Tuesday, July 16, 2013

The world is too much with us.

Zimmerman. Snowden. Dhaka. Taksim Square. Tahrir Square. Lac-Megantic. Oklahoma tornadoes. West, Texas. Syria. This is starting to feel like one of those novelistically awful long-hot-summers.... as if it's building up toward a blackout-riot on a global scale, or to the revelation that the neighbor's demon-possessed dog has been orchestrating the whole thing, or to a wrath-of-god thunderstorm in which Batman returns after ten years of retirement. This seems like an appropriate summer for Superman to start snapping people's necks.

In the novel that's set in this summer, Jenny McCarthy, Anthony Weiner Colin McGinn, and Elliot Spitzer will provide the dark comic relief--bad, and in some sense too bad to be funny, but not immediately* fatal, and so implausibly ridiculous that they let you laugh for a few pages in between the long stretches of tension.

*Yes, giving Jenny McCarthy a platform for her views will lead to more deaths. I said "immediately."

2 comments:

Russell Arben Fox said...

This post is brought to you by Facebook. (Hey, I kid, I kid.)

Jacob T. Levy said...

Every so often I notice someone like Kieran trying out an idea on facebook and twitter and turning it into a blog post; I've never really gotten into that habit, and so FB ends up crowding out blogging in my head.

I didn't set out to do that in this case either, but after a while it occurred to me that this would be a good time to turn some content-generated-for-FB into some content for this poor neglected blog.