Monday, January 1, 2007

The Funniest Novel in History - Its Scope and Literary Lineage

In another region of the Blogosphere (http://warblemcgorkle.blogspot.com/), I talk about my motivation for writing "the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle" and who I would like to see play the various roles in the event that it is ever made into a movie.

On this new cyber homestead, I will plainly tell you what that novel is. First, though, a bold and brash prediction: "the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle" will one day be considered a classic, from a voice crying out in the wilderness, from one hand that was clapping in an unpeopled forest. I am not at all sure, or even all that optimistic, though, that it will even get published (in the conventional sense, that is) in the near future.

What is this strange beast, this post-hippie, nose-thumbing, irreverent stripping of Emperors that I call the funniest novel in the history of mankind? "the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle" is hilariously outrageous, yet (thus?) it is unabashedly a "message" book, which uses pivotal events in U.S. history as a cultural mirror and as a jumping off point for the examination and exposé of current events and trends.

the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle descends from a long line of protest books, such as George Orwell's "1984", Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces", Miguel Cervantes' "Don Quixote", and Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five".

As did those books when they dove, cannonballed and belly-flopped into the existing pool of literature and the milieu of their times, the Zany Time Travels of Warble McGorkle delivers both glancing blows and an occasional head-on sledgehammering to many of our crises du jour.

Issues that bubble to the surface in the book's hissing and sizzling cauldron, to be briefly exposed to the air and then noisily burst, splattering bubble residue onto the reader's nose, include but are not limited to:

  • Preemptive Strikes
  • Collaborations between Church and State
  • Pollution and Global Warming
  • Religious Hypocrisy and Religiously-Motivated Violence
  • Illegal Arrests/Kidnapping and Pyschological Torture
  • Eugenics/Ethnic Cleansing
  • Globalization/"One Dollar, One Vote"
  • Economic Polarization (Rich richer, Poor poorer) and Poverty
  • Loss of Species/Habitats
  • War Crimes/Crimes Against Humanity
  • Steroid Abuse in Sports
  • Illegal Aliens/Downsizing/Outsourcing
  • Historical (unjust) Treatment of Native Americans
  • Rampant Corruption and Dirty Tricks in Politics
  • Corporate Greed
  • Government Waste
  • Frivolous Lawsuits
  • Water Shortages/Distribution of Natural Resources
  • Subliminal Advertising
  • Political Propaganda
  • The Military Industrial Complex
  • Racial Prejudice
  • Gender Prejudice
  • Ethnic Misconceptions and Stereotypes (Arabs, Jews, Mexicans, Germans, Japanese, etc.)
  • Religious Misconceptions and Stereotypes (Muslims, Jews, Lutherans, Mormons,etc.)
  • Abuse of Animals
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Schadenfreude
  • A running joke/good-natured barbs targeted at Texas in general and Dallas in particular
To learn more or get your copy (you can either download the .PDF file or order the hardcopy edition), go here: www.lulu.com/blackbirdcraven