quality literature

With my painting trip to Portland in just about 3 weeks, I started digging through the library donation pile for a throw-away paperback to read on the plane. We have hundreds of these things. People paid actual money for them at one time; one of them must be good, right? Wrong. And in the pile of red-covered cowboy romances and super lawyer novellas, I realized that I did not need a good book; the thing I needed was a really bad one.

My top 3 picks, in descending order:

3rd place

Little Heroes, by Norman Spinrad, 1987

In the near-future dystopia of the 1990s, the world is a nightmare of kibble-eating teenagers with machine guns, and music is being made by synthesizers. A drug-snorting muzik executive enlists a leather-pants-wearing retired rocker queen to create a virtual pop star using computers, with the help of some "fat, sloppy" nerds. Some guy named Paco joins the Reality Liberation Front and they do something to fight against whatever it is this book is about . Many asses are wriggled - wriggles of seduction, wriggles of anticipation, wriggles of discomfort by the reader. The hard-ons are all raging and the nipples are all rosebuds in this misanthropic novel written by a man who now blogs in all-caps about stupid people at his bank, Vladimir Putin, and how he's been unfairly blacklisted just because he self-published a book about a sexy Bin Laden that everyone is too political to appreciate. How dare you. DON'T YOU KNOW WHO HE IS? HE IS THE WRITER OF BUG JACK BARRON.

The fun of this book comes in seeing where the author was accidentally correct about anything. 


2nd place:

Books of Blood, Volume 2, by Clive Barker, 1984

Before there were gratuitous torture-gore films, there were the Books of Blood. Grossly sensuous descriptions of impractically elaborate murders and dismemberments are held together with scraps of plot. Sometimes. Teeth will melt, tongues will spurt, skin will fly off hands like gloves. You think these things are physically impossible? Not when you are a shapeshifting monster who can grow breasts on his own chest until they burst apart like wet tissue. HA. Shows what you know.



1st place: THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN*

Venus on the Half Shell, by Philip Jose Farmer, 1974

Simon Wagstaff is a one-eyed Space Wanderer with a pet owl, a dog, and an electric banjo. He drinks the elixir of immortality while bonking a cat woman, and then hooks up with a sexy, cynical robot who is programmed to hate birds. They battle "zeppelin things", get into an ax fight with a hunchback, and get drunk while telling a story about a spaceman who's space suit is operated by his penis.

If we can't give future generations any great works of literature by which to gauge our society, this is the book that should rise to the top of the ashes for archaeologists to puzzle over. Folks, this book has everything.

Science!

This was called the Unavoidable Transdimensional Shift in scholarly journals but was privately referred to as the You-Grab-My-Nuts-I'll-Grab-Yours Hypothesis.

Romance!

Her kiss was soft and hot with a tang of milk shake and ketchup. 

Complex characters!

"No," she said, "My name has always been Pussyloo. But it was Dunnernickel you were talking to yesterday, and Goobnatz the day before. Tomorrow, it'll be Quimquat."

Poetry!

"To hell with Euclid's beauty bare!
Liz, get your ass out of that chair!"

(An ode to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, after which the poet is clubbed to death by a wino.)



Literary perfection.


A QUEST: Go out and find yourselves some very bad books, and then leave them on park benches somewhere to pass it on. Every one of these books were proof-read, edited, and then approved for publication. The least we can do is to not let them live it down.



* As determined by 10 minutes of page-flipping