Broken News: Respected author to churn out some bullshit about vampires

NEWARK—After a literary career that began with 1959’s Goodbye, Columbus and has spanned the decades. Noted author and Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth today announced that he was abandoning his more high brow literary pursuits to churn out some old hoary cack about vampires.

“I don’t know, I doesn’t seem like provocative explorations of what it means to be Jewish or of the American identity and blurring the lines between biography and fiction makes a guy a buck anymore,” the author explained in an interview with the New Yorker.

“So I’m just going to churn out some shit I thought up over lunch about vampires, teen romance, and epic battles over love and sit back and watch the money pile up. It’s pretty much what everyone else is doing. Why fight it? I don’t think I’m even going to make it all that different from Twilight.”

He sighed before adding “Ooh! Maybe a vampire school or a boarding school where vampires and humans meet! Has anyone done vampire style Harry Potter knockoff yet?”

Reaction from the literary world was swift with most surprisingly supporting the move.

“Frankly 90% of what I read is some awful re-purposed shit about forbidden love and euro-trash vampires that I’d appreciate reading what someone competent could do with a completely fucked out genre,” said Michael Kimmelman of the New York Review of Books. “Even if he is just nakedly slumming it for cash.”

Others, from the New York Times to McSweeney’s, offered support ranging from “Just don’t make them sparkle” to a fervent hope that Roth would attempt to tie his famed Nathan Zuckerman character into the new series of novels. Either by making Zuckerman a vampire, a vampire hunter, or recounting a romance had with a shiksa vampire in his youth.

“Zuckerman as a teacher at a school for vampires is the idea that has me most excited,” said Times literary critic Janet Maslin when contacted for this story.

When presented with some of these suggestions Roth reportedly yelled that they were all legally his and that he’d sue anyone who infringed on them.

But Roth’s recent foray into naked money grubbing is part of a larger trend in the literary world. Cormac McCarthy recently announced he was about to start work on a trilogy of books about werewolves, while Michael Chabon has reportedly cast his lot in with merpeople, hoping that will be the next genre to take off and set him up with a lucrative series of films.

Alice Sebold has quit writing books to becoming a staff writer on Two and a Half Men, while the estate of Roberto Bolano has unearthed a 1700 page novel entitled Star Wars Jedi War: The Mandalorians Revenge which will be released by Lucas Books and Ballentine by the end of the year.

“There’s just no money in integrity nowadays,” observed Harvard English Professor and Twilight fan-fiction writer Dr. Karen Whitman. “Sure you can try to putter around here and there writing the odd masterpiece of American fiction and getting a Pulitzer every couple of years, but where’s the money in that? Who wants to make a movie out of a heady tome about the immigrant experience in 1930’s San Francisco? Why not just crassly jump on board whatever is popular at the moment and ride that wave to the bank?”

“Like I wrote in my Twilight short story Love’s Bite, after Edward leaves Bella to marry the new, shy, mousy, literary girl Karen: ‘Sometimes you just gotta keep it real.’”

As of now Roth plans to have the first novel out sometime next month with four to follow by the end of the year. He says he hopes that his endeavors will lead to a movie company taking a chance on glomming onto the Twilight bandwagon and churning out a low budget competitor, but that he is, at the very least, hoping that these novels can be turned into a low rated drama for the ABC network.

“Fingers crossed,” Roth said. “Film or TV. I will tailor this bullshit to whatever medium will provide me the riches that being considered one of the greatest living writers has failed to.”

Book of the day

Cameron Pierce's Ass Goblins of Auschwitz

In a land where black snow falls in the shape of swastikas, there exists a nightmarish prison camp known as Auschwitz. It is run by a fascist, flatulent race of aliens called the Ass Goblins, who travel in apple-shaped spaceships to abduct children from the neighboring world of Kidland. Prisoners 999 and 1001 are conjoined twin brothers forced to endure the sadistic tortures of these ass-shaped monsters. To survive, they must eat kid skin and work all day constructing bicycles and sex dolls out of dead children.

I believe this was published by Random House and is on the short list for both the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. It was optioned as a film for Sony Pictures Classics. If the rumors on Ain't It Cool News are true, the Ass Goblins movie is slated to star Meryl Streep as the head Ass Goblin, Ralph Fiennes as The White Angel, and Danny McBride as Danny McBride. It's slated for a winter 2011 release and a big Oscar push as one of Sony's prestige pictures.

In 2011, America is about to be Shit Slaughtered!!

Broken News: Maine town finally included in Stephen King story

LINNEUS—Celebration rang out in the streets today, as the small town of Linneus, Maine learned that it’s decades-long literary exodus had come to an end. In a note posted on his website, author Stephen King announced he had decided to set a short story in Linneus, officially making it the final town in Maine to be featured in one of King’s tales.

“I am proud to announce that today, Linneus will be the last area of Maine to be menaced by my particular brand of contemporary horror fiction,” the writer announced via his website.

“I’m sure the 892 residents spread out over the town’s 45.8 square miles will scarcely believe what I have in store for their little hamlet. But I am certain they’ll enjoy my latest tale of Gothic terror scraped together from concepts I had long ago discarded as unworthy of the printed word, but have since revived in an effort to avoid my wife through writing. I’m sure the good people of Linneus will appreciate what a writing legend will be able to do with facts gleaned from their town’s meager Wikipedia page.”

Adding, “A 0.67% Hispanic population? You won’t believe how that fits in. The rest will be standard New England pastoral generic small town bullshit filler but, hey, at least you're on the map!”

