N*****Berry Finn

Lots of you have probably heard about the new version of Huckleberry Finn with all the n-words taken out.

To the left you'll see one of the guys responsible, Alan Gribben. I picked this red-eyed photo because the news has taught me that when you're going to disagree with someone, you should find an unflattering picture of him. Gribben figures that, because it's such a controversial word and causes trouble in classrooms, he could go through and clean it up, leaving an alternative for people who don't want to have to deal with naughty words.

The most reasonable point made is that there are still many, many publishers who will continue to publish the unedited version, so all he's doing is creating another version available for those who want it. But to be honest, I think that's sort of defeating the point of reading a book.

For one thing, who the fuck is Alan Gribben? He's an English professor who has written a couple articles and one book, the biography of Harry Huntt Ransom. It's somewhere around the six-millionth most popular book on Amazon with exactly zero reviews. The original Huckleberry Finn is somewhere around 20,000.

What I'm saying here is that we have a guy who wrote what I highly suspect is a boring -ass, research-heavy book about some guy that nobody even knows, and this guy has decided to go ahead and edit a book that is widely considered a piece of Americana and a masterpiece. I feel like he's a little out of his depth here. He's an expert on Twain, apparently, but that doesn't make him any sort of artistic force. So who is he to say that this word, which appears over 200 times in the original text, is not an important part of the text itself.

If Mark Twain were alive today, and if someone asked him whether he wanted to release a clean version, that would be his decision. He could stroke his insane mustache for a while and think it over. But after the dude's dead, he's dead, and cutting it out changes the text. Why not go through Moby Dick and change all the character names? Why not have them harvesting crops as killing whales is controversial and different in today's context? I understand that Eminem releases a clean version of an album because he knows half his fans are 12, but I don't think that's the case with Twain.

Which brings us to another point: Not everything needs to be for kids. There's a comepletely misguided idea that classics are the books that kids should be reading. This is absolutely untrue. There is really no reason to read classics until maybe, MAYBE, late high school, and even then it is my opinion that you'll actually get something out of them if you wait a little longer. The problem isn't that there's this great kids' book out there, if only it didn't have bad language. The problem is that there is a book out there with contextually-understandable language that is being presented to an audience that's too young.

And how are we supposed to understand the context of the time if things are presented unrealistically? A big draw for that book is that it's a look into a time and place that none of us will ever experience first-hand. To change that view would be like changing a book about 1980's New York to reflect a cleaner, more friendly New York of today. It loses meaning and purpose.

In the last few years we've been treated to a lot of updated classics, specifically ones that feature monsters, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies here. I think you could make a lot of the same above arguements against these types of books. They remove the context, they try to appeal to an audience that is not of best fit, and they are written by a team-up between a respected author and a nobody.

What's the difference? Well, for starters, as someone who thinks that context DOES matter, this is comedy. This is not an acedemically-minded attempt to stop giggles from the back row. When you see the cover, you can pretty much guess what you're going to get.

Furthermore, the changes are very obvious. Pretty much anything concerning zombies or kung-fu sticks out quite a ways from the thrust of the original. In the Huckleberry Finn update, the idea is to make the change seamless, which I find to be silly and disrespectful at the same time.

The really odd part of the whole thing, which I will never understand as a white male who has yet to hear an effective racial slur against himself, is why removing that one word is supposed to make things better somehow. Because is it really the word that's the problem, or is it the context in which the word referred to someone who was paid no money and whipped to do work and could never escape? If I could choose between continuing my current life while being referred to as "Asshole" all the time, OR being a slave, I think I would make some calls to get business cards changed. The point being, changing the word doesn't really change anything, and in fact softens the harsh reality of the time.

Finally, by softening the book for the classroom, you are removing a difficult and important conversation. How are we supposed to understand our past if we remove catalysts to its discussion?

Book Review of a Book I Refuse to Read (Except for Money)

Lately there's been a big publication surge in memoirs by youngish, attractive-ish women who write comedy. The prototypical example is, of course, Chelsea Handler, or possibly Sarah Silverman, both of whom had books on the bestseller lists recently.

I have to say, after trying to read one of Handler's books, I wasn't super-impressed. The writing is fine, but I'm just not amused when a woman says dirty shit that is traditionally the field of men. That in itself isn't enough to make a book hilarious. As knee-slappers go, my knee wasn't sore in the least, or as she would probably say, Not nearly as sore as a cheerleader's outer labia after prom.

See, it's not that hard.

But the real crime of this whole situation is that, as much as I am not a big Handler fan, publishers start scrambling to publish shit imitations of books that are bringing in big money.

That brings us to You'll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again by Heather McDonald. Please allow me to share a bit of the summary:

You'll Never Blue Ball in This Town Again is the laugh-out-loud story of an attractive Los Angeles woman who found herself in the predicament of being an unwilling virgin. As an actress, writer, and stand-up comedienne, Heather McDonald passed up ample opportunities to have her V-card revoked by handsome, rich, and sometimes even fabulously famous men, but she could not bring herself to do "it" until well after her friends had been deflowered.

Okay, let's take a minute here.

First off, how bad do you feel for this person? Let's see: hot, good career, pursued by desirable members of the opposite sex...yeah, I think she'll be just fine.

