Jim Dawson - Blame It on the Dog: A Modern History of the Fart

Copyright 2006 by Jim Dawson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the publisher.

Ten Speed Press
PO Box 7123
Berkeley, California 94707
www.tenspeed.com

Distributed in Australia by Simon & Schuster Australia, in Canada by Ten Speed Press Canada, in New Zealand by Southern Publishers Group, in South Africa by Real Books, and in the United Kingdom and Europe by Publishers Group UK.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawson, Jim.
Blame it on the dog : a modern history of the fart / Jim Dawson.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77877-2
1. FlatulenceHumor. I. Title.
PN6231.F55D39 2006
818.6o2dc22
2006011433

v3.1

CONTENTS

A fart is just a turd with all the shit scraped off, a sage told me several years ago, implying that flatulence wasnt a subject worthy of filling a bookor at least a book worth a hill of beans. But what did he know? The idea of writing the definitive history of farting had been nagging at me for thirty years, since my student days and wayward nights at West Virginia University, a notorious party school. It wasnt the all-night keggers and marijuana binges that inspired me (though they certainly helped), but rather the English literature class where I discovered the fart jokes in Chaucers fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales. And by 1998, when the timelike a good fartseemed ripe, I approached Ten Speed Press with a coffee-stained, thumb-smudged, and altogether unsavory-looking manuscript called Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart. (All right, it was actually an email attachment, but a mysteriously soiled manuscript sounds much more romantic; and if nothing else, this sordid saga of a grown man obsessing on butt stink could use some romance.)

The rest is history, and thats probably where it belongs, but Ive never been one to leave well enough alone. After all, Im still psychologically smarting from the humiliation of being tarred, feathered, and run out of my home town of Parkersburg, West Virginia, for hosting an art gallery exhibit of X-rays of my lower colon, with superimposed green arrows pointing out that the little gray blobby areas were farts about to happen.

On the eve of the publication of Who Cut the Cheese? my editor solemnly sat me down and told me, Jim, when this thing comes out, your life is going to change. I mean really change. People will revile you, call you a sick bastard. Pretty women will shun you like the plague.

I know all that, I said, but how is my life gonna change?

(Actually, several attractive women did stop me on the street after the publication of Who Cut the Cheese? They asked me questions like Why are you following me?)

Anyway, when the book came out at the beginning of February 1999, none of the major magazines or newspapers would touch it. A columnist I knew at the Los Angeles Times told me that no family newspaper would dare print the word fart. But fortunately there was one corner of the media that greeted me with open arms: morning drive-time radio, where shock jocks and wacky zoo triplets were waiting for an excuse to air the second F word (the FCC having expressly prohibited the first) and discuss its many facets. For six or seven months I was up almost every weekday morning around 4:00 or 5:00 A.M ., Los Angeles time, standing in my kitchen in my underwear or sweatpants, pumping coffee down my throat in hopes of ratcheting up my ability to engage with motormouth deejays in the eastern time zones without falling back on a slight stutter Ive had since childhood. Being a night owl who normally didnt get to bed before 2:00 A.M ., I had a tough time with this schedule and stumbled around in a perpetual state of jet lag, yet still I pursued my new mission as Americas emissary of toilet humor with doo-doo diligence.

I think I did a phoner with every A.M . radio program in America except Howard Sterns. (Howards staff pre-interviewed me, and Howard talked about Who Cut the Cheese? on the air, remarking pointedly that no way could a book about farts be as funny as the real thing, but I never got to speak to him personally.) First Id get a call from the producer, who would give me a last-minute prep, put me on hold, and let me listen to the commercials and the bumper music on the feed until the on-air personalities introduced me to the audience and punched me into the show. I couldnt help but notice the similarities between them, whether they were in Birmingham, New York, or Birmingham, Alabama. Most of the jocks came in threes, with monikers like Frosty, Tammi, and the Bean, and approached me one of two ways: I was either this cool guy who had come up with the greatest book idea ever (the Im too sexy for my farts Jim) or some creep whod crawled out from under a rock (the Yes, I really do stink! Jim). I would figure out which one they were looking forcool or creepyand play along. During one phone-in, the girl of the team dramatically evacuated herself from the studio before my voice came on. But who cared, as long as listeners bought my book.

As it turned out, many people did. The book has sold many tens of thousands of copies, has gone into its tenth printing, and continues to sell at a steady pace seven years later. Two other books called Who Cut the Cheese? (with different subtitles) came out a year or so after mine. They were both parodies of Dr. Spencer Johnsons best seller, Who Moved My Cheese? In England, where Id done several phoners and appeared on a BBC radio special, Michael OMara Books, a publisher of novelties and knockoffs, commandeered the clever cover art from Who Cut the Cheese? and printed a somewhat faded facsimile on two of its own paperbacks, including The Little Book of Farting. The cover, a detail of Thirty-Six Faces of Expression by Louis Boilly, had been painted in France some 150 years earlier, so nobody was in a position to sue. Besides, isnt imitation a sincere form of flatulence?

Since I had become the national crepitation clearinghouse, not to mention the only American who could bet that the words who cut the cheese? would be in the first sentence of his obituary, many radio callers and letter writers were anxious to give me new material or correct some of my information. For example, I had written about the blue dartthe methane flame-up you get when you light a fartwithout mentioning blue angel, the term most popular in Canada and England. Someone else added to my list of flatulent food items by informing me that the then-popular diet drug Fen-Phen would make you fart-phart. A Latin scholar chastised me for mistranslating crepitus ventris as a crackling wind. I had made crepitus an adjective, he said, when in fact its a noun, and ventris has nothing to do with windits the genitive singular of venter (belly, stomach)so the phrase means a crackling or rumbling of the stomach. Crackling wind in Latin would be