I Don't Even Own A Television: 'Those Who Trespass'

Ordinarily I'd assume that I did a good enough job last time selling you on my friend Jay W. Friedman's podcast. And I would likewise assume that the new page for podcast appearances I put up would be a sufficient resource for finding out where and when I'd droned on and on like an asshole about something. But this time I joined Jay to talk about Bill O'Reilly's Those Who Trespass, and nothing about O'Reilly comes easily. Except his women.

Here's the thing about Bill-O: despite Jay and I spending an hour busting on his godawful prose, his sexism, his casual racism, his uncritical love of police strong-arm tactics, his bunkum facts about David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, his racialized image of crime, his historical clunkers, his incredible vanity, his stereotypical straight-outta-suburbia Irish-American fawning over the Ould Sod and his bad sex scenes, we could have gone on for another hour without breaking a sweat. Because he's really that awful in his fantasyland version of reality, too.

Jay touched on something in Those Who Trespass that I wanted to supplement with a bit from real life. In it, O'Reilly's Gary Stu character has a black friend named Jackson Davis, one who Bill's narration takes pains to describe as articulate. He's one of the good ones basically for no other reason than that he behaves like Bill O'Reilly's vision of a good white guy. And I really don't want anyone to walk away with the sense that this was an accident of bad writing.

I Don't Even Own A Television: 'Pregnesia'

Some of you may know my friend Jay Friedman. For those of you who don't, he's one of those exasperatingly prolific creative people who's always doing something interesting when you're doing things like marathoning Magnum P.I. on Netflix for no reason.

In addition to working a full-time job, Jay might as well also be a full-time MC. And when he's not releasing another mixtape under the name Satellite High, he's doing things like helping me out by recording a diss track of World Net Daily birther rappers "Wolverines" or tag-teaming a fatuous American Enterprise Institute list of the "21 Greatest Conservative Rap Songs" for a piece in The New Republic.

So, with all that on his plate, naturally Jay started a podcast about books. Fantastically bad books. Because of course he did. And I'm pleased to say that I was the inaugural guest on I Don't Even Own A Television.

In a previous life, I wrote reviews of current events and public affairs books for Barnes & Noble's website. (Under yet another pseudonym.) And while neither those nor my reviews on this website prepared me for the kind of texts that Jay had in mind, it's nice to know that the critical reading skills honed in that job and during the long slog through my history thesis haven't completely atrophied. Basically, I brought a thoroughly misguided level of critical analysis to a discussion of a Harlequin Intrigue title named Pregnesia.

The General's Fiction: A Military Internment of Literature — No. 2

Note: Today, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria. He last joined us to explain how Christopher Hitchens should burn in hell, how we can help Andrew Breitbart get there and how killing Bin Laden was the last spasm in the American fever dream.


Pavane For A Dead Country: Mark Brendle's Radio Fragments
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

You probably know the holiday blues, if not personally, then at least by reputation. And you probably know them more acutely when the celebrations end, when there's no one left to lie to—winter without the trappings. Wallace Stevens wrote, "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us," and in the twilight of an economically corroded and spiritually bereft America, it is more vital than ever that artists shine a light. Mark Brendle, an Oregon-based writer and colleague here at Et Tu, Mr. Destructo, has published a new book of poetry, Radio Fragments.

Radio Fragments consists of a few dozen prose poems beneath a lovely illustrated cover, depicting a cordon of riot cops forming a human abatis, as a ribbon of radio waves bends and curls between them. How is Radio Fragments? It is superb, because as an author, Brendle gets the stakes. This poetry is neither for the aloof liberal who sets great store in a few clean tweaks, nor the reactionary clinging to his long-dead liturgy. Radio Fragments is sad, strong, crystalline, beautiful, like the thick ice atop a dark lake. This is poetry for people who, in Andrea Dworkin's words, "Don't find compromise unacceptable—[they] find it incomprehensible."

