Welcome to the All-New Bookfraud, where you’ll get more features, more posts, and more eyestrain than ever! A crappy new header, which I designed and made myself! Real links to real writers! One or two posts a year actually about books and writing!
And, as promised, more exclamation points!!!
After three years (!) of posting on Blogspot, yours truly decided that it was about time to get my own domain, and join the "adult" world of blogging (unfortunately, not the world of "adult blogging"). It is a world in which something called "Perez Hilton" gets 3,450 times more viewers in an hour than I do in a year, but no matter.
Also, I thought owning a domain would be cool, and wanted to do some stuff I couldn’t on Blogspot. Maybe you like the new design, maybe you think it’s hideous. Would love to know your opinion.
But first, let’s consider the new features, sans exclamation points:
THIS WEEK IN LITERARY HISTORY: Notice the all-caps. Notice the lame joke. Basically, an outlet for my inner bad comic, mixed with my literary sensibility. If you think this is genuinely funny, then I’ll buy you a beer and make you laugh until you hurt. About 11 beers, that is.
Feed the Beast: I still don’t know how all of the services work, and Technorati is like Greek, but every blog "expert" says I should have E-Z links to them. Why? Because I want to be more popular. Because I’m insecure. Because I’m a writer.
In any case, if you can explain how Technorati works, and why I should link to it — and just how the hell to link to it – I’ll send you a picture of Baby. He’s really really really really cute.
My BF Posts; Not Necessarily Yours: These are my favorite entries. They’re not necessarily the best or any good at all, for that matter. I stole this idea from another blog, though I can’t remember which one. Feel free to claim credit.
Linx Pak: When I was in college, one of my favorite pastimes was riding over golf courses at midnight while listening to Black Flag’s "Six Pack" ("Thirty-five dollars and a six-pack to my name! Six pack!"). This is a homage to those bright, happy days before my soul was crushed by the corporate grinder, ignorant book editors, even more ignorant literary journal editors, and the machine.
I had resisted putting links together on the old incarnation of this blog, for reasons I can’t remember. I guess I just gave in this time.
E-mail: That’s not new.
Recent Posts: Not new, either.
Top 12 Works of Fiction (This Week): This migrated over from Blogspot; it’s sorta, kinda new. It’s just some cool thing in which I, the learned expert, get to tell you, the reader, what you should be reading, because I am certainly correct in all things literary, though I can’t write a graduate-level English paper for shit.
Recent Comments: Doesn’t serve any purpose, but it’s kinda cool.
Spam Blocked: Why this number would interest anybody is a mystery to me, but to get the spam blocker you put the widget in the sidebar, and it gives you a number.
Current and Past Tunemeisers: This is eye-candy from a site called Last.fm. Really no purpose other than it looks groovy, and the mix of rock, jazz and classical artists illustrates my evolved, sophisticated taste. Or that I’m a pretentious prick.
Oh, and the header atop the page. Yes, that’s me on the left, with my back to the viewer in a generous show of love.
The photo was taken after I woke up one morning on vacation, and imbibed some coffee by the sea. Wife couldn’t resist. My hair usually doesn’t look like a pencil eraser. It’s normally a Jew-fro cut down to a neat, flat Caesar. It looks like George Clooney’s hair. (The resemblance stops there.)
I’ll be adding separate "About" pages and such soon. I know the world clamors for it.
And I’m still trying to figure out the photo editor, all these WordPress plugins, and the server thing.
Oh, and I couldn’t migrate comments from Haloscan for the last few posts. However, for the rest, I inadvertently did so twice, so all the comments are duplicated. Ooops.
Other than that, it’s perfect. Love it or hate it, but it’s the future.
This picture was taken a couple of miles from my sister’s house in my hometown of Memphis when the tornadoes hit a few weeks ago. She (and her family) were untouched but shaken. My mother was going to the mall that evening where a tornado annihilated a Sears (see below), but decided to stay home, thank goodness.
It’s odd seeing one’s hometown hit like that. Growing up, there were endless tornado warnings and tornado watches and tornado cakes and whatever the hell the weathermen would say, but a tornado never, ever hit Memphis. It’s enough to make you believe in global warming, or Satan.
