ToBS R4: Celeb fiction vs. calling anything you write a manuscript
Emma Roberts pees in a jar and massages my imagination. A friend encourages.
[matchup #60 in Tournament of Bookshit]
“Funny how new facts pop up and make you doubt that there’s any goodness in life.”1 An ewer of wisdom. “The first baby of the new year, her arrival had been announced in all the papers as if she were heir to a throne or a fortune instead of the daughter of a sometime fisherman and fulltime gambler, and the best waitress at the Garden Cove Pancake House on U.S. 1.”2 There are times when your connection to humanity is self-evident, joyously overwhelming. “She had to take a shower, like, immediately.”3 Who doesn’t know the bright snap of day, and welcome it? “Most people think about age and experience in terms of years, but it’s really only moments that define us.”4 Could it be any sweeter? “The club will not run out of tequila until I get my hair right. So shut the fuck up.”5 Forms like dew, inevitable as the sun. “One of the things I hate most about this book is that it is all about me.”6 Alas, we are all selecting principles. “Surely this babe would be impressed by his résumé.”7 Alas.
4 Glenn Beck, The Overton Window
5 Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, A Shore Thing
7 Bill O’Reilly, Those Who Trespass
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ToBS R1: characters that ‘just have to have their stories told’ vs. celebrity fiction
[Matchup #17 in Tournament of Bookshit]
I don’t how many people who hate this novel, or just want to make fun of it (here, here, here, and here for a random smattering of the shit-talking) cite the following passage as an example of bad writing: “Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.” Snooki’s “novel” might be bad (I wouldn’t know; I’ve only read one excerpt enough to write this), but shall I compare this to a summer’s day–I mean to Ayn fucking Rand, in particular from Atlas Shrugged (a book I read when I was 19 and won’t bother with again because it’s Ayn fucking Rand)?: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
All you sentence-heads, Snooki’s on the sentence tip too: “Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. And bacne. They fly into a ‘roid rage, it is a ‘road’ ‘roid rage.” I mean, sound is sound: Knopf by way of the club. I’ve read worse; hell, frequently.
10
These Things May Dismay You
Snooki of Jersey Shore fame is going to publish a novel. I have, previously, expressed enthusiasm for Tyra Banks’s opus, Modelland and I don’t have a problem with celebrity books (I support them, in fact, not that it matters), but I admit I am struggling mightily to feel anything but a profound sense of hopelessness at the idea that a young woman who has read only two books in her life (Twilight and Dear John) is going to “write” a book.
Tucker Max has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 150 consecutive weeks and he has some advice for how you, too, can make that happen.