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It is said that God created academia to train the faithful. Oh, no, wait; that’s Arrakis I’m thinking of. But, the point stands: the academic setting is full of little conflicts, petty rivalries, and various other annoyances that test the patience of those working in it.

And it can also be a place where people find love. At least, that’s what the dual protagonists of this book, Prof. Flora Fineman and Prof. Mark Reynolds, are hoping. Flora is still recovering from a disastrous relationship during her post-doc years, and Mark is dealing with the double-whammy of a divorce and raising a child recovering from cancer. Both of them have a lot on their plates, and that’s before they’re assigned to serve on Astor College’s budget committee for the semester.

The thing is, Flora and Mark don’t like each other. They haven’t interacted much, but to the extent that they have, their encounters have been unpleasant. But, you know how it is: fate and committee meetings have a way of throwing people together.

And soon, their work gives them another challenge to confront. An anonymous informant notifies members of the budget committee that something strange is going on with Astor’s finances, and sends the committee members a spreadsheet of all the college’s financial transactions, something which even faculty are not normally allowed to see.

Flora and Mark may not like each other, but they do like investigating mysterious goings-on, and these financial shenanigans appear to go all the way to the top.

Of course, figuring all this out means working together closely. And in so doing, Flora and Mark each realize that their judgments of each other may not have been entirely accurate.

The book is written with chapters alternating between Mark and Flora’s points of view. What makes this especially interesting is that the co-authors wrote the different chapters, with Dobson writing Mark and Anonymous Ph.D. writing Flora. The two authors have different styles as well; one being a “pantser” and one a “plotter.” This gives each character a subtly different feel, and makes the evolution of the plot feel spontaneous. As explained in the Afterword, the authors would often surprise one another with the direction they took the story.

I loved the book, partially for its unique storytelling style, but above all for its extremely vivid portrayal of the setting and denizens of Astor College. The personalities, the intrigues, the cynical humor which most people adopt as a coping mechanism… all of it felt like a very accurate depiction of a bureaucratized institution of higher learning.

I recently watched the BBC series The Barchester Chronicles, starring Donald Pleasance and Alan Rickman. It’s a delightful romantic dramedy, based on novels by Anthony Trollope, about church politics in 19th-century rural England. One of the main sources of humor in it is how unbelievably petty are the concerns of the churchmen. They imagine themselves as crusaders for Holy Justice, doing the work of their Lord and Savior… when all that they are really arguing over is some trivial question like who shall receive wardenship of a Church hospital. The meek and mild-mannered Mr. Harding muses that all this hardly seems worthy of worshippers of Jesus Christ, to which the perpetually-outraged Dr. Grantly angrily fumes, “Christ has nothing to do with it!”

There’s something similar going on in The Academy, I think. Perhaps the cathedrals of yesteryear have been replaced by university administration buildings, and yet the fundamental dynamics remain the same. The same fights over trivial fiefdoms and fleeting political power override the institution’s true mission. As my Sith mentor used to tell me, “it’s all about power and control.”

But as my other Sith mentor used to tell me, “apathy is death.” And indeed, the apathy of the faculty and staff is the principle weapon which the villains of the piece count on to ensure their scheme will succeed. So when Flora and Mark realize they themselves actually care…

Well, “it’s an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.” To which I might add, rom-coms and other light entertainments. Perhaps if more people took the trouble to actually care, things would be different. Then again, perhaps not. Either way, though, this book is a fun and funny look at academia through the eyes of two rivals who gradually learn the oldest and most fundamental lesson of all human endeavor: that sometimes you have to be willing to admit when you’re wrong.

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Well, right off the bat, you’ve got to love the title.

I’ve been a fan of Andrew Crowther since I was a teenager. He was the world’s leading expert on W.S. Gilbert, and I was a kid who used a dial-up internet connection and an iMac G3 to read archived Savoynet discussions on the G&S Archive.

Well, times have changed, but Crowther is still the leading expert on W.S.G. Now I have faster internet and a MacBook Air, but I have never lost my appreciation for Gilbertian humor, which is to say, sharp wit and clever satire. Crowther’s book contains plenty of both.

Which is not to say he’s just imitating Gilbert. Far from it. His style is different; darker and starker, with a harsh edge not found in most of Gilbert’s works. (With important exceptions.) Crowther tackles the absurdity of the modern world by heightening it just enough, until the contradictions and hypocrisies become impossible to ignore.

