Flann O’Brien - The Third Policeman (1967)

A surrealist fantasy, a treatise on the unending nature of guilt, absurdist noodlings - whatever the case, this book, first offered (and rejected) for publication in 1940, was only published after the author’s death. Having given up on the project, parts of it emerged in ‘The Dalkey Archive’. More recently the book allegedly provided the inspiration for the TV series ‘Lost’ (the cover was glimpsed in one scene). In truth, this is a book that satisfies on so many levels. The plot concerns a policeman’s love for his bicycle, miniature pianos, a murder and a philosopher whose rejection of most of the fundamental structures of reality leads him to the inescapable conclusion that darkness is caused by an accumulation of soot in the atmosphere. This is a book that inspires, amuses and amazes - buy one today!

Gran Dio!
La strada fa una lieve curva in salita e di là dal muretto lungo il marciapiede, sulla sinistra, si estende un mondo incantato: prati sassosi che si srotolano ripidi fino a una ferrovia sul fondo che sembra un giocattolo, e, dietro, immanente, incommensurabile, il mare, che si muove lento e silenzioso nell'immensa distesa di Killiney Bay. Alto nel cielo, che si unisce al mare lungo un orlo slabbrato, un convoglio di nuvole leggere arranca in silenzio verso oriente.
E a destra? Una mostruosa arroganza! Una possente spalla di granito si inerpica perdendosi in lontananza, il suo mantello di ginestrone e di felci puntellato da severe file di pini, abeti rossi e bianchi e ippocastani e, più oltre, da eleganti gruppetti di smilzi eucalipti puntigliosi: tutto un barbaglio di foglie appena mosse, un guazzabuglio di luci, colori, nebbioline e ariosità, una meraviglia in campo verde, verdeggiante, verticale, verticillata, vertiginosa, all'ombra di rami addirittura vespertini. Oddio, sarà sfuggito qualcosa dal lessico del sergente Fottrell?

Flann O'Brien, L'archivio di Dalkey [1964],
traduzione di Adriana Bottini, Adelphi, 1995.

This week, bicycling in Belfast.

Sam Ruscica, the 'Mother Teresa of Broken Bikes' in Belfast, talks about his shop "I Fix Bikes" in the Smithfield Market, as well as his plans for the future.  He'd like to move from rescuing all the abandoned and abused bikes in town to managing a community bike shop, teaching people how to build and fix bikes for themselves.  Sam also talks about Bike Pirates of Toronto, the abuse and flying objects he encounters while riding through the city, and the DIY Wednesdays he hosts at his shop.

Then Austin Brown of Belfast Bicycle Workshop talks about his work repairing and selling bicycles, as well as leading bike tours of the city.  He is located in 'The Workshops' on Lawrence Street in the Holylands, after having run Lifecycles down in the Smithfield Markets for many years.  Austin explains why there's not a critical mass in Belfast & how he's trying to generate a bike culture here.  He can be reached at 028 9043 9959, or at info@lifecycles.co.uk.

 The 'Bicycle Repair Man' skit from Monty Python, from which Sam derives his job title.

― In the Irish pub, I replied.

― What like O'Neills or something?

― No, by Irish pub I mean pub full of old Irish men, not a pub decorated in a kind of faux-Irish style.

― Oh right.

It was shortly after this conversation ensued that myself and a friend devised the term Moirish.  This is a kind of variation on mockney, although of course referring to mock Irish rather than mock Cockney. For some reason, I always want to say "Moirish" with a kind of, well, moirish chuckle, but the word serves its purpose. In the example above I could have differentiated between the two "Irish" pubs by referring to one as "Moirish". Of course not of them were actually Irish being as they were in West London.

I was thinking about this recently, as I am currently in the middle of reading The Poor Mouth. Apparently the title  in Irish derives from the expression "an béal bocht a chur ort" which means to exaggerate the direness of one's situation in order to invoke sympathy from creditors, landlords etc.

I'm quite a fan of pinching words and phrases that I like so the next time someone starts on about the hardness of their life I might just accuse them of "poormouthing". Of course it would be better if I could say it in Irish.

...mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann.