The book's strength comes from its unity of vision—a dire one. In one of the book's final poems, "An Elegy For Cinna The Poet," the speaker plainly doubts the ability of any creative work to puncture the violence and anomie that has come to dominate our lives: "What are words to the angry mob, or anyone else for that matter? The patricians have been fighting with each other over their toys again." The poet is ignored, Caesar gets whacked by his equally loathsome usurpers, and "atomized, dissonant voices howl in the marketplace." As Brendle writes in another poem, "The equivalence of words brands us with proper nouns like Charlemagne, Babylon, Gilgamesh, Constantinople, Prospero." Let any dissidents bay; they've always been ignored in time for the next collapse. What change could a poet possibly effect?

'The General's Fiction': A Military Internment of Literature — No. 1

Note: For discussion of Muslim figures in literature, we turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. His multi-part series on Libya, Slouching from Benghazi, resumes later this year.


Amazing Gaze: The Western Eyes of Soulful Scribbler Caleb Powell
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"'Algonquian women in New England,' wrote William Wood in 1634, were 'more loving, pitiful, and modest, mild, provident, and laborious than their lazy husbands.' Wood imagined that oppressed Indian women would gladly embrace European gender roles with their presumably lighter burdens of female domesticity."
— Kirsten Fischer

The holidays are long over. Liquor sales have stabilized; few of the year-end suicides remain undiscovered, and, if you are like me, you have a major haul of gifted books. Stacked on my bedside table, towering over my bloated, holly-jolly frame, the books are a leering accusation: "You're like all the others," sniffs The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. "Just direct me to the bookshelf best situated to intimidate your landlord."

As I limply cast aside the hose of my opium huqqa, ash sprinkling the datemaki sash of my authentic silken Nipponese kimono, I despair: literature is dead. Then suddenly, there is a change. There is a Powellful discovery. Who is Caleb Powell? A question I pondered not two weeks ago — now I have some sense of the answer, of an author who asserted himself in my mind's eye. Thus far, his vision has been inscribed only within a few brave avant garde presses, like Prick of the Spindle, Yankee Pot Roast, and Zyzzyva. I aim to change this.

In this special inaugural issue of "The General's Fiction," I invite you to imbibe deeply of the rose-colored drippings of Caleb Powell — author, stay-at-home father, poet. Let us, in the words of the late, great Christopher Hitchens, "let in daylight upon the magic."

Deadspin: Undervaluing 'Moneyball'

The new Brad Pitt vehicle based on Michael Lewis' bestselling book and a script by the authors of Schindler's Facebook has been getting unfairly blasted by exactly the sorts of people who you'd think would be in love with it: sports nerds. The negative reactions seem to come down to upset superfans, churlish nitpickers and cynics who see the movie as a chance to pimp their criticisms of the book again.

They're all wrong, of course, but funnily enough this was a lesson I learned because of — not in spite of — old people. Find out what you can learn about movies from sitting in a flickering antechamber to the hereafter with a bunch of people whose eternal Subway Club Cards are just one punch away from the big freebie.

Click the East Coast Bias-Sized Jeter to take this incredible journey:


Also, please come back this week as we recommence the annual death march into the 2011 MLB Postseason. Until then, feel free to check out the playoff and Series blogs from the 2010 MLB Postseason and the 2009 MLB Postseason.

The Downfall of Horse_ebooks

"Meet Trouble, the incorrigible rogue colt that refuses to be ridden but later goes on to discover deep within himself the... most dreadful thing that can ever happen to a horse owner... BLACK FURY... ...AND much, much."
— Horse E. Books

That's how the stories used to go, brilliant disconnected snippets resolving over a day into a sliced-up narrative or one cobbled together by the reader, through his or her playful imagination. Along with hysterically funny sudden interjections, like a harmlessly crazy person on a street corner, that's what we used to get, before we supposedly lost Horse_ebooks, when something changed, almost imperceptibly.

