Honoring the Iconoclast: Shakespeare? More like...Suckspeare! Yeah!

Get thou bawdy hides to a room!

Yet again, brave soldiers wander the wastes of the internet to save us from time-wasting hacks like the Bard.


i just read this book. everybody like always talks about how great it is and everything. but i don't think so. like, it's been done before, right?? soooo cliched. omg.


This fearless scholar is obviously referring to selections from The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter, which was in turn inspired by Arthur Brooke's 1562 translation of The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.  He or she also likely refers to the Roman myth of Pyramus and Thisbe.  


Of course, the author isn't referring to West Side Story or anything else written after 1595; I mean, OMG!!?1!*? Such a lack of historical perspective is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo beneath the prowess of the scholar responsible for the divine prose seen above.

Pulp Spills and Nerd Tumors

This guy had the best titles EVER.
My favorite is "Black Legion of Callisto."
Also, what a hell of a name for a metal band...

My parents are readers.  This isn't so much a compliment as a diagnosis.  Had it existed 20 years ago, they probably would have qualified for an episode of Hoarders, and they didn't stop collecting 20 years ago. Before they moved houses, the shelves for paperbacks were stacked four deep vertically, with two layers stacked horizontally on top of that -- on each shelf, on all 20-plus shelves in the house.  Don't even get me started on the hardbacks.  During my childhood, literary avalanches were known to occur and cause real-world suffocations. Rest in peace, Timmy; you were the brother I never knew.

The folks have since moved into a defunct survivalist's would-be compound out in the woods.  To give you a taste of this estate's decor, let me just say that the previous owner went through the trouble of climate-controlling his THREE gun-safes (complete with a dedicated back-up generator), but he chose to "install" his hot tub on the raised deck by balancing it atop cinderblocks stacked six feet high.  Not being quite so insane, mom and dad decided to turn the guy's panic room (no, I'm not joking) into their personal library.  Last weekend, I was tapped to help build it.

Let me put aside the back-breaking work of assembling bookshelf after bookshelf. Let's leave out the Herculean task of creating order out of four decades worth of haphazard collecting. What struck me most wasn't the amount of books my parents had, the amount of certain genres they had. My mom has been reading housewife mysteries and thrillers for years now, never really stepping outside the genre unless Michael Crichton or J.K. Rowling came calling.  She certainly had quite a few books to put up, but I could at least picture someone reading a comparable amount. But my dad...well, christ. My father owns nearly everything written by the major pulp writers in history. This is not an exaggeration.  His collection is curator-esque in its completeness.

I found everything Edgar Rice Burroughs had ever written, and Michael Moorcock, and Lin Carter.  Dad has a first edition of Pigeons From Hell and nearly every Conan novel, plus all of the adventures Andrew J. Offutt wrote after Howard died.  I found every novel ever set in the Dark Sun universe, and there were so many novels set in the Warhammer universe it took TWO shelves to contain them.

Now, I knew these were my father's reading proclivities, but most of this stuff had been buried out of sight for my entire life. It was...jarring to see how much my dad loves this stuff. I mean, imagine your significant other likes to hulu-hoop, and you know this; it's just one of those endearing little quirks. Then, while investigating a discrepancy on the credit card bill, you discover that your loved one is maintaining a series of storage units, each of them filled to the brim with hulu-hoops of all shapes and sizes. It was a staggering realization: the combined vertigo of underestimated passion and an otherwise unpredictable normalcy.

In two days, my hands passed over the collective history of sci-fi/fantasy subculture and the bygone days of pay-by-the-word fiction. The stories weren't so much written on paper anymore as the ink was allowed to lie on the bloated, green mold that had eaten its way underneath. I worried each title would crumble in my hands; one even did, but it turns out that dad had two copies of Casca the Damned, for some reason.

Thinking back on it, I now understand my lifetime obsession with comic books, tabletop roleplaying, the sci-fi channel, and every other form of crap art. Dad never foisted these things upon me; we couldn't have dug out those old pulps if we'd tried. I was always allowed -- nay, encouraged -- to read books of my own choosing, yet I always picked the grandchildren of the pulps like they were my long lost siblings.

Is my reading just a phenotype for some inherited cultural gene, like myopia and flat feet? Did I mutate in the nerd radiation leaking from row three of the overstocked bookshelves? Did the speculative fiction that secretly insulated my childhood alter my growth like some environmental spill, my self-identity not so much learned as breathed in via the asbestos snow of decaying, low-grade paper stock?

As an English teacher, I'm constantly justifying the importance of books -- and the act of reading itself -- for a generation that seems all too eager to dance on the grave of print media. Does the fact that my personality is so completely shaped by books I've never read help or hurt that arguement? Either way, how do I express it in a way a teenager can understand? After all, I didn't know the infection was taking root until I was already terminal.

The Cardinal Sin of Bloggery

I wish something this dramatic had happened.

I know I'm new to the whole blog thing, but even a noob like myself knows that waiting a month between posts defeats the purpose of the exercise. I've disappointed my legions of fans and followers. The nameless hordes grown ravenous for morsels of wisdom in my absence, and for that I apologize.

In my defense, if form followed function, my previous laptop would look something like the picture above. The old warhorse came down with a massive virus, prompting me into a 3 a.m. panic of password changing before someone stole my identity with that key-logger (not sure why you'd want to be a chubby, midwestern man-boy, but shame on you all the same, Mr. Hacker). I decided to send her out to pasture. I got 5 years of college and a couple of unpublished novels out of her so, you know...that'll do pig; that'll do.

Next day, after the sales attendant asked why I was crying, I handed him my credit card and pointed a shaky finger at the mac-book. I'm not disappointed with the product. Granted, I'm now taking up residence in a tent display at Bass Pro Shop (shhhhhh, don't tell anyone!), but this certainly is one fine machine. It feels a bit childish to do anything on it thus far; its capabilities warrant more serious endeavors than googling myself and playing Peggle. However, until I can get an audience at the White House, load my fancy 3d projections into the war room, and say "No, Mr. President. The asteroid will strike in two hours...IN NEW YORK!" I guess I'll just have to be content with useless blogging.

Then again, the processor on this thing is fast enough to play Starcraft 2.

Maybe I won't be posting for a while, after all...