Jason Peters writes to entertain his friends and exasperate his enemies
Batavia, New York H.L. Mencken mocked the authors of I’ll Take My Stand, the classic 1930 manifesto of Twelve Southerners, as ‘typewriter agrarians’. The gibe was partly fair and partly not, but then a strict adherence to fact is a disability in a humorist — it is what adds those warning braces to his title and makes him that deadliest enemy of the lively reader: the ‘humorist’. Always self-reproving, never self-improving, Jason Peters, a scapegrace professor of something-or-other at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, gemstone of the Quad Cities, is no ‘humorist’. Though his new book is titled The Culinary Plagiarist, he is no keyboard kebabist either.