I always wanted to call it "Horsey Books," thinking it was a play on words. The actual name is "Horse_ebooks," with or without the space, which is what you find on its Twitter feed, and which is probably just coincidence. Spam usually isn't punny. SomethingAwful.com's Johnny "Docevil" Titanium first wrote about the account and gave the skinny on it thus:

Tuesdays with Gamblor: The Problem of Telling an Oral History of 'The Simpsons'

I keep buying books about Hitler, and really this doesn't make much sense. All GOP claims aside, the world is not making more Hitler. Our Hitler levels remain constant at one or none, depending on your attitude. It's slightly illogical to pick up a book on Hitler and expect to find anything novel or radical. There is no new Hitler under the sun.

Still, I do this, not because I admire the man, but because I was once a hopeful young student who spent years reading about him and other monsters of the twentieth century before a history degree's non-practicality impressed itself on me. I invested so much time into learning the historiography of his rise and fall that I feel like I've never fully resolved the argument about him. Ninety-nine percent of the content of a new book by, say, Ian Kershaw will be old hat. Instead, the lines that jump out, the little things to search for, are the shades of argument that push interpretation gently one way or the other, changing history's verdict of the how and why, rather than the details of the what. This is a clinical and academic way of looking at it, but people do this all the time in terms of simple fan interest. (Hopefully not about Hitler.)

Consider the Beatles. New biographies come out seemingly every year, and yet the Beatles' existence as a band remains stubbornly mired in a period of a decade. As years pass, we only get more dead Beatles (seemingly along a spectrum of decreasing talent), but we don't get more of what made them. Fans refuse to let go, and so thousands buy the books to hear a familiar story again, just as more academic fans read to support or attack an argument like, "It was engineer Geoff Emerick and not Paul McCartney who changed the way McCartney's bass was recorded/mixed for the singles before Rubber Soul." (They were both trying to make him sound like James Jamerson anyway.)

It was inevitable that something like this would start to happen with The Simpsons. Like the Beatles, that show changed a generation and a form, and like the Beatles, the arguments about who created what and for what reasons will only intensify as the years between their heyday and the present increases, and as the few remaining facts in dispute continue to diminish. With the show creatively having run its last legs into the ground, it's time to assign credit and blame for the period in which it was a masterpiece. Chris Turner already tried a quasi-philosophical, uneven and solipsistic look at the show's impact on the zeitgeist with Planet Simpson, and recently John Ortved attempted a more straightforward oral history in The Simpsons: an Uncensored, Unauthorized History.

Guest Column: C-List Critics' Slapfight

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present our first guest column from a real, live person who is also a complete stranger. Maxwell Kuhl is a blogger who might also be a horrible monster or a powerful genius, but we don't know, because he didn't go through the normal vetting process of "being someone we got drunk with at some point." Instead, he used the contact information in our blogger profiles and cyberbullied us into acquiescence.


Overrated and Underwhelming

by MAXWELL KUHL

Slate published an article last week titled, "Overrated: authors, critics and editors on 'Great Books' that aren't all that great." It's a charming title and a pithy thought, fraught with possibility, potential anarchy and an air of literary excitement. What follows the title isn't really any of that.

I don't know the author, Juliet Lapidos, and I don't know the literary people she cites (though they all have serious literary gigs), and I don't have anything personal against any of them, but this article stretches the limits of useless intellectualizing and confirms that the internet, like nature, abhors a vacuum. There are two main problems with it. First, her definition of "great books" seems at once misguided and charitable. Second, the "takedowns" are dreadfully limp and banal.

As for her notion of greatness, well it's a little unclear. Beyond a book simply being "one of the greats" and a "must read" (she puts both in quotation marks), she doesn’t say all that much. The quotation marks suggest she's reluctantly deferring to someone else (without saying whom) and lacks the conviction to make her own judgment. She subsequently reveals her own wobbly standard with an ambivalent account of struggling to convince herself to read the great Thomas Hardy... unless that's a joke, which would be way too abstruse for this article — and actually funny.

Jonah Keri's 'The Extra 2%'

I like Jonah Keri. Apart from a calculus teacher who brought a hammer dulcimer to class and a trigonometry teacher who let us turn in homework only weekly, he's one of few people who've taught me things involving mathematics without engendering any sense of malice. He also has the best intro music in all of podcasting, and I suspect he makes beautiful, tender Canadian love.

