Like most of us, Mitt Romney saw anthropologist Jared Diamond's Pulitzer prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel in a bookstore, and heard some NPR segment about it, and decided to just pretend that he read it. Unlike most of us, Romney is running for president, so when he says this like this:
Gospel singer BeBe Winans' memoir based on his friendship with Whitney Houston, The Whitney I Knew, is out today. Winans stole the show at Whitney's funeral with his tale of "crazy Whitney" (as much as a funeral is a show that can be stolen), and he expands on his point further in Knew's Crazy Whitney chapter. He writes about Whitney's tendency to talk through movies and details a spat she had during a showing of The Prince of Tides. This excerpt from it made me laugh harder than anything I've read all month:
Avid Pearl Jam fan and basketball-playing crazy person Dennis Rodman has just announced, via his agent, that he has written a book for kids titled Dennis the Wild Bull.
It takes a special, sultry someone to read aloud E.L. James' 50 Shades of Grey. With all those "holy crap's!" and "Later, baby's," Anastasia's Steele's inner goddess requires a very specific kind of reading. (Hence the trending Twitter topic, #best/worst50ShadesAudioBookNarrator. For example, Stephen Hawking and Betty White.)
Your teenage daughter—how much do you really know about her? You know that she likes church, and playing with dolls, and going to the ice cream shoppe. But did you know that she wants to be tied up and sexually dominated by a dark brooding stranger? Well, she does. Sorry.
The New York Times reports that male jewelry enthusiast Johnny Depp has begun editing work on "House of Earth," a previously unpublished novel written by folk singer Woody Guthrie.
50 Shades of Grey author E.L. James—Snowqueens Icedragon to her fans—is purportedly making an estimated $1.34 million a week off her quaint little country romance novel. Having sold 20 million copies and counting, the trilogy is calmly and methodically shattering every previous sales record in the world.
Rich liar Mitch Albom, once described by H.P. Lovecraft as "a grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings," has written a column about 50 Shades of Grey. Reading it is like coming across a big shotgun next to a tiny barrel with an enormous, beautiful fish inside, only the fish has already hung itself from a tiny noose.
Heavyset American Jonah Goldberg has a new book coming out about how the people he disagrees with are not merely wrong, but are also poisonous hateful cheaters and liars and fascists and tyrants. The dust jacket claims that Goldberg has "twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize," which is true in the sense that I am a three-time World's Greatest Dad nominee.
One of the biggest surprises of last year was Midnight in Paris' ability to breeze in during the summer and emerge as Woody Allen's highest-grossing box office hit (that's if sleepers like Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters aren't adjusted for inflation). The film is charming and Owen Wilson is beloved, but the real shock is that Allen was able to sell the public on subject matter centered on a dying industry: literature. To delight in that movie is to delight in revisiting figures like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as their work. Cinema's relationship to literature is inherent and, in the case of book-to-movie adaptations, dependent, but rarely is it so blatant. The success of Midnight was a little ray of hope that people might still care about the culture of reading.
There is a small, but palpable sense of disgust for gay men in Tim Story's Think Like a Man, which is based on comedian/self-styled love expert Steve Harvey's inane self-help book with a slightly longer title, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. The only explicitly homo dude we ever see is in a pink polo, swishing his shoulders as he attempts to fight women shoppers from grabbing the book he's about to buy ("For me!" he says with several S's). Gayness is otherwise relegated to the taboo: the group of six men the film follows routinely freak out when they are in the presence of a shirtless or under-dressed buddy (this mild gay panic ensues in kitchens and locker rooms). Sentiments like violin-playing proving that one's son is gay and that one must qualify his Oprah-watching with, "No homo," are expressed. A guy buying a book for his mother's book club is deemed "kinda gay" by a female character, and after dazzling a pretty woman (played by Kelly Rowland) at a bar, Romany Malco's character, Zeke, tells her confusingly, "I'm gonna walk away like a fairy now." Um, bye.
Interested in celebrity dick size? Boy, do I have the book for you: Celebrities with Big Dicks like Jay-Z, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, and Many More, edited by one Dana Rasmussen. It's out of stock right now on Amazon—I bought the last copy—but you can order one of three used copies available, starting at the low price of $37.73 (plus shipping).
In light of the "hullabaloo" surrounding BDSM novel Fifty Shades of Grey, elderly Smithtown, New York resident David Shobin gave the lusty lady book a read. Afterwards, he penned a powerfully ambivalent Amazon book review that has since been quoted in The Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair. (Both publications quoted Shobin as a nameless "Amazon reviewer.")
You know when you're reading a book, and the book is kind of meh, and so you decide to roll a joint, but then you realize you ran out of rolling papers and forgot to buy a new pack, because you are a stoner? Sucks, right? Problem solved, thanks to the melted brain of America's favorite burnout, Snoop Dogg.
When I watched Making the Boys, the documentary about Mart Crowley's seminal gay play Boys in the Band and its film adaptation, from which the clip above was pulled, I was a little horrified to see Christian Siriano conflating his ignorance with cuteness. (I'll concede that getting goofy could be his way of dealing with embarrassment, and it seems very gotcha of director Crayton Robey to spring this question without checking first if this small, smirking haircut of a human was familiar with the subject of his doc.) Regardless, don't do this. Don't neglect the work that helped facilitate the increasing levels of public acceptance you experience, and don't act like it's funny when you do. Don't be a Christian.
