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I should create a new category: satirical videos I missed last summer. From the creators of The Hipster Olympics, here’s ‘Llectuals, presenting Girls Gone Wilde at PBS. (Thanks, Javier.)

“If you’ve ever had the misfortune of writing a book, or knowing someone who has, you’ll relate to this,” says Matthew Yglesias.
(Via.)

The video made the rounds ages ago, apparently, but it’s new to me. Have a great weekend, everybody.

As a bona fide Twain obsessive, I am of course almost unnaturally excited about Who Is Mark Twain?, a forthcoming compilation of some of the Huck Finn author’s previously unpublished work.

Last December The New Yorker offered a preview: “The Privilege of the Grave,” one of the collection’s strongest pieces, and arguably its raison d’être.

Now B&N Review provides another look, at Whenever I Am about to Publish a Book.

Here the author claims that, before committing fully to publishing a work, he always “read the manuscript to a private group of friends, composed as follows”:

1. Man and woman with no sense of humor.

2. Man and woman with medium sense of humor.

3. Man and woman with prodigious sense of humor.

4. An intensely practical person.

5. A sentimental person.

6. Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.

7. Hypercritical person — natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.

8. Enthusiast — person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.

9. Person who watches the others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.

10. Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.

11. Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.

12. Person who detests them.

13. Person of evenly balanced judicial mind.

14. Man who always goes to sleep.

These people accurately represent the general public. Their verdict is the sure forecast of the verdict of the general public. There is not a person among them whose opinion is not valuable to me; but the man whom I most depend upon — the man whom I watch with the deepest solicitude — the man who does most toward deciding me as to whether I shall publish the book or burn it, is the man who always goes to sleep.

The rest is here.
 

Twain was preoccupied not only with predicting the public’s reaction to his work (and setting aside the most inflammatory stuff for posthumous publication), but with preserving memory.

Pictured below is a dubious game of his creation. According to one critic, it looked “like a cross between an income tax form and a table of logarithms.”

The intensity of the argument linked above, if not the content, is awfully familiar. I’ve been so insufferable this weekend on the disappointments of the Battlestar Galactica series finale that I owe everyone I know who also watched the show an apology. I wasn’t allowed much access to TV as a child and consequently never learned to do that thing where you separate real life from the people inside the big, shiny box. Sorry, guys.

(As for the question posed here: cavemen, obviously.)

Thanks to all who came out to Housing Works for our Witches, Demons, and Thieves Puritan Halloween party last night. I’m on deadline, so no time for a recap, but we had fun.

For those who couldn’t make it, here’s the kinda-on-theme trivia quiz we handed out. The best part — aside from William Boggess’ questions — was that the winner, Leah, leapt out of her seat in amazement when told she’d won (with 8/10). She was so excited, I felt like a preacher at a tent revival, but I resisted the impulse to commence the laying on of hands.
 

1. Which New England author wrote, in praise of Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” “It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin”?

a) Henry James
b) Edith Wharton
c) Herman Melville
d) Harriet Beecher Stowe
 

2. Witches aren’t unique to New England. According to Roald Dahl’s book The Witches, they are most plentiful in Norway. Identifying Dahl’s witches is a little more of an exact science than it was in Salem, however. Which of these characteristics do Dahl’s witches not have? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) They are hairless, forcing them to wear itchy wigs
b) They are toeless, making it nearly impossible to wear fashionable women’s shoes
c) They have cobalt blue saliva, so they can never spit
d) They have extremely hairy legs, so they must always wear long pants
 

3. It was Puritan custom to let a house struck by lightning burn down, in deference to the will of God, while trying to preserve the other dwellings nearby. Which sometime admirer of Cotton Mather made a scientific discovery that called this practice into question?

a) Jonathan Edwards
b) Benjamin Franklin
c) Silence Dogood
d) John Winthrop
 

4. Strings of deaths in families led to the belief, in 19th Century New England, that one of the dead had transformed into a vampire and was returning at night to feast on everyone else. In the most famous of these cases, when Mercy Brown’s brother became ill soon after her death, their father ordered the girl dug up. Finding her oddly well-preserved, and her heart full of fresh blood, he cut out her heart, burned it, and fed the ashes to the boy, who died anyway. What very contagious disease do scientists say was actually killing these people?

a) Dropsy
b) Tuberculosis
c) Pneumonia
d) Billious colic
 

5. Despite playing girl-who-cried-witch in the 1996 film adaptation of The Crucible, Winona Ryder is no Puritan. In 2001, she was arrested for shoplifting $5,500 worth of designer clothing from which high-end store? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) Neiman Marcus
b) Barney’s
c) Saks Fifth Avenue
d) Nordstrom
 

