Billy Shakespeare used to write "comedies", but they probably would have been helped out by a laugh track. Some 500 years later, we just don't get the jokes. They're stale. They ain't funny no more.
Some books of recent history are still worth a laugh. A Confederacy of Dunces is often amusing, and Catch 22 is nothing short of brilliant.
I would argue, the cutoff is a hundred years ago. Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken are the only humorists that are still funny a hundred years later. Although Twain's supposed classics, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, are good but somewhat sloppy reading, they should not be used to judge Twain as a humorist. His understanding of humor was so thorough that he could make an audience burst into hysterics by simply standing silently on stage for several minutes. His finest work is undoubtedly his controversial indictment of religion, Letters From The Earth, first published until the 1960s. Read it. This treatise on masturbation also looks fulfilling, though I haven't read it.
The question is: is there anything older than this stuff that will bring a chuckle to my heart?
Movember is also known in some circles as "NaNoWriMo", or National Novel Writing Month. Every day, participants write a thousand words. By the end of the month, you have a full length novel. And a moustache.
I'm going to give it a shot this year. Never mind the fact I don't usually find the time to put on clean underwear in the morning. Wish me luck.
I've officially dropped out of NaNoWriMo. I simply had to spend too much time working on my moustache. But in my occasional ponderings about literature, it did stick a a burning question in my mind:
Is writing about writing ever good?
For a writer, writing a book about a writer is the ultimate in either laziness and egotism. Unfortunately, writers have to write what they know, and all too often it means writing about a struggling artist stuck in a small room without heat. But they ain't all that interesting.
Personally, any time I read a book and it turns into "Gee shucks, doesn't it suck being a struggling writer?", I put the book down. Occasionally the book can still be good, (Wonder Boys and Sideways pop to mind), but more often than not it's simply aggravating. Give me some imagination.
Commenters... help me out. Are there books about writers that are actually any good? Or can you think of good examples of clunkers that break the 4th wall and are all the more annoying for it? Examples of movies about writers/artists/filmmakers are welcome too.
How often have you heard the above in life? Very often, James Joyce is not associated with the world of immediacy. in fact, Boring, thick, drawn out, painful and dense are all words that your average Joyce reader will stumble across first. It's not like anyone is entering into any Joyce Summery Competitions any time soon...
Yet, this evening, this is exactly what i found myself doing. Desperate for a fix for Chapter 11 of Joyce's epic work, I was phoning all my literary friends and begging to borrow a copy of one of the most started, least read, books in the history of the world. Frankly, I thought it was a gimme. I assumed that my poor friends, daunted by the opening salvo in this crazy tome, would have put it down and would be begging for a chance to unload the cumbersome object. But alas, it turns out that either many already HAD unloaded it, or hadn't even wanted to pick it up in the first place.
But really, who would want to be in the head of this man?
The sad answer is: me. I am disheartened to learn that Emergency reading materials actually would involve me shipping out to the local B&N and purchasing another copy of the book.
Let me just say that, as an academic experience, I have found few things in life as rewarding as unpacking that book. But let me also say that I would have been completely powerless to get anywhere in it at all if not for the assistance of Cliff Notes, Class Mates, and the Genius of my professor. And even then, it was a struggle. Why then, do I list this book as one of my favorite novels? Is it a sense of trying to create a false academic superiority? Is it a desire to show off that I conquered what felt like an overwhelming edifice of dense language?
Maybe. But once the door is opened to the intricacies of this novel, its impossible to overlook that ever single word is intentionally placed exactly where it should be. Even the words he made up. To read 300 hundred pages without a single extraneous word or a single concept out of place is the complete opposite of everything i hear today. Look at a political speech these days, and you see layers of pointless words obscuring meaning, obfuscating point, and blunting any sharp rhetoric in the interest of political feasibility. With Joyce, you can re-engage with a man who uses words with both an utmost respect and a cheeky inventiveness, challenging our sense of the way sentences work while painting pictures more vividly then traditional wordplay has ever allowed. Sure, you have to work for it, but after yet another vague talking points answer that wilts under any sort of direct thought into a puddle of pathetic blah, isn't that a good thing?