Some of the stories verge on horror, most notably “Jasper” (which animal lovers may wish to skip), others, including my favorite, “The King’s Juggler”, are more in the Victorian satire vein, wherein we are invited to shake our heads and chuckle sardonically along with the author. And some are downright uncanny given current events.

You don’t see a lot of books like this any more. Short stories have been said to be dying for decades. Now, novels are said to be dying too, and indeed literacy itself may be on the way out. Therefore, I encourage you to rage, rage against the dying of the light by reading this collection. It’s just the right blend of Victorian and modern cynicism.

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“The past is a foreign country,” according to L.P. Hartley. In his latest volume, Zachary Shatzer sets out to explore this foreign country, armed with nothing but his own whimsical sense of humor.

The first, and perhaps most educational section of the book focus on Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, published in 1922. Specifically, the section the proper usage and modes of address on visiting cards. Personally, I’ve wondered what visiting cards were since I listened to “The Grandson of Abdul Abulbul Amir,”  which includes the line: “and his visiting card / bore the name of this bard: / Count Ivan Skavinsky Skivar.”

Well, they were like business cards (which I’ve also never used) except in the early 1900s, everyone used them for social calls and occasions, and an incredibly complex system of etiquette evolved regarding their use. Ms. Post—excuse me, Mrs. Price Post, which is apparently the correct form of address for a divorcée—describes the rules for what a card should and should not say in different situations.

A few years ago, I reviewed a book that made reference to the debutante season, and I said it felt like reading about an alien civilization. I get that same vibe here. Frankly, the scariest part is that it feels like an alien civilization that is superior to our current one. Like we’re just apes throwing bones at monoliths.

But I digress. Shatzer then turns his humorous touch to more of the jests of Joe Miller, whose work he had previously collected in another volume. If you read that one, this feels like more of the same, although personally, I thought some the jests were too dark. As Shatzer notes, hating one’s spouse seems to be a source of much of Miller’s comedic material this time around.

From there we get an excerpt from a book (which sounded promising, I might actually read it), a selection of fables from the notoriously jaundiced eye of Ambrose Bierce, and a complete short story about baseball. Now, here I must confess that I find baseball to be extremely boring, and unless a work of fiction about it is written by, say, Mark Paxson or Kevin Brennan, it’s not a must-read for me. Shatzer’s humorous asides make it tolerable.

We then get another set of acerbic observations on relations between the sexes from a writer named Helen Rowland. I’d never heard of her before. Sadly, she seems to have had bad experiences in relationships. One of the running themes in this section is that men are constantly being unfaithful with chorus girls, which, oddly enough, was apparently the reason Emily Post divorced her husband.

Speaking of Emily Post, the book ends with another set of tips from her, this time on the art of camping, or roughing it without anything rough. This idea of simulating hardship while not actually having anything difficult or upsetting happen is, if anything, the most recognizably modern sentiment in the book. Perhaps that’s the reason Shatzer chose to end on that note, to remind us that we are not so different from our ancestors after all.

As a whole, the book is a charming look into the past, and an invitation to reflect on what future eras may think of our own. The public domain is a treasure trove of interesting works, and I hope Shatzer continues this practice of adding his commentary to older works. They can enliven even rather dull stories.

And I would also note that The Great Gatsby recently entered the public domain, so if Mr. Shatzer ever feels “borne back ceaselessly into the past…”

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Only Adam Bertocci could take one of the oldest and tritest riddles in the book (it dates to 1847, I discovered in writing this post) and transform it into a compelling work of literary fiction.  I mean, really, in this very short story he manages to weave together feelings of romance, fate, heartbreak, and dark comedy. I’ve read novels that didn’t have as much going on in them as this book does.

It’s the story of a chicken named Bertram, and the reasons that he decides to flee the farm life and go to… the other side. But, like many another literary crossing, this is more than just a literal crossing. It is a spiritual transformation.

This is somehow both very moving and deeply funny. I’m reminded of Paul Graham’s essay “Taste for Makers”:

The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings– or Shakespeare, for that matter.

That’s Bertocci to a “T”. He crafts something that is simultaneously a parody of the literary short form and a magnificent example of it. And he does it while staying true to the source material. The same cannot be said of many another modern adaptation.

And while I’ve never been as good at writing to prompts as, say, my friend Mark Paxson is… this made me wonder: what other hackneyed jokes or riddles could be repurposed as fodder for literary works? Knock, knock… who is there?