“If we don’t cherish the work of Flann O’Brien,” said Anthony Burgess, the late English novelist (he of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), “we are stupid fools who don’t deserve to have great men.” Burgess can rest in peace on that score, at least. Flann O’Brien’s work is becoming about as cherished as avant-garde literature can ever expect to be, and not just among the cognoscenti. Flann O’Brien is chic. University courses on his writings proliferate. Smart pubs in such disparate places as London, Boston, and Graz, Austria are named after him. Numerous Web sites offer slick packages of info on his life and works. And, the ultimate accolade: in the second season premiere of the television series Lost, a copy of O’Brien’s masterpiece, The Third Policeman, was briefly shown onscreen, resulting in a sudden uptick in sales—more than 15,000 copies in three weeks, equaling total sales of the previous six years—and enhanced name recognition for its author, who’d been dead four decades. Of course, he’d been dead a year by the time The Third Policeman was finally published in 1967, whereupon it was an instant critical success. An ironist to his bones, he would not have been surprised at that, but he might have been surprised at Everyman’s Library releasing, forty-one years later, all five of his novels—At Swim-Two Birds; The Third Policeman; The Poor Mouth; The Hard Life; and The Dalkey Archive—in one handsome volume. Such an honor implies literary respectability, which he scorned but yearned for, in the way of so many true originals.

His real name was Brian O’Nolan, and he was born in 1911, in Strabane, County Tyrone, in what is now Northern Ireland, into a teeming family of thirteen souls, two of whom were his parents, the remainder his six brothers and five sisters, all of them huddled in a stifling fug of Catholic shamrock-nationalism. (That there were so many such families in Ireland then and so many fewer now is a measure of the nation’s progress in the past century.) Brian was the third son. His mother, Agnes, was a shopkeeper’s daughter with literary antecedents. Michael, his father, was a customs and excise officer and a devoted nationalist at a time when the use of the Irish (Gaelic) language was a crucial gesture of national solidarity; Irish, not English, was the language of the O’Nolan parlor. Like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, O’Nolan came late to his writer’s tongue—in fact, Russian malchik Vladimir was speaking English at a slightly earlier age (five) than was Irish boyo Brian (seven)—and, like them, he uses English in the exuberant, inventive, and unexpected way of the non-native speaker. His eventual exposure to, and immersion in, English was inevitable, of course. His father knew this, but still postponed it for as long as possible by keeping his children out of the regular schools, where all instruction was in English, and by creating an incestuous little Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking region) at home. Fortunately, he did nothing to discourage the children from reading in English, which they—especially Brian—did avidly, with a strong Anglo-Victorian bent: Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, Huxley. In another parallel with Nabokov, O’Nolan always loved H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal creation, Sherlock Holmes.  ... more>>

and raise a glass to Flann O'Brien

BLOOMSDAY (a term Joyce himself did not employ) was invented in 1954, the 50th anniversary, when the novelist Flann O'Brien and the writer and magazine editor John Ryan organized what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the ''Ulysses'' route. Accounts of the venture are given by Ryan in his book of reminiscences, ''Remembering How We Stood'' -- renamed by Dublin wits ''Remembering How We Staggered'' -- and in ''No Laughing Matter,'' a biography of O'Brien by the poet Anthony Cronin, who was one of the pilgrims. Cronin's downbeat version of the ''structured and, in a way, humorless'' event is probably the more accurate one. The tour began at the architect Michael Scott's house beside the Martello tower in Sandycove, where the effects of the drink that Scott had laid on caused a scuffle between O'Brien and the poet Patrick Kavanagh. As might be expected, matters went downhill from there, and the pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary Lestrygonians succumbed to inebriation and rancor at the Bailey pub in the city center.

