The Farm Report

Every now and then in class, I mention “the library” and look out to see rows of blank faces. Time to explain myself again.

“It’s like the Internet, only it’s printed out,” I tell my students. “It’s this big building across campus . . . surely you’ve seen it? Has a million or so books?”

Blank stares again. “Books! You know, sort of like a blog that’s been printed out?”

There are a couple of Florida writers, longtime bloggers, whose work has now been preserved the old fashioned way: in books. It’s probably not much different than the old days when writers serialized their work in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s.

But for a semi-old fashioned guy like me, it’s so much handier – and more handsome – to tote around books, rather than carrying a laptop. Because this is the kind of writing you want to read aloud to friends and a book is a lot easier than saying, “Hey, hang on. As soon as I open my laptop and link to the network and type in the URL, I got some really funny shit for you.”

In this case, the really funny shit comes from two Florida writers, both in their early 40s: Lance Carbuncle from Tampa and Patrick Hughes (below) from Gainesville.

Let’s start with Hughes, because his wonderful book, Diary of Indignities (MPress Books, $14.95) has been out for some time.

It’s basically his life story, from his blog, Bad News Hughes. He’s since put that blog into hibernation and now maintains The Domesticated Shithead. The change reflects Hughes’s life, so hisDiary is sort of like Pat Hughes: The Early Years. Indeed, from the cover —  a disturbing photobooth portrait of Hughes at 8 (an estimate) — we see the whole catastrophe of his life laid bare.

So we march through the intertwined lives of a bunch of funseekers who happen to be linked by law and thinning genses. It’s such a great, endearingly odd family that we wonder why HBO hasn’t picked up the option for a series. The Hughes family kicks the piss out of those wimpy “True Blood” vampires. The intricate relationships make the polygamous clan of “Big Love” look like exiles from Mayberry. And these people are so dark, they make the funeral-home Fisher family of “Six Feet Under”  into “Leave it to Beaver” innocents. These people are seriously weird.

Hughes’s gift has always been in finding the most uncomfortable life moments and writing about them, in cringing detail — in painfully honest, soul-searching, microscopic detail.

Despite that, he’s funny. Whether writing about another drunken Jell-O shot Christmas, the intra-family squabbles that dwarf the Middle East political negotiations, or the minutiae of his rectal problems, Hughes is always funny. I’ve been reading him for 20 years, since he was a college newspaper columnist, and his work never fails to entertain.

As I said, Diary of Indignities has been out for a while and we can hope that something is in the works for his Domesticated Shithead writings – you know, another one of this things like a blog, only printed out.

Lance Carbuncle developed a following with his blog and produced Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed (self-published, $12.50) in 2007. He’s followed that with his new novel, Grundish and Askew (Vicious Books, $12.50).

Like Hughes, Carbuncle has a strong and untempered voice. Smashed, Squashed, Etc. was told largely from a dog’s point of view, but Grundish and Askew is the story of a couple of Florida ne’er-do-wells on the run. In fact, if the Florida Ne’er-Do-Well Association has its way, a cease and desist order wil be issued against Carbuncle. These losers defame the good name of those hard-working ne’er-do-wells out there.

Think of those grungy, maggoty knuckle-dragging villains in Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey novels. Those morons are fucking Osmond family teasippers compared to the crew Carbuncle has created.

And then there is this paragraph, which is bound to be quoted in upcoming Chamber of Commerce literature from Bartow, Fla.:

“Florida is sometimes referred to as the nation’s genitals. In the center of the nation’s dong is a largish, ruptured varicose vein known as Polk County. Sitting right smack in the middle of this burst vein is an infected carbuncle, a little pus-filled town by the name of Bartow.”

Both Hughes and Carbuncle used their blogs to find their identities and perfect their voices. That explains why these books are written with such staggering confidence. It’s unlikely we’d find such consistent and toxic points of view in the catalogs of major mainstream publishers.

