Today’s Post by Joe Farace
April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.—Mark Twain
Let’s begin with some unrelated topics but maybe they’re not…
Ever since I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school—it wasn’t an assignment, by the way— I’ve been fascinated with the writing of Mark Twain. That’s when I realized his writing style and wit was something I aspired to. If you haven’t seen the 1949 movie of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court staring Bing Crosby, it’s pretty good. Skip the remakes. My recent interest in journaling and fountain pens was triggered by the fact that Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain wrote all of his books using a Conklin fountain pen. Conklin was founded in 1898 and Twain wrote with a Conklin Crescent Filler pen, a model the company still makes as a tribute. I own two Conklin Duragraph pens and hope to someday own a Crescent Filler. It may not improve my writing or even my handwriting—something fountain pens often accomplish—but it’ll make me feel good.
And to dip into Joe’s Movie Club territory a second time, I can’t jump off this date without mentioning one of my favorite movies from the sixties—The April Fools staring Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve. You can read my review of the film here. This is the movie that made me fall in love with Catherine Deneuve, although I may have seen her first in s 1969 film Mississippi Mermaid back in the day. But it was The April Fools and 1975’s Hustle with Burt Reynolds that really did it for me.
Books I’ve Read and am Reading
Having recently read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (and am looking forward to the 4K release The Maltese Falcon in a few days (look for a review on my YouTube channel real soon now) It was obvious I needed to read Tim Dorsey’s The Maltese Iguana. If you are familiar with Dorsey’s work you can pretty much guess that his new book, like the others that proceeded it, are funny. But is it?
Most of Dorsey’s books concern the exploits of Serge who might just be a serial killer and his sidekick Coleman, who might just be an unrepentant drug addict as they travel around Florida indulging the author’s passion for relating the history of the state. Funny stuff, right. I’ve always thought so, in a kind of chaotic and twisted Max Brother’s style.
When I started writing this I was more than half-way through the book but when I saw that Dorsey decided to take on the pandemic as his main subject I wondered what’s so funny about that? Update: I finished reading the book last night: NO SPOILERS. And for those keeping score, The Maltese Iguana is the fourteenth of my “Book Read in 2023.
Then I remembered the South Park episode in which the show’s creators —Trey Parker and Matt Stone—asked how long it takes to be able to create humor about a serious illness, in their case AIDS. They decided it was eight years. The pandemic is still with us in some form or another, so what’s Dorsey up to? And then it hit me. For far too long I’ve been thinking about him as a guy who writes fumy books about Florida but missing what’s been starting me in the face all this time; He’s a social satirist, much like Jonathan Swift.
If you’re not familiar with the work of Jonathan Swift, He’s regarded by the Encyclopedia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language. You may already be familiar with his book Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or even Ray Harryhousen’s 1960 film, The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver. Back to Dorsey…One of the subplots of The Maltese Iguana oncerns illegal immigration and US interference in the affairs and government of Central America countries. Funny stuff right? But definitely Swiftian.
And now for something completely different…If I may be excused for writing about dinosaurs again; sorry, I can’t help myself. As I mentioned in my tribute to the late Greg Bear, I wanted to read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World because it informed and inspired Bear’s Dinosaur Summer and I have to say, that this earlier book is a great yarn. There are some people who may not want to read a book written in 1912 and while there is a certain formality and English-ness in the writing, it’s not off-putting. If you like dinosaurs, pick up a copy from the library or buy a paperback from Amazon ($6.99,) Doyle was a heckuva writer and this book demonstrates that there’s more to his oeuvre than Sherlock Holmes.
Book Reviews Coming Up: I’ve started reading Porsche 365: 75th Anniversary and am impressed. It a big book, measuring 10.25 x 1.2 x 12.4-inches and 256 (thick) pages long, so I’m reading it concurrently alongside The Maltese Iguana. This is something I used to do—read one non-fiction book, while also reading one fiction book—but it’s not anything I’ve done recently. But, for some reason, I’m doing it now. Look for a review of Porsche 365: 75th Anniversary real soon now.
PS. And to quote Cinzia DuBois, “Books save lives, so keep reading.”