We Shall See

Let's cover a variety of topics! We have nowhere to go. 1. I was reading the New York Times on my phone just like a teenager and I saw they have made a list of the 30 greatest living songwriters. And I raged silently to myself, "I thought I solved this problem years ago!" The problem, that is, of people making lists of things. The year was 1999. People started making lists of everything. I think it was the upcoming century that had them in a panic. They thought if they made lists of things, they could stave off the death of the universe. That's just a theory. After a decade or so, I got really sick of reading lists. So I struck! Like a mighty panther! My hilarious anti-lists would put an end to all this listmania... ha ha, remember when Ken Russell made a movie called LISZTOMANIA? I enjoy peppering my interesting observations with pointless crap like that. What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah! So I made my anti-lists, like "The 50 Greatest Things That Just Popped Into My Head" for THE BELIEVER magazine... and after PASTE did their own "Greatest Living Songwriters" (to which I admit I contributed a blurb on Chuck Berry, who was, it may amaze you to learn, alive at the time), I sent them a joke list, which they published, of "The Greatest Dead Song Writers"... I included, for example, King David from the Bible. You remember him! And then, at the top of the list of dead songwriters, I put Bob Dylan, who was alive, and still is, as of this writing, as far as I know. But I'm about to go on a walk around the neighborhood with Ace Atkins (so I was wrong about having nowhere to go, if you consider walking in a circle somewhere to go), and who knows what might happen by the time I come back to finish this "post"? I make no promises. Anyway! The exciting thing was that a USA Today interviewer told Bob Dylan that PASTE had called him the greatest dead songwriter, and he laughed! That's the main thing I wanted to say. I just wanted to remind you about the time I made Bob Dylan laugh. 2. Yesterday, I filled you in on what's going on in my nighttime book (horses are crying, natch) but I neglected to mention my daytime book, ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC. Well, I'll tell you. Mostly it just says "In Chapter 6, we shall see" this and "In Chapter 6, we shall see" that. I've been hearing about how great Chapter 6 is going to be since the introduction! Something better happen in Chapter 6, that's all I can say. Because not much has happened so far, unless you count "more study is needed" as something. I checked the Table of Contents and Chapter 6 is the last chapter in the book. Well played, Gideon Bohak! 3. McNeil emailed me about Charles Fort. That was exciting! Nobody ever emails me about Charles Fort. McNeil called Charles Fort "Mark Twain's nutty cousin." As evidence, McNeil cites the lines that Fort sticks in about "once a page" (according to McNeil) as he catalogs various inexplicable phenomena: "In my own mind there is distinguishment between a good watchdog and the fleas on him".... "To have any opinion, one must overlook something." That's a great one! McNeil deduces imaginatively: "Fort found these on crumpled up pieces of paper in Twain's drawer" and concludes with a Fortean memory of a cloudburst he, McNeil, once witnessed, approximately 24 inches in diameter. 4. I told Ace I would give him three guesses which Elvis movie I had been watching this morning, and if he got it right I would give him a million dollars. His second guess was TICKLE ME. Anyway, now I owe Ace a million dollars. Unless... to quote Megan after she was informed of the incident, "Are you sure he just didn't want you to tickle him?"

