Encyclopedia clown
 John Hodgman, the author of "The Areas of My Expertise," will be at the Coolidge Corner Theater on Friday evening. (Elizabeth Connor Photo) |
THE LAST TIME Brookline native John Hodgman took the stage at the Coolidge Corner Theater, in November 2003, he was hosting ''Brookline: The Town that has Everything and at the Same Time has Nothing." It was the latest installment of his mock-serious Little Gray Book Lectures, a monthly colloquium launched in 2001 and usually staged in New York, where Hodgman lives. This Friday evening at the Coolidge, Hodgman will reprise that event. Originally featuring novelist Danzy Senna and recorded interviews with Conan O'Brien and Michael Dukakis, the lecture this time around showcases performance artists Zero Boy and Jennifer Deaderick, among other talented Brookliners.
Why the return of ''Brookline"? Friday's lecture is part of a tour, it turns out, in support of Hodgman's newly published book-a mock-serious almanac titled ''The Areas of My Expertise" (Dutton). Asked via e-mail about the book, which offers deadpan fabrications on topics ranging from Jokes That Have Never Produced Laughter (like the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the nonreligious person who survive a plane crash without incident) to Hints on Building Snow Forts to a 20-page section on What You Did Not Know About Hoboes-Hodgman replied in a manner that was, somewhat surprisingly, not mock-serious in the slightest.
In answer to a query about his familiarity with almanacs, for example, Hodgman admitted to being charmed by popular reference books of the 1970s and '80s like the ''Book of Lists," as well as by older, more earnest attempts to cram all of human wisdom between two covers. He is particularly fond of the layout of the ''North American Almanac," he said, and of the 19th-century tome ''World of Wisdom"-which includes such outre topics, he gleefully pointed out, as Diseases of the Horse and Nicknames of the American Cities. Hodgman's own almanac is merely the first of three proposed volumes that will eventually complete a set titled, modestly, ''Complete World Knowledge."
Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.