Well, I’ll leave that up to the rest of you. In the meantime, if you’re in the mood for a quick and clever literary experiment, pick this up.

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On the one hand, you might be tempted to say, this book is just a zany comedy. It certainly has its share of zaniness. It’s about a woman who travels to a small river village, populated by colorful characters. A wizard named Zuzzingbar, a group of gossipy ladies, and a species of aquatic creature known as a “leaping chomper”, which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be, are just some of the odd denizens of the place.

And then there’s Coren, a man cursed to never be allowed to set foot on dry land. So, he spends his days rowing up the aforementioned river. He has to, because if he doesn’t, he’ll go over the waterfall at the end of it.

Is this setting fertile ground for hilarity? It is! And there is plenty of that. Humorous hijinks abound. You might as well know that, despite the name on the cover, this is a Zachary Shatzer book. I’ve reviewed every one of his published books, and if you don’t know by now that I enjoy his work, well, you just haven’t been paying attention.

And yet… you might stop and wonder, why did he publish this under another name? Isn’t it just another one of his wizard stories?

Well, yes and no. It is another one of his wizard stories. But it is also something else.

You see in the description where it says it’s a “philosophical comedy”? Don’t ignore that first word. The book poses a philosophical and moral dilemma for the reader to puzzle over. And argue about ad nauseam. (Well, maybe that’s just me.) But it really is an interesting question of ethics that lies at the center of this seemingly light little comedy.

What is the interesting question, you ask? I’m not telling. That would be to spoil it! The whole story has been constructed specifically to invite the reader to think about this moral quandary. For me to just vomit forth my own interpretation would be leading the witness.

And how refreshing it is, I might add, to read a story that invites us to think, rather than lecturing us on what to believe. There is more than one way the story can be viewed, and that’s what makes it magical. Well, that and the wizards.

Is this Shatzer’s best book? I’m not sure—I really am fond of The Beach Wizard. But it’s in the top three, certainly, and it probably is the one that lends itself most readily to discussion and analysis. And it does it with the lightest of touches, without ever seeming heavy-handed or preachy. It’s just a story about some people and how they play the cards life deals them.

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One of the things we writers like to talk about are the so-called “rules of writing”, if such things even exist. Mostly, we come down on the side that there are no rules. But I don’t know that I’ve ever met a book quite as dedicated to rule-breaking as this one.

It’s not just the “usual” writing rules that get violated in Awful, Ohio. The basic rules of spelling and grammar come in for a sound thrashing as well. On the first page, the author uses “was” when it should be “were.”

And then there’s the matter of the words themselves. What are words, after all? Nothing but symbols, signifying sounds, that we, as a society, mutually agree to mean things. There’s nothing inherent in them that says the symbols composing the term “elephant” must correspond to the thing they describe. If language had evolved differently, “elephant” might have meant what we mean when we say “teacup” instead. It’s arbitrary. And yet, language works because speakers of a given language are trained to follow these conventions. Words are ultimately just agreements between writers and readers.

Except not in Awful, Ohio. Frequently, the author uses some word that just cannot mean what it is conventionally understood to mean in the context.

Not to say that there aren’t clues. For example, the word “ration”, which can be either a noun referring to some limited quantity of something distributed according to a schedule, or a verb meaning the act of distributing same, is here used to mean “rationality.” Clearly, the words have some etymological connection, but this is in no way a standard usage.

I’ve often criticized Lovecraft for his overuse of adjectives and repetitive, long sentences. But in HPL’s prose, the overused adjectives typically meant the thing they were generally understood to mean. Now imagine if they didn’t. Imagine if sometimes, in one of his fits of purple verbiage, the horror-master of Providence had just started throwing out malapropisms and you had to guess what he actually meant. That happens frequently here.

In short, the author has chosen to break the most basic rule in all of communication, the fundamental agreement as to what things mean. Clearly, he is far more committed to the idea of rule-breaking than even I am, and I think of myself as a real iconoclast.

That’s an introduction to the prose style. I say “introduction” because I suspect linguists could write whole papers, perhaps hold whole conferences, analyzing the writing in this novel. But we haven’t the time for that now, we have to get along to the plot, which is the story of a man named Troy Slushy. Troy has grown bored with his factory job in the town of Awful, and just wants to get away from it all and spend time with his wife, Lacy.