* * *
I want to tell Neil of the otherwise fabulous Citizen of the Month blog that a certain post of a few days ago has pretty much come close to ruining my life.
Thanks, Neil.
* * *
I’m not saying that the Oscars sucked, but when your best joke involves a Wii, you realize that mebee that those striking writers could have helped a little. Jon Stewart is my kinda dude: funny, Jewish, handsome-in-a-not-threatening way (just like me!). But fake news is more of his bag.
I think a team of evil clowns should host instead.
Dustin Hoffman: an evil clown, and he’s Jewish!
* * *
A great post from our friend Voix. It links to a site for the British Bacon Council or some such group. My favorite headline from the site: "Regional Competition Winners for Britain’s Best Birthday Banger."
I could never win, of course, since I’m American.
* * *
I voted for Barack Obama in the primaries. And once you go black…oh, never mind.
* * *
There was a story in the New York Times a few weeks back collecting the "Views of the Man in the Street"– more like "Old Fucks Sitting in a Diner, Complaining." The reporter went to a small town in Tennessee and wrote about what these old fucks in a diner (and others) thought of the candidates.
Generally, they had voted for Bush, but were disappointed in him. They didn’t like McCain. Hillary Clinton was the devil. Some of the greatest animus was directed towards Obama — one dude mentioned Obama’s middle name ("Hussein") and how the senator was probably in some mosque right at that moment, on the phone with Osama bin Laden, trying to figure out how to attack America and forcably convert us to Islam, etc. OK, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but you get the idea.
And when I read this, all I could think was the following: "Now I know why I had to move the hell out of that goddamned state."
* * *
Once, I ran into Harold Ford Jr., a former Congressman from Memphis who lost in a bid for the Senate, in an airport bathroom. (No, no, not like Larry Craig.) It was crowded, we were standing next to each other at the urinals, and I said, "Congressman Ford, I wish I still lived in Memphis, so I could vote for you for senator."
But, of course, I didn’t mean it. The part about living in Memphis.
He smiled and we shook hands, after we had washed them.
Since I’m sick of opining on insects, instead I offer a much more provocative subject. But first, a review and a shameless plug, not to mention some gratuitous name-dropping.
I’ve just finished An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England, a novel that I highly recommend. It’s about a fellow who accidentally burns down the Emily Dickinson house, goes to the slammer for 10 years, and his misadventures after prison. (Which does not include his burning down writers’ homes. Though others may be involved.) I’ve been a fan of the author, Brock Clarke, for a few years now. He’s published two collections of short stories and a previous novel, all of them excellent. "Plowing the Secondaries" is certainly one of the best unknown short stories ever written.
(That I happen to know Brock, that he served as my adviser at a conference, and has actually read my novel and offered invaluable advice, really has nothing to do with my admiration of his work. Really. I mean this.)There is only a hint of eros in An Arsonist’s Guide, which is, despite the title, extremely funny. Most of the copulatin’ is off stage, which I appreciate, since it primarily involves old people who have drank copious amounts of Knickerbocker beer.
Buy it, read it. But don’t burn it
Which, commercial message aside, brings me to what I want to write about: sex. Or not about sex.
If there’s anything that can embarrass your typical spinner of tales, it’s a sex scene. I can think of several good ones that come to mind (“come to mind” — get it? are you embarrassed yet?). Philip Roth is good at this, though most of the time his sex scenes are played for laughs. There’s Steve Almond, whose female ejaculation scene in a short story (and a collection) called “My Life in Heavy Metal” is just one of several fresh takes on sex (yeah, I kinda know Steve, too, just a little. He’d recognize me and probably would say hi if I ran into him on the streets of Boston. But it wouldn’t go farther than that).
I even asked Wife, a voracious reader if there ever was one, if she could think of any well-written, memorable sex scenes in literary fiction. She sat and thought about it a few minutes, but couldn’t think of any.As for my writing, I shy away from writing about sex in direct proportion to the amount of time in my life that I have thought about sex. Translated: I never write about sex, and about 99 percent of my waking time has been spent thinking about it (certainly not doing it, save for my brief career in porn, which ended prematurely [“prematurely” -- get it?]).
