Oh, Sweet Irony!

Revenge is sweet, but I don’t think people could possibly love it as much as they do irony. Is there anything more satisfying than seeing a self-important windbag fall prey to the same weakness that he excoriates in others (I’m thinking right now of Christian preachers who are closet homosexuals)?

But irony, while satisfying to recognize in the lives of others, is hard to acknowledge in oneself. I took a graduate class a few years ago in Romantic poetry. My teacher was a knowledgeable man and a good scholar. He was also a member of what I like to call the masturbatory school of literary criticism. He would sometimes read a line from Wordsworth or Keats, then sit back, gaze into the air, and say what a great line that was. That was it. He was usually right, but I didn’t think I needed a professor to tell me that.

As a writing teacher, I have become a card-carrying member of the same school of criticism. I’ll read from one of the essays my students were supposed to have read, and just comment on what a great passage it was. I don’t tell my students about that graduate class, though. There are some things that are just best left unsaid.

It is with this sense of irony in mind that I gather my thoughts and try to figure out what to say about Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire. It’s this year’s “One Book, One Philadelphia” choice. Like The Things They Carried (last year’s selection, I think), this is a memoir written by someone who went through a deeply traumatic experience (Why do they have to be memoirs?). For Eire, it’s having to leave Cuba after the Revolution and becoming a refugee, then a foster child, in the States. While this is a good book, written with a self-deprecating, caustic humor and a bitterness and guilt of childhood, I can’t imagine it would go over very well at a book discussion in Philadelphia.

What I liked best about Eire was his tone. You should read the book yourself, and if you do, you’ll probably notice that my post “Portrait of the Artist” (see below) was a poor attempt to emulate Eire’s style.

So it turns out that there’s very little I can offer about the book, except saying, “What a good book that was!” If anyone ever decides to cover Alanis Morisette’s song, and wants to change the words to reflect things that are truly ironic and not merely unfortunate, this would fit well.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell

I just finished My War by Colby Buzzell. I read it because I was writing a war story and, since I have never been in the armed services, I wanted to learn a little of the lingo so the story would seem more real. After reading Buzzell, I don't know if I'm going to finish my story. I don't think I could tell it as well as it's already been told. We'll see.

I hate book reports and reviews. If you want to know what the book is about, read it yourself or just read the synopsis on Amazon. And no one would care if I liked the book or not.

There were, however, some thoughts that I had as a reult of having read the book.

Buzzell mentions Jello Biafra, former singer of the Dead Kennedy's and political activist. As a young, stupid teenager, I was a fan of the Dead Kennedys, though as an older, stupid man, I can't see what about the music was appealing. Biafra also released a few spoken-word CDs. I bought one, listened once to hours of him talking and talking (I was too young to care about what he was talking about), then promptly traded in the CD.

There was one message that stood out: become the media. Biafra praised Buzzell for the soldier's idea to post first-hand accounts of his experience in Iraq, including accounts of the battles he was in. Buzzell also reproduces the official News accounts of those battles, and the discrepancies, euphemisms, and flat out lies told by the army and perpetuated by the media make Buzzell a seemingly good candidate for the anti-war movement. The blurbs on the book seem to say as much.

But what makes My War so different is it's more complicated than that. People in the US aren't getting an accurate picture from the army and the media of what's going on in Iraq; but that doesn't change the fact that Buzzell deeply believes that the invasion wasn't necessarily a mistake, and he supports this argument with conversations he had with Iraqis on the base and positive accounts of his contact with Iraqis while on missions.

This leaves the book in an odd place. On the one hand, it's critical of the media (not for the same old "liberal bias" that conservatives like to trot out) for the inaccuracies that it accepts and then passes on. But the book doesn't turn into an anti-establishment jeremiad. In one word, it's honest. That honesty is apparent throughout the book.

Buzzell is a good writer who got his start as a blogger. But don't take my word for it--read the book yourself.