Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, Eli Horowitz, eds., The Future Dictionary of America, 2004

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reality [ree-al’-uh-tee] n. anything experienced in private.
ANT. unreality n. anything appearing on or experienced through the mass media. – ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

I had seen this book reviewed either in the New Scientist or The Economist yet reckoned I’d be lucky to ever come across a copy. This book is also worthy of a far deeper scan than the superficial coverage I give it here, as it also includes in its various endpapers the Declaration of Independence, the Charter of the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a future, fictional declaration on the illegality of the Iraq War.

rumsfeld [ruhmz’-feld] n. one who can stomach casualties. – KURT VONNEGUT
cheney [chay’-nee] vi. to parlay one cushy job into another, esp. via personal connections. e.g. Ron clearly hoped to cheney his way from Chairman of the Board at Marduk Industries to the Ambassador of Luxembourg, preferably using other people’s campaign donations. – SCOTT PHILLIPS

Think of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Adams & Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff, Gustave Flaubert’s The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, and set them five hundred years in the future with a strong anti-Neocon slant: this is of course very much of its time, it is also a very speculative and sardonic retrospective on words and colloquialisms that will one day enter the English language (this is the ‘sixth’ edition). There is also a loosely cohesive future history imagined here, and one that is brighter than that which the Bush-era Neocons were once offering America (though possibly equally weird, and for funnier and less sinister reasons). It is not all political – there are other domestic quirks explored, some of which are begging for an imaginative expansion, for instance the entry Starwatch, in which the month of September is renamed thus, has a particularly good back-story.

outFox [owt-fahks] v.1. to be more dishonest and deceitful than one’s rivals.
v.2. to lean more heavily to the right. – RYAN HARTY

Over 170 writers contributed entries (for free), with proceeds going to Democrat causes, and it was published prior to the November 2004 election. But in this book’s universe the Democrats won and the Bush Gang and the religious Right are consigned to eternal damnation and ridicule.

secularity blanket [sek-yoo-layr’ih-tee blan-ket] n.1. a small blanket or other soft cloth, often embroidered with the likeness of Noam Chomsky, clutched by an atheist or agnostic person who has failed to register according to the American Religious Resurrection Act of 2012.
n.2. anything that gives a person a feeling of safety or freedom from fundamentalist or absolutist oppression. – GARY SHTEYNGART

There are also strange cartoons from Art Spiegelman and others, and the accompanying CD has music from R.E.M., David Byrne, Tom Waits and more. Enough eulogising. Let me just end with my least favourite place on Earth:

guantanamo [gwahn-tahn’-uh-mo] 1. v. [Origin uncertain, but likely a remnant of the hispanic-WASP patois of the late 21st-century northeastern United States: from the Spanish aguantar, to bear, endure, put up with + the early 21st-century anglo-suburban colloqial no mo’, no more, nothing else.] to be unable to bear; to find unacceptable, to refuse to endure, for even one second longer.
2. n. [Origin uncertain, but of common use in Arabic-, Dari-, Pashto-, and Urdu-speaking regions, likely a borrowing from one of those tongues.]
2a. a purgatory. An intermediate floor of hell.
2b. the mythical final place of confinement of the last president, vice-president and cabinet of the United States of America, immediately following the Great Upheaval but prior to the Grand Awakening and the Glorious Final Making Ammends and Mellowing the Fuck Out Forever After of that nation.
3. n. a vast butterfly and wildflower preserve on the Caribbean coast of Cuba. – BEN EHRENREICH

Dimitri Verhulst, Problemski Hotel, 2003

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One word can sum up Problemski Hotel for me: stunning. A novella about the lives of incarcerated asylum seekers before they escape across the channel from Belgium into England, Verhulst exposes the casual prejudices of just about everyone, being politically incorrect to the point of recklessness yet always remaining humane and heartfelt. This is writing that is sharp, unforced, funny and totally true. Brilliant.

Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story, 1991

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A Dutch teacher and classical scholar goes to sleep in Amsterdam and inexplicably wakes up the next morning in Portugal, in a hotel bed in which twenty years before he slept with another man’s wife. But this Kafka-esque premise goes in a very sardonic direction and is delivered with a sharply observant humour, as the protagonist roams back and forth in his life seemingly searching for clues. The Following Story covers a lot of ground in its brief 97 pages but there seems to be no place at which you can say with certainty “ah, so that’s what the author is getting at” as it is constantly moving on to the next thing, never chronologically, but evidently with Nooteboom’s own sequential thought processes, perhaps making it an analysis of fulfillment by taking the reader through a game of join-the-dots in prose – one in which if you haven’t arrived at a clear picture by the end, makes you want to start again for another try. Very enjoyable, despite Nooteboom’s habit of disorienting the reader, which almost seems careless at times.

Andrew Kaufman, All My Friends Are Superheroes, 2005

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Tom is the only normal person he knows: everyone else has one superpower which defines their lives, such as his wife, the Perfectionist, to whom he becomes invisible on their wedding night thanks to Hypno, her hypnotist ex-lover. She thinks Tom has abandoned her, but six months later on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver he has to figure out how he can finally make her see him again. This book is a very neat idea that with poor editing could have sprawled all over the place, but instead it’s tightly put together, just the right length for the kind of literate surrealist fantasy that it is. Not laugh-out-loud funny though the off-beat humour works in an intelligent Being John Malkovich kind of way, and I’d recommend this to any number of people who admire books that aren’t self-consciously smug about their own cleverness.

