Happy Ending
by Mike Topp
Future Tense, 52 pp.
Still digging the literary yuks of the McSweeney’s set, but tired of shelling out for Dave Eggers’ high-end production fetish? If so, there’s an exciting new trend afoot (maybe) that’s guaranteed to please your wallet: cheap mini-books by McSweeney’s contributors –that are neither printed with painstaking craftsmanship in Iceland, nor wrapped in an industrial-strength rubber band and packaged in a handmade cherrywood box.
First out of the gate is world-class smartass Mike Topp. Happy Ending collects writings previously published in McSweeney’s and elsewhere, and it’s some powerful funny voodoo. The mini-book reads like a cross between Jack Handey and bp Nichol, alternating between spacecase gags (a recipe involving 300,000,000 tablespoons of shortening, it is noted, "Makes 800,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 DUMPLINGS") and concrete poetry shenanigans (in the single word "balloon," the third vowel threatens to float right off the page). Each piece is extremely short, making it hard to quote fave passages without repeating the whole darn thing, so – ah, what the hell, once won’t hurt: "I think a good poem would be where a man and a horse stop in the woods and watch it snow. They watch and watch, but you know what? It gets dark out. And you know why it gets dark out? It doesn’t say. The poem leaves it up to you, the reader, to decide. Then, at the very end, there’s a part where the horse bites the man on the ass."
I laughed, I cried (assuming "cried" actually means "laughed some more"), I only paid seven bucks. Between Happy Ending and Jeff Johnson’s forthcoming self-published, cheapo collection of McSweeney’s football writing (Ignore the Spread: Four Years of Horrid NFL Picks), 2003 is shaping up to be a very good year for skinflints. Staples can be beautiful.
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