My Gal

My podnah Frank is doing his best to make me a George Saunders fan.  He actually sold me on Saunders some time ago.  I don’t let on though so that he’ll continue to forward me links to brilliant essays like this one in that Élite publication, The New Yorker, by regular guy Saunders.  Here’s an excerpt.

Sarah Palin knows a little something about God’s will, knowing God quite well, from their work together on that natural-gas pipeline, and what God wills is: Country First. And not just any country! There was a slight error on our signage. Other countries, such as that one they have in France, reading our slogan, if they can even read real words, might be all, like, “Hey, bonjour, they are saying we can put our country, France, first!” Non, non, non, France! What we are saying is, you’d better put our country first, you merde-heads, or soon there will be so much lipstick on your pit bulls it will make your berets spin!

Genius.  Thanks, Frank, and keep ‘em coming.

Junot Diaz on Colbert Report

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author gets the Colbert Report treatment, which includes advice for using the Pulitzer to pick up chicks.

My Hobby

From xkcd

Authors in the 2.0 World

How books get done in the internet age…

[via The Elegant Variation]

Thesaurus Misadventures

Quiz: Can you spot the two words that mean the same thing and are synonyms?

And they didn’t use an oxford comma!

Have a great weekend, everyone, and stay fly.

When copy writers give up

Come on, man. Try!

(photo by the Journopals – Manhattan)

Way Ahead of His Time

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.

Cease and Desist

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.

Nattering on about ferrets

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.

What is the world coming to?

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.”

Arrrrrrrrrr Vey!

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).

Faux Francais Friday

Live the Dream

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.

Randy & Pufnstuf’s Writing Workshop

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.

Closing the Simile Gap

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.

Ur Proost…

by Ape Lad

BGB Group Photo

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.

The Lama Himself

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.

Scenes from the ATL

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.

What do you think, Thomas Pynchon?

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.