We’re Trying to Ignore Them, But They Won’t Go Away

Can’t they just burn A Tale of Two Cities? Sweet Jeebus, reading Dickens’s prose was torture. And if I ever see another word about Miss Manette’s hair, so help me, FSM…

No imagination. I hope this guy doesn’t consider himself an apocalyptic vulgarian.

@FlyingChainSaw:

you have seen the mustache? they should burn that instead.

I wish just one person interviewing this piece of shit would say, “you know what, I dont believe for a second God or anyone else told you to do this. you are doing it because you are a media whore jealous of all the publicity Fred Phelps gets. what do you think of that?”

And thank goodness the media is amplifying and by sheer notoriety legitimizing the views of insane, right-wing fringe nutcases, whom we never-ever-ever-ever hear about, and who’re totally absent from our national “dialogue,” which would be perhaps be better described as an unmedicated, paranoid schizophrenic shrieking and pissing on a wall.

How much you want to bet I can get a camera crew out here to discuss the night Obama snuck into my back yard and ate a white baby under my kitchen window?

@FlyingChainSaw:

“Babies don’t cost money, they make money! ‘specially the little white ones.”

–Jerri Blank

btw, 9/11! falls on a Saturday this year, and we don’t get Friday or Monday off. Fascists.

TPM: “State Department issues global travel warning based on Koran-burning church ruckus.”

My brain hurts.

@nojo: It’s been upgraded from “shenanigans?”

@nojo:
and Interpol too!

huzzah.

@Capt Howdy:

TPM has a piece up which points out that Pastor Torch actually *has* hung out with Phelps. Apparently even Phelps thinks the guy is a kook.

Oh, also this. Should get a giggle out of the design geeks. :)

@al2o3cr:

wow
when Fred Phelps thinks you are a nut . . . .
for the life of me I dont know how to finish that.

Kook or not, burning the KOR-RAN is now the official policy of Real AmeriKKKa.

Can they toss Moby Dick in there while they’re at it?

I think he means it. He’s german and was thrown out of his own church, the church he founded, for being too muslimy extremist.

@¡Andrew!: Let’s have a ‘Burn Ayn (what is with the fucking spelling?) Rand Day’.

@¡Andrew!:

and some books of mormon?

@¡Andrew!: Hey! Watch what you say about A Tale of Two Cities and Dickens! I highly recommend the Recorded Books edition.

@TonyBlair: I was going to burn a bible in my front yard this weekend but I’d have to buy one, so I canceled on account of cheapness.

@karen marie: Did you watch the video that JNOV posted in the sandbox of her burning a Blue Book in my honor?

@SanFranLefty: I saw it but had no clue why she did it. Bad used car purchase?

@karen marie: Different blue book. The one she burned in the authority for the proper way to cite a case (or statute,etc.) in a legal document.

@¡Andrew!: I stand with you on Dickens and Melville, my friend. Do you know how much of that crap I’ve had to catalogue? Ten complete sets of Dickens in the last year alone. I wanted to stam Little Nell to death personally.
However, the Arion Press Moby Dick is very cool, with engravings by Barry Moser. Still wouldn’t want to read the (beautifully printed) text, though.

@Mistress Cynica: Moby Dick is not unlike a lot of O’Neill, it succeeds through its sheer weight and the talent of its writer even though he had no real idea how to write. It’s a pretty stunning idea and one of the greatest 1st lines ever. Dickens is another protean talent. My secret guilty pleasure is A Christmas Carol from a time I played Scrooge and would find myself weeping uncontrollably on the stage. I kept thinking, this can’t be right, and would go back to the story and yes, indeed, that is what Dick meant. For me it had to do with being an only child. When you’re Scrooge you stand outside looking in on the lives of others all night. I find his great overarching theme being to stop the children having to pay for the sins of their fathers and mothers. And I adore Bleak House, byzantine and heartstoppingly exciting. Ditto Little Dorrit. And Great Expectations is one of the pinnacles of the English novel. He’s more off-putting in the abstract than when one actually picks up one of his novels to read. Do you know (I’m sure you do) Labour and the London Poor? Great influence on Dickens and its author Mayhew was a friend of his. Most piercing moment for me was the account of the occupations undertaken in Covent Garden by girls as young as five. Collecting blossoms fallen from the barrows to gather into little nosegays to sell.