The rest is here

now, moving along, today is william butler yeats birthday (and friday the 13th, but that's just a coincedence!). yeats is regarded as the greatest poet ireland ever produced, and he's certainly my personal favorite. yeats led the celtic renessaince & irish literary movement of his time, building upon the work done before him by the likes of oscar wilde and those who were his contemporaries and who'd come after him: james joyce, george bernard shaw, flann o'brien, samuel beckett, brendan behan (totally underrated!), seamus heaney, etc. yeats' words amaze me, and i don't even care much for poetry. i'd say that he may be the runner-up to favorite writer position (to flannery o'connor) for me. here's my personal favorite, "never give all the heart"...

never give all the heart, for love
will hardly seem worth thinking of
to passionate women if it seem
certain, and they never dream
that it fades out from kiss to kiss
for everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreary, kind delight
o never give the heart outright
for they, for all smooth lips can say
have given their heart up to the play
and who could play it well enough
if deaf and dumb and blind with love?
he that made this knows all the cost
for he gave all his heart and lost

i do think that his best poem would have to be easter 1916, though. absolutely amazing. some other favorites are before the world was made, i am of ireland, in tara's halls, the lake isle of innisfree, the second coming, the song of wandering aengus, when you are old, why should not old men be mad?, and of course, he wishes for the cloths of heaven. and you can't forget his tales of a man young & old, aedh, crazy jane, cuchulain, the lover and oisin. a true genius.

you can hear yeats read one of his poems here and another here.

Your summer action plan should at least include:

1. Maintaining your independent reading program (http://www.amazon.com/360%C2%B0-Reading-Literature-Guide-College/dp/1598583794 ); plan to read, on average, at least 50 pages every day (i.e., 350 pages per week).  It’s a tall order, but the dividends it will pay are large.
2. Dedicating at least 6 hours each week to SAT or ACT study; there are many study guides on the market, e.g., Kaplan or Princeton Review (also, don’t forget to check out SAT / ACT prep software).  Take three full-length practice tests: one each at the beginning, middle and end of the summer.
3. Spending at least thirty minutes, three times each week, investigating potential candidate colleges: buy a college guide (they list and compare colleges), familiarize yourself with the US News Best College Website (http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php ), continue to  browse through college websites on the Internet; many of them have pages for “perspective students” (your goal is to become familiar with as many colleges as possible; try to get a feel for what you like in a college).  Pay special attention to colleges that are within a three-hour drive of your home (they are easy to visit, and if you decide to attend one of these, your commute will be less of a hassle).

RECOMMENDED READING

Start your summer reading with these challenging books:

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller

At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien

How to Read Literature like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, by Thomas Foster

The Poetry of Arab Women, by Nathalie Handal

Tell Them Who I Am, by Elliot Leibow

Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998).
Writing in Salon's Literary Guide to the World, John Banville recommends this novel as Ireland reading:

While the celebrated "The Third Policeman" is probably the finer work artistically, "At Swim-Two-Birds" is funnier. O'Brien, real name Brian O'Nolan -- which, paradoxically, sounds, to an Irish ear, entirely made up -- was one of the oddest birds in the Irish aviary of literary oddities, a self-loathing product of an ultra-nationalist family whose humor was as black and twisted as a blackthorn stick. "At Swim-Two-Birds" -- that hilarious postmodernist-before-its-time fantasia, with Mad Sweeney in the trees and Wild West cowboys galloping through the streets of Dublin -- sank like a stone when it came out on the eve of war in 1939, and even lifelines from the likes of Graham Greene could not rescue it, but it remains a comic masterpiece, as galling as a bad draught of Guinness, and as Irish as rain.

Graham Greene called it "one of the best books of our century." And Dylan Thomas said, ""This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl!"

Here is a brief excerpt. Google Book Search has a preview and more. Here is Wikipedia's page on Flann O'Brien, the nom de plume of Brian O'Nolan. Allen Barra wrote about O'Brien in the St. Petersburg Times. Eric Mader-Lin wrote this brief essay on the book. Eight years later, Eric Mader (coincidence? I think not) wrote this somewhat longer essay. Here is The Modern Word's Flann O'Brien page, and here is the discussion of At Swim-Two-Birds. Sheila O'Malley writes about it, and also links to this essay by John Updike on O'Brien. Nathaniel Rich writes about O'Brien and the novel at Slate. Here's a review by Anthony Campbell. Christopher says "approach with caution." Lev Grossman (in Time) says it's one the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Nicholas "can see why people get obsessed with" it. Fionnchú discusses the technique that has made it "memorable for nearly six decades of flummoxed, chortling, and delighted readers." Graeme Mitchell calls it a "must must must (etc.) read for one and all." Matt says it's "brilliant and intricate." It made Profmike laugh out loud. Brian Rock posted the abstract of his paper on the novel.

