John Hodgman - The Areas of My Expertise

In John Hodgman’s world, there is a reference book devoted entirely to eponyms. Ruffner’s Eponyms Dictionaries Index lists 33,000 eponymous things or concepts, including these surprises: Hans Geigercounter, Sir Dennis Ballpoint, Ampere Angstrom Alfredo Sauce, and Marie Eponym.

In John Hodgman’s world, the government is offering twenty-five gold dollars to the person who finds the Donner Party and another $25 to the man who can eat them alive.

In John Hodgman’s world, a world not so unlike our own, Arab American cheesecake-on-a-stick entrepreneurs at the Mall of America are targets of a discrimination campaign led by a rival vendor at Granny’s Squeezecakes.

I check in with one of the Egyptian brothers on my way out of the Mall of America. “Did you ever discover why they are kicking us out?” he asks. “No,” I say. “The mall officials are stonewalling me. I have gone rogue,” I explain. He nods as only a sad Egyptian about to lose his deep-fry place at the Mall of America can. “Perhaps this is for the best,” he says. He gives me something fried on a stick, and I promise to eat it someday. But for him and for me, the Minnesota picnic is over.

John Hodgman is perhaps best known as the “resident expert” on The Daily Show and for his role as the PC in the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and This American Life on public radio. The Areas of My Expertise is Hodgman’s first book, an almanac, including (as the subtitle reveals) “Matters Historical, Matters Literary, Matters Cryptozoological, Hobo Matters, Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food), Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels, Haircuts, Utopia, What Will Happen in the Future, and Most Other Subjects.” It is also one of the funniest books in years.

This is the robust wit of The Onion and Jon Stewart. But instead of skewering politicians and satirizing the cultural elite, Hodgman uses very short essays, long annotations, lists (including seven hundred hobo names), tables, and illustrations to construct a new realm that is vastly larger than the sum of its absurd parts. Facts are inadvertent in The Areas of My Expertise but insight is in abundance. “This edition is essentially identical to the hardcover,” writes Hodgman in the recently released paperback edition. “The false material is still false, and the various moments of unintended truth are still true, although it increasingly seems that the world does not notice or care about the difference between the two.”

Concord, Massachusetts - home to Henry David Thoreau and the Transcendentalists - has old laws on the books banning “insights by the pond” and “keeping a journal in the woods” as well as a law strictly prohibiting the inspiration of “self-appointed liberators of India, whether now or in the future.” This is true.

In John Hodgman’s world, the following is also true:

- Robert Frost bathed by rolling around in the Vermont dust once a year.
- Prohibition euphemisms for booze included “jazz chowder”, “fairy pee”, and “stutter milk.”
- Yale University seeks to control the world through its a cappella singing groups. The Wiffenpoofs, for example, are in charge of conventional espionage and fencing. The Duke’s Men are responsible for the kicking and punching of people.
- My home state of Oregon has its back to the ocean, where it seethes, “perpetually covered in a dark cloud of marijuana smoke, ever dreaming of conquest.”

Here at last is complete world knowledge. It’s not our world but a place very much like it, just through the looking glass from here. The Areas of My Expertise might be a handy guide to navigate that world, I don’t know. But Hodgman’s vivid imagination and his tweedy syntax shine a soft melancholy light in our own dark corners.

In John Hodgman’s world, Incan-themed restaurants feature paintings and very thin air, which makes it hard to breathe and undercooks the eggs, and the restaurant is staffed by actual Incas, “looking sad and doing their sad little math with knots of string.”

Hodgman’s dinner companion says, “This is all that’s left of their once-great civilization.”

Indeed.

The Areas of My Expertise is available from Powells Books.