That’s because I’ve read so many awful sex scenes, in books, online, and especially in workshops. They fall into a few categories: there’s the Penthouse Forum fantasy scene; the Superintenseorgasm scene; the tender-lovey-dovey-sex-on-rose-petals scene; the clinical Sex Ed Insert-Penis-into-Vagina scene; and my favorite, the Unintentionally Hilarious Fuckmaster scene, in which the writer (usually a young male under 25) tells of his protagonist (who bears uncanny resemblance to the writer) bringing his swimsuit model conquest to new plateaus of ecstacy unmatched in the history of mankind. That the writer and protagonist resemble the president of the high school A/V club really doesn’t matter.
Sullied
As for when I am compelled to write a scene resembling fornication or even making reference to it, I go for the crutch that always serves me when I am put into a position of extreme discomfort: I take the coward’s way out and go for the jokes, and though Mr. Roth can play this expertly – in one book, the protagonist masturbates on his mistress’s grave — with most writers, myself included, such attempts (at writing) turn out more leaden than a hippo dropped from a B-52 without a parachute (or more leaden than lame metaphors about hippos).
If you were to ask me about movies, I could name a dozen or so movies that have sex scenes that inform the reader, illuminate the plot, and show shadings of character. But few for literature.
So I put it to you, dear reader — are there any scenes of physical congress in fiction that aren’
t merely titillating, but actually add something to the story, our understanding of the characters, or make us think?
Also, if you want to share any personal stories involving Uma Thurman or Charlize Theron — better yet, Uma Thurman and Charlize Theron — that’s cool, too. I’ll pay good money for it, in fact.
It’s Saturday night, and I’m in the bathroom of a hotel room, marooned.
Wife has retreated to the hotel bar, a place where she assures me she will not drink so many gin and tonics that Baby will get plastered the next time he breast feeds.
For his part, Baby is sleeping in a port-a-crib with the profile and feel of a prison cell: confined space, metal bars, and his very own prison bitch.
That bitch would be me, relegated to the bathroom as the rest of our temporary home stews in darkness to allow my young son to sleep, a state of consciousness that, I might add, he shows no sign of attaining at 7:30 p.m., if his screaming at 232 decibels is a sign.
And tomorrow, sweet Sunday, when I will go back to our place and mop every uncarpeted square inch of our home, so that I don’t inadvertently lick up the residue in a few days when I really lose it and drop to my hands and knees,barking like a cocker spaniel in heat.
Why, oh why do I subject myself to such indignities of the soul? Anybody who has glanced at this space in the last seven (!) months knows why: this afternoon, still suffering from a plague of bedbugs, Wife and I had the homestead sprayed with pesticides for the eighth time, a number that turned on its side becomes "infinity," which is beginning to seem like the amount of time it will take us to get rid of these beasties.
The exterminator (the third different one), a voluble fellow who unfortunately stank of a Union Carbide plant, was flummoxed he had to make a return visit from two weeks ago.
"I goddamn soaked the place the last time," he said, thus confirming my suspicion that bed bugs will survive a nuclear armageddon. It’s Saturday night, and I’m in the bathroom of a hotel room, marooned.
Wife has retreated to the hotel bar, a place where she assures me she will not drink so many gin and tonics that Baby will get plastered the next time he breast feeds.
For his part, Baby is sleeping in a port-a-crib with the profile and feel of a prison cell: confined space, metal bars, and his very own prison bitch.
That bitch would be me, relegated to the bathroom as the rest of our temporary home stews in darkness to allow my young son to sleep, a state of consciousness that, I might add, he shows no sign of attaining at 7:30 p.m., if his screaming at 232 decibels is a sign.
And tomorrow, sweet Sunday, when I will go back to our place and mop every uncarpeted square inch of our home, so that I don’t inadvertently lick up the residue in a few days when I really lose it and drop to my hands and knees,barking like a cocker spaniel in heat.
Why, oh why do I subject myself to such indignities of the soul? Anybody who has glanced at this space in the last seven (!) months knows why: this afternoon, still suffering from a plague of bedbugs, Wife and I had the homestead sprayed with pesticides for the eighth time, a number that turned on its side becomes "infinity," which is beginning to seem like the amount of time it will take us to get rid of these beasties.