6. Some scholars have speculated that the hysteria that culminated in the Salem Witch Trials may have been brought on by contaminants in Salem’s food supply. Specifically, Salem’s stores of rye may have been laced with a fungus that contains large quantities of Lysergic Acid, an analog and precursor for synthesis of LSD. What is this fungus called? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) Peyote
b) Ergot
c) Magic Mushrooms
d) Corn Smut
 

7. In an effort to turn everyone’s favorite childhood movie into a breathtakingly boring civics lesson, high school history teachers often teach The Wizard of Oz as an allegory for the economic and political situation of the 1890s. On the off chance that you did not sleep through these lessons, what does the Wicked Witch of the West represent in this interpretation? (Contributed by William Boggess.)

a) The California Gold Rush
b) Marauding groups of bandits on the Southern-Pacific Railroad
c) The money of the old West Coast oil establishment
d) The impending rise of West Coast hip-hop, about a century later
 

8. Which New England author, cartoonist, and illustrator, accused of being predictably drawn to the gothic, responded, “If you’re doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there’d be no point. I’m trying to think if there’s sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children – oh, how boring, boring, boring.”

a) Maurice Sendak
b) Lewis Carroll
c) Eric Carle
d) Edward Gorey
 

9. Which of these authors wrote a story in which the protagonist’s wife makes “frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion [that] all black cats [are] witches in disguise”?

a) James Hynes
b) Edgar Allan Poe
c) Henry James
d) Mark Twain
 

10. Which writer famously defined a Puritan as “someone desperately afraid that somewhere, someone might be having a good time”?

a) H.L. Mencken
b) Mark Twain
c) Ben Hecht
d) Dorothy Parker
 

Answer key: 1. c, 2. d, 3. b, 4. b, 5. c, 6. b, 7. c, 8. d, 9. b, 10. a.

The image shown is “Shot Through,” one more of Michael Aaron Lee’s gorgeous forest paintings.

Years and years ago, I read an interview in which the director John Waters divulged his strategy for avoiding conversations with fellow passengers on airplanes.

He hides whatever book he’s reading behind the cover for Flying Lesbian Nuns.*
 

Last night New York’s Blythe Sheldon saw Waters performing This Filthy World at the Society for Ethical Culture. Among other things, Waters offered a little advice on how to keep the kids reading. “If your daughter is promiscuous, give her a book on womb raiders!” he reportedly said.

Asked after the show whether he had any desire to start a blog, Waters was unequivocal.

“No!” he replied. “I want to be harder to reach. I don’t want people to find me. I’ll write a book.”

* At least that’s how I remember it, but I can’t find a single hit for that title. Which explains why, despite years of hunting, I’ve never been able to put his suggestion into practice.

Last night Marie brought her copy of Goodnight Bush to a party, and a group of us gathered on the back deck to read it together. You can spend a surprisingly long time with the book if you pass it around so everyone can cackle over the details. (True, as one friend complains, the parody is not subtle. Nor has this administration been.)

For me a highlight is this section of the notes that follow the text:

Bush himself, while campaigning, referred to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which was not actually published until one year after Bush graduated from college; the president’s infancy was clearly an extended one.)

Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For has gone into hibernation, but she’s updating her blog regularly, and posting old comics there.

The recent California Supreme Court ruling declaring gay marriage a constitutional right (yes!) inspired a memory of Bechdel’s own spontaneous and conflicted marriage in San Francisco four years ago. Also, its annulment, six months later.

After Bookslut directed my attention to the David Foster Wallace cartoon at pictures for sad children, I read through the archives. Much of the story centers on Paul, who has a crush on a coworker and still shows up to his cubicle even though he’s dead. The call center series is especially good.

Last month the cartoonist, John Campbell, was taking orders for custom comics at $20 each. You were able to request specific characters, and I asked that my comic feature Edgar Allan Poe and Jacques Derrida. Here it is.

For the holidays, the design firm Pentagram sent out Decipher, a gorgeous book of cryptograms now reproduced online for your enjoyment. Solve them here, and enjoy.

The plane back from Georgia was delayed, and all the pulled pork and fried okra and cake I ate this weekend must have gone to my brain. I can’t think to answer email, much less catch up on reading.

For now maybe you’ll enjoy Wilfred, an Australian TV show being broadcast in daily installments at IFC.com. Ingredients: one man, one woman, and a bong-smoking dog who thinks he’s human.

(An old buddy from my Gainesville days is one of the masterminds behind IFC’s new Web Series lineup, but I point you to Wilfred because it’s funny, not because I need a check on the nepotism scorecard.)

Already benumbed by attack ads this election year? Never fear: the philosophers’ presidential campaigns will enable you to appreciate the absurdity of political machinations anew.

