Baby Got Books

I’ve been a fan of Don Novello for a long time, and not just because he was born and raised in my hometown of Lorain, Ohio. I, like many of you, thought he was pretty darn cool before I even knew of his impressive origins. For a long time, I knew him solely as the character he created for Saturday Night Live, Father Guido Sarducci; but I somehow came to learn that he participated in multiple ways in all kinds of funny stuff, and so I had to do some digging to see what I could get my hands on.

In addition to recordings of some pretty hilarious stand-up comedy, what I came up with was The Lazlo Letters, a compilation of correspondence that was first published in 1977, but which contains letters spanning the period from 1973 to 1977. Novello’s idea, which he executed in spectacular fashion, was to write letters to various bigwigs from the world of politics, show business, and big business, playing the part of a loyal follower, concerned citizen, or huge fan, and trying to provoke a response.

The prose and punctuation he uses in his letters, in addition to the rather zany ideas presented by them, suggest that he is somewhat of a dimwit; nonetheless, in the interests of good public relations and nondiscrimination against knuckleheads, many of the folks he wrote to actually wrote back. The staffs of President Nixon and President Ford treated these letters as legitimate, and sent personalized responses back to him. Repeatedly.

The genius of this book doesn’t really lie in its content (although there are some pretty funny exchanges documented by these letters); rather, it lies in what Novello did, how he did it, and when he did it. This started over thirty-five years ago! He was writing on what I guess was a manual typewriter, and mailing letters out for ten cents. The time and effort needed to pull off a hoax like this was incredible. And it didn’t come with the sort of immediate gratification that pranking someone on the Internet can bring. While we take the Internet for granted in this day and age, Novello was working on this at a time when you had to work pretty hard to track down information. Even finding the name and address of someone he wanted to write to must have been a chore.

I applaud Mr. Novello, albeit it a couple of decades later than he deserves, for this effort. And now I think we can safely place him up on the pedestal with the other critically acclaimed writers originally hailing from Lorain, Ohio, such as Toni Morrison and . . . uhm . . . uh . . . let me get back to you on that one.

Dear Publisher’s Weekly:

It was brought to my attention by keen-eyed readers Russ and David that you recently posted this shirt on your web site in a post titled Baby Got Books:

O! the copyright infringement-larity! While you were on questionable legal ground with that post, you then sought to proceed further into additional infringing activities by posting lyrics to a fictional song in your post Sir Mix-A-Lot Remixed.

As it should be clear to any reasonable party, this blog has a long established use of Sir Mix-A-Lot derivative work that clearly pre-dates your offending work.  My lawyers have begun to calculate just how much your activities will cost you. Please have your checkbook out and ready when they call in order to avoid any unnecessary, expensive, and potentially protracted legal actions through the courts. Thanks.

Tim

P.S.  Or you could just send us one of those shirts.

The AJC’s Book Page blog explains the unintentional hilarity behind the plagiarism charges being levied against romance author Cassie Edwards. It involves an overly detailed discussion of ferrets.  Following a heated scene.

Let’s just pause here a moment. Shadow Bear, old buddy, if you have just done your manliest best with a woman, and you and she are entwined on a pile of pelts or whatever, and she starts nattering on about a book she read about ferrets, then you need to raise your game a notch. Trust me on this.

At The Onion: Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book.

“The whole thing was really engrossing,” said Meyer, referring not to a movie, video game, or competitive sports match, but rather a full-length, 288-page novel filled entirely with words. “There were days when I had a hard time putting it down.”

I love misunderstood lyrics. We’ve all suffered that embarrassment of *knowing* the words to a song and then finding out, sometimes years after the fact, that we weren’t even close. The high comedy moment of our weekend revolved around that kind of misunderstanding.

After watching the Joe Strummer documentary, The Future is Unwritten, I was inspired to get around to learning Redemption Song on guitar. (The song doesn’t feature in the documentary at all, but Strummer covered the song on his last album with the Mescaleros. And I’m trying to learn the original Bob Marley version, but I digress…)

Anyway, the first line of the song is “Old pirates, yes, the rob I.” I was noodling around with the song, and my daughter, 3, walked in and said, “Daddy, that’s the ‘Oh! Pirate Rabbi’ song!” That she got that much, I’m taking as a promising sign for my efforts. I spent the rest of the weekend conjuring what a pirate rabbi might look like. Here’s what I came up with.

It would have been better if I could draw a parrot on his shoulder. Or if I could draw. I think that I have my Halloween costume all lined up for next year. If you want to check out more hilarious misunderstood lyrics, check out Kiss This Guy (from a misunderstood line in Hendrix’s Purple Haze). Amazingly enough, they have two versions of the same misunderstood lyric (1, 2).

You’ve seen the video explanation of Web 2.0 and the follow-up clip about the r/evolution in the handling of information.  Now Gabe and Max present: How to Get the Dream Life of Your Dreams Using the Internet.

“I thought that the Internet was just for scientists?”

“Not anymore!”

The speed of life:  a “kid” at work was impressed yesterday by my “old school” iPod.

Why sign up for an MFA program or workshop when all you need to know about creative writing was aired last evening on My Name is Earl. Earl attended a creative writing class is prison, which resulted in each of the main characters taking a stab at putting a story on paper. Randy’s action/adventure tale featuring H.R. Pufnstuf as his sidekick was inspired genius. Genius! I tell you.