Troy’s plan for how to escape the tyranny of the industrial labor force is an unusual one: to destroy the sun. His reasoning is, since the sun wakes people up to go to work, eliminating it means they wouldn’t have to. This is of course the same sort of confused logic underlying cargo cults, but we can ignore that for now. Things are going to get much weirder before we are through.

While plotting to destroy the sun, Troy still has to go to clock in at his place of employment, Mad Ted’s Uckin Hot Auce factory. Now, you might say, shouldn’t that be “hot sauce”? Well, it might. Throughout the text, the product the factory makes is called “hot sauce.” But the factory name is always written without the “S”. Why is this? We don’t know.

The aforesaid “Mad Ted” is a dictatorial figure who oversees the workers on his hot sauce assembly line from a mirrored pod hanging over the factory floor. Mad Ted is reclusive and mysterious, and what little information is available about him comes from the dubious source of an investigative reporter named Wilsie McHickoryboob.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the names in this book are absolutely bonkers. Later on, we meet Doink McTriggers and Sammy Ammo. The latter was once a kindly transient named Samuel Amiable, but changed his name when he was transformed into a ruthless criminal.

I think you’re starting to get an idea of how insane this book is. But really, I’ve only scratched the surface of it. Our author sometimes gleefully ignores the rules of basic causality, which makes for a very unpredictable plot.

Now, here’s the part that may surprise you.

I really enjoyed this book. The way the story works out is quite funny, and in the end, surprisingly satisfying. One thing that doesn’t become clear until fairly late in the game is that the plot does have a certain logic to it; albeit a very strange logic.

I heard about this book from a friend who did not finish it. I read it and enjoyed it, so recommended it to another friend who likes wacky humor. He also did not finish it.

So, 66.67% of those polled couldn’t stand it. But that’s a small sample size. I’m sure if we cast a wider net, we could get those numbers up to more like 90%-95%, at least.

I’m under no illusions about this. Most people who attempt to read this are going to give up because it’s so bizarre in so many ways. The writing is truly hard to decipher in points. Sometimes a book is hard to read because the author uses too many large, obscure words. Sometimes a book is hard to read because of basic mistakes in grammar and spelling. It’s rare to find a book that is hard to read because of both. Usually sesquipedalian types have a good handle on the fundamentals.

But I could get past this. And the reason is simply that I respect a willingness to experiment and try different things. Anytime you do that, you’re risking disastrous, embarrassing failure. But you’ve got to do it if you want any hope of ever hitting it big. Everybody remembers the moon landing. Almost nobody remembers all the test rockets that blew up on the launchpad. But you can’t get the one without the other.

If you like extremely strange, wildly experimental fiction, and can look past a whole slew of typos, grammatical errors, and just flat-out incomprehensible things, Awful, Ohio is a surprisingly fun story.

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Cover of the book 'Wit and Assurance' by Zachary Shatzer, featuring the subtitle 'Reviewing the Jests of 18th Century Humorist Joe Miller.' The design has a dark background with white text.

Whenever I’m on the lookout for books to read, and a new title by Zachary Shatzer comes to my notice, I pause, stroke my mustache, and say in the voice of an English bobby, “‘ere now, wot’s all this then?”

In this case, “all this” is an annotated review of an 18th century joke book allegedly by an actor named Joe Miller, although actually it seems to have been compiled by a man named John Mottley, writing under the pseudonym of Elijah Jenkins. Are you confused yet? Just wait.

18th century humor is not always like modern humor. Sometimes, of course, it is. There are patterns in the human experience which are universal, and some of the jests do indeed strike chords of hilarity which echo down all the ages.

But other times, it’s hard, to be quite blunt, to know what the hell Miller (or Mottley or Jenkins or whoever) is talking about. Sometimes, Mr. Shatzer’s commentary is able to shed light on the matter. Other times, he is as baffled as the rest of us.

Fortunately, Shatzer is one of the funniest writers currently going, and so his commentary on each of the 247 jests is enjoyable in its own right, even when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible. Maybe especially when the joke he is commenting on is incomprehensible.

And every now and again, one of the jests is actually relatable and funny, and suddenly, the gulf between us and the 18th century is bridged, and we understand the people of the past were people, not merely names in history books, and that they laughed at absurdities just as we do. There’s nothing like shared laughter for helping to relate to someone else.

If nothing else, this book is a good window into Shatzer’s process. When his future biographers are trying to describe what made this great 21st-century humorist tick, they will no doubt turn to this volume for insight into Shatzer’s philosophy of comedy. To paraphrase a film review I once read, “Joe Miller’s wit is almost enough, because Zachary Shatzer’s wit is more than enough.”

