Fast Food Nation, why do you get so much press?

Confession: I never much cared for the book Fast Food Nation. It framed everything as such a shock, and I wasn't that shocked. The Jungle it wasn't. Hell, it wasn't even The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I thought was more insightful.

Anyway. Apparently we're revisiting in. Boo, just lay down and die already, FFN.

Glenn Beck novel trailer!

Oh oh oh oh oh this is so exciting. By which I mean, what the fuck is going on in that video??

Orlando Bloom is not a musketeer

Orlando Bloom, continuing his domination of books-to-movies, will be the Duke of Buckingham in a new adaptation of The Three Musketeers. You heard that right, gentlefolk, they're going to put Orlando Bloom next to Christoph Waltz, and hope that no one notices that one of the people with an accent is actually a block of wood.

Hurray casting!

A primer in technology

Do you feel overwhelmed by all the new doo-dads and interwebs running around? Well, I can't really help. But I can help if you're interested in the gossipy side of Silicon Valley. Behold, a reading guide to titles about the tech-mafia leaders. Nerds: they're so in right now!

Dear Daddy Long Legs, please do advise

Some might suggest that, of women in literature, Juliet Capulet might not be the best for love advice. Mostly because she was 13, and my love advice at 13 involved having friends talk to boys for you and wearing Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.

I would prefer to ask...erm...I actually can't think of anyone I would prefer to ask. Awkward. Thoughts?

Villainous, authors

Some authors are bad, reader types. Not only in the "talent" sense, but also, often, in the cinematic "what a bad ass or a crazy" way. And, oh look, a gallery of the best of these bad authors!

How convenient.

And the bans played on

Sometimes society feels a need to band together and say, "Heck no, our chittlins should not be reading!" And when that happens, Mommy kisses Daddy, and the angel tells the stork, and the stork flies down from heaven, and leaves a diamond under a leaf in the cabbage patch, and the diamond turns into a banned book.* Yes, the explanation doesn't make much sense, but the books that get banned also don't make much sense. Little Women? The dictionary? Nice work, America.

*Five imaginary dollars if you can tell me a) what movie that's from and b) why it is the greatest movie of all time.

The copy and paste generation

I am a member of the copy and paste generation, both by age(-ish) but also, hey, look at this blog--it is almost all commentary on what others have written. This puts me in the same generation as Helene Hegemann, Germany's 17 year old bestselling author who is accused of plagiarism. Alas, by payment standards we are leagues apart, and she has done way more than I did by her age. But I digress.

Hegemann lifted a page from a novel by another writer without attribution, in addition to other unattributed bits and pieces. However, she doesn't see this as stealing, but rather "mixing," and others agree with this:

“Obviously, it isn’t completely clean but, for me, it doesn’t change my appraisal of the text,” said Volker Weidermann, the jury member [for the Leipzig Book Fair fiction prize] and a book critic for the Sunday edition of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, a strong supporter. “I believe it’s part of the concept of the book.”

Robert McCrum at the Guardian writes that Hegemann doesn't understand what plagiarism means because of her age and "the Internet age." And yea, maybe it is part of her shtick, because her novel is all about remixing, and here she's remixing other texts. But I take offense to the idea that because people in their late teens and early 20s grew up with the internet they (we) don't understand what is and is not stealing.

We aren't stupid, and we're no more unethical than those who grew up with the telegraph (although that already ruined journalistic integrity). This smacks of the nastiness toward Tavi Gevinson, the 14 year old fashion blogger, in which her every mistake is because of her youth, and her successes aren't credited.

Reading reality in television

As we all know, reality TV is 100% unscripted, and the editing does not in any way shape people into characters or make mountains out of molehills. I know this because I watch Jersey Shore, the greatest reality show of our time. For those of us who want to emulate the stellar cast of this show, Lit Drift put together a reading list for the cast of Jersey Shore (if they ever deign to crack open a book, that is).

If Jersey Shore isn't quite your style, and you prefer the (kind of eh but I guess okay) drama of the Hills, Lauren Conrad has done an interview with EW about her writing (warning: do not read if you are an aspiring author who does not want to hear that someone made the NYTimes bestseller list after mostly reading SparkNotes and Goodnight Moon her whole life).

And if you'd rather skip the whole reality trope (although I have to tell you, you're missing out), someone finally read Dustin Diamond's book and unearthed the juicy behind the scenes bits from Saved by the Bell. Spoiler: it mostly involves drugs and a lot of sex.

So, does anyone else think they made a major life mistake by not trying harder to be a famewhore? ...Me either.

Edwardian drama

The fact that John Edwards was a legitimate contender to be President of the United States really makes this tell-all even more ridiculous. His aide Edward Young (the one who pretended to be the father of Edwards' lovechild with Rielle Hunter) spills the beans, and they are juicy, juicy beans. In addition to the dirt on Edwards' affair, this comes up:

Young also goes for some particularly vengeful quotemongering by citing the once down-home candidate as railing against appearing at state fairs and having “fat rednecks try to shove food down my face. I know I’m the people’s senator, but do I have to hang out with them?”

John Edwards is now officially relegated to my mental camp of former presidential contenders who are terrifying as potential leaders but hilarious otherwise. So it's just him and Mike Huckabee. Worst summer camp ever?

Like, famazing!

So, like, I was at the mall with my bff Kristen, and she was like, "Oh em gee, that romper is, like, super cute!" and I was like, "Are you for serious?" and she was like, "I totally am," and I was like, "Well, okay, maybe I'll spend my dollarz on it," and she was like, "Like, yea!"

In other news, Christopher Hitchens wrote an article for Vanity Fair about the abuse of the word "like" by the yuts of today, which was sent to me by our fair Rejectionist (sidebar: send me tips! I will acknowledge you in a post!).

Hitchens makes some fair points (even if he's tardy for the party by about 15 years), and I'm with him until he writes:

[Y]ou have to talk well in order to write well, and you can’t write while using “like” as punctuation[.]

I give that a solid "eh." Written English and spoken English have differing conventions. I wouldn't write "like" instead if "said" (erm, expect for above), but I would use "like" in conversation to indicate "something along the lines of this was said, but this isn't a direct quote or anything."

Full disclosure: I am not a huge Hitchens fan, and so tend to look for things I dislike in his writing. I'll be happy to convert to fandom if he will just admit that there is irony in the fact that his breed of atheism requires his militant adherence to a belief system. Just a hint of self awareness, and I'm so on board.