McSweeney's Issue 14

McSweeney's is always a mixed bag, and this installment is no exception. Overall the offerings range from the insufferably longwinded and trying ("The Doubtfulness of Water"), to wonders inconceivable in any other venue. I found "A Child's Book of Sickness and Death" to be walking the edge of being socially acceptable, but entirely redeemed by the purported illnesses of the animals involved, such as the cat who suffered from feline leukemic indecisiveness, which has interesting symptoms, my favorite of which is that he has a feeling at the tip of his tail the same time each day like someone is putting it in their mouth and chewing. (There is also a pony with dreadful hoof dismay and a peacock with crispy lung surprise, to name but a few.) I enjoyed the foray into art by Lawrence Weschler, "Convergence: Thumb in Eye," which details the history in modern art of giant sculpted thumbs (including those of Saddam Hussein). The entire piece can be neatly summed up by the Zen teaching "When I point my finger at the moon, don't mistake my finger for the moon." (Or so it is claimed.) "What I Ain't" linked, for the first time in my consciousness, Patti LaBelle, Chaka Khan, and navel string, while "Convergence: Torso as Face" dealt with the contemporary influence of Magritte's art. I also took relative delight in the songs noted in "Pigs in Space," which include "Strap on the Toilet Song," "Making the Omelette Song," and, of course, the "Semolina Song." The article goes into a certain detail regarding "two pig-sized stasis chambers," and their influence on colic, gas, bloat, and explosion of pigs. Without question, though, the best work in the book is "Rodent Disaster in Xinjiang," which details a Great Gerbil invasion plaguing parts of China. I was hooked as soon as I read the unabridged title of the piece: "An Investigation Into Xinjiang's Growing Swarm of Great Gerbils, Which May or May Not be Locked in a Death-Struggle With the Golden Eagle, With Important Parallels and/or Implications Regarding Koala Bears, The Pied Piper, Spongmonkeys, Cane Toads, Black Death, [and] Text-Messaging." This is an absolutely stunning work and I recommend the entire volume highly on the basis of this one piece. The Chinese gerbil invasion is followed from start to finish in a historical framework, and includes official viewpoints of the Chinese Regional Headquarters for Controlling Locusts and Rodents, as well as noted gerbil researchers like Helga Fritzsche, who notes that "when gerbils excrete their dusty pellets of rare urine concentrate, they do so entirely without sound." (Ponder that, please.) It turns out that these gerbils are not ordinary pet store sized, they are about 16 inches long from snout to tail, and are causing environmental havoc, which, naturally, has led the Chinese government to introduce breeding pairs of Golden Eagles to eat them. They chose Golden Eagles because they have multiple anti-gerbil attack modes, the most useful of which is "contour fl