Goodnight Moon: Some Continuity Errors

1. On the “comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush” page, the brush and comb look like they are about four inches apart, but on the “goodnight light” page (and others), the comb is practically touching the brush.
2. Before and after the “goodnight mittens” page, it shows a pair of socks next to the mittens on the drying rack (or whatever), but on this page it shows just the mittens by themselves with no socks.
3. In prior (and subsequent) pictures of the “little house”, the door on the house has a doorknob but on the “goodnight little house” page, the door is missing the doorknob.
4. Prior to my owning this book, my apartment had an “office”.
5. The picture of the kittens immediately prior to the “goodnight kittens” page depicts the kittens playing with yarn, as does the subsequent picture, but on the “goodnight kittens” page itself: no yarn.
6. Prior to my receiving a copy of this book in a gift set of other books by the same author, I would just go to Amazon and buy a bunch of things whenever, but now I think a lot about how much food costs.
7. Before I had this book, it seemed impossible to me that I would ever have said to someone I loved: “You know, a percentage of me is still a penis”; or: “I’m confused how your having had an episiotomy a week ago prevents me from getting a bj now?” although maybe we can all admit singing “Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and a bj” is objectively funny divorced from the context. 
8. Before the appearance of this book in my home, I didn’t immediately assume strangers I saw on the street were actively attempting to cause harm to people close to me as I walked with them or pushed them in a stroller and then in my head jump off from that image of them (the strangers) potentially hurting my family into playing out scene after scene of my violent retribution, like recent-Korean-movies levels of violence, against these strangers, who in these scenarios that I am imagining would meet with staggering and disturbing consequences at my hand, but in a complicated inversion of what you might expect, this results in the people in my apartment building and just in my general neighborhood looking on me with a new respect instead of pity and this is also mixed with a kind of sexual desire from some of them, but subsequent to my receiving this book, all that, but plus I also oscillate between pity for myself and contempt for myself and how every mundane choice I make is ultimately insufficient, like a perverse Choose Your Own Adventure where every decision leads not merely to a death but to a specifically unimpressive death, the choices I’ll make for the rest of my life spread out before me, forming a polluted, qlipothic tree, on every branch a sour, rancid piece of shit fruit that if this were an overexplainy political cartoon would each be labeled with things like “inadequacy” or “disappointment” or “even the moderate successes in his life can be chalked up to the mere happenstance of his being born into a white middle class family and the entropy that that afforded him” and know that even this pity/contempt is practically a working definition of triviality compared to some of the nightmare stuff that many, many other people legitimately have to deal with, and even my acknowledgment of same just heightens the privileged position from which the solipsism feeds on itself, which just makes the whole feeling of bullshit inadequacy collapse into itself like a melting Klein bottle.
9. On the “goodnight noises” page, it sort of looks like the brush no longer says “bunny” on it.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, etc.

Towering over them all is Nicholas Sparks and he is naked, typing, his small fingers lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to Gena Rowlands, huge and tan and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He types a movie for Miley Cyrus and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, Nicholas Sparks. He has typed sixteen books and his fingers are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He types in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, Nicholas Sparks. He is typing, typing. He says that he will never die.

Good Reads

Here you can see how much I have invested emotionally in GoodReads.com Part II

Tickle Me Pooh! by Walt Disney


rating: 1 of 5 stars


From the title, I thought that this would be a book about a pirate who was into coprophilia.

NOT SO. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY IF THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE AFTER.


[previously]

Here you can see how much I have invested emotionally in GoodReads.com

THE RAVISHING OF LOL STEIN
by
Marguerite Duras

Pretty good, I guess, but not quite as good as The Ravishing of ROTFLMAO Stein.


View all my reviews.*



* or, you know, don't

Entrapment

or:
I Use Google Chat to Supply Content For My Seldom-Updated Blog, Which Is Probably Bad Form

recbee: Hey Shearn: have a good death match tomorrow

moonlightambulette: Oy! Jeezus. Thanks. I'm a skeered.

recbee: here's a tip when facing a literary adversary: try to picture them without their eyewear

moonlightambulette: Ew! They all just look like moles that way.

recbee: They all look like Avogadro's number?? What are you talking about? Is this explained in your book?

moonlightambulette: Yes, it is explained in the book. But only in the hardcover edition. and only if bought new. and in bulk.

recbee: That is a good strategy. If I ever write a book; I'm going to do the hardcover in invisible "Yes/Know" ink and only include the decoding pen in the softcover.

moonlightambulette: Hey. You might be on to something there...

recbee: And then the audio book could detail how to make an antidote for the carcinogens that you absorbed using the first two books. I ACTUALLY MAY BE ONTO SOMETHING

moonlightambulette: HOLY SHIT YOU'RE GOING TO BE RICH

recbee: I AM GOING TO POST THIS ON MY BLOG SO EVERYONE KNOWS THAT YOU SWEAR IN YOUR IM'S

moonlightambulette: FUCKING FUCK. I'M OUT OF HERE

The proprietrix of Moonlight Ambulette, whom I have just demonstrated swears like a stevedore (and who broke up my writing group with her terrifying insouciance), has a book coming out.* The word on the street is that this book is terrific and also that the title of the book was once shouted by a sleeping Dave Eggers. This is a coincidence!

