Giuseppe Zangara

I found a first-edition, jacketless copy of Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) in a library about a year or so ago. Any value it may've had was wrecked by some girl's neurotic, pseudo-intellectual notes in the blank pages at the start of the book. I don't remember much of what it said, but it featured a lot of her complaining about life. The Chemical Brothers were namedropped somewhere, too.

That's 3356.5 posts per day of quality.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The occasional scene of graphic violence might be troublesome, but it's a relatively easy read (compared to McCarthy's other work, certainly) and it brings up a lot of subjects, like loyalty and morality, for people to chew on. The only other McCarthy book that might work is All the Pretty Horses.

If only there were a way to set up a program that would subtract one post from his post count, say, once a minute. This would be in numbers only, not actual posts. In order to keep up his post count, he'd have to start posting all the time, inevitably forgoing food and sleep, which, in turn, would lead to the deterioration of his mind, causing to him post utter, ban-worthy nonsense. Though it may be too late to do it with Marvin, it could work on someone else, given that a lot of people here are very sensitive about their post counts.

I read The Bluest Eye for an Adolescent Literature class in college. I read it in my 20s; I liked it then, but I'm sure if I was made to read it when I was 15 I would've hated it. That something so comparatively dense is shoved down so many unwilling throats only shows just how out of touch so many high-school English departments are. One of the reasons I quit teaching entry-level writing/lit college classes is I didn't have the energy to break freshmen of years-long apathy/outright dislike of reading.

I watched Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth my senior year of high school. It was gorier than most horror movies. One girl walked out during it; I guess she never told her parents because the teacher never got in trouble. Back to books, I know The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a fairly popular/controversial title in schools these days. I haven't read it, but, from what I've heard it about, it's a step in the right direction re: getting kids interested in literature. Forcing students to read dry, dusty prose from dead, white men or heavy-handed tomes of multiculturalism are doing just as much to turn young people off reading than the distractions of TV or the Internet. What do you guys think are some good titles for high schoolers? I mentioned Slaughterhouse Five earlier; that one is taught in high schools, but, due to its profanity, sexual, and supposedly anti-religious content, it's not taught enough. It's weird, funny, and a little difficult, but not too difficult to be impossible to follow.

Pre-ordered this. I own/have read Falconer already, but getting all his novels in a fancy Library of America hardcover for $23 was a deal I couldn't resist.

I wanted more banning.

Hey, Smartly Pretty, are there any books being taught at your school that require the student's parents to fill out a permission slip before they read it? I wonder what the current standards are; years ago, I had to get my mom to sign off on The Picture of Dorian Gray because of a brief and rather tame reference to pornography.

I don't know where Gary Floyd got the balls to go after anyone. It was only a couple years ago he was a punching bag in this folder; that no one gives him shit now has nothing to do with him improving any.

That he specifically set out a copy of the manuscript near his body so his wife could find it suggests that he knew the value of his work. Still, it's a little disheartening to read that he'd been working on it for so long because he was having trouble making it as good as he thought it could be.

David Foster Wallace's third novel was to be called The Pale King. It's going to be published next year. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03...0309fa_fact_max Decent article, but a lot of the bio stuff was already covered in the Rolling Stone tribute.

I didn't read any of Hawthorne's short stories until college and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked them. Well, I might have read "Young Goodman Brown," in high school, I'm not sure. Anyway, they weren't good enough for me to go back and see if The Scarlet Letter would read better than it had when I was 15. It might. I found The Old Man and the Sea brutally boring when I was in the ninth grade; this was enough to steer me away from any Hemingway until I was an adult. Then I read and enjoyed A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. I've lately considered giving Steinbeck another shot. Having hated The Pearl and The Red Pony in my youth indirectly led me to not having read East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath. As for what I did like back then. I dug some of Shakespeare's stuff, but the only books I had to read for high school that I actually enjoyed were Nineteen Eighty-Four (I read and liked Animal Farm, too, but I was never assigned it in any class) and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I also read, on my own, Slaughterhouse Five around my junior or senior year. That was my gateway to "serious" literature.

Forget whatever you may have thought back when the song was popular. Forget the accompanying cheesy video. Accept that Hanson's "mmmBop" is a fantastic pop song.

Now Playing. I still feel strongly about this song.

If it makes you feel any better, I knew it was a joke.

So, you have a pencil dick.

The second sentence in that post undermines the first sentence.

That's what all Canadians look like.

Oh, who am I kidding: Also, they haven't broken up, since some people still seem to be under this impression.

Don't forget that "If I Had A Million Dollars" song which wasn't any good at all. I can't think of anyone that I like from that subsection of kinda light-hearted funny bands. Barenaked Ladies were terrible, They Might Be Giants had a song I liked four years ago but it's not as if I like them, Rush admittedly had their moments, and Weird Al stops being cool after the age of ten. Barenaked Ladies had enough "serious" songs to where their being a written off as a quirky joke band isn't entirely fair, but, ultimately, I don't give shit. I know too much about this band, thanks largely to an ex-girlfriend and, to a lesser extent, my sister.

Czech's right re: both BNL and Hootie. Except for the former's "One Week," both bands never created anything other than fluffy, marginal blah-rock perfect for scoring your visit to the supermarket or gym. If either deserve hatred, it's due to the desire of both bands to do little more than exist for their easily entertained audiences. Something this competently, if perfunctorily, performed can never be "unlistenable."

To scale? Is it difficult to flush?

Oh, I forgot to mention I'm circumcised. No filthy dog dick for me; a sleek fucking tool of form and function.

Asians are inherently better at math than everyone else. Let me find the zygote that proves it.