Famous Writers Shirtless: Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady

A fleeting internet meme happened of writers in underpants--but it passed too quickly to be truly appreciated.

So, occasionally we'll post some literary beefcake for your perusal.

Today:  Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.

Ken Kesey is about ten seconds away from stripping off the tighty whities, while Neal Cassady clearly feels at home being shirtless in dark, underground rooms with hippies.

Somehow, the roadies for Santana have all decided to congregate with the doppelgangers of Jesus Christ and Gertrude Stein.

Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart drums at AARP meeting.

In other related news, Rock and Roll died today after a long battle with lameness and an arthritic hip. It was 67 years old.

Fungi is a boss, overtakes outdoor book installation.

Fungi is not only a nasty athlete's foot infection that weirds out your significant other, it's also a lover of books.

Jardin de la Connassaince, an outdoor book installation placed in the woods of Quebec by designers Thilo Folkerts and Rodney LaTourelle, has begun the slow decline to the fungi overlords.

Originally created in 2010 as an artistic expression where "culture is fading back into nature," it took about two years for nature to cooperate. It'll take an untold number of years for fungi and fauna to complete the process.

Now let's see how long it takes for mushrooms to attack a stack of Kindles. Someone get on this.



Full story and photos at PSFK.com.

Personally, I always thought Miss Piggy was a Fascist.

Also from the interwebs recently:

Fox Business Network analysts say that The Muppets are communists.

I, for one, have always suspected Elmo of being a commie. Why the red fur, man? Why the hippie love? Why all the sharing??

Says Mr. Corporate Analyst #1:
"It's amazing how far the left will go just to manipulate your kids, to convince them, give the anti-corporate message."

Says Mr Corporate Analyst #2 in reply:
"They've been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media, they hate the oil industry...They hate corporate America. And so you'll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was 'Cars 2,' which was another kids' movie, the George Clooney movie 'Syriana,' 'There Will Be Blood,' all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means for most people: fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don't want to tell that story."

I know! Why hasn't there been a film about someone fueling up an ambulance?!


Photo: A website called libcom.org. Libcom = libertarian communists. I don't know what that even remotely means, but the photo is cute/serves a purpose.

Prospective chapter 17 of new history books: Kenny Rogers Roasters: The Tragedy

I've often wondered how long I had to wait until a school textbook would tell me what a cultural juggernaut Kenny Rogers was. Now, I need wonder no longer.

Thankfully, the Texas State Board of Education feels the same way. They've recommended inserting into textbooks the influence of country music as a nationally important cultural movement. Likewise, they've recommended eliminating hip-hop as any sort of influence altogether, as well as minimizing Latino cultural impact references altogether.

Potential Texas tourism slogan:

Xenophobia: It's not a town in Texas. It's a state of mind!

It seems the the Texas State Board of Education is undergoing massive changes with what they require in textbooks. Apparently, they also purchase a disproportionately large number of textbooks. This, in turn, leads to states like Oregon and Vermont--the respective capitals of patchouli and trail mix consumption--to buy the same textbooks that Texas deems appropriate. Some estimates say that 80% of all textbooks are based off what the Texas State Board of Education recommends. Lucky for us, the board doesn't stop at country music influence. Let us count the ways:

1.) Joseph McCarthy? He's a swell guy now.

Doesn't this look like the face of an angel? He was. This photo is of Joseph McCarthy. He was the senator from Wisconsin in the 1950s who went on a tear to rid America of Communists, and tried limiting the civil liberties of Americans as a result. In the process, he ruined the lives of countless innocent people. Thanks to the Texas Board of Education, Joe is going to get a new leash on life as a hero who kept the Soviet Russians quaking in their boots--all while doing a spot-on impersonation of an older Eddie Munster. Thank goodness. I, for one, believe we can never have enough alcoholic, mildly racist, Chicken Littles for our children to look up to.

2.) Thomas Jefferson? Just between you and me, James Madison was the real brains amongst the founding fathers.

Thomas Jefferson has always been trumpeted as one of the great intellectual minds of American history. Good thing the Texas Board of Education is going to put such nonsense aside. This is because Jefferson is largely attributed to being the root of the American separation of church and state. See? He was a hippy radical--the Abbie Hoffman of 1776.

