eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
This volume of cartoons from the revered Mr. Fish (aka Dwayne Booth) spans politics, popular culture, economic disaster, and much more, and nobody—right, left, or middle—is safe from his razor-edged satire. Included are cartoons never previously published as well as original essays by Mr. Fish, whose work has appeared in such venues as Harper’s Magazine, Truthdig, the Los Angeles Times, TheAtlantic, and Vanity Fair.
“Fish’s work makes you want to do something—even if you’re not entirely sure what that something is—to change things for the better, and the feeling stays with you long after the book is closed.” —Verbicide Magazine
“A vibrant example of political cartooning as it is practiced at its heights. . . . Anyone who thinks political cartooning is stale need only take a closer look at this body of work. . . . Certifiably brilliant.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617750687 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 34 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Go Fish
How to Win Contempt and Influence PeopleBy Dwayne Booth
Akashic Books
Copyright © 2011 Dwayne BoothAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61775-014-4
Chapter One
Go, Fish. Go! (an introduction)
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote a book in 1969 called On Death and Dying. 1n it she described how there are five stages of grief that one might expect to experience when facing the end of life. When it became a national best seller, she expanded the concept to include anybody experiencing a catastrophic personal loss, like a drug addict hitting rock bottom or anybody who suddenly finds himself or herself incarcerated or destitute or limbless or celibate or pregnant. Then the concept was expanded farther still, to include anybody who has ever been passed over for a promotion at work or anybody whose pet has ever ran away or anybody who has ever woken up with beard burns on her uterus and the sound of the First Battalion, Twenty Third Marine Regiment singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" from the shower. Anybody, really, who has been blessed by a normal life and who has easy access to the K shelf in the death-and-dying section of a bookstore.
The five stages of grief, according to Kübler-Ross, are, from first to last: 1) denial, 2) anger, 3) bargaining, 4) depression, and 5) acceptance. Of course, those stages are now as endemic to how we perceive ourselves as the way we brush our teeth and elect our presidents and seek out validation in self-help books for any emotion that we find we cannot repress effortlessly.
Now, assuming that these are, in fact, legitimate emotional phases that everyone experiences when clobbered by some unforeseen disaster {and not simply just another academic concoction designed to sell books and further promote the bullshit illusion that the inner workings of a human being can be sorted and labeled and cataloged and understood as easily as the innards of a cuckoo clock}, I have to figure that these must also be the same stages that a person who attempts to preemptively clobber disaster before being clobbered by it must experience, only in reverse. Somebody who can look up and recognize impending disaster everywhere, as !leach potential disaster were a big stinky bison, part of a dispersed herd both polka-dotting the horizon and standing close enough to fog the sheen off our patent leather shoes while munching at the flowers that we planted in celebration of our eternal optimism.
Thusly, just such a person would begin by 1) accepting the fact that he lives in the world and has a certain measure of responsibility to help maintain both his own and the world's longevity and well being. Perhaps his motivations are selfish, purely predicated on something as ignoble as self-preservation. No matter, he accepts that he would rather survive in the world than succumb to its hostilities, knowing full well that there are forces and menacing realities that exist contrary to his mission, maybe even in active contempt of it. He accepts that his egotism may not keep him safe, but that it might confuse him sufficiently with just enough narcissism to propel him forward with some self-edifying sense of purpose into a lifetime unlikely to corroborate his self-regard.
Almost immediately 2) depressed by his inability to profoundly improve upon the indifferent mediocrity of human existence or to inspire a global collaboration between enlightened men and women capable of challenging the thuggish inhospitality of the world and to ultimately mellow it, he will wonder if his innate desire to help maintain both his own and the world's longevity and well being is a waste of time. Maybe it is even worse than that; specifically, a terminal form of spiritual self-destruction. Perhaps it is a death wish. Like a prisoner confined to a tiny cell, he will question the usefulness of his dreams of freedom, believing that because they are unreal beyond the confines of his sleep and have never known physical expression, they must be nightmares. How else to explain the impossibility of their realization? He is a stone preoccupied with the insane notion that weightlessness is a matter of will and not physics.
He will then find himself 3) bargaining with the dismissive universe, as if it has ears, telling it that in exchange for him not attempting to alter it that it should attempt to reward his goodwill by going out of its way to not alter him. Upon realizing that his request for mutual respect is directed at a reality vast enough to make him puny by comparison and insignificant beyond measure, his voice so microscopic as to not even rise to the level of a whisper, he will turn his back on reality—fuck it! He will then bargain with himself. He will promise not to expect any tangible reward for his perseverance in exchange for the energy to continue failing miserably without succumbing to the madness that comes with continuing to fail miserably.
He will then find himself overcome with 4) anger when he realizes that the atoms conspiring to create the indifferent, booby-trapped universe are precisely the same atoms that conspire to make him, and that asking for preferential treatment for himself is as ludicrous as his asking the moon to not only have the power to sustain his sanity through unrelenting turmoil but also to make him special in the process.
He will then rely on 5) denial to help him forget that he ever wanted to—or even tried to—save himself or the world using such harebrained argumentation, for without such improvised deniability he'd never be able to look himself in the mirror, let alone fall asleep at night and then get up in the morning feeling sufficiently refreshed to begin the process of moving through the stages all over again, his self-aggrandizement restored, the world in flames and exploding like the most promising New Year's Eve ever.
* * *
What follows is a book about how a lewd, four-eyed political satirist with a set of gnarled Staedtler pencils and a gummy eraser has been drawing his way through those stages day in and day out for the last half-decade. And byway of clarification, especially for those who may already know the lewd, four-eyed political satirist's work from seeing it posted online or published in magazines and newspapers where it is almost always presented as editorial cartooning, it is not editorial cartooning—or at least it isn't specifically, the same way that a guy who wears a cowboy hat isn't always trying to be John Wayne. Sometimes he's trying to be Jon Voight. Other times he's actually using his hat to beat back the sin. By way of explanation, I've included a personal statement—a sort of grounds-of-opposition to my involvement in or association with the editorial cartooning profession—in the Appendix, the place that, like a human appendix, is notoriously invisible to most people until shooting pains and excessive vomiting indicate that it is there. That said, if at anytime during the reading of this book you find yourself experiencing shooting pains and a sudden nausea that begs the question, Who the fuck does Mr. Fish think he is? look to the Appendix and drink some Pepto-Bismol.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Go Fish by Dwayne Booth Copyright © 2011 by Dwayne Booth . Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE,
COPYRIGHT PAGE,
GO, FISH. GO! (an introduction),
ACCEPTANCE,
DEPRESSION,
BARGAINING,
ANGER,
DENIAL,
WHY I AM NOT A CARTOONIST (an appendix),