The Joke's on...

The earliest joke was supposedly a 1900 BCE Sumarian one liner, something like: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial - a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Jokes pepper contemporary literature, Amy Hempel frequently seems to have skimmed the internet for the latest to stick in a short story -- each time I read one I imagine Gordon Lish screaming.

The latest incantation of joke-lit is The Book of Jokes by Nick Currie, aka Momus, aka What-ever -- some self described Brit songwriter who is trying awfully, awfully hard to be the new Brit bad boy. Take offensive, dirty jokes and create a narrative from them. The idea is brilliant. No wonder Dalkey published it. Note I said the "idea." The writing is shoddy. Why did Dalkey publish it? Here's a joke by Dorothy Parker...this is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force. Yukity Yuk Yuk. I guess rude boys retain a good deal of currency in Britain (thinking of Self, Welsh, and that other curly haired singer? Actor? Comedian? Russell Brand who was all over the papers last time I visited.) Enjoy the concept, skip the book -- it lacks both punch and line. Thank you, you've been a great audience.



Separated at Birth?

Death Sentence

Here is perhaps the worst sentence I've come across in a very long time. This one from a book titled Novels of the Contemporary Extreme by Jean-Michel Ganteau.

"The mixture of anadiplosis, anaphora, and quasi-epanalepsis, underlined by the powerful use of epizeuxis and the correlative hammering of the spondee, such rhetorical and prosodic concentration provides a hyperbolical acoustic image of revenge."

And he ain't kidding.

What am I reading right now? Wonderful poems by Patricia Young published as Here come the Moonbathers and I've just started Kahlo: The World Split Open by Linda Frank.

Nobel Prize Winner Herta Muller

Herta Mueller has won the Nobel Prize for Literature -- Not a lot of her work has been published in English. She's the twelfth woman to win, and get this, the daughter of a Waffen-SS soldier in WWII. Don't worry she's been a low key but outspoken activist. If you're interested for winning you get about $1.4 million. PhD question: how many Nobel Prize books seem to have been chosen in order to make a political statement?

You can read the first chapter of her newest novel Everything I Own I Carry With Me here.

Check out the other articles on that site too, pretty interesting material.