This week, in Meetup invites that probably went to the wrong person...

You always look so cool.

So this happened in my inbox:


The e-mail (from the J. Peterman Company, WHERE ELSE) was also titled "Gatsby would be furious," but really, shouldn't it be "Carraway would be furious"? The man himself would probably nod solemnly and admire the business acumen of such a move.

"All that matters is that you have one, just one," goes the copy. "A piece of how things were." That's great, but on the wrong man (really, most men) this shirt would not look cool at all, but rather stuffy and a bit Puritan, like a stray historical re-enactor who just sat on a freshly painted picnic bench. Still, I'll make sure to order that a cupboard full of these shirts is conspicuously displayed on the set of my rap video.

Moonwalking on his grave

According to my inbox, it is now okay to start hawking books about the sordid details of Michael Jackson's life! I quote an e-mail marketing newsletter from a major publisher I got yesterday, entitled "From Cult Insanity to the Magic & Madness of M. Jackson's Life":

We were saddened to learn of the passing of Michael Jackson earlier this summer, and we knew that no one could cut through all of the tabloid rumors better than New York Times bestselling biographer, [redacted so as not to give free publicity], who worked through the night to bring you the whole story, with updated material from the star's last years...

He worked through a whole night on it? What commitment. That's part of the first paragraph. The second may start out even funnier, though:

Yet Michael Jackson is only one of the fascinating people whose lives we bring to the forefront this summer.

...because even if he was the King of Pop, he has to share an online marketing newsletter with the rest of the frontlist. E-mail blasts are so expensive these days.

Hey baby, what turns your pages?

There are at least two things this "Marie Claire" article "8 Ways To Use Books to Flirt" does right; one of them is that it talks about books and reading in a slightly more intelligent way than expected from that title. The writer interviewed Jack Murnighan, author of a collection of summaries of all those books you should have read already called BEOWULF ON THE BEACH (oh, Beowulf) to get some lighthearted tips on using books to attract the opposite gender, and you can tell it's lighthearted because in the answer to the first question they spelled ULYSSES wrong. (And all the copy editors in the world just died.)

In any case, some stray thoughts:

• Having actually read LOLITA, I would not classify it as a titillating book either in title or subject matter. (As for THE NAUGHTY BITS, I got it confused with THE NASTY BITS, the Anthony Bourdain food collection, and started thinking about offal, but your mileage may vary.) I would never cast undue aspersions on a man or a woman I saw reading LOLITA in public, but I would cast them on people who called it "titillating." Just... consider it.


• At what party are ANNA KARENINA and MADAME BOVARY coming up in regular conversation? First, I would like to be at that party, and second, that could go horribly wrong. ("I went to visit my friend who's having a horrible time; she just found her boyfriend's been cheating on her." "You know what Flaubert would have to say about that?")


• As for bringing up Márquez, I quote the immortal Rob Gordon: "Hey, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right?"*


• In college, the sole class required of everyone in my in my concentration (or "major" for the rest of you) was a literary theory course in which we used THE CANTERBURY TALES as our main text for writing tedious papers on which my TA, for whom English was not a first language, would change words apparently at random and leave no other comments. In fact, maybe the real purpose of the class was to get concentrators to bond over how much they hated the class, in which case, mission accomplished. A Daily Beast interview reveals Murnighan is a fellow alum, which suggests at least he must have had a different TA. Anyway, that ruined me for ever using THE CANTERBURY TALES as an aphrodisiac, but if Chaucer works for you, God bless you and make you happy in love and life.

*Completely off-topic, but if you enjoy "High Fidelity" and use Twitter you should be following Emily's tweeting of the movie. It's been too long since I've watched it, but this will tide me over.

Men! Some of them like to read! And then they like to talk about it!

There are many things to love about this Sunday Stylesesque Boston Globe article about men's book clubs:

• The snobbery right off of the bat that a club whose purpose is to "drink beer and read Charles Bukowski" is not a real book club. A real book club contains two things: Tea sandwiches and ladies.
  

• The discovery that it is someone's job to write a column entitled "Books for Dudes." Dude, how do you get that job? If enlisted I would quickly abuse this privilege by using the word "dude" all the time, but it looks like author Douglas Lord (o lucky man) does the same thing: I spotted 19 in this column alone.

• The Page 69 rule, according to book club member and man Ned Pride:

  "There has to be something pretty sick going on on page 69 for us to read the book. Either a sexual encounter or some crazy situation. You can count on it with [John] Updike or [Tom] Wolfe, guys like that."

• I went ahead and tested this rule with a book I had in reach, Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN, and it failed! Therefore, Cormac McCarthy: not for men. (On page 69 the boy is being pulled through a market and "traveling medicine show" by soldiers -- not crazy enough.)

• The ham-fisted attempt to tie book-club participation to the recession ("At a time when men account for nearly 80 percent of the 5.7 million Americans who have lost their jobs") by suggesting that the groups provide both support and networking. Because in a boom economy, no one needs to read.

Much as I would fully support a man joining a book club (friends, brother, the pseudonymous Camus, whoever) this is just silliness. But maybe something good can come out of it: Using the beer-Bukowski model, describe your fantasy of what a book club should be, man, woman or child that you are.

Oh, so that's what "having a writer's perceptions" means...

Holly doesn’t just behave like a writer; she has a writer’s perceptions. In the middle of sex — satisfying sex — with a man she loves, she finds herself face-to-face with a pile of books on his nightstand. Of course, she tunes out to read the titles on the spines.

--Jincy Willett in the New York Times on the protagonist of Sarah Dunn's new novel SECRETS TO HAPPINESS. This blog sure is prurient this week. I am looking forward to Dunn's novel, though, having enjoyed her last one THE BIG LOVE.