Category: Books

Foucault’s Pendulum — Umberto Eco

Edwin Turner4 Comments

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Go here to see a Foucault Pendulum at work.

Snagged as part of the same cache from the Shinjuku-nishiguchi school that yielded Kinski Uncut. Not really a theft–I traded a VHS tape of a six-hour Cosby Show marathon into the book trade for these books.

Foucault’s Pendulum is a detective story fertile with semiotic pranks–a ludic maze of meaning, history, and logic. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code basically rips off Eco, keeping some of the gnostic speculation, and dumbing down both the plot and the writing. Steal from the greats, I guess…

Something I love about this book is that it was a huge bestseller and I always find meet people who’ve read it (or find out that people I know have read it). Have you, gentle reader, read this book?

I loaned the book to RP a few years back; perhaps he’ll consider loaning it to you.

Pessimus Populus: The Worst People of 2006

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As the days of 2006 dwindle down, we take a hateful look back.

10. Condoleezza Rice.

Condi Rice has managed to tell more lies in just two years as the Secretary of State than she did in the four years she was the National Security Advisor.

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Above: Condi demonstrates remaining US credibility

9. Every kid who “starred” on an episode of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16

My Super Sweet 16 illustrates so perfectly, so beautifully, everything that is wrong with a culture of consumerism that promotes selfish materialism. Watch and marvel at spoiled brats crying like babies while their narcissistic whims are indulged.

8. Rachel Ray

Look what happens to the commodified personality–they puncture any credibility they might have had to begin with and they end up overexposed.

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For a good laugh check out Rachel’s sexy FHM magazine shoot.

7. Dan Brown

For dumbing down America. For ripping of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. For being the worst hack-job piece of schlock to ever pass for a worthy book. For fooling people into thinking they were learning something. For Tom Hanks’s creepy haircut in the movie version. For damaging the already-rotten sense of history Americans have with a brutal infusion of misinformation. This is what we’re choosing to read?

6. Ted Haggard

Pastor Haggard was the linchpin figure in the mega-church movement in the US. These churches represent the complete opposite of the teachings of the New Testament, advocating a “me me me” approach to religion: church as networking. In keeping with selfishness, Haggard, as ex-head of The National Association of Evangelicals, was largely responsible for rallying the religious right (as well as more moderate churches) to back Bush. Haggard recently stepped down as head of the NAE due to allegations that he’s been having sex with a male prostitute while high on meth.

(Editorial note: I’ve actually been working on this list for a while now. Haggard was on here before his recent woes. The outing of his hypocrisy is like icing on the cake, but is also part of the reason I decided to go ahead and publish this post with over 50 days remaining in the year–who knows how many more horrible things people will do, causing me to rewrite? I’d rather post what I have now, and amend later).

5. Everyone who used alcoholism or drug use as an excuse for horrible behavior, and then used rehab as an apology for that behavior.

That’s right, sugar tits–whether you’re a crazy, anti-semitic actor, a spoiled walking skeleton, or a two-faced Republican, drinking/drug-use doesn’t excuse you from being one of the year’s Worst People.

4. Ann Coulter

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Getting fame by attacking 9/11 widows? Nice one, champ. This skinny bitch grows more evil by the minute. Check out Henry Rollins’s letter to Ann Coulter.

3. Rick Santorum

Santorum belongs on this list for so, so many reasons. But because biblioklept purports to be a literary blog, we’ll attribute his inclusion due to his ridiculous misappropriation of Tolkien in a recent speech:

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

Props to Dan Savage for savaging Santorum’s name.

2. Dick Cheney

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Uhmm, where to start, where to start? I guess since this is a look at the Worst People of 2006, we should try our best to look at Cheney from a human perspective–do our best to ignore all the evil Cheney’s political/business enterprises represent, and just look at Cheney the man. So what type of person is Cheney, when he’s on “downtime,” just relaxing with regular folks? Let’s see: in February of 2006, while “hunting” quail, Cheney shot a 78 year old man in the face with a shotgun. The old man had a heart attack. So the Vice President is the type of person who would shoot an old man in the face. Dick Cheney is a bad, bad man. Go here for John Stewart’s coverage of the incident.

