(++++) GIVING HOMESPUN A SPIN

What’s What and What to Do about It: Answers You Didn’t Know You Wanted to Questions You Didn’t Know You Had. By Waldo Mellon (Steven Adams). Seven Stories Press. $21.95.

     Screenwriter Steven Adams, writing as Waldo Mellon, isn’t nearly as clever as he thinks he is, but he is more than clever enough to make What’s What and What to Do about It an enjoyable read – and occasionally an insightful one. Adams sees himself as a “triple very” (as in “very, very, very clever”) but is more of a “single very.” Yet that still puts his short book (128 pages, including blanks) in the “worthwhile” category. And that’s a worthwhile place to be.

     Adams tries to write like a latter-day Will Rogers, packing his book with would-be folksy humor that works surprisingly often. His concept is a nonexistent advice column – along the lines of the reviews of nonexistent books in Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum, but focused in Adams’ case on the BIG QUESTIONS of life, love, God, the Universe, and everything. Plenty of real advice columns run alleged queries from alleged real people that do not stand up particularly well under close viewing, so What’s What and What to Do about It has one proverbial foot firmly in the real-life-advice-column world. But while advice columnists only occasionally dip into their personal experience to make comments and suggestions to (real or imaginary) readers, Adams does that all the time. His basic approach is to have a made-up person of some sort (“Worried Dad,” “Bertha,” “Horndog a-lookin’ for love,” and so forth) send in a question that provokes Adams-as-Mellon’s philosophical/existential musings.

     Thus, for example, “6 Feet Under” worries that he “think[s] about the horrible inky blackness of death morning noon and night.” Adams/Mellon points out that “nobody has the foggiest idea of what happens after Death” and therefore suggests the “letter writer” imagine an “eternal appointment book” that mostly consists of pages filled with appointments labeled “float around.” On one page, however, one appointment space contains the word “Life,” which should be thought of as “a Fabulous Holiday” in the eternity of “float around” appointments – so you may feel sad that the holiday must end, but a return to the “float around” routine should be “something calming.”

     Then there is the issue raised by a “letter writer” christened “Smegma,” which leads Adams/Mellon to break the proverbial “fourth wall” by starting his answer with, “Are you sure about your name being Smegma?” The issue here is one of yes, no, or maybe – the idea being that everything is really a yes-or-no decision but that we humans, with our brains that are “the greatest question-formulating machines on the planet,” insist on a host of “maybe” answers that lead to being unhappily “stuck in Maybe-time.” To remedy this, Adams/Mellon offers a series of 10 specially designed yes-or-no questions and tells Smegma, “I do not what [sic] you to answer them out loud” but only to focus on the internal feeling of a “yes” or a “no,” and then build on that in everyday, real-world life.

     If you find these simplistic speculative byways of thought profound, or at least engaging, you will truly enjoy What’s What and What to Do about It. But it does help if you avoid thinking too hard about the Adams/Mellon philosophical meanderings. At the very start of the book, for instance, he creates the word “Voocule” and says it stands for each individual’s “bubble of life,” adding emphatically that “you and only you can see what is inside your Voocule.” This is a cute, if scarcely profound, way of saying that everyone has different experiences and filters elements of life differently as a result. So far, so OK. But Adams/Mellon applies the concept inconsistently. For instance, in replying to a “letter writer” who is worried about what other people really think of him, Adams/Mellon’s whole answer turns on a method of obtaining “a rare glimpse into what is inside someone else’s head concerning You.” But then you can see what is inside that other person’s Voocule, so….

     Well, no philosophical system is perfect, although those that strive to be self-consistent are most likely to stand the test of time (if not always of everyday life). Adams/Mellon at least has an almost consistent form of presentation, starting each brief chapter with a communication from a “letter writer” and ending with “Your Fan, Waldo Mellon.” Umm…except in one case. There is a chapter called “Blues” in which a “letter writer” called “Paul Lee Anna” (“Not my real name” – there goes that fourth wall again) says that everyone should just cheer up and stop being so dreary and sad all the time. This leads Adams/Mellon to suggest that everyone possesses a “Blues-O-Meter,” used to measure the distance “between what you think you want and what you think you have.” The idea is to spread your hands apart to indicate that distance – the farther apart they are, the greater your distance from what you believe you want. This in turn leads to an anecdote – apparently a sincere one, although in this book it is hard to tell – about a friend Adams/Mellon had who, despite being “handsome and smart and funny” and widely loved and accomplished, committed suicide. “Sometimes unhappiness has less to do with choices made than with the mysteries of chemistry,” Adams/Mellon writes, and at the end of this chapter, he simply writes “Waldo Mellon,” without a “Your Fan.” Of course, this could be a simple editing error – again, in this book it is hard to be sure – or this could be an instance in which the quotidian real world comes just a bit too close to Adams/Mellon’s home and heart for him to be able to distance it through humor even while trying to explain it through offbeat thinking. Either way, readers certainly have some thinking of their own to do before deciding whether they would end a letter to the Adams/Mellon “Dear Waldo” advice column with the words “Your Fan,” or without them.