Buy it at Amazon.com.

... un verdadero genio de la escritura: Flann O'Brien. Su influencia en la literatura irlandesa posterior ha sido extraordinaria y su empleo del lenguaje no desdice del de Joyce. Su obra más famosa, una narración laberíntica, de novelas dentro de novelas, con un gran espíritu cómico, es At swim two birds, que, aunque es casi intraducible, lo ha hecho con no mala fortuna José María Álvarez Flórez (En nadar dos pájaros. Edhasa). Su obra la viene publicando con entusiasmo Nórdica (El tercer policía, La boca pobre, Crónica de Dalkey). O'Brien, que mantuvo durante largos años una columna satírica en el Irish Times, es un escritor dotado de una imaginación desbordada que le permite encadenar situaciones delirantes con una tranquilidad de espíritu fascinante: Dalkey, por ejemplo, se desarrolla en torno a la idea de que James Joyce no murió sino que vive escondido y en cuya persecución se lanza el protagonista.

Il se redressa soudain et me regarda de façon presque directe, sa pipe agressivement fichée entre ses mâchoires serrées. Il remplissait le monde de fumée. J'étais mal à l'aise, mais n'avais pas vraiment peur de lui. Si j'avais eu ma pelle, il n'aurait pas duré longtemps. Je me dis que la meilleure chose à faire était de me plier à ses caprices et d'être d'accord avec tout ce qu'il disait.

Bienvenue dans une Irlande déroutante, où l'on vole les bicyclettes, qui se vengent en imprimant leur personnalité à leurs utilisateurs. D'ailleurs, un détachement spécial de policiers s'occupe exclusivement de ces vols, négligeant les crimes du narrateur, qui, après avoir procédé à plusieurs assassinats à coups de pelle, se fera lui-même voler son vélo. Le malheureux affrontera policemen fétichistes, voleurs philosophes et autres théoriciens de l'absurde, avec le même désir d'aller au fond des choses, et de voyager aux confins des mondes connus... pour récupérer sa bicyclette. Un disciple d'Ulysse ?

Dans ces pages d'une tranquillité délirante, Flann O'Brien devient le frère en noir de Jarry et d'Alphonse Allais. La campagne irlandaise, c'est-à-dire le monde, ne sera plus jamais la même.

Chez Phébus, traduit par Patrick Reumaux.

Which leads you to ask: If we read a book and forget that we read it, is that the same as never having read it? I think between reading and nonreading there is an indeterminate space that is quite important, a space where you have books you have skimmed, books you have heard about and books you have forgotten. You don’t have to feel guilty about it.

But what about those of us who read to feel things — to experience pleasure, an end to loneliness? Of course I read in order to feel something. And to feel an end to my loneliness, of course, just as you.

Then why are you so willing to devalue the experience of close reading in favor of skimming? You seem to believe that knowing a little bit about 100 literary classics is preferable to knowing one book intimately. I think a great reader is able to read from the first line to the last line; if you want to do that with some books, it’s necessary to skim other books. If you want to fall in love with someone, it’s necessary to meet many people. You see what I mean?

In regards to remembering, here's another question. If you do not remember a book, does it matter that you've read it? I think it does. I think that while it does some good for a book to live on in one's head and resonate over time, even if it enriches your world for just the time you are reading and perhaps some very short time after, it contributes to your life. (I really have to say this because otherwise I have thrown away a pretty substantial portion of my life). I think books are like food except it is quite obvious that you can live without them and many do.

I may not remember the meal I had yesterday but it lives on in my body. It gives me strength for some time to come. It forms part of the basis on which I taste everything to come. And if it is a really good meal (or a really mixed metaphor), the peace of mind and hum of that small island of pleasure, like a canoe pushed into the water, keeps going even after the hand withdraws.

Of course, now that I want to write about those books long forgotten I will have to leaf through the copies I have and curse my limitations for the ones I don't. I have found that even if the mind is a little blank about the book, there is usually something small, and if you start reading it again, the story fills in quickly enough. I've had those times where, and this might be more common with obsessive mystery readers, I wasn't sure I had read a book, and about a chapter in I realize I did, and all too often, remembered it wasn't all that good.