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“When they’re offered to the world in merry guise / Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will. / For he who’d make his fellow creatures wise / Should always gild the philosophic pill.” –W.S. Gilbert. The Yeomen of the Guard, Act I. 1888.

The title is a lie. This isn’t just a review of Zachary Shatzer’s new book, The Beach Wizard and the Easy Mind. This makes the third entry in the Beach Wizard chronicles, and while I have no idea if Mr. Shatzer plans to continue the series or keep it as a trilogy, this seems like as good a time as any for a big picture retrospective

That said, since this is the newest entry in the series, it requires an in-depth recap. In this episode, the town of Benford Beach is overrun by a gang of rude and obnoxious mermaids. This is the sort of problem that the Beach Wizard was born to solve, under normal circumstances. But, as luck would have it, the Beach Wizard’s mind is controlled by a mysterious bug which makes him calm, detached, and indifferent. Not bad things, necessarily; but when they cause a man to neglect his duties as the magical guardian of his home, they become a problem.

There is also a subplot involving a bar in the sewer run by a wandering adventurer, and a new character known as the “hobo professor.” He quickly became one of my favorites.

Naturally, the story is resolved after plenty of hijinks and appearances by the many zany characters who populate Benford Beach. Though, I must confess a smidge of disappointment at the absence of Warren Grumley and Deputy Mayor Swivelson, two of my favorites from earlier installments. On the other hand, Mayor Smacks features heavily in the story, which is always a plus.

Bottom line: if you enjoyed the first two books, you will like this one. But probably if you read the first two books, you don’t need me to tell you that. So what do you need me to tell you?

I guess the main thing I would like to convey, about both this book and the series as a whole, is that the general wackiness of Shatzer’s style is not the main appeal for me. That’s not to say I mind it; I enjoy the whimsical touches. But they aren’t the main attraction.

Now, it’s probably the case that are some readers who will just never be able to get into Shatzer’s oeuvre due to the zaniness quotient. Obviously, if you demand complete realism in your fiction, a story featuring things like reanimated pirates and extremely intelligent blue lobsters probably isn’t going to be for you.

But I think the majority of readers are in more of a middle ground. They don’t demand complete realism, but they aren’t going to automatically like anything just because it’s silly and off-the-wall. I consider myself to be in this category: I don’t mind surreal humor, as long as it’s done well. Which, I contend, Shatzer’s almost always is.

If your first reaction to the madcap universe of Shatzerism is negative, I would echo Harrison Ford’s rejoinder to Mark Hamill when he asked about continuity in Star Wars: “Hey, kid, it ain’t that kind of story.” Some stories are that kind of story, and when they have completely mood-ruining goofiness break out, I am the first to decry it. Not everything can be a cavalcade of silliness.

At the same time, even when something is a cavalcade of silliness, that also doesn’t mean it can’t show a few glimpses of something deeper beneath the surface. (Anyone who doubts this should check out the work of that Gilbert fellow quoted above.)

Shatzer’s writing often has layers to it. You don’t exactly have to be a Straussian to see that Dog Wearing a Bowler Hat can be read as more than just a funny story about a silly painting. (Though it works as such.) The Beach Wizard Chronicles are less obviously allegorical, but they too have layers. There is more of real human nature in these books than in some supposedly “gritty” novels that I have read.

What makes the Beach Wizard stories so good is not their whimsical humor, but the way important philosophical concepts are woven into them. This book, for example, is about how to deal with the worries of life without letting them either consume you or, even worse, becoming numb to them.

The Beach Wizard is a stoic, through and through. He deals with the unpleasant realities of the world, accepts them, and then gets along with his day. He’s not perfect, and he doesn’t pretend to be.

There are moments of sincere emotion in every book in the series, and it’s to Shatzer’s credit that he never undercuts or shies away from them. It’s his essential good-heartedness, more than the humor itself, that makes Benford Beach such a pleasant place to come back to again and again. Like Wodehouse, Shatzer has created a world filled with basically pleasant and likable people. Even the ostensible villains, like the mermaids in this volume, aren’t truly evil; merely rowdy and disrespectful.

And this is what I admire most about Shatzer: almost nobody else, with the exception of Chuck Litka, writes stories like that these days. I’m not saying that everyone should. Everyone should write what they want to write. But it’s pretty cool when what people want to write also happens to be something that almost nobody else is writing. (This, by the way, is why the concept of “comps” in publishing is so toxic.)