Where is the conflict in this story? My understanding here is that she was doing fine, wanted to get rid of her virginity, and had the opportunity to do so. What the fuck is the problem?

And for a laugh-out-loud book, there wasn't one fucking joke in that whole paragraph, the first paragraph that people are likely to read. Why wouldn't you throw them a bone? She's supposedly a writer AND comedienne, so how about a little punch-up on the script here? Watch:

"...passed up ample opportunities to have her V-card revoked by handsome, rich, and sometimes even fabulously famous men..."

Becomes

"...passed up ample opportunities to have her V-card revoked by handsome, rich, and sometimes even fabulously rich men..."

Okay, it's not solid gold or anything, but changing one word turned an unimportant plot point into at least some semblance of comedy. It took all of two seconds.

Next we get a quote from Handler herself, which is fine, but begs this question: Why would you bury the Handler quote in the middle of this thick summary, meanwhile a quote attributed to all three Kardashian sisters (somehow, as if they were speaking in unison) is highlighted in its own offset bubble? Since when did we ever give a fuck about the Kardashians opinion on BOOKS. If you want to talk eye makeup and how easy it is to bounce back physically from having a baby when you're 24, that's one thing, but I'd rather leave the literature to someone who isn't famous for starring in a sex tape. Why not highlight the quote by Handler, someone who is respected in this particular field, and bury the Kardashian quote in the text, or off in a quarry somewhere?

Finally, we get to the author bio. Pardon the length, I had nothing to do with it:

Heather McDonald is a stand-up comic, and full-time writer and producer on E!'s top-rated show, Chelsea Lately. She appeared in the Wayans Brothers' White Chicks and Dance Flick, was a regular on MTV's Lyricist Lounge, and had guest roles on hit television shows like Frasier, Malcom in the Middle, and Reno 911. Heather and her husband, Peter, have been married for nine years and have three children. Follow her at [twitter and facebook URL's removed because fuck that shit]

Okay, long. Too fucking long. It's an author bio, not a fucking resume. Jesus christ, I wouldn't have a bio that said, "Pete worked at McDonald's, Target, Wal-Mart..." and so on. Maybe you're trying to convince me that you must be funny, but if everyone from a Wayans movie was funny...well, no one from a Wayans movie is funny.

And what the fuck, you killed all the suspense of the book. You've been married NINE years? So we can assume that this dry spell ended with your marriage, and has been over for nine years?

According to my sources over at the google, that would have made you 27 when you lost your virginity, assuming that you didn't bang anyone, including your husband, before marriage. Is that terribly shocking? Is that blowing someone's mind? It's outside the norm, sure, but not so much so that I'm curious as to your insights about it. And getting married at 25 probably puts you on the other side of that particular curve. Losing your virginity at 25 is a little on the late side, but getting married at 25 is a little on the early side, so do the math and decide whether or not it's super bizarre.

Not to get too far off track here, but this feels like that book Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich in which Barb takes on a number of America's shittiest jobs in order to see how the other half lives. The fundamental problem with this book that Barb doesn't understand is that the shitty part of working at Wal-Mart isn't working at Wal-Mart. The shitty part of working at Wal-Mart is depending on it to survive, knowing that this is about the best you're going to do, and taking massive amounts of shit from your boss because you NEED this job. Need it. Corralling carts isn't a means to an end for book writing. It's your career.

Here's the shitty thing about having your virginity: Wanting to get rid of it and not having the opportunity. Not having any possible chance is very different from having the chance and waiting for the right thing to come along. Ask any 16 year-old boy.

McDonald was being picky, not unbangable, and that's okay. That's great. Anyone besides someone trying to get in her pants would support that decision because what the hell is the difference? Nobody is begrudging your ability to make that choice, but that choice doesn't interest me.

I'd much rather read a book by someone who was a 25 year-old virgin who had no real possibility to lose it, where you look at a picture and think, Good luck, motherfucker. That's some compelling shit.

As a book, totally uninteresting. I'm just not interested. I didn't even bother to come up for two different words for "uninterested," that's how bored I am. We all got relationship issues, and a lot of them are more fascinating to me than the decision to not fuck.

The book could be great. Maybe there's some angle on this whole thing that would really help it make sense, but shouldn't that be included in the summary? And shouldn't the summary have some fucking jokes in it? It's like having a trailer for a comedy movie that only shows the stupid last thirty fucking minutes where we win the big game and learn a little bit about ourselves. Fuck you, Dodgeball! Everyone talks about how hilarious that fucking movie is, but what about the last half hour where we have some dumb fucking uplifting story where there are almost no jokes, they win the big game, get the girl, and you might as well have a voice-over that says, "Well, things turned out pretty okay"?

Anyway, back to the book.

Here's what you're selling me: An attractive woman, dressed nicely on the front, and an explanation that she lost her virginity somewhat later than most because of choices she made, although what those choices are is unclear. Whoop de shit.

To conclude, the magic number for this book is

57

which is the number of dollars someone would have to pay me to make me read it.

By the way, if you check the Amazon reviews, you'll see a lot of 1-star reviews that cite the same problems almost universally, which is that the book is not funny, not interesting, and spends a good portion talking about sorority life.

If you also check the 5-star reviews, you'll also notice that most of them are brief, and that somehow this book was so compelling that it was the only review many of these people had written. Fascinating...