Witold Gombrowicz Is Like Jim Gaffigan

Time and time again we have established that I am wrong about everything. Here, let me give you a recent example! So, remember when I said I remembered going to Square Books and... wait. Please remind yourself that my brain was zapped by mysterious forces just a couple of years ago. But remember when I said I had seen a version of THE ILIAD blurbed by Emily Wilson but not translated by her? That can't be the case. Because I went to Square Books yesterday and saw with my own eyes Emily Wilson's translation of THE ILIAD, which I had convinced myself did not exist. And why would she blurb an ILIAD when she had a fresh new ILIAD of her own? I said to Mevelyn... wait! Let me tell you about Mevelyn. Mevelyn is from Cuba. She is a great bookseller. Case in point, she has forced me to buy a lot of Alejo Carpentier with her hypnotic powers. She tells a good ghost story. She knows everything about books! You can ask her about the different translations of DON QUIXOTE, for example, and she'll point out all their strengths and weaknesses. I always hope that Mevelyn will be working when I visit Square Books so I can hear a good ghost story or a nightmare she had about Karl Marx. Anyway, I grasped Emily Wilson's translation of THE ILIAD in my wizened paws and I says to Mevelyn, I says, "Hey! Mevelyn! Wasn't there a recent version of THE ILIAD with a blurb by Emily Wilson, but she didn't translate it? I feel like I'm going crazy!" So it sounds familiar to Mevelyn, too! She feels like she saw it recently. So we stand there a long time trying to figure out what the hell we are talking about. We are having one of those folies à deux that people enjoy so much. Anyway! When I got home, I realized what I had seen was a new translation of THE AENEID for which Emily Wilson wrote the introduction. Not a blurb! An introduction! Not THE ILIAD! THE AENEID! The important thing is that I had a coupon, so I was able to get Emily Wilson's translation of THE ILIAD for free, just about. That's the thing! Get yourself a "Constant Reader Number" at Square Books! Then you too will be able to grab an almost-free book once in a while. And so it came to pass that THE ILIAD is my current "nighttime book" and the DIARY of Witold Gombrowicz is my current "daytime book." I have reached the point in the diary where Gombrowicz has begun to attack himself, sotto voce, the way Jim Gaffigan does in his standup act. You know, Jim Gaffigan will tell a joke and then he'll switch to a soft, high-pitched, almost strangled voice, pretending to be an audience member, questioning his own premise. Is that a good description of what Jim Gaffigan does? No? How the hell would you know? Anyway, now Witold Gombrowicz is doing what Jim Gaffigan does... in diary form! It's like when Milhouse said that ALF was back in pog form. Everything is like when Milhouse said ALF was back in pog form.

Feelin' Ancient

Am I going to read THE ILIAD? I'm afraid it appears likely. Was it Emily Wilson who got me on this ancient kick? I read her translation of THE ODYSSEY and her biography of Seneca, and then six plays by Seneca that she translated, which ruined me for reading things that were not ancient. I've even read ancient things I haven't bothered to tell you about on the "blog," such as Josephus. Josephus! And before I took up Witold Gombrowicz for the Million Dollar Book Club, Tacitus was my daytime book. Sitting around reading Tacitus in the broad daylight like some kind of animal! And I guess I'll pick up where I left off if I ever finish Gombrowicz. Okay, I'll be right back. I need to do a little research. All right, I'm back. I have confirmed a nagging feeling. It wasn't Emily Wilson who got me into all this. It was Kirk Douglas! ("Click" here for details.) Sorry, Emily Wilson! Anyway! I guess you're wondering where all this ILIAD crap is coming from, though. Well, remember when I decided to become interested in Simone Weil? I don't suppose any of us will ever forget it! So I'm going around learning stuff about Simone Weil and I see that she wrote a famous essay about THE ILIAD. So I get hold of that and I'm like, "Uh-oh! Here we go again!" And do I want to get my Robert Fagles translation of THE ILIAD off the shelf? Well, hell, no. Didn't I read it already? Or part of it? Did I ever finish it? Also, it's on a shelf behind a glass door with latches at both the top and bottom. That's a lot of work! The bottom latches, in addition, have some stuff piled in front of them, such as my blood pressure machine. Oh! Speaking of my blood pressure machine, let me come clean about something. I've told you many times that I stopped reading old comic books. I still say that is true. However! I do have a gigantic hardcover DC "omnibus edition" of comics that I currently sample while relaxing for five minutes before blood pressure time. This sturdy volume has just the kind of spine I need for laying out the book flat on the dining room table, where the medical task in question is undertaken. So yesterday, or the day before, I think, I saw a representation of the DC comics character the Spectre, and... here... allow me to quote an email I sent to Adam Muto on the subject: "I was looking at a DC comic book from 1989 and it had the Spectre in it, and he was really ripped! I was like... he's a ghost! Has he been going to the gym? You're the only person I could think of to tell." I did not add... "Or should I say RIPped?" because I thought such wordplay would make Adam sad and disappointed. Then I poked around on the "internet" because I was afraid "ripped" wasn't the right term. I spent a lot of time on "web" sites dedicated to parsing the difference between being "ripped" or "shredded" or "jacked" or "swole." But we're getting off the subject! Are we? Well, I recalled seeing a newish translation of THE ILIAD at Square Books. And given the fact that I'm going to have lunch with Tom Franklin one day soon, I just know I'll stop by on the way and pick it up. I can see the future! This ILIAD wasn't translated by Emily Wilson, but it had a blurb from Emily Wilson. [Wrong! - ed.] Now, as a person who has both given and received blurbs, I know that blurbs aren't really worth spit. Except for the time Lauren Graham blurbed one of my books! That one counted!