More importantly, he wrote The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, the first smart book about the Tampa Bay Rays. Unless you consider brick-sized coffee-table commemorative editions with photos and cut-and-paste promotional text "good," it's essentially the first good book about the team at all, which makes it frustrating that it's often oblique about its main topic and instead feels far more enjoyable and touching in a way that Keri probably didn't initially intend.

Ostensibly, Keri's book should exhibit a kind beautiful meeting of talent and topic. He's a contributor to Baseball Prospectus and a co-writer of their Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong. So he not only marries writing chops to sabermetric bona fides, but the subtitle of this book alone tells you how right he is for the job.

Criterion Recollection: Silent Bob Strikes Out

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Pretentious Farts from a Stupid Dick: Spine #75, Chasing Amy (1997)

by MARK BRENDLE

Watching the Criterion logo fade into this waste of celluloid brings a single, artificial tear to my eye, much like when Jason Lee's character Banky poignantly asks Ben Affleck's Holden MacNeil, "Girl?" Criterion introduced Chasing Amy into its collection early on, in the laserdisc days, and I see its inclusion in the same light as Armageddon and The Rock: a movie that exemplifies its genre, even if it lacks individual merit in spades.

It would be hard to count the number of times Kevin Smith has justified his filmmaking by explaining in his Comic Book Guy voice that he just makes "dick-and-fart joke movies" and that taking them seriously misses the point. If only this were true. The problem with Smith's filmmaking, evident in Chasing Amy, is that he actually does think his movies are more than dick and fart jokes; he makes a point of forcing his juvenile ideas of morality, social commentary and intelligent dialogue into his already jumbled and mismanaged work. That he also utilizes an excessive amount of dick-and-fart filler to offset the pretentious emptiness of his dialogue and plot proves only that he has the faintest glimmer of awareness that his movies suck and, as such, need sufficient cushion to repel critical barbs.

I won't dwell on the whys or hows of Clerks' success, but its unlikely acceptance into the usually hermetic world of filmmaking launched Smith's career and developed a cult following that has maintained its adamant support all the way down the steep trajectory of his oeuvre. After the abysmal failure of Mallrats, Chasing Amy almost did not get made at all. But low budgets and independent productions can be positive aspects of a film. One of Smith's stated influences, Richard Linklater's Slacker, proves that a movie does not require a big production to be good. It does, however, require some kind of unique insight and respectful self-awareness, the lack of which can only produce pretentiousness, something that seems as much an integral part of Smith's "Askewniverse" as hockey, skeeball and inside jokes.

Ostensibly, Chasing Amy tells the story of Ben Affleck's giant face, complete with goatee (or, as Smith angrily points out on the commentary track, a "van Dyke"), mugging the camera for a consistent two hours, under the laughably allusive name Holden MacNeil, while one of the women Smith somehow convinced to touch his penis, Joey Lauren Adams, rambles incoherently in her trebled screech about gays and lesbians, much to the chagrin of homosexuals everywhere. Adams' Alyssa is the comfortable sort of movie lesbian: she's blonde, good-looking, politically null and evidently just a little bit of pitched-woo away from not actually being a lesbian.

Bill Simmons and Grantland

In the last few days, ESPN began the soft launch of Grantland.com, a "sports and culture website created by Bill Simmons," their in-house blogger/everyman writer and Boston mega-fan for the last nine years. It has a lot of problems.

The basic appearance alone can look discouraging to someone who's never read ESPN or Simmons. The banner quote is tiny, something sure to be fixed but also something that only takes 20 minutes to tweak before a soft launch and constitutes your visual branding. To those familiar with Simmons, other problems leap to the fore, such as the very idea of his tackling a culture website of any kind.

Even fans of his would concede that a Bill Simmons Culture Museum could be housed in a newlyweds' guest room, with four walls tacked with Bobby Orr, Pedro Martinez, Tom Brady and Larry Bird jerseys, with a single chair facing a TV/DVD cabinet stocked with copies of The Shawshank Redemption, The Karate Kid, sports movies, John Hughes movies, Pacino/De Niro movies and a complete set of Miami Vice and The White Shadow episodes. Die-hard fans can probably name only five non-sports books he's ever read (and three of them are by Malcolm Gladwell). On the TV front, Simmons spent a few years proudly reminding people of his refusal to watch shows like House, The Wire or Arrested Development.