One more interesting video, in relation to the previous clip: I always thought the golf line sounded strangled!
Between alien invasions and hobo wine, Sam's got most of the X-mas wish list covered. Since he's half Jewish, however, he should only expect to receive half of the items he asks for.
There's a notable and tactical omission, however. Amazon.com's terrible Kindle. Our enemies at Cracked.com have a mildly grin-inducing fake ad. Core 77 had a design contest to come up with a better Kindle. It wasn't hard. Despite Newsweek's puff piece, the Kindle didn't seem to spark any fires.
But the other morning on the subway, between spurts of blood, I saw it. I decided I need it. Yet I don't want it. In fact, I would reject it outright if I somehow came across one. Other than the e-ink, it's so badly designed, it would actually anger me to own it. If other people didn't beat me up, I would beat myself up. It is one of the clunkiest and worst pieces of technology I have ever seen. It looks less sophisticated than the Apple IIe, which was released a quarter century ago.
But after this crappy first draft, I know they'll release a good second version. I don't think I'll be able to resist at that point. I could finally get myself a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and be able to read it every morning on the subway. I wouldn't need to bring a huge backpack on the plane with me every time I fly. I could make enough room in my man-purse to carry around a loaded gun. Conceptually, it's more exciting to me than an iPhone.
If Apple had made it, it would be amazing and I'd probably skip buying X-mas presents for other people to buy one right now. So my pocketbook and my friends owe Amazon a thank you for making a must-have item so frightfully bad that I'm able to resist.
Some bored grad student named Virgil Griffith data-mined Facebook to find out what books people at smart colleges listed as their favorite, and what books people at dumb colleges read. The results are interesting, but in my mind, it reveals the truly odd and suffocated culture which has emerged out of the pretentiousness of smart colleges:
The dumbest books? Supposedly chick lit. However, having attended a smart college, it's pretty safe to say that the gals loved themselves some chick lit too, but were a lot more embarrassed about it. Could this be why Lolita ranked so high... it's intelligent chick lit, and therefore a socially acceptable proxy to put on your Facebook profile?
I read Freakonomics, and thought it was a stupid book for people whose whole identity is wrapped up in feeling superior to others. Unsurprisingly, people at smart colleges took the bait.
African American literature ranked very low. This one needs to be taken with a grain of salt, though. Because African-Americans at smart colleges don't form a critical mass, the ratings of these books are unfairly being brain drained.
Sorry Flav, but Crime and Punishment is not a good book. No matter how many intellectuals rate it highly.
The Book of Mormon ranked as smarter than the Bible. The Bible in general ranked low to average. A partial explanation? At my smart college, open celebration of religion was frowned upon. Unlike other identity groups, Christians on campus kept a very low profile. If this was the same at other smart colleges, Christians may have felt pressured to not advertise their faith on their Facebook page, dumbing down the book's ranking.
Unfortunately, only four of my faves ended up on the list. Catch-22 ranked high, but A Farewell to Arms, On the Road, and Harry Potter apparently makes me decidedly average.
A word of warning to WaMu customers. The "friendly neighborhood bank" has decided to wade its way out of the subprime sewer by charging you $2.00 to use non-WaMu ATMs, after years of bragging about charging zilchola. Fine, jerks. If you need me, I'll be over at HSBC, where the worst they've done is drop their savings interest rate from 5% to 3.5%. What's yours again, WaMu? Oh right, an impotent .5%
On the subject of ATM fees, political junkies looking for a good read should pick up Al Franken's best book, Why Not Me, in which he runs for POTUS on the single issue of ATM fees. Hopefully his strategy for his Minnesota Senate campaign.
Yup... new web toys! DeGraeve.com has a bunch of more useful rpn-like programs that are totally addictive. This comes from his ASCII art generator. Here's another... see if you can guess who this handsome 2logger is:
I've officially dropped out of 