1. George W. Bush

Like you didn’t see this coming.

***INSERT YOUR OWN REASON HERE***

(Sorry, but after six-plus years I can’t keep up my outrage even long enough to write a decent post about this insane bastard. I can’t articulate how angry I am, and there isn’t enough room here to catolog all of Bush’s crimes. I’m tired of this shit.)

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Guy Fawkes Day and V for Vendetta

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“Remember, remember the 5th of November…”

I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand for a few years as a kid, so I got to experience Guy Fawkes Day. We made effigies of Guy, and then we burned them on a bonfire. There was a barbecue, and fireworks. To me it seemed a strange mixture of the Fourth of July and Halloween.

It was a few years after my last Guy Fawkes experience that I read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. V, an anarchist who wears a stylized Guy Fawkes mask, wages a vigilante war on a harsh authoritarian government. Along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, V was a first for me, something different than the stuff I was reading at the time, stuff like The Uncanny X-Men and the ill-fated Valiant Comics imprint (I actually made a small fortune selling early Valiant issues I owned).  

A film version of V for Vendetta was released in 2006; Alan Moore famously had his name removed from it. I enjoyed the film, although it certainly wasn’t as good or thought-provoking as Moore’s original story; and even though the film looked good, the passive experience of watching an action movie can’t measure up to David Lloyd’s original art work and that wonderful space between the panels of comics that engages the reader’s imagination.

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This afternoon I finished the first graphic novel of Alan Moore’s  run writing Swamp Thing, and I can’t wait until my library hold on the second graphic novel comes in. I had no idea Saga of the Swamp Thing would be as good as it was, nor as beautifully illustrated; it’s actually much better than V for Vendetta or Moore’s other famed work, Watchmen (and none of these titles are even in the same league as Moore’s masterpiece, From Hell). Alan Moore and Steve Bissette’s run on the DC Comics series essentially led to DC’s creation of the edgier Vertigo imprint for their more “mature” titles, such as The Sandman. These titles helped to change the audiences of “comic books” and helped to make the graphic novel a new standard in the medium (no mean feat, considering the fanboyish culture of comic nerds, a culture that prizes rarity of print run over quality of storytelling).

V for Vendetta illustrates what happens when we don’t allow for dissent, what happens when ideas are both prescribed and proscribed, and all dialogue is muted. Authoritarian governments consolidate their power from the silencing of ideas. A healthy society requires all sorts of opinions, even ones we don’t like. The smiling Americans in this photo aren’t burning effigies of would-be revolutionaries, they are burning something much more dangerous–books.

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100 Most Frequently Challenged Books

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Via bibliophil,  (links by biblioklept):

The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books
of 1990–2000
Compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges.
1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Any favorites on the list? I’ve got a few. I’ve read or at least familiar with 57 of these, including most of the top 25. What’s the beef with Where’s Waldo? Image links to a much better write up on banned books via the MPBA.

Freedom to Read

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Freedom to Read, poster by Maurice Sendak. Image links to a concise history of book bannings.

A Wrinkle in Time

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I loved this book as a kid. Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time explores the the intersections of space and time against a backdrop of adolescent angst. Our intrepid heroine Meg goes on a trans-dimensional quest to find her missing physicist father. Dad has disappeared due to his work on a project involving a tesseract. Go check out Tomorrowland’s brilliant write up of the tesseract.

Charles Bukowski

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I must have been in the 1oth or 11th grade when I borrowed three Charles Bukowski novels from M***ael J***ings. These were:

Women, easily my favorite and Bukowski’s best. I didn’t return this one.

The short story collection, Tales of Ordinary Madness. I kept this one too, but it is no longer in my possession. Loaned out, never to be returned.

And another collection, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town. I think I gave this back; anyway, I don’t have it anymore.