Noting that he would name-check the town’s Hodgdon Mill Road and Red Roof Road, King noted that he hoped this level of detail would gain him somewhere in the neighborhood of 892 new readers. King took the time to remind people that in this economy, and given the putrid state of the publishing industry, “every extra person counts”, before lamenting that he had overused Bangor in earlier stories and was regretting that it wasn’t a reliable sales generator anymore.

The news was of great relief to many within Linneaus, who had long suffered the indignity and mockery of surrounding towns as being the only place in the state unworthy of being mentioned in yet another King story the author had set in Maine.

“I thought this day would never come,” a relieved Mayor John Swithen said. “After he set Duma Key in Florida of all places, I wondered if we’d ever get our shot.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Swithen shouted, beaming with pride. “I’ve taken shit at the Maine Mayor’s Conference for the last time! No longer am I going to have to sit around as other mayors leaf through King’s books, point to their town’s name and knowingly nod at each other. No more having to listen to ‘I can’t find Linneus in my book, is it in yours?’ comments. Next year, I’ll be able to slap down a book, point to my town and yell ‘There! It’s right fucking there!’”

Some are worried that King’s placement of the town within his pages will rob the small borough of its unique status and the requisite tourist dollars Linneus previously generated among King fans as the one place in the state that Mr. King had yet to hit on the giant dartboard of Maine he keeps in his office.

But city officials assured those who are wary that the municipality can function without the $150 dollars it raised last year from an eBay auction after one King fan left their iPod behind during a brief stopover on the way to Derry.

With the future publication of this story a certainty, focus now shifts to the nearby Juniper Knee Pond which, unless it also merits a mention in the as yet untitled story, will be the only remaining Maine landmark or structure yet to be immortalized in King’s work. But those who live nearby are hopeful that the author can find it in his heart to grace the small body of water with at least one supernaturally dismembered corpse or perhaps even a psychic struggle between a shy boy and an ancient evil.

In any event, King is glad to finally complete his longstanding goal of cataloging the entirety of the Pine Tree State through offhand references in his horror novels.

As for what’s next, King isn’t sure, but he noted that he is curious to see “what kind of flavor the state of New Hampshire brings to his stories.”

Interactive fascism

View Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2009 in a larger map

via the American Library Association comes this Google Map of all the recorded 513 book ban challenges for last year. I know what you're saying "Only 513? We must be getting more tolerant." Nope. The ALA thinks that only about 20-25% of bans get reported.

Most surprising about the list? No Utah. There's always next year, though. As the 2009 list is not yet out, these are all for last year. But according to the ALA's top 10 Richardson and Parnell's And Tango Makes Three was last years most banned book. It's a book about gay penguins. Pulling into second is Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is about God as we know Him being a lie and polar bears kicking the shit out of each other. Lest you think that expressing tolerance, dislike of religion, and combining them with arctic animals is the only thing that will get you on the list, rest assured, humanizing Arabs gets you a black mark.

Looking back at previous top 10's I see that Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, and Of Mice and Men are still making waves. Really? Some school districts are still hashing it out whether or not these are literary classics? I just hope that when the ALA drops their 2009 list, hopefully during Banned Book Week (plan your book burning parties accordingly) next month, we can finally start getting some consistent new blood in there. If we don't change things up, people are just going to tune out yet another Huck Finn banning. Twain's had his day, let's start making a concerted effort to revile Phillip Pullman and Cormac McCarthy. For the sake of the children.

Broken In Brief: Michael Bay begins pre-production on James Joyce’s Ulysses

HOLLYWOOD—In the wake of the release of the blockbuster Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, a film which, much to the consternation of anyone with taste, has grossed nearly $750 million dollars worldwide, director Michael Bay has announced his next project: an adaptation of James Joyce’s literary classic, Ulysses.

“I just want to prove to my critics that I’m not a dumbass and shit, that I recognize art as something other than the stuff I pay some gay-ass designer to put up on my walls,” said the man-child while sitting poolside atop his emaciated model throne at one of his multi-million dollar estates. “So I Googled ‘good books,’ and after finding out that they had already made the DaVinci Code, I stumbled onto a list made by some egghead fag who said Ulysses was the best, so I bought the rights. Now I'm gonna film this bitch.”

The script, written by Transformers scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, has already jettisoned the novel’s complex structure in favor of a more linear, three-act form. They have also discarded Joyce's stream-of-consciousness method of describing protagonist Leopold Bloom's single-day journey through Dublin and replaced it with a descent into the criminal underworld of Hong Kong.

“Yeah, Joyce’s shit doesn’t really translate to film, so we’re improving it,” said Bay during a brief pause in the daily dark art ritual that honors his pact with Satan. “I mean, I only really scanned the top of the Wikipedia page for the book and that sounded boring. A bunch of shit about the Odyssey, which I haven’t read, and allegory, whatever that is. Fuck that with a stick.”

He continued “It did mention something about Modernism, so I think fans of the book will be happy that we will use the most modern pyrotechnics and CG techniques to realize Joyce’s vision. You know, stuff like the epic car chase between Bloom’s rogue ex-cop character and Stephen Dedalus’ international drug kingpin. Plus I saw a mention of jokes, puns, parodies, and allusions being a large part of the work, so I told the writers to add in a stereotypical, jive-talking, wise crackin’ black sidekick for Bloom, so as to better stress Joyce’s themes.”

Bay hopes to have his $200 million production of Ulysses ready for release in the summer of 2012.