Amazon book link

It’s a beautiful April 1st here in Saidia, Morocco. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the waves are gently lapping the golden Mediterranean shore. What better day to forget the world’s troubles, spread our wings, and fly away…into the world of illustrated 19th-century-style nonsense verse?

Bad Birder’s Birding Report: Nonsense Ornithology from Bad to Verse

Amazon description: This “birding report” is actually illustrated nonsense verse in the tradition of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Gillette Burgess, and Dr. Seuss. Featuring 125 poems and 130 illustrations, it mentions more than 150 species of birds, including virtually all of the most common North American species as well as several “exotics,” a few of which may not actually exist. The poems are alternately humorous, ironic, tragicomic, mystical and just plain nonsensical. Together they have created an exciting new avant-garde poetry genre called “birderel,” which can mean “doggerel about birds,” “doggerel for birders,” or (for people who don’t like it) “bird drivel.” These 100 percent human-crafted poems were illustrated by an AI programmed to commune with the soul of Edward Lear and other great nonsense illustrators. If you have ever seen a bird you will undoubtedly enjoy this book. And if you don’t enjoy it you can rip out its pages and use them for birdcage liner, which could be very useful if you live in a birdcage without indoor plumbing. Even in that unlikely event you won’t regret your purchase, since ten percent of the net profits will be donated to Abderrahman Shimlali’s stork preservation society in Berkane, Morocco.

From the Afterword

Though this book is very far from being an ethics treatise, its nonsense, wit and mysticism are not unrelated to an important ethical obligation: The duty to reveal and honor the truth by annihilating the language-fabricated lies that veil it. That means smashing the monstrous verbal idols that tyrannize us. Today more than ever humanity is being suffocated by the propaganda lies of the powerful. We witness videos of a peaceful protester being gratuitously executed by an officer of the law—and propagandists use buzz-words to convince their audience that the victim is the one attacking the perpetrator. We witness tens of thousands of men, women and children being systematically exterminated in Gaza—and propagandists justify the genocide by calling the victims “terrorists.” We witness three buildings in New York being explosively demolished—and the propagandists tell us that there were no explosions or demolitions, and the buildings just randomly fell down due to relatively minor office fires.

The people who believe the official stories of these and similar events are blinded by language. Propagandists take as their motto Chico Marx’s line “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” They insist that exploding buildings aren’t really exploding, that the obliterated Gaza moonscape and the tens of thousands of corpses beneath it wasn’t a genocidal massacre, and that ICE officers who get annoyed by protesters and murder them are somehow acting in self-defense. They offer these outrageous, ludicrous lies spiced with emotionally-evocative terms designed to distract and conceal the truth beneath the veil of a self-serving narrative. And people line up behind these obfuscations, buy into one or another version of them, and incorporate them into their very identities.

Nonsense and mysticism attack such lies by unveiling the fabricated, constructed nature of conventional language mistaken for reality. Wit, for its part, can underline the ironic tension between the world of words and the world as it is.

And finally consider the power of imagination…

…Despite all of the above I am not entirely convinced that this book possesses what the Supreme Court used to call “redeeming social value.” To help it do at least a modicum of tangible good I will be donating 10% of the net profits to Abderrahman Shimlali’s stork conservation society. So please buy multiple copies, gift them to your friends, and save some storks!

-Kevin Barrett