Tod Goldberg

Non Believers, You Can Check The Stats*

My friend Rider's 30 second spot for Obama is one of the 15 finalists for Moveon's top award, thanks in no small part to the tremendous number of you who went and voted from this site. So, take a few more minutes of your life and cast your deciding vote here (you'll have to go through many of the 15 of the finalists, but they are all actually pretty good...a little heavy on the treacle in places, but, you know, it's liberal politics, what do you expect?). And as long as I'm pimping, if you happen to be in NY, check out his short film Irish Twins in the Tribeca Film Festival, which has two more showings -- one on Wednesday and one on Friday.

*bonus points for anyone who can cite the source without visiting google...

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

My friend Rider, his girlfriend Alexandra and his brother Shiloh called in a few favors, made a few calls, killed a few midgets with outstanding vendettas, bought actors off with troughs of coke and photos of them in compromising positions with Republicans and then made a series of ads for MoveOn.org's "Obama in 30 Seconds" campaign competition. The results are pretty damn funny. They actually ended up with several options, but have submitted one for competition. (In order for your vote to count, do go and sign in at that website.)

The other spots are available on their website, but since I'm all about spreading the viral campaign, I've put them below as well:

Norman Mailer Dies And...

...Ed Champion skull fucks his still-warm corpse into hell...

...Mark Sarvas provides links a plenty...

...NPR gives him the All Things Considered treatment...

...John Freeman prints a recent interview he conducted with the author... 

...I admit that I frequently confuse Brian's Song and The Executioner's Song in my mind, to the point that I'm never sure if Gary Gilmore played for the Bears and was befriended by Billy Dee Williams or if Brian Piccolo was a murderer who later married Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter. I never read much Mailer, apart from The Executioner's Song and The Naked and the Dead, and am now unsure if I actually read The Naked and the Dead or if I've just told people I have and, along the way, assimilated the plot into my brain. I haven't read enough of Mailer to have an informed opinion as to the skull fucking or the glorification except to say that one by one the books I remember being stacked on the shelves of my childhood home -- the Bellows, the Mailers, the O'Haras -- are now, more often than not, the works of the Great American Ghosts.

An Open Letter To Lori Drew, Mother -- And Patriot -- Of The Year

Dear Lori,

We don't know each other, but after the last few days, I feel like I have a pretty good sense of who you are, what you stand for and the limits of your world view. Maybe it's presumptuous of me to say this since we haven't been formally introduced and I've only come to know you through listening to an interview with you on a conservative talk station, reading your quotes in the newspaper and seeing a photo of you with your daughter, but my sense is that you have a jaundiced view of life, Lori, but that you're nevertheless rather enjoying your 14:59 of fame for spearheading the "banning" of Will Clarke's nonfiction piece in the anthology "When I Was A Loser."

At first, it was simply about protecting your daughter from the word cunt -- a word which is known to turn young women into enemy combatants -- and then it became a crusade against bestiality and now, well, now you're here to help All The People Of The World: "I'm not willing to lower my morals to prove a point," you said recently in the 109th interview you've conducted in the last two weeks. "I feel it is my duty to ensure that not just my child is never handed this kind of vulgar material, but (that) your children never receive it as well."

I don't have any children, Lori, but I thank you for your concern. Of course the problem with your plan to become The Queen of Decency is that the class your daughter was in has likely already finished discussing Clarke's essay and is now well into The Great Gatsby (which is filled with murder! sex! deception! and wanton alcohol consumption!), or Ivanhoe (witchcraft! Jews! sex! violence!), Of Mice & Men (murder! puppy squashing! false hope of the American dream!) or some other classic text and have long forgotten the essay in question, which is good, since it's now been banned. I've been checking the papers each day to see if there's been an up-tick in school shootings, or uses of the word cunt, subsequent to the students in your daughter's class reading the offending work, and really the only tangible thing I can find is you, Lori. You telling everyone else what to think and feel. You being outraged. You on the radio. You in the paper. You being discussed on every conservative blog in the state. And the end result, after all of You, is that an essay an entire class already read, is now not being read, which was the case before you exploded in righteous indignation at a world gone so sour that the word cunt should appear in an essay.

