How to Be Inappropriate

Nester's like a boy in the basement who's so quiet you start to get worried. What the hell's he doing down there? We find out exactly what dirty, obsessive business he's been up to when he comes upstairs and hands us this book, in which he writes about love gone wrong, bands gone wrong, and the history of mooning. Mooning! He writes about a video-game king, a Christian-rock parody band, and the literary history of farting! Farting! Thankfully, he's not the kind of boy who gets all sweaty and overheated hoping you'll love what he loves. He's humble and understated and as surprised as you are about what funny, filthy creatures little boys are, with their lonely cravings and wayward penises. For the sake of submersion journalism, Nester fake-tans, takes penis pills, and teaches creative writing to students in NY. I bought a copy of the book to see what an alternative life I might have led, and one for my younger brother, as a cautionary tale.

No doubt about it, there are hilarious moments in this book--the furious, outrageously violent, new endings composed by ESL students for The Catcher in the Rye, the bizarre queries his student's even more bizarre writing assignments required the he make--but this is not a book of jokes. The humor is often daringly dark--it's sad and little troubling that a young artist the author dates allows a security guard at the defunct investment company "Stair-Burns" pay to lick her feet. Also, at the heart of the book is a series of essays that describe his life from the time he moved to New York to become a writer (only to find out the first that an estranged ex-girlfriend happens to live next door) to the time he left to try with much worry-making help from science to start a family. It is a complex book that is sad, serious, and moving all at the same time.

This is a great book, and not only for the reasons you (if you are drawn to it for the "inappropriate" content) may think. The attention grabbers are the ones about the most taboo subjects (read the table of contents), but How to Be Inappropriate, at it most comic and its most serious, is so much more than that. My favorite of the super funny essays is "Queries," which lists comments he's made on students' writing assignments--"Isn't everything tucked lovingly tucked?," "Is there another, non-legendary Kraken?" The gentleness with which the author treats his students' work heightens the funniness of their contorted language while celebrating the strange products that can result from the awkward effort to put words on paper. But (and I hope I don't turn off anyone who wants a funny book, because it IS funny) Daniel Nester's book is also quite moving. Several essays--my favorite is "The Difference Between Chickens and Goats"--explore in between times in the author's life, when he has finished one part of his life and is waiting for another to begin. They convey the poignancy of those moments, the lost feeling, the uneasiness of transition. This is a different kind of inappropriate--the feeling of being out of place, the sense that you are acting in ways that do not fit your context. And it is a different kind of funny, the in-retrospect kind you experience when you look back on a painful time in your life and recognize the humor of the human condition. How to Be Inappropriate is a great humor book, but it is also great writing. It is ideal for anyone who appreciates the art of the personal essay.

Ondi Timoner's documentary, "DiG!" follows two bands: the blandly successful Dandy Warhols, and the raucous, combustible, insanely talented and brilliantly inexplicable Brian Jonestown Massacre. The Brian Jonestown Massacre spends the entire documentary alternating between creating stunningly original, genre-mashing music and systematically trying to destroy their opportunities through booze-soaked infighting and bizarrely normalized instability. And I mention this all to say this: Daniel Nester's "How To Be Inappropriate" is the Brian Jonestown Massacre of autobiographical / non-fiction essay books. "How to Be Inappropriate" is fresh, and manic, and exhilaratingly weird. Nester fearlessly allows all the strange incarnations of his id to run rampant, from his misguidedly perverse MFA lit major side ("Pulling the Muse's Finger: A Fartspotter's Guide to Poetic Passing of Wind"), to his mulleted Jersey yahoo side ("Mooning: A Short Cultural History" ), to the surprising vanity of his upstate professor side ("Yes I Tan: The Indoor Tanning Diaries"). Mixed in with these straightforwardly funny musings are oddball non-fiction articles -- such as his interview with "classic video game king" Todd Rogers and his expose of ApologetiX, a Christian Rock Parody Band -- and compelling prose pieces, like "Queries," which is a collection of actual comments Nester has made on his students' creative writing papers and "A.I. Wanna Rock 'n' Roll All Night," where Nester replaces Gene Simmons' responses during his famous Fresh Air with Terry Gross interview with comments written by "ALICE, an artificial intelligence chatbot." But what really makes the book for me are when Nester defies expectations again, and showcases some incredibly personal and humanizing writing, such as the heart-breaking "Garden Path Paragraphs," where he speaks with brutal honesty about his and his wife's troubles conceiving their first child. Or "Goodbye to All Them," an unapologetic reflection on being a New York City poet who commits the cardinal sin of leaving New York City. Daniel Nester doesn't hide anything, nor does he try to fit into any prescribed molds about what a book of collected non-fiction / autobiographical essays should be. Rather with "How to Be Inappropriate," he smashes those expectations, sets 'em on fire, and then stand over the smoldering ashes to play an extended solo on talk box guitar.