oddest book titles

A list of odd book titles:

Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice

How Green Were the Nazis? (do we really care if the Nazis were environmentally-friendly if they weren't humanity-friendly?)

People Who Don't Know They're Dead

How To Avoid Huge Ships

Here are some others:

Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality

Pedagogical Lexicography: A Case Study of Arab Nurses as Dictionary Users

Toothpick Culture and Icecream Stick Art

And my personal favorite:

Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar.

mcsweeneys.net: hamlet, facebook news feed

In preparation of my Hamlet 2 review: Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition), by Sarah Schmelling. Quite brilliant. Some highlights:

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

* * *
The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

* * *
Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Ophelia removed "moody princes" from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That's Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

* * *
The king sent Hamlet a goblet of wine.

The queen likes wine!

The king likes ... oh crap.

The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies.

bulwer-lytton fiction contest 2008

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."


You can read all of the winners here. Below are a few that I found especially entertaining.

Grand Prize Winner

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

Garrison Spik
Washington, D.C.

Winner: Children's Literature

Joanne watched her fellow passengers - a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they thought was a witch - there was a story here, she decided.

Tim Ellis
Haslemere, U.K.

Winner: Purple Prose

The mongrel dog began to lick her cheek voraciously with his sopping wet tongue, so wide and flat and soft, a miniature pink fleshy cape soaked through and oozing with liquid salivary gratitude; after all, she had rescued him from the clutches of Bernard, the curmudgeonly one-eyed dogcatcher, whose own tongue -- she remembered vividly the tongues of all her lovers -- was coarse and lethargic, like a slug in a sandpaper trenchcoat.

Christopher Wey
Pittsburgh, PA

Runner-Up: Romance

Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater - love touches you, and marks you forever.

Beth Fand Incollingo
Haddon Heights, N.J.

Winner: Spy Fiction

Special agent Mark Park's strong chin and firm mouth showed that he was a man to be reckoned with, while his twinkling blue eyes revealed surprising depths of kindness and humor, the scar on his cheek a past filled with violence and danger, and his left ear a fondness for M and Ms, but only the red ones.

John R. Cooper
Portland, Oregon

Dishonorable Mentions: Miscellaneous

She had the kind of body that made a man want to have sex with her.

Barry J. Drucker
Bentonville, AR

Her name was Mauve, like the color of paint, which was apt: not only was she "pretty as a painting," she was also "smart as paint," and certainly as thin (assuming sufficient solvents had been added); she was, however, Arnold discovered when she stepped from the shower, a lot more fun to watch dry.

Steven W Alloway
Granada Hills, CA

Like almost every other post-Hegelian neo-hipster angst monkey at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Rene flatly rejected the labels society placed upon him.

Bob Salsbury
Spokane Valley, WA

a smashing theme of mythic grandeur

I've been reading The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Modern Library Films didn't italicize the film's name...), and I recently read a few chapters chronicling Arthur C. Clarke's experiences before and during production. Clarke and Kubrick had such a wonderful kinship, one of intellectual stimulation and exciting curiosity and respect. Kubrick is famous for being a perfectionist, and Clarke even admits that, at times, he was ready to be done with the movie. He had allotted two years of his life for discussing, drafting, writing, and making both the novel and the film 2001, but it ended up taking over four years. It's exciting to read excerpts from Clarke's journals, and I've included some of the stranger and more interesting thoughts, not necessarily having anything to do with the movie.

May 31, 1964. One hilarious idea we won't use. Seventeen aliens -- featureless black pyramids* -- riding in open cars down Fifth Avenue, surrounded by Irish cops.

July 9. Spent much of the afternoon teaching Stanley how to use the slide rule -- he's fascinated.

July 11. Joined Stanley to discuss plot development, but spent almost all the time arguing about Cantor's Theory of Transfinite Groups. Stanley tries to refute the "part equals the whole" paradox by arguing that a perfect square is not necessarily identical with the integer of the same value. I decide that he is a latent mathematical genius.

July 12. Now have everything -- except the plot.

July 28. Stanley: "What we want is a smashing theme of mythic grandeur."

September 7. Stanley quite happy: "We're in fantastic shape." He has made up a 100-item questionnaire about our astronauts, e.g. do they sleep in their pajamas, what do they eat for breakfast, etc.

December 10. Stanley calls after screening H.G. Wells' Things to Come, and says he'll never see another movie I recommend.

March 8, 1965. Fighting hard to stop Stan from bringing Dr. Poole back from the dead. I'm afraid his obsession with immortality has overcome his artistic instincts.

October 15. Stan has decided to kill off all the crew of Discovery and leave Bowman only. Drastic, but it seems right. After all, Odysseus was the sole survivor...

November 10. Accompanied Stan and the design staff into the Earth-orbit ship and happened to remark that the cockpit looked like a Chinese restaurant. Stan said that killed it instantly for him and called for revisions. Must keep away from the Art Department for a few days.

Clarke was quoted in Newsweek as saying, "There is nothing we wanted to do we couldn't do or wouldn't do. Stanley would say, 'If you can describe it, I can film it.'" And that is why this friendship brought us the ultimate science-fiction film to which all subsequent movies would be compared.


* From the chapter "Monoliths and Manuscripts," Clarke explains that "in the beginning, the alien artifact had been a black tetrahedron -- the simplest and most fundamental of all regular solids, formed of four equal triangles. It was a shape which inspired all sorts of philosophical and scientific speculations (Kepler's cosmography, the carbon atom, Buckminister Fuller's geodesic structures...)" but "somehow [it] never looked right, and there was also the danger that they would arouse wholly irrelevant associations with the pyramids." So it seems Kubrick and Clarke had pyramids on the brain.

j. g. ballard: the magician is tired

New York Times wrote a most wonderful review of The Best Stories of J. G. Ballard. Below is an extraordinarily complimentary excerpt:

Most are identified with an unlucky future-present, where functions have gone awry. In Mr. Ballard's cosmos, science has become a crippled dog. Our energy has begun to drain out, man, the magician, is very tired. The human race is like "Cahban asleep across a mirror smeared with vomit." All our tinkerings, the wonders we have produced, will finally bring us back to the Stone Age. "Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multibrained starmen, will probably be naked prognathous idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through the remains of the Clinic like neolithic men caught in a machine inversion of time."

His protagonists tend to be displaced persons of one sort or another: restless students, lonely ex-pilots, neurosurgeons on the decline. Uncomfortable with ordinary definitions of time and space, they try to escape the maddening scrim that holds the world together -- find scattered bits of psychic truth for themselves and puzzle out the meaning of their existence. They're connected to some institution -- a library or a hospital clinic, and they live in a vast nightmare city that has no beginning or end. They fail at whatever they seek, as outlaws, they are usually imprisoned, or else they enter the "black holes" of their individual psyches. The turn to silence, they go mad, or they die. [...]

"Concentration City" and "Billennium" are a kind of homage to Kafka. It's almost as if Gregor Samsa and Land Surveyor K had stepped out of Kafka's books to inhabit J.G. Ballard's perverse landscapes. Like Kafka, Mr. Ballard deals with the loss of spirit of a mummified world that has its own macabre energy. The gentle ones disappear, they turn into bugs, or are trampled into nothingness. They long for the sleep of the dead.

The image above is from Ballardian.com, and it's a triple simulacral reference. Firstly, it references the story "The Drowned Giant." Secondly, it references the drowned giant itself in relation to the tourist humans. And thirdly, it references the actual Lego, suggesting that the giant Lego person is just as real as the drowned giant, who is just as real as humans. The image is quite Ballardian in of itself.