Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Cheap books and magazines bring back memories

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, May 28, 1999 | 10:15 a.m.

Here at Shelf Life, when duty calls, we usually answer, Howdy, duty! and hop right to it. Not this week.

Duty -- in the form of oven-fresh books demanding immediate reviewing -- sits unattended, stacked on a corner of the desk. The typing fingers are willing but the addled brain is, this week, not. I think it has something to do with La Nina.

Anyway, I'm still preoccupied with some cheap reads I picked up at a parking-lot sale not long ago. Didn't seem like much at the time, just $4.50 worth: two old Playboys and a paperback from 1972. But, later, as I read through them, I first felt briefly reconnected to the past, then oddly reassured about the future.

The book was "M*A*S*H Goes to Maine," the first of a half-dozen or so sequels to the classic Korean War novel. I found it in a tub of paperbacks being hawked by some guy in the city of Henderson-sponsored junk sale in the parking lot of my local rec center.

It was one more slim, forgettable book in a sun-faded heap of them -- except that I'd remembered tearing through the whole post-"M*A*S*H" series in my teens, and felt a sudden, unbidden pang of nostalgia.

See, nothing screws up your reading like writing. Once you decide to make your knack for words pull its weight, you approach books like hunks of ore to be crunched and sifted for useful elements. What can I learn from this dude? It leaches some of the fun from reading. Spotting "M*A*S*H Goes to Maine," I flashed back to a time before all that, when I plowed through books for the sheer joy of the enterprise. Of course I bought it.

Now, it's not a great book. The writing is never better than it strictly has to be and not usually that well-done. It's just a good ol' romp, fun and non-nutritious -- literary junk food, a Twinkie for the soul -- and I loved it again the way I had as a book-hungry teen. For the first 50 pages.

Alas, I'm not the reader I was then, nor the person, and before long the weak planks in the prose got to me. It had to be said: Man, this sucks! I closed it for good well before Hawkeye managed to talk Trapper into coming to Maine. Still, I got my 50 cents worth: a remembrance of things past.

The Playboys I bought for the pictures -- specifically the snapshots of author D. Keith Mano among the contributors notes. He's a writer I'm familiar with almost entirely through third-hand Playboys I've gripped at yard sales (issue dates: mid-1970s through the '80s). Yet, on the basis of six or eight pieces, he's one of my favorite writers.

Mano is, first, a monster stylist. He weaves high-minded literary effects (voice changes, loony metaphors) and crazy humor into a dense mix that stood out in the largely vanilla precincts of magazine journalism. He is a fearless minter of puns -- a vastly underappreciated skill close to me own heart. Example: Of a cross-dresser who planned to have a sex-change, Mano once wrote "(he) means to go whole hag" someday. His stuff is full of such kooky bons mots.

Playboy describes him thusly: "D. Keith Mano is either a great prose stylist or something akin to Big Fig with a typewriter -- or both." While I have no idea what that means, I couldn't agree more.

He's written a few novels you can't find and is otherwise not widely known. If contemporary letters were an ocean, he'd be a quarter cup off Long Island. (By comparison, I'm an eighth of an ounce at the bottom of the Dead Sea.)

And yet, as far as I can tell, he's had an enviable career. On various assignments he has: hung out at the NBC commissary with a very hungry Mr. T ("Give T a year, there'll be nothing but peacock bones left"); exposed Disney's corporate greed long before attacks on the Mouse House became fashionable; reported on makers of marital aids (hey, it's Playboy); haunted the grungy depths of New York City in the company of one Ugly George, an early cable TV phenomenon notorious for asking passing women to undress on camera.

In another piece, covering a transvestite convention, he donned drag -- dress, fake breasts, depilatory, even cramming his tootsies into cruel women's shoes: "size 10 1/2, also EEE -- which is both my width and a sound I want to make."

That's the paper trail of a guy who's leveraged a strange good time out of his writing, even if the results end up being peddled in yard sales, and I was pondering the lessons of that vis a vis my own modest future -- something about enjoying the ride whether or not acclaim ever comes -- when, THWACK, another 800-page freebie landed on my desk. Duty called.

Reading list

The Essential Cartoonist Series (Workman Publishing, $10.95): A hearty Shelf Life huzzah to this fine publisher for putting between soft, affordable covers the top drawer of New Yorker cartoonists.

Two volumes are out so far: George Booth and Charles Barsotti. Each comes with plenty of biographical material and interviews with the artists. Regular New Yorker readers will recognize Booth's drawings by the freaky cats and dogs that populate them, while Barsotti's cast of kings, businessmen and talking geometric shapes capered in USA Today as well as the New Yorker.

His book gets our nod simply because he's a more versatile cartoonist; Booth is an acquired taste.

GQ, June 1999: For this special comedy issue, the magazine's editors fearlessly list the 75 best jokes of all time. They claim to have canvassed comedy albums, books, the Internet (23,540 jokes in all) to arrive at the final ranking.

You'll quibble -- that Gary Shandling number ain't the funniest ever, don't care what the GQuipsters say -- but you'll get a hoot from the list itself. Which is, obviously, the point.

Elsewhere, critic Terrence Rafferty extols the virtues of "Roadrunner" creator Chuck Jones, John Brodie profiles Mike Myers, Lucy Kaylin probes the enduring reputation of Sam Kinison, and, in "There's Something About Morons," writer Andrew Corsello offers a welcome debunking of the dumb and dumber school of movie comedy.

Footnotes

Dan "Have Safari Jacket, Will Travel" Rather has stood before cameras in all sorts of interesting places, and he writes -- you just know he's a monster stylist! -- about some of them in his new book, "Deadlines and Datelines: Essays From the Turn of the Century."

He'll sign copies at 6 p.m. Wednesday in the Borders Books and Music in Henderson. Call 433-6222.

I can't tell you whether the book's any good because I haven't read it; sometimes, when duty calls, we let the machine get it.