Who will be taught in his place? St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and conservative British jurist William Blackstone. Really. Logically, it's always best to replace an American with three non-Americans when teaching American history.

3. Words: you say "tomato," I say you're misrepresenting the produce aisle with your ideology.

The Texas Board of Education is eliminating the words students use. Gone are words like "imperialism" when referencing America's rise to power. "Imperialism" only brings up images of Darth Vader and emphysema, which no one likes to think about. Instead, "expansionism" will replace it. You know--expanding, like a waist line. It's a much more tender image. Full bellies and all.

Likewise, gone is the dirty, filthy word "capitalism" from textbooks--which, undoubtedly, sounds greedy. Michael Douglas in Wall Street kind of greedy. Now it's replaced with "free market." Anything with the word "free" in front of it is supposed to be inspirational. It conjures images of Uncle Sam with a bald eagle on his shoulder eating apple pie while he drives a Ford pickup. "Free market" also sounds selfless, as if you're handing out free merchandise to everyone. That's a win-win for everyone.

4.) Affirmative action is now a negative action.

And so is Title IX, which allowed women equal rights in the classroom and in school athletic programs. Texas will require students to be taught that "unintended consequences" occurred once affirmative action and Title IX went into effect. I bet. Like women playing sports. Pssh. What good ever came of that? Venus and Serena Williams? What'd they ever do?

All I know is that Title IX never influenced country music to make Kenny Rogers the king of country music and haphazard plastic surgery. And now that the Texas State Board of Education has decided as such, my dream of finally understanding what a juggernaut he was can finally come true.

Book Review: Into the Forest, by Jean Hegland

This is part of the continuing series of random books reviews that'll be nothing like the New York Times book review. Gone is the ten thousand word analysis. Instead, here is a book review like you'd tell your friends.

The Book: Jean Hegland's Into the Forest


Review:
Diet post-apocalyptic happenings? Check.

MacGyver-esque ingenuity? Check.

Incestuous lesbianism? Check.

Homeopathic birthing techniques? Check.

Communal living in rotted out tree stumps? Who in their right mind...?

Listen, Jean. I love dystopian stories as much as the next neurotic English major. But people living in tree stumps?? Is Smokey the Bear a ghostwriter on this book? Did the Sierra Club put you up to this? We're not even talking tree houses with a fashionable window and rope swing. We're talking rotted stumps. I've yet to meet a human being who fell in love with rotted stumps and wanted to live in one, no matter how dire the situation. But if you included a rope swing maybe I could get behind you on this.

Spelling out the differences...

1.) Awkward: adj.: Lacking dexterity or skill; lacking ease or grace

The National Spelling Bee concluded the other day. The dirty little secret of the typical English major is that none of us really know how to spell. (See: Spell-check Gone Rogue.) Sure, we read a lot, but none of us can spell a lick. If the word is polysyllabic, there's 75% chance any English major will throw a misbegotten vowel in there just to jazz up the word a little.

That's why English majors often look dumbfounded at the National Spelling Bee kids. All of these kid contestants say they want to become doctors, scientists, physicists--any profession that requires a complete lack of imagination along with a six figure income. Despite their mastery of spelling, none say, "Gee, Bob, I want to be a writer some day!"

Each kid always seems a little socially awkward up there as well. No matter how hot and bothered I might have gotten over some Sir Gawain and the Green Knight action, I can happily report that neither I, nor any other English major, has passed out from the moment like this kid.



Look at this kid go down! Joe Frazier hit the mat with more grace after Muhammad Ali cocked him. Down goes Fraz--AH! Down goes Fraz--AH!! And no fellow spelling bee friend even moves from their seat to help him. Those kids are cutthroat. They'd cut you in a dark alley for your lunch money with that kind of mindset. (I'll give the kid credit. He spells the word after getting back up. Apparently his fall jarred the letters loose in his head.)

I'm also happy to report that if any English major started sucking wind like this kid, one of our fellow chums would have come over and lend a hand after we took a dive.

2.) Mustache: noun: The hair growing on the human upper lip, especially when cultivated and groomed.

