I’ve been trying to come up with a damn pitch to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency but I’m not nearly literary enough. So, I’m going to try to fake it. Here are some authors I’m trying to force into a humorous essay despite never studying them nor being familiar with their work.
William Butler Yeats
Yeats’s Passive Aggressive Note in the Laundry Room of His Coop
WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this note,
And slowly read that you’re a dick for taking my clothes
Out of the dryer when they were still damp;
Nah, they’re going to be able to tell I googled “Famous Yeats Poem” and that this is the first line of the first poem.
William Faulkner
Faulkner’s Note to Seamless When They Bring Him the Wrong Pad Thai
The delivery boy come up fifth avenue a fur piece bringing the pad thai thinkin “was it chicken or shrimp? Hope it’s shrimp cause that’s what I got.” He would get to my door and ring the bell, hand it to me, turn and go thinkin “shrimp, yeah, shrimp’s what it were.”
Man, I’m hitting that southern thing way too hard…
Jane Austen
Jane Austen Goes on a Bad Tinder Date
His immodest pleasure in his own lack of accomplishment amused her, though, less so than his umbrage at her indifference to the hops in his craft brew.
Seems like low hanging fruit and I honestly don’t know her voice well enough.
Raymond Carver
Will You Please Give Me the Wifi Password, Please?
That’s just a one liner. Where are you going with this?
James Baldwin
Cliffs Notes of a Native Son
Yeah. I know. I’m sorry…
Martin Amis, Joan Didion, Carson McCullers
Hell, I don’t know, something about e-cigarettes?
Alright, this is their fault. They’re all very namecheckable but none of them has an easily recognizable style that is easily parodied. Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to see it, not from the first page of a book of theirs anyway. Dammit, why didn’t I go to a liberal arts college?!
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace Goes To The New Shuffleboard Bar in Gowanus
In actuality it is merely a disc sliding upon a smooth surface coming to rest in arbitrary geometry(1), ostensibly to provide entertainment to the recreational octogenarian. I watch myself push this disc with the claw like handle called a tang and both the angle of the vector and the coefficient of friction assign me points and I wonder if I am actually engaging in the game or if I am witnessing an experience one thinks one must have in order to say that one is having a good time. Ironic activity? Check. Wes Anderson movie decor? Check. Employees with visible tattoos? Check. Yes. I am in Brooklyn. I am here.
(1) The disc is called a biscuit and the back most trapezoid is called a kitchen, making one think of the synchronicity of a game played by grandparents and the childhood comforts they provided.
You bought Infinite Jest six years ago and haven’t even cracked it, dumbass. You even included a footnote joke! Do not mention how much you liked Jason Segel in the movie. Wait. Yeah, you just did.