With the 50th Anniversary of Sputnik in the news recently, it seems odd that the literary Cold War launched by the novel Doctor Zhivago has been overlooked by the mainstream media.  Luckily, the Bid Read blog is on the case:

To his credit, Ike soon realized that he had gravely underestimated the threat to U.S. novelistic hegemony. He promptly chartered the National Aesthetics and Style Administration, a crash program designed, among other worthy goals, to close the “simile gap.” … Gradually, however, U.S. efforts began to close the distance. By executive order, Ike put campus writing programs on a war footing … John F. Kennedy won the White House in 1960, in part by accusing the Eisenhower administration of being “soft on modernism.”

Etc.  Good good stuff.   Did I mention that the Big Read blog is hosted by the National Endowment of the Arts’ Big Read Program?  That’s the Government.   This Government.  Really.

by Ape Lad

During commercial breaks in last night’s Tour coverage, I was goofing around with the Simpson’s Movie avatar generator.  You can create a character that approximates your appearance by selecting various parts and they are magically lumped together to create what you would look like on the Simpsons.  Here’s what I came up with for myself:

If you are up for it, e-mail your creation to - admin at babygotbooks.com. All are welcome. I’ll take all of the submitted characters and Photoshop them into a BGB group photo at some point down the road.  I totally stole this idea from Bill Walsh’s Blogslot.

It was announced today that the Dalai Lama will be a Presidential Professor at Emory University. I mention it so that I can be the first to chime in with a variation of Carl Spackler’s classic (Caddyshack) line. Which as a male of a certain age and temperament, I am genetically required to do:

So, I tell them I’m a religion major, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking….. So we finish the course and he’s gonna fail me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any grades, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consiousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

At my MARTA station, you’ll find a poster for the new, sure-to-be-awesome movie, Code Name: The Cleaners. On one side of the poster is this:

Poor Lucy Liu! Why the quotes? (the full poster looks like this).
Later that same day, a float went by in the Peach Bowl Parade with this huge poster on the side.

It was quite the experice. Don’t forget, we are the third most literate city (tied) in the U.S.

The LA Times has a suitably baffling review of Against the Day. Is it a positive or negative review?

In the NYT, Michiko is not vague in her dislike:

“Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

Neal Pollock talks about the Golden Testicle competition. There is a brief back story, in case you were wondering why. Coffee shoots out of my nose every time I read this. Govern yourself accordingly.

In the New Yorker, Ian Frazier speaks to the real issues facing our Nation:

Right now, it’s costing me forty-five dollars to fill up my 4Runner, which is about two novels. Tough decisions are going to have to be made…We go through a couple of dozen novels in a year without even noticing. I hate to say it, but this can’t go on.

And lastly, from The Onion:

I recently started to read Saturday by Ian McEwan, but I had to stop. I got about 12 pages in and had a strong urge to throw the book in the C&O Canal (I happened to be sitting on the bank of the canal on an absolutely specatular, uncharacteristically cool summer day in Washington, DC when I began the book). I found the writing to be stilted, inelegant, and sometimes just plain bad. One example: “They cross towards the far corner of the square, and with his advantage of height and in his curious mood, he not only watches them, but watches over them, supervising their progress with the remote posessivenes of a god” — Awful sentence. Another: “As he glides across [the bedroom] with almost comic facility. . .” — what the hell is “comic facility”?

I understand that others LOVE this book! What am I missing? I suppose I’m willing to be persuaded that I need to give it another shot. (If anyone wants to borrow it, I did not throw the book in the canal — I schlepped it home in my suitcase.)

This just somehow seemed appropriate for my first post since “Mission Accomplished.”

In The Tournament of Books, the book that we read has once again beaten the book that we didn’t, which makes us look much smarter than we are. Our NCAA brackets should look this good. If history is a guide, Home Land by Sam Lipsyte will easily crush that book we didn’t read in tomorrow’s round (our take on Home Land).

Our man on the inside, Roosevelt Franklin, passes along the news of a preliminary new study that finds that High Times does not appear to be “a gateway magazine to harder readings”. The White House Office of National Reading Control Policy disputes the findings:

We’ve all heard horror stories of young people not being able to put down Gravity’s Rainbow. Thanks to book kingpins like Barnes & Noble, more and more Americans—even kids—are gaining wider access to stronger, more potent reading material.

Speaking of High Times, I came across this sign by the side of the road on my way to Selma, Alabama this week:

The E. Annie Proulx story that became the inspiration for the movie Brokeback Mountain just keeps on inspiring.  Singer Jill Sobule has written a song that explains what the Cheney shooting was all about (free download).  Willie Nelson, ever the outlaw, has released a gay cowboy song (available for pay on iTunes). No, really.  Lastly, a new video Brokeback to the Future removes the subtext and gets into the real relationship between Marty McFly and Doc.

Between re-building the site and the winter olympics, there is not going to be a whole lot of posting or reading going on around here for the next few weeks. Olympic coverage hasn’t started yet today, but it is snowing (briefly, I’m sure) here in the ATL. Here are a few things that have been meaning to find their way into a post lately:

• Steve Martin played a James Frey-esque writer getting reamed by Oprah on SNL last week (thanks for the tip,Shaft).
• An east coast/west coast rap battle has started over the Chronicles of Narnia Rap Video.
• Redefining “cynical bastards”, Michael Crichton received a journalism award for his anti-climate change fictional novel “State of Fear” from the august journalism review the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Actual scientists, journalists, and people who think are outraged.
• If you live by Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (who doesn’t), you’ll love the new how-to guide Elements of Spam.