Creating a culture site when you essentially have no interest in an entire medium and celebrate your willful blindness to acclaimed work from other media means it can only operate if the intent is actually to be bad at it. In one sense, Jack Kevorkian is an incredibly flawed doctor, but if you approach him from a different frame of reference, he's a specialist with an incomparable track record. Similarly, Simmons so regularly mauls subtlety and complexity with ham-fisted prose and wads multi-faceted concepts into gut-level inanity that maybe his purpose here really is to reduce culture to a kind of gray-lighted broadcast accompanied by a undifferentiated white-noise frat obscenity — like a rocky seashore whose breaking surf gives off the soothing noise of a constant fart.

The Poetry of, Like, Alienation and Stuff

A former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com, short-fiction writer and author of the Criterion Recollection, Mark Brendle is also a regular reviewer of literary fiction for Et tu, Mr. Destructo. His last piece, "Huck Finn and the Nigger in the Woodpile," examined the new bowdlerized edition of the classic Twain novel. In his private life, he has inspired the television series Portlandia and been romantically linked to both Winona Ryder and Adam Duritz. He uses a different open-source operating system for every mood. You can follow him on Twitter.


Guinness World Record: A Hipster Say '...'


by MARK BRENDLE

"…"

i don’t hide my sadness
and i don’t glorify it either
my sadness is displayed exactly as it should be

Poetry that matters reflects contemporary society upon itself, in its funhouse mirror way, with various layers of meaning, allusion and intent. Lehan Li's self-published book of poetry, "…", gives voice to the information-riddled, developmentally arrested, yet surprisingly self-aware modern manchild. An overarching theme of intimacy versus irony ties this collection of short, funny poems together in a way that produces a cohesive worldview, one shared by many people in their twenties, of absurdity, loneliness and destructive wit.

The title of the book, "…", lends itself to multiple interpretations: the ellipsis as silence, the ellipsis as gap between sentences, the absurd symbol of failed communication or the popular catchphrase of many a Final Fantasy protagonist. In past forms, an author typically chose between irony and sincerity, clueing in the reader to the mode in which they were operating. In "…" however, no such distinction exists. More than a narrative technique, the simultaneity of ironic sincerity betrays an emotional compartmentalization that drives the author and readers who share his malaise through a cycle of mockery and desperation.

We've internalized the mechanisms of too many cartoon anti-heroes, sarcastically dynamiting anything sincere and pointing out the inescapable vulnerability in those who fail to armor themselves with ironic distance. TV characters spout witticisms in every direction, blow up every sacred bond and ideal, yet exert an image of unattainable happiness, appearing inhuman, unreal, like media golems forged from the worst pieces of our realities and the best phantoms of our desires.

'Christine Falls': Irish Quincy and Slumming Literary Lions

Years ago, when I worked regularly with lots of different lawyers, I started to notice interesting speech patterns in members of legal-support staff who frequently interacted with the same people. When we'd talk about certain advocates, the words "lawyer" and "attorney" would be used along a spectrum of professional and ethical probity. A lawyer was just some viper that an asshole plaintiff hired to sue over an orange tree dropping unwanted fruit over a shared fence. An attorney was a serious person, something even the constitution said you had an inviolable right to speak to.

There were exceptions to this pattern, of course; I even heard more than a few people make a similar argument with terms reversed. But I found myself adopting this distinction. Lawyers are the sharks that boorish people tell you you'll be getting a call from. Attorneys are the urbane guys, too reserved and confident to be ashamed of still carrying around leather valises with buckles on them, the sorts of people your granddad would sit in wing-backed chairs with and talk about Korea. If I used the term "lawyer" and spoke of someone I esteemed, I almost always prefaced it with his type of practice. "Oh, he's an appellate lawyer; he fights cigarette companies through the appeals process." I believe lawyers buy into this denominational barrier, too. There's got to be a reason why the most predatory and shameless of their ilk officiously refer to themselves as "Personal Injury Attorneys."