The point is, I strongly encourage you to try this series, even if you don’t regularly read this sort of thing. I don’t think anyone regularly reads this sort of thing, because there isn’t enough of “this sort of thing” for anyone to read it regularly. Maybe you’ll hate it, but then again, maybe you won’t. You never know unless you try, and besides, the best way to keep from having your choices curated for you entirely by marketing algorithms is to occasionally do something so weird the algorithm can’t account for it. Remember, “you are not a number!”

Well, I have gone on long enough. I haven’t done Shatzer’s work justice, but oh well; a critic never can really say the right things about the good books. What makes them good is unique to them; a singular quality which can be appreciated one and only one way: by reading them.

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New York, New York… I’ve never actually been to New York City. Something tells me if I did, it would go not unlike Homer Simpson’s visit. As an ex-girlfriend once pointed out to me, New Yorkers are blunt and up front–they’ll tell you exactly how they feel. She liked that about them. I am more of the classic reserved midwesterner, which perhaps explains why she is an ex-girlfriend.

Nevertheless, I can appreciate the New York City sense of humor, and I think that Twitter, as it was called at the time that this book was compiled, is an ideal venue for the wit of an NYC-er. And I can think of absolutely no other person from New York City who has leveraged the form to greater effect than Adam Bertocci, whose witty sayings from 2010-2012 are collected in this volume.

The book is divided into broad categories by subject, and each section is prefaced with an explanation that puts the tweets in context. Some are about specific news topics on a given day, others are more general observations. It put me in mind of some of Nietzsche and other philosopher’s books that are compendia of short aphorisms. For instance:

If at first you don’t succeed, blog about it at length.

This, I did.

Bertocci’s style really is emblematic of Twitter at its best. It should be a place to find short phrases that make you think, or smile, or both. It should emphatically not be used for conducting affairs of state or debating ideological issues. Not that anyone would ever use it for that, of course, but wouldn’t it be terrible if someone did?

Sadly, I think this form of Twitter is largely gone. I normally shy away from giving my views on current events, but in this case, I feel the need to expound extensively on the reasons for this. I have collected my voluminous thoughts here.

Just kidding. I wouldn’t do that to you, at least not this week. Rather than spend any more time on my pontificating, I invite you to revisit those halcyon days when the bird app was young, and what better way to do it than by reading one of the leading lights of the medium? So if you feel nostalgic for that Golden Epoch, I encourage you to pick up this little collection.

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One of the rules for writers, laid down somewhere in the fragments of an ancient Instagram post by the mad literary agent Abdul Al-Hazred, is that a writer should give their audience what they expect. A steady hand at the tiller and no surprises, that’s what readers want! And if a writer must venture outside their typical comfort zone, at least they should do it under a pseudonym, so people don’t accidentally get exposed to something they didn’t expect.

How powerful is this rule? So powerful that even the richest and perhaps most (in)famous living author conforms to it.

Naturally, because I am a rebel without a clue, I like it when people break this rule. So I was delighted when one of my favorite authors decided to do exactly that in this book.

Travailing Through Time is a very un-Bertoccian book. Usually, his stories are about millennials trying to navigate modernity, usually with a heavy dose of ironic detachment and witty pop-cultural references.

Travailing Through Time is different: it’s about hardworking farmers in colonial New England. Simple, God-fearing people, who have no time to spare for ironic detachment. As for cultural references, well, they basically begin and end with the Bible.

In short, it’s a picture of a people and a place totally different from us and ours. Having established this, Bertocci then proceeds to introduce, in a clever way, a glimpse of a more modern sensibility. Only a hint, nothing more.

Both the drama and the humor of the story come from the obvious questions: what would people of the past make of us? When we look back in history, it’s too easy for the people to appear to us as caricatures. Which of course is also how we would appear to them. It takes work to really know and understand a person, or a people, or a place.

And since the New Year is always a time for reflection, this seems like a good time to ponder the questions raised in Bertocci’s ingenious little story. What do we really know about the past? And what would the past make of us? Leopold von Ranke said “All ages are equidistant from eternity.” We mustn’t think of ourselves as somehow “better” than the people of another time just because we are more recent. It’s 2025, after all.

All these big ideas, Bertocci packs into a witty and entertaining short story. A perfect choice for starting the new year off the right way.