A few days ago, a friend asked his Facebook constituency what event from Arkansas history they'd like to see re-enacted on the Comedy Central show Drunk History. Within minutes he had a number of responses: The Brooks-Baxter War. Bill Clinton announcing his run for the presidency at the Old State House. Somebody referenced the 1837 knife fight in the Arkansas General Assembly between Speaker of the House Col. John Wilson and state Rep. Maj. Joseph J. Anthony that left Anthony dead.
Good choices, all. If the producers of the show decide to focus on Arkansas, they'll find no shortage of material to be mangled via drunken retellings. And they'll also find a superior compendium of Arkansas lore and history, the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, which is a project of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System and apparently the only state encyclopedia published and maintained by a public library. If you want to acquaint (or re-acquaint) yourself with our state's colorful and sometimes bizarre history, there is no better resource.
In addition to the ongoing online project, last year the encyclopedia issued The Encyclopedia of Arkansas Music, a photo-filled reference work that included entries on more than 150 musicians, ensembles, musical works and events. Now it's publishing Arkansas in Ink: Gunslingers, Ghosts and Other Graphic Tales, a volume edited by Guy Lancaster (who's also the encyclopedia editor) and illustrated by this newspaper's Ron Wolfe. (A moment for transparency: Ron is beloved around here, as is the encyclopedia. Like most people who type for a living around these parts, I've contributed to the encyclopedia. And I'm writing this without the benefit of seeing the finished volume; I've got a typescript that has only the first 49 pages of what will be about a 200-page book. Just so you know.)
In his introduction, Lancaster invokes comics theorist Scott McCloud and his (excellent, highly recommended) 1993 work Understanding Comics by way of explaining the new volume's purpose.
"[McCloud] cites several antecedents to the comic book form," Lancaster writes, "to prove that this combination of word and image has long standing in human culture. In fact, human beings evolved as visual creatures, so it's no accident that certain visual cues resonate with our memories more than text."
Wolfe's indefatigably cheerful illustrations are value added to the encyclopedia entries collected within (written by a roster of writers too numerous to name) that might imprint the events on our memories.
"Maybe, just maybe, 30 years from now, you'll be thankful that you can talk with some expertise about the Brooks-Baxter War or the shadier history of Hot Springs," Lancaster writes. "That will have made the whole project worthwhile."
Even if you're not called on to do so after imbibing a few double Scotches.
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Speaking of double Scotches, a slim (64-page) volume called The Drinking Man's Diet (Cameron & Co., $12.95) has just crossed my desk. If it sounds vaguely familiar to you (as it did to me) that's because it's the 50th anniversary edition of a book originally published in 1964 by San Francisco-based ad man Robert Cameron.
The book caused a blip in the zeitgeist -- columnists Walter Winchell and Herb Caen wrote about it, there were stories in Time and Newsweek. Walter Cronkite interviewed Cameron on the evening news, and parodist Allan Sherman -- the Weird Al Yankovic of his day -- wrote a song about it. ("With every Manhattan/our stomach will flatten/If pounds you would burn off/Then turn on your Smirnoff ...")
Cameron, who probably was better known as an aerial photographer responsible for the Above series -- 20 handsome coffee-table books that feature photos taken from high above famous landmarks and historic sites (such as Above San Francisco, Above New York, Above Paris, etc.) -- started his publishing company in order to publish The Drinking Man's Diet. (Cameron, who was 93 in 2004, brought out a 40th-anniversary edition that year; he died the following year.)
The book has about 20 pages of text in which the authors, Gardner Jameson and Elliot Williams, walk us through a pseudo-scientific explanation of how a low-carbohydrate diet works before giving way to wonderfully droll testimonials (that have the feel of being completely made up) and tables of dietary information. There are also a few period cartoons from magazines like Gourmet and The New Yorker that certify the diet's brief vogue and Cameron's preface from the 2004 edition, in which he sort of gloats about the success of the book -- the 1964 run sold 2.4 million copies -- and the death of Dr. Robert Atkins, whose book The Diet Revolution was released nine years after The Drinking Man's Diet and, at least to Cameron's mind, added little to the conversation.
If we are being fair, we have to note that variations of the drinking man's diet date at least to 1087 when William the Conqueror, distressed that he was too heavy to ride his horse (and that the French king had described him as looking "pregnant") took to his bed, resolving not to eat. Instead he consumed only ale and wine. It worked, to a point. William was eventually able to get back on his horse, but when he died his body was too large to fit in his stone sarcophagus. When the king's men attempted to force the body into the tomb, apparently his bowels exploded.
Which should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone planning to follow this fad diet, which basically advocates lowering carbohydrate consumption while encouraging consumption of alcohol and meat. It works, but most dietitians say you'd run the risk of developing ketosis if you limited your daily carbohydrate intake to the 60 grams the diet insists on.
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We're a couple of weeks into the college football season, and the NFL schedule kicked off a few days ago, so now's probably a good time to acknowledge the Library of America's Football, a handsome collection of "writing about the national sport" edited by John Schulian.
The volume lists for $30 and contains 44 stories by the likes of Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Jim Murray and Grantland Rice -- most of which, it should be noted, were written for daily newspapers. You'll also find excerpts from Buzz Bissinger's seminal Friday Night Lights, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes and George Plimpton's Paper Lion.
While many of the pieces will be familiar to literary-minded fans of the sport, there are a few I hadn't read before, including Paul Solotaroff's "The Ferocious Life and Tragic Death of a Super Bowl Star," which appeared in Men's Journal shortly after former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson's 2011 suicide. Anyone who devotes a corner of their library to sports books ought to have a copy of this book.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 09/07/2014