Another great mystery with the spelling bee is the sheer number of 12 and 13 year old boys sporting mustaches. I wasn't sporting that much facial hair at 21. Yet these kids look like they're just a few years away from doing a Just For Men commercial. I couldn't have even tried to grow a mustache at 13. The sparse hairs on my face that remotely qualified as peach fuzz needed seven coats of shoe polish to thicken and darken them to make out a shadow of facial hair.

I'm not suggesting there should be drug-testing in the spelling bee. I'm just saying some of them are juicing, and I don't mean a V-8. 'Roids, my friends. I'm saying the kids are on mental 'roids.

3.) Militant: adj.: Very active or aggressive in support of a cause.

These spelling geniuses also have another thing going for them that many English majors do not: militant families. English majors by and large come from much more independent minded families. We're the hippies of education. We revel in the free love of books and writing. The libraries are our communes. College is our Woodstock. Whether or not we choose to dabble in tie-dyed shirts is another matter, but we English majors rarely frown on it.

But these spelling bee kids come from the Fascism school of thought. Forget Mussolini making the trains run on time, these families demand perfect memorization of giant 10,000 page dictionaries. Your friends want to play with you? Stop your foolishness! These families demand the child memorize the binary etymological route of words in the cold encasement of the family office, far from sunlight or human interaction.

The only emotion many of these kids come across is when they see the word "love" in the dictionary. And even then it's a foreign premise to them.

4.) Defeated: noun: A bringing to naught, frustration.

The moment of truth for 99% of the contestants is when they finally spell a word wrong. It's a quick walk backstage to their parents, who are not waiting with open arms half the time. You usually only see this kind of cold rejection by family on an episode of Montel Williams.

Here, again, is where English majors differ. If you write a crappy essay or story or poem (or blog post!) as an English major, someone will tell you they like it and love you. There's always someone--anyone--to tell you you're special. English majors only learn this type of defeat and rejection when publishers and editors rip your latest manuscript apart. But until then? You're always loved.

And it's not just a word you see in a dictionary.

Writers are anyone with a keyboard or a pad of paper nearby.

Someone recently asked me, "How do writers write?"

I didn't know what they were looking for, so I said, "With desperation."

Surprisingly, that wasn't what they were looking for.

But a Google search for just that very question isn't very helpful either. The search term "how do writers write" had a first return to some website called famouswhy.com. The author of the piece, Cristina Nuta, lights a firecracker under the question and gives a gripping in-depth analysis of how writers actually write. Her view (including her own typos):

"They prefer to be alone and enjoy silence. They may also work in a dark room, where the sun can hardly penetrate. Moreover, some writers have a mess in the rooms they work in, because they are surrounded my several materials, books, essays, sheets of papers and so on. But this environment does not bother them, instead it gives them inspiration. On the other hand, there are writers who prefer a light room, painted also in bright colours. They also need to have a large balcony and feel nature is taking part in their creation of an extraordinary work of art."

((zzZZzZzz))

I'm sorry. Dozed off there for a second.

Cristina more or less just said all writers are either befuddled hermits living in man-made caves overflowing with their trash, or they're blossoming hippies who smell of patchouli that live in neon yellow rooms while humming mantras to Mother Earth.

I don't know what Cristina classifies as a "writer" though. I'm sitting here at a computer screen at 2am (hooray, insomnia!) in a room with a lamp lit while the television hums away in the corner, all the while nothing is terribly out of place or messy. Oh, and the walls are painted a very toned down color. I'd call it "Cookie Crumb" (so says the Behr paint website), which is in the terrible middle ground between "cave" and "neon yellow."

Maybe I'm not a writer then. I need to work on stereotypes to fulfill what the much-insightful Cristina says I should be. I'm sure she also thinks I need to smoke two packs a day, drink a fifth of scotch, and refuse to bathe until head lice is my closest friend. That, or I need to invest in Birkenstocks and have a vase of daisies at my side while I move to some nature reserve where my only high is the smell of wild animals outside my door.

Though Cristina does tell us this nugget of typo-ridden wisdom: "A very important thing while writing is the moment of the day to write and food: for some writers the brain only works until lunchtime and food is vital to keep them going."

Pssh. Amateur writers. Let's see them write something at 2am.