Recommended viewing order: the Kant Attack Ad, the Nietzsche Attack Ad (above), and then Kierkegaard in ‘08. (Thanks, Maximus.)

I’m already imagining the literary critics version.

Tom Toles’ Washington Post editorial cartoon, Obama’s Eating of Vegetables Fuels Rumors About Him, satirizes Wednesday’s inane front-page Washington Post story, Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.

In this satirical 1991 video, the great James Wolcott battles multiple personalities induced by Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost — until he heals himself by comforting the hurt little boy inside him.

At the end of every road is another road, and at the end of that road is a place where it’s sunny and quiet, a place where we men can meet and talk, and our inner children can play together. And it will be good. And I think it’ll be really nice.

“For those of us who grew up in his literary thrall,” Wolcott wrote earlier this month, “losing him is like losing a planet, a fire sign of the Zodiac.”

I’ve probably mentioned Tom Gauld’s Guardian illustrations before, but they’re worth another look (and laugh) on this Monday morning. (Thanks to Making Light for the reminder.)

At last Patrick Hughes’ Diary of Indignities is headed for a bookstore near you. I believe the angelic lad on the cover (above) is Hughes himself — pre-D&D Magistrate days.

Statistically improbable phrases include “poo water,” “ass blood,” and “saltwater catfish.” Says Hughes:

You just ain’t getting Party Melon and poo water and ass blood and Skinhead Katrina from regular books, and Amazon proves it. (I do know a guy who suspects he got ass blood, and maybe poo water too, from Skinhead Katrina, but they got ointments for that kind of shit these days so let’s not dwell on it.)

Over the past year I’ve struggled intermittently with the Dryden translation of Plutarch’s Lives.

I settled on this version after noticing it was the one in Twain’s library, but I should have looked more closely. The book was an article of loathing and ridicule for Twain, who amended the title page (at right) to read “Translated From the Greek [into rotten English] by John Dryden and Others,” and “The Whole Carefully Revised and Corrected [by an ass].”

In the margin, he wrote:

When you come across the pronouns he and him in this slovenly book, you will never know to whom they refer. But never mind — neither does God.

When I Was a Loser, an anthology of high school essays, is officially out today. Editor and contributor John McNally appears on Talk of the Nation to discuss the book at 3 p.m.

I’ve cajoled McNally and more than half of the other writers into sending along their high school photos (above). My picture is up there, too — some of you will have seen it already — although it dates to a couple years after most of my essay takes place. I wish I’d been able to find a shot featuring my Sally Jesse Raphaël glasses. Sexxxy.
 

The first person to match the authors with their younger selves will win a copy of the anthology — signed by several contributors — and a Dr. Who iron-on.

If no one has figured them all out by next Monday at 5 p.m., the prize goes to the person with the most correct answers, or to the winner of a drawing between those who’ve guessed the same number correctly. One guess per person, please. Send your answers to [email protected].

Congratulations to Mark Bonney of Seattle, the first person to guess all identities correctly.

Answer key: A — Kelly Braffet; B — K.L. Cook; C — Zelda Lockhart; D — Dean Bakopoulos; E — Tod Goldberg; F — Elizabeth Crane; G — Aimee Nezhukumatathil; H — James P. Othmer; I — Doug Crandell; J — Will Clarke; K — Maud Newton; L — John McNally; M — Julianna Baggott; and O — Johanna Edwards.

The pictured writers, and brief excerpts from their essays:

• Tod Goldberg (who helps you out at his site): “If the truth be known, I would have preferred not meeting Zsa Zsa Gabor at all versus meeting her while covered in the pubic hair of my sisteen-year-old girlfriend.”

• Aimee Nezhukumatathil: “Before I left the stage, she whispered, ‘Aimee, your hair!’ and pointed to the bulletin board. There, on the wall of bright construction paper, was a giant grease stain.”

• James P. Othmer: “We picked up my best friend, Sully, at his house while his mother looked out he window as if I was taking her son on a suicide mission. Sully was a diabetic, had to inject himself several times a day, and often slipped into mild comas while drinking with me.”

• Julianna Baggott: “My grandmother says, ‘So, you’re going on a date! Isn’t that nice. Now you be good, you hear? You be nice.’ Did I neglect to mention that my grandmother was raised in a house of prostitution? Is this being nice a veiled reference to money? It’s hard to say.”

• John McNally: “In eighth grade, my hair is a sculpture — thick and wavy — kept in place with a can’s worth of Aqua Net. If someone were to come near me with a cigarette, I’d go up in flames. The good news is, I’m starting to slim down, and the blue leisure suit is looking pretty sweet on me.”

