Almost Fainting While Listening To Cintra Wilson

Last night I went to a comedy show at Greenlight Bookstore featuring a number of contributors to the Believer, on the occasion of their latest book of advice coming out this week. (Contributor Julie Klausner looked at the cover and sniffed, "I didn't know those were the cars. That's illegal.") The Believer's advice column is short on actual advice and long on wit, if you've never read it, but contributors had enough latitude to add jokes as necessary and I suspected some of those who read last night were ad-libbing at least a little.

I think I was most curious to see critic Cintra Wilson, who read from her forthcoming book about advertising and fashion (and some of her advice pieces, including a very funny one about needlepoint). Wilson has stepped back from the New York Times style section after criticism over this column about J.C. Penney, which was too bad because her Critical Shopper columns had a delightful bite to them that no one else replicates. (That I didn't find the column offensive is neither here nor there, really, but I'm pointing it out anyway.) Wilson has a voice in the Jerri Blank region and climbed up on a store table to read because, as she explained, not only was she short but she also had "totalitarian" impulses.

I took a friend from work who is a Michael Ian Black fan (who isn't?) and who, by chance, had never been to the bookstore, so I felt I had done my good deed by promoting it. Black read from his new memoir YOU'RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT about the first harrowing months of parenting and how they mysteriously seemed to double under the spell of advanced sleep deprivation.

The one regrettable spot to the evening was that it was very warm in the bookstore and midway through Wilson's "Fast Five" review (which I loved) I started feeling unsteady and dizzy and, with none of my adult grace, wobble-kneed it down to the floor for the rest of the reading. I'm not a fainter, but I wasn't the only one who was suffering from the heat. (Astonishingly it was much cooler at floor level and I was able to stare at people's Converse and Danskos and come back to myself.) Greenlight, if you're checking your referrals this morning, please open the door next time as I could probably take about 4 people down with me if I fell and you don't want to be responsible for that kind of carnage.

I'm at the Brooklyn Book Festival all day today, and if you want to know more about that you had best find me on Twitter. Updates will be more frequent than usual, but judicious. (Sidebar: This is my first "hometown" festival, which I note so I can have A Moment about it later, but I'll say... so far, so good. Although last weekend someone referred to me as "making the trek" from Brooklyn to East 19th Street, which was hilarious. All the way where?!)

In case you need diversion, I recommend Julie Klausner's recent interview with David Rakoff on her podcast "How Was Your Week?" in which he talks about his beginnings as a writer. You can stream it from this page directly (it's the episode "Shelf of Justice").

Also, congratulations to BUNNICULA author James Howe on his marriage.

Patton Oswalt, in short form

I requested this book at the library after hearing Oswalt on fellow comedian Julie Klausner's podcast "How Was Your Week?" (His interview is episode 6, "Polar Bears on Moonbeams.") Klausner herself wrote a great memoir about men and New York City called I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BAND, and over the course of two stressful weeks at work I listened to every episode of "How Was Your Week?" except the Joan Rivers one which I'm saving for a desperate occasion. 

Oswalt wasn't unknown to me before -- I even saw him open for Aimee Mann once -- and I'm not sure why I didn't catch up with ZOMBIE SPACESHIP WASTELAND when it came out earlier this year. I am pro-comedians writing books and I don't mind when, as with ZSW (yeah, that abbreviation just happened), memoiristic material is mixed up with other pieces of writing. The first time Oswalt's narrative was interrupted by a nondiegetic piece -- of punch-up notes on what sounds like a terrible comedy script (that we don't get to read) -- I was surprised, but enjoyed it. I wonder if he'd wanted to organize the collection differently, with genres separated, but was prevented because there wasn't enough of a through line. 

Biographically, there still isn't much of a through line, but the best pieces show Oswalt's comic consciousness developing out of a sort of suburban ooze. In "Ticket Booth," a summer job at a suburban multiplex causes Oswalt to both vow that he'll get out of the suburbs, and a sort of sickly nostalgia for the noxious combination of boredom and superiority he was breathing in those days. The saddest/ most terrific piece, "A History Of America from 1988 to 1996," recreates the paths of three different archetypal comedians Oswalt claims to have opened for in his time on the comedy circuit, which he describes both as soul-destroying and attractive in such a way that it displaces his old dream of being a famous author.

The titular chapter of ZSW posits that nerds and other non-popular adolescents gravitate toward and take the form of one of those three scifi tropes -- Zombie, Spaceship or Wasteland. This is the kind of theory about which people could argue for hours and there's a lot of truth to it, although not how I would have organized the teenage misfit world. (To begin with I would have retermed them zombie, astronaut and vigilante so they are all figures, not figure/object/world. Type A much?) Oswalt places himself and many other comedians in the Wasteland category in that they want to tear down what's horrible about the world, while leaving hope open that a better world can be built over the smoking ruins. An observational comedian, by this logic, would be a Zombie; one who posited a lot of what-ifs and hypotheticals, a Spaceship. (I'm probably Spaceship. Tell me what that says about me.) I wish Oswalt had done more with this theory, which could have provided the through line ZSW doesn't have; but I still enjoyed the break it provided from longer, denser reads.