The History of Literature

Never thought I'd run across the phrase "She was going to turn me into an owl one time" in an Elmore Leonard novel, but I did... twice! The second time, it's "gonna" instead of "going to," the kind of distinction you notice only if you've wasted a good portion of your life cataloging every time a book has an owl in it. Anyway, after I read that (in KILLSHOT), I got in bed and came by coincidence to the part of THE ODYSSEY where the guys get turned into pigs. That's the history of literature for you, from THE ODYSSEY to Elmore Leonard: people getting turned into owls or pigs. What else have I been reading lately? Some Jack Kerouac journals that McNeil gave me for my birthday. He (Kerouac, not McNeil) is struggling to finish writing his novel THE TOWN AND THE CITY... which made me recall one of Dr. Theresa's former bosses, who told me that her favorite Kerouac novel was THE TOWN AND THE CITY, so I marched right down to Square Books and bought a paperback of it and stuck it on a shelf and never read it. Well, after reading some of those journal entries, I took THE TOWN AND THE CITY off the shelf, opened it, and the receipt fell out... May 27, 2013. And the pages of the book had turned brown with age! Look. That's not necessary. Once, when Dr. Theresa was still just an undergrad, we went to her Latin teacher's house, where fruit punch was served! And her Latin teacher brought out a book from the 15th century for us to pass around, and the pages were as white as snow! So my guess is that the people at Harcourt were like, "What are we going to do with this cheap paper we have lying around? Let's give it to the beatniks, they like that kind of crap." Related: there's a blurb from Johnny Depp on the back cover - ?! - in which the word "Kerouac" is misspelled... with two c's! "Yeah, I saw it. The beatniks won't care." (See also: the cheap glue used by Scribner.)