I know, I know, you're also upset about bestiality. Let's examine the grand total of bestiality contained in Clarke's essay, Lori. Are you ready? No need to pack a lunch, because this will be short: "What if a guy fucking a dog only worked on the depraved urges that lead to buying liquor? The book was terribly unclear on this." That's it, Lori, and it's actually referring back to another text the author read in this piece of nonfiction. There's no one actually fucking a dog in this essay, Lori. But the thing is, Lori, this is nonfiction. This is something a teenager thought about. A teenager. You see, teenagers live in this world even if you don't. That Clarke is recounting his own thoughts is simply his personal history. Are you concerned about other historical situations your daughter might read about?

There's World War II, which your daughter will read about in her history class. Are you concerned that the depictions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima will scar her indelibly? What about Auschwitz?  Is the real loss of human life somehow less awful, less spiritually destructive than the silly queries of a 16 year old about a man fucking a dog? I suspect your daughter will learn about the Roman Empire and their wonderful baths. What if she learns that those baths were habitually used by men in the company of other men, which lead to, you know, white hot gay sex? Oh, they might not mention it in her history text, but I'm sure someone in her class saw the documentary on Discovery and will let that rabbit out. What if she happens to get a dash of modern history and learns about ethnic cleansing and the wholesale rape that went along with it? What if she's simply taught about the founding of America, which was largely built on the backs of slaves? Maybe she'll avoid all of these pesky classes after you read this, certain that your daughter will become, you know, human, and thus you'll home school her. What if she happens across the newspaper and reads about any series of grisly murders, rapes and kidnappings? What if she reads about Michael Vick not fucking, but torturing his dogs? An iron lung, Lori, that's where you should put her.

I'm sensitive to your plight, Lori, I really am. I think it's unlikely anyone in the class your daughter was in would benefit from my essay in the same book on my failed forage into oral sex, so I'm glad the teacher didn't assign it. Of course, the irony here is that I wrote that essay about an incident that happened when I was about your daughter's age, which means kids your daughter's age couldn't be too much different than I was, and so perhaps they'd empathize with me. Is my essay appropriate reading for a teen? Oh, probably, if that teen had cable TV and knew who Zsa Zsa Gabor was (it's important for the overall hilarity of the piece, Lori). Some books and essays aren't appropriate for kids -- you'll get no argument from me there. It's not a red state or a blue state issue. It's an issue of knowing your child, I believe, and what they can and cannot comprehend. (I recall being told as a young kid that a book was too adult for me by a librarian in Walnut Creek and my mother getting mad as hell, because she'd decide what was too adult for me...and as it turned out, nothing ever was.) So that you didn't want your child to read the essay is fine, Lori. Though is it beyond the pale to think your child has never seen the word cunt before? Has never heard a gross joke or two about a man fucking a dog? (It's rarely a lifestyle choice in my experience, Lori, not even here in California; it's usually just a joke.) Nothing in Will Clarke's essay is more salacious than what your child might hear in the halls of her school, presuming she ever wants to go back after your star-fucking turn on the dance floor. Nothing in the essay will turn her into a gun toting maniac. Rest easy. Though I suppose it's difficult to rest easy when you're now charged with protecting the morality of children who aren't yours, too. What if other kids, in other cities, are reading this very letter to you, Lori, and seeing the word cunt and anecdotal mentions of dogs being fucked by men? Will the world just blow up? You better get yourself a cape and a sidekick, because saving the world from bad words is a fight made for a superhero.

The thing I'm most appalled about, really, is how you've turned your parenting choice into a conservative talking point. Let me tell you about me, Lori. I know a bit about liberal and conservative politics from the inside. My uncle just had Hillary over for dinner. My oldest and dearest friend is helping to run one of the most high profile conservative campaigns for the White House. And what I can tell you from my experience is that all politicians, no matter the party, are amoral, power driven whack jobs who like kinky sex and use the word cunt as a noun, verb and adjective. The closest I've ever come to seeing Caligula realized was at a California Republican Party Convention held in a swanky hotel in Northern California. By day, Republican law makers talked family values and morals, by night they were literally licking salt off of female Young Republicans. I went to a Democratic function not too long ago and after hours, when the tents were pulled up, it was pretty much the same thing -- except it was organic sea salt. You see, Lori, the people who champion your cause in the conservative blogosphere or radio or, eventually when you're held up as a paragon of values, on the political stump, go home and jerk off to Cinemax porn just like the rest of us. And as kids they probably read about a man fucking a dog or two, at least if they read the Bible, because keeping time with beasts is in there over and over again (really, it is -- check it out and I'll have the lord watch over me and thee when we're apart, one from the other, until you get back), or if they grew up on a farm, and I'm sure they use the word cunt and I'm sure you're not perfect, either, but it's not as if our country is totally fucked up...oh...wait...well, you get my point, Lori. Word rarely makes flesh.

