Further to the previous post, it appears that the Simpsons are hard at work defending the English language, not just by getting new words inserted into the dictionary, but by highlighting words that have been unceremoniously removed. Over at the Paper Cuts blog, David Kelly points to Sunday night’s episode, which tipped its hat to words that seem to be dropping out of the lexicon:

Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times, was on last night’s episode of The Simpsons, helping to heal a rift between Homer and Lisa. Earlier in the show, Lisa participated in a crossword competition during which there was a tribute to words that had been removed from the dictionary in the previous year: “skedaddle,” “Nixonian,” “zounds,” “mimeograph” and “hootenanny.”

Quillblog will grant that “mimeograph” has probably outlived its usefulness, but the other four are still in use, albeit not in common parlance (and the word “Nixonian” sounds so much more presidential than “Bushesque”). Perhaps a concerted effort is required to keep these and other such words — “cockamamie,” “yonder,” “betwixt,” “towsack,” etc. — in use. For Lisa’s sake.

There’s nothing new under the sun, especially in the hackneyed world of comedy. As the BBC reports, a book containing jokes that date back to the 4th century BC riffs on such shopworn topics as “farts, sex, ugly wives and a dimwit referred to as ‘a student dunce.’” More surprisingly, the book, which is available in e-book format with embedded multimedia, also includes an early version of Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch.

Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died.

“When he was with me, he never did any such thing!” is the reply.

Not all of the jokes are quite so hilarious, it would seem:

Some jokes are likely to baffle modern audiences, however – especially the ones about lettuce, which only make sense if you share the ancient superstition that the vegetable is an aphrodisiac.

The McSweeney’s blog recently posted a “short imagined monologue” from the mind of Jeff Bezos (as imagined by contributor Evan Johnston). We meet Bezos in the waiting room at his doctor’s office, where he’s waiting to have a massive paper cut on his hand stitched up. Bezos is catching up on his summer reading with his Kindle – and he wants to tell us a little about himself “and the common reading experience we all share.”

Now, like you, I get a lot of my reading done in the least hospitable of places. There’s the airport, the ensuing plane flight, and the subsequent crash in the middle of an ocean, followed by being marooned on a deserted oil rig.

[...]

Assuming it doesn’t get wet, the Kindle could become your best friend on that oil rig – unless there are other survivors. In the likely event that those survivors turned against you – let’s say they know that you caused the accident by demanding that the pilot look at your Kindle – you would be forced to deal with them. Harshly.

The Kindle can’t help you with that particularly gruesome task – but it can help you recover from the pyschological trauma of successfully sending your accusers to a watery grave. Reading, or course, is the best therapy a marooned murderer can buy.

As Bezos says, the Kindle can’t catch fish, but fish can’t buy a book in the middle of the ocean.

New York arts blogger Terry Teachout has posted a wonderful anecdote told by Edith Wharton about Henry James. It seems the Master’s complex writing style carried over into his speech, and, as one might expect, it got in the way when asking simple things.

According to Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, the two authors got themselves lost while rattling around the village of Windsor in her motor car, and James asked an old man on the road for directions.

“My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer–so,” and as the old man came up: “My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.”

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: “In short” (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), “in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…”

“Oh, please,” I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”

“Ah–? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”

“Ye’re in it,” said the aged face at the window.

(Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.)

Because there is nothing more important going on in the world than the drunken, drugged-up antics of a talented young actress barely out of her teens, below is a version of Allen Ginsberg’s “HOWL,” adapted specially for Ms. Lohan. “I’ve seen the best actresses of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, drunk,/driving through the streets of Beverly Hills at dawn looking for a place to crash.”

Weirdly enough, or perhaps appropriately enough, it ends up being kind of sympathetic.

It’s not new or anything, but Clive James’ poem “The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered” is a Quillblog favourite that will undoubtedly resonate with anyone who works in the book biz.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.

Those are just the opening lines. The New York Times‘ book blog, Paper Cuts, has posted the poem in its entirety; the hook is Norton’s announcement that it will issue a retrospective collection of James’ poetry, to be called Opal Sunset, next year.

High-five, book world – CBC Online and Entertainment Weekly are reporting that British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, the madman behind the Borat character, has signed a book deal with the Random House/Doubleday imprint Flying Dolphin Press.