People of Earth: It would be nice of you to buy this book.
And New Yorkers specifically: You can see her tonight (Wednesday the 25th) at Opium Magazine's Literary Death Match where, based on the above exchange, she may or may not be LASIKing people with her mind.
Other People With Whom I Have Engaged in Google Chat: I will probably not betray you like this, assuming you have not broken up a writing group I was in.


* as do other people from my old writing group; for real, if you want a book published, join a writing group with me. Not all of my stories will be about eleven year olds in suburban Texas where pseudomagicrealist things happen! Not all of them fall under the category "Like David Mitchell If David Mitchell Had Zero Intellectual Rigor"!

These go to eleven

Misogyny: Pretty much always funny?
AFFIRMATIVE.

But we're a little mystified: on this Dell Book Comparison Chart, Why is it more interesting to spend an evening with this book than with a beautiful woman?, we're confused..? About the number-of-words joke? Like, specifically, why does a [beautiful] [$45] woman only speak eleven words?

Is it that the number that means "mutual oral pleasure" hadn't been invented yet in 1943 or whenever, and the number 11, representing "upright congress" was as crazy as it got?

Help us out, ladies?

(Please keep your responses short to reduce your frankly insufferable insomniability)

The Giving Tree

It would have been better if this book had ended by saying that the boy took the remains of the tree to be harvested and then put into a wood chipper and turned into pulp and then dried out and bonded and rolled and coated and then eventually made into a copy of the book The Giving Tree.



That would make it more of a forehead-slapper.





When reviewing a book for GoodReads or something, I say to myself: "Did I slap my forehead upon completion of this book? No? AUTOMATIC DEDUCTION OF ONE STAR!"

Samantha Moss Let Down by the Second Half of a Book, Part CMLXXXII

Oh! I didn't realize this was a LitBlog now! Awesome idea to turn this into that. Totally great, seriously, because now I can talk about this: I know everyone on Earth has read this book but urrrhrghrghrhghrghr, Wind Up Bird Chronicles, UgGUGHHIhrhrhhrrrggffg

And now that this is a LitBlog, I can review it!
Here we go:

• 
  
  The first half was charmingly Lynchian. :) *
• 
  
  But I found the second half to be annoyingly Lynchian. :( **

*e.g., interesting mysterious women; strange occurrences leading a mostly reactive protagonist into a seedy underworld

**i.e., the second half kept me interested and entertained well enough, I guess, and periodically brought up some thematic connections to the first half, but I felt like it had kind of strayed so far from the original plot/characters from the first part that it made me wonder why I had invested time/empathy into them if they were only going to be discarded. And there were a lot of little details whose reasons to exist were suspect. Liiiike they were jarringly non-sequitury or just throw-away surrealities or improbable coincidences and while sometimes that works, some other times, in 600 page books, for instance, it's really annoying. Like the bat and the lemon drops and the two sisters, one of whom had a conspicuous red hat that conspicuously failed to fire in the third act, and the cat and the assistant of the brother and pages 23-72. and why can't cinnamon talk? and wasn't it weird how he used western brand names so often? Oh wait, I've just been handed a note that says this is not a LitBlog.
OK, um, not a LitBlog, not a LitBlog, OK, quick, here is something not related to literature that I thought about today:

Problems at the 42nd street transfer probably never get resolved because on the work forms where it says: "Subway lines affected" the workers put "N/A".

THIS SEEMS TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE, ACTUALLY.
IF THIS IS TRUE, PLEASE FIX THIS, NEW YORK.
Now go out there and be so swell that you'll make me hate you!
XOXOXOXO

Save Ferris

From the comments, moonlight ambulette intones...

listen, this has nothing to do with your post, really, but i've been thinking that you should read Then We Came to the End because it is about people in offices and you work in an office and so do i and i think this book is really really funny and maybe you will too? also...do you still live in new york?

..And my response to that was getting too long, so here it is here:

[spoilers?]

I do still live in New York for something like two more weeks, and when I move, that book will be boxed among my other items because verily: I totally read that book and I liked it a lot.

In particular:

I LIKED:

• How funny it was;
• The first-person-plural voice;
• The guy who quotes Emerson;
• The Catch-22ishness (though it wasn't slavishly Catch-22esque, which you might initially think);
• The very last line, which maybe could be considered gimmicky, but worked for me and which I read with what I guess I would call a satisfyingly pleasant shock (that almost never happens to me in a novel -- the last time it came close was Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, where the last line suddenly made me remember the first line of the book (conveniently printed on the cover) and I went back to the first line to make sure I understood the implication of the last line, and I had, and wow, that got me, but then the rest of the book wasn't so consistently great, and so I'm not going to count that one);
• The fun promotional website, which I wisely did not look at until after I read the book, not that it gives anything away, but because we all know what happens when you look at a debut novelist's fun promotional website and then read her stupid, sucky book. (A clever thing about the website is that only the characters that would have myspace pages do have myspace pages.)

HOWEVER, I LIKED LESS SO, MAYBE, ALTHOUGH THESE WEREN'T THAT BIG A DEAL, I JUST CAN'T ENJOY ANYTHING WITHOUT QUALIFICATION ANYMORE, THE FACT THAT:

• It seems utterly implausible to me that a large percentage of a group of people in a cubefarm would (a) know and (b) embrace a Tom Waits song;
• The "end" the title references, which I take to mean "the end of August and first few weeks of September" thing toward the close of the book, which I read with unpleasant shock (it seemed like a calculatedly throwaway line, and I'm not ready for that to be a throw away line yet; maybe you have a different opinion -- I felt the same way about DFW's "The Suffering Chanel", and I pretty much love DFW);
• I kind of lost track of some of the characters, although I'm happy to blame myself for this
• The resolution to the central maguffin conceit ("Design a funny cancer awareness campaign") wasn't that great, but maybe the point was it couldn't be; but I was looking for it to be like The Cheese Monkeys, where the students get a design challenge and you get a chance to figure out what you would do and then you find out what the students did and you're all like, "Chip Kidd, you madman!"

IN CONCLUSION HERE ARE TWO ANECDOTES

• The book is set in and spends a lot of time dealing with the great city of Chicago and specifically an ad agency in Chicago, and a week or so ago I spent a whole day in Austin with someone who works in an ad agency in Chicago (!) (we were both there for a wedding), and I asked if he had read this book which I had assumed everyone in the world knew about, and if it had taken the Chicago ad agency community by storm and whatnot, and he said he had never heard of it.
• From reading the book, you would think "this remarkable debut novelist must live in Chicago!" and when you finish the book and read the author description it says something like, "Ferris currently lives in Brooklyn" and I think that's probably the darkest joke in the whole book.

I can't believe she killed off Hermione!

Just kidding, I haven't read it yet.


Jesus Christ, don't look at me like that.

I'm reading The March

It is totally sad!

Because you know even if they survive the Civil War, the starvation, the March itself, Reconstruction, &c., &c., a lot of them still have to live in Atlanta.

No disrespect. Your airport is top notch.

I'm reading What is the What

It is totally sad!

Because you know even if he survives the civil war, the starvation, the lion/crocodile/helicopter attacks, the murahaleen, &c., &c., he still has to live in Atlanta.

No disrespect. Your airport is top notch.




(see also: previous eggersalitiness)
(from 2004, holy cow, that was a long time ago)

Comma Police, Arrest this Man

I like this power-sentence excerpt from the Times review of the new Newt Gingrich novel:

James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.

I tried to diagram this sentence, but the diagram collapsed upon itself and turned into a black hole, which sucked the paper inward, folding it into an origami crane (to honor the memory of Sadako Sasaki).

No disrespect, though: it is hard to write when you are having an affair (they say), and anyway this will have to do until the next DFW novel comes out in probably never.

Page On Which I Said, "Shit, I Need to Start Over and Pay Better Attention"

1992: Loon Lake (E. L. Doctorow): page 133
2006: The Sea (John Banville): page 4


Yay! I'm getting better at reading!

Reviews of “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” and the Bottle of Açaí Juice I Bought for Lunch Cleverly Masked as SAT Test Questions

Choices:
(a) Special Topics in Calamity Physics
(b) The bottle of açaí juice I bought for lunch
(c) Both a and b
(d) Neither a nor b

Questions
(1) __ I had heard good things about it
(2) __ I bought it on a whim
(3) __ If feeling extremely charitable, I might call it “frothy”
(4) __ It seemed sort of good in the beginning, but by the end I was like, “Blaahahhgajh. End, end, end.”
(5) __ Contains metaphors that go down like a junebug having lion sex in a bourbon mood
(6) __ Blue things totally dissed
(7) __ Nabokov rolling in his grave
(8) __ Authoritative blurb raises questions about agenda of blurber
(9) __ Handy pronunciation key for difficult-to-pronounce words like “açaí” or “pessl”
(10) __ “I’m confused about what editors, like, do?”
(11) __ “Maybe I don’t need this many antioxidants and/or self-indulgence.”
(12) __ “Post-BBC Office is anyone allowed to be named Gareth? Really? Really?”


[Pencils down.]


Answers:
(1) c
(2) c
(3) c
(4) c
(5) c (“A Cadillac-sized smile drove away with his face as if I’d just agreed to pay him ‘in cayash,’ as Dad would say, for a Sedona Beige Metallic Pontiac Grand Prix, fully loaded, two grand over sticker price, driving it off the lot right then and there.”; “Stop the radicals! Join the antioxidant revolution!”)
(6) c (~bloods plotline disappear halfway through; ~berries have 61 fewer ORAC units than açaí)
(7) d (This is against policy at Cimitière de Clarens.)
(8) c (Jonathan Franzen: “A masterpiece of sorts.”; Brunswick Laboratories, MA: ORAC Unit analysis, presented as bar chart)
(9) b (“say ‘ah-sci-ee’”)
(10) a
(11) c
(12) a (No, unless a boy is born that can swim faster than a shark.)