The Mark Leyner Owl Problem

I'll tell you the truth. Despite all my big talk, I got tired of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR and switched over to E TU, BABE by Mark Leyner, which I immediately found more agreeable to my way of thinking. There was something I wanted to tell you about it, but I became discouraged because I couldn't think of a passage to quote to describe the narrator (Mark Leyner), at least not a passage I could quote without having to lie down from just thinking of how much typing it would entail. Somehow, this led me to wonder whether I had ever "blogged" about Mark Leyner before, so I did a search and found him in only one spot: my big list of books with owls in them. That's where the mystery began! Strap yourself in! You see, according to the "blog's" "design," it should be a mighty ouroboros, leading nowhere but back to itself. So, if you follow me, how could Mark Leyner's delightful GONE WITH THE MIND be on my list of books with owls in them AND YET not in some other "post" in which the owl was first catalogued properly? So I "clicked" and found that the Leyner allusion led only to a zombie "link" to my long-dead twitter account, a clear violation of "blog" policy (the reader will certainly recall when I departed social media like some kind of haughty titan, giving nary a thought to the destruction I left in my wake). Maybe I was reading GONE WITH THE MIND during the period when I claimed to have stopped "blogging." I have a lot of regrets. I'm ashamed to say Leyner's particular owl, which I have forgotten, is lost forever - at least for our purposes - if I don't suddenly get some unexpected energy and, for starters, walk across my home office, where my copy of GONE WITH THE MIND can be plainly seen from here, which isn't going to happen. Anyway! None of this is the point, because E TU, BABE doesn't have an owl in it... yet. Or maybe at all. BUT! I wanted to tell you, regarding E TU, BABE, that the narrator's favorite TV show is QUINCY, which is also Dr. Theresa's favorite TV show, which is why I wanted to tell you. Last night, I mentioned as much to her. Without context, the comment didn't really go anywhere. For you see, not only was I too lazy to type anything giving you a real idea of Leyner's narrator, Mark Leyner, I was too lazy to even describe the narrator to Dr. Theresa with the words of my mouth. Today, while I was considering all this, I flipped to the rear cover of the book and saw a "blurb" by Jay McInerney, who describes Leyner's protagonist as "a flashbulb-tanned, narcotic-nourished, steroid-swollen, priapic monster." Thanks, Jay McInerney! You did my work for me. Except for the typing. But you cut it way down! So anyway, the narrator's favorite TV show is QUINCY, and, as a result, to quote the book now, "whenever I run across a corpse, I try to take advantage of the opportunity to do a quick autopsy."

Famous Tootsie Pop

Given recent events, I have different books going at the same time now, and given those same recent events, one of the categories is "books I read in a doctor's waiting room." It's not the same as either book in the other two categories, if you are making a chart. There can never be an overlap. Each of the three (so far) books needs to be of a different size, and to have different qualities. The one I read while taking my blood pressure, for example, requires a sturdy spine, like me, so it can lie flat on a table, like me. I don't lie flat on a table. But we all lie flat on a table one day. That's not the point. What was I talking about? Oh yeah. So I was sitting there reading this one novel in the waiting room when, by a big coincidence, the narrator mentioned the problem for which I was about to see the doctor! Not only that, he cited a probable cause for the problem. And this cause was something in the proximity of which I had recently loitered! Now, this is the kind of coincidence that McNeil and I talk about all the time, all giddy from delight. So when I saw the doctor, I said, "Hey, could this thing be caused by this other thing?" And he said "No." So that was a bust. And the coincidence wasn't so great after all. So why are we here? I don't know. It does give me the liberty to mention that Megan and I have been discussing the devil a pretty good bit lately, and then she asked me a question about the Tarot (an entirely separate discussion, although there is, of course, a card with the devil on it. But that's not what we were talking about for a change). Anyhow, I looked up what Jesse Moynihan has to say about another card, the one under discussion, and I was like, "Huh! Okay!" Then I opened JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS to the passage I had been reading... and the devil, in that passage, talks about the VERY SAME IDEAS I had just been reading in Jesse's pamphlet! I'm not saying Jesse is the devil. Far from it! So that was another coincidence. This great tale of life as it is lived in our lively times isn't over yet. Because I had TWO doctor appointments today! I had enough time in between them to stop by Square Books. I was happy to see that Richard Howorth was not just trying to protect my fragile feelings when he said that my books aren't 100% out of print... just 99.999999%! I added that part. They had a big old fresh stack of MOVIE STARS, my troubling masterpiece of short fiction. Lauren Graham raves: "Funny, poetic, vivid, unique. Jack Pendarvis has crafted a collection of gems." I'm not lying! It's on the cover! Go see for yourself. Pick up a few copies for the family. While supplies last! I signed the whole batch, and wrote secret messages in a couple of them. It's like Willy Wonka all over again! Ran into Tom Franklin, who was walking down from the second floor of the bookstore with a young woman to whom he introduced me as "Via Bleidner, Kim Kardashian just bought her book for Netflix." Oh! On the way out of the store, I saw a big poster for the novel I said I couldn't tell you about yet. But I can now, because there's a big poster right there at the front door of Square Books. It's DON'T LET THE DEVIL RIDE (the devil again!), the latest from Ace Atkins! The owl I have been sitting on since January 22, 2023, is... I can now reveal... the owl in the famous Tootsie Pop commercial. Well, I haven't seen the published book yet, just the manuscript, but Ace says he "thinks" the owl is still in there. And I guess you think the story is over. WRONG! Because as I waited for the second doctor, once again reading my "waiting room book" in a different waiting room... well, first I should tell you that I saw a raccoon using a walkway last night. A walkway that a person would use. Like, a narrow sidewalk of sorts. So, anyway, I'm reading this novel again and the narrator is astonished to see "a raccoon using a sidewalk." All right, that's the end.