The exterminator (the third different one), a voluble fellow who unfortunately stank of a Union Carbide plant, was flummoxed he had to make a return visit from two weeks ago.
"I goddamn soaked the place the last time," he said, thus confirming my suspicion that bed bugs will survive a nuclear armageddon.
There is a positive to all of this, which is…is…aw, fuck it, there’s nothing positive about all this except the fact I can appreciate what it feels like to be a refugee while still living in my own home. As a colleague of my college newspaper would say, "It sucks moosecock. It sucks total moosecock."
There is a positive to all of this, which is…is…aw, fuck it, there’s nothing positive about all this except the fact I can appreciate what it feels like to be a refugee while still living in my own home. As a colleague of my college newspaper would say, "It sucks moosecock. It sucks total moosecock."
Dancin’ fools
So I’m sitting in the bathroom, scribbling away on a hotel notepad with a hotel pen, like a jailed Eastern Bloc dissident writing on the back of his calves. Right now, as I am sitting on the (closed) toilet, my head leaning upon the sink, the only thought going through my mind is, "I wonder if drinking a combination of Bath & Body Works™ Aromatherapy Orange Ginger Energizing Voluminizing Conditioner plus Bath & Body Works™ Aromatherapy Orange Ginger Nourishing Body Lotion will finally put an end to this." As in, end to my life.
No, the thing one learns from bed bugs is rather Zen: you can’t blame anyone, you can’t do much about it. You just have to accept it.
Which is a good lesson as a writer, as the novel piles up more rejections than a high school nerd (i.e. me) does with asking out cheerleaders, there’s nothing I can do about it.
Well, I guess I can blame society. Or my do-nothing, invisible agent. Or the stupid editors who didn’t understand the utter brilliance of my work or the editors who did but said, "This is awesome! But ultimately not for me."
Society made me do it
Such is the hatin’ right now that I’m going to have to write a novel about bed bugs to get this out of my system. In it, the protagonist surreptitiously begins production of DDT in his basement, At night, he breaks into homes, bags all the furniture, and sprays bug-infested areas with his illegal homemade pesticide, which kills all bed bugs in the universe.
As usual in every political campaign, my special interest is being ignored in the Race for the White House ’08.
In all the brouhaha over superdelegates and Super Tuesday, a voluntary health care plan versus a mandated one, coded racism and uncoded tears, campaign rallies that resemble rock concerts and Rush Limbaugh’s head exploding, nobody has really broken down what the next president will mean for writers. Like me.
In literary terms, the three remaining candidates all have major advantages than George W. Bush:
–Clinton 2.0: has authored or co-authored several books, smart, organized, actually reads.
–Barack Obama: has authored two books, incredibly articulate, handsome, actually reads.
–McCain: authored or co-authored several books, white hair, no verbal filter, hot headed, hot wife, actually reads.
It is a rite of passage that any person running for president will have to write a book, or hire someone to do it for them. Still, from a writer’s perspective, any one of these candidates has a fine literary pedigree, So what if Hillary Clinton “wrote” Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets ; at least we know she loves animals and has enough imagination not to name her dog “Spot.”
And big deal that Barack Obama is the author of a cookbook. Yes, a cookbook for African-American men. OK, he only wrote the foreward, but still.
Granted, I haven’t actually read It Takes a Village (Clinton) or The Audacity of Hope (Obama) or I’m a Military Hero, But Why I Still Favor This Insane Iraqi War Is a Mystery Even to Me(McCain), so I can’t accurately judge the quality of their work. It’s plain, however, that the one thing that unites these politicians-authors is that they favor non-fiction.
For those of this inclined towards those things fictitious — novels, plays, political speeches — it is an interesting thought experiment to imagine just who these candidates would be, if they did write novels and plays.
Not only are these categories random, but indicative of nothing. Feel free to add your own.
