When You Are Englufed in Flames by David Sedaris

Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker! This has got to be the most badass book ever written! What could be more kickass than a skeleton smoking a motherfucking blunt? Pretty much nothing, not even Bruce Willis blowing up an airliner with a Zippo and laughing while doing so. Maybe a flaming skeleton pulling a bong hit. No, too contrived. A plain old skeleton smoking a blunt is way cooler. It’s artfully understated, elegant without being totally gay. This is real art for real people, not the kind of museum crap printed on coffee mugs and mouse pads. Monet, Manet, van Gogh (more like van Gay). They’re responsible for the elitist doctrine that art must be stuffy and effeminate, that it can never be funny or badass. I’m guessing that this cover might be a Caravaggio, the Bruce Willis of the Renaissance. While Michelangelo and company were wussing out, pissing their togas over God’s sociopathic omnipotence, Caravaggio was out shagging prostitutes and stabbing dudes to death. Therefore, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is not for the faint of heart or stomach. There is undoubtedly some crazy ass-kicking in this book.

The caption at the top of the cover says that Sedaris is also the author of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, further proof that this author speaks for the American everyman. Judging from this, my bet is that When You Are Engulfed in Flames is a cowboy revenge saga with old-fashioned grit and gore. The protagonist is probably some sort of amoral, misanthropic gunslinger whose entire family has been raped, slaughtered, and torched. They were the only thing keeping him on the straight and narrow, from regressing to his former days as a bank-robbing, ruthless bastard. Now, with nothing but his soul to lose, he takes a flaming Johnny Weissmuller swan dive into hell, blasting the faces of his enemies the entire way down. After Brokeback Mountain, the Western could use this kind of penile pick-me-up. When You Are Engulfed in Flames is basically John Wayne on Viagra, wielding modernized weaponry.

The book isn’t all blood and brawn. It also has thematic genius. The smoking skull depicted on the cover is a hedonistic reminder to pound as many beers and heads as possible before dying. In the end, life is like Bruce Willis, much shorter than you’ve imagined. 5’9 at best, and that’s in a pair of man clogs (my uncle almost beat him up a few summers ago in Boston for flirting with his wife). Caravaggio’s smoking skull isn’t some Surgeon General’s Warning about the dangers of smoking. It’s about pulling the trigger on evildoers with your middle finger. It’s why Adam Sandler holds a skull during his performance as Hamlet in Billy Madison. All those old-timers kept skulls around so they wouldn’t forget to avenge their enemies before dying. When your uncle kills your dad and starts banging your mom, when a gang of outlaws rapes and kills your entire family, you’ve got to ask yourself the following question: Do I want to be the proverbial zit on the proverbial ass cheek or do I want to burn in hell while gaining revenge?

Well, do ya, punk?

I didn’t think so, but you can rest easy knowing that there are authors out there like David Sedaris, depicting man in a way that the P.C. police might consider patriarchal and/or sexist, but with whom we true-blue, working class Americans would like to have a beer. The kind of man we’d cast a vote for in 2012.

Keep an eye out for When You Are Engulfed in Flames. It’s bound to become an American classic if republicans can string together a few more two-term presidencies. Even better, I've heard rumors that David Sedaris is going to write the next Die Hard script.

How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

This cover is completely redundant. How to be alone? We all know that reading is the surest way to achieve loneliness, celibacy, and a host of other depressive disorders, not to mention shortsightedness, bad breath, and a hair across your ass. Exhibit A: the woman on the cover. She’s an unfashionable nerd, Eleanor Rigby in a pair of Jean-Paul Sartre glasses. The red lipstick fails to sexualize her thin lips. She’s also rocking some sort of feathered mullet from the mid ‘80’s. That black beatnik sweater merely slims down her already slender chest. Reading at a bookstore is the last thing this androgynous melancholiac should be doing. She is sure as shit going to die alone, covered in the fur of twenty-seven Persian cats. She needs to get the hell out of that bookstore and join some type of social network. Even masturbating on Chatroulette with a paper bag over her head would be a step in the right direction.

There’s no need to buy this book of essays because the cover perfectly illustrates the self-explanatory rhetoric of its title. It’d be like buying a book entitled How to Be Fat with a cover picture of a morbidly obese woman chomping into a Big Mac while she sits inside of a crowded McDonald’s. Look at the other people in the bookstore. Their blurry, indistinguishable faces are prime examples of what happens to a person who reads too much. You lose your identity. You lose your autonomy. You become tyrannized by the authority of not just the author but the stuffy New York agents and editors who had a hand in constructing this new reality that has re-territorialized your own. I get an existential migraine just looking at those facial auras in the background. I am not sure what the attractive brunette under the lamp is doing in a bookstore. Perhaps she is looking at the cover of the newest Candace Bushnell novel. Why else would a beautiful woman be standing in a bookstore?

I wanted to applaud Jonathan Franzen for writing a collection of essays that warn people about the dangers of reading, but something told me that How to Be Alone is more of an instruction manual, a how-to book for unimaginative recluses. The wordy, name-dropping quote from the New York Times signifies as much. So the question must be asked. Why does Jonathan Franzen want people to read and hence be alone? Socrates warned Athenians on the dangers of reading. Aristotle once described man as an apolitical but completely social animal. Is Franzen calling two of Western civilization’s greatest thinkers stupid? Probably. Controversy sells books and how else would Picador sell a collection of essays? Nobody reads them anymore. Not even the French.

The underlying question to all of this is who reads anymore period? The answer? Writers. Unless you’re an aspiring or established writer, there is no need or motivation to open a book. You think Don DeLillo spends a bunch of money buying books? It’s why there are so many MFA programs these days. The literary industrial complex depends on failed and struggling authors; otherwise, there wouldn’t be any readers/customers. The publishing world needs losers, desperate ones. It’s why most MFA programs don’t require GRE scores. A friend of mine is getting one. He looks really smart, but his affected introvert persona excludes him from ever having to prove it verbally. Once he did muster enough interest in the world to mumble a sentence or two in my presence. He said the best way of becoming a writer is to become a voracious reader. I asked where he heard such rubbish. He said his MFA program. Sounds like a racket to me. Most MFA directors could probably be brought up on RICO charges.

My MFA buddy also told me (between strokes of his soul patch) that Franzen is an admitted literary descendant of Don DeLillo. If so, why is he trying to convince young writers to read more in order to develop their craft? DeLillo himself admits that his writing was more influenced by jazz, abstract expressionism, and avant-garde European films than reading. So clearly, if you want to be the greatest American writer of all time, your best bet is to invest in an iPod, a Netflix account, and membership to your local art museum. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a thirty thousand dollar MFA program.