Holy crap, Sue Sylvester

Sweet Cheerios,Sue Sylvester is writing a memoir. There is a god!

Libraries and spoofs, all the rage

In my round up last week at PMN I pointed out this video of the Old Spice guy shilling for libraries. Now I bring to you Stephen Jones, on the value of studying in the library:

I'm on a cart!

Hall of heroes personified

As we all know, American culture is built on a millenial world view, which sees the end of days coming at any time. And I'm not saying the zombie apocalypse is nigh, but I am saying: what could be more American than a good apocalypse?

Max Brooks, chronicler of the apocalypse, did an interview with Shelf Life. He says:

I knew I had turned a corner when I did my first zombie-protection lecture, which was at Colorado College, I believe. Two hundred people showed up and I was so panicked, flop-sweating like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. I did my lecture for 45 sweaty minutes and I opened the floor up to questions, thinking, okay, they’ve suffered through my lecture. I thought they’d ask me questions like, “Is Will Ferrell really that funny?” or “Is Tina Fey nice?” but the questions were all, “If I cut off my arm, can I stop an infection?” “What rifle do you recommend at what range?” “Should I wear body armor?” They were all actual zombie questions, and I thought maybe I was on to something.

Oh man, be my friend, Max Brooks.

If we just cover this one word here...

We get these great moments in price tag placement, book edition. Hurray!

Justin Long argues for gay marriage

I'm so confused...usually I don't like Justin Long so much, but today I find him awesome:

How does this affect my beliefs about Justin Long? Crap, I guess I like him now.

Gaga for Gaga, library style

Famazing:

Why I heart the Rejectionist and Le R hates Cormac McCarthy

I know we all already read the Rejectionist religiously, because that blog is so good and so smart and so spot on. Well, Le R strikes again with her analysis of man fiction and her response to Cormac McCarthy. Heart heart. Heart.

Ray Bradbury: The man, the myth, the mythology

Ray Bradbury is super, super prolific, and may or may not be the great American mythologizer.

He's seen the future, and it's not all grand pink-stoned chess cities on Mars and houses that tidy up after you. It's also knowing that the world is about to end and that there's nothing to do but lie under the covers and wait for oblivion to come. It's a room full of robots telling stories about the people who made them, long after the human race has vanished from the earth.

Live strong, Ray.

Neil Gaiman charges $45k for four hours

Neil Gaiman recently spoke at a library event, and was paid $45,000 for a four hour talk (and before anyone asks, the money was earmarked for speakers, so they couldn't spend it on anything else).

Some people are angry, but I say, hey, I would also charge that much. Now taking speaking engagements! Mail cash, and I assure you I'll show up.

Angry authors say great things

Amazing list of quotes from angry authors. Oh god, I love when people say things they shouldn't (who aren't me).

Call me Ishmael, one fierce tenor

After the news about the Atonement opera, I thought there was nowhere to go but to the land of less insane. With the rise of the Moby Dick opera, I can safely say: I was so, so wrong.

Moby Dick opera-style at the Dallas Opera now, but, with its inevitable success, I can only hope it will come to NYC and the Met, so I can see how they get a live sperm whale on the stage.* Ben Heppner, who plays Ahab, has this to say:

“I’m still trying to find my sea legs, which I guess I mean as a pun,” Mr. Heppner said after hobbling through his second day of rehearsals on the artificial limb his role requires....“Ahab is beautifully written for my voice,” Mr. Heppner said, “But today that peg leg was rubbing hard on my shinbone. I’d never thought about that, or I might have been less eager. But we’re making progress.”

And artist with the soul of a guy who doesn't like to have to wear things that chafe--we may be in love.

*Yes, I fully believe the Met would and could do this. Because they are bad ass.

Professor of vice, scholar of debauchary

It turns out academics do more fun stuff that I had previously thought. First we found this analysis of the ethics of vampirism (and part 2 is up!), and now we have Mara L. Keire of Oxford, who writes about American red light districts. She says:

I wanted to write a history of American drug culture, but I soon discovered that if I wanted to talk about the regulation of drugs, I really needed to understand the regulation of alcohol. And to understand the limitations on drinking, I needed to grapple with people’s attitudes toward saloons. Once I started reading the anti-saloon literature, I soon realized that reformers were more concerned about men drinking with prostitutes than with workers grabbing a beer. In other words, step by step I found that I was studying red-light districts: the environment for vice, not simply vice itself.

So. Smart. Please be my friend!

Vampires do shop at Whole Foods

An open call to Emily Colette Wilkinson: please be my friend. Although I ever so slightly mocked this conference on vampires in modern writing, and still think it is a little silly, Wilkinson has written a really amazing analysis of vampirism in the Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse books, which made my inner psuedo-academic fall in love. She writes:

Our vegetarian vampires, I think, are afflicted with the same crises of conscience that we are as first-world twenty-first century humans. We eat too much, we shop too much, we use too much fuel, water, land; we mistreat the animals on which we depend for food and the other peoples whose labor produces for us the cheap abundant goods we have all grown so used to....Contemporary vampire fiction mirrors our collective anxiety about our need for self-discipline and a return to a more humane approach to our fellow beings....From the shimmering pâleur of the vampire radiates something new and hardly otherworldly: an aura of white liberal guilt.

The whole post is absolutely worth the read, and is only the first of two. Is there such a thing as being a pop culture PhD? Because if so, I will start working on stuff like this posthaste.

Eating, reading, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

I have a deep love for Laura Ingalls Wilder--at first, when I was little, almost entirely because she was another Laura, but later because her adventures were so awesome. Now I have another reason to love: her written food-gasm. Pete Wells writes:

Some of Wilder’s accounts of hog butchering are exact enough to serve as manuals. If you have a big enough pot (and the fortitude to scrape out a pig’s cranium), you could follow her directions for boiling the head meat, then chopping, seasoning, cooling and shaping it. You would have head cheese. And while her description of Ma’s cooking off the fat in big iron pots over a wood stove might not inspire can-do confidence in a first-time lard renderer, it does, in fact, give a reasonably complete picture of the process, down to the skimming and draining of the crunchy solids, the cracklings.

Om nom nom. Plus, he includes recipes! Hurray, Laura Ingalls Wilder, greatest of writers and first food writer I ever cared about.

Nicholas Sparks-ize your movie

Nicholas Sparks, you are so good at writing really similar books and making people buy them. Give me your secret potion sir!

Oh, wait, someone else already found it, and showed us what 10 movies would be like if they were inspired by Nicholas Sparks novels. So...good...

Plus, thank you, great Rejectionist, for sending along the link, with the subject line "HAHAHAHAHA" and no text in the body of the email. You read my friggin mind.

Things I cannot do: Cover edition

While I have many (many) skills, "art" writ large is not among them, and so I respect this cover making ability:

Oh man, friggin' awesome.

Danielle Steel, please be my friend

Having recently discussed Danielle Steel, I don't think I properly expressed how great I think she is. To quote:

"I'm very organized," Steel says of her regimented schedule. "You can't have nine children and not be organized. Otherwise it just looks like Appalachia."

Oh my, Danielle. You are a feisty lady. Please come hang out.