Thursday, February 26, 2004
Although I receive pounds upon pounds of correspondence on an hourly basis, gentle reader, many pieces of mail are suspiciously shaped like bombs or other incendiary devices. Every once in a while, however, I receive a gem of a letter, a missive so articulate it makes me appreciate my investors all the more.
Dear Professor,
I very much enjoyed your latest entry. I think the DweeD is definitely marketable in the same vein as abridged versions of classic novels. For example, you don’t need to read all of The Grapes of Wrath. You just need to know that there are some rotting oranges in the beginning, a lot of dust in the middle, and a woman breastfeeding a grown man in a barn at the end. The same editing technique could be applied to the film version of the novel. Though for younger or more sensitive viewers, the ending could be lopped off entirely and replaced with more shots of rotting fruit.
Plus, with today’s ever truncated attention spans, no one wants to sit through a 2 hour movie anymore. I mean, I for one —
Lost my train of thought. Time to hit up the vending machine!
Kind regards,
Gentlest Reader
I couldn’t agree more, Gentlest Reader. Like your namesake, your theories are indeed superlative. If I may, though, I’d like to elaborate, not that you could’ve stopped me in the first place. My stable of graduate degrees allows me to wax metaphysical at the drop of a hat.
Literature–or, as I like to put it, litterature–wastes both time and paper. Why did Steinbeck fill his treatise on rotting fruit with inconveniences such as personimification? I propose we synthesize your two ideas and produce a book with naught but a few images of rotting fruit, dust, and breastfeeding. Cue endpaper. If you think that’s profound, consider splitting the title into two parts. You’d have The Grapes on the front cover and Of Wrath on the back cover. It’s like getting two books in one, but that’s just my advanced marketing degree speaking.
I know the folks at Cliff’s Notes are probably frothing at the opportunity to write a study guide for this truncated classic, so I’d like to preempt their enthusiasm. I plan on releasing my own guides under the label TruncaNötz. While they may resemble single sheets of paper with pithy lines of text scrawled on them (Don’t even try, punk. You’re going to fail the English quiz tomorrow.), they’ll also be affordable and pocket-sized.
It is also imperative that I scold Gentlest Reader–I suppose they’re just coarser down in Buenos Aires–and my PR Department for introducing “breastfeeding” to the exchange. This concept may be too graphic for our younger readers, so allow me to paint it in rosier terms. Breastfeeding, to play it euphemistically, simply means to nourish someone. From the tit.