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Title: The Satanic Nurses: And Other Literary Parodies by J. B. Miller ISBN: 0-312-30544-3 Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Extremely modern comedy
Comment: Some people think it is fun to do a parody of a song, but this book extends comedy to make fun of literary personalities for more than half a century. I have fond memories of being in the presence of three of the authors mentioned in this book, usually for readings from a book that I had not read. Just knowing that such people exist is part of the omniscience of our journalistic age, but I have read books by more than a dozen, most of which were pretty funny. Comedy skits are becoming a fundamental part of the way in which many people develop an understanding of the world. At the cutting edge, the raw material which the world provides is more mysterious than the nature of jokes. Entertainment values can skewer select lives in ways that are most amusing when the punishment is self-inflicted, and education can become an effort to addict people to reading with this kind of expectation. My life is as prone to this addiction as any, with several movies adding to the knowledge that I have of a few more creative efforts. Comedy is a habit that has become widely admired as the nature of reality has become so skewed that a major reason everybody is not equal has to be because we know different jokes. Parody is a pretense which allows J. B. Miller to make obvious how difficult any effort to produce a meaningful reflection of our times became in a century which followed the great minds, Freud and Jung, joking about polymorphous perversity.
You ought to be curious about what is in this book, if you have any appreciation for how funny people's thinking has been lately, but you can't depend on anything that it says because the disclaimer on the page before the Contents says: "Don't believe a word of it." With 44 selections in the 235 numbered pages, at an average of 5 pages per author sampled, selected, folded. spindled, or mutilated, which were preceded by a ten-page introduction dated May 2002, in which the satirist claims he was nine when he pocketed pages from Virginia Wolff's journal dated 1936, which could mean J. B. Miller was born before 1928, and might have been 74 when he produced these reflections on "these ink-stained wretches" (p. xi) who supposedly "entrusted these pieces to me on the understanding that I would never share them with anyone. So here they are." (p. xii).
Was rock funny? In the "Rabbit Rocks" by John Updike, Harry Angstrom is in a man band, leaping and tripping on a speaker cable, falling off the stage for a compound fracture of his right leg. Janice tells him, "You're a joke. They're calling it Lame Rock." (p. 100). Then in the List of Works by Joyce Carol Oates, there's "I'm a Believer: Musings on the Monkees." (p. 112). That's more like a reminder than a joke, coming after "Whodathunkit (I did)" (p. 111).
People don't always plan to get old, but "Harry Potter and the Rolling Stone" by J. K. Rowling describes Keith as something worse: "The heap coughed and then closed its eyes. Harry assumed it had gone back to sleep." (p. 223). The theme is how quickly things get old in this culture. "Even Harry was getting a little long in the tooth for the kids these days; every six months they were on to a new action figure or boy band. He was thinking of retiring himself--after all, who wanted a nineteen-year-old boy wizard?" (p. 225).
There is something great about freedom: a culture which allows so much to be going on that none of it fits together. The ideal moment in the book, THE SATANIC NURSES, for me, was in a set of rules by Norman Mailer on meeting women, designed to avoid the problems he had, and learning from his mistakes. Try to picture the dating scene from Norman Mailer's point of view: "How was I to know? I had two tickets to the Timothy McVeigh Lethal Injection, which the press had made out to seem like the hottest event in town." (p. 32). This did not turn out to be a great date for Norman Mailer, however much it reminds me of the old-fashioned procedure by which someone might be pictured dancing upon the air in the great poem by Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." The wit in this book is like the wry verse from this poem by Wilde:
It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair :
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare :
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air !
The J. R. R. Tolkien parody, "Lord of the Strings," has a brilliant idea about string which was magic, so when a string was tied around Balbot Biggins' finger, "he found that he was able to remember things." (p. 38). Evil Knitting Needles and The Return of the Yarn finally result in a "(Big battle with string.)" (p. 39).
The song parody in this book, "penned by an evidently irate Cole Porter," (p. 40), reversed the idea of the famous song, "You're the Top." Typical ideas:
"You're a fiend
I'd say more but it'd be obscene." (p. 41).
That idea might be quite common, now, as everything becomes more uninhibited. The wit is in being able to say things that take some thinking to figure out what it sounds like, not just how it looks. "You're an ist that's Fash" (p. 41). In the song, it might be twisted around like that so it would rhyme with "You're the stock market crash," but I suspect there is a deeper meaning. Normally, it would not be polite to say some of the things in this song, or this book. I shouldn't even tell you what line rhymes with "A stupid joker." (p. 42).
Rating: 1
Summary: Fine line between funny and stupid
Comment: When I read the list of authors parodied, I couldn't wait to dive into this book. I've read a majority of the originals and always enjoy a good parody. Unfortunately, this book wasn't it. Sometimes there's a fine line between funny and stupid - but this book never gets close to that line; it stays well over on the stupid side. Miller did manage to capture the style of the originals, but the attempts at parodies were senseless and void of humor. Don't waste your money; don't waste your time. If you're faced with getting a root canal or reading this book, go to the dentist; you'll enjoy it more.
Rating: 5
Summary: Smart, pithy hilarity
Comment: This is the stuff your English teacher never told you about.
Miller has put together a fine collection of satires. He's not only well read, but well versed in The Marx Brothers, Mad Magazine, Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, and Jackass.
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