Alert readers may have noticed something about these diaries: certain concepts keep cropping up.
By “concept” I mean the choice of the section of Badbookistan we visit each week. My relatives do not count (especially my aunt Betty, who would be outraged at the mere thought of being something so mundane as a concept), nor do my pets, nor do the scrips and scraps of my biography that I keep inflicting upon a weary website. This series’ unofficial and copyrighted-by-others mascots, the GIANT TURKEY PUPPET O’DOOM and Captain S. Rogers, USA, just might, but they are not what I have in mind.
No, by “concept” I mean that certain types of books, about certain subjects and in certain genres, show up again and again and again. I’m not sure why this occurs — God knows I try to find as many terrible books on as wide a variety of subjects as I can — but despite my best efforts I’ve found myself writing several times on the following:
- Ancient Aliens, who landed in rocket ships or other advanced craft thousands of years ago to distribute their wisdom to primitive natives in what are now Third World countries as opposed to the equally primitive denizens of the British Isles or another area in Europe. They then left cryptic clues in rock carvings but never anything as useful as, say, the wheel or computers or anything fun, then disappeared in a cloud of space dust, ne’er to return. Erich von Daniken and Graham Hancock have made quite a bit of money chronicling their exploits, and bad sess to anyone who dares say it’s all bull pucky.
- Closely related are diaries about Bad Archaeology/Cosmology, such as the masterworks of Barry Fell (who should have stuck to his own field) and Immanuel Velikovsky (who actually got Carl Sagan pissed at him). There are a surprising number of these, and please don’t even get me started on all the people who think there are Mystery Spots and Ancient Phoenicians in New Hampshire. Please.
- World War II, its pop culture, its German-speaking villains, and those who fought, suffered, and died during it. This is almost certainly because of a cache of photographs that my father took during his involuntary employment in the 66th Infantry between 1943 and 1945, but it’s proved to be an unusually rich source of material, from the World-Ice theory beloved of German meteorologists to the Christian romance starring a Nazi camp commandant and his closeted Jewish secretary.
- Merovingian Jesus, his theoretical offspring, and his ULTRA-SMOKING HAWT WIFEYKINS. I cannot even begin to count the shelves and shelves and shelves of books written about the Priory of Zion, the Merovingian descendants of Jesus H. Christ (literal King of the Jews) and Mary Magdalene (his unbelievably sexy and fecund legal spouse and belovedest of disciples), and the formerly obscure town of Rennes-les-Chateau, but oh my my my my my, there are a lot of them. And that’s before you get to related subjects like the Shroud of Turin, the Tomb of James the Great, and the whole mess with Rosslyn Chapel and the Knights Templar. I could spend six months writing about this alone, and aren’t you glad I haven’t?
- The Effects of Bad Geekery Upon the Fandom, by which I mean science fiction where the science is nonsense and the fiction written in Ancient Middle Upwardly Mobile Sideways Wendish, fantasy quest trilogies that make JRR Tolkien turn in his grave, and comic books dignified by the term “primitive.” Some of this is actually amusing, others so bad that Superman Pez dispensers throughout this great land of ours come to life and eviscerate the parties responsible.
- Cover Art of the Less Than Appropriate Persuasion, and Mother Mary Malone, it’s hard not to devote entire diaries just to the masterworks of Darrell Sweet or any of a dozen anatomy-challenged disciples of Michael Whelan, let alone Nazi leprechauns and green cats the size of Buicks and portraits of Bily Budd, Foretopman, that make him look like the guy who sang “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter” on Shingdig or Top of the Pops. It’s also hard to refrain from flinging myself headlong down the slopes of Mount Tom into the inky depths of the Connecticut River Oxbow after reviewing some of the choices, but that is neither here nor there.
- Bad Movies. Usually these are bad adaptations of good books, like unspeakable mess that Demi Moore and Gary Oldman made of The Scarlet Letter, but sometimes not. I’m still getting up the nerve to write about Battlefield Earth, which is probably the only film in Hollywood history where an A-list star clomped around in platform boots with what appeared to be several feet of snot dangling from his nostrils, but maybe this summer?
- Ultra-Prolific authors, usually but not always from early in the last century. Some of these authors might have a trace of storytelling talent, but they write so fast, and so sloppily, that whatever talent they have is lost in a hideous gush of verbiage that is the death of so many trees it may be contributing to global warming.
