Do you love paper books? How about toilet paper books? Enterprising eBay seller the_heppcat offers a copy of Moby-Dick typed on 6 rolls of (clean!) Cottonelle. Says the item description:

There are four full rolls, one roll (epilogue) is about 1/5 of a roll and one half-roll
All of the rolls of TP came out of a brand new — clean — package of 2-ply Cottonelle.
They’ve been handled very gingerly and infrequently.

As you’ll see in the following photos, one or two rolls have a tear at the beginning.
This is where i was trying to pull the paper through the typewriter.

The auction ended on Saturday with bids up to $320, but the reserve was not met, so this—uh—unique item is still up for grabs. What do you think? Is this a statement about how much you love paper books… or a statement to the converse? (Via: Neatorama.)

• For a slightly more serious take on Moby-Dick, check out Jackie Reitzes’ review of The Art of Fielding.

Part 1:

Part 2:

As you might guess from its name, Tumblr site Slaughterhouse 90210 pairs stills from TV shows with literary quotes—with both hilarious and thought-provoking results:

If you think about it, My So-Called-Life and Anne of Avonlea are indeed thematic soulmates. And Mad Men and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook make an inspired match.

Still need convincing?

“She felt, in every way it was possible, astonished that she had slept with him.”
—Lorrie Moore, Like Life

‘Nuff said. Go check it out.

Here’s my one tiny complaint about Gmail: it may be a little too good at filtering out the spam. I used to get tremendous joy (uh, no pun intended) out of the badly-phrased, ill-translated, nonsensical requests offering me “Turbines for your meat jet” or the opportunity to become a crude oil dealer.

Thank goodness for the Spam Poetry Institute, which describes its mission thusly:

The Spam Poetry Institute is an organization dedicated to collecting and preserving the fine literature created by the world’s spammers. Not only do these persistent individuals sell useful products like cable filters and international drivers’ licenses, they also know how to combine words in a very powerful way.

We hope that you will browse our collection of special messages and that you will be as touched as we were when we first found these gems of imaginative composition.

Oh, and what gems they are! Here is one of my favorites:

Untitled

by dghnfgj

If you are looking wow power leveling,
buy warcraft gold as well as WOW
Power Leveling and World Of wow leveling
When you need someone to listen,FFXI Gil, I’ll be there.
When you need a hug, cheap FFXI Gil,I’ll be there.
When you need someone to hold your hand, I’ll be there.
When you need someone to wipe your tears, guess what?
I’ll be there.
William Shakespeare

(William Shatner, please call me. I think I’ve found your next performance piece.)

Spam emails are often created by programs called Markov text generators. Basically, such programs start with a source text, chop it into pieces, and reassemble, creating works that sound almost like poems. I’ve seen writing exercises that ask you to do something similar, which made me wonder: what would a spam story look like?

There are lots of Markov text generators online, so I popped two paragraphs of a recent Margaret Atwood story from the New Yorker into one. The fourth and fifth paragraphs of the original text produced this spam-ified version:

It’s the Caribbean. Her face is one off, if only to Aquacize, and low on her purposes; she avoids eye contact with them. The ones who cherish the Arctic over, say, the solitaries, who interest her—the Arctic over, say, the belief that she chooses her left breast. Thanks to demonstrate to herself that she’ll do anything about it, she tells herself, but there’s life in a little bronzer and glimmer powder and, low on her best that she’ll do anything about it, she chooses her game. Not that there’s life in excellent shape for any age, at least when fully clothed and low lighting, she tells herself, but there’s life in excellent shape for her cream-colored pullover, perching the solitaries who cherish the lurkers at least when fully clothed, and core strength training, she’s still in a little bronzer and low on her purposes; she can finesse ten years.

It’s the Magnetic Northward nametag, just slightly too old for selecting the lurkers at this stage: with a bikini—superficial puckering has set in, despite her game. Not that she can; still in the best that there’s life in the Magnetic Northward nametag just slightly too old dog yet.

Despite its randomness, there’s a certain poetry here, too. The insistent repetition of “that she’ll do anything about it” and “there’s life in” gives the piece a rhythm and the sense of a desperately ruminating woman of a certain age. And some of those phrases turn out quite striking: “there’s life in a little bronzer and glimmer powder” suggests one kind of attitude towards aging, while “superficial puckering has set in, despite her game” undercuts the ruse. A little editing, and this might turn into a moving little piece.

By the way, if this spam-fiction reminds you of the the so-hot-right-now Twitter feed @Horse_ebooks, you are not crazy. @Horse_ebooks isn’t a parody site, though it reads like one: it’s a spam bot. Splitsider says it “might be the best Twitter account that has ever existed.” Oh, and it has over 28,000 followers.

Might spam fiction have a future? The Tumblr blog horse_ebooks fanfics thinks so: it’s devoted to (yup) fanfiction based on the spam account’s tweets.

After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago (http://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA), my wife and I decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto.

Here’s the result, in which books dance their way around a bookshop after it closes for the night. Enjoy!

(My favorite part? The Moleskine carefully turning the pages of the larger book. Adorable!)

I was once in a workshop where a fellow student had written an entire story with no proper names–the main characters were referred to just as “she” and “he” for fifteen or so pages. Most of the class felt the characters needed handles: to make things clearer to the reader, to make dialogue less awkward, to make the characters feel like real people rather than abstractions. All of these things were true, but I sympathized with the author. I hate naming things too.

In the internet era, at least, you can find help. Long common among writers of sci-fi and fantasy, online name generators have entered the mainstream.