I was reading Henry Miller and Hemingway at the time, and macho Bukowski fit right in. Something about being a teenager, trying to gain access to the “adult world”–or something like the adult world. How to act, what to say. I read just about all the short stories that Bukowski wrote. Factotum and Post Office were two of my favorites. Everyday when I see our mailman I think of Post Office.

 Our mailman is old, and skinny as a sick girl, and he has a nose like a bird’s beak to boot. He runs his entire route; he has a strange little knock-kneed hustle. He always tells me to “Stay safe” when I see him. He’s withered. Post Office makes working for the post office sound like an annihilating, damning, Sisyphean task. I wonder: “Does the mailman not feel safe?”

Charles Bukowski

Bukowski painted some pictures.

Factotum was recently made into a movie starring Matt Dillon as Bukowski’s alter-ego, Henry Chinaski. Mickey Rourke played the “real” Bukowski in a horrible-looking movie called Barfly. I haven’t seen either film.

So Bukowski’s sort of been “branded” commodified as “type”–like Hemingway and Miller (and HST, and Anaïs Nin, and Wm Burroughs,  and Nietzsche, and so on) He becomes a stolen writer, a lazy gesture, a footnote in the movie Swingers. Then again, maybe a few people saw that movie and picked up Hollywood, a really funny late-period Bukowski novel about making the film that will come to be Barfly. In Hollywood, Bukowski endures the trouble of having other people manipulate his writing and sweats sweats sweats that he might have sold out.

Jack O’ Lanterns 2006

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Halloween Craft Links

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Benfrank 

Go check out MAKE’s Halloween blog for plenty of cool Halloween projects–cool pumpkin carving stencils, homemade costumes, DIY scary sound generators, and more. Check out the whole site while you’re there. Good stuff.

The Pumpkin Lady shares lots of cool easy-to-use stencils, including this nifty Shakespeare design:

If you are a socially-challenged misfit with plenty of spare time, go to Raven’s Blight to download PDF how-to’s for constructing paper Halloween toys, like this “Moving Sculpture.”

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Halloween Web has all of your fake-blood-needs covered, including this classic recipe:

Homemade Fake Blood

1 c. Karo Syrup

1 Tbsp Water

2 Tbsp Red Food Coloring

1 tsp Yellow Food Coloring

Mix together in a mixing bowl and you’re done. Try adding blue or yellow for a different shade.

Jeff Smith–Bone

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I got Jeff Smith’s Bone: One Volume Edition in the mail today. I love getting mail, maybe that’s why I love Netflix so much.

This book collects every single issue of Smith’s self-published Bone comic book series, which first came out back in the early nineties…I still have the first couple of issues (think they might be worth anything?)

When Bone originally came out, I was very much into Dave Sim’s Cerebus and other black & white indie comics of a “dark” nature–and despite Dave Sim’s recommendations, Bone was too sweet-natured for me. I couldn’t appreciate Smith’s Walt Kelley-esqe art (the Pogo strip had perplexed me as a kid), and Smith’s layered plot moved too slowly–I realize now it started slow because Smith had all 1300 pages of the series plotted out from the first issue.

A few weeks ago, I was searching through some old graphic novels, looking for a particular Asterix book for some reason, when I came across the first graphic novel in the Bone series, Out from Boneville. I started re-reading it to find that it was waaaaaay funnier than I had realized, and that the art was beautiful and logical and spare and clean. Luckily, Smith has made his work easily accessible, in one big (seriously, this book is heavy) edition.

Will post more on this as I read. 

Danny Rolling: From Hell–Part II

Edwin Turner1 Comment

 While I took an afternoon nap, serial killer Danny Rolling was killed by the State of Florida. Sixteen years ago in Gainesville, FL, Rolling went on a killing spree, murdering and mutilating five college students.

I graduated from the University of Florida in 2001. A decade after the murders, you would meet someone–a grad student, a law student, a native–who had a story about that weekend. They made it sound scary as hell.

Anyone who’s lived in Gainesville or even spent some time there will be familiar with the 34th Street mural wall. One panel of the wall is dedicated to the victims of the slaying: Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Tracy Paules, and Manuel Taboada. The panel seems to be repainted annually; sometimes due to vandalism.