So, really, what has your crusade achieved? You've banned an essay...after the class already read it. You've most likely encouraged, through your vanity and arrogance, more sales than Simon & Schuster could have dreamed possible. Though the thing that really makes me wonder about you, Lori, is your decision to leave a comment on John McNally's blog, where you show yourself to be smug and self-important and not the least bit concerned about the welfare of your child:

lori drew said... Kudos on your first banned book. To bad it's no Pulitzer. Well atleast you achieved something. I just hope I wasn't responsible for any increased sales. That would have been an even bigger trajedy.

The pinheads.
Lori Drew
Dictator as you say.

One might think it would behoove you, when you have the ear of the man who found all the essays in the book in question, to perhaps ask just what the fuck his problem was, why he deigned to create such filth. If you're concerned about vulgarity and you have the source of your most hated text before you, shouldn't you at least try to find the root of his issue? Your study in and of itself might be the grist of your own Pulitzer winning work. I doubt you've read any Pulitzer winners, Lori, but if you'd like to, I suggest the 2001 winner in fiction, Empire Falls, which contains a school shooting, a gay priest, adulterous relationships, drunken behavior, theft, foul language, crooked cops, a really long prologue in italics (a personal issue of mine, but read it...it totally pays off) and there's a cat with a clear and convincing desire to mate with one of the main characters. There's also 2003's Middlesex, which is about a hermaphrodite! But for a really good time, pick up this year's winner, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's a very tender love story about a baby on a spit. Really. You'll love it.

Anyway, Lori, you sort of scare the shit out of me. I guess that's what this is all about. You scare me and you honestly sadden me.

But when my next book comes out, I'd like to hire you as my publicist.

All my best,

Tod

Update: This Lori Drew is not the same Lori Drew that allegedly created a fake MySpace identity that led to the death of Megan Meier. But yes, both are complete fucktards of the highest order and, I suspect, will cause an entire generation of women born to the Drew name not to be named Lori. Nancy would be a good alternative.

Fucktard Of The Year Still A Fucktard

I dunno...this time it just feels tawdry. The first time, well, it was hot. Actually, I think this time it's just slightly more offensive because they're now informing us that if you -- specifically YOU -- don't read, the Nazis win:

Q6: Why burn books?

A: As a wake-up call to the culture. The Nazi's burned books because they didn't want people to read them. Prospero's is burning books to try and get you to read - because when people don't read books they are accomplishing exactly what the Nazi's wanted.

Burning books is an inflammatory act because books can contain our most sacred and valuable thoughts.  A 2004 National Endowment of the Arts study indicates that less than 50% of Americans read even one book not required by work or school in a year – down 20% in the last 2 decades.  These figures are 5 years old; this trend line will drop us to a 1/3 of Americans reading even one book in just a few years.  Combined with a waste stream that destroys hundreds of thousands of books each year, this allows us an opportunity to hold up the art/life mirror to our culture.  We risk a secular idolatry when we value the physical pages and continue to ignore the fact that fewer and fewer people are choosing to read what's contained on the pages.

The Stupid, It Burns

If you're still drawn like a, uh, moth to the flame of fucktardery that is the story below, I've written something about it on Jewcy today, and picked up a few other opinions along the way:

If Wayne and Leathem don’t see the hypocrisy in their actions, perhaps they need only to look down the road a few miles at the Blue Valley School District, where debates raged over appropriate titles being offered to students, prompting the formation of the PABBIS-like ClassKC.org (Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools), a group with their own stringent ideas about literacy. If burning 20,000 books for the cause of literacy is an act of art, how does that art change if the belief system of the group changes? I have no doubt that both Wayne and Leathem love books, just as I have no doubt that many of the parents who comprise ClassKC.org love books (or at least the Book), and thus I wonder: If the action is the same, does it matter what the cause is?  If ClassKC.org hosted a book burning in the name of literacy awareness in the schools of Blue Valley, too, the same books would burn. 

"Books are life,” David Ulin, Editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, says. “You don't burn them, no matter what. While I understand the frustration of a book dealer who literally cannot give his stock away, this just plays into the notion that books are disposable -- or even worse, destructible. It's a disturbing and contradictory message for a book lover to send." 

