Meta-Humor
Topic: by Lenny
As many of you know, a friend and I are writing a novel, a satirical take on all those
Left Behind books and the like.
When writing fiction I try not to
read any, for the obvious reasons. But sometimes you can't help it. So, yesterday I was rereading
the Illuminatus! Trilogy for the first time in ten(plus) years, and came across this passage:
_______________ "Got your book review read, Eppy?"
"Have it tomorrow, dear boy. Can't be any faster,
honestly!"
"Tomorrow will do..."
"It's a dreadfully long monster of a book... and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough
skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent -- no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of
ghastly boring subjects. And the sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors -- whom I've
never heard of -- have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be
sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish, but I'll have a prefectly devastating review for you by tomorrow at noon."
"Well, we don't expect you to read every book you review..."
_______________The book she refers to is, of course,
the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Then again, she could very well be referring to the book that I am writing with
Josh.
Posted by mediafaction
at 12:01 AM EST