And I wish they hadn’t.
If you’re wishing to trigger premature blindness, you might want to check out HuffPo’s piece on The 11 Worst Memoir Covers Ever.
Some of them aren’t really that bad (like Ricky Martin’s…it almost looks like Andre Agassi’s), but I really with I could un-see Jamie (M*A*S*H’s Klinger) Farr’s cover (below).
After springing news of the J.D. Salinger toilet on eBay, Jacket Copy has dug deeper into the online auction company to find their 12 Favorite Non-Book Literary Items on eBay.
I can’t decide whether I want to go for the Jack Kerouac alarm clock or the Gertrude Stein stein (below).
I normally loathe blogging about books in August, because generally nothing happens. Everyone is either on holiday, or wishing they were on holiday, and not really up for doing much of anything beyond surviving.
But then I came across this lovely item. Somebody is auctioning off the late J.D. Salinger’s toilet.
For a cool $1 million, you can own this unique literary artifact.
The sales pitch on the eBay auction is really quite priceless:
When he died, his wife inherited all of his manuscripts with plans to eventually release some of them! Who knows how many of these stories were thought up and written while Salinger sat on this throne!
One question-was Salinger the type of guy to use a toilet without a seat? I mean, he was eccentric, but was he that eccentric?
A million bucks may seem like much, but at least the shipping is free.
Ever since it was announced that Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth) was beginning work on an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, I’ve tried to reacquaint myself with all things Lovecraftian.
Making this quest easier is this video, which nicely sums up Call of Cthulhu in around two minutes.
(via io9)
Futurama, like the other animated Matt Groening brainchild The Simpsons, often features a lot of blink-and-you-miss-’em jokes.
Fortunately, somebody invented not only freeze-frame, but the ability to cut and paste images.
In last week’s episode, the professor invents a time machine that can only move forward in time. Arriving to the wasteland that is Earth circa the year 30,000, Bender decides to start a fire.
(image from 20th Century Fox)
But it was kinda lame, so instead here is the video for Jane Austen’s Fight Club, which is a viral video I can really sink my teeth into.
And if Chuck Palahniuk would grant permission for some enterprising author to use his concept and tropes, I know it would cure my overexposure to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
I saw this on Tuesday before I went to bed and wanted to blog about it, but the Benadryl kicked in and I was out like a light.
Jacket Copy linked to the fabulous website that reads whatever text you put into it and determines what famous writer is similar in style.
The good news is that some of my reviews came out saying I wrote like James Joyce, but when I put in my blog postings, it said I wrote like Dan Brown. Could be worse, I guess; it could have said that I wrote like Robert James Waller (Bridges of Madison County).
Now, here’s a trick for the kids at home: type in the text from Joyce, or Nabokov or Salinger, and see who they come up as.
I have to say, this is almost as much fun as the Wu Tang Name Generator.
Nora Ephron takes aim at Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy with the parody The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut in the New Yorker.
While I think it could have been a bit more biting, as there are lots of things to poke fun at in these books, it’s hard not to crack a smile at lines like “…but it was starting to become confusing just how much irritability could be blamed on your slight figure and an abusive father you had once deliberately set on fire and then years later split open the head of with an axe”.
Chuck Taylor All Stars are the great equalizer of athletic footwear. For as long as I can remember, you could wear these and always look cool. Other styles, like Air Jordans, come and go while Chucks continue to endure.
A new addition to their evolving patterns involve the images of Dr. Seuss. Now you can have the coolest and most literate sneakers for your kids.
Sadly, the selection in adult sizes is a bit more limited.
(via Jacket Copy, where I swiped the image above-credited to Converse)
I was having a pretty loathsome week so far, but this cheered me right up.
Al-Qaeda Calls Off Attack On Nation’s Capitol To Spare Life Of ‘Twilight’ Author