Fucktards Of The Year

It's still early in the voting for Fucktard of the Year, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that Tom Wayne and William Lethem, the co-owners of Prospero Books in Kansas City, have such a huge lead in early reporting that it would be impossible to surmount the sheer amount of fucktardedness boiling inside their personage. To whit:

Tom Wayne amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books. His collection ranges from best sellers like Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them.

Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply - estimated at 20,000 books - is exhausted.

Actually, I believe that is the funeral pyre for your inability to run a successful business, or, at the very least, to spend a couple bucks to rent a dumpster and just throw the offending volumes away. Oh, but wait, there's more:

"After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction," he said. "And it's a good excuse for fun."

Wayne said he has seen fewer customers in recent years as people more often get their information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, that found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, down from almost 57 percent in 1982.

A good excuse for fun. Yikes. Well, on the bookstore's website, they explain it a bit more succinctly, albeit it with more unholy pretension than I can usually muster before, like, a whole pack of cloves and three or four hours of listening to Bauhaus imports:

For ten years Prospero’s Books has been in the front lines of the literary arts, both as a bookseller (www.prosperosbookstore.com) and as a publisher (www.unholydaypress.com).

As a used bookseller, we have put our money where our hearts are – surrendering our hours and our revenues to sharing the world of books and, more importantly, the ideas they contain with anyone who would listen.

During these ten years we have seen reading decline dramatically. The National endowment of for Arts study on literary literacy in America which painfully highlighted the rapid decline of reading in America. In our own community, we’ve watched as bookstore after bookstore has folded.

Yesterday, we performed an act of art – a wakeup call to all who value books and ideas. Over the last 10 years, Prospero’s Books has 20,000 books we’ve collected that people simply will not read. We receive hundreds more each week.

At Prospero’s we fundamentally believe that the literary arts are not dead. We believe that there is still much about the human condition and our time still needing to be said. In so saying, we challenge you to get involved in two ways:

1. email these stories to your friends
2. call your local TV, radio, newspaper, blogs, etc. and tell them what is going on
3. For $1 a book (+ postage), you can save these books from the flame. We will not take these $s as profit, but will use them to publish new books.

Well, that makes sense. Except that, as far as I can see, at least two of their new books are by the store's owners, Wayne and Lethem. Maybe if they framed their argument a little differently -- Unless you pay us $1 a book, plus shipping, so that we can fund our self-publishing empire, The Hunt For Red October burns! -- I could get behind this whole charade.

I find this distasteful on a lot of levels, particularly since it smells less like a protest and more like a business decision/publicity stunt. If you were doing it in real protest, would you send out a press release? Would you ask people to call their local TV, radio, newspaper, and blogs (don't any of you motherfuckers call this blog...I'm warning you...I have blog caller ID...) if there wasn't a way to make a buck? (And if TV and radio and the internet are to blame for all of this book burning, as Wayne suggests above, isn't it hypocritical to turn to them to save the books from the pyre of pretension?) If you were doing it in real protest, would you call it "fun?" If you can't sell the books, why the fuck did you buy them in the first place and why are you continuing to take in hundreds of books a day?

Burning books you can't sell makes for good copy -- hell, you've got my attention, so bully for you and all that -- but what does it solve? Are you somehow increasing readership by doing this? Are you somehow encouraging kids to step away from their PlayStations by showing them how utterly disposable words are? Are you, in fact, exacerbating the situation by publishing poetry, which, I think we can all agree, no one reads, no one wants to read and, at base, is responsible for some of the world's worst ills: Slams, spoken-word on college campuses, people reading in the "poet voice" even when they aren't reading poetry, Michael Silverblatt's odd interviewing technique and the preponderance of people taking their author photos in stairwells, dilapidated buildings, and up against walls.

My advice is simple, then: If you can't sell the books, just let people take them for free for a few months and then, the rest, throw out. It's not as much fun as burning them, but it's less pretentious, you wouldn't be accused of being publicity mongering fucktards and your true intentions -- clearing up some shelf-space -- could be achieved without the glare of your false indignation messing things up.

(Oh, one other thing: If you could, uhm, not burn my books, I'd appreciate that. Now, Lee's books, sure, that's fine.)

UPDATE: In the comments, a friend of the store in question and sometime counter-person says, essentially, No, You're a fucktard! And I reply, No, You're a fucktard. And then Romance Author extraordinaire and former officer of the court HelenKay Dimon rules that No, Tod isn't a fucktard, but this friend of the store sure is and then, well, two men enter, one man leaves and it's all Thunderdome. Check it out.

