Philadelphia Weekly

Sometimes a factual book can kick ass as hard as the craziest novel. Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University by William C. Dowling is such a book.

It's about how quasi-professional college sports are eating higher education's brains. Having seen the demands of bloated sports programs dumb down and corrupt universities elsewhere, English professor Dowling was grateful to escape to the hallowed halls of Rutgers, part of the State University of New Jersey. And then he saw the same thing start to happen there. So he went to war.

Even if you care not a fig about the Neanderthalization of our universities, you'll get a buzz out of Dowling's furious prose. Dude's got a chip on both shoulders and half a dozen angry beehives throbbing in his bonnet.

Featuring bribery, lies, corruption, forgery, "sex-and-recruiting" parties, barely functional illiterates swanning around campus in sports cars while real students struggle to survive, known sex offenders admitted to college, and students rioting so they can partake of the culture of invulnerability surrounding the pampered, slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging idiot athletes, Spoilsport is pissed-off anti-sports writing at its most passionate and eloquent.

Dowling's story contains all the elements of a bloody crime page-turner: rape, murder, drugs and the rather scary inability of most academics to say or do anything to stop the rot.

Spoilsport is the follow-up fans of the classic football book Friday Night Lights (which was about sports corruption in the football-rotted high schools of West Texas) have been waiting for. Ironically, Hollywood turned that damning indictment into a dumbed-down feel-good football movie. Wonder if they'll do the same with Spoilsport.

As all real writers know, "writer's block" is an excuse used by the incompetent to excuse their laziness. When Robert Louis Stevenson's wife threw the manuscript of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde into the fire, Stevenson didn't kvetch. He rewrote the 30,000-word bugger in a three-day cocaine-crazed frenzy. And it's in this spirit we welcome Blood Poison, the latest Philly-based forensic thriller from our very own one-man crime-fiction machine D.H. Dublin. It'll probably take you longer to read it than he took to write it. It just reeks of Philly and--like most genre fiction--it's better than literature.

Just as Western culture is generally hamstrung by the ridiculous low/high divide, so English-language literature is crippled by its disdain for both popular fiction and that most American of artforms, the comic book. (Hence that ridiculously effete confection the graphic novel.)

We'll tolerate none of that snobby bollocks here. Shaolin Cowboy is an achingly complex, surreal and superbly drawn episodic work-in-progress about a renegade Shaolin monk and a talking donkey. The plot is perhaps best described as a series of violent brain spasms reminiscent of the work of the great French comic artist Moebius at his speed-addled, psychedelic best. The action currently takes place around, in and on a ginormous dino-lizard (with mile-long chin hairs) carrying an entire city on its back and a shark-infested hell in its stomach.

Proving how much cooler and more useful comics are than novels are the numerous cheeky wee buggers popping up all over and gibbering intensely about the war in Iraq. There's the gritty Cr�cy, in which foul-mouthed English peasants bow-and-arrow the fuck out of an armored, arrogant, all-conquering, high-tech medieval French superpower. And there's the satanically satirical Army@Love about a New Jersey National Guard unit that's part of a totally privatized coed army awash with sex and fighting a, like, totally fun, never-ending war against nonwhite types in "Afbaghistan."

Then there's Black Summer, in which mentally ill liberal superheroes kill the president and his cabinet for lying to the people and starting an illegal war.

The Programme starts with the Red Army triumphantly marching into Berlin, jumps forward to a resurrected Soviet-era Russian superhero wiping out an entire U.S. Army division in the Middle East, and then introduces America's savior--also a product of Cold War-modified Nazi technology. Only problem: America's superhero is a pinko do-gooder who thinks the U.S. shouldn't go around invading other people's countries and stealing their oil in the first place. The crazy liberal bastard.

This is why we need to stamp out liberalism in America--before Al Qaeda get their hands on Soviet-era superhero technology. (Do you think George W. reads comics? And if he does, do you think he understands them?)

Finally there's Killing Girl and Paolo Parente's Dust--two comic books that look sensational but are as dumb as bricks. The latter, however, features huge-breasted Soviet punk-chick robotank pilots fighting Nazi zombies and android-apes. And it's also a "strategy board game"--proving America truly is nerdvana. Hurrah for us.