SemiConscious Dot Org

It is with great shame and regret that I must inform you that I completely spaced on this year’s observance of Towel Day. I spent the entire day wandering around this low-rent rock of a planet without The Most Massively Useful Thing in my possession. It’s a wonder I survived. If any regular readers of this blog inadvertently experienced more danger or inconvenience than they otherwise would have due to my failure to warn them of the need to carry a towel, I sincerely apologize.

Let me make it up to you all. Tomorrow, June 16th, is Bloomsday. Whatever else you do, make certain that you have a copy of Ulysses on you at all times, and be sure to drink lots and lots of Guinness. Your very life may depend on it.

There, now we’re even. You’re welcome.

What’s daffier than daffy?

Writing a book about the future of libraries (you know, those places where they lend books to people)... and then charging twenty dollars to download it.

Who out there has the pun, the barb, the eloquent poison-pen quip, to sum up the silliness of this situation in devastating fashion? Let’s hear ‘em. Seriously, I’m tapped out. I got nothin’...

Short answer: no.

Slightly longer answer: Aw, HELL no.

Maybe one of the creators of the original, cheesy 70’s series was Mormon. Maybe the current show’s “Lost Tribe” mythos has some superficial similarities with Mormonism (and about a dozen other religions.) So? If The Best Show on TV™ was designed as a secret Mormon recruitment tool, they’ve done a lousy job of it: morally ambiguous, three dimensional characters; the principle adherents of the One True Religion being the Bad Guys; many different philosophical viewpoints presented without any being favored; and lots of drinking, swearing, and screwing. You know, sort of like real life.

As Keith points out, fiction (and science fiction) whose primary purpose is to advance one philosophical or religious agenda almost always sucks, because character development and story believability is inevitably sacrificed for the purpose getting across the author’s agenda. The result is a story that is boring, stilted, and predictable, with two dimensional characters doing idiotic things for reasons that never ring true. That, and lots of windy moralizing and long, boring speeches. In short, the end product is terrible and unreadable. (See: the Left Behind series; any Ayn Rand novel ever written.)

BSG will go down as one of television’s artistic pinnacles, precisely because it avoids all those pitfalls.

At last, someone has finally combined my two favorite pastimes:

Reading books and drinking beer.

That is all.

I’m sure that, all this time, the vast majority of you have been laboring under the illusion that the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is the only annual prize awarded for horrible fiction writing.

How wrong you were!

When it comes to truly deplorable writing, not even death, it seems, lets you off the hook. This year’s Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award has gone to the late Norman Mailer for a description of oral sex in his final novel, The Castle in the Forest, in which a male member is likened to a “coil of excrement”.

“It was the excrement that tipped the balance,” admitted Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, whose editorial staff judge the annual prize. “That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being ‘ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety’. That was pretty awful.”

(link via LISNews)

As further irrefutable proof of the timeless maxim that People Too Old For Sex Should Not Write About It, the article notes that in 2004, the award went to Tom Wolfe for the amazingly awkward and voyeuristic I am Charlotte Simmons, a novel in which the 74 year old Wolfe described a bunch of raunchy college sex scenes from the first-person viewpoint of a female, 18 year old coed.

You know, so he could express his disapproval of such naughty behavior.

Riiiiight…..

Great Zombie Jesus, it looks like Christianity is, yet again, under dire attack from the insidious forces of The Gay Agenda!

(Awesome pic via Badtux)

For those of you who may not know, The Gay Agenda is a fiendish supervillain who works 24-7 to turn all of America’s God-fearing children gayer than the Mayor of Gaytown. This insidious character has many weapons: in addition to zapping people with his Gay Laser of Gayness, he also works his dastardly plots through his allies in the Big Gay Evil Liberal Media.

Luckily, however, Rev. James Dobson is here to protect us from the terrifying menace of gay penguins:

Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said the complaints over books are well-founded.

“Most of these books don’t end up actually being removed,” she told Family News in Focus. “The few that do end up being removed are being removed mostly because they have sexual themes or are explicit.”

The book that topped the list this year was And Tango Makes Three, the story of “gay” penguins. It’s the second year in a row that a book with gay themes drew the most ire from parents.

“Parents have a right to object to their kids being exposed to material that they don’t feel like their child is psychologically prepared to handle,” Cushman said.

Unfortunately, these days, the allies of The Gay Agenda multiply faster than the offspring of “abstinence only” sex ed graduates. Chief among those who thirst to destroy America: J.K. Rowling! It wasn’t enough for this wanton trollop to write books specifically intended to turn children into Jesus-hatin’ witches. Nooo, she had to go and announce that one of her main characters is a homo:

Clearly, this Bride of Satan loathes Christanity with every twisted fiber of her being, and will stop at nothing to destroy it. Will no one answer the call to save our omnipotent, omniscient Lord and Creator from the dire threat to His very existence posed by the vile machinations of children’s book authors?