Perhaps the most frustrating is when you have read a book that was remarkable in every sense except that it left no impression whatsoever on your grey matter. (And I remember all too well some really substandard works).

I do have a few books I reread. These tend to be not for the story, though story there must be, but more for the language. I reread Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex every few years because it manages to be both a parody and a homage, a sly wink at the Arthurian legend by someone who obviously loves them intensely. I reread The Third Policeman also for the language, and Fup. In each case, these are writers barely holding on to the paper, so full of excitement are they at the goings on, and the wonder of the language that swirls around the events.

I think it must come down to how you are reading in the first place. I think I read a little like I find my way through strange places. I tend not to keep track of where I have been but try to just keep moving forward. Kind of like being a passenger in the car; leave the memory to the driver. Unfortunately every now and then you get stranded, or someone asks you for directions to the place you just came from, and you end up idiot for the day.

I like Guided By Voices more in theory than in actuality. In theory, Robert Pollard is a songwriting maniac who has released hundreds of songs that are all snappy, catchy and brilliant. In practice, Robert Pollard is a songwriting maniac who has released hundreds of songs that he puts out whether they are finished or not. A vast quantity of GBV output is about a minute long. And for the most part the songs feel like fragments, rather than real songs. Nevertheless, I find that just about everything he writes is catchy and quite good, it's just that so much of it is so forgettable.

Despite that, they have several songs that are fantastic. I could easily make a greatest hits record of GBV songs that I think are fabulous, and it would probably have 20 songs on it. The only problem is Pollard has released probably a thousand songs, so that's not such great average.

I received this copy of Universal Truths and Cycles as a promotional copy many years ago. I had really enjoyed Do the Collapse, and so I grabbed this CD, and much like my assessment above, I find that there's nothing I really dislike about the album although at 4:59, almost three times longer than a typical GBV song, "Storm Vibrations" tends to drag, but overall there's not that much that's memorable. Of course, "Everywhere with Helicopters" is fantastic and "Christian Animation Torch Characters" is also pretty wonderful. I could pick maybe 3 of the 19 songs here to go on my hits collection, but overall, the album is typical GBV, a little weird, but very catchy.

[READ: October 2, 2007] McSweeney's #24.

I just flew through this latest issue of McSweeney's. It was a real treat to read. The packaging was another one of their fun covers. It is designed in two parts, with a gatefold type of sleeve that reveals a full nighttime scene if you open it all the way. These guys have so much fun with their design, I'm surprised they're not noted more for that.

Anyhow, the contents: the one side is a selection of six short stories, they all seem to feature guns, and they're not afraid to use them. The other side is a symposium of reasonably famous authors writing tributes about Donald Barthelme, and two short stories by Barthelme himself. It also comes with an excerpt from Millard Kaufman's Bowl of Cherries, which I have not yet read, but if it's good I will get the book and review it later.

Part One, the stories:

I once tried to note how many movies I could go to see that did not feature a gun anywhere. It's harder than you'd think; even comedies have them! I don't even think of myself as a gun-friendly-entertainment kind of guy. I don't really like mysteries, and I don't really like action films, except for Jackie Chan chopsocky films, and there's usually no gun in those, and of course, classic action films are always classic. But I am usually gun free in the books I read. Then came this issue:

Christopher R. Howard: "How to Make Millions in the Oil Market"
This is one of the first stories I have read about the current Iraq war. It concerns a man who joins a group of former soldiers who remain in Iraq as private militia, making a lot more money--a LOT more money. On his return home he finds that his former life is no longer possible. Pretty violent, but not terribly insightful, other than that war sucks.  [UPDATE 11/14: I didn't realize that there were actually guns-for-hire companies doing the kind of work described in this story...imagine my surprise when the headlines were full of them merely a few days after I read this!]

Joe Meno: "Stockholm, 1973"
A bit of research confirms that this is a fictional account of the origin of "Stockholm syndrome." I didn't know that ahead of time, and hope I don't poison your reading now that you know it. The story was a good look at a failed attempt at a bank robbery. The man, Jan, a loser by nature, takes four hostages but has no intention of hurting them. He eventually calls his friend to help him figure out what to do, and they hole up in the bank vault for a couple of days. What I liked about the story was that it basically stated from the outset that Jan would fail, and I was fascinated to see how long the story would last and still hold interest knowing that it would all go downhill.