Knut Hamsun, Dreamers, 1904

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A mild comedy of manners set in a Norwegian fishing village at the turn of the 20th Century, centred around the errant escapades of Ove Rolandsen, the local, genial, all-round reprobate. All the characters are to a degree trapped in their situations and hoping for something better, and it takes the unlikely ingenuity and improvisations of Rolandsen, simply by living out his own complex inner nature, for things to turn out right for everyone in the end. Hamsun was gently poking fun at all his characters but was also noticeably sympathetic towards them, a trait which separated his more aggressive earlier books from later novels such as this one. A very likeable story indeed.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 1963

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An unintentional ‘wampeter’ of Vonnegut’s own design around which agnostics still flock. Surprisingly perhaps, it remains particularly well-judged as a hefty swipe at religion and shows precisely how humans are all running around chasing after the wrong things. Vonnegut’s invented religion of Bokononism – like Taoism with added determinism – is the real centrepiece, with the deadly Ice-Nine almost a macguffin and the ensemble of characters all playing bit-parts to a much bigger story. As a re-read, this time around I knew what to expect, but I recall being three-quarters of the way through it the first time when it dawned on me how well put together Bokononism, and Cat’s Cradle itself, really is; a lesser talent would have made this twice as long and only half as entertaining.

Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Observed Trains, 1965

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~ aka. Closely Watched Trains. ~

In 1945 a young railway signalman with a death wish, Milos Hrma, works at a small but strategic Bohemian station, but however straightforward his job may be it’s complicated by his own set of small concerns, such as the matter of dispatching German troops to their crumbling Eastern Front, or the minor scandal involving the station’s female telegraphist, or losing his virginity, or the small part he will soon play in disposing of a German ammunition train. It’s cleverly comedic in the way that the endless trains of death and misery that pass through Hrma’s station are only briefly acknowledged while Hrma’s own lesser preoccupations always take centre stage. Like another of Hrabal’s rather unique books Too Loud a Solitude, this was initially difficult to find a way into, but once I got the rhythm of it I found it full of earthy humour and some joyously sardonic writing.

Jim Theis, The Eye of Argon, 1970

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I have a fellow science fiction fan to thank for this extraordinary pleasure – and yes it was a pleasure, quite possibly the worst (or at least the least good) book I will ever read, that is, in the “so bad it’s good” post-modern sense. Written when Theis was just sixteen and originally published in a forgotten fanzine, this 7,000 word ‘sword and sorcery’ epic’s rise above complete obscurity has come at the (possibly cruel) efforts of several prominent SF fans and has been enshrined in its own paperback edition, complete with the long-lost last few pages and a long introduction by Lee Weinstein. The Eye of Argon‘s charm is its teenage naïvity while at the same time Theis’s writing, undaunted by lack of familiarity with his subject or fear of stereotype, bravely takes on adult themes with a barely adequate vocabulary: there are perhaps a dozen grammatically correct sentences in the whole story that are at least properly structured, or free of typos, or don’t use an awkwardly heavy emphasis on the wrong components. It often reminds one of reading badly translated Cantonese (I particularly liked the use of “avantgarde” to mean “advanced guard”). Jim Theis died in 2002 and in his later years grew to be sporting about his story’s unwanted notoriety… does anyone still play “The Eye of Argon” game at conventions?

D.W. “Prof” Smith, Captain Proton: Defender of the Earth, 1999

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Just occasionally Star Trek: Voyager would rise to unexpected heights, one of its best episodes being ‘Bride of Chaotica’ which focussed on Tom Paris’s interest in 20th Century pulp SF. Dean Wesley Smith’s original non-Trek novel is fettered with the usual skiffy tropes: evil galactic empires, ray guns and a talking giant spider from outer space, played tongue-in-cheek but with none of the science fictional self-referencing that Robert Sheckley or Harry Harrison would have indulged in. The physical book itself is also good: a well-produced facsimile of a pulp SF mag with 2-column type, a typical letters page in which the editor cheerily bats away pedantic teenage nerds, and a few space-filling written-before-breakfast short stories, one of which starts brilliantly.

Leo Rosten, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, 1937

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Over a period of two years Leo Rosten wrote these fifteen short stories for the New Yorker, depicting the beginners’ grade at New York’s Preparatory Night School for Adults, and prominent among the students is the verbose Polish immigrant Hyman Kaplan, whose singular logic about how English should work is vastly at odds with how it actually does. Rosten added some flamboyance to these stories about the students’ rather unadventurous learning of the language, while at the same time keeping the humour innocent and sticking to the point – there was also a second volume published in 1959, The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, which the intervening World War did much to make that innocence harder to achieve. I read the hardcover edition with the introduction by Howard Jacobson that unfortunately explains far too much, and goes on to give away Rosten’s best jokes while stating that nothing is funnier than this book, even surpassing Rosten’s famous lexicon The Joys of Yiddish. Maybe this negatively affected my reading of them, but I suspect in a different time these stories may once have been laugh-out-loud, whereas today they read as gentle yet rather erudite humour. But I’ll certainly be looking out for that sequel.