- Books that actually are not bad, but simply weird. “Lord” Timothy Dexter, a merchant who made his fortune carrying coals to Newcastle in the most literal way, also wrote a book that is so astonishingly strange, and unpunctuated, that I’m still not sure if “bad” truly applies. Another example of this is lawyer/author Arthur Train, a better than average author of legal thrillers who ended up being sued by an angry reader who thought his final book, the “autobiography” of his Saturday Evening Post character Ephraim Tutt, was real and not fiction.
- Books by or about unrepentant bigots/fanatics/scary nasty bad lunatics. Finding books related to such sterling examples of humanity suitable for discussion in these diaries is much more difficult than it sounds; some of these fine people are still alive and might object to being the subject of mockery, which can get mighty unpleasant. Others have heirs and/or disciples who are most zealous of the reputations. Still others have guns, and seriously, mocking the stupid/crazy/prejudiced isn’t worth a death threat.
These are themes that old readers will recognize and new readers should be aware of; I’ve been doing this for five years, after all, and the real surprise would be if certain patterns hadn’t manifested themselves. Even when it comes to really bad literature, my personal taste (such as it is) is always a factor in what I write about, for good or ill.
That said, there are some books that are strictly off limits. There are a variety of reasons for this, but they all boil down to five main themes:
1. I do not rag on the holy books of established religions. Yes, I know that there are some less than outstanding examples of religious literature on the shelves. Yes, I know that Mark Twain claimed that he used The Book of Mormon as a sleep aid whenever he had a bout of insomnia. Yes, I know that there are hundreds of contradictions in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Yes, I know that a lot of the “history” in Starhawk’s books has been debunked long since. I know all this, but it doesn’t matter. Millions of people regard these books as sacred, and at this point going after them would be both pointless and rude. Non-orthodox books, “religions” that were admittedly created solely to make money, or anything involving table tipping, flying saucers, or chanting for hours upon end to the Great Guru of _________ after a hard day of selling wilted flowers and badly made puppets at airports are all fair game, but the biggies get a permanent pass.
2. I do not rag on books written by children. There are some truly execrable books written by by the young — Ally Sheedy’s “Elizabethan history” She Was Nice To Mice comes immediately and unpleasantly to mind — but they get a pass because they’re by children. That means you will not see anything about Daisy Ashford or Opal Whiteley in these diaries, now or ever. I might write about Kaavya Viswanathan, whose first (and last) novel was found to be largely cobbled together from other people’s work, but given that she seems to have written/copied/channeled most of it when she was in high school, probably not.
3. I do not rag on books that are actively evil. Sorry, guys, but there is absolutely nothing amusing about The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, Malleus Malificarum, or The Turner Diaries. These books have quite literally caused the deaths of millions of innocents (especially that gem by the late and unlamented Herr Hitler) and I get mildly queasy at the mere thought of even touching them, let alone writing in a mocking and allegedly humorous way about them.
4. I do not rag on certain conspiracy theories. Even if Kos allowed this under the site rules (which Meteor Blades assured me is not the case a few years ago), the stuff found in the average book about the assassinations of 1963-1968, the terrorist attacks of the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and the EVIL FORCES THAT PULL THE STRINGS THAT CONTROL ALL US HUMAN MEAT PUPPETS HA HA HA HA is frequently so ludicrous that it just makes my teeth hurt. You want to read about how the death of ____________ was caused by the untrammeled lusts of _________________ for ______________’s wife/dog/horse/land/country/mint condition copy of Action Comics #1 and how this eventually led to the fall of ________________’s government and the _____________ of ______________ at the hands of _____________ rebels funded by ______________ and ______________ over a bet about _____________ juice futures, have fun, but you won’t find anything about it here.
5. I do not rag on amateur works. This means no fan fiction, no fanvids, and no fan art. Some of it indeed really horrible (trust me on this, and no, you don’t want to know how I know this) but if it hasn’t been published for money, it’s off limits. Not only would it be unspeakably cruel on my part to make fun of people who write what they write solely out of their love for a specific book, movie, comic, or TV series, it would be the height of hypocrisy given that I’ve been writing fanfic off and own for most of my life. “Don’t foul your own nest” applies whether or not the GTPOD is involved.
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So...these are the recurring themes and taboo topics for these diaries. If you can think of anything else you think I shouldn’t write about (or a lousy book that I absolutely should keep in mind for the summer or fall), let me know. I’m always looking for fresh material and/or warnings, so speak now or forever hold your peace (or at least until Hamilton tickets are available again)….
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