In the voice of the “Kazakhstani” “journalist,” Cohen will write a pair of books entitled Borat: Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A and Borat: Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The former is billed as a guide to the U.S. for Kazakhstani travellers, and the latter will supposedly introduce Americans to Borat’s version of his home country (with a strong adherence to truth, reality, and decency, if the movie is any indication).

The website for Flying Dolphin says the publisher prints “a tightly focused list of high-quality non-fiction with occasional fiction titles. Great emphasis is placed on the quality of the writing as well as the subject matter which encompasses people and/or ideas central to contemporary culture.” Quillblog can see how the Borat titles will fit right in with that. As long as he can keep himself from talking about his sexytimes with Pamela Anderson.

The Guardian has posted a blog by William Skidelsky in which he takes issue with the seeming lack of comedy in modern fiction. The impetus for the essay was the list of 21 top young authors unveiled by Granta magazine last month.

…of the 21 best young novelists in America, not one is producing work that makes people laugh. Isn’t this more than a little peculiar? It isn’t as if the comic novel doesn’t have a distinguished pedigree. Many of the acknowledged greats have been comedies, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the early 17th century, via Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in the 20th. So what’s going on?

Skidelsky’s column leaves you with the impression that there aren’t a lot of respected comic novelists around right now, which is a dubious assertion. Has he never read Tom Perrotta? Ken Kalfus? Not to mention Mark Haddon, Jincy Willett, Miriam Toews, Marina Lewycka, etc, etc. But if Skidelsky is simply trying to say that “serious” novelists get more respect, then the argument begins to look a little more plausible.

It’s when he tries to explain why we place a higher value on serious literature that he really begins to sound bogus. Quoting heavily from an essay by writer Julian Gough, Skidelsky argues that there are two main reasons: 1) That “far more tragedies survived from ancient times than comedies, and since many western writers have taken the Greeks as their model, this has resulted in tragedy being favoured over comedy.” And 2) Christianity.

The one church spoke in one voice, drawn from one book, and that book was at heart tragic. All of human history, from the creation, was a story that climaxed with the sadistic murder of a man by those he was trying to save. Essentially, the church had to crush the comic impulse because it was so vulnerable to it. If people had started making jokes about Jesus, the entire edifice would have collapsed.

So if it weren’t for Christianity, we would all be worshiping Aristophanes, not Jesus? And instead of wearing crucifixes around our necks we’d be wearing rubber chickens?
If there is a shortage of comic novels these days – and that’s a big if – the reasons are probably a lot less fancy than those supplied by Skidelsky. Isn’t it more likely that, in North America, we are just so up to our eyeballs in comedy that novelists can’t help but feel that the comedic terrain is already well-covered? When every ad on TV is attempting to be a 30-second comedy classic, when every billboard displays a clever double-entendre, when every politician feels the need to appear on Jon Stewart to appeal to the under-40 generation, maybe a little more seriousness is finally in order.

One of the 21 authors that Skidelsky erroneously labels “unhumorous” is Jonathan Safran Foer, who spends at least the first half of Everything is Illuminated in flat-out humor mode. But then the novel takes an abrupt turn about halfway through. Quillblog doesn’t have the book at hand, but we recall the kooky Ukrainian narrator, Alex, suddenly announcing that he is tired of treating everything as a joke, that maybe comic detachment isn’t the ultimate attitude to aspire to. And from this point on, Foer himself becomes more serious, and the novel improves immensely for it. This is probably where a lot of young writers are coming from now; they’ve spent their lives being tickled to death, and they’re ready for something more.

As the L.A. Times reports, today marks Avril Lavigne’s foray into the publishing world as the imaginary friend and conscience of an unhappy teenaged girl in a two-volume manga comic.

Published by Del Ray, Avril Lavigne’s Make 5 Wishes is written by Joshua Dysart – the punk princess served as creative consultant on the project. She is, of course, doing it for the fans.

Lavigne’s official website includes a link to “Avril Manga episodes,” which stream images from the comic accompanied by instrumental versions of songs from her new album. Fans can also post their own five wishes.

The first volume hit stores today, but Lavigne’s fans will have to wait until July for, like, the best damn conclusion.

This is cute – a medieval monk calls for help in using the latest technology: a book.

(If the video below doesn’t work, you can also watch it here.)