Jonathan Ames: "Bored to Death"
This story is a hard boiled mystery. Top to bottom. I don't usually read detective-type stories, but I really enjoyed this one, and while I probably won't start reading other detective stories because of it, I do see the appeal. This one was interesting because it was told from the first person, something I don't see too often anymore, and, it seemed to be written as an essay, with the character having the same name as the protagonist. Also, the narrator is not a detective, but a writer who gets caught up in the case of a missing person. I stayed up late to finish it, which is certainly a pro for the story, although I was rather surprised by the ending. I'm trying to imagine how he's going to explain his yucky injuries to friends and relations. I'll keep an eye out for more by this fellow.

Aaron Gwyn: "Look at Me"
This story was very visceral, about a man's reaction to a psychopathic individual busting into a diner and killing everyone in sight. As I said, it was thrilling and fast paced, but ultimately it felt like a story you would write in high school. It was a very detailed rampage, with great knowledge of weaponry. I imagine a high school senior who is really into guns writing this story as a way to get revenge on school bullies.

Philippe Soupault: "Death of Nick Carter"
This story did not feature a gun. It is a translation of an older story. It's told in 4 parts, about a "famous" detective who was killed in unusual circumstances, involving inmates at an asylum. It was a little too scattered in plotting for me to really enjoy it, so it didn't do all that much for me. However, it was very descriptive and painted a vivid picture of the asylum and the football field.

Eric Hanson: "The Last Adventure of the Blue Phantom"
This was a long story about a superhero (and yes there was a gun here too). The Blue Phantom calls on a small boy to be his apprentice (the boy's name is Robin but that's unsuitable for anyone's sidekick but Batman's...hee!...so his name is changed). The boy is sent on a couple of scary missions all with the goal of recovering a valuable relic. The story flashes back to a previous expedition of the Blue Phantom in the jungle and how he came to discover his real identity. And yet the whole story seems to be a parable of a broken relationship and a lost childhood. It was somewhat hallucinogenic, and a little disturbing, but overall it was really good.

Part Two, Donald Barthelme:

I enjoy a lot of post-modern things. I studied philosophy in college and was a fan of Derrida and the deconstructionists. I like a lot of the theater of the absurd, and really enjoy Samuel Beckett and Flann O' Brien. And yet somehow I had never read Donald Barthelme. This issue's symposium on Barthelme really opened my eyes to him. Now obviously these are fans of the man, so they are going to say nice things about him. But the general sense you get is that he was a fun man who liked to make jokes and write funny stories. I'm certainly not going to review the comments about him, because that would be pointless, but the general sense I took away from reading this testimonials was that I had to read some Barthelme stories. So I have put 60 Stories on hold at the library. In the meantime, two stories are included here.

There is just something about reading an older story that really changes the way you get used to reading. I read a lot of current fiction, so the language and style is very modern. It was weird to read these stories and read such "formal" writing. It makes the stories seem more significant I suppose.

Donald Barthelme: "The Bed"
You can tell that this story is older, as it is written in a more formal, classical style, even if it is unusual in nature. The story is about a man and his ex-wife, Honoria. Honoria states that he promised to get her a bed for her new apartment. No background to this story is given, except that he promised to buy her a bed. The story contains letters to each other, and is rather silly. An awful lot is packed into the 6 or 7 pages.

Donald Barthelme writing as David Reiner: "Pages from the Annual Report"
This read so much like a Kids in the Hall skit! I could see the Kids in their business offices saying this absurd dialog. And then when the maid came in and hijinx ensued, I could practically see Scott Thompson as the maid. At any rate, this story is pretty odd, and as it is the first Barthelme I've read I don't know how to compare it to anything else. It features two businessmen in an office where evidently they do nothing all day; just wait for more paperwork to pile up so they can ignore it. The ending felt like a scene out of Waiting for Godot if it were filmed in the landscape of Brazil. Rather than hanging themselves, they decide to initial the paperwork and forward it to someone else. It has a fairly scathing critique of modern corporate culture, and was quite funny. It'd be even funnier with Bruce McCullough and Mark McKinney, though!