• Kelly Braffet: “The rednecks we went to school with made machine-gun noises and spit at us when we walked down the hall, and for a while there was even a much-storied ‘Freak Hit List’ in one of the first-floor bathrooms, but most people just ignored us. And let’s be honest: we preferred the machine guns.”

• Owen King: “[A photo of the Loch Ness Monster] was like the guys who claimed to have girlfriends in other towns, or to have gotten laid over the summer. While you couldn’t disprove what they said, it strained credibility. Why were girls in other towns fucking everybody? What was wrong with the girls in my town? Why was there still a dinosaur in this particular lake? Why Scotland?”

• K.L. Cook: “My mother and I had our knees on the floorboard, our faces close together on the vinyl seats. Our breaths whistled. Her wig was askew and one of her false eyelashes was plastered to her cheek like an insect. My body shook, my heart thumping wildly in my neck and temples. She smiled at me, a big enough smile for me to see lipstick smudged on her top two teeth. ‘Now that’s what I call fun,’ she said.”

• Zelda Lockhart: “Senior year we decided we would get Ciretta’s grandmother to make us similar dresses — hers blue and mine pink — and that we would attend the prom together. In my head and heart, she was my girlfriend, a truth neither of us spoke, but a truth we had lived for three years. The adult queer men in the choir strongly suggested that two of them come with us as fake dates.”

• Will Clarke: “What if I hid the word pussy in my campaign posters and then everyone was manipulated into thinking I was a bigger pussy than they already did? What if a word like cunt didn’t work on girls?. . . . How did these ad agencies know what bad words would connect with a depraved urge?”

• Johanna Edwards: “If I did go to Prom, I’d have to stuff my size-18 body into one of the sequined nightmares that pass for plus-sized evening gowns. Oh, I’d seen the ‘extended sizes’ prom dresses available at our local department store — all five of them — and the idea of wearing one of those eyesores appealed to me about as much as the thought of turning up naked.”

• Dean Bakopoulos: “For most of my teen years, I was in love with a guy named Mack. The fact is that we were all a little in love with Mack. Not in an intimate way, mind you — though we did once watch him shoot a bottle rocket out of his ass, which is, in no small way, an act of intimacy.”

• Maud Newton: “They sat kissing on the bleachers, his hands up her shirt, hers on his broad neck, while I worked at seeming neither pathetically bored nor pathetically interested. Often I paced, kicking up dirt, around the periphery of the baseball diamond.”

• Doug Crandell: “‘How many of you teenagers here tonight feel pressured by your . . .’ He pried the book apart to a page marked with a red tassel, and searched the text. ‘By your peers?’”

• Elizabeth Crane: “It turns out that modeling isn’t something you have to go to school for, but even if you did, probably there ought to be some requirements for admittance, which at Barbizon, there were not.”

The remaining contributors (not pictured) to the anthology are: Quinn Dalton, Sean Doolittle, Emily Franklin, Lisa Gabriele, David Haynes, Erika Krouse, Brad Land, Michelle Richmond, Timothy Schaffert, and Richard Yañez.

The best of Steven Cloud’s Boy on a Stick & Slither (BOASAS) comics recall Calvin & Hobbes, and Linus’ existential philosophizing in the glory days of Peanuts.

The strip has reached new heights lately — “Champions of Winning” is a recent favorite — but it’s always been good.

“Conformity” has hung on the Maud Household’s pantry since 2002. “Don’t forget! Be severely competitive within the narrow range of acceptable behavior.”
 

Here’s an August 2006 interview with Cloud, a Brooklynite raised in Bonifay, Florida.

While laid up, I can only do so much sleeping and reading and stroking of cats before the pacing starts.

Mr. Maud (and YouTube) have come to the rescue with The Mighty Boosh, a hilariously surreal British TV show that began on stage, went to radio, and finally aired as a BBC3 series several years ago.
 

In this episode (Charlie), Howard announces his plans to become a novelist.

His chirpy, poncho-clad friend, Vince, mocks him — “You don’t even have a pen” — and says he himself is already a writer, having produced several books about a character made of bubble gum.

The following exchange ensues:

Howard: That’s not a novel. That’s the scribblings of a retard, Vince.

Vince: They are novels. They’re novelettes.

H: It’s in crayon, ya berk.

V: So what? I’m New Skool.

H: New Skool?! I’m talking about books that are gonna get published.

V: Mine are published. I published ‘em myself.

H: You photocopy them, and you leave ‘em lying around supermarkets, inside Weetabix boxes. That’s not published, is it?

Gawker’s new Kreepie Kats feature (above) can only be the work of the man whose Stone Cold Poetry Bitches attended last year’s AWP.