For me at least, this same linguistic separation carries over to the field of writing. Practically anyone can be an author; the ability to string together a narrative from A to B to C is something within most people's wheelhouse. That's just relating data, basic structural stuff that we intrinsically learn from our parents' teaching us, from overheard conversations, from all kinds of entertainment, religion and reporting. But just as the term "attorney" seems to signify that, beyond structural talent, an intellectual and ethical light is on and somebody is at home, there is something more important to the term "writer." (Of course, people have made the inverse of this argument, too. Quick joke: what's the difference between an author and a writer? An author is someone people will actually pay to read.) It bespeaks some artisanal distinction, some craft and spiritual intent that transcends the sum of all the data and incidents in a story.

Murder, Suicide, Fire, Theft, Racism and Boners: Cait Murphy's Case for Baseball's Greatest Season

At the heart of Cait Murphy's very entertaining Crazy '08 is a simple thesis: that the 1908 baseball season is the greatest in the history of the game. To prove this, she combines daily results for a handful of teams over the 154-game season with character studies of the richly idiosyncratic founding fathers of the national pastime and a selective but enlightening contextual look at American culture and baseball at the turn of the last century. Both approaches have their benefits and shortcomings, and while simultaneously pursuing them provides a natural counterpoint that helps to pace the season and deepen our understanding of it, both elements can at times inhibit the other from feeling fully realized.

On an "and then what happened?" level Murphy's approach is efficient and fairly easy to grasp. She focuses on a team's fortunes over the course of a few weeks, then switches to another team, allowing us to watch the see-sawing of luck, injury, slump and serendipity peculiar to baseball's long season. Non-fans frequently make the complaint that this is exactly what's wrong with baseball — its interminable pace both in-game and over the course of the year. These people are idiots. To the purist or even a lightly engaged fan, this is the essence of baseball: a long journey that inevitably wrenches honesty from the performance of its players, tempering hot streaks during (then) 154 games with their counterparts, the slumps, at the end giving us a fairer idea of the capabilities of all involved.

Thus Murphy shows us the New York Giants on a roll and then suddenly dropping games to weaker opponents. Pitchers lose "their stuff" for a few games and give up heartbreaking losses. Giants legend and Hall of Famer, the gentlemanly Christy Mathewson, comes into a game with an arm that feels like jello, or meets a batter whose owned him for years now and gives up another hit. The Pirates, Cubs and Giants rise and fall in the standings, while other teams languish in the basement. Of course, even under the best of circumstances, this style of recap doesn't always work.

Genre Fiction, Rennie Airth and the Blitz

During some sleepless nights this holiday, I found myself too tense to read anything with big words. Improving books about North Korea or the American Revolution satisfied for a paragraph before my mind drifted off, and I wound up turning pages with no clue as to their contents. Eventually, I settled on a trilogy of detective stories from Rennie Airth. After speeding through them over two nights, I felt what seems like a unique reaction to a trilogy of novels: that the second was by far the best of all.

Now, if you know a Star Wars fan or are one yourself, this is not necessarily a radical idea regarding film, but it's not something I've heard stated often about books (at least in part because good books rarely have a sequel and almost never have two of them). The argument in favor of The Empire Strikes Back is that it offers the richest character study, broadens the moral and spiritual parameters of its universe and increases the stakes for everyone. What's interesting about the Airth books, though, is that despite all of them featuring the same characters going over virtually the same plot for the same stakes, the second book tries the least to convince you of how grave they are and, in that process, creates a richer story for those same characters.

Of course, immediately after thinking of writing this down, I thought about a response I'd received to another piece I'd written about historical detective fiction. Midway through last year, I got in an argument on a message board with a guy who's read this site off and on. I suggested that a book he liked didn't really count as "literature," to which he replied (I'm paraphrasing), "What the hell would you know about it? All you do is review mystery novels." Ouch.

