Very Baad Books

Very Baad Books

David B. Downing

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Let’s face it: we all know that when you add the extra vowel, baad is the ultimate term of endearment. All hipster, counter-culture, soul searchers love baad stuff, perhaps ever since Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. That’s because it does the right stuff: it refuses conformity to the powers that be; it refuses to take seriously all the high-falutin’ ideals and pretenses; it gets down with the real folks, whoever they might be. And it’s a pretty rigorous taxonomy, best used, of course, for the contemporary, the latest baad stuff. But you could take it back a bit, using the same criteria and say that, for instance, Madame Bovary (1857) is baad—so is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpa-per,” Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Henry Miller’s Sexus (1949) and Nexus (1960), Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s Mule Bone (1930), Amiri Bara-ka’s Dutchman (1964), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and so on—you get the point, there’s a lot of baad stuff there that’s really good.
But can a book be baad and bad at the same time given this taxonomy? The answer has to be: of course. The book can be hip, cool, revolutionary, code breaking on many levels, but just plain crappy. Examples will have to work here, and so I’m going to nominate for dual honors Bob Dylan’s 1966 classic baad book, Tarantula. If this isn’t baad and bad at the same time, I give up. So I’m just going to end with the first, well, let’s call it “sentence” of the book:

aretha/ crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him diffused in drunk transfusion wound would heed sweet soundwave crippled & cry salute to oh great particular el dorado reel & ye battered personal god but she cannot she the leader of whom when ye follow, she cannot she has no back she cannot…

If you love that, you know you’re baad, no matter that the book itself is bad.

Dildo Cay

Jonathan P. Eburne

Pennsylvania State University

“They’re not flamingoes, Adrian thought; there wouldn’t be flamingoes on Dildo Cay in September.”

It is through this keen eye for regional detail that we encounter the opening lines of Nelson Hayes’s 1940 novel, Dildo Cay, a very real book whose title is so outlandish as to have provoked an incredulous review (as well as a single star rating) on Amazon.com. The review, entitled “Elaborate hoax,” reads:

I’m sorry to report that this book does not actually exist…. What’s next? A bogus listing for “Goodnight Mooninite” to shill the Cartoon Network?

It is unfortunate that some people seem to think that Amazon is some sort of amusement park, like a literary Astroland, here for nothing more than their moronic brand of hedonism.

The book does, in fact, exist. Yet Dildo Cay—a salt-plantation melodrama set on a fictionalized island in the Turks and Caicos—warrants skepti-cism nonetheless. For starters, one questions the presumption that even the most sober war-era reader

would leap to associate the titular islet with the tall Caribbean cactuses that populate it, rather than, say, with artificial phalluses. All the same, there is already something impressive about a novel whose very dust jacket can prompt an Amazon.com browser to doubt its existence.

Yet Dildo Cay is bad in ways that surpass its title. The product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly tin ear, the novel’s prose is so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion. Herein, I’d like to suggest, is the triumph of an exquisitely bad book such as Dildo Cay: it is so earnestly bad as to call its own existence into question. In many ways, of course, the novel parades the typically forgettable qualities of other undistinguished midcentury fiction: tawdry displays of local color, liberal deployments of racism and misogyny, textbook Oedipal conflicts,

and the hypertrophic use of italics. But Dildo Cay boasts countless passages that far exceed these indistinctions:

‘Father, I want to talk with you!’ Adrian had been watching his father
walk the dike unsteadily, and suddenly he had seen himself at the age of sixty walk-ing the dike unsteadily, and on top of his restlessness it was too much for him.

‘How strong do you think that pickle is?’ his father asked, ignoring the tone of Adrian’s voice.

If ever the family romance has so forcefully raised its pickle, I know few other novels so susceptible to accidental (?) allegory. We all walk the dike unsteadily.

It has become a minor ambition of mine to become a connoisseur, or at least a collector, of books as marvelously bad as Dildo Cay. Consider the Borgesian possibilities of such a library, especially given that one is spared from inventing its contents.

The titles, the authors, and the prose are no less fic-tional for being real, historical artifacts.
Such books are not to be confused, however, with ephemera, whose material existence may once have been transitory, but which have instead been preserved against the ravages of time. Rather, the status of a bad book like Dildo Cay represents something akin to an eclipse: these are books whose material form raises the same doubts, the same ques-tions about their existence, as their outlandish titles. My gradually increasingly library of such bad books now boasts titles such as Mary Wood-Allen’s What a Young Woman Ought to Know (1898), Frances Neuman’s The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), Virginia Elliott’s post-Prohibition Quiet Drinking (1933), and Isaac Cronin’s The International Squid Cookbook

(1981). What’s next? To quote the novel’s closing line: “Keep your jib full…our course is for Dildo Cay.”