Go here for a detailed chronological account of the murders. 

These murders were horrific, terrible crimes; random and indeterminate, but premeditated nonetheless. Rolling mutilated the corpses, beheading one of them; he also took body parts from the victims. There is no doubt in my mind that this man was a monster, a killer out of the woods like Grendel. And he got exactly what he wanted: fame and infamy and attention. He channeled hell and brought it to earth; I’m sure that hell still exists for some of his victim’s families to this day. Pragmatically, it is right and proper that Rolling be executed.

I still find myself opposed to the death penalty. I don’t pity Rolling and I don’t aim to add to his fame–but he has bought his fame by personifying abject horror, and this is Halloween horror-time. And as just and right as it seems that Rolling die, I still believe that it is wrong for our state government to kill him. I am not arguing that the death penalty is not a deterrent, or that the appeals process death row inmates go through is just as costly as life imprisonment; my argument is simple: murdering people is wrong. It is wrong and therefore against the law, so we (the “we” of community and society who consent to just government) do not kill. If we kill each other we cannot thrive. Rolling’s crime illustrates the human and social disruption of murder. These killings, these gruesome hyperboles of annihilation, show exactly why it is so important that government discontinue use of the death penalty.

Many, many times I have thought: “That person should be killed. That person should be shot.” I have had these murderous thoughts about awful psychopaths and child molesters and about people I am in strong disagreement with and people who have cut me off in traffic. I have had them in brief passing and I have concentrated on them with intensity, giving them much of my time. However, I know that these feelings are rooted in revenge fantasy and rotten wish-fulfillment. I think that when we buy into the death penalty as a punishment, we validate murder. We endorse a moral paradox: killing is wrong, so we will kill you. This type of social paradox becomes a vicious circle. The revenge cycle is metonymized so perfectly in everything from gang warfare to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Confronted with the sheer evidence of such futility and emptiness in violence, I think it only sensical and right that we choose to end capital punishment. Otherwise we only help to maintain the hell that Rolling has channelled, a hell we choose to keep.

Graham Greene and Donnie Darko

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The Portable Graham Greene, ed. Philip Stratford. I haven’t read a single story in this beautiful Viking Portable Library edition, save “The Destructors,” (full text here) (sorry, the page is no longer up [3/07]. Ed.) which I only read because it was referenced in one of my favorite movies, Donnie Darko.

I found this one in another teacher’s classroom. My uncle Lee had just given me a copy of Greene’s The Quiet American, which I finished in a weekend; it’s a slim, spare novel, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, despite the fact that Brendan Fraser was on the cover (the book was re-released to coincide with a film adaptation that I never saw). Anyway, I’d just read TQA, and I saw this beautiful Viking Portable Library edition (I’m a big fan of VPL), so I surreptitiously absconded with it only to never read it. A meaningless theft?

Anyway, last year a new director’s cut of Donnie Darko came out; the wife and I saw it at the San Marco Theater, I was reminded of the book, and read “The Destructors.” “The Destructors” is a simple story about a teenage gang that destroys a beautiful old house from the inside to the outside. “The Destructors” functions as an abyss structure or reading rule that informs the text-proper of Donnie Darko (it’s assigned reading from an English teacher). If you’re a fan of this movie (and if you’re not, why not?!) check out this story; it’s short and to the point. Flipping through it again, I realize that I should probably put The Portable Graham Greene back on the “To Read” stack.

If you haven’t seen Donnie Darko, enjoy the following review courtesy The Comic Critic.

Riddley Walker–Russell Hoban

Edwin Turner7 Comments

I never gave Riddley Walker back to Patrick Tilford (aka TLFRD). A few years ago I loaned it to a student who never returned it. Said student never returned Dune, or The Left Hand of Darkness, or several Jules Verne novels either. Doesn’t matter, I know that he read them.

This book is a favorite. Russell Hoban’s coming-of-age story takes place in a future that has regressed to the iron age due to a catastrophic war. Hoban writes in his own language, a mutated English, full of fragments of the 20th century.