But maybe things are changing. He’s not from Florida, but we include Atlanta resident Joe Peacock here because his upcoming (November) Mentally Incontinent (Gotham Books, $15) reminds me of the books of Hughes and Carbuncle. Peacock’s voice is another one honed on the Internet and now ready for prime time. Mentally Incontinent is hilarious from start to finish as he deals with a mother who wonders if Peacock and his friend are “you know, gay together” to the thrilling conclusion, when he goes to work for Wal-Mart because, as a future writer, he felt that he needed to “indulge in something truly dark and evil” in the name of that experience all writers yearn to have,

You can have your Dan Brown novels. Give me something fun, original and twisted instead.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to nominate the University Press of Florida for the state’s highest public service award.

After all, the publisher has brought Carl Hiaasen’s two collections of newspaper columns  back into print in handsome trade paperbacks. Check out Kick Ass and Paradise Screwed (both University Press of Florida, $24.95 apiece).

Hiaasen has always said that if he isn’t pissing people off, he isn’t doing his job. Will somebody please give this man a raise?

There’s something in these books to offend just about everybody – particularly morally challenged shitheels ass-raping Florida’s environment and destroying the fragile beauty of this magnificent and wacky state.

And if you don’t fall into that category, Hiaasen will probably still make you pretty mad. He might get you so angry you’ll get out of your chair and do something to stop the ecological and ethical erosion of the Sunshine State.

Lots of people know Hiaasen the novelist.  His marvelous satirical books – Tourist Season, Strip Tease, Nature Girl and Lucky You among them – have sold truckloads of copies. He’s become a monster in young-adult fiction, with Hoot, Flush and Scat. And he is the Patron Saint of Golfers-Gone-To-Seed in his latest nonfiction best-seller, The Downhill Lie.

But a lot of his loyal fans don’t realize that despite his success, Hiaasen keeps his day job as a Miami Herald columnist. This probably saves him a lot of trouble. He doesn’t have to go looking for weirdness to put into his novels; all he has to do is page through the local section of his newspaper.

So he holds onto the newspaper job as a sort of reality check – or, since this is Miami, a surreality check.

These are books for Florida. Unlike his novels,these might not travel well. Hiaasen takes the “local columnist” thing seriously, and these pieces are specific to his beloved and vulnerable home state.

They are also well reported. Again, fans of his novels might not realize it, but Hiaasen was part of the Herald’s investigative team before he became a columnist in 1985. Unlike a lot of snoremonger columnists  — who read the work of real reporters, then ruminate and deign to tell us what it all means — Hiaasen still does his legwork. He doesn’t sit on his can and comment on things he’s only read about. This guy never stopped reporting.

His column isn’t syndicated much out of Florida and Hiaasen seems to have no interest in being a fixture of the Anytown Gazette, like his pal Dave Barry. To go for mass acceptance would mean watering down his message and betraying his audience. The book is dedicated to “all those who care about Florida,” and the profits will benefit the Carl A. Hiaasen Scholarship Fund at his alma mater, the University of Florida College of Journalism and  Communications.

Of course, the columns share with the novels that uncanny ability of Hiaasen’s – to blend the comic and tragic, to horrify readers and make them laugh at the same time.

Kick Ass (the title is drawn from Hiaasen’s self-composed job description) is, among other things, a history of South Florida from the dawn of the Reagan Era to the middle of the Clinton Years. Paradise Screwed picks things up from there.

The columns are freckled with corrupt politicians (a redundancy in Hiaasenland), immoral developers and mouth-breathing geeks who, for example, ignore posted “no swimming” signs on the beaches when the waters are contaminated with feces. “You can almost hear Darwin’s ghost,” Hiaasen writes. “Surely these morons aren’t going swimming in THAT crap! Not with their kids! Not with a warning sign right in front of their face! Wrong, Charlie Baby.”

Hiaasen pokes fun at it all – the inane tourist slogans, the ineffective drug war, the unchecked growth and, of course, the madcap politicians. While watching Cardinals pitcher Joaquin Andujar throw a fit during the 1985 World Series – he chased umpires, foamed at the mouth and destroyed a dugout toilet with a baseball bat, all on live TV – Hiaasen realized he might be the perfect candidate for mayor of Miami: “In no time Andujar would mop up the City Commission,” Hiaasen wrote. “Forget diplomacy – we’re talking a 93-mile-an-hour brushback pitch. It’s not such a bad idea, when you review this year’s crop of political hopefuls, a veritable slag-heap of mediocrity.”