An Expression

You've probably been on pins and needles! Is that an expression? Anyway, in August I told you I was "blurbing" a book with an owl in it, but I couldn't tell you the name because I wasn't sure it had been announced. Now, thanks to the twitter account of Bill Boyle, I see that the forthcoming publication of the book has been announced, and it is a novel called IVORY SHOALS ("click" here to preorder), written by John Brandon. I hope you feel as relieved as I do!

Wise

A memory came to me. I was sitting in an almost empty lounge at an Elvis-themed hotel mainly known, perhaps, for its onetime outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease, drinking Maker's Mark or Buffalo Trace and waiting for a catfish sandwich to arrive. When it did arrive I could tell at once - and I say this with little fear of committing libel - that it bore only the slightest familial relation to catfish, if any. Meanwhile, on the television over the bar, one of the STAR WARS prequels blared on a basic cable station, complete with commercial breaks. At the time, I had such thoughts as "Why am I here? What have I done with my life? What is the point of everything? How did I get into such a fix? Why do bad things happen to good people? Is there a different way to live? If I could do it all over again, would I? Where could I be instead of here? Am I a bad person? If there is a God, why did he allow this to happen?" Now, however, in our current circumstance - and the following observation will hardly be unique - I think back on it in every detail with tender fondness as a glimpse of heavenly glory to which I wish I could return. Also! As long as I have you here, I am in the process of blurbing a novel, which contains a character "wise as an owl," in the protagonist's words. I do not think the future existence of the book has yet been publicly acknowledged, so it is not my place to provide the details. I do stick this reminder here just for myself, like a Post-It note, so that I will not forget to add the book to my list of books with owls in them, when the time is right. Maybe those will be better days!

Life Member of the Vampire Research Society

Poking around the old "internet," I discover that Peter Underwood, author of A GAZETTEER OF BRITISH GHOSTS, is still alive and very busy with his various ghost clubs. He's a "Life Member" of the "Vampire Research Society" too! And he cuts quite a dashing figure, I must say, as you can see here. Plus his "web" site has a blurb from Arthur Conan Doyle's daughter. She calls Mr. Underwood "The Sherlock Holmes of Psychical Research," ha ha! Pretty good.

McNeil and McGee

Email from McNeil! "Reading DARKER THAN AMBER (1966)," he writes. "I'm 3 pages into it and Travis [McGee] is just as sexist as he was in the last novel (DRESS HER IN INDIGO). So that's comforting," McNeil adds sardonically, though he does note for the record that "someone is referred to as owl-like" in the latter. He also says INDIGO has a noticeable "gay streak... everyone is gay. It's like drug use = gayness." I'm not sure what he means by that last equation. I think he's saying that the book posits a direct correlation. I'll ask! (I did ask, and McNeil replied that the characters in the book "on the wrong side of the law - and even those who walk near the border of illegality - engage in a homosexual act at some point, whether they actually take drugs or not. I think even these characters - the non drug takers - administer drugs or sell them, though. I may be wrong about it, but that's the way I remember it.") Another email from McNeil, contemplating a blurb about John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee series: "'He's the Dickens of mid-century America' - Boston Globe. I wonder which Dickens book they had in mind? Reading DARKER THAN AMBER now (at work). On page 20." McNeil then summarizes DARKER THAN AMBER up to page 20 as "The regular McGee on steroids." He notes that McGee's hairy sidekick goes around introducing McGee as "the handsome one." "It must be nice," McNeil muses wistfully. I'm going to try to get Ace Atkins to comment on all this. McNeil and I were talking about the (SPOILER ALERT) baroque death scene of McGee's romantic interest in A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD and it reminded me of the time Ace actually managed to spoil the entire Travis McGee series for me! Which I am about to do for you in turn. We were at Megan Abbott's apartment when she was living here in town. I think it was the night we watched SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. Ace told me THE TURQUOISE LAMENT was unusual because "the woman doesn't die." And then he told me the terrible secret of every Travis McGee novel: "The woman always dies," said Ace. (And now I am remembering a conversation that Ace and I had a while back, in which he noted MacDonald's penchant for getting McGee together with physically powerful women, which I had already noticed in a secondary relationship in A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD. Ace mentioned a book - I can't remember which one - in which McGee becomes involved with a woman who can lift a car.)