[Thanks to HelenKay for making me insane.]

Word Made Flesh

I spent a fair amount of time today reading about the mass killings at Virginia Tech and so wasn't too terribly surprised when, a few hours into the afternoon's news cycle, samples of the killer's creative writing began appearing on the Internet. As soon as they identified Cho Seung Hui as an English major, I knew it was only a matter of time before some of his work came available for examination. Having read his two short plays -- which apparently were found so disturbing that other students feared him from that alone, never mind his icy demeanor -- I couldn't help but wonder how much credence anyone should give anyone's fictional ramblings going forward, because god knows my fiction in college was far more violent than Cho Sueng Hui's and, in addition, I remember clearly the work of other students that was far more graphic, violent, misogynistic and none of those students, nor I, ended up killing three dozen people.

In my experience teaching writing at various institutions, I've encountered numerous students who, quite frankly, scared the shit out of me. Rarely was this the result of their writing. The scariest student I ever had was 6'6 and about 300 pounds, prone to loud outbursts of anger, charges of rampant racism for anyone who didn't like his work and a general sense of menace generated by his mere respiration. He wrote love stories. They were actually fairly tender love stories, if completely incoherent and prone to bizarre diversions into world politics and issues of racism. But it was his demeanor outside of the workshop that frightened the entire class to the point that the entire class came to me one after another after his first workshop and asked me to just tell the student that his work was perfect for fear of what he might do if told his work was poor again. Fortunately, the student never returned to class. Still, I think about this kid frequently. He was clearly unstable mentally but for the most part your hands are tied as a teacher.

But when a student turns in work that is hyperviolent or misogynistic, I don't think you can ever assume that it's the way the person actually lives their life. It's always dangerous to assume one's fictional creations are somehow manifestations of their inner most desires -- there's no ethical responsibility in writers to only create pleasant characters, nor to create characters that are in any way decent humans whatsoever or who have any emotional nuance. They might have a creative responsibility if they actually want their work to be readable -- and after having read Cho Seung-Hui's two plays I can report that his work was unreadable in the most base way, which is to say it doesn't appear he had much in the way of talent -- but in the end people's art is their own. They can make it as awful as they want, provided they don't want to actually earn a living from it.

One of the first short stories I wrote in college concerned a boy who systematically murders all the people who ever bullied him. Impalement was a popular choice, as I recall. Another one of my first stories was about a father who makes  his son kill his mother's lover. The father and son cut off the man's head and leave it in the freezer for the mother to find, right behind the winter's stock of venison. At no point did anyone ask me if I needed counseling. They just told me my stories sucked. I'd hate to think that one troubled young man who happened to write violent stories and then did the unspeakable will change that.

I Blame I Dream Of Jeannie

The perception that once you fly into space you can pretty much do anything you want on Planet Earth, like, you know, keep some crazy magic stripper in a bottle, or wear a diaper on a cross-country stalking excursion, has reached its pinnacle.

An astronaut drove 900 miles and donned a disguise to confront a woman she believed was her rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot, police said. She was arrested Monday and charged with attempted kidnapping and other counts.

U.S. Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, who flew last July on a shuttle mission to the international space station, was also charged with attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery. She was denied bail.

Police said Nowak drove from her home in Houston to the Orlando International Airport to confront Colleen Shipman.

Nowak believed Shipman was romantically involved with Navy Cmdr. William Oefelein, a pilot during space shuttle Discovery's trip to the space station last December, police said.

Nowak told police that her relationship with Oefelein was "more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship," according to an arrest affidavit. Police officers recovered a love letter to Oefelein in her car.

NASA spokesman James Hartsfield in Houston said that, as of Monday, Nowak's status with the astronaut corps remained unchanged.

"What will happen beyond that, I will not speculate," he said.

Hartsfield said he couldn't recall the last time an astronaut was arrested and said there were no rules against fraternizing among astronauts.

When she found out that Shipman was flying to Orlando from Houston, Nowak decided to confront her, according to the arrest affidavit. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers so she wouldn't have to stop to urinate, authorities said.

Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry.

Huh. Well, that's good to know. I now have a whole new level of respect (and attraction) for Sally Ride.

On Being Famous And Dead

The recent spate of notable deaths reminded me of a very scientific study I did a few years ago in the Las Vegas Mercury concerning the troubling trend of celebrities dying in bunches of three. I reprint it here, after the jump, in the name of national security.