I couldn’t find an image of the edition I stole/lost. This edtion from 2000 features an introduction by Will Self, whose latest book, The Book of Dave, apparently was directly influenced by Riddley Walker. Will Self’s book Great Apes deeply, deeply disturbed me. Nothing repulses me more than images of chimpanzees dressed as humans; Great Apes is the literary equivalent.

Great Apes was an airport bookstore buy; I suppose at some point on this blog I will address the “airport bookstore buy.”

Microserfs

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Microserfs, Douglas Coupland; loaned out, never to be returned. I remember this book as being relatively entertaining. I mostly recall the design of the book–very cool, playful, and ahead of its time. This book will be more interesting in twenty or twenty-five years. Coupland’s site: beautiful. 

http://www.coupland.com/

Choose Your Own Adventure

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I loved these things growing up. Images lead to fun links (or grisly death!)

 

The Crucible/Bohemian Grove

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My 11th graders just finished The Crucible. Here are a few images that we looked at in class.

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These images remind me of a video I saw a couple of years ago, Inside the Bohemian Grove. This video claims to expose the bizarre rituals of the Bohemian Club, a secret society of world leaders, industrialists, and so on. The important people. To get a relatively mainstream take on the Bohemian Grove meetings go here; of course the internet hordes an abundance of (mis?)information on the BG. Just google it. File under Illuminati/conspiracy/paranoia.

 Here’s an image of a Bohemian Grove ritual from a 1915 issue of National Geographic.

 

Bob Dylan

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Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan:A Biography (1972?); another one from my cousin’s closet, part of the same cache that included Fear and Loathing. This would have been in the very early 1990s. I had always loved Bob Dylan, always–one of the earliest songs I remember taping off of the radio was “Like a Rolling Stone.” I had to call in to request it. I recorded it at the end of my first (and only, at the time) cassette tape–a copy of Dire Strait’s Brothers in Arms that my dad had taped from his vinyl for me. By the time I got a hold of Anthony Scaduto’s fantastic bio, I knew a bit about Dylan. I already had a couple of Dylan albums, including one of the first CDs I ever bought, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (still my favorite). Like Fear and Loathing, this book was a door-opener to me. Interestingly, I was mostly enchanted by Dylan’s voice and wordplay before I read this book; that is to say his cult of personality hadn’t really effected me yet. This book changed that.

               

(I took the edition on the left. The one on the right you can buy online or in your favorite bookstore)

Any true Dylan fan has probably already read this book, but if you consider yourself one (a true fan, that is), and you haven’t read it, make amends. You won’t be disappointed. The book is particularly good if you bookend it with viewings of DA Pennebaker’s extraordinary documentary Don’t Look Back.

 Dylan in his later years (i.e. nowadays) is as perplexing as ever. He’s made three of the best albums of his post-60s career, making up for some questionable output. He’s slowed down on the touring quite a bit (saw him about 10 years ago and he blew my mind — who knew what an accomplished guitar player he was?), and made those weird Victoria’s Secret commercials a few years ago. Recently, he made a ruckus when he attacked modern recording techniques in a Rolling Stone interview with one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Lethem. 

One of the best things Dylan has done lately is his “Theme Time Radio Hour” on XM satellite radio. The show is thematic; Dylan riffs on the bible, coffee, the weather, all sorts of stuff. His musical taste is fantastic (saying Bob Dylan has good musical taste is sort of like saying water is wet), but it’s really his voice that mesmerizes. It’s a gleeful mix of the sinister with the playful. He actually kind of sounds like the late comedian Mitch Hedberg, especially in a comment from a recent show on the bible: “Nine out of ten Americans have at least one bible in their home. What’s up with the other guy?” Doesn’t look funny in print, but his delivery is unexpectedly hilarious.

If, like me, you can’t afford to subscribe to fancy satellite stations but still want to hear the word of Dylan, never fear! Check out White Man Stew for free downloadable mp3s of complete Dylan shows. You can get the shows as  zip files full of divided mp3s, or as one long mp3.