She Is Everything

Elizabeth is reading Diana Vreeland's autobiography and exclaims happily, "Her first chapter is all about fitting Jack Nicholson for a back plaster in the basement of a Chinese restaurant!" Elizabeth's email concludes with this fine yet mysterious blurb for Diana Vreeland: "She is everything." (See also.)

Holistic Poop

Hey! According to this Norman Mailer bio, one reviewer called his novel ANCIENT EVENINGS "holistic poop." He didn't mean it in a nice way! But Mailer had it put on a poster advertising the book. You know how bad reviews will often intrigue me while good reviews make me bored and surly? So, Bill Boyle is bringing me his old copy of ANCIENT EVENINGS from Brooklyn when he returns. Hmm, it says in this summary here that the protagonist will be "supping on a paste made of bat dung," so I have that to look forward to.

The Wrong Book

So McNeil ordered a book about Jerry Lewis - "foreword by Kathleen Freeman!" McNeil exclaimed parenthetically - and it came in the mail with the right cover printed on it, and the right summary and blurbs printed on the back, but ON THE INSIDE IT WAS A BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIE STARGELL. I am not talking about a dust jacket, people! I mean, between these two covers firmly and deliberately printed onto the surface of this paperback was the wrong book. McNeil asked if I could recall anything similar and all I could think of was the time I bought an Ornette Coleman record and Side One was Ornette Coleman but Side Two was a random flute concerto, I think. The world sure is some crazy mixed-up place. I want you to think about it! THINK ABOUT IT! Pictured, Kathleen Freeman, thinking about it. Ha ha yes that's right she looks confused by what I just told you I am indeed a master of this form.

Histriomastix!

Wow! Reading in REPROBATES: THE CAVALIERS OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR about a thousand-page denunciation of the theatre called HISTRIOMASTIX, THE PLAYERS SCOURGE OR ACTORS TRAGEDIE by William Prynne, "a monumental work of cultural abrasion... insane in its reasoning, astonishing in its stamina, hurling verbiage and citation from an abyss of loathing." That's some blurb! You could do worse. "Prynne's insult to the queen could not be left unpunished. He was tried and, as if in the very masochistic climax his book was calling for all along, had his ears clipped at the pillory." I wonder whether Hawthorne gave Hester Prynne his surname on purpose, she who - as Dr. Theresa has pointed out - turned her scaffold to a stage and her audience into a spectacle.

Big Shoe Drop Any Minute Now

Finally getting around to reading AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD by Laura Lippman. It's not fair to call it my favorite Laura Lippman novel because I'm only on page 86 but I THINK IT MIGHT BE. You know that expression "waiting for the other shoe to drop," right? NONE OF THE SHOES HAVE DROPPED. But there is every indication that somebody is holding tons of shoes over our heads and those shoes, some with spikes on them, are going to start dropping like crazy any minute. I refuse to compare AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD to Balzac, mostly because I have no idea what that means. I barely know what "waiting for the other shoe to drop" means. But AND WHEN SHE WAS GOOD has a sharp eye on society from its first mesmerizing page. And were I asked to blurb it - ha ha! on what planet? - I'd rank it all the way up there with MILDRED PIERCE as a novel about business.