Yes, one man will. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Don Surber, Defender of Jeebus. Onward, brave, brave columnist! You do America proud, sir.

Today, we changed over all the monthly “Staff Recommends” book displays at the library, and as the new Head of Public Services, it was my turn to create one. As usual for me, I had to try and ruffle as many feathers at my new job as possible, taking advantage of the upcoming National Banned Books Week to create a “Read These Books To Annoy People!” display. Unfortunately, we had very few of the really controversial titles in the 100 Most Challenged Books list; no Anarchist’s Cookbook, no New Joy of Gay Sex, no Last Exit, no Sex by Madonna. We didn’t even have the most challenged book of 2006 (a children’s book about two male zoo penguins who raise and hatch an egg, which apparently enrages religious dingbats convinced that reading it will turn their younguns into agents of the Homosexual Agenda.)

Alas, my “controversial” display turned out rather tame. Ooooh, A Wrinkle in Time, how rebellious.

I thought I might quench my unfulfilled urge to offend by printing up and plastering the library with Banned Books Week posters. Unfortunately, the ALA’s offerings were, predictably, both lame and not free. See, this is the kind of thinking that has convinced me not to bother rejoining ALA. The library advocacy organization is going to make cash-strapped libraries pay for promotional materials to get more people into said cash-strapped libraries? What genius thought that one up?

Eventually, I did find some cool, free posters at the American Booksellers Foundation. (They do also sell promotional material, but their free posters are far more effective than anything on the ALA site.)

These days, we tend to think of efforts to ban or censor books as almost comical, the ravings of blinkered bumpkins who think Harry Potter is an Agent of Satan. But in this post-Patriot Act world, censorship has a darker, more insidious dimension. After all, if you know that law enforcement agents might someday pore through your borrowing records without your knowledge, would you check out that copy of Steal This Book or the Anarchist’s Cookbook or that medical textbook on deadly airborne diseases or Mein Kampf for your history paper on World War II? Or would you be too scared, fearing that someone might later think that reading controversial material was tanatmount to agreeing with it?

Our current government, more than any in recent memory, survives by fostering a climate in which the vast majority of citizens are frightened, stupid, and easily manipulated. If self-censorship due to fear of punishment becomes the norm, then they’ve already won. In this climate, reading controversial books is nothing less than an act of civil disobedience.

Each year, the Department of English at San Jose State University holds the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This competition, named after the Victorian author who penned the infamous line “It was a dark and stormy night,” rewards that individual who submits the most cringe-inducing first line for an imaginary novel. This year’s winner, Jim Gleeson of Madison, WI, cranked out the following doozy:

Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.

Runners-up, Dishonorable Mentions, and “winners” in various specialized categories are all available here. (Do not read these literary abortions right after eating. You’ll thank me later.)

Still, I can’t help but think that all of these aspiring hacks are really just fighting for second place. After all, Bill O’Reilly can generate more ghastly prose by accident than any of them can manage on purpose.

Today, two of our volunteers called in sick, so I spent several hours covering the circ desk. At approximately 10:41am, Eastern Standard Time, a book landed on the desk, the sight of which caused the very blood in my veins to run cold.

It seems that Willard Scott is a published murder mystery author.

Yes, that Willard Scott.

(Picture made with LOL Cat Buildr)

As you ponder the bone-chilling knowledge that someone gave Willard Scott a book deal, bear in mind that Ulysses, often touted as the greatest novel of the 20th century, didn’t see the light of day in the US until twelve years after it was written.

I think I need to go pour myself a gin and tonic now. And hold the tonic.

And, at long last, we come to it: the Last Day of School. But lest anyone think that this weekend may be an occasion to relax and unwind from a long, exhausting school year, far from it! Tonight, the Special Lady Friend has her bachelorette party, while I will most likely spend the evening on the couch in a fetal position, swilling gin and desperately trying not to imagine her stuffing dollar bills in male strippers’ g-strings.

Most people know that Sunday is Father’s Day, but did you know that not one but two equally important holidays occur tomorrow? Bloomsday is a holiday dedicated to James Joyce’s acclaimed novel, Ulysses, in which all events take place on June 16th, 1904. Tomorrow, people in Dublin and in college towns all over the world will dress up like Joyce, drink Guinness, and pretend to have both read the novel and understood it.

Here in Seattle, tomorrow also happens to be the day of the Fremont Solstice Festival. A friend of the SLF who lives in Fremont is throwing a party to mark the occasion. We’re planning on attending, despite our almost certain mutual hangover, as our impending departure from Seattle means that this is the last time* we’ll ever be treated to the retina-burning spectacle of naked hippies on bicycles.

*Hopefully.