19TH CENTURY BRITISH NOVELIST
Clinton: George Eliot
Obama: Charles Dickens
McCain: Charlotte Bronte
PSYCHOTIC POET:
Clinton: The women in the poetry program at my grad school
Obama: Baudelaire
McCain: Sylvia Plath
DRUNK AND DRUNKER:
Clinton: Dorthy Parker
Obama: Charles Bukowski
McCain: Some knight in the 12th Century who came back from the Crusades, wrote about it, got plastered on mead, and choked on his own vomit
MODERNIST:
Clinton: T.S. Eliot
Obama: James Joyce
McCain: Samuel Beckett, Kafka, Inonesco (you get the picture)
FATALIST:
Clinton: Theodore Dreiser
Obama: Thomas Hardy
McCain: The guy who wrote that book about the ‘Nam!!!!!!!
I’m a handsome writer
POLE-UP-THE-BUTT MORALIST/PLAYWRIGHT:
Clinton: Ibsen
Obama: G.B. Shaw
McCain: That dude who wrote A Few Good Men
LOST GENERATION:
Clinton: Gertrude Stein
Obama: F. Scott Fitzgerald
McCain: Ernest Hemingway (and Hemingway, and Hemingway)
BLOOMSBURY:
Clinton: Virginia Woolf
Obama: E.M. Forster
McCain: Bloomswhatthefuck?
SHAKESPEARE CHARACTER
Clinton: Lady Macbeth (Ouch!)
Obama: Prince Hal (Double Ouch!)
McCain: Richard III (Triple Ouch!)
EXISTENTIALIST:
Clinton: Sartre
Obama: Camus
McCain: Kafka
If only she had known…
’60s AMERICAN POST-MODERNIST
Clinton: John Barth
Obama: Thomas Pynchon
McCain: In the 60s I was serving my country while you were in diapers and smokin’ weed in Hawaii, mister Obama!
MODERN HACKS:
Clinton: Tom Clancy
Obama: Jackie Collins
McCain: The love child of Tom Clancy and Jackie Collins
OTHER PRESIDENT-AUTHOR:
Clinton: Bill Clinton
Obama: JFK
McCain: Richard Nixon
ABSURDIST:
Clinton: Bill Clinton
Obama: Oprah Winfrey
McCain: McCain
Well, the votes are in, but there are some dimpled chads. Feel free to submit your own ballots. I’ll declare the winner in time for the next election.
Children keep you young, but first they make you old. –Anon.
Kids vomit frequently, particularly on their parents. –Bookfraud
Baby had his first illness a fortnight ago, and it was not pretty for neither child nor parents. In a display so revolting it would make sanitation worker blush, Baby made his stomach flu evident for all to see, and feel. Subsequently, Wife took ill exactly two days after Baby started throwing up. And precisely one hour after Wife got ill, I started heaving. It was, essentially, our own version of “2 Gals 1 Cupp[sic].” (Without the coprophagia).
As Baby sat listlessly while trying to comprehend why he was being forced to drink a nasty fluid called “Pedialyte,” his parents basically lost their minds. The mere thought of food made us sick. My body aged about 10 years: it felt as if gremlins were taking a jackhammer to every square inch of my body.
Oh, and the fucking bedbugs are still in the place. They decided to hold a parade through our apartment on the days we were ill.
This all went down three weeks ago, and although the nausea passed after three days and no food later, I’ve felt as energetic as a Patriots fan at about 11 p.m. after the Super Bowl. And last week, we had the apartment sprayed a seventh time for bed fucking bugs. The exterminator who basically carpet bombed the place. When he was finished, a slick sheen covered our floors. We spent the night at a hotel.
Today, Wife called me to say she’d been bitten (again) by a bedbug, after a few days of bliss. We’re going to have the place sprayed for an eighth time Saturday.
INSERT PRIMAL SCREAM HERE
My options are 1. Kill myself; 2. Run off with “Porsche,” who I met last night at Club Elegance (and boy, did we really hit it off when I gave her my credit card number!); 3. Kill myself; 4. Drink copious amounts of vodka; 5. Kill myself.
Since I’m sick of opining on insects, instead I offer a much more provocative subject. But first, a review and a shameless plug, not to mention some gratuitous name-dropping.
It’s Saturday night, and I’m in the bathroom of a hotel room, marooned.
That’s What You Said