Melville was a lot more fun writing about buttsecks in the South Seas.

@Tony Blair Witch Project: I have two main problems with Dickens: first, he was paid by the word and desperately needed an editor; and second, I find his writing too blatantly manipulative of emotion. I hate feeling manipulated, and he really gets my hackles up in that regard. I understand, and respect, his efforts to draw attention to the lot of the underclass, but dude, stop hitting me over the head with a two by four.
I’m more of a Trollope person. I find people tend to like either one or the other author, but rarely both.

@Mistress Cynica: @Tony Blair Witch Project: I love Dickens for no other reason than because my personal existence has been Bleak House for the last 21 months.

I’m working on my verbose tome that will be the account of the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case of the 21st Century. It involves real estate in San Francisco, which is almost as dramatic and interesting as estates and trusts and the rule against perpetuities in England in 1850.

@karen marie: I know, I’m a bad person, but I find both Dickens’s and Melville’s prose to be unbearably overwrought and inscrutable. Mind you, I’m not referring to the actual stories or the themes of those novels–which are fascinating in their interpretation–but solely to the manner in which they’re written, which is intolerable.

@Mistress Cynica: That’s very true – as was O’Neill; he’ll never tell you something once if he can tell you 14 times. Dickens was just so talented! He was Shakespearean in the reach and ridiculousness of his novels. His plots frequently got away from him but as he wrote his mastery of character grew and deepened. I haven’t read much Trollope but what I have I enjoyed: Eustace Diamonds, Can You Forgive Her. The one I really have trouble with is George Elliot apart from the beautiful and not at all ridiculous Middlemarch. I was never so shocked as when the Dorothea did not marry who you were sure she would. I do think that Great Expectations can stand alongside any of the masterpieces of the 19th cent novel.

@¡Andrew!: M’s prose can be painful when he tries to be entertaining – like Eugene O’Neill. Which is why I like the early yarns about being shipwrecked with his boyfriend on cannibal islands.

@SanFranLefty: Will we soon see it on Masterbators Theatre hosted by Alan Cummings?

Three cheers for Trollope! The first one I read was Barchester Towers, which I love. When I learned that he had written forty novels, I was overjoyed. (That was over forty years ago, and I still have not read all forty. However, the Palliser novels as done by the redoubtable Brits in the seventies [or eighties. was it?] and shown on PBS even here in darkest southern Hoosierland were a wonderful treat, right up there with Brideshead Revisited, which came along soon after.)

why are you all making me think i should commit an entire book to memory? i don’t believe in burning ANY book. they are all sacred to me. same for tearing out pages or writing in them.

dickens? he brought us the broadway musical, “oliver!” he’s off the hook.
i used to wonder what o’neill would have written if he was taking prozac.

@nojo:
this post name reminds me of one of my favorite book titles:
“if you can’t live without me, why aren’t you dead yet?”
(cynthia heimel) a laugh out loud beach read.

@SanFranLefty: @Tony Blair Witch Project: I like both Melville and Dickens. I have a dead-tree version of Bleak House to accompany me in NotTibet. Is it a bad idea to include “Infinite Jest” in my luggage, or will the two titles cause irreparable pain and suffering to my dress shirts?

@Nabisco: I’ve never read Wallace. I’d pack Pale Fire or Pnin for the fun of them. Bleak House has a scene so silly it’s worthy of Agatha Christie. I won’t say what in case you haven’t read it. He pulls it off – admittedly leaving the reader openmouthed – through sheer talent. But the plot is a marvel of Saturday morning serial writing. About 50 principal characters and if you take any one of them away it won’t work.

Oh, and put the books in first. Shirts on top.

@baked: dickens? he brought us the broadway musical, “oliver!” I’m so proud of you.

TBWP: Thanks for not spoiling Middlemarch, which I just started. I’m only about 80 pages in right now, so I’m just getting a feel for it.