Tina Fey’s Bossypants
Tina Fey’s wonderful show 30 Rock is one of my favorite TV comedies of all time, and her work on Weekend Update is also a favorite. Since her writing chops…
Sam Lipsyte’s “The Ask” and the problem with ironic distance
Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask is very funny. It’s also sufficiently dark and morbid. And it lacks something that I can’t seem to define, so I don’t think it’s really…
P.G. Wodehouse and the Role of Humor (vs. Comedy)
The writings of P.G. Wodehouse might suggest themselves as antithetical to everything I cherish in literature, but that suggestion would be erroneous. In spite of my rabid disliking of golf,…
Reading Log: Stephen Fry’s ‘Moab is my Washpot’ and the Balance of Authenticity and the Curated Self
Stephen Fry has a very “created” persona. He’s the public-school smartass all grown up, always funny and always a little bit quicker than everyone else in the room. It’s a…
Reading Log: ‘Barrelhouse 13: Comedy’ or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ephemeral
I have a hard time with pop culture. Specifically, I have a hard time with intellectually rigorous examination of pop culture, because it always seems like too much thought is…
Reading Log: Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There
My girlfriend picked this up, read it in a day or two, then passed it on to me. I’d never heard of it (or seen the Academy Award-winning movie) and…
Webcomics Roundup
In the style and delivery of my Podcast Roundup, (part one here: ) these are the webcomics you should be reading: Pt.1- Everyone should read these: http://xkcd.com/: Insightful and hilarious.…
Reading Log (Audiobook Listening Log?): Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please
Celebrity bios are often vacuous, ghostwritten appeals to the voyeuristic spirit of Western civilization as a whole. Amy Poehler’s is not ghost written. I gave the book a shot since…
Revising Prose, Carlin, Euphemism and the Official Style
Richard Lanham’s book Revising Prose -now in its fourth edition- has the worst cover of any book I’ve read this year. Something about living in academia goes hand-in-hands with horrible…