Harry Potter and the NFL Wild Card Weekend

Somewhere around hour #6 of the first day of NFL Wild Card weekend, I began to suspect that I'd been cured of my loathing of sports announcers.

Nearly two years spent luxuriating in the NFL Red Zone channel's absence of commercials and its frenetic jumps from game to game and from big play to big play meant that I'd experienced unmediated football. When big important things are happening in the game is when most announcers are too focused to go on inane time-filling mental jags. I had been spared about 30 weeks' worth of ads about THE ONLY TRUCK WITH A HEMI, Lipitor and dick medicine, and also "end zone" reporting from the obese Tony Siragusa, who needs to have a heart attack from mistaking his dick medicine for Lipitor — then have his corpse dragged into a ditch by a truck.

I was cheerful and, at times, a little bit rueful. This was fun. Who could fail to have total fun while watching football, and why had I failed at that so long? Could it be that I hadn't given people a fair shake?—that so much familiarity over so many years bred such contempt that I willfully blinded myself even to some announcers' good qualities? Were they actually good people, and was I actually just the jerk?

On the second day, during the fourth game of the weekend, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman dispelled all my doubts in less than three minutes. They didn't just suck; they sucked expeditiously. They sucked like they'd just gotten hired at Suck Co. by the Director of Suckery, and they were still in their 30 day probationary period wherein they could be terminated instantly for failure to suck hard, suck often and suck with vigor. Their ratio of minutes spent talking to minutes in which they were sucking approached one. They were truly doing yeoman's work, if "yeoman" is old English for the blowjob caddy on a ship that's falling apart because the people who built and run it are all assholes.

What I had forgotten to take into account was that minor but cherished delight of the NFL playoffs: that networks send out their best people to cover games because their limited broadcasting access allows them to know which is the game to cover. (For instance, of the four games this weekend, NBC covered the first two, while CBS and FOX covered the next two.) Generally, the people who have been around the longest are the people who viewers complain about the least, so networks send out the veterans expecting to satisfy the viewership.

This can still get screwed up, though. FOX Sports, for instance, is categorically horrible, which is how their premier announcing team can be universally regarded as the worst one on their payroll. Buck and Aikman have reached the top of the pyramid — and with any luck they will be entombed in it soon — but it's as if Egyptian civilization was based on the glory and immortality of turds. FOX Sports' national football (and baseball) empire is a ziggurat of cowpats lorded over by retards.

Let's go to the games.

Huck Finn and the Nigger in the Woodpile

Note: Mark Brendle is a media critic for BarnesandNoble.com, a short-fiction writer and the author of the Criterion Recollection series for Et tu, Mr. Destructo?. Today he takes a break from reviewing classic cinema to address a word volatile enough to create powerful anxiety and debate for parents' groups, school representatives and even booksellers. You can follow him on Twitter.

Recently NewSouth Books, an impossibly ironic name, partnered with a Mark Twain scholar named Alan Gribben to publish an edition of Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The noteworthy thing about this edition is that it completely removes the word "nigger" from the book.

While some may see this as a harmless attempt to render Twain’s novel accessible to younger children, in fact it does a two-fold harm and sets a dangerous precedent for the publishing industry. First, manipulating a text after the fact, especially one as well known and well-liked as Huckleberry Finn, is a disservice to the author and more importantly to the work itself. The second, more grievous harm caused by this attempt to make the novel "politically correct" consists of a revisionist mentality toward American history.

Gribben, the brains behind this edition, claims that the idea for changing the book came to him as he gave public readings of Huck Finn and substituted the word "slave" for "nigger" as he spoke. However, his hesitation to speak this word aloud, in front of an audience of listeners, illustrates the very reason why it must remain in the novel. The very embarrassment Gribben, and most anyone, feels when using the word "nigger" is a direct result of a complex and terrible history that will be a part of our country forever. "Nigger" and "slave" are in no way synonymous — just ask a racist whose ancestors came to America in indentured servitude. While it’s true that slavery is the central issue around which the word "nigger" was developed, it can hardly be said that "slave" carries the same connotations as "nigger."

