Remember the children’s books about a family named the Stupids? Evidently one of their descendants has landed a blogging gig at Harriet—a fellow we’ve met before: K. Silem Mohammad. His latest post is hard to beat for sheer stupidity. The irony, of course, is that our blogger resorts to actual compositional writing in order to praise a book called Words of Love for being “beyond the usual condition of appropriational recycledness”—a book, that is, of surpassing stupidity.
The book’s “author,” Mark Rutkoski, according to one of the book’s blurbers, Paul Hoover, “numbers and alphabetizes all the words in Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets.” Hoover means that Rutkoski counts all the words, groups the instances of each together, then places these groups in alphabetical order. But why quibble? Suffice it to admit that Rutkoski out-stupids the original Stupids, although his brand of stupidity lacks the puerile humor of the Stupids books.
If we step back a moment, we may fairly ask ourselves who is stupider:
- the “author” of Words of Love, Mark Rutkoski;
- the publisher of said book (Les Figues Press);
- The Mamas and the Papas, the title of whose iconic ’60s tune “Words of Love” is said to have been appropriated by Mr. Rutkoski;
- the blogger who has betrayed his conceptualist principles in order to assemble coherent sentences that pretend to justify the book;
- Shakespeare, for composing his poems in the first place;
- or me for wasting the time of anyone who has read this far and who, by now, has surely begun to feel that sickish fascination we feel when slowing down to stare at a bloody car wreck.
why are you being a dumb ass, i don't think that you couldn't have written one sentence that Shakespeare has written in any one of his great plays.
Conrad: Hah!<br /><br />Lyle: Try Les Figues Press, I'd say. Tell 'em all your words are taken from a letter by Velimir Khlebnikov to his Albanian mistress. They'll snap it right up.
Sometime back in the 1990's, I spent a couple of hours one day paging through a Russian-English dictionary, and writing down Russian words (rendered more or less into Roman alphabet) and an English translation for each Russian word (based on whatever range of choices the dictionary gave).<br /><br />When I had around 25 or 30 Russian words and their translations, I grouped them into groups of
Joseph,<br /><br />think how stupd the average Harriet blogger is and consider that half of them are stupider than that (after George Carlin).