Aw, don’t hold back, Carl. What do you really think of them?

Like Hiaasen’s novels, this book is filled with great one-liners. And, as always, he walks so well that terribly fine line between comedy and tragedy. He horrifies you with his stories of life’s insanities, but he makes you laugh about them too. But unlike his novels, where the weirdnesses are products of imagination, all this stuff actually happened.

This is real; this is journalism. Truth can be stranger than fiction and that’s why fiction can be such a comfort.

(By the way, this entry from Bill McKeen’s Book Blog in Tampa Bay’s Creative Loafing magazine features comments  drawn from my earlier reviews of Kick Ass from the St. Petersburg Times and Communigator magazine.)

Every morning I leap from bed and sink to my knees and thank God that Bob Dylan never made a video for “Like a Rolling Stone.” And good on Mick and Keith for having the sense to not shoot a promo clip for “Satisfaction.”Every time I hear those songs — and I’m sure I’m well into the thousands with both of them — I have different and intense feelings. Think about all the ways we can go with those majestic six minutes of Dylan’s rant — was it aimed at someone or was it an internal monologue? Is it aimed at me… or her… or you?

That’s the beauty of music — the stirring melody and words create all kinds of images and associations and allusions. As one of those who bitches now and then about the paucity of genius in modern music, I have to point to the tyranny of the video: It nails down an image to go with each note.

It’s not that we didn’t have visual associations with pre-video music. When I was a child, the cellos on one of my father’s favorite records reminded me of ovals of color moving in syncopation. We all have those images that accompany the library of music in our skulls. They’re there if we ever hear those songs and want to call on them.

William Munch paints what he hears. His impressionistic work beautifully evokes the majesty of the changing seasons and the emotional evolution of the planet.

But the dude also rocks.

Step into his studio and you’re likely to hear Hendrix or Led Zeppelin thrashing chords while Munch thrashes the canvas.

Rock’n'roll is fuel for Munch — as it is for thousands of other creators, be they painters, poets or pounders of keys.

But a few years ago, he decided to respond with his art to the way the music makes him feel.

In short, Munch began to rock.

What he’s produced are impressionistic versions of rock stars. These are visual interpretations of musicians — not literal-minded insults, like some jejune-bullshit video, but emotional tributes to those who have provided the fuel: Mick Jagger, large-lipped and bawdy; Elvis, aw-shucksy and hopped up on pills; Cobain, dark and depressed; Bob Marley, the embodiment of tri-colored peace.

Sure, these works of art could join Munch’s other works on the walls of museums and collectors. Some of them are in the permanent collection of the Seminole Hard Rock Casino — where he had a huge reception and show last October.

But in keeping with the anarchistic and egalitarian nature of the music, Munch’s rock portraits adorn T-shirts of the hip. He’s created a virtual store to sell the things (www.munchrocks.com) and the colorful blooms decorate the chests of rock fans around the world. In addition to those we mentioned, his subjects include Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

It’s art, it’s commerce and it’s Munch’s way of giving back. This is a thank-you for a lifetime of fuel.

When he made his speech at the Hard Rock last fall, a humbled Munch paid tribute to the music he loved.

“Imagine a world without music,” he said. “Imagine a world without art. The wind would have never cried Mary. The jingle-jangle morning would have never followed us. We’d never strive to break on through to the other side. Me and Bobby McGee would have never been busted down in Baton Rouge. The sky would have never cried. We would have never traveled down Thunder Road. Jailhouses would never have rocked. Strawberry fields wouldn’t have been forever. We wouldn’t know to give peace a chance.”

Videos? We don’t need no stinking videos. We just need the music. We can close our eyes and feel what the music urges us to feel. Munch’s wearable art allows us, in a silent way, to repay a debt.