'Everything Is Going to Be Great'

The cover of Rachel Shukert's Everything Is Going to Be Great speaks to the reader in the same way that the "Don't Panic!" cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is probably meant to. Her memoir evokes the anxieties of the collegiate and post-collegiate, groups for which the dread of embarrassment, confusion and failure — of having tripped coming out of life's starting gate — is far more real than for fictional space travelers. They need some assurance that the journey will be okay, and so does the reader, both in a general existential sense and because so much of her book can induce cringes of recognition and sympathy.

Shukert is a klutz and a serial bad-decision maker. Despite a going-nowhere acting career (or because of it), she takes off to Europe with a touring company, performing as an extra in a play that sounds annihilatingly dull, the sort of tendentious theater that you imagine Europeans and thin New Yorkers alone like because it helps them to hate themselves and to hate the people who hate it. She travels to Vienna and has a quaint May-November affair with a Viennese man. She takes advantage of an unstamped passport (and thus unlimited time in Europe) and stays with two gay friends in Amsterdam for what seems like months. While there, she gets involved with a man already in a long-term relationship, stands in front of the Anne Frank house passing out coupons for bad American comedy, has a wrenching but meaningful moment with her visiting parents and finally stumbles across a happy ending.

That last item is meant literally, but given much of the book's content, it's perfectly understandable that someone might mistake it for a handjob euphemism. Part of what makes Everything Is Going to Be Great so rife with anxiety at times is that many embarrassing moments are graphically sexual. In the midst of a dental emergency, a jealous ex-girlfriend shrieks at Shukert before she's whisked through a dark doorway and, basically, tongue-assaulted at both ends by a pair of Italian partners-in-fucking. During her Viennese sojourn, she discovers what an uncircumcised penis is like, in the most profound and orally immediate way possible. The former event betrays a shockingly undeveloped danger sense, and the latter shows a surprising inexperience. Both episodes are the sorts of things the book's title is for: Rachel Shukert emphatically and reassuringly pledges a positive outcome because, in many parts of the story, she does some pretty stupid and worrisome shit.

An Open Letter to Famous Russian Translator Richard Pevear

Dear Mr. Pevear,

Sir, please find enclosed the content of your latest email to me. Simply put, this is inexcusable. It has gone too far.


I admit to being fooled by the first one. A hyperlink modestly titled Petersburg could very well have directed me to a new translation of Bely's novel. Honestly, the double-entendre didn't even occur to me at the time. A subsequent email entitled "Bang Britzka" appeared similarly innocuous.

National Novel Writing Month: 'In the Beginning Was the All-Spark Cube'

Explain to anyone what National Novel Writing Month is, and there's a good chance that person will say, "Oooh, yeah. That idn't good." Getting people writing and thinking harder about story and characterization is a good thing and, longterm, should only engender a stronger appreciation for literature. Undoubtedly, the organizers of "NaNoWriMo" have their hearts in the right place. That said, meeting their goals via a project that demands 50,000 words in 30 days from people who may have gone years without writing more per day than an email yields more accidentally funny stuff than anything else.

Among people who take writing seriously, who realize that it's work, the default responses range from weak encouragement to discreet eyerolling. If you're looking for a more substantive response, it's likely to be a sincere wish that all the attention for NaNoWriMo could be directed at, say, funding the sort of community-college creative writing workshops that might actually employ people who take writing seriously.

In the short term, though, sympathetic teasing or mockery dominate the reactions. (I asked for a blurb from a published author I know — one who both participated in NaNoWriMo and who is patient enough to have enjoyed teaching high school — and even his politely begging off contained the concession that it yields a lot of terrible work as well as people who take it way too seriously and start self-identifying as "Author.") NaNoWriMo pieces tend toward self-insertion fan-fic, the genre-heavy and stereotypical. There are girls rewriting the story of their doomed college relationship; only this time it works out. There are boys turning themselves into crime-fighters who have sex. Where the sexes meet, there are wizards and aliens and monocled men in morning coats with pneumatic arms getting down to lovemaking in the Babbage-Omicron Zeppelin.