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.