Milk For Burt

Dr. Theresa always says that when the moustache is absent you know it's going to be a serious Burt Reynolds movie. And such was the case with HUSTLE, though Burt's first line is a misleadingly innocuous and wholesome request for a glass of milk. But HUSTLE was rough stuff! Eddie Albert - Oliver Douglas of GREEN ACRES fame - plays a sleazy, murderous lawyer (though I do want his yachting outfit, seen above), but the casting gets weirder than that. Includes Fred Willard, old-timey comic (and mortal enemy of Robert Goulet's son-in-law) Jack Carter, and (spoiler alert) in a last-minute surprise of the downer kind for which the 1970s are famous (though you can guess it from the beginning, as we did, from the way Burt stares longingly at the picture calendar of Rome on his dirty office wall - "He's never getting to Rome!" Dr. Theresa and I both cried simultaneously), the guy who played Freddie Krueger, typecast already, typecast before the fact, the eternally typecast Freddie Krueger, ladies and gentlemen. Incorporates some of the weirder visual effects of SUPERDAD while anticipating Paul Schrader's HARDCORE. A possible inspiration for the Robin Williams episode of the TV series HOMICIDE. I guess I am saying if you like SUPERDAD, HARDCORE, and HOMICIDE, check out HUSTLE! That's a blurb. Chock full of MOBY-DICK allusions!

Cat Astrology Blurb

Hey I was just examining the blurb on that cat astrology book. Somebody has to! It says, "'YOUR CAT'S SUN SIGN AND HOW YOU TWO CAN BEST RELATE' - COSMOPOLITAN." That's not really a blurb. It reminds me of my other favorite, "The book was received and has been reviewed by our Book Selection Department."

Taper-Witted

I used to "blog" all the time but now I only "blog" almost all the time. Yeah, so, I was in Square Books yesterday and I glanced at a blurb on the back of a Muriel Spark novel and I thought it referred to her as "taper-witted" but I had misread it and it said "rapier-witted." After I put the book down, still not realizing my mistake, I stood there and pondered what "taper-witted" might mean. It seemed more like an insult than anything, but I knew it couldn't be an insult, not printed on the back of a book like that, so I tried to rationalize how "taper-witted" might be interpreted as praise. Finally I looked again and it was "rapier-witted" which is a terrible old meaningless cliché - is that why my brain refused to accept it? Man is this dull. I feel sorry for you. But this is what a "blog" is! Nobody forced you to read "blogs." I was also flipping through the book NO HEROES by my pal Chris Offutt and everything in it seemed so good I kind of thought I ought to buy it, but here's what clinched it, brother: I came across a chapter entitled "Burying an Owl." And then there was this sentence: "Owls are so much like humans that we are afraid of them." And you know the rest. Maybe I should mention that Chris is casually holding a possum under his arm on the cover and that automatically became my new standard for author photos, yeah, maybe I would have bought that Muriel Spark book if only she had appeared on the cover holding a possum under her arm as she was wont to do.

Weeping Unicorn

"Click" here for chapter 10 of my sprawling fantasy epic, presented by the friendly folks at the Vice magazine. Just 990 chapters to go! If this were an old Marvel comic book instead of a chapter of my sprawling fantasy epic, there would be a splashy blurb on the cover reading "TODAY... A UNICORN WEEPS!"

Some Blurb

So here's part of Cynthia Ozick's blurb for SABBATAI SEVI: THE MYSTICAL MESSIAH by Gershom Scholem: "There are certain magisterial works of the human mind that alter comprehension so unpredictably and on so prodigious a scale that culture itself is set awry... Obviously it is not possible to 'review' such a work, any more than one can review a mountain range." All right! That's all I want from a blurb. Is that too much to ask?