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Dave
Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure
is part of a certain breed of artistic work that provides
a certain kind of pleasant feeling. Imagine that you are reading
a book or seeing a movie, and it fills you with absolute pleasure.
Not just ANY type of pleasure, mind you, but that "the world
is a beautiful place, and I love everything in it, and there's
magic if only I look for it" type of peace.
The Hipster
Book Club has long been a proponent of such a genre, having
bonded in love over books such as Danny Wallace's Yes Man.
The core tenant of this movement seems to be a rather hearty
and affirming cry of "Fuck yeah, life. Fuck yeah, indeed."
Googlewhack, for example, is about Gorman's obsessive
quest to string together ten consecutive "googlewhacks"—a
two word term that, when typed into Google, returns only one
result. Examples include (at the time of the book's writing):
pomegranate filibusters, bushranger doublespeak, and yoyo
triptychs.
Gorman
(who now occasionally pops up on The Daily Show), takes
up a quest to find a googlewhack, find the person who made
the website, visit that person, and have that person find
him two more googlewhacks. The resulting book is a whirlwind
travelogue of sorts leading the author to China, Australia,
the United States, and around his native United Kingdom. This
sort of behavior tends to be central in works of this type:
lighthearted risk-taking that most people wish they could
undertake but rarely do for fear of the consequences. The
genre tends to be life-affirming, and it also has the unfortunate
side effect of causing readers to dislike the desk job which
prevents them from traveling the world on flights of whimsy.
In his
travels, Mr. Gorman wakes up drunk at airports, scratching
himself in front of Chinese children; gets idiotic tattoos
on his arm (also while drunk); gets caught looking at gay
porn by hotel employees; meets famous screenwriters; attends
spacerock concerts; goes to Mexico to buy cocaine with a Texan
carrying a gun (that sounds far worse than it really is);
meets lesbian birds; and talks to cute girls in airports about
Snoopy. Basically, these are all the things that were your
New Year's resolutions. He goes through these trials and travails
with charm and not-quite-Wilde wit, and readers will enjoy
meeting the people he meets.
The downside
of the book is that, after a time, he starts to cut out a
lot of the time between googlewhacks, and the book becomes
a series of ever-shortening episodes of brief encounters with
random individuals. As the episodes shorten in length, they
lose some of the whimsy of entering their unique little worlds.
The interests they hold dear, those that produced Gorman's
googlewhacks and led him to meet these people, stop being
explored with any sort of depth and therefore they become
less satisfying. When Gorman takes the time to give a fair
glimpse into these individuals' lives, the character portraits
are interesting, humanistic, and uplifting. The people he
meets, by random choice of bizarre vocabulary words and internet
use, essentially all turn out to be warm, inviting, and curious.
Many
people spend their entire lives learning to mistrust and close
themselves off, but a book such as this serves as a reminder
that human beings are basically good. And for a few days after
finishing the book, readers will resolve to start to live
life better by taking more fun risks and talking to that cute
girl in the airport. Hence the benefits of uplifting books.
Hence the benefits of Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure.
(March,
2007)
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