material—900 pages long in two volumes—may have cramped his style, the O’Rourke faithful, myself included, can still take refuge that the work is not totally devoid of humor.

“At my house I see a Made in China label on everything but the kids and the dogs,” O’Rourke says in Chapter 8. “And I’m not sure about the kids. They have brown eyes and small noses.”

Here’s hoping that his next book would prove to be funnier than his British Airways commercial (which, by the way, is available on YouTube.)

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Picture of the book is taken from the Cato Institute, whose members include O’ Rourke.