Enter a gender, an ethnic background, and a country of residence into the Fake Name Generator, for instance, and it will create a realistic-sounding name, along with a full dossier: everything from birthdate to blood type. It created a neighbor for me, Muhammed Howard (male, Welsh, United States), of 4411 Stanton Hollow Road, Cambridge, MA, who is a 5′9″, 175-pound, 47-year-old bicycle repairer. If I didn’t have a story in mind for Muhammed already, I might get one just from those stats.

Need to name a company? Despite its rather prosaic name, the Company Name Generator will suggest one for you, like Gamma State or Saxxumi. If you’re not sure what product your new company produces, Wordoid–which generates natural-sounding almost-words in English, German, Spanish, and several other languages–can help with that. Have you heard about Gamma State’s new phenodynamic laser?

Less helpful, but perhaps more entertaining, is the Public Radio Name Generator. Enter your name, or any seed name, and it will create a moniker suitable for NPR. Mine was Corazon Taylor-Boilen, but I don’t think it compares to the (real) NPR names Doualy Xaykaothao and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton.

Do you have tricks for creating character or company names for your fiction? Share them in the comments below!

Do you know Bookfessions? This Tumblr offers confessions of voracious and passionate readers. If you’re such a reader, you’ll find many of these confessions strike a chord with you.

These, and many more, at Bookfessions. (All images: Bookfessions.) And if you’ve got book-related confessions of your own, share them with us in the comments.

Image: Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly’s blog has named the Worst Book Ever, and it’s pretty bad. But the Amazon reviews of Microwave for One are themselves delightful little vignettes of fiction:

It used to be that I got home from work and the only thing I’d want to put in my mouth was the cold barrel of my grandfather’s shotgun. Then I discovered Sonia Allison’s Chicken Tetrazzini, and now there are two things.

This book is all you need for all the cooking you will ever do. Yes, even when you’re cooking for more than one! Impossible you say? Well, I thought so too, but that’s wrong!

After years of mastering the art of microwaving for one, not needing anything else, I was shocked to hear a sound of what I vaguely recollected being my doorbell.. When I opened the door, I was surprised be face to face with the frankenstein monster I had created decades ago. Back then he ran away real soon after his creation, probably due to malnutrition, leaving me alone yet again. Now, after all these years, he had finally returned to say hello. And he wasn’t alone, he had brought his new family: a young sexy wife and two weird but lovely children. Of course I was happy with the prospect of all the possible attention I could get, so without thinking I invited them for dinner.

But soon I realized they were going to be starving to death. What was I thinking? I can’t even cook for two, how am I supposed to cook for five? This was madness! It just couldn’t be done! Only one of us would eat tonight, that was it.

When I shamefully brought this painful news to my guests, this genius monster of mine had the perfect solution: just have some more delivered! And he just mentioned it so casually, like it wasn’t the greatest idea of the century!

So, right away I called in for a special delivery: four more microwaves! Now I can cook for five people ANY day! This book is AWESOME!

And then there’s this one, most timely for a book published in 1987:

I found this book on the kitchen counter of an elderly woman’s house after serving her foreclosure papers. I needed something to read because while we waited for the ambulance to arrive, she had the audacity to collapse before signing away the rights to her property.

I assumed that this ‘microwave’ was a trendy new style of cooking. I’ve had liquid nitrogen prepared uni; I figured using a ‘microwave’ would be another way to elicit and accentuate the subtle flavors of this dish. Most importantly, I wanted to be the first to share my discovery at the country club.

Suffice it to say, I found no recipes for any of the basic foods. No recipes for wagyu beef, Kobe beef, Chilean Sea Bass, toro, arugula, or any of the other staples of a balanced diet.

Instead, I found mystery meats such as ‘chicken’, ‘ground beef’, and ‘casserole.’ The only ingredient I recognized was bacon, but once our servants prepared them in our ‘microwave’ (it turned out we already had one in the servants’ quarters!), the bacon became so stiff that the servants couldn’t even wrap it around the filet mignon for our Chihuahua’s dinner.

I find it appalling that there are so many positive reviews for a cookbook that excludes myself and the fellow job creators of my class. However, I have been inspired to put my servants to work on a book of recipes for the ‘microwave.’

My title: Microwave for the 1%

It’s hard to believe, but there must be worse books out there than this. Any suggestions?

• What writers can learn from “bad” books
• Charles Baxter discusses when bad reviews are useful—and when they’re just “Owl criticism”
• Possibly worse than bad cookbooks: bad sex scenes.

Image: Breaking Copy

Breaking Copy highlights these ads, by the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, that satirize anti-drug PSAs:

Image: Breaking Copy

I can see an MFA program putting together its own series of these ads:

Anita Desai: “Where did you learn to write stories? Who taught you how to do this stuff?”
Kiran Desai: “You, all right? I learned it by watching you!”

Ad campaign, anyone?

National Geographic recently released a list of the “Top 10 Literary Cities.” But it seems a bit controversial to me. Here’s the ranking:

1. Edinburgh, Scotland
2. Dublin, Ireland
3. London, England
4. Paris, France
5. St. Petersburg, Russia
6. Stockholm, Sweden
7. Portland, Oregon, USA
8. Washington, D.C., USA
9. Melbourne, Australia
10. Santiago, Chile

You read that right: Portland, Oregon, is in the top 10, but New York City is not. It’s hard to argue with some of the choices on the list—London